No Escape, Part Thirteen: "Switch Love, Move House -- You Will Soon Be Back Where You Started"

I am intimately familiar with both the dream of Escape and its companion, the Siren song of the Ideal Place.  A long-time reader of this blog recently commented that he had spent his holiday in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Being unfamiliar with the area, I did some Internet research.  Upon seeing how lovely the area is, I soon began dreaming of spending my remaining years in a secluded vale amid the Wolds, "and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made."  With occasional treks eastward to the North Sea for a walk along the shingle.  And so it goes . . .

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Summer" (1940)

The theme of this "No Escape" series of posts is:  "Wherever you go, there you are."  As I have noted before, this notion is not a contemporary pop psychology platitude.

"Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country . . . Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  'I should think not,' he said, 'he took himself along with him.'"

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958).

Two centuries or so later Samuel Johnson retraced Montaigne's steps:

"The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. . . . [H]e, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove."

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).

Yes, yes, well said, sirs.  But easier said than done.

Harry Epworth Allen, "The Caravan"

                         Ideal Home

                                   1

Never would there be lives enough for all
The comely places --
Glimpsed from a car, a train, or loitered past --
That lift their faces
To be admired, murmuring 'Live with me.'

House with a well,
Or a ghost; by a stream; on a hill; in a hollow: breathing
Woodsmoke appeal,
Fresh paint, or simply a prayer to be kept warm,
Each casts her spell.

Life, claims each, will look different from my windows,
Your furniture be
Transformed in these rooms, your chaos sorted out here.
Ask for the key.
Walk in, and take me.  Then you shall live again.

                                   2

. . . Nor lives enough
For all the fair ones, dark ones, chestnut-haired ones
Promising love --
I'll be your roof, your hearth, your paradise orchard
And treasure-trove.
With puritan scents -- rosemary, thyme, verbena,
With midnight musk,
Or the plaintive, memoried sweetness tobacco-plants
Exhale at dusk,
They lure the footloose traveller to dream of
One fixed demesne,
The stay-at-home to look for his true self elsewhere.
I will remain
Your real, your ideal property.  Possess me.
Be born again.

                                   3

If only there could be lives enough, you're wishing? . . .
For one or two
Of all the possible loves a dozen lifetimes
Would hardly do:
Oak learns to be oak through a rooted discipline.

Such desirableness
Of place or person is chiefly a glamour cast by
Your unsuccess
In growing your self.  Rebirth needs more than a change of
Flesh or address.

Switch love, move house -- you will soon be back where you started,
On the same ground,
With a replica of the old romantic phantom
That will confound
Your need for roots with a craving to be unrooted.

C. Day Lewis, The Gate and Other Poems (1962).

Harry Epworth Allen, "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

"His Gains In Heaven Are What They Are"

I'd like to stay with the themes of "the lovely in life is the familiar" (Walter de la Mare) and "the seeing of small trifles . . . ./Real, beautiful, is good" (Ivor Gurney) for a moment longer.  As one might expect, Robert Frost takes an equivocal, and sly, view of such things in the following poem.

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "The Road to the Hills"

               Bond and Free

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about --
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turf, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world's embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be.
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius' disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight,
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

Robert Frost, Mountain Interval (1916).

Harry Epworth Allen, "Summer" (1940)

The question immediately arises:  where do you stand on this Love versus Thought business?

I suspect that Frost comes down on the side of Love, but one can never be sure when it comes to Frost.  On the one hand, he titles the poem "Bond and Free," rather than "Bond or Free," so perhaps his view is that we are fated to continually move back and forth between Love and Thought.  It is not a matter of either/or.

On the other hand, the final stanza seems to come down on the side of Love:  "His gains in heaven are what they are" seems to suggest that the gains don't amount to much.  "Simply staying" seems to be the way to go. Or so "some say."  ("Some say" is a characteristic Frostian way of hedging: "Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice.")

One commentator believes that a clue may lie in Frost's placing "Bond and Free" immediately prior to "Birches" in Mountain Interval, citing these lines in "Birches" as evidence that Frost opts for Love:  "Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better."  John Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912-1915 (Grove Press 1988), page 250.

But, then again, the final lines of "Birches" suggest the back and forth of "Bond and Free":

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Robert Frost, Ibid (italics in original).

Yes, of course:  "Toward heaven."  Which fits quite well with:  "His gains in heaven are what they are."  (Whatever that means!)  Typical Frost: equivocal and sly.

Harry Epworth Allen, "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

Lists, Part Eight: "A Shy Person's Wishes"

In keeping with the musical theme of C. Day Lewis's "Hornpipe," I offer the following poem by Dora Greenwell (1821-1882).  According to the OED, a "scherzo" is "a movement of a lively character, occupying the second or third place in a symphony or sonata."  It is an Italian word meaning "joke" or "jest."  Hence, like "Hornpipe," "A Scherzo" is, I presume, intended to be read in a sprightly fashion.

As such, the poem may be classified (perhaps) as "light verse" (at which the Victorians were quite good).  That being said, we should bear in mind that good "light verse" can be every bit as truthful and keen about the world and its occupants as good "serious verse."

             Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

                         A Scherzo
           (A Shy Person's Wishes)

With the wasp at the innermost heart of a peach,
On a sunny wall out of tip-toe reach,
With the trout in the darkest summer pool,
With the fern-seed clinging behind its cool
Smooth frond, in the chink of an aged tree,
In the woodbine's horn with the drunken bee,
With the mouse in its nest in a furrow old,
With the chrysalis wrapt in its gauzy fold;
With things that are hidden, and safe, and bold,
With things that are timid, and shy, and free,
Wishing to be;
With the nut in its shell, with the seed in its pod,
With the corn as it sprouts in the kindly clod,
Far down where the secret of beauty shows
In the bulb of the tulip, before it blows;
With things that are rooted, and firm, and deep,
Quiet to lie, and dreamless to sleep;
With things that are chainless, and tameless, and proud,
With the fire in the jagged thunder-cloud,
With the wind in its sleep, with the wind in its waking,
With the drops that go to the rainbow's making,
Wishing to be with the light leaves shaking,
Or stones on some desolate highway breaking;
Far up on the hills, where no foot surprises
The dew as it falls, or the dust as it rises;
To be couched with the beast in its torrid lair,
Or drifting on ice with the polar bear,
With the weaver at work at his quiet loom;
Anywhere, anywhere, out of this room!

Dora Greenwell, Poems (1867).

                          Harry Epworth Allen, "The Road to the Hills"

Samuel Johnson Climbs A Tree

I have previously noted Samuel Johnson's antic side, suggesting that we should not forget this often-neglected aspect of his personality.  Thus far, we have seen that Johnson was a runner of foot-races, as well as a man who was wont to roll sideways down a tempting hill.  ("Samuel Johnson Runs A Foot-Race": June 10, 2010; "Ludwig Wittgenstein Pretends To Be The Moon. Samuel Johnson Rolls Down A Hill": May 8, 2010.)  But Johnson did not confine himself to those two activities: 

One day, as he was walking in Gunisbury Park (or Paddock) with some gentlemen and ladies, who were admiring the extraordinary size of some of the trees, one of the gentlemen said that, when he was a boy, he made nothing of climbing (swarming, I think, was the phrase) the largest there.  'Why, I can swarm it now,' replied Dr. Johnson, which excited a hearty laugh -- (he was then, I believe, between fifty and sixty); on which he ran to the tree, clung round the trunk, and ascended to the branches, and, I believe, would have gone in amongst them, had he not been very earnestly entreated to descend; and down he came with a triumphant air, seeming to make nothing of it.

"Recollections of Dr. Johnson by Miss Reynolds," Johnsonian Miscellanies, Volume II (edited by George Birkbeck Hill) (1897).

              Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Linlithgow, Sheffield"

James Reeves On Edmund Blunden: "Nor Very Much To Give His Time Of What His Time Expected"

James Reeves wrote a poem in tribute to Edmund Blunden.  The poem was first published in 1958.  Blunden died in 1974.  When the poem was later published in his Collected Poems, Reeves added the dedication that now appears below the title.

                    On a Poet

             E. B. 1896-1974

Having no Celtic bombast in his blood,
Nor dipsomaniac rage, nor very much
To give his time of what his time expected,
He saw his Muse, slight thing, by most neglected.

She was no exhibitionist, and he,
With only the Queen of Elfland's gift to Thomas,
Could not afford to school her in the taste
For stolen gauds and ornaments of paste.

When he is dead and his best phrases stored
With Clare's and Hardy's in the book of gold,
She with her unpresuming Saxon grace
In the Queen's retinue will take her place.

James Reeves, Collected Poems: 1929-1974 (Heinemann 1974).

There are several versions of the ballad of "Thomas the Rhymer" or "True Thomas."  In all of them, Thomas, a mortal, is brought to Elfland (i.e., "fairyland") by its Queen.  After a stay of seven years, Thomas returns to the world.  Before he departs, the Queen offers him a gift:  the choice of becoming either a harper or a seer.  He chooses to become a seer.  Thus, as Walter de la Mare notes in his anthology Come Hither (1923):  Thomas "was famous as a Wise One and a Seer (a See-er -- with the inward eye)."

The following passage comes from Barry Webb's Edmund Blunden: A Biography (1990):

"Among the group standing by the side of [Blunden's] grave was a small unobtrusive figure:  he was Private A. E. Beeney of the 11th Royal Sussex Regiment, who had been Edmund's runner at Ypres and Passchendaele.  Stepping forward he let fall from his hand a wreath of Flanders poppies which fluttered down on the coffin in fond and final salute."

                 Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Crowlink, Sussex"