"A Merry Christmas, Friend!"

At sunset, on nearly the shortest day of the year, I walked homeward through green, open fields, a row of bare big-leaf maples a few hundred yards off to the left.  A straight, narrow, shallow river of white cirrus cloud arched overhead from the far southeast corner of the horizon to the far northwest corner of the horizon, disappearing somewhere into Canada.  Or perhaps into the Pacific.

As the bright circle of the sun sank beyond the Olympic Mountains, the white river of cloud above me began to turn pinkish-orange.  But "pinkish-orange" is a wholly inadequate approximation of that heavenly, heart-catching glow, a not-long-for-this-world glow that lasted no more than a few minutes -- beginning to vanish as soon as it arrived.  Its essence was its evanescence.  And onward came nearly the longest night of the year.

     Christmas Poem

We are folded all
In a green fable
And we fare
From early
Plough-and-daffodil sun
Through a revel
Of wind-tossed oats and barley
Past sickle and flail
To harvest home,
The circles of bread and ale
At the long table.
It is told, the story --
We and earth and sun and corn are one.

Now kings and shepherds have come.
A wintered hovel
Hides a glory
Whiter than snowflake or silver or star.

George Mackay Brown, The Wreck of the Archangel (John Murray 1989).

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), "1930 (Christmas Night)" (1930)

On this clear and cool Christmas Eve, the sunset was a dramatic red and orange spectacle, spread out above the dark, now snow-covered, mountains, the yet darker waters of Puget Sound in the foreground. Lines from John Masefield's "On Eastnor Knoll" came to mind:  "the red, lurid wreckage of the sunset/Smoulders in smoky fire, and burns on/The misty hill-tops."

Another short day, another long night.  But the houses in the neighborhood, and the trees in the yards, are strung with lights. Christmas.  May it never change.

               Christmastide

The rain-shafts splintered on me
     As despondently I strode;
The twilight gloomed upon me
     And bleared the blank high-road.
Each bush gave forth, when blown on
     By gusts in shower and shower,
A sigh, as it were sown on
     In handfuls by a sower.

A cheerful voice called, nigh me,
     "A merry Christmas, friend!" --
There rose a figure by me,
     Walking with townward trend,
A sodden tramp's, who, breaking
     Into thin song, bore straight
Ahead, direction taking
     Toward the Casuals' gate.

Thomas Hardy, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (Macmillan 1928).

"The Casuals' gate" refers to a gate of the Union House in Dorchester. J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook (University of North Carolina Press 1970), page 581.  "In Hardy's time any 'casual' (pauper or tramp) could apply to the police for a ticket, with which he would be admitted for supper, a bed, and breakfast."  Ibid.

A Merry Christmas, friends!

Robin Tanner (1904-1988), "Christmas" (1929)

Mirrors, Glimmers, Glimpses

In this part of the world, one must learn to embrace greyness and inclemency.  Otherwise, you may find it difficult to venture beyond your doorstep.  You learn to adapt.  For instance, after living here a certain number of years, one day, without making a conscious decision to do so, you stop using umbrellas.  It just happens. Cumbersome things, after all.  A hat or a hood (or neither) will do.

But, beyond the minor practicalities, there is this:  the World has a way of providing us with compensations, however small and however fleeting.  If we fail to remain on the lookout for these compensations, all is lost, whether we abide at the Equator or in farthest Thule.

He who has lived in sunshine all day long,
               His happy eyes
From too much light defending,
               He cannot duly prize
One gleam of light at the day's ending.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).  The poem is untitled.  It was written in 1888.

"One gleam of light" may be all that we get, but it is more than enough.  A few days ago, while out for a walk, I saw the first tuft of blossoming crocuses -- pale purple -- next to the sidewalk.  The dark green shoots of daffodils have begun to emerge as well.  Unexpected compensations.  Enough to subsist upon.

"All I have been able to do is to walk and go on walking, remember, glimpse, forget, try again, rediscover, become absorbed.  I have not bent down to inspect the ground like an entomologist or a geologist; I've merely passed by, open to impressions.  I have seen those things which also pass -- more quickly or, conversely, more slowly than human life.  Occasionally, as if our movements had crossed -- like the encounter of two glances that can create a flash of illumination and open up another world -- I've thought I had glimpsed what I should have to call the still centre of the moving world.  Too much said? Better to walk on . . ."

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne), Landscapes with Absent Figures (Paysages avec Figures Absentes) (Delos Press/Menard Press 1997), page 4.  In the original French text, the passage ends with the ellipses.

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

In this matter of the World's freely-bestowed compensations, we should never forget the miraculous puddle.  I have sung the praises of puddles -- those World-reflecting wonders -- in the past, and I will do so again now.  At the beginning of last week, on my afternoon walk, I was marveling at how the beauty of bare branches set against a cloud-dappled blue sky becomes deeper, more profound, when seen on the surface of a humble puddle.  But that is not the end of it:  the beauty takes on yet a different aspect as you begin to walk.  All of the intricacy, color, and depth moves along with you, at your feet, as you pass beside the bright water -- an entire upside-down World in motion.

I thought of puddles when I came across these four lines later in the week:

Thou mirror that hast danced through such a world,
So manifold, so fresh, so brave a world,
That hast so much reflected, but, alas,
Retained so little in thy careless depths.

Matthew Arnold, fragment from "Lucretius," in Kenneth Allott (editor), The Poems of Matthew Arnold (Longmans, Green 1965), page 585.

Allott notes that this fragment echoes a passage in Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna":

          Hither and thither spins
          The wind-borne, mirroring soul,
          A thousand glimpses wins,
          And never sees a whole;
Looks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last employ.

Matthew Arnold, "Empedocles on Etna," Act I, Scene II, lines 82-86, Ibid, page 159.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this image of the soul as a mirror. "Thou mirror that hast danced through such a world,/So manifold, so fresh, so brave a world" is indeed a lovely thought.  But, at the risk of oversimplifying (and/or misinterpreting) Arnold's point (which originates in his reading of the philosophical remnants of Empedocles), I wonder if he isn't being a bit too pessimistic about the soul's capabilities.  His vision of the soul as a mirror seems far too passive.  My limited experience with puddles suggests that some mirrors may "retain" (to use Arnold's word) a great deal of the World upon -- and beneath -- their surfaces.

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

As the crocuses and the daffodils emerge, the flitting and twittering spirits arrive as well.  I recently noticed a single dove disappearing into a bush in the back garden.  I hope, as was the case last year, I will be hearing coos outside my window later this spring and through the summer.

Saturday afternoon, walking through the woods, I noticed that the bushes beside the paths have come into leaf.  (I hadn't noticed this earlier in the week.  I was no doubt inattentive.  On the other hand, these things sometimes happen in the space of a day, or overnight.) At the tip of each twig is a single leaf or a small, unfolding spray of leaves.  I was entranced by one bush in particular:  at the center of each green spray was a circle of tiny white blossoms, a cluster of bright yellow stamens at the heart of each blossom.

                                   The inward frame
Though slowly opening, opens every day
With process not unlike to that which cheers
A pensive Stranger, journeying at his leisure
Through some Helvetian dell, when low-hung mists
Break up, and are beginning to recede;
How pleased he is where thin and thinner grows
The veil, or where it parts at once, to spy
The dark pines thrusting forth their spiky heads;
To watch the spreading lawns with cattle grazed,
Then to be greeted by the scattered huts,
As they shine out; and see the streams whose murmur
Had soothed his ear while they were hidden:  how pleased
To have about him, which way e'er he goes,
Something on every side concealed from view,
In every quarter something visible,
Half-seen or wholly, lost and found again,
Alternate progress and impediment,
And yet a growing prospect in the main.

William Wordsworth, "Home at Grasmere," The Recluse, Part I, Book I, lines 472-490, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Volume 5 (University of Oxford Press 1949).

To combine Arnold and Wordsworth:  in "such a world,/So manifold, so fresh, so brave a world," "the inward frame/Though slowly opening, opens every day."  Glimpses and glimmers.

John Aldridge, "Roofing a New House"

Last night's sunset over Puget Sound brought to mind these lines: "the red, lurid wreckage of the sunset/Smoulders in smoky fire." (John Masefield, "On Eastnor Knoll.")  However, that is too strong a description:  it was more delicate than "lurid," more deep orange-pink than primary, burning red.  Still, "smoulders in smoky fire" rings true.

But more striking than the sunset was a large oval orange-pink-purple gleam that appeared out in the middle of the Sound after the sun had disappeared beyond the Olympic Mountains.  There is surely a scientific explanation for why the pool of light appeared there when it did:  something about the sun's declining rays glancing off the clouds, et cetera.  Ah, well, there are always explanations, aren't there?  They take the life out of the World.

"Slanting Pillars of Light, like Ladders up to Heaven, their base always a field of vivid green Sunshine."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon Books 1957), Notebook Entry 1577 (October, 1803).

We should attend to these glimmers and glimpses.  Who knows where they will lead us?

"Of all my uncertainties, the least uncertain (the one least removed from the first glimmers of a belief) is the one given to me by poetic experience:  the thought that there is something unknown, something evasive, at the origin of things, at the very centre of our being.
* * * * *
As I reflect on all this I begin to see nonetheless that the poetic experience does give me direction, at least towards a sense of the high, and this is because I am quite naturally led to see poetry as a glimpse of the Highest and to regard it in a sense (and why not?) as it has been regarded from its very beginnings, as a mirror of the heavens . . .
* * * * *
(So it would be possible to live without definite hopes, but not without help, with the thought -- so close to certainty -- that if there is a single hope, a single opening for man, it would not be refused to someone who had lived 'beneath this sky.')

(The highest hope would be that the whole sky were really a gaze.)"

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by Mark Treharne),  Landscapes with Absent Figures, pages 157 and 159.  The italics and the ellipses are in the original text.

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

Poetry

I suspect that, by most people's standards, the speed at which I read poetry is slow and slothful.  As I have mentioned here in the past, I intentionally limit myself to one or two poems a day.  If a poem is lengthy, it may take me several days to finish it.  Thus, for instance, reading Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" will take me at least a week -- at 32 stanzas, four stanzas or so a day seems about right to me.

I am not stating this as a matter of pride, nor am I asking for plaudits.  This is simply the way it goes for me.  I need to mull things over.  I need to listen closely.  I need to let a poem sit.  I feel that I owe it to the poet and the poem to give them time and extended attention.

For the same reason, I return again and again to the old chestnuts.  I never tire of them.  Hence, the past few weeks I have been spending time with two of my favorite anthologies: The New Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Helen Gardner, and The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Christopher Ricks.  The current century is of no interest to me.  I prefer to visit dear friends from long ago.

               The Coming of Good Luck

So good luck came, and on my roof did light,
Like noiseless snow; or as the dew of night:
Not all at once, but gently, as the trees
Are, by the sun-beams, tickled by degrees.

Robert Herrick, in Christopher Ricks (editor), The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford University Press 1999).

David Macbeth Sutherland (1883-1973), "Drambuie, Wester Ross"

In browsing through the two anthologies, it was nice to be reminded how little poetry has to do with current events.  Of course, there are exceptions: "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna" (Charles Wolfe), "England in 1819" (Shelley, as self-regarding, disingenuous, and mendacious as ever), "The Convergence of the Twain" (Hardy), "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (Hopkins), for instance.  But these are few and far between. The general themes are, as one would expect, Love, Death, the Game of Life, the Beauty of the World.

This makes perfect sense.  Who wants poets to write about the passing happenstance of The News of the World?  Think of all the wasted emotion and energy some people devote to cultivating, and propounding, what they perceive to be the "correct" political, economic, and social views about what is "wrong" with the World, and how it ought to be fixed.  Think of all the utopian chimeras that these same people (left, right, and Martian) preoccupy themselves with on a daily basis.  They will never be happy.  For them, something will always be wrong with the World, something will always need to be fixed.  And they (totalitarians at heart) have appointed themselves to be the fixers.  Good luck with that.

I, on the other hand, believe that the World is perfect just as it is.  Are human beings perfect?  No.  Am I perfect?  Certainly not.  But the misery we create for each other is never going to disappear as the result of somebody concocting a grand theory about How We Should Live.  We are best advised to tend to our own soul, while being mindful, and careful, of the souls around us.  This is the true subject matter of poetry.

                    Magna est Veritas

Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world's course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

Coventry Patmore, in Helen Gardner (editor), The New Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford University Press 1972).

David Macbeth Sutherland, "The Breakwater, Stonehaven Harbour" (1950)

I am simple-minded.  I need to be reminded of certain things over and over again.  Although I do not believe that it is the function of poetry to set out to instruct or edify, I do believe that a good poem can embody human truth -- the truth of what it means to make one's way through the World as a unique soul, touching, and touched by, others.

                            An Epilogue

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.

John Masefield, in Christopher Ricks (editor), The Oxford Book of English Verse.

This is the sort of poem that I love to return to often.  Eventually, its truth gets through my thick skull, at least temporarily.  There are scores like this. Fortunately, the beauty of the poems is always there, regardless of my obtuseness.  Thus, returning to them is an everlasting delight.

David Macbeth Sutherland, "Evening in Skye, Loch Carron, Highlands"

Gratitude in the midst of evanescence.  This is poetry's ultimate message to us.

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam 

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
          Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
          We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
          Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
          Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, in Helen Gardner (editor), The New Oxford Book of English Verse.  The title of the poem comes from Horace's Odes, Book I, Ode 4, line 15, and may be translated as:  "the short span of our life forbids us to indulge in a long-term hope."  Ernest Dowson, Collected Poems (edited by R. K. R. Thornton) (University of Birmingham Press 2003), page 225.

Poetry shakes us by the shoulders, gently, and whispers in our ear:  Pay attention.  Live.

David Macbeth Sutherland, "Plockton from Duncraig" (1967)

"His Soul Is With The Saints, I Trust"

Last week, after posting poems by John Masefield and G. K. Chesterton about the leafy fate of two dead knights, I remembered that Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed a poem on the same subject.  After writing the poem, he recited it to a friend, who later repeated it to Walter Scott.  Unbeknownst to Coleridge, Scott used a slightly different version of the final three lines in Ivanhoe, which was published in 1819.  The poem was not published under Coleridge's name until 1834.

Eileen Aldridge, "The Downs near Brighton, East Sussex" (1962)

               The Knight's Tomb

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn?
Where may the grave of that good man be? --
By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,
Under the twigs of a young birch tree!
The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,
And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,
And whistled and roared in the winter alone,
Is gone, -- and the birch in its stead is grown. --
The Knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust; --
His soul is with the saints, I trust.

Ernest Hartley Coleridge (editor), The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford University Press 1912).

Stephen McKenna, "Foliage" (1983)

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who wrote the following untitled poem, was a knight.  In the last two lines, he hauntingly anticipates the poems by Coleridge, Masefield, and Chesterton.

Happy were he could finish forth his fate
     In some unhaunted desert, most obscure
From all societies, from love and hate
     Of worldly folk; then might he sleep secure;
Then wake again, and give God ever praise,
     Content with hips and haws and bramble-berry;
In contemplation spending all his days,
     And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;
Where, when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,
Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (1925).

I say "hauntingly anticipates" for the following reason:  Devereux was beheaded in February of 1601 for alleged treason against Elizabeth I.

Dane Maw, "Woolverton and Peart Woods" (1970)

"Telling His Loneliness To The Solitary Stars"

The closing lines of John Masefield's "The Dead Knight" -- "The mournful word the seas say/When tides are wandering out or in" -- brought to mind a lovely poem by John Freeman (1880-1929).  I recently spouted off to the effect that "it is the poem that matters, not the poet."  In retrospect, this sounds too highfalutin', but my point is this:  a large number of fine poems tend to be overlooked simply because they were not written by well-known poets.

As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may have noticed, I am determined (in my tiny way) to save some of these poems (and the poets who wrote them) from oblivion.  I harbor no illusions about what I am up against -- the news of the world, and all the other deafening noise out there -- but I am stubborn.

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "The Old Harbour"

                    The Hounds

Far off a lonely hound
Telling his loneliness all round
To the dark woods, dark hills, and darker sea;

And, answering, the sound
Of that yet lonelier sea-hound
Telling his loneliness to the solitary stars.

Hearing, the kennelled hound
Some neighbourhood and comfort found,
And slept beneath the comfortless high stars.

But that wild sea-hound
Unkennelled, called all night all round --
The unneighboured and uncomforted cold sea.

John Freeman, Stone Trees and Other Poems (1916).

Perhaps I am deluded, but I would stack this small poem up against any number of poems written by "major" poets.  I loved this poem the first time that I read it, and it has stayed with me ever since.  Is it the simple, recurring rhymes?  (Which seem to mimic the cries of the hounds and the sway of the sea.)  Is it the repetition of certain words?  Or is it the lonely middle-of-the-night feeling that all of us know too well?  (If I am not being presumptuous.)

Best to leave it alone.

Dane Maw (1908-1989), "Scottish Landscape, Air Dubh"

Two Dead Knights: "The Mournful Word The Seas Say When Tides Are Wandering Out Or In"

My previous post on John Masefield got me to thinking about another poem by him.  The poem may seem anachronistic to some.  After all, who writes (or reads) poems about knights any more?  In fact, the poem may have been viewed as anachronistic even in 1902, when it was originally published.

Ah, but I consider most anachronisms to be virtues, not vices.

James Cowie (1886-1956), "A Door in the Woods"

               The Dead Knight

The cleanly rush of the mountain air,
And the mumbling, grumbling humble-bees,
Are the only things that wander there.
The pitiful bones are laid at ease,
The grass has grown in his tangled hair,
And a rambling bramble binds his knees.

To shrieve his soul from the pangs of hell,
The only requiem-bells that rang
Were the hare-bell and the heather-bell.
Hushed he is with the holy spell
In the gentle hymn the wind sang,
And he lies quiet, and sleeps well.

He is bleached and blanched with the summer sun;
The misty rain and the cold dew
Have altered him from the kingly one
(That his lady loved, and his men knew)
And dwindled him to a skeleton.

The vetches have twined about his bones,
The straggling ivy twists and creeps
In his eye-sockets; the nettle keeps
Vigil about him while he sleeps.
Over his body the wind moans
With a dreary tune throughout the day,
In a chorus wistful, eerie, thin
As the gull's cry -- as the cry in the bay,
The mournful word the seas say
When tides are wandering out or in.

John Masefield, Salt-Water Ballads (1902).

I think that these are particularly nice:  "The only requiem-bells that rang/Were the hare-bell and the heather-bell;" "In the gentle hymn the wind sang;" "And he lies quiet, and sleeps well;" "The vetches have twined about his bones;" "The mournful word the seas say/When tides are wandering out or in."

Allin Braund, "Copse Path" (1940)

But Masefield was not the only person writing poetry about knights (or the skeletons of knights) at the beginning of the 20th century.

            The Skeleton

Chattering finch and water-fly
Are not merrier than I;
Here among the flowers I lie
Laughing everlastingly.
No:  I may not tell the best;
Surely, friends, I might have guessed
Death was but the good King's jest,
     It was hid so carefully.

G. K. Chesterton, The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900).

For another lovely poem about a knight, I recommend John Leicester Warren's "The Knight in the Wood," which I have posted here previously.

George Allsopp, "Wharfdale Landscape" (c. 1960)

Four-Line Poems, Part Two: "So I Trust, Too"

The early life of John Masefield sounds like something out of a novel by Charles Dickens.  He was born in 1878 in Herefordshire, where his father was a successful solicitor.  However, his mother died when he was six, and his father died when he was thirteen.  He was placed in the care of an aunt and uncle, who decided that he should immediately leave school and join the Merchant Navy.

After suffering bouts of seasickness and sunstroke, as well as a nervous breakdown, he deserted his ship in New York in 1895.  In America, he lived as a vagrant for a time, but then found work in a tavern and, later, in a carpet factory.  He returned to England in 1897.

He went to work as a bank clerk, but then decided to become a poet.  His life at sea provided him with the poems that were collected in Salt-Water Ballads (1902), the book that established his reputation.  The rest is, as they say, history:  he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1930, and served in that position until his death in 1967.

His work is now neglected, which is unfortunate.  Yet, a four-line poem by him continues to find its way into anthologies.

Eric Hesketh Hubbard (1892-1957), "The Cuckmere Valley, East Sussex"

                       An Epilogue

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.

John Masefield, Poems (1946).

I suspect that "An Epilogue" is too non-ironic for "modern" sensibilities (such as they are).  No surprise there.  It has its source in deeply-felt, non-ironic experience, which always seems to puzzle and befuddle "moderns." The following poem provides a hint of that experience.

                                          Personal

Tramping at night in the cold and wet, I passed the lighted inn,
And an old tune, a sweet tune, was being played within.
It was full of the laugh of the leaves and the song the wind sings;
It brought the tears and the choked throat, and a catch to the heart-strings.

And it brought a bitter thought of the days that now were dead to me,
The merry days in the old home before I went to sea --
Days that were dead to me indeed.  I bowed my head to the rain,
And I passed by the lighted inn to the lonely roads again.

John Masefield, Salt-Water Ballads (1902).

George Mackley (1900-1983), "Brackie's Burn, Northumberland"