"What Says He? -- 'Caw!'"

I wish that I was competent to distinguish between crows, ravens, rooks, and jackdaws.  I do know that the largest and most ominous specimens that I have encountered frequent the graveyards of Japan.  Loud, demanding, and huge-beaked they were.  I liked to think of them as ravens.  But who knows?

Jackdaws seem less ominous, more comical -- but still clever.  The following poem by William Cowper is a translation of the Latin original by Vincent Bourne.  As I mentioned in a recent post ("Herodotus And William Cowper: On Certain Customs Of Thrace"), Bourne was a teacher of Cowper's at Westminster School, and Cowper translated a number of his Latin poems. 

               The Jackdaw

There is a bird, who by his coat,
And by the hoarseness of his note,
   Might be supposed a crow;
A great frequenter of the church,
Where, bishop-like, he finds a perch,
   And dormitory too.

Above the steeple shines a plate,
That turns and turns, to indicate
   From what point blows the weather.
Look up -- your brains begin to swim,
'Tis in the clouds -- that pleases him,
   He chooses it the rather.

Fond of the speculative height,
Thither he wings his airy flight,
   And thence securely sees
The bustle and the raree-show,
That occupy mankind below,
   Secure and at his ease.

You think, no doubt, he sits and muses
On future broken bones and bruises,
   If he should chance to fall;
No; not a single thought like that
Employs his philosophic pate,
   Or troubles it at all.

He sees that this great roundabout,
The world, with all its motley rout,
   Church, army, physic, law,
Its customs and its businesses,
Is no concern at all of his,
   And says -- what says he? -- "Caw!"

Thrice happy bird!  I too have seen
Much of the vanities of men;
   And sick of having seen 'em,
Would cheerfully these limbs resign
For such a pair of wings as thine,
   And such a head between 'em.

                         James McIntosh Patrick, "Stobo Kirk" (1936)

Samuel Johnson Climbs A Tree

I have previously noted Samuel Johnson's antic side, suggesting that we should not forget this often-neglected aspect of his personality.  Thus far, we have seen that Johnson was a runner of foot-races, as well as a man who was wont to roll sideways down a tempting hill.  ("Samuel Johnson Runs A Foot-Race": June 10, 2010; "Ludwig Wittgenstein Pretends To Be The Moon. Samuel Johnson Rolls Down A Hill": May 8, 2010.)  But Johnson did not confine himself to those two activities: 

One day, as he was walking in Gunisbury Park (or Paddock) with some gentlemen and ladies, who were admiring the extraordinary size of some of the trees, one of the gentlemen said that, when he was a boy, he made nothing of climbing (swarming, I think, was the phrase) the largest there.  'Why, I can swarm it now,' replied Dr. Johnson, which excited a hearty laugh -- (he was then, I believe, between fifty and sixty); on which he ran to the tree, clung round the trunk, and ascended to the branches, and, I believe, would have gone in amongst them, had he not been very earnestly entreated to descend; and down he came with a triumphant air, seeming to make nothing of it.

"Recollections of Dr. Johnson by Miss Reynolds," Johnsonian Miscellanies, Volume II (edited by George Birkbeck Hill) (1897).

              Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Linlithgow, Sheffield"

Life Explained, Part Seven: "Does The Road Wind Up-Hill All The Way?"

There is a tinge of melancholy in much of  the poetry of Christina Rossetti (1830-1894).  However, given the fact that she wrote more than 1,000 poems, it would be unfair to characterize her solely as a poet of melancholy.  She may be best known for "In the Bleak Midwinter," which was set to music by Gustav Holst (and others) after her death.  She also wrote a book of poetry for children (Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book) which contains ditties about burying a dead thrush in the snow, a "fatherless, motherless" baby, linnets mourning over their eggs ("crushed" by "cruel boys"), and "a baby's grave where autumn leaves drop sere." 

All of which leads to the following poem, which does not exactly provide us with a sunny Explanation of Life.  

                          Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
   Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
   From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting place?
   A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
   You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
   Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
   They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
   Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
   Yea, beds for all who come.

                        John Everett Millais, "A Vale of Rest" (1858)

Moonlit Apples Of Dreams. Moon-Washed Apples Of Wonder.

As you amble through the series of Georgian Poetry anthologies compiled by Edward Marsh from 1912 to 1922, you soon realize that you are not strolling through the "modernist" land of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  Here, rather, you come across the likes of Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, a young Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, and Siegfried Sassoon.  Alas, not an Imagist or a Symbolist or a Free-Versifier in sight.

                                           Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979)
                                                   "Bedroom Window"

And, occasionally, you will encounter someone who is all but unknown today.  Someone who once may have written a small gem of a poem.  John Drinkwater, for instance.

                           Moonlit Apples

At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
Apples are deep-sea apples of green.  There goes
   A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.

A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then
There is no sound at the top of the house of men
Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again
   Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.

They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams;
On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams
Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams,
   And quiet is the steep stair under.

In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep.
And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep
Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep
   On moon-washed apples of wonder.

Georgian Poetry: 1918-1919 (1920).

                             Gilbert Spencer, "From My Studio" (1959)

Herodotus And William Cowper: On Certain Customs Of Thrace

Herodotus relates the following anecdote about the Trausi, who were one of the tribes of Thrace:

"The Trausi in all else resemble the other Thracians, but have customs at births and deaths which I will now describe.  When a child is born all its kindred sit round about it in a circle and weep for the woes it will have to undergo now that it is come into the world, making mention of every ill that falls to the lot of human kind; when, on the other hand, a man has died, they bury him with laughter and rejoicings, and say that now he is free from a host of sufferings, and enjoys the completest happiness."

Herodotus, The Histories, Book V, Chapter 4 (translated by George Rawlinson) (1859).  When I came across this passage, I realized that the Trausi may have anticipated the gloomy conclusion arrived at centuries later by Arthur Schopenhauer and Giacomo Leopardi:  that humans would be better off if they had never been born.  (As I said, gloomy.)

                                               Caspar David Friedrich
                                        "Graveyard under Snow" (1826)

I had not thought about the passage for a while, but recently I came across a poem titled "The Thracian." The poem is a translation by William Cowper of the Latin original, which was written by Vincent Bourne.  Bourne (1695-1747) was an Englishman who wrote poetry in Latin.  Cowper was a pupil of Bourne's at Westminster School.  Later in his life, Cowper translated a number of Bourne's poems.

               The Thracian

Thracian parents, at his birth,
   Mourn their babe with many a tear,
But with undissembled mirth
   Place him breathless on his bier.

Greece and Rome with equal scorn,
   "O the savages!" exclaim,
"Whether they rejoice or mourn,
   "Well entitled to the name!"

But the cause of this concern,
   And this pleasure, would they trace,
Even they might somewhat learn
   From the savages of Thrace.

                                                  Frans Francken
                   "Death Invites the Old Man for a Last Dance" (1635)

"On The Hurry Of This Time"

Recently, I have seen a spate of articles about the adverse impact that technology (e.g., the Internet, PDAs, etc.) may be having upon us.  In particular, there has been much talk of the impact of these things upon our attention spans and our reading habits.  Because I am a Luddite by temperament, I tend to sympathize with these sorts of concerns.  (Given the fact that I am writing these words on a blog, I realize that charges of hypocrisy may be in order.)

However, part of me realizes that we need to put these concerns into perspective.  Not in the sense that they may not have some validity, but in the sense that each "modern" generation (or at least a portion of that generation) believes that things are moving too fast and that the world is undergoing a unique technological transformation that will permanently change (for the worse) humanity.  In other words, a portion of each "modern" generation feels that the world is going to Hell in the proverbial handbasket.

                             George Mackley, "The House by the Lake"

Poets often feel this way.  In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth writes:

[A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.  The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1800).  Sound familiar?

                                         George Mackley, "Drawbridge"

Here, on a smaller scale, is a poem from the Victorian era by Austin Dobson (1840-1921):

       On the Hurry of This Time

With slower pen men used to write,
Of old, when "letters" were "polite";
   In Anna's, or in George's days,
   They could afford to turn a phrase,
Or trim a straggling theme aright.

They knew not steam; electric light
Not yet had dazed their calmer sight; --
   They meted out both blame and praise
          With slower pen.

Too swiftly now the Hours take flight!
What's read at morn is dead at night:
   Scant space have we for Art's delays,
   Whose breathless thought so briefly stays,
We may not work -- ah! would we might! --
          With slower pen.

Vignettes in Rhyme and Other Verses (1880).

"The Lattermath Will Be A Fine One": Edward Thomas

"Lattermath" is, I think, a lovely word.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as follows:  "The 'latter' mowing; the aftermath.  Also, the crops then reaped."  Edward Thomas fashioned a beautiful sonnet around the word.  The poem is untitled.

It was upon a July evening.
At a stile I stood, looking along a path
Over the country by a second Spring
Drenched perfect green again.  'The lattermath
Will be a fine one.'  So the stranger said,
A wandering man.  Albeit I stood at rest,
Flushed with desire I was.  The earth outspread,
Like meadows of the future, I possessed.

And as an unaccomplished prophecy
The stranger's words, after the interval
Of a score years, when those fields are by me
Never to be recrossed, now I recall,
This July eve, and question, wondering,
What of the lattermath to this hoar Spring?

                                         Howard Phipps, "Eggardon"

Thomas wrote the poem in the summer of 1916, after he had enlisted in the army, but before he was posted to France, where he died in April of 1917 at Arras.  Given these facts, there may be an understandable tendency for us -- who know the "lattermath" that actually awaited him -- to bring some sentimentality to the poem.  (Something that I readily confess to.)  However, the poem stands fully on its own as a beautiful meditation on the pasts, presents, and futures that we all ponder, regret, and hope for.  Thomas is indeed "wondering" about his own "lattermath," but, like any timeless poet, he speaks for us all.

                                  Howard Phipps, "Malacombe Bottom"

Trains In The Distance At Night: Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust, And Emmylou Harris

I hold romantic notions about the sound of distant trains in the countryside at night.  Perhaps this is due to the fact that I am a city dweller.  Or perhaps it has something to do with country music -- Emmylou Harris singing "Tulsa Queen," for instance.

Siegfried Sassoon wrote the following poem near the beginning of the Second World War:

                    A Local Train of Thought

Alone, in silence, at a certain time of night,
Listening, and looking up from what I'm trying to write,
I hear a local train along the Valley.  And "There
Goes the one-fifty," think I to myself; aware
That somehow its habitual travelling comforts me,
Making my world seem safer, homelier, sure to be
The same to-morrow; and the same, one hopes, next year.
"There's peacetime in that train."  One hears it disappear
With needless warning whistle and rail-resounding wheels.
"That train's quite like an old familiar friend," one feels.

Siegfried Sassoon, Rhymed Ruminations (1940).

 

                                 Claughton Pellew, "The Train" (1920)

I would ask myself what time it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now further off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in the forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller is hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; translation revised by D. J. Enright) (1913).

                               Eric Ravilious, "Train Landscape" (1939)

"Stationary Clouds": John Ruskin And Homer

John Ruskin could be a bit obsessive, as well as a bit prickly.  Take, for instance, the subject of "stationary clouds":

When, in the close of my lecture on landscape last year at Oxford, I spoke of stationary clouds as distinguished from passing ones, some blockheads wrote to the papers to say that clouds never were stationary. . . . Those foolish letters were so far useful in causing a friend to write me the pretty one I am about to read to you, quoting a passage about clouds in Homer which I had myself never noticed, though perhaps the most beautiful of its kind in the Iliad.  In the fifth book, after the truce is broken, and the aggressor Trojans are rushing to the onset in a tumult of clamour and charge, Homer says that the Greeks, abiding them, "stood like clouds."

The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The Works of John Ruskin: Library Edition, Volume XXXIV, pages 11 and 12.

                    Aelbert Cuyp, "The Maas at Dordrecht" (c. 1650)

Ruskin then silences his critics by quoting his friend's letter:

"Sir, -- Last winter when I was at Ajaccio, I was one day reading Homer by the open window, and came upon the lines -- 'But they stood, like the clouds which the Son of Kronos establishes in calm upon the mountains, motionless, when the rage of the North and of all the fiery winds is asleep.'  As I finished these lines, I raised my eyes, and looking across the gulf, saw a long line of clouds resting on the top of its hills.  The day was windless, and there they stayed, hour after hour, without any stir or motion.  I remember how I was delighted at the time, and have often since that day thought on the beauty and the truthfulness of Homer's simile.  Perhaps this little fact may interest you, at a time when you are attacked for your description of clouds.  I am, sir, yours faithfully, G. B. Hill."

Ibid, page 12.  Thus ends the dispute over whether clouds can indeed be stationary!  (An aside: "G. B. Hill," the letter-writer, is none other than George Birkbeck Hill, the Samuel Johnson scholar who edited numerous excellent editions of Johnson's works during the 19th century.)

                     Aelbert Cuyp, "The Valkhof at Nijmegen" (c. 1650)

Life Explained, Part Six: "He Beholds The Sordid Assemblage Just As It Is"

A year prior to providing an Explanation of Life in "Madam Life's a piece in bloom" (which appears in my post for July 18, 2010), William Ernest Henley offered a less scandalous Explanation involving a Child, a Nurse, and a Fair.  The poem is untitled.  Henley dedicated it to his friend Robert Louis Stevenson.  Alas, the figure of Death again makes an appearance, but in a different guise.

                             Stanley Spencer, "The Roundabout" (1923)

A Child,
Curious and innocent,
Slips from his Nurse, and rejoicing
Loses himself in the Fair.

Thro' the jostle and din
Wandering, he revels,
Dreaming, desiring, possessing;
Till, of a sudden
Tired and afraid, he beholds
The sordid assemblage
Just as it is; and he runs
With a sob to his Nurse
(Lighting at last on him),
And in her motherly bosom
Cries him to sleep.

Thus thro' the World,
Seeing and feeling and knowing,
Goes Man: till at last,
Tired of experience, he turns
To the friendly and comforting breast
Of the old nurse, Death.

The Works of W. E. Henley, Poems: Volume I (1908).  The poem was written in 1876.

                                                       Stanley Spencer
                             "Helter Skelter, Hampstead Heath" (1937)