Signposts

Once, long ago, I drove through the rolling fields of the Virginia countryside at dusk in autumn, searching for the site of a somewhat obscure Civil War cavalry skirmish.  In those days, GPS navigation systems did not exist, so my only guide was one of those devilishly-folded state road maps that used to be available free-of-charge at gas stations.  (When I was young, my grandparents called them "service stations."  Ah, another lost world!)  However, the map was of no use since it only went as far as numbered county roads, and I was beyond them.

The sun had begun to set, and I was about to call it a day, when I came upon a crossroads in the middle of empty pastures and harvested cornfields.  Utility poles and their drooping lines headed off in all four directions.  There were no buildings.  But there was, unaccountably, a telephone booth in one corner of the intersection, attached to a utility pole by a cable.  (Yet another lost world.)

A signpost stood beside the road near the telephone booth.  Wondrously, one of the signpost's arms -- pointing east into the coming dark -- contained the name I was looking for: "Yellow Tavern."

I was so taken by the scene that I decided to call my then-girlfriend (who was three time zones away) in order to tell her that I was standing in the middle of the Virginia countryside at sunset calling her from a lonely telephone booth and that I had just discovered the way to Yellow Tavern. She was not impressed.  Perhaps this was due to the fact that I had called her collect to deliver this momentous news.

I'm afraid that I cannot concoct a moral to this story, other than this:  even in this day and age, we should be on the lookout for signposts.  You never know when one might turn up.

Tristram Hillier, "The Argument" (1943)

                         The Signpost

The dim sea glints chill.  The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller's-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.

I read the sign.  Which way shall I go?
A voice says:  You would not have doubted so
At twenty.  Another voice gentle with scorn
Says:  At twenty you wished you had never been born.

One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what 'twould be
To be sixty by this same post.  'You shall see,'
He laughed -- and I had to join his laughter --
'You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall,
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall freely be given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
'Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth, --
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, --
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?'

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

Tristram Hillier, "January Landscape, Somerset" (1962)

Well, well, there is quite a bit to consider in that poem, isn't there? Although Thomas's character is strongly present in nearly every poem he wrote, I believe that "The Signpost" may be the one that captures him best. To use Philip Larkin's phrase (which I have quoted before):  "the poetry of almost infinitely-qualified states of mind."  And we mustn't forget the anecdote that Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" may have been prompted by Thomas's tendency to hesitate or second-guess in choosing between forks in the road when he and Frost went out on walks together in England.

In addition, there is the heartbreaking irony in ". . . the first voice told/The other he wished to know what 'twould  be/To be sixty by this same post." We know in sad retrospect that that possibility ended at Arras in April of 1917.  But perhaps it doesn't matter:  ". . . but either before or after,/Whatever happens, it must befall,/A mouthful of earth to remedy all/Regrets and wishes shall freely be given."  (Those lines could just as well have been written by Thomas Hardy, don't you think?)

Finally, there is the astounding technical accomplishment:  fifteen rhyming couplets that sound like everyday conversation.  This is exactly what Thomas and Frost were after.  Who knows what 20th century English and American poetry would have been like had Thomas lived, and had he continued as "the only brother" Frost "ever had"?

Tristram Hillier, "Trott's Lane" (c. 1944)

"Untroubling, And Untroubled Where I Lie, The Grass Below -- Above The Vaulted Sky"

The following poem is perhaps John Clare's best-known poem.  This is ironic, because it is not really typical of his poetry.  Yet there is no gainsaying its emotional impact.

I am -- yet what I am, none cares or knows;
     My friends forsake me like a memory lost:--
I am the self-consumer of my woes:--
     They rise and vanish in oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes:--
And yet I am, and live -- like vapours tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, --
     Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
     But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange -- nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
     A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God;
     And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below -- above the vaulted sky.

John Clare, in Eric Robinson, David Powell, and Margaret Grainger (editors), The Later Poems of John Clare, 1837-1864, Volume I (Oxford University Press 1984).

As I say, "I am . . ." is uncharacteristic of Clare.  He was not what we moderns would call a "confessional" poet.  He usually kept his counsel. (Which, in my humble opinion, is something that we all ought to do more often.)  The next poem catches his character quite well, I think.

Tristram Hillier, "Cutler's Green" (1944)

                         To John Clare

Well honest John how fare you now at home?
The spring is come and birds are building nests
The old cock robin to the stye is come
With olive feathers and its ruddy breast
And the old cock with wattles and red comb
Struts with the hens and seems to like some best
Then crows and looks about for little crumbs
Swept out by little folks an hour ago
The pigs sleep in the sty the bookman comes
The little boys lets home close nesting go
And pockets tops and tawes where daiseys bloom
To look at the new number just laid down
With lots of pictures and good stories too
And Jack the Giant-killer's high renown.

John Clare, Ibid, Volume II.  The spelling and punctuation are as they appear in Clare's original handwritten manuscript.  "The new number just laid down" (line 12) refers to a newly-published children's book or magazine sold by the bookman.

During his periods of madness, Clare sometimes spoke of a "John Clare" who was someone other than himself.  In this poem, "John Clare" makes an appearance as a younger version of the John Clare who is now residing in an asylum.  One feels the happiness and the innocence of the young and vanished "John Clare," but one also feels the sense of loss, and the longing, of the present-day John Clare dwelling against his will in a madhouse.  Or perhaps I am reading more into the poem than I ought to.

Tristram Hillier, "The Argument" (1943)

Clare's "I am . . ." brings to mind a remarkably (and eerily) similar poem by another poet who, like Clare, was beset with mental distress throughout much of his life.

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait, with inpatient readiness, to seize my
                                   Soul in a moment.

Damn'd below Judas: more abhorr'd than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy Master.
Twice betrayed Jesus me, the last delinquent,
                                   Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever hungry mouths all
                                   Bolted against me.

Hard lot!  encompass'd with a thousand dangers;
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors;
I'm called, if vanquish'd, to receive a sentence
                                   Worse than Abiram's.

Him the vindictive rod of angry justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
                                   Buried above ground.

William Cowper, in H. S. Milford (editor), The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper (1905).  The poem is sometimes printed with the title "Lines Written during a Period of Insanity."  However, the  poem was not published until after Cowper's death, and the title was likely added by an editor.

Tristram Hillier, "Flooded Meadow" (1949)

"The End Of The Opera"

In my previous post, I confessed my cultural blind spot with respect to opera.  I then remembered the following poem by Howard Nemerov, which makes me wish (wistfully) that I had a greater appreciation for the art form.

The poem was first published on June 24, 1991.  Nemerov died on July 5, 1991.  Given these circumstances, his contemplation on the relationship between opera and life, art and life, takes on an added poignance.

                   Tristram Hillier, "January Landscape, Somerset" (1962)

               The End of the Opera

Knowing that what he witnessed was only art,
He never wept while the show was going on.

But the curtain call could always make him cry.
When the cast came forward hand in hand
Bowing and smiling to the clatter of applause,
Tired, disheveled, sweating through the paint,
Radiant with our happiness and theirs,
Illuminati of the spot and flood,
Yet much the same as ordinary us.

The diva, the soubrette, the raisonneur,
The inadequate hero, the villain, his buffoon,
All equalled in the great reality
And living proof that life would follow life . . .

Though back of that display there'd always be,
He knew, money and envy, the career,
Tomorrow and tomorrow -- it didn't seem
At that moment as if it mattered much
Compared with their happiness and ours
As we wept about the role, about the real,
And how their dissonances harmonized
As we applauded us:  ite, missa est.

Howard Nemerov, Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (University of Chicago Press 1991).

The ellipses at the end of line 13 appear in the original.  "Ite, missa est" is the phrase that is spoken to conclude the Mass of the Roman Rite. Opinions differ as to how the words should be translated.  In particular, "missa" is the source of some linguistic and liturgical contention.  In any event, "Go, the dismissal is made" or "Go forth, the Mass is ended" appear to be serviceable translations.

                                 Tristram Hillier, "Flooded Meadow" (1949)

Perspective, Part One: "O Little Waking Hour Of Life Out Of Sleep!"

"Eternity is not length of life but depth of life" -- the epitaph discovered by Charlotte Mew on a child's gravestone in a rural churchyard -- got me to thinking about all of those dreamy, death-haunted poems written by the poets of the 1890s.  I recently posted Ernest Dowson's "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam," which contains the quintessential Decadent statement on the matter:  "Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes/Within a dream."

The following poem by Arthur Symons is reminiscent of Dowson's poem. But, in addition, it -- like the epitaph found by Mew -- helps to put things into perspective.

              Tristram Hillier, "Snails" (from Shell Nature Studies) (1957)

                            Epilogue

O little waking hour of life out of sleep!
When I consider the many million years
I was not yet, and the many million years
I shall not be, it is easy to think of the sleep
I shall sleep for the second time without hopes or fears.
Surely my sleep for the million years was deep?
I remember no dreams from the million years, and it seems
I may sleep for as many million years without dreams.

Arthur Symons, Images of Good and Evil (1899).

Of course, one might be prompted to respond:  "That is all very well and good, assuming you have a soul!"

              Tristram Hillier, "Fossils" (from Shell Nature Studies) (1957)