"A Glimpse Of Immaculate Sand That Awaits Our Footprints"

Louis MacNeice's and Seamus Heaney's like-titled poems "The Strand" reminded me of the closing image of a lovely poem by Michael Longley, who has written many fine poems that are set along the margins of the sea.

                        Bjorn Olinder's Pictures

I have learned about dying by looking at two pictures
Bjorn Olinder needed to look at when he was dying:
A girl whose features are obscured by the fall of her hair
Planting a flower,
                                   and a seascape:  beyond the headland
A glimpse of immaculate sand that awaits our footprints.

Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan (Jonathan Cape 2000).

                                   William Baziotes, "Water Forms" (1961)

Many of Longley's seaside poems are inspired by Carrigskeewaun in County Mayo.  I suspect that the following poem may be set there.

                         Phosphorescence

There was light without heat between the stepping stones
And the duach, at every stride the Milky Way.
Her four or five petals hanging from an eyelash,
Venus bloomed like brookweed next to the Pleiades.

Michael Longley, Gorse Fires (1991).  In a note to his collection Snow Water (Jonathan Cape 2004) Longley writes:  "machair is Irish and Scots Gaelic for a sandy plain found behind dunes and affording some pasturage: duach, the Irish for sandbanks or dunes, means in Mayo the same as machair."

An aside:  the Japanese word for what in English is called "the Milky Way" is amanogawa.  "Ama" means "sky" or "the heavens"; "no" means "of"; "gawa" (i.e., "kawa," which often changes to "gawa" in compound words) means "river."  Thus, two possible translations might be:  "river of the sky" or "river of the heavens."  Beautiful:  a river of stars.

                                    William Baziotes, "Opalescent" (1962)

Regarding the sea, the night sky, and the Pleiades, the following untitled poem by A. E. Housman (which I have previously posted) comes to mind:

The weeping Pleiads wester,
     And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
     Far sighs the rainy breeze:

It sighs from a lost country
     To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
     And I lie down alone.

A. E. Housman, Poem X, More Poems (1936).  Housman composed an alternate version of the poem, which appears in my previous post as well. Both of the poems are based, in part, on a poem by Sappho.

William Baziotes, "Sea Phantoms" (1952)

"Continual Conversation With A Silent Man"

In my previous post I made an inadequate and ill-advised attempt to explain what Wallace Stevens's "The Region November" might "mean." Paraphrase and explication are the death of poetry.

Perhaps a better way to approach the poem is through another poem by Stevens.  Once again, we find ourselves bumping up against obdurate, wordless, and emotionless Reality, exemplified this time not by the north wind and the swaying trees, but by "the old brown hen" and "the old blue sky."

                                William Baziotes, "Primeval Wall" (1959)

   Continual Conversation with a Silent Man

The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die --
The broken cartwheel on the hill.

As if, in the presence of the sea,
We dried our nets and mended sail
And talked of never-ending things,

Of the never-ending storm of will,
One will and many wills, and the wind,
Of many meanings in the leaves,

Brought down to one below the eaves,
Link, of that tempest, to the farm,
The chain of the turquoise hen and sky

And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.
It is not a voice that is under the eaves.
It is not speech, the sound we hear

In this conversation, but the sound
Of things and their motion:  the other man,
A turquoise monster moving round.

Wallace Stevens, Transport to Summer (1947).

                                 William Baziotes, "Water Forms" (1961)

You will not get me to opine on what that means.  I will say that a possible conjunction between this poem and "The Region November" may become apparent in the fifth stanza, when Stevens begins to talk about "voice," "speech," and "sound."  Again, as in "The Region November" (in which the wind and the trees are capable of "saying and saying"), Reality (the World, Nature, whatever you wish to call it) is capable of "conversation."  But this "conversation" is sound without "voice" or "speech."

Yes, I know:  curious, this Stevens fellow, this lawyer and insurance company executive walking around a park in Hartford (Connecticut) during his lunch breaks, looking around, composing odd poems.

A side-note:  Stevens's use of color is often entertaining and light-hearted. Here we have the "brown hen," the "blue sky," the "turquoise hen and sky," and, most mysteriously, "the other man,/A turquoise monster moving round."  I am reminded of the wonderful colors in "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts":

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk,
And August the most peaceful month.

. . . . .

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone --
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (1942).

                                      William Baziotes, "Pinwheel" (1958)

"Looking For Something, Something, Something"

In "Sea-Marge" (which appeared in my previous post) Ivor Gurney writes of ". . . the lacy edge/of the swift sea.//Which patterns and with glorious music the/Sands and round stones -- It talks ever/Of new patterns." Gurney's images bring to mind Elizabeth Bishop's "Sandpiper."

Although I have posted "Sandpiper" here in the past, I am not averse, as I have mentioned before, to circling back from time and time.  When it comes to poems, one thing always seems to lead (delightfully -- and often unexpectedly) to another, doesn't it?

                                William Baziotes, "Water Forms" (1961)

Tim Kendall, in his wonderful new book The Art of Robert Frost (which I highly recommend!), directs our attention to this phenomenon in the well-chosen epigraph to his book:

"A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written.  We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A).  We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A.  Progress is not the aim, but circulation.  The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do."

Tim Kendall, The Art of Robert Frost (Yale University Press 2012), page v, quoting Robert Frost, "The Prerequisites" (1954).

The entire passage is marvelous, but I particularly like this:  "Progress is not the aim, but circulation."  (Although "where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do" is hard to beat.)

Frost's "circulation" in turn reminds me of a poem by Wallace Stevens: "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating."  Here is the first stanza:

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936).

                                    William Baziotes, "White Bird" (1957)

                         Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat.  On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

-- Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards.  As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist.  And then the world is
minute and vast and clear.  The tide
is higher or lower.  He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (1965).

As I have noted previously, Bishop's description (in line 4) of the sandpiper as "a student of Blake" has its source in William Blake's line from "Auguries of Innocence":  "To see a World in a Grain of Sand."

                                William Baziotes, "Sea Phantoms" (1952)

How To Live, Part Two: "Leave Them Alone"

What shall we do about those persons, institutions, and cultural (so to speak) phenomena that get on our nerves?  We each have our own set of irritants, and, if we are not careful, they can drive us to distraction.  Here is some advice from Patrick Kavanagh (1906-1967):

               Leave Them Alone

There's nothing happening that you hate
That's really worthwhile slamming;
Be patient.  If you only wait
You'll see time gently damning

Newspaper bedlamites who raised
Each day the devil's howl,
Versifiers who had seized
The poet's begging bowl;

The whole hysterical passing show
The hour apotheosised
Into a cul-de-sac will go
And be not even despised.

                             William Baziotes, "The Flesh Eaters" (1952)

Life Explained, Part Three: "On That Green Evening When Our Death Begins"

It may not come as a surprise that Philip Larkin has provided us with a mordant explanation of What Life Is Like.  But an admirer of Larkin (me, for instance) might add:  "Yes, mordant and witty and  laceratingly honest and -- perhaps -- an explanation which may be absolutely true (at least for 'one man once')."

                    Continuing to Live

Continuing to live -- that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries --
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
     It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise --
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
     But it's chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
     To exist.

And what's the profit?  Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
     But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
     And that one dying.

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber/The Marvell Press 1988).

                                     William Baziotes, "Scepter" (1960)