"A Mind Content Both Crown And Kingdom Is"

In the Elizabethan Age, what people longed for was "content" (as in "contentment"), not happiness.  This makes perfect sense.  Happiness is overpromoted and overrated.

One of the founding principles of the country in which I live is that human beings have an "unalienable right" to "the pursuit of happiness."  Thomas Jefferson was wise, but with a practical bent (he was not a utopian dreamer):  it is the "pursuit" of happiness that is an unalienable right, not happiness itself.  Alas, a great many of my fellow Americans believe that they are entitled to be "happy."  Whether they have ever read, or heard of, the Declaration of Independence (and whether they know who Thomas Jefferson is) I will not venture to say.

In any event, "content" seems gentler, calmer, quieter, more reflective, and  -- one hopes -- more attainable than "happiness."

Stanley Roy Badmin, "Bow Brickhill, Bletchley" (1940)

For a start, here is one way of looking at our options.

Were I a king I could command content.
     Were I obscure, unknown should be my cares.
And were I dead, no thoughts should me torment,
     Nor words, nor wrongs, nor loves, nor hopes, nor fears.
A doubtful choice, of three things one to crave,
A kingdom, or a cottage, or a grave.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), in Norman Ault (editor), Elizabethan Lyrics (1949).

Stanley Roy Badmin, "Storm over Pole Hill, Kent"

Well, then, a cottage it is.

In crystal towers and turrets richly set
     With glittering gems that shine against the sun,
In regal rooms of jasper and of jet,
     Content of mind not always likes to wone;
But oftentimes it pleaseth her to stay
In simple cotes closed in with walls of clay.

Geoffrey Whitney (1548-1601), Ibid.

"Wone" (line 4) is defined by the OED as "to stay habitually, dwell, live." The "walls of clay" of the "simple cotes" in the final line bring to mind Yeats's "And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made" from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

Stanley Roy Badmin

"Flooded Meadows at Olney, Buckinghamshire" (1940)

Here is a lengthier consideration of what content consists of.

Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content;
     The quiet mind is richer than a crown;
Sweet are the nights in careless slumber spent;
     The poor estate scorns fortune's angry frown:
Such sweet content, such minds, such sleep, such bliss,
Beggars enjoy, when princes oft do miss.

The homely house that harbours quiet rest;
     The cottage that affords no pride nor care;
The mean that 'grees with country music best;
     The sweet consort of mirth and music's fare;
Obscured life sets down a type of bliss:
A mind content both crown and kingdom is.

Robert Greene (1558-1592), Ibid.

I particularly like the lovely alliteration and assonance of "the homely house that harbours quiet rest" and "sweet are the nights in careless slumber spent."  And the idea of attaining "a type of bliss" (a fine phrase) by living an obscure life is very nice.

Stanley Roy Badmin, "Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire" (1940)

"There's Masses Of Time Yet, Masses, Masses . . ."

I have visited Yorkshire on a few occasions, and I found it and its inhabitants to be lovely.  With regard to the following poem, I consider all of us to be Yorkshiremen who frequent pub gardens.  To be specific:  "the man in charge of the boating pool" eventually calls for each of us.

            Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens

     As they sit there, happily drinking,
their strokes, cancers and so forth are not in their minds.
     Indeed, what earthly good would thinking
about the future (which is Death) do?  Each summer finds
     beer in their hands in big pint glasses.
     And so their leisure passes.

     Perhaps the older ones allow some inkling
into their thoughts.  Being hauled, as a kid, upstairs to bed
     screaming for a teddy or a tinkling
musical box, against their will.  Each Joe or Fred
     wants longer with the life and lasses.
     And so their time passes.

     Second childhood; and 'Come in, number 80!'
shouts inexorably the man in charge of the boating pool.
     When you're called you must go, matey,
so don't complain, keep it all calm and cool,
     there's masses of time yet, masses, masses . . .
     And so their life passes.

Gavin Ewart, Selected Poems 1933-1988 (1988). 

                                              Stanley Roy Badmin
               "Wharfedale Looking Towards Grassington, Yorkshire"  

"Cut Grass Lies Frail"

Now, on sunny afternoons, the peaceful drone of lawn mowers can be heard in the distance.  The scent of freshly-cut grass arrives on the breeze.  White and yellow daffodils border the lawns.  The magnolias and dogwoods are in bloom.  The scene is like something out of a Philip Larkin pastoral.  (Such scenes do exist -- together with a hint of mortality, of course.)

               Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

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

               Stanley Roy Badmin, "Spring in the West Country" (1963)

"We Can Ask And Ask But We Can't Have Again What Once Seemed Ours For Ever": J. L Carr

In my previous post, I mentioned J. L. Carr in connection with A. E. Housman's cherry trees.  I also mentioned Carr's novel A Month in the Country (1980), which tells the story of Tom Birkin, a First World War veteran who has been hired to uncover a Medieval wall-painting in the loft of a small church in rural "Oxgodby."  To quote one of the novel's epigraphs (from Samuel Johnson):  it is "a small tale, generally of love."

Carr's novel has its own connections with Housman.  He provides its second epigraph:

Now for a breath I tarry,
   Nor yet disperse apart --
Take my hand quick and tell me,
   What have you in your heart?

The source is poem XXXII ("From far, from eve and morning") of A Shropshire Lad.  Housman returns at the close of the novel.  (The following passages do not include any "spoilers," should anyone be interested in reading the novel hereafter.)  Over the past month, Birkin has discovered that the wall-painting  is an undiscovered masterpiece by an unknown hand.  Other things have transpired as well.  He decides to take a final look at the painting.

"And, standing before the great spread of colour, I felt the old tingling excitement and a sureness that the time would come when some stranger would stand there too and understand.

It would be like someone coming to Malvern, bland Malvern, who is halted by the thought that Edward Elgar walked this road on his way to give music lessons or, looking over to the Clee Hills, reflects that Housman had stood in that place, regretting his land of lost content.  And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart -- knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever -- the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face.  They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

All this happened so long ago.  And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby.  So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.

But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow."

J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country (1980; revised 1990).  The source of "regretting his land of lost content" is poem XL of A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills
   From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
   What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
   I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
   And cannot come again.

                Stanley Roy Badmin, "Summer, Stopham Bridge" (1962)

"Oh Grateful Colours, Bright Looks!"

The poetry of Stevie Smith (1902-1971) is often a bit twee for me.  However, she does have her moments.  Philip Larkin, whose judgement is usually (apart from a few blind spots) unerring, has this to say about her:  "Her poems, to my mind, have two virtues:  they are completely original, and now and again they are moving.  These qualities alone set them above 95 per cent of present-day output."  Larkin also said (and herein lies a clue as to why he liked her poetry, given what we know of Larkin's temperament):  "Miss Smith's poems speak with the authority of sadness."  (Only Larkin could come up with a comment like that!)  Philip Larkin, "Frivolous and Vulnerable," in Required Writing (1983).

I recently posted Patrick Kavanagh's "The Hospital," which contains these wonderful lines:

        But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
        The common and banal her heat can know.

The poem closes: 

        For we must record love's mystery without claptrap,
        Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

The following poem by Stevie Smith is, I think, a fine companion piece to "The Hospital."

     Oh Grateful Colours, Bright Looks!

The grass is green
The tulip is red
A ginger cat walks over
The pink almond petals on the flower bed.
Enough has been said to show
It is life we are talking about.  Oh
Grateful colours, bright looks!  Well, to go
On.  Fabricated things too -- front doors and gates,
Bricks, slates, paving stones -- are coloured
And as it has been raining and is sunny now
They shine.  Only that puddle
Which, reflecting the height of the sky
Quite gives one a feeling of vertigo, shows
No colour, is a negative.  Men!
Seize colours quick, heap them up while you can.
But perhaps it is a false tale that says
The landscape of the dead
Is colourless.

Stevie Smith, Collected Poems (1975).

                            Stanley Roy Badmin, "Ludlow, Shropshire"

"In The Wood Of The World Where Neither Of Them Is Lost"

Louis MacNeice's "Selva Oscura" brings to mind a quiet poem about two people who are not lost in a "dark wood."  The poem is by Stanley Cook (1922-1991), who deserves to be better known. 

                      Second Marriage

The sky stops crying and in a sudden smile
Of childish sunshine the rain steams on the roofs;
Widow who has married widower
Poses outside the Registry for photographs.

Their grown up children are there
And damp confetti like a burst from a bag
Accumulated from a morning's marriages
Is second-hand for them against the door.

In the wood of the world where neither of them is lost
They take each other by the hand politely;
Borrowers going to and from the Library
Pass through the group as if it were a ghost.

Stanley Cook, Woods Beyond a Cornfield: Collected Poems (1995).

                                              Stanley Roy Badmin
                 "Wharfedale Looking Towards Grassington, Yorkshire"

"What The River Says, That Is What I Say"

Continuing with the theme of rivers, here is a lovely poem by William Stafford.  For me, at least, it is one of those poems that you memorize automatically after reading it a few times.

                           Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether
what I have done is my life.  Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait.  We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

William Stafford, Stories That Could Be True (1977).

                                                 Stanley Roy Badmin
                                 "Skating on Oakwood Pond" (c. 1960)

"The Region November"

I fear that the recent spate of seasonally-themed posts may have turned this blog into a Farmer's Almanac of sorts -- without the prescient weather predictions.  But the temptation in this, my favorite season, is too great and I am too weak.  And thus . . .

               The Region November

It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They 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.
It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated
On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

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

Wallace Stevens, "Late Poems," Collected Poetry and Prose (1997).

If you prefer a seasonal variation on Stevens's refrains, you may wish to consider the final stanza of Philip Larkin's "The Trees":

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

High Windows (Faber and Faber 1974).

                          Stanley Roy Badmin, "November" (c. 1958)

"When I Said Autumn, Autumn Broke": Elizabeth Jennings

Because October is my favorite month and because autumn is my favorite season, please bear with me as I pursue a seasonal theme.  Here is a poem by Elizabeth Jennings from one of her early collections.  (Collections which are well worth returning to.)

   Song at the Beginning of Autumn

Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells.  All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields.  Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child's cake would understand
The ambiguity of this --
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia.  We give names --
Autumn and summer, winter, spring --
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.

Elizabeth Jennings, A Way of Looking (1955).

Ah, those long-lost innocent days before the authorities banned the burning of leaves!  Yes, yes, our World is no doubt a healthier and cleaner place than it was in those benighted times -- with the help of experts we are surely progressing toward a pristine state.  And yet, is autumn autumn without the scent of leaf-smoke?

                                              Stanley Roy Badmin
                       "Matlock Bank on an Autumn Afternoon" (1962)

Euphrasy: "The Land Of Life To Look At And Explore"

I had never seen the word "euphrasy" until I came across it in this poem by Siegfried Sassoon:

                    Euphrasy

The large untidy February skies --
Some cheerful starlings screeling on a tree --
West wind and low-shot sunlight in my eyes --
   Is this decline for me?

The feel of winter finishing once more --
Sense of the present as a tale half told --
The land of life to look at and explore --
   Is this, then, to grow old?

Common Chords (1950).  Sassoon wrote the poem in 1949, at the age of 63.

                                      Stanley Roy Badmin, "February"

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "euphrasy" is "a plant, Euphrasia officinalis, formerly held in high repute for its medicinal virtues in the treatment of diseases of the eye."  "Eye-bright" is "the popular name of the plant."  The OED states that "euphrasy" may be used figuratively, and provides an example from Frederick Faber's Bethlehem (1865):  "Eyes which have been touched with the special euphrasy of heaven."  A few years after encountering Sassoon's poem, I discovered that Walter de la Mare, who was a friend of Sassoon's, also wrote a poem titled "Euphrasy."  It appears in de la Mare's 1938 collection, Memory and Other Poems.

                                                Euphrasy/Eye-Bright

Ink, Insects, And Candlelight: Thomas Hardy And Walter De La Mare

For no other reason than that it is now August, I recently revisited the following poem by Thomas Hardy:

              An August Midnight

                                 I
A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter -- winged, horned, and spined --
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands . . .

                                II
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
-- My guests parade my new-penned ink,
Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.
'God's humblest, they!' I muse.  Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

                                 Graham Sutherland, "Lammas" (1926)

After reading the poem, it occurred to me that, within the past year or so, I had read another poem that featured ink, insects, and candlelight.  At my age, notions such as this often arrive without particulars.  However, I have found that, if I quietly refer the notion to my brain, and patiently wait, the particulars will usually arrive later.  In time, I remembered the poem.  It is by Walter de la Mare:

                    Unwitting

This evening to my manuscript
Flitted a tiny fly;
At the wet ink sedately sipped,
Then seemed to put the matter by,
Mindless of him who wrote it, and
His scrutinizing eye --
That any consciousness indeed
Its actions could descry! . . .

Silence; and wavering candlelight;
Night; and a starless sky.

Inward Companion (1950).  (The ellipses are in the original.)

                                                 Stanley Roy Badmin
                            "Evening Light Near Sevenoaks, Kent" (1930)

Neglected Poets: James Reeves

James Reeves (1909-1978) devoted his life to poetry -- as a poet, an editor, an anthologist, a teacher, and a critic.  But his devotion was a quiet one.  Hence, his poetry does not receive the attention that it deserves.  I urge you to seek it out, for I believe that you will find it rewarding.  The poems below may all be found in his Collected Poems: 1929-1974 (Heinemann 1974).

                    Things to Come

The shadow of a fat man in the moonlight
   Precedes me on the road down which I go;
And should I turn and run, he would pursue me:
   This is the man whom I must get to know.

                                      Stanley Roy Badmin (1906-1989)

                           "The Abbey Barn, Doulting, Somerset" (1930) 

To put the following poem in context, it may be helpful to know that it was written by Reeves after the death of his wife Mary (1910-1966).  He dedicated his Collected Poems to her.              

                         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.

                         Stanley Roy Badmin, "Fallen Mill Sails" (1931)

                       Bestiary

Happy the quick-eyed lizard that pursues
   Its creviced zigzag race
Amid the epic ruins of a temple
   Leaving no trace.

Happy the weasel in the moonlit churchyard
   Twisting a vibrant thread
Of narrow life between the mounds that hide
   The important dead.

Close to the complex fabric of their world
   The small beasts live who shun
The spaces where the huge ones bellow, fight,
   And snore in the sun.

How admirable the modest and the frugal,
   The small, the neat, the furtive.
How troublesome the mammoths of the world,
   Gross and assertive.

Happy should we live in the interstices
   Of a declining age,
Even while the impudent masters of decision
   Trample and rage.

                                     Stanley Roy Badmin, "Priory Pond"

                              Precept

Dwell in some decent corner of your being,
Where plates are orderly set and talk is quiet,
Not in its devious crooked corridors
Nor in its halls of riot.