Earth

What is poetry?  If someone were to ask me that question, I would tell them that I am not qualified to answer.  Instead, I would ask them to read this poem:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
     I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
     The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
     She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
     With rocks, and stones, and trees.

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800).

George Charlton, "The Four Seasons: Spring" (c. 1942)

In terms of sound and sense, words and meaning, form and feeling, I believe that this is as close to perfect as poetry can get.  On a previous occasion, I attempted to discuss a few of the many fine things about this poem, so I will not repeat that discussion here.

Although I cannot define "poetry," I can say that one mark of a good poem is that it follows you over the years:  it haunts you (in a good sense); it returns when you least expect it.  Thus, in recent months I have encountered two poems that brought me back to "A slumber did my spirit seal."  And now, by mere chance, I have three lovely poems circling around one another.

George Charlton, "The Four Seasons: Summer" (c. 1942)

First, I came across this:

Lay a garland on my hearse
     Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear,
     Say I died true.

My Love was false, but I was firm
     From my hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lay
     Lightly, gently, earth.

Francis Beaumont/John Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy (1622), in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949).  The poem is sometimes titled "Aspatia's Song" because it is spoken by a character of that name in Beaumont and Fletcher's play.

George Charlton, "The Four Seasons: Autumn" (c. 1942)

A month or so later, I discovered this:

The honey-throated nightingale, our Musa the blue-eyed
This narrow tomb claimed suddenly where she doth voiceless bide:
For all her art and all her fame, stone-still she lies to-day:
And over thee, our Musa fair, light lie the dust for aye.

A. H. Bullen, Weeping-Cross and Other Rimes (1921).

The poem is a translation by Bullen of an anonymous poem in The Greek Anthology.  Bullen was well-known in his time as the editor of a number of editions of Elizabethan verse and drama, and as the founder of the Shakespeare Head Press, which was located in Stratford-upon-Avon.  He self-published two volumes of poems (of 25 copies and 30 copies), which he gave to friends only.  After his death, Weeping-Cross and Other Rimes was issued.  It contains forty poems.

Given Bullen's interests, it is not surprising that his translation of the Greek original has an Elizabethan feel to it.

George Charlton, "The Four Seasons: Winter" (c. 1942)

Life As A Work Of Art, Part Six: "Only The Disconsolate Hero Survives"

As one ages, commonplaces become eternal verities.  Truisms are recognized as being true.

For instance:  the longer one lives, the more one gets the uneasy feeling that Reality consists of bad actors appearing in an ill-conceived sequel to a movie that wasn't very good in the first place.  Or, alternatively, that it consists of unconvincing characters in one of those novels that are awarded prizes and are described as "lyrical and moving" in reviews and blurbs.

Commonplaces, yes.  But here is the proverbial rub (of which we are all aware):  how do we avoid becoming one of those bad actors or unconvincing fictional characters?  Alas, dear reader, we don't.

Gilbert Spencer

"The School on Peggy Hill, Ambleside" (c. 1952)

            Novels I Have Never Written

From novels I have never written
The ghosts have long departed,
Leaving tenantless the Sussex country houses
And the palazzo steps green with moss.
Only the foundations remain
On which were to have risen
The towers and cloisters of the fatal school.
In the unfinished rooms
The conversations have shivered into silence.
The moving incidents,
The revealing situations,
The moments of profound psychological insight --
All are lost, unwanted,
Like garden furniture rusting in a summer-house.
All the ghosts have departed, unaccounted for,
Some perhaps for South America,
Others to get what employment they can
As car-park attendants and waiters in seaside hotels,
Or they have simply died.

Only the disconsolate hero survives,
Sitting on an upturned packing-case in an empty house,
With the electricity and the telephone cut off,
Nothing to eat, no money, and nowhere to go.
Too round a character to disappear quietly,
Too big a man to be pensioned off or eased into a sinecure.
Presently, perhaps, he will reappear in Oxford
As one of those dusty, forgotten dons whom I have heard
Talking to themselves in the High,
Or a faded roue living on the Cote d'Azur
On the savings of a discarded opera-singer --
Someone who can sustain the pretence
Of having been influential in former days,
The intimate of writers, friend of diplomats . . .

James Reeves, The Password and Other Poems (Heinemann 1952).

George Charlton, "Welsh Chapel" (c. 1950)

The Life imitates Art/Art imitates Life motif is, of course, an ancient one. And, as I have noted before, each generation tends to have the erroneous view that its own age is uniquely wise and/or uniquely cursed in comparison with prior ages.  Perspective is required.

That being said, I do think that a bad actor in a small hamlet in medieval Swabia had less capacity for creating mischief than a bad actor with a website (or a blog?) in today's "global village."  Moreover, today's bad actors and unconvincing characters number in the millions, and are always clamoring for attention.  What's worse, many of them become heads of state, politicians, media mouthpieces, "journalists," social scientists, and celebrities.

Osmund Caine, "Wedding at Twickenham Parish Church" (1948)

Memory: "There Is Nothing To Be Frightened Of"

I intended to move from the subject of love to the subject of memory.  But, as it happens, the three poems that I had in mind turn out to have (perhaps not surprisingly) a waft of love about them.

                                                  George Charlton
      "The Churchyard at Leonard Stanley, Gloucestershire: Spring" (1942)

First, the antipodes:

                         Memory

Is Memory most of miseries miserable,
Or the one flower of ease in bitterest hell?

William Rossetti (editor), The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Volume I (1886). 

Of course, the answer to Rossetti's question is:  "It depends."

                                                  George Charlton
                  "The Churchyard at Leonard Stanley: Summer" (1942)

Next, a rare short poem by Robert Bridges (he usually tended to go on at greater length).

                                      Ghosts

Mazing around my mind like moths at a shaded candle,
   In my heart like lost bats in a cave fluttering,
Mock ye the charm whereby I thought reverently to lay you,
   When to the wall I nail'd your reticent effigys?

Robert Bridges, October and Other Poems (1920).

"Reticent effigys" is the fine thing here, isn't it?  As is the idea of nailing them to the wall.  As is the idea that one could believe for a moment that they might be "reverently" laid to rest.  Fat chance.

                                                    George Charlton
                     "The Churchyard at Leonard Stanley: Autumn" (1942)

And, finally, something that may hold out some hope.

            In the Blindfold Hours

In the blindfold hours,
in the memory wars,
don't fool yourself it never happened,
that you never loved her.
Don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

Go to the window.  Listen to the trees.
It is only air we live in.
There is nothing to be frightened of.

Hugo Williams, Dock Leaves (1994).

                                                    George Charlton
                      "The Churchyard at Leonard Stanley: Winter" (1942)