Robins

As a child growing up in this country, one of the first birds that one is likely to encounter is the robin.  Perhaps this is why I retain a particular fondness for them.  Call me sentimental, but I think of the successive generations of robins I have shared the World with as lifelong companions:  wordless, but not unspoken.

As we enter another winter together, I worry about them.  How will they fare in the cold and the wind and the gloom?  But there they are in the garden, flitting about in the trees and bushes, hopping along the paths, going about the business of being robins.

                 A Robin

Ghost-grey the fall of night,
        Ice-bound the lane,
Lone in the dying light
        Flits he again;
Lurking where shadows steal,
Perched in his coat of blood,
Man's homestead at his heel,
        Death-still the wood.

Odd restless child; it's dark;
        All wings are flown
But this one wizard's -- hark!
        Stone clapped on stone!
Changeling and solitary,
Secret and sharp and small,
Flits he from tree to tree,
        Calling on all.

Walter de la Mare, The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933).

Dudley Holland, "Winter Morning" (1945)

De la Mare was writing in England, so his robin is a European robin, not an American robin -- a flycatcher, not a thrush.  But I like to think that the two share certain affinities:  a charming stolidity, staying power, and a cheerful stoicism.

And they both have their songs and notes.  Different songs and notes, of course, but perhaps the underlying message is the same.  "Synonyms for joy."

                 The Robin

Poor bird!  I do not envy thee;
Pleas'd in the gentle melody
     Of thy own song.
Let crabbed winter silence all
The winged choir; he never shall
     Chain up thy tongue:
          Poor innocent!
When I would please my self, I look on thee;
And guess some sparks of that felicity,
          That self-content.

When the bleak face of winter spreads
The earth, and violates the meads
     Of all their pride;
When sapless trees and flowers are fled,
Back to their causes, and lie dead
     To all beside:
          I see thee set,
Bidding defiance to the bitter air,
Upon a wither'd spray; by cold made bare,
          And drooping yet.

There, full in notes, to ravish all
My earth, I wonder what to call
     My dullness; when
I hear thee, pretty creature, bring
Thy better odes of praise, and sing,
     To puzzle men:
          Poor pious elf!
I am instructed by thy harmony,
To sing the time's uncertainty,
          Safe in my self.

Poor Redbreast, carol out thy lay,
And teach us mortals what to say.
     Here cease the choir
Of ayerie choristers; no more
Mingle your notes; but catch a store
     From her sweet lyre;
          You are but weak,
Mere summer chanters; you have neither wing
Nor voice, in winter.  Pretty Redbreast, sing,
          What I would speak.

George Daniel (1616-1657), "Ode XXIII," in Alexander Grosart (editor), The Poems of George Daniel, Volume II (1878) (spelling modernized).

"That self-content."  Call me an anthropomorphizer, a practitioner of the Pathetic Fallacy, but "self-content" is one of the traits that I admire in the robin.  "A robin with no Christian name ran through/The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew."  "All it knew"?  Yes, perhaps.  But:  "I am instructed by thy harmony . . . teach us mortals what to say."

Beryl Sinclair, "Winter, Regent's Park" (1941)

When I was young, we were taught to look for "the first robin of spring." But it has always seemed to me that quite a few of them stick around through the winter.  Their red-orange breasts are a welcome sight amidst the dark days, and add to the gaiety should snow arrive.  (Although I suppose that a snowfall is not necessarily a cause for celebration in the Robin-World!)  Thus, I think of robins not just as harbingers of spring, but as year-long reminders of the constancy and continuity of the World that surrounds us, a World that calls for our attention in even its humblest manifestations.

                    Winter

Clouded with snow
     The bleak winds blow,
And shrill on leafless bough
The robin with its burning breast
     Alone sings now.

     The rayless sun,
     Day's journey done,
Sheds its last ebbing light
On fields in leagues of beauty spread
     Unearthly white.

     Thick draws the dark,
     And spark by spark,
The frost-fires kindle, and soon
Over that sea of frozen foam
     Floats the white moon.

Walter de la Mare, The Listeners and Other Poems (1912).

Frederick Mitchell, "Greig Close in Winter" (1955)

Poets rhapsodize about nightingales and skylarks.  There are those among us who search the woods for cardinals, orioles, bluebirds, and others of bright plumage.  But the commonplace, quotidian robin deserves its own paean.  Please note that I do not use "commonplace" or "quotidian" in a pejorative sense.  After all, both words apply to each and every one of us, although we may like to believe otherwise.

We need to often remind ourselves of this:

                                                     Learning

To believe you are magnificent.  And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.  Enough labor for one human life.

Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998).

As I have noted here on more than one occasion, we are all in this together. We each have our offices to perform.  Who among us is the humblest?  Who among us is of importance?  Who knows?  None of us is in a position to render judgment.

                    To Robin Redbreast

Laid out for dead, let thy last kindness be
With leaves and moss-work for to cover me:
And while the wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter,
Sing thou my dirge, sweet-warbling chorister!
For epitaph, in foliage, next write this:
Here, here the tomb of Robin Herrick is.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648).

"Where, when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,/Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush."  Not a bad way to spend eternity, communing with robins and thrushes.

John Aldridge, "Winter" (1947)

Companions

I am, as the saying goes, "a dog person."  But I have been extremely fond of quite a few cats in my time.  For instance, there is George, the orange cat who lives down the block.  Three or four evenings a week he strolls through the back garden at around seven o'clock, feigning (or is he feigning?) indifference.  If his presence is not noticed and acknowledged, he will quietly sit outside the French doors, staring inside, until he is duly greeted for the evening.  After a brief conversation, he will go his way, leaving no promises in his wake.

Thus, it is not an either/or matter for me.  I am unashamedly sentimental about the dogs and cats I have known.  Anthropomorphism bothers me not when it comes to these wonderful beings.  And I am perplexed by, and wary of, anyone who expresses indifference to them.

As W. H. Auden suggests, each occupies a distinctive place in our lives.

Dog    The single creature leads a partial life,
            Man by his mind, and by his nose the hound;
            He needs the deep emotions I can give,
            I scent in him a vaster hunting ground.

Cats    Like calls to like, to share is to relieve  
            And sympathy the root bears love the flower;
            He feels in us, and we in him perceive
            A common passion for the lonely hour.

Cats    We move in our apartness and our pride
            About the decent dwellings he has made:
Dog    In all his walks I follow at his side,
            His faithful servant and his loving shade.

W. H. Auden, Poem V in "Ten Songs," Collected Poems (Random House 1976).  The poem is untitled.  It was written in 1939.

Duncan Grant, "Girl at the Piano" (1940)

The contemplative detachment of cats is one of their attractive characteristics.  Again, whether this is feigned or not, I am not able to say. While dogs are certainly capable of contemplation, detachment is not one of their strong suits.

Imagine the word "dog" substituted for "cat" in the following haiku.  It just doesn't feel right.

     The peony;
A silver cat;
     A golden butterfly.

Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 295.

Likewise, a dog wouldn't fit in a tableau such as this.

     The Cat and the Sea

It is a matter of a black cat
On a bare cliff top in March
Whose eyes anticipate
The gorse petals;

The formal equation of
A domestic purr
With the cold interiors
Of the sea's mirror.

R. S. Thomas, Poetry for Supper (Rupert Hart-Davis 1958).

Philip Connard (1875-1958), "Jane, Evelyn, James and Helen" (1913)

There comes a time in each of our lives when we turn to our faithful companion, feline or canine, and say something along the lines of:  "Well, at least you love me."  Or:  "Well, at least you understand me."  And your companion will look directly into your eyes and say, wordlessly:  "Of course I do."

     The Cat Says --

The Cat says,
And so say I,
Love is a winter fire,
And a summer lawn.
Love is a sharp claw,
Love is a pricked ear,
Love is a strong wind blowing at night
And a light sleep without fear.

I say,
And the Cat says too,
Love is a warm plumage
And a scented wine.
Love is a mackerel sky,
Love is the moon in a well,
Love is a feather the midnight owl lets fall,
And all oceans in a shell.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, New Collected Poems (edited by Claire Harman) (Fyfield Books/Carcanet 2008).

Some among us may find this sort of thing preposterous, sentimental, childlike.  Not I.  I suppose one's views depend upon how many dogs and cats one has been acquainted with.  I'm reminded of something that Arthur Symons wrote about his dog Api:  "It is enough to say that the eyes would be human, if human beings could concentrate so much of themselves into their eyes."

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "Lady with Cat"

This last part is difficult, for the memories of past companions come rushing.  "At first we seek to forget sorrow, to drown it in noise or oblivion; but gradually it comes back and takes hold of us and becomes our guest. Unbidden, we accept it, and recollection sits down with it by our hearth, an old friend."  Arthur Symons, "For Api," Collected Works, Poems: Volume Three (1924).

Yes, so one hopes, but still . . .

     Parting from a Cat

Whoever says farewell,
Has, for acquaintance, Death:
Small death, maybe, but still
Of all things dreaded most.
Yesterday I lost
An old, exacting friend
Who for ten years had haunted
My labours like a ghost,
Making my days enchanted
With feline airs and fancies.
Time, no doubt, will send
Some solace; and I know
Memory enhances
The half-companionship
Which is the most that can
Exist between cat and man.
But even so, I mourn
With a miniature grief
That won't relax its grip
Whichever way I turn,
Seeking to forget
My unimportant pet,
And that all life is brief.

Richard Church, The Inheritors: Poems 1948-1955 (Heinemann 1957).

Edward Bawden, "Roses and Rue" (1986)

Transformations

I do not accept the common caricature of Thomas Hardy as a "pessimist." Poets who report things as they see them are often pigeon-holed as "pessimists" by those who have not taken the time to actually read the poetry.  Philip Larkin is often caricatured (wrongly) in the same fashion. As it turns out, few poets have written about the human condition and individual human beings with as much wisdom, sensitivity, empathy, and compassion as have Hardy and Larkin, the purported "pessimists."

Beyond this, there is an interesting cosmological thread that runs through Hardy's poetry.  It is true that he viewed the Cosmos (or Existence or the Universe) as something that is, at best, indifferent to our fate.  Hence, we find him referring to "Crass Casualty," "purblind Doomsters," and the like. There is no denying that he possessed a tragic sense of life.

But there is another side of Hardy that can be described as serene, and accepting, in the face of this state of affairs.  This serenity and acceptance arise from a sense of -- I am wary of using these words -- oneness and continuity, of timelessness in the midst of unceasing change.  This was not the product of any theological principles.  Hardy did not go in for those.

But I should stop, and let the poems speak for themselves.

                                In a Museum

                                           I
Here's the mould of a musical bird long passed from light,
Which over the earth before man came was winging;
There's a contralto voice I heard last night,
That lodges in me still with its sweet singing.

                                           II
Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird
Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending
Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard,
In the full-fugued song of the universe unending.

Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917).

The bird of the poem is a fossil of archaeopteryx, which Hardy saw in the Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter in 1915.  J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press 1970), page 345.

Call me dreamy, addle-pated, and/or old-fashioned, but I love a poet who writes without irony of the "visionless wilds of space" and "the full-fugued song of the universe unending."

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "First Frost"

Later in the same volume -- which was published in Hardy's 77th year -- we find this:

               The Occultation

When the cloud shut down on the morning shine,
        And darkened the sun,
I said, "So ended that joy of mine
        Years back begun."

But day continued its lustrous roll
        In upper air;
And did my late irradiate soul
        Live on somewhere?

Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses.

The OED defines "irradiate" as: "illumined; made bright or brilliant."

John Aldridge, "The River Pant Near Sculpin's Bridge" (1961)

As I have noted on previous occasions, Hardy is at home in graveyards.  In Hardy's poetry, casual conversations with ghosts are a common occurrence, and are no cause for alarm.  It thus makes perfect sense that those who have departed are likely to find their way back into our World via other avenues.  Nothing ever vanishes.  A comforting thought, I think.  One that cannot be proven, of course.  But that is of no moment.

       Transformations

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

Thomas Hardy, Ibid.

John Aldridge, "The Pink Farm" (1940)

All of this is reminiscent of a poem that has appeared here before, a poem that was written on the other side of the world eleven centuries or so before Hardy wrote these three poems.

          Climbing the Ling-Ying Terrace and Looking North

Mounting on high I begin to realize the smallness of Man's Domain;
Gazing into distance I begin to know the vanity of the Carnal World.
I turn my head and hurry home -- back to the Court and Market,
A single grain of rice falling -- into the Great Barn.

Po Chu-i (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918).

That's it, isn't it?  "A single grain of rice falling -- into the Great Barn." More than enough for one life.

John Aldridge, "Beslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield"

Watermills

Given that windmills were the subject of my previous post, I ought to consider watermills as well.  Those that were once bustling, but are now abandoned, have often been an evocative subject for poets.

          Requiem for a Mill

They took away the water-wheel,
Scrap-ironed all the corn-mill;
The water now cascades with no
Audience pacing to and fro
Taking in with casual glance
Experience.

The cold wet blustery winter day
And all that's happening will stay
Alive in the mind: the bleak
Water-flushed meadows speak
An enduring story
To a man indifferent in a doorway.

Packaged, pre-cooked flakes have left
A land of that old mill bereft.
The ghosts that were so local coloured
Hiding behind bags of pollard
Have gone from those empty walls.
The weir still curves its waterfalls
But lets them drop in the tailrace
No longer wildly chivalrous.

And with this mention we withdraw
To things above the temporal law.

Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960).

Stanley Bryan, "Botley Flour Mill Loading Barn" (1955)

Like Kavanagh, Edward Thomas notices the ghostly feel of an idle mill.

                    The Mill-Water

Only the sound remains
Of the old mill;
Gone is the wheel;
On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.

Water that toils no more
Dangles white locks
And, falling, mocks
The music of the mill-wheel's busy roar.

Pretty to see, by day
Its sound is naught
Compared with thought
And talk and noise of labour and of play.

Night makes the difference.
In calm moonlight,
Gloom infinite,
The sound comes surging in upon the sense:

Solitude, company, --
When it is night, --
Grief or delight
By it must haunted or concluded be.

Often the silentness
Has but this one
Companion;
Wherever one creeps in the other is:

Sometimes a thought is drowned
By it, sometimes
Out of it climbs;
All thoughts begin or end upon this sound,

Only the idle foam
Of water falling
Changelessly calling,
Where once men had a work-place and a home.

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

Perhaps I am overreaching, but I hear in the fifth stanza a hint of what was to come in Thomas's second-to-last poem.  The poem has appeared here before, but here is its final stanza:

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

Edward Thomas, "Out in the Dark," Ibid.

In connection with "The Mill-Water," Edna Longley points us to a prose passage by Thomas about "a lifeless mill":

"Each evening, just when the first nightjar was skimming the wood, the sedge-warblers began to sing all together round the pool.  The song might have been the abstract voice of some old pain, feebly persistent.  It went far into the night with a power of ghostly alarms, and attuned to such thoughts as come when night in certain places is malign, reverses the sweet work of the day, and gives the likeness of a dragon to the pleasant corner of a wood. The birds were full of prelusive dark sayings about the approaching night."

Ibid, page 253, quoting from Edward Thomas, "Isoud with the White Hands," Horae Solitariae (1902), pages 178-179.

"Prelusive dark sayings about the approaching night" is wonderful, isn't it?

George Vicat Cole, "Iffley Mill" (1884)

The following poem could pass for a haiku, save for its length, and save for the fact that it was written in Victorian England.

                       A Mill

Two leaps the water from its race
     Made to the brook below,
The first leap it was curving glass,
     The second bounding snow.

William Allingham, By the Way: Verses, Fragments, and Notes (1912).

John Aldridge, "Old Mill, West Harnham" (1948)

"We Meet Only To Part"

I have written here before that the purpose of poetry is not to edify.  Perhaps a better way to put it is that anyone who sets out to write a poem in order to edify us is doomed to failure.  Still, I should also be very clear about this:  a good poem can -- perhaps better than any other form of art (I am biased, I admit) -- help us to understand what it means to be a human being in a wondrous and mysterious world.

Poetry provides inklings, not answers.  Poetry is not religion or science or metaphysics or politics (for which we can all be thankful).

The world through which we walk is beautiful and heartbreaking.  From stepping stone to stepping stone is the only way to traverse the ground.

               . . . . . we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

From Philip Larkin, "The Mower."

John Aldridge, "The River Pant Near Sculpin's Bridge" (1961)

We meet only to part,
Coming and going like white clouds,
Leaving traces so faint
Hardly a soul notices.

Ryokan (1758-1831) (translated by John Stevens), in Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan (Shambhala 1996).

Walter Goodin, "The River Beverley" (1938)

                            Afterpeace

This wind that howls about our roof tonight
And tears live branches screaming from great trees
Tomorrow may have scarcely strength to ruffle
The rabbit's back to silver in the sun.

Patrick MacDonogh Poems (edited by Derek Mahon) (The Gallery Press 2001).

Alfred Parsons (1847-1920), "Poplars in the Thames Valley"

Why should little things be blamed?
Little things for grace are famed;
Love, the winged and the wild,
Love is but a little child.

Anonymous (translated by Thomas Rogers), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from the Greek Anthology (1849).

George Vicat Cole, "Iffley Mill" (1884)

In Memory Of Crethis

The angled light of early spring and early autumn is, I think, the loveliest light of the year.  It calls things to your attention, things that detain you, delightfully.

After a rain-filled night, today was bright and blustery.  It was a wide-open-sky day, a day that encouraged expansiveness.  But, as I walked, my attention was drawn to the various mosses lining the edges of the paths or filling the cracks in the sidewalks.  In the slanting yellow afternoon light they glowed in a range from bright lime green to deep forest green.

Some lines from Louis Simpson's poem "The Foggy Lane" come to mind: "Walking in the foggy lane/I try to keep my attention fixed/on the uneven, muddy surface."  The loud, importunate parts of the World -- the media, politics, economics, et cetera -- do their best to lure us into abstractions and categories and classifications.  But in our heart of hearts we know it is the particulars that matter.

John Aldridge, "Artichokes and Cathay Quinces" (1967)

Their Crethis, with her prattle and her play,
The girls of Samos often miss to-day:
Their loved workmate, with flow of merry speech,
Here sleeps the sleep that comes to all and each.

Callimachus (c. 310 B.C. - c. 240 B. C.) (translated by A. H. Bullen), in A. H. Bullen, Weeping-Cross and Other Rimes (1921).

Henry Lamb, "Tea Things" (1932)

Crethis, young prattler, full of graceful play,
Vainly the maids of Samos seek all day;
Cheerfullest workmate; ever talking; -- she
Sleeps here, -- that sleep, from which none born can flee.

Callimachus (translated by "F. H."), in The Classical Journal, Volume XXXIII (March and June, 1826), page 9.

Charles Mahoney, "Auriculas in Pots" (1956)

The Samian virgins us'd often to play
With Crethis the witty, the pleasant and gay,
But now, when they seek her, she cannot be found,
Their sportive companion sleeps here under ground,
Discharging the debt which to nature we owe;
For all must descend to the regions below.

Callimachus (translated by H. W. Tytler), in H. W. Tytler, The Works of Callimachus, Translated into English Verse (1793).

Thomas Henslow Barnard, "Still Life"

The Samian maidens oft regret their friend,
     Sweet Crethis, full of play and cheer,
     Whose gossip lightened toil.  But here
She sleeps the sleep they all will sleep at end.

Callimachus (translated by Edward Cook), in Edward Cook, "The Charm of The Greek Anthology," More Literary Recreations (1919).

Charles Ginner, "Yellow Chrysanthemums" (1929)

Winter Into Spring, Part Seven: "Mystery, Unresting, Taciturn"

Lo and behold: yesterday I saw the first crocuses of the year.  Purple and yellow they were, on a sunny patch of ground facing westward.  They seem a trifle premature in this week's freezing weather.  And tonight the snow has begun to fall.  Ah, but what do I know?

There is ever a mystery to all this, isn't there?  And our ability to put names to it, to "explain" it -- in the language of Science -- means nothing.

John Aldridge (1905-1983), "February Afternoon"

                         The Wood

I walked a nut-wood's gloom.  And overhead
A pigeon's wing beat on the hidden boughs,
And shrews upon shy tunnelling woke thin
Late winter leaves with trickling sound.  Across
My narrow path I saw the carrier ants
Burdened with little pieces of bright straw.
These things I heard and saw, with senses fine
For all the little traffic of the wood,
While everywhere, above me, underfoot,
And haunting every avenue of leaves,
Was mystery, unresting, taciturn.
          .          .          .          .          .
And haunting the lucidities of life
That are my daily beauty, moves a theme
Beating along my undiscovered mind.

John Drinkwater, Loyalties (1919).  The ellipses are in the original.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I tend to be skeptical of the primacy of Science in our modern world, and the claims that are made for it in the name of "progress."  (See, for example:  Wittgenstein and "Progress"; Edmund Blunden and  "Progress"; R. S. Thomas and "Progress.")  I should be clear that I am not opposed to the practice of science that leads to cures for diseases, efficient plumbing, and The Wonders of the Internet.

But I am opposed to the utopian belief (which is what it is: a belief -- no different than any sincerely-held religious belief) that Science, by "explaining" all, will ameliorate our ills, improve our lives, and, ultimately, bring us to the gates of Paradise.  Alas (for true believers), scientific "explanation" leaves one tiny thing out of account:  the human soul -- individual, indissoluble, and inexplicable.  As it happens, this tiny omission invalidates the whole utopian project.  For which we can all be grateful.  Oh, well, back to the drawing board . . .

John Aldridge, "Bridge, February" (1963)

               In the Conservatory

A bird's nest lined with leaves and moss
Kept here through the winter . . .
                  Spring come, I find among leaf-mould
A brown mouse -- the tail an unlikely flourish --
Modelling the letter 'C'
As if it stood for Comfort,
Though it lay there fixed and cold.

Clive Wilmer, The Times Literary Supplement (December 8, 2006).

John Aldridge, "Beslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield"

Lot 96 And Lot 304: "The Ghost Dogs In The Vanishing Gardens"

Here is a sobering and, perhaps, tristful thought:  what will an idle browser think of your life as he or she peruses the items in your estate sale?  What will the detritus of your life tell them about you?

For example, one of my prized possessions is the 1976 edition of The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy (edited by James Gibson):  the first edition of Hardy's poetry to collect all of his poems in a single book.  I don't usually write in my books.  However, I decided to make an exception for this volume.  It seemed to me that the book would be with me until my dying day, and, given the number of poems in the book -- 947 -- I wanted to check them off as I read them, so that I could keep track of my progress.  In addition, over the years I have nearly filled the endpapers of the book with words from the poems for which I have written out definitions.

Or, consider this:  an egg of green alabaster acquired in an antique store in a Cotswold village on an autumn day in 1986.  Or this:  a baseball signed by members of the 1967 Minnesota Twins (Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Rod Carew, Dean Chance, and others), purchased for me by my grandfather during a game at Metropolitan Stadium in the summer of that year.

You know what I mean.

John Aldridge, "Still Life" (1958)

                              Lot 96

Lot 96:  a brass-rimmed ironwork fender.
It had stood guard for years, where it used to belong,
Over the hearth of a couple who loved tenderly.
Now it will go for a song.

Night upon winter night, as she gossiped with him
Or was silent, he watched the talkative firelight send
Its reflections twittering over that burnished rim
Like a language of world without end.

Death, which unclasped their hearts, dismantled all.
The world they made is as if it had never been true --
That firelit bubble of warmth, serene, magical,
Ageless in form and hue.

Now there stands, dulled in an auction room,
This iron thing -- a far too durable irony,
Reflecting never a ghost of the lives that illumed it,
No hint of the sacred fire.

This lot was part of their precious bond, almost
A property of its meaning.  Here, in the litter
Washed up by death, values are re-assessed
At a nod from the highest bidder.

C. Day Lewis, Pegasus and Other Poems (1957).

George Clausen (1852-1944), "The Chinese Pot"

     Lot 304: Various Books

There are always lives
Left between the leaves
Scattering as I dust
The honeymoon edelweiss
Pressed ferns from prayer-books
Seed lists and hints on puddings
Deprecatory letters from old cousins
Proposing to come for Easter
And always clouded negatives
The ghost dogs in the vanishing gardens:

Fading ephemera of non-events,
Whoever owned it
(Dead or cut adrift or homeless in a home)
Nothing to me, a number, or if a name
Then meaningless,
Yet always as I touch a current flows,
The poles connect, the wards latch into place,
A life extends me --
Love-hate; grief; faith; wonder;
Tenderness.

Joan Barton, The Mistress and Other Poems (1972).

Thomas Henslow Barnard (1898-1992), "Still Life"

Blackthorn

Poets are wont to write about the blackthorn as it begins to bloom in late winter or early spring, particularly in connection with the chill winds that accompany the turning of the year.  Straddling the seasons, the blackthorn bears winter's bleakness, while at the same time hinting of spring.  A precursor of the crocus.

                                       John Aldridge, "Winter" (1947)

          "Endure Hardness"

A cold wind stirs the blackthorn
     To burgeon and to blow,
Besprinkling half-green hedges
     With flakes and sprays of snow.

Thro' coldness and thro' keenness,
     Dear hearts, take comfort so:
Somewhere or other doubtless
     These make the blackthorn blow.

Christina Rossetti, Verses (1893).  "Blow" in this instance means to blossom or to bloom.

With its suggestion that "coldness" and "keenness" and "hardness" will eventually give way to reawakening and growth, "Endure Hardness" is reminiscent of Rossetti's "There Is a Budding Morrow in Midnight," which I have posted here previously.  Here are the last three lines of that poem:

For a future buds in everything;
               Grown, or blown,
Or about to break.

Christina Rossetti, Poems (1888).

                                 John Aldridge, "Bridge, February" (1963)

The resemblance of blackthorn blossoms to snow recurs in the following poem by Michael Longley.

                            The Blackthorn

A bouquet for my fifties, these flowers without leaves
Like easter snow, hailstones clustering at dayligone --
From the difficult thicket a walking stick in bloom, then
Astringency, the blackthorn and its smoky plum.

Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan (Jonathan Cape 2000).

In a note, Longley indicates that "dayligone" (line 2) is a "Scots (or Ulster Scots)" word which means "twilight, dusk."  Ibid, page 68.  The word "easter" (line 2) is not capitalized in the original.

                                 John Aldridge, "Landscape" (c. 1940s)

"The Curse Of Literacy. And The Greed For Knowing."

In winter, on my daily walks, I always enjoy seeing the bushes with white berries.  At this time of year, the bushes have long ago lost their leaves. The creamy white berries -- which are the same size and shape as blueberries -- tend to grow in bunches out on the tips of the twigs that extend from branches.  The newer branches range in color from rusty brown to red.  The older branches are grey, and are often covered with moss.

On a gloomy day, the white berries seem to gather in all of the available light.

What name do these bushes go by?  I don't know.  I've been looking at them for years, and I've been content to call them "the bushes with white berries."  Mind you, I greatly admire those who know the names of all things.  And as for those who can rattle off the Latin binomials for every flower, tree, and bird they come across:  I envy them their curiosity, diligence, and knowledge.

But I am content with "the bird with the yellow head, black beak, and yellow-striped wings" and "the tree with the big, dark-green leaves that fall first in autumn."

And "the bushes with white berries."  The berries that, on certain days in winter, gather in all of the light.

                   John Aldridge, "Artichokes and Cathay Quinces" (1967)

          1,800 Feet Up

The flower -- it didn't know it --
was called dwarf cornel.
I found this out by enquiring.

Now I remember the name
but have forgotten the flower.

-- The curse of literacy.

And the greed for knowing. --
I'll have to contour again
from the Loch of the Red Corrie
to the Loch of the Green Corrie
to find what doesn't know its name,
to find what doesn't even know
it's a flower.

Since I believe in correspondences
I shrink in my many weathers
from whoever is contouring immeasurable space
to find what I am like -- this forgotten thing
he once gave a name to.

Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

                                        John Aldridge, "Still Life" (1958)

"Autumn Is Here, It Is"

In accordance with the movements of the heavenly bodies and the tyranny of the calendar, autumn will arrive this weekend.  Now is a good time to take stock.

Perhaps we should think of this time of year as a culmination, not as a descent.  Having said that, I acknowledge that culmination and descent will be just a hair's-breadth away from each other over the next few months -- until the last leaf spins from a bare tree sometime in December.

                                 John Aldridge, "The Pink Farm" (1940)

            Autumn

Fragile, notice that
As autumn starts, a light
Frost crisps up at night
And next day, for a while,
White covers path and lawn.
"Autumn is here, it is,"
Sings the stoical blackbird
But by noon pure gold is tossed
On everything.  Leaves fall
As if they meant to rise.
Nothing of nature's lost,
The birth, the blight of things,
The bud, the stretching wings.

Elizabeth Jennings, Celebrations and Elegies (Carcanet 1982).

                   John Aldridge, "Artichokes and Cathay Quinces" (1967)

"Long And Sluggish Lines"

There are quite a few magnolia trees in my neighborhood.  At this time of year, the large, furry buds begin to emerge.  Wallace Stevens mentions yet-to-awaken magnolias in the following poem -- one of his wonderful late poems, written in his seventies.  It is set in "the pre-history of February."

                    Long and Sluggish Lines

It makes so little difference, at so much more
Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.

Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow
Of air and whirled away.  But it has been often so.

The trees have a look as if they bore sad names
And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,

In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,
Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.

What opposite?  Could it be that yellow patch, the side
Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;

Or these--escent--issant pre-personae:  first fly,
A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,

Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,
The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?

. . . Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.
The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal
Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.

Wallace Stevens, "The Rock," Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997).

                         John Aldridge (1905-1983), "February Afternoon"

Stevens's observation that the trees "kept saying over and over one same, same thing" brings to mind his poem "The Region November" (the loveliness of which I have touted on more than one occasion).  In that poem, the trees

. . . sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,
So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say
On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.

Wallace Stevens, "Late Poems," Ibid.

I will hazard the guess that Stevens wants us to know that we need to move beyond the iterations of the trees, which, though beautiful and real, are nothing in themselves.  And what enables us to move beyond the "saying" of the trees?  "The life of the poem in the mind."

It is important to recognize that, in Stevens's world, "poem" has a definition that goes well beyond "verse":  throughout Stevens's poetry, "poem" means the imagination interacting with the world and the world interacting with the imagination.  Back and forth, back and forth.  The title of another of his late poems perhaps sums this up:  "Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination."  (And we mustn't forget "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.")

                           John Aldridge, "Beslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield"

R. S. Thomas On Christmas

The word that comes to mind when I think of R. S. Thomas is fierce. However, having said that, I feel that I have fallen into the stereotypical view of Thomas as The World's Grumpiest Poet.  To wit, the man who was peremptory when not silent, living in an unheated stone cottage on the coast of Wales.   To my mind, this makes him, well, a human being.  And, of course, there's this:  his poetry is often graceful and beautiful.

Thomas's fierceness is reflected in his lifelong battle with God.  This battle consisted of Thomas stubbornly waiting upon God's equally stubborn silence, with Thomas commenting upon this state of affairs in his poems. The battle was made a great deal more piquant by the fact that Thomas served as an Anglican priest for 42 years, ministering to rural parishes in Wales (the subject of another of his love-hate relationships).

All of this leads to a seasonal note:  over the years, Thomas wrote a number of lovely Christmas poems.  How shall I describe the poems?  A bit fierce, yes, but withal lovely.  A selection follows.

                Song

I choose white, but with
Red on it, like the snow
In winter with its few
Holly berries and the one

Robin, that is a fire
To warm by and like Christ
Comes to us in his weakness,
But with a sharp song.

R. S. Thomas, H'm (1972).

                                        John Aldridge, "Winter" (1947)

                  Blind Noel

Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
on the heart for another
snowflake to reveal a pattern.

Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out.  In the shadow
of so vast a God I shiver, unable
to detect the child for the whiteness.

R. S. Thomas, No Truce with the Furies (1995).

                                 John Nash, "The Garden in Winter" (1967)

                  Lost Christmas

He is alone, it is Christmas.
Up the hill go three trees, the three kings.
There is a star also
Over the dark manger.  But where is the Child?

Pity him.  He has come far
Like the trees, matching their patience
With his.  But the mind was before
Him on the long road.  The manger is empty.

R. S. Thomas, Young and Old (1972).

                                     Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959)
                         "Landscape with Trees, a Lake and a Village"

Lists, Part Four: "Field Names"

My introduction to English field names came through a chapter in George Ewart Evans's Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (1956), a book about the now-vanished life of rural Suffolk.  Much later, I came across the following poem by Clive Sansom (1910-1981).  Perhaps the poem provides another approach to the topic of the wordlessness (but not silence) of the World -- and our own use of words as a response.

                              Field Names

Our name-givers loved the World and loved the Word:
These two delights are only an ell apart.
Coupling, they gave birth to those field names
That map the earth in the language of the heart:

     'Wooden Cabbage', 'Three Men's Field',
     'Charity Bottom', 'Doom',
     'Perrymans', 'God's Blessing Green',
     'Fishponds' and 'Bramble Coomb'.
     'Reddleman's', Bedlam', 'Dancing Hill',
     'Troy Town', and 'Starvecrow Land',
     'Lottery', 'Drummer's Castle', 'Fleet',
     'Crocker's Knap', 'Flower-in-Hand'. . . .

Lavish as wildflowers in a Dorset hedgerow,
Fragrant as their names before the botanists came,
They startle the lawyers' deeds with their heart-language
And stake, in some fragment of England, their loving claim.

Clive Sansom, Dorset Village (1962).

                          John Aldridge, "Stubble Field, Thaxted" (1968)

"This Solitude Of Cataracts"

William Wordsworth's meditation on the soothing qualities of moving water leads me to one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens.  (Come to think of it, it is one of my favorite poems period.)  It begins with two lovely variations on Heraclitus's well-known dictum:  "You cannot step into the same river twice."  Stevens then heads off in his own beautiful direction.


                    This Solitude of Cataracts

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing.  He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.

Wallace Stevens, The Auroras of Autumn (1950).

With regard to "thought-like Monadnocks," Stevens writes:

The expression "thought-like Monadnocks" can best be explained by changing it into "Monadnock-like thoughts."  The image of a mountain deep in the surface of a lake acquires a secondary character.  From the sheen of the surface it becomes slightly unreal:  thought-like.  Mt. Monadnock is a New England mountain.    It is in New Hampshire.

Wallace Stevens, Letter to Renato Poggioli (March 4, 1954), Holly Stevens (editor), Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966), page 823.  Poggioli was a publisher who was preparing a translation of Stevens's poems into Italian. Stevens normally avoided such direct explications of his poems.

Stevens also writes:

In this same poem there is the following phrase which may not be perfectly clear to your translator:  "the oscillations of planetary pass-pass."  It means the seeming-to-go-round of the planets by day and night.

Ibid.

For Stevens, a river usually stands for the world in which we live:

Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

Wallace Stevens, "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" (the final four lines).

              John Aldridge, "The River Pant Near Sculpin's Bridge" (1961)

"Crowded With Thoughts That Need A Settled Home"

Sages often counsel us to avoid too much thinking.  This is a piece of advice that we hear from the Stoics on one side of the world to the Taoists on the other.  William Wordsworth, who is more prolix than, say, Marcus Aurelius or Lao Tzu, nonetheless has similar thoughts.  The following untitled poem is one of a group of five poems that appear under the title "Inscriptions Supposed To Be Found In And Near A Hermit's Cell":

Hast thou seen, with flash incessant,
Bubbles gliding under ice,
Bodied forth and evanescent,
No one knows by what device?

Such are thoughts! -- A wind-swept meadow
Mimicking a troubled sea,
Such is life; and death a shadow
From the rock eternity!

Wordsworth wrote the poem in 1818.  He revisited the subject at a later date, in a poem that was not published until 1850, the year of his death.

        On the Banks of a Rocky Stream

Behold an emblem of our human mind
Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home,
Yet, like to eddying balls of foam
Within this whirlpool, they each other chase
Round and round, and neither find
An outlet nor a resting-place!
Stranger, if such disquietude be thine,
Fall on thy knees and sue for help divine.

                                     John Aldridge, "Still Life" (1958)    

"True And Not Feigning": Edward Thomas And John Clare

Edward Thomas wrote all of his poems between December of 1914 and January of 1917.  Some have suggested that this creative period was a sort of "miracle," given that Thomas had not previously written poetry.  I disagree.  If there was any "miracle," it was the fact that Thomas and Robert Frost met each other in 1913.  Moreover, Thomas's prose writings prior to 1914 show, first, that he knew English poetry inside and out, and, second, that he had long thought about -- and felt -- the essence of true poetry.

His discussion of a poem by John Clare reveals the depth of Thomas's thoughts and feelings on the subject of poetry.  He begins by quoting in full the following untitled poem by Clare:

     Love lives beyond the tomb,
And earth, which fades like dew!
     I love the fond,
The faithful and the true.

     Love lives in sleep:
'Tis happiness of healthy dreams:
     Eve's dews may weep,
But love delightful seems.

     'Tis seen in flowers,
And in the morning's pearly dew;
     In earth's green hours,
And in the heaven's eternal blue.

     'Tis heard in Spring,
When light and sunbeams, warm and kind,
     On angel's wing
Bring love and music to the mind.

     And where's the voice,
So young, so beautiful, and sweet
     As Nature's choice,
Where Spring and lovers meet?

     Love lives beyond the tomb,
And earth, which fades like dew!
     I love the fond,
The faithful and the true.

Arthur Symons (editor), Poems by John Clare (1908). 

After quoting the poem, Thomas writes:  "This and perhaps all of his best poems show Clare as one of those who have in them the natural spirit of poetry in its purity, so pure that perhaps he can never express it quite whole and perfect."  Thomas then comes to the heart of things:

"Here, I think, in 'Love lies beyond the tomb,' in this unprejudiced singing voice that knows not what it sings, is some reason for us to believe that poets are not merely writing figuratively when they say, 'My love is like a red, red rose,' that they are to be taken more literally than they commonly are, that they do not invent or 'make things up' as grown people do when they condescend to a child's game.  What they say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification.

If this is not so, and if we do not believe it to be so, then poetry is of no greater importance than wallpaper, or a wayside drink to one who is not thirsty.  But if it is so, then we are on the way to understand why poetry is mighty; for if what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death."

Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (1910), page 86.

This is the wisdom and the sensibility that Thomas already had in him when the time came for him to (at last!) write his poems.  And what he said in those poems is -- above all else -- "true and not feigning."  I return once more to what Kingsley Amis said of Thomas:

"How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel, since you have only his word for it, is hard to discover, but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it."

Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988), page 339.
 

            John Aldridge, "Besslyn's Pond, Great Bardfield" (c. 1950)

"The House Across The Way"

The line "there's masses of time yet, masses, masses . . ." from Gavin Ewart's "Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens" brings to mind a poem by Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962) on the same subject -- what Hilaire Belloc calls "implacable fate . . . and the strumble of the hungry river of death."  Hodgson was one of the "Georgian poets," and his verse is now little remembered.  We owe Hodgson our thanks for arranging the first meeting between Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, which took place in London on October 6, 1913.  In his note to Frost setting up the meeting, Hodgson wrote:  "Edward Thomas will be up [to London] and I think you'd both like to know each other."  Very perceptive, and how fortunate for us!  

          The House Across the Way

The leaves looked in at the window
Of the house across the way,
At a man that had sinned like you and me
And all poor human clay.

He muttered:  "In a gambol
I took my soul astray.
But tomorrow I'll drag it back from danger,
In the morning, come what may;
For no man knows what season
He shall go his ghostly way."
And his face fell down upon the table,
And where it fell it lay.

And the wind blew under the carpet
And it said, or it seemed to say:
"Truly, all men must go a-ghosting
And no man knows his day."
And the leaves stared in at the window
Like the people at a play.

Ralph Hodgson, Poems (1917).

                       John Aldridge, "Charles II Street, London" (1944)