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"

Lists, Part Seven: As The Year Comes To A Close

As the year comes to a close, we are encouraged to come up with resolutions that will help us to straighten up and fly right in the new year.  I'm afraid that my resolutions are the usual prosaic suspects:  fewer words are better (i.e., don't add to the cacophony); simpler is better; kindness is better.  All of which will be broken within the next 15 minutes or so.

But here is one that I hope might have a longer duration:  pay closer attention.  The following poem by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) provides a good start.

   Green Waters

Green Waters
Blue Spray
Grayfish

Anna T
Karen B
Netta Croan

Constant Star
Daystar
Starwood

Starlit Waters
Moonlit Waters
Drift

Ian Hamilton Finlay, in The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (Edna Longley, editor) (2000).

                                 Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)

   Some Preliminary Definitions

Your life:
A collection of facts;
A succession of desires;
A whirl of thoughts.

Your death:
Abiding;
Unfathomable.

The world around you:
An intractable paradise.

sip

               Richard Eurich, "Coast Scene with Rainbow" (1952-1953)

Lists, Part Six: "The Candle A Saint"

I confess that the following list by Frank Ormsby leaves me a bit perplexed. But, no matter:  the poem sounds lovely and, in addition, provides a good piece of advice.

                    Under the Stairs

Look in the dark alcove under the stairs:
a paintbrush steeped in turpentine, its hairs

softening for use; rat-poison in a jar;
bent spoons for prising lids; a spare fire-bar;

the shaft of a broom; a tyre; assorted nails;
a store of candles for when the light fails.

Frank Ormsby, A Store of Candles (1977).

                              Samuel Palmer, "The Lonely Tower" (1879)

Wallace Stevens was fond of candles.  For instance, consider this:  what would the night be -- in fact, what would the whole of the universe be -- without a candle?  Your own particular candle.  Keeping "a store of candles" is indeed a wise idea.

                      The Candle a Saint

Green is the night, green kindled and apparelled.
It is she that walks among astronomers.

She strides above the rabbit and the cat,
Like a noble figure, out of the sky,

Moving among the sleepers, the men,
Those that lie chanting green is the night.

Green is the night and out of madness woven,
The self-same madness of the astronomers

And of him that sees, beyond the astronomers,
The topaz rabbit and the emerald cat,

That sees above them, that sees rise up above them,
The noble figure, the essential shadow,

Moving and being, the image at its source,
The abstract, the archaic queen.  Green is the night.

Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (1942).

For more on "the topaz rabbit and the emerald cat," you may wish to visit Stevens's "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," where you will be introduced to a "fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk" and a rabbit "that fills the four corners of night."

                             Samuel Palmer, "The Weary Ploughman" (1858)

Lists, Part Five: "A Quilt Of Quilt Names To Keep You Warm In The Dark"

As I have mentioned previously, Michael Longley is a master of lists.  His collection The Weather in Japan contains several poems that have quilts as their subject.  (An aside:  Longley is fond of transposing Homeric scenes into the modern world.  Thus, Longley's lists sometimes bring to mind Homer's list of Greek ships in The Iliad.)

                         The Yellow Teapot

When those who had eaten at our table and drunk
From the yellow teapot into the night, betrayed you
And told lies about you, I cried out for a curse
And wrote a curse, then stitched together this spell,
A quilt of quilt names to keep you warm in the dark:

Snake's Trail, Shoo Fly, Flying Bats, Spider Web,
Broken Handle, Tumbling Blocks, Hole in the Barn
Door, Dove at the Window, Doors and Windows,
Grandmother's Flower Garden, Sun Dial, Mariner's
Compass, Delectable Mountains, World without End.

Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan (2000).

                             J. E. H. MacDonald, "Rowanberries" (1922)

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)

Lists, Part Three: Michael Longley On Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, And Thomas Hardy

Although the following poem by Michael Longley has a list at its physical center, it is far, far more than a "list poem."  The subject is "poetry" -- in a wonderful, touching, ever-expanding number of senses.

                                   Poetry

When he was billeted in a ruined house in Arras
And found a hole in the wall beside his bed
And, rummaging inside, his hand rested on Keats
By Edward Thomas, did Edmund Blunden unearth
A volume which 'the tall, Shelley-like figure'
Gathering up for the last time his latherbrush,
Razor, towel, comb, cardigan, cap comforter,
Water bottle, socks, gas mask, great coat, rifle
And bayonet, hurrying out of the same building
To join his men and march into battle, left
Behind him like a gift, the author's own copy?
When Thomas Hardy died his widow gave Blunden
As a memento of many visits to Max Gate
His treasured copy of Edward Thomas's Poems.

Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan (Jonathan Cape 2000).  Max Gate was Thomas Hardy's home in Dorset.  Blunden visited Hardy there often, sometimes accompanied by Siegfried Sassoon.  (And, on one occasion, by T. E. Lawrence.)

Michael Longley states in a note that "Poetry" is "based on episodes from Edmund Blunden by Barry Webb."  The episodes of which Longley speaks are these:

"One find late in 1918 caused [Blunden] particular pleasure.  Billeted in a ruined house in Arras, he found a hole in the wall by the side of his bed.  Feeling inside, his hand rested on a copy of Edward Thomas's study of John Keats.  Thomas had been killed at the battle of Arras, and Edmund never gave up hope that it was the author's own copy:  'I fancied that I could see the tall, Shelley-like figure of the poet gathering together his equipment for the last time, hastening out of this ruined building to join his men and march into battle, and forgetting his copy of John Keats.'
. . . . . .
On Hardy's death in 1928 his widow presented Edmund with Hardy's treasured copy of Edward Thomas's Poems as a memento of these visits [to Max Gate]."

Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: A Biography (Yale University Press 1990), pages 56 and 135.

                            Stanley Spencer, "Map Reading" (1927-1932)
                       Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire

Lists, Part Two: "The Ice-Cream Man"

Michael Longley is a master of listing.  He has said:  "nothing remains ordinary if you look at it for long enough."  In the following poem -- one of his finest, I think -- Longley transforms a list into a profound lament for the human cost of the violence in his native Northern Ireland.     

                          The Ice-cream Man

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours.  That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day:  thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady's bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

Michael Longley, Gorse Fires (Cape 1991).

Who would have thought that a simple list of wild flowers could be so heartbreaking?  Or could tell us so much about the value of life?  I take it back: this is, of course, not a "simple" list at all.

                          Eero Jarnefelt, "Pond Water Crowfoot" (1895)   

Lists, Part One: "The Dearness Of Common Things"

When it comes to what I call "list poems" (a more imaginative term does not come to mind at the moment), Ivor Gurney is a good place to begin, for he was fond of lists.  "Encounters" -- which I have previously posted -- is a wonderful example.  Here is another.

               Common Things

The dearness of common things --
Beech wood, tea, plate-shelves,
And the whole family of crockery --
Wood-axes, blades, helves.

Ivory milk, earth's coffee,
The white face of books
And the touch, feel, smell of paper --
Latin's lovely looks.

Earth fine to handle;
The touch of clouds,
When the imagining arm leaps out to caress
Grey worsted or wool clouds.

Wool, rope, cloth, old pipes
Gone, warped in service;
And the one herb of tobacco,
The herb of grace, the censer weed,
Of whorled, blue, finger-traced curves.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

In order to put Gurney's lists into perspective, the following poem may be helpful.  (I have posted it before, but it bears revisiting.)

                            The Escape

I believe in the increasing of life whatever
Leads to the seeing of small trifles . . .
Real, beautiful, is good, and an act never
Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles
Under ingratitude's weight; nor is anything done
Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight
Of a thing hidden under by custom; revealed
Fulfilled, used, (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight.
.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
Trefoil . . . . hedge sparrow . . . the stars on the edge of night.

Ibid.  The ellipses are in the original.  As is often the case with Gurney's poems (especially those that were not published in his lifetime), his punctuation (or lack thereof) can make things a bit puzzling.  But the point is clear, I think:  pay attention.  

                                        Evelyn Dunbar (1906-1960)
                 "A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling"