"The Silent Friendship Of The Moon"

Today, I was tempted to go off on a tangent about the Crimean War.  You know:  the one that ended in 1856.  I might have found a way to work in Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  But a sudden weariness came over me.  Thus, let us instead consider the moon, which remains pretty much the same after 158 years:  still presiding over we humans, who remain pretty much the same after 158 years, with only a superficial outward change in appearances and appliances.

Which is no cause for concern, by the way.  What I worry about are the people who believe we have changed since 1856.  The moon knows otherwise.

Harald Sohlberg, "Moonlight, Nevlunghavn" (1922)

                       The Moon

There is such loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
Whom the first Adam saw.  The long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her
With ancient lament.  Look at her.  She is your mirror.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Willis Barnstone), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

I suppose that the poem violates John Ruskin's strictures about the use of the pathetic fallacy in poetry (although I'm not certain he was consistent in his thinking on the matter).  Personally, as much as I admire Ruskin, I don't see the pathetic fallacy as such a bad thing.  If Borges perceives the moon as being filled with "ancient lament," I don't see why not.  It makes perfect sense to me.

Winifred Nicholson, "The Hunter's Moon" (1955)

I am also quite willing to accept the silent friendship of the moon, even if she is filled with ancient lament.

                       The Limit

The silent friendship of the moon
(I misquote Virgil) has kept you company
since that one night or evening
now lost in time, when your restless
eyes first made her out for always
in a patio or a garden since gone to dust.
For always?  I know that someday someone
will find a way of telling you this truth:
"You'll never see the moon aglow again.
You've now attained the limit set for you
by destiny.  No use opening every window
throughout the world.  Too late.  You'll never find her."
Our life is spent discovering and forgetting
that gentle habit of the night.
Take a good look.  It could be the last.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alan Trueblood), Ibid.

How nice to see Borges use the word "destiny."  A very unmodern word, wouldn't you say?  It suggests something beyond ourselves, and thus makes us nervous.  Destiny?  Fate?  Soul?  "The vale of Soul-making"?  Of what relevance are they when we have Science and Progress at our disposal?

Paul Nash, "The Pyramids in the Sea" (1912)

I think the following poem captures our affinity and reciprocity with the moon very well.  In his quiet way, over hundreds of poems, Walter de la Mare often surprises us with these small gems.

                    Moonlight

The far moon maketh lovers wise
     In her pale beauty trembling down,
Lending curved cheeks, dark lips, dark eyes,
     A strangeness not her own.
And, though they shut their lids to kiss,
     In starless darkness peace to win,
Even on that secret world from this
     Her twilight enters in.

Walter de la Mare, Motley and Other Poems (1918).

Frank Ormond (1897-1988), "Moonrise, Stanford Dingley"

Enlightenment

As I have noted before, I do my best to avoid politics, both domestic and international.  Life is too short.  I believe that trying to behave decently towards others is the most politic thing that one can do with one's life. Speaking for myself, this is struggle enough for one brief stay above ground.

Moreover, there is always the problem of having to identify your place on the political spectrum.  I suppose that I am a reactionary.  A wistful, laissez-faire reactionary.

On the other hand, there are those who like to think of themselves as being "progressive" and "open-minded" and "tolerant" when it comes to political matters.  (And, for them, everything is a political matter.)  There is something of a religious fervor about this self-designation.  It does seem to make them feel better about themselves.  Self-esteem (our modern mantra) is a wondrous thing, isn't it?

It has been edifying to see some (not all, but some) of these self-designated "progressive" and "open-minded" and "tolerant" political beings openly celebrating the recent death of a well-known politician.  Yes.  Of course. Why not?  Throw a party.  After all, from time immemorial the demise of an opponent (real or imagined) has always provided a perfect occasion to reaffirm the eternal verity of one's own deeply-held beliefs.

Now.  As to the state of the souls of the celebrants . . .

Richard Eurich, "Eddistone Light" (1974)

             The Pier

Only a placid sea, and
A pier where no boat comes,
But people stand at the end
And spit into the water,
Dimpling it, and watch a dog
That chins and churns back to land.

I had come here to see
Humbug embark, deported,
Protected from the crowd.
But he has not come today.
And anyway there is no boat
To take him.  And no one cares.
So Humbug still walks our land
On stilts, is still looked up to.

W. R. Rodgers, Awake! and Other Poems (1941).

Paul Nash, "The Studio, New House, Rye" (1932)

Winter Into Spring, Part Six: "Now First Known"

In addition to their intrinsic beauty, the bare trees of late winter offer an opportunity for the discovery of birds' nests.  This thought brings to mind Edward Thomas, who was a great searcher for, and lover of, nests.

In a marvelous coincidence, Thomas met Paul Nash in the spring of 1916 at Hare Hall Camp, where Thomas was serving as a map-reading instructor. On May 21, he wrote to Robert Frost:  "I was with a young artist named Paul Nash who has just joined us as a map reader.  He is a change from the 2 schoolmasters I see most of. . . . He is wonderful at finding birds' nests." Edward Thomas, Selected Letters (edited by R. George Thomas) (Oxford University Press 1995), page 126.

It is lovely (and poignant) to think of Thomas and Nash going for walks together in the countryside during their time off, discovering nests.

Paul Nash, "The Orchard" (c. 1914)

                         Birds' Nests

The summer nests uncovered by autumn wind,
Some torn, others dislodged, all dark,
Everyone sees them:  low or high in tree,
Or hedge, or single bush, they hang like a mark.

Since there's no need of eyes to see them with
I cannot help a little shame
That I missed most, even at eye's level, till
The leaves blew off and made the seeing no game.

'Tis a light pang.  I like to see the nests
Still in their places, now first known,
At home and by far roads.  Boys knew them not,
Whatever jays and squirrels may have done.

And most I like the winter nest deep-hid
That leaves and berries fell into:
Once a dormouse dined there on hazel-nuts,
And grass and goose-grass seeds found soil and grew.

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

Paul Nash, "Oxenbridge Pond" (1927-1928)

W. H. Davies and Edward Thomas were friends.  Thomas supported Davies financially when he was impoverished, even though Thomas and his family were themselves always struggling to make ends meet.

               Killed in Action
             (Edward Thomas)

Happy the man whose home is still
     In Nature's green and peaceful ways;
To wake and hear the birds so loud,
     That scream for joy to see the sun
Is shouldering past a sullen cloud.

And we have known those days, when we
     Would wait to hear the cuckoo first;
When you and I, with thoughtful mind,
     Would help a bird to hide her nest,
For fear of other hands less kind.

But thou, my friend, art lying dead:
     War, with its hell-born childishness,
Has claimed thy life, with many more:
     The man that loved this England well,
And never left it once before.

W. H. Davies, Forty New Poems (1918).

Paul Nash, "Behind the Inn" (1919-1922)

"The Strand"

On my daily walk, I sometimes visit a lighthouse that is located on a point that juts out into Puget Sound.  The beach is strewn with driftwood -- large grey-white logs in many cases, especially in winter, when the wind and the currents have brought them across the Sound from the west.

Ocean freighters arrive and depart out on the horizon.  I have seen no "quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir."  (John Masefield, "Cargoes.")  Rather, these ships have come from, or are bound for, places such as Shanghai, Qingdao, Yantian, and Ningbo.

                                      W. E. Leadley, "Driftwood" (1960)

                           The Strand

White Tintoretto clouds beneath my naked feet,
This mirror of wet sand imputes a lasting mood
To island truancies; my steps repeat

Someone's who now has left such strands for good
Carrying his boots and paddling like a child,
A square black figure whom the horizon understood --

My father.  Who for all his responsibly compiled
Account books of a devout, precise routine
Kept something in him solitary and wild,

So loved the western sea and no tree's green
Fulfilled him like these contours of Slievemore
Menaun and Croaghaun and the bogs between.

Sixty-odd years behind him and twelve before,
Eyeing the flange of steel in the turning belt of brine
It was sixteen years ago he walked this shore

And the mirror caught his shape which catches mine
But then as now the floor-mop of the foam
Blotted the bright reflections -- and no sign

Remains of face or feet when visitors have gone home.

Louis MacNeice, Holes in the Sky (1948).

                                                Paul Nash, "Plage" (1928)

MacNeice wrote "The Strand" in 1945.  A half-century later, Seamus Heaney published the following poem.  The players are the same:  a father, a son, and the strand.  But Heaney has distilled things down to three lines. And has perhaps come to a different conclusion.

                      The Strand

The dotted line my father's ashplant made
On Sandymount Strand
Is something else the tide won't wash away.

Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (Faber and Faber 1996).

  Maxwell Armfield, "Seven Sisters" (1944)

"Words At Once True And Kind, Or Not Untrue And Not Unkind"

On more than one occasion, Philip Larkin suggested that his discovery of the poetry of Thomas Hardy was one of the things that enabled him to come into his own as a poet.  It was the subject matter of Hardy's poetry -- its humanity and its emotional content -- that had an impact upon Larkin.

When asked by an interviewer what he had learned from Hardy, Larkin replied that Hardy had taught him "not to be afraid of the obvious."  He continued:

"All those wonderful dicta about poetry: 'the poet should touch our hearts by showing his own', 'the poet takes note of nothing that he cannot feel', 'the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own' -- Hardy knew what it was all about."

Philip Larkin, "An Interview with Paris Review," Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber 1983), page 67.

The following poem by Larkin goes well with Hardy's "A Two-Years' Idyll" (which appeared in my previous post).  Perhaps it can be thought of as a sort of coda to the "idyll" described by Hardy: the aftermath when "romance straight forsook/Quickly somehow/Life when we sped from our nook."

                                           Paul Nash, "Coronilla" (1929)

               Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us.  Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber and Faber 1964).

The final two lines of the poem are, of course, classic Larkin.  How you react to the lines is, I think, a rough litmus test of whether Larkin is your cup of tea.  If you slap yourself on the forehead and/or shake your head in delight and wonder and/or smile to yourself, you will likely enjoy Larkin's company.  I first read "Talking in Bed" about three decades ago, and I still do one or more of these three things each time I read it.

                                                          Paul Nash
                                "Riviera Window, Cros-de-Cagnes" (1926)

"Begin Afresh, Afresh, Afresh"

Because I am a creature of habit, I return to certain poems at the same time each year.  For instance, I read the following poem by Philip Larkin each May because, um, it takes place in May.  Plus, it is a very fine poem.  Plus, reading any poem by Philip Larkin will put a smile on your face and will make you feel that all is right with the world.  Well, almost any poem.  But don't ever let anyone tell you that he is a "gloomy" poet.  Nonsense.

                 The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?  No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin, High Windows (Faber and Faber 1974).

                                       Paul Nash, "Granary" (1922-1923)

As I have noted before, the last line of "The Trees" reminds me of "The Region November" by Wallace Stevens.  (A poem that I read each -- yes -- November.)  Stevens's poem closes with these lines:

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.

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

                                     John Nash, "The Thunderstorm"

Under Trees, Revisited

Today, while on my afternoon walk, I was wishing for a long canopy of leaves as the rain moved ashore from the west.  But I had already moved out of the woods into the open fields.  In any case, waiting out the rain beneath the trees, however pleasant, is not really an option in this part of the world: once the rain starts, it may go on for hours.  Or days.  Or weeks, for that matter.

                                   Alcaic

Out in the deep wood, silence and darkness fall,
down through the wet leaves comes the October mist;
     no sound, but only a blackbird scolding,
             making the mist and the darkness listen.

Peter Levi, Collected Poems 1955-1975 (1976).  A note:  the "alcaic stanza" was a Greek and, later, Latin verse form consisting of four lines and having complicated syllabic and metrical requirements (which I no longer remember).

                          Eliot Hodgkin, "A Clearing in the Wood" (1942)

                      The Elms

Air darkens, air cools
And the first rain is heard in the great elms
A drop for each leaf, before it reaches the ground
I am still alive.

John Fuller, Poems and Epistles (1973).

"The Elms" calls to mind a poem by James Wright (1927-1980).  The poem is often thought of as a classic of a certain type of early-1960s American poetry.  It was published in 1963.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's
      Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break (1963).  An aside:  being a native Minnesotan, I have long had a sentimental attraction to this poem, even though I do not recall ever having been in Pine Island (which I am certain is lovely).

 

                                    Paul Nash, "The Stackyard" (c. 1925)

"St Luke's Summer"

Until I read the following poem by Norman Nicholson, I was not aware of the term "St Luke's Summer."  I then learned that it refers to a period of unseasonably warm weather occurring around the time of St Luke's feast day: October 18.  The unexpected arrival of a St Luke's Summer (or, as it was called in the Scandinavian and Lutheran Minnesota of my youth, Indian Summer) ups the already bitter-sweet ante of autumn, doesn't it?

                     St Luke's Summer

The low sun leans across the slanting field,
And every blade of grass is striped with shine
And casts its shadow on the blade behind,
And dandelion clocks are held
Like small balloons of light above the ground.

Beside the trellis of the bowling green
The poppy shakes its pepper-box of seed;
Groundsel feathers flutter down;
Roses exhausted by the thrust of summer
Lose grip and fall; the wire is twined with weed.

The soul, too, has its brown October days --
The fancy run to seed and dry as stone,
Rags and wisps of words blown through the mind;
And yet, while dead leaves clog the eyes,
Never-predicted poetry is sown.

Norman Nicholson, Rock Face (1948).

                                       Paul Nash, "Swan Song" (c. 1928)

Two Further Variations On A Theme

I have remarked previously that I don't mind circling back on my tracks. Thus, I beg the pardon of any loyal (and, of course, greatly appreciated) readers for retracing my steps to the following two poems, which have appeared here before.  The theme of love (love with a somewhat melancholy cast, I admit) brought them to mind, and I believe that they go well with Elizabeth Jennings's "Delay" and Richard Church's "Be Frugal."

                      Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Graves, The Welchman's Hose (1925).

It is quite an accomplishment to express so much about love in a four-line poem:  joy, exaltation, giddiness, longing, despair, and loss (and whatever else you might think of) all rolled into one.  I never tire of this poem.

                                    Paul Nash, "Nest of the Siren" (1930)

                          To Not Love

One looked at life in the prince style, shunning pain.
Now one has seen too much not to fear more.
Apprehensive, it seems, for all one loves,
One asks only to not love, to not love.

James Reeves, Subsong (1969).

"To Not Love" may be too bleak for some.  I avoid biographical "explanations" of poems.  However, it may (I emphasize may) be helpful to know that James Reeves's wife Mary died in 1966 at the age of 56 after a long illness.  Notice the effort to maintain distance and control by the use of "one" in each line of the poem.  (In contrast, Reeves uses "I" for the speaker in many of the other poems collected in Subsong.)  Then notice how the distance and the control seem to dissolve with the revealing repetition in the final line:  "One asks only to not love, to not love."

                                   Paul Nash, "Lupins and Cactus" (1927)

How To Live, Part Six: "Not Conscious That You Have Been Seeking Suddenly You Come Upon It"

My series of "No Escape" posts suggests that the Wherever You Go, There You Are rule quashes any hope we may have of finding the Ideal Place.  R. S. Thomas -- like others -- suspects that what we seek may be right there in front of us, and that the only way to discover it is by giving up the search.

                       Arrival

Not conscious
       that you have been seeking
             suddenly
       you come upon it

the village in the Welsh hills
             dust free
       with no road out
but the one you came in by.

             A bird chimes
        from a green tree
the hour that is no hour
        you know.  The river dawdles
to hold a mirror for you
where you may see yourself
        as you are, a traveller
             with the moon's halo
        above him, who has arrived
        after long journeying where he
             began, catching this
        one truth by surprise
that there is everything to look forward to.

R. S. Thomas, Later Poems (1983).

Thomas's poem is reminiscent of these lines towards the end of T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" (in Four Quartets):

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

                                     Paul Nash, "Wittenham" (1935)

Neglected Poets: Charlotte Mew

The poetry of Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was admired by some of the best poets of her day:  Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, and Siegfried Sassoon (among others) all praised her.  Because of her difficult financial  circumstances, in 1923 Hardy, de la Mare, and John Masefield successfully petitioned for her to receive a Civil List Pension.  Their petition to the Prime Minister read, in part:  "As she is a poet, writing poetry of a rare kind, she may not be widely known for many years.  We feel that it would be a wise and gracious act, worthy of a great people, to give to this rare spirit the means of doing her work until the work can appraise and reward it." 

                                 Rooms

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart;
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide --
   Rooms where for good or for ill, things died:
But there is the room where we two lie dead
Though every morning we seem to wake, and might just as well seem
                to sleep again
   As we shall some day in the other dustier quieter bed
   Out there -- in the sun -- in the rain.

                                                           Paul Nash
                               "Riviera Window, Cros de Cagnes" (1926)

                              Afternoon Tea

Please you, excuse me, good five-o'clock people,
   I've lost my last hatful of words,
And my heart's in the wood up above the church steeple,
   I'd rather have tea with -- the birds.

Gay Kate's stolen kisses, poor Barnaby's scars,
   John's losses and Mary's gains,
Oh! what do they matter, my dears, to the stars
   Or the glow-worms in the lanes!

I'd rather lie under the tall elm-trees,
   With old rooks talking loud overhead,
To watch a red squirrel run over my knees,
   Very still on my brackeny bed.

And wonder what feathers the wrens will be taking
   For lining their nests next Spring;
Or why the tossed shadow of boughs in a great wind shaking
   Is such a lovely thing.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).

                                   Paul Nash, "Mimosa Wood" (1926)

A Single Leaf

Out for an afternoon walk the other day, I paused in a grove of trees.  No wind stirred the branches overhead.  After a moment, I heard the sound of a single leaf rattling down through the boughs.  The leaf settled to the ground a few feet away from me. 

     Elemental

A last flame,
sole leaf
flagging at the tree tip,
is dragged through the current
down into the water
of the air, and in this final
metamorphosis, spiralling
swims to earth.

Charles Tomlinson, The Way In and Other Poems (1974).

                 John Nash, "The Lake, Little Horkesley Hall" (c. 1958)

     One Day of Autumn

One day of autumn
sun had uncongealed
the frost that clung
wherever shadows spread
their arctic greys among
October grass:  mid-
field an oak still
held its foliage intact
but then began
releasing leaf by leaf
full half,
till like a startled
flock they scattered
on the wind:  and one
more venturesome than all
the others shone far out
a moment in mid-air,
before it glittered off
and sheered into the dip
a stream ran through
to disappear with it.

Charles Tomlinson, The Shaft (1978).

                                    Paul Nash, "The Orchard" (1914)

"October": Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas being who he was, it is not surprising that, in a poem of his about autumn, melancholy makes an appearance.  At the same time, it is likewise not surprising that Thomas's melancholy goes hand-in-hand with beauty.  This combination occurs often in his poetry.  (And beauty was absolutely real for Thomas -- it was not a poetic conceit.)  But enough.  Here is the poem.             

                               October

The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, --
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,
Bow down to; and the wind travels too light
To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;
The gossamers wander at their own will.
At heavier steps than birds' the squirrels scold.

The rich scene has grown fresh again and new
As Spring and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
In alternation of violet and rose,
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
But if this be not happiness, -- who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.

                                  Paul Nash, "Behind the Inn" (1919)

"October Trees": Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon is not a "nature poet" in the sense that, say, John Clare or Andrew Young may be thought of as "nature poets":  close observers and recorders of what many of us might not otherwise see.  That being said, the English countryside was a beloved part of Sassoon's life.  Many of his poems are set in the landscape around Heytesbury, Wiltshire, where he lived from 1934 until his death in 1967.  Here is an autumn poem by him.

          October Trees

How innocent were these
Trees, that in mist-green May,
Blown by a prospering breeze,
Stood garlanded and gay;
Who now in sundown glow
Of serious colour clad
Confront me with their show
As though resigned and sad.

Trees who unwhispering stand
Umber and bronze and gold,
Pavilioning the land
For one grown tired and old;
Elm, chestnut, beech, and lime,
I am merged in you, who tell
Once more in tones of time
Your foliaged farewell.

Siegfried Sassoon, The Tasking (1954).

                                  Paul Nash, "Berkshire Downs" (1922)