Hospital Poems, Part Five: "And If I Am Lucky, Find Some Link, Some Link"

I have previously suggested that Bernard Spencer (1909-1963) is a "neglected poet."  Thus, I am pleased to report that his poems have recently come back into print (Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose, edited by Peter Robinson, Bloodaxe Books).  As I noted in my earlier post on Spencer, his poetry reminds me of that of Louis MacNeice (they were, in fact, acquaintances; they both died too young in September of 1963). Perhaps the resemblance has something to do with an urbanity of tone, together with a certain irony, with a bit of reserve thrown in.  (I suppose that this description fits a number of English poets of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties.  A. S. J. Tessimond comes to mind, for instance.)

Spencer worked for the British Council in various European (usually Mediterranean) countries.  His poetry vividly reflects all of the locations in which he lived.  At one point, he contracted tuberculosis, and, as a result, spent some time in a hospital in Switzerland in 1948.  The following poem is about that hospital stay.

               William Ratcliffe (1870-1955), "The Conservatory Window"

               In a Foreign Hospital

Valleys away in the August dark the thunder
roots and tramples: lightning sharply prints
for an instant trees, hills, chimneys on the night.
We lie here in our similar rooms with the white
furniture, with our bit of Death inside us
(nearer than that Death our whole life lies under);
the man in the next room with the low voice,
the brown-skinned boy, the child among its toys
and I and others.  Against my bedside light
a small green insect flings itself with a noise
tiny and regular, a 'tink; tink, tink'.

A Nun stands rustling by, saying good night,
hooded and starched and smiling with her kind
lifeless, religious eyes.  'Is there anything
you want?' -- 'Sister, why yes, so many things:'
England is somewhere far away to my right
and all Your letter promised; days behind
my left hand or my head (or a whole age)
are dearer names and easier beds than here.
But since tonight must lack for all of these
I am free to keep my watch with images,
a bare white room, the World, an insect's rage,
and if I am lucky, find some link, some link.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).

The phrase "all Your letter promised" in line 17 may refer to his first wife Nora, who died of tuberculosis-related heart failure in June of 1947.  His lovely poem "At Courmayeur" (which I have previously posted) is based upon their planned holiday in the Alps that was foreclosed by her death.

                      William Ratcliffe, "Regent's Canal at Hammersmith"

No Escape, Part Eleven: "Back"

The theme of this "No Escape" series is:  "Wherever you go, there you are." This remark sounds like a bit of contemporary pop psychology.  However, it may have its origins in a remark by Socrates.  This surmise is not based upon systematic research, but upon a passage from Montaigne (which I have previously posted):

"Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country. . .  Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  'I should think not,' he said, 'he took himself along with him.'"

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958).

             Charles Ginner, "Lancaster from Castle Hill Terrace" (c. 1947)

Yes, all roads do lead back to ourselves.  That being said, I know quite well the siren song of escape.  It goes something like this:  "I should not be withheld but that some day/Into their vastness I should steal away . . ." (Robert Frost, from "Into My Own.")

                  Back

Where is that sought-for place
Which grants a brief release
From locked impossibilities?
Impossible to say,
No signposts point the way.

Its very terrain vague
(What mountainside?  What lake?)
It gives the senses nothing,
Nothing to carry back,
No souvenir, no photograph.

Towards its borders no train shrieks
(What meadowland?  What creeks?)
And no plane howls towards its heart.
It is yourself you hear
(What parks?  What gentle deer?).

Only desperation finds it,
Too desperate to blaze a trail.
It only lives by knowing lack.
The single sign that you were there is,
You know that you are back.

D. J. Enright, Unlawful Assembly (1968).

                                              Cedric Lockwood Morris
                     "From a Window at 45 Brook Street, London" (1926)

"Leaning On A Cane"

A time arrives (imperceptibly, it would seem) when one begins to exhibit an increased interest in poems about mortality.  In due course, this interest may become more specific, more pressing.  Thus, for instance, the ability of a poet to look certain facts in the face -- with equanimity and without bravado -- may suddenly begin to strike a nerve (something between a welcome sense of recognition and an urge to flee).

When it comes to equanimity without bravado, the Chinese and Japanese poets seem to have this mortality business well in hand.  Whether this has something to do with Taoism and/or Buddhism, I am not competent to say. The following two poems by Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) are, I think, fine examples of what I am trying to get at.

                                                C. H. H. Burleigh
      "The Burleigh Family Taking Tea At Wilbury Crescent, Hove" (1947)

                  Up After Illness

Old and sick here in spring mountains,
but the warm sun's just right for a skinny body.
I sweep the bedroom, put the bedding out to air,
peer into the garden, leaning on a cane.
Birds scold, as though resenting visitors;
blossoms are late -- it seems they've waited for me.
Trust to truth when you view the ten thousand phenomena
and heaven and earth become one bottle gourd.

Ishikawa Jozan, in Burton Watson (editor/translator), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and Other Edo Period Poets (North Point Press 1990).

               Osmund Caine (1914-2004), "Washing at No. 25, Kingston"

       Leaning on a Cane, Singing

Leaning on a cane by the wooded village,
trees rising thick all around:
a dog barks in the wake of a beggar;
in front of the farmer, the ox plowing.
A whole lifetime of cold stream waters,
in age and sickness, the evening sun sky --
I have tasted every pleasure of mist and sunset
in these ten-years-short-of-a-hundred.

Ibid.  According to tradition, this was Ishikawa Jozan's final poem.

                                   Gilbert Spencer, "The Terrace" (1927)

On A Boat At Night, Revisited

During the Edo Period (1603-1867) in Japan, a tradition developed of writing poems in Chinese.  These poems in Chinese by Japanese writers are known as kanshi.  According to Burton Watson, "the writing of such verse came to be an important mark of the educated man, much as the writing of Latin verse was for English gentlemen of the same centuries." Burton Watson (editor/translator), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and other Edo Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page x.

In addition to complying with the technical requirements of Chinese verse (e.g., number of lines, number of Chinese characters per line, rhyme, and tonal parallelism), the Japanese poets also echoed the subject matter of the Chinese poets.  As I noted in a previous post, poems written while travelling by boat were a staple of T'ang Dynasty poetry.  Thus, it is not surprising to see similar poems among the kanshi written by Japanese poets.

                        Kenneth Macqueen (1897-1960), "Beach Patterns"

The following poem is by Okubo Shibutsu (1767-1837).  The translation is by Burton Watson.

                    Aboard a Boat, Listening to Insects

As though delighting, as though grieving, each with its own song --
an idler, listening, finds his ears washed completely clean.
As the boat draws away from grassy banks, they grow more distant,
till the many varied voices become one single voice.

Ibid, page 92.

          Kenneth Macqueen, "Receding Tide Near Coolum, Queensland"

Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) is perhaps the most well-known kanshi poet (along with Ryokan, whose poems have appeared here in the past).  The following poem by him sounds strikingly similar to many Chinese poems of the T'ang Dynasty.  It also exemplifies, I think, the distinctive qualities of classic Chinese poetry.

On the one hand, it may be nothing more than a lovely, yet commonplace, observation of a passing moment.  But, then again, it may hold within it untold depths.  However, it is critical to note that those depths -- if they are there -- have nothing to do with Western concepts such as "symbolism," "metaphor," "allegory," et cetera.  Any depth is solely in the thing itself, in the moment itself.  But, to bring the circle back around, perhaps there is no depth at all: it is nothing more than a lovely, yet commonplace, observation of a passing moment.  And yet . . .

          Spending the Night at Murotsu

Numberless sails voyaging west and east --
with evening they'll be scrambling to enter this one inlet.
Ahead of us the waves of eighteen choppy seas;
we'll tie up the boat here, wait for a favorable wind.

Ibid, page 10.  Murotsu is a port town on the island of Awaji, which lies in Japan's Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku.

                                    Kenneth Macqueen, "Wave Sketch"

Noise

I have decided that I am going to ignore this year's presidential election in the United States.  I hasten to add that this is not intended to be some sort of grandiose political/philosophical/cultural statement on, say, the status of republican democracy.  I am not raising a white flag at the thought of enduring four more months of media mendacity.  Nor am I throwing in the towel at the horrific prospect of watching a series of mind-numbing, soul-destroying (my mind and my soul) debates between the candidates.

No, the rationale for this dereliction of civic duty is very simple:  noise reduction.  We live in a time when noise -- whether it is absorbed through the ears or through the eyes -- assails us from all sides.  We dwell in a Bedlam which consists, not of the cries of the mad in a dark Victorian asylum, but of a never-ending airport concourse in which CNN blares from television monitors 24 hours a day.  Have you ever tried to escape from that sound?  Why add to the cacophony?  The choice, after all, is ours.

             Anne Isabella Brooke, "Near Masham, Wensleydale" (1954)

               Latterday Oracles: Noise

Listen to me and you will not need to listen
To your own voice thin as a shred of paper uncurling,
Your laughter empty and brittle as an eggshell:
Your thoughts thrown back in your teeth by the cynical wind.

You will not hear the diffidence of breath,
The importunacy of blood, denying death,
The pulse's halt and start,
The morse code of the heart,
Or your two hands whispering together, unquiet as air-stirred leaves.

Listen to me and you will not need to listen.
I am your rampart against silence, time,
And all the gods with empty arms, and eyes
Cold as mirrors, cold and white with questions.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2010).

      Anne Isabella Brooke, "Wharfedale From Above Bolton Abbey" (1954)

Life Explained, Part Twenty-Seven: Dreams

What would we do without our dreams?  Waking or sleeping, they are always with us.  Of course, there is a school of thought (sometimes espoused by the Chinese and Japanese Taoist and Buddhist poets) that life itself is nothing but a dream.  Consider Chuang Tzu's butterfly dream:  did Chuang Tzu dream that he was a butterfly?  Or did the butterfly dream that it was Chuang Tzu?  Or, for instance, this:

The vicissitudes of this world are like the movements of the clouds.
Fifty years of life are nothing but one long dream.
Sparse rain:  in my desolate hermitage at night,
Quietly I clutch my robe and lean against the empty window.

Ryokan (translated by John Stevens), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryokan (1977).

                       Lucien Pissarro, "The Garden Gate, Epping" (1894)

Perhaps one definition of a human being is "the creature that dreams."  But, in our current "civilization" -- in particular, its political and entertainment and "social science" worlds -- the dreams that are being peddled are at once shallow and frightening.  Although we cannot stop dreaming, we should beware of dreaming dreams that are not our own.

                      Dreams

The farmers are walking about
in their soggy fields.  Inside their heads
a pleasant sun shines on crops without weeds.

In a house across the road a young man
plays a piano, aware of Bach and Bartok
listening indulgently to his blundering counterpoint.

And the dog asleep in a doorway twitches
his forepaws.  He's chasing
the fattest hare in Midlothian.

Dreams fly everywhere.  They creep
into minds whose owners have slammed them shut.
That boy's lungs are full of them.

Sometimes they come true and the world stares
at a new great painting or a body by the wayside
with chopped off hands.

The dreams of sleep dissolve when the window whitens
and the dreams of daylight swarm in with a passport to heaven
in one hand and a passport to hell in the other.

And sweet berries grow over the graves
of all of us or a white stone marks the place
which is the end of dreams, and of hell, and of heaven.

Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

                           Lucien Pissarro, "High View, Fishpond" (1915)

"The Sun, That Brave Man"

The place in which I live -- what we in the United States call "the Pacific Northwest" -- has a reputation for dampness and greyness.  This reputation is somewhat exaggerated.  Still, when the sun appears, especially for extended periods of time, we locals are wont to go into a fit of (as they say about the financial markets) irrational exuberance.

We now find ourselves in the midst of a week-long stretch of bright blue, mid-70s to low-80s weather.  Sailboats dance out on a glittering Puget Sound (deep azure, of course).  To the west, the white peaks of the Olympics gleam in the sun.  The fields are green.  Eagles soar above the shoreline bluffs.

We walk out into the light, blinking our eyes in disbelief.  To quote John Cheever:  "Oh what a paradise it seems."

                                        Norman Rowe, "Span" (1985)

        The Brave Man

The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.

The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.

Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.

That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936).

                             Norman Rowe, "Garden with Chairs" (1978)

In a similar vein,  I recommend Philip Larkin's "Solar" ("suspended lion face"), as well as Charles Madge's "Solar Creation" ("the sun, of whose terrain we creatures are"), both of which have appeared here previously.

                                    Norman Rowe, "Water Lilies" (1979)

"Outlived By Trees"

The idea of trees as revenants (of a sort) in Patrick Kavanagh's "Poplar Memory" (which appeared in my previous post) brings to mind a poem by Siegfried Sassoon.

            Outlived by Trees

A beech, a cedar, and a lime
Grow on my lawn, embodying time.
A lime, a cedar, and a beech
The transience of this lifetime teach.

Beech, cedar, lime, when I'm dead Me,
You'll stand, lawn-shadowing, tree by tree;
And in your greenery, while you last,
I shall survive who shared your past.

Siegfried Sassoon, Rhymed Ruminations (1940).

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

I presume that the beech, cedar, and lime were located on the grounds of Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, where Sassoon lived from 1934 until his death in 1967.  Sassoon's trees reappear in a poem that he wrote a decade later.  This time, however, the prospect of their survival -- and of the survival of part of him through them -- seems less certain.

                    A Proprietor

A meditative man
Walks in this wood, and calls each tree his own:
Yet the green track he treads is older than
Recorded English history:
His feet, while moving on towards times unknown,
Travel from traceless mystery.
Wondering what manner of men
Will walk there in the problem'd future when
Those trees he planted are long fallen or felled,
He twirls a white wild violet in his fingers
As others may when he's no more beheld,
Nor memory of him lingers.

Siegfried Sassoon, Emblems of Experience (1951).

We will always have a "problem'd future" ahead of us, won't we?  All the more reason to concentrate on the trees rather than the forest.

                                 Paul Nash, "The Orchard" (c. 1914-1917)

"Poplar Memory"

My previous two posts considered the possibility that our souls may leave remnants behind when our stay here comes to an end.  I should have noted at the outset of this excursion that, in bringing up this subject, I am not attempting to be profound or metaphysical or anything of that sort.

As is always the case, I am merely idly ruminating.  This detour was occasioned by a small poem by Mary Coleridge, not by a weighty contemplation upon Our Place In The Universe.  There shall be no ontology here.

In the interest of further idle rumination, the following poem by Patrick Kavanagh is, I think, a lovely instance of how we may leave something of our soul behind.

                                     David Jones, "The Storm Tree" (1948)

                    Poplar Memory

I walked under the autumned poplars that my father planted
On a day in April when I was a child
Running beside the heap of suckers
From which he picked the straightest, most promising.

My father dreamt forests, he is dead --
And there are poplar forests in the waste-places
And on the banks of drains.

When I look up
I see my father
Peering through the branched sky.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (Penguin/Allen Lane 2004).

         David Jones, "The View from Gatwick House, Essex, April" (1946)

"Aeons Hence"

The following poem by James Reeves provides a modest (yet hopeful) view of what a soul may leave behind after its stay here.  We each dwell on our own "unregarded island," one that is both earthy and imaginative.  Yes, yes, I know:  "No man is an island, entire of itself," according to John Donne.  But, then again, each of us dies alone.  Take your pick.

                               Richard Eurich, "Bottle on a Beach" (1976)

                 Aeons Hence

When, aeons hence, they rediscover
The unregarded island I inhabit,
Will they not marvel
How life upon so bare a soil withstood
This testy climate and abrasive sea?

And when by excavation
My relics are exposed, my habits known,
How, perching on a ledge out of the wind,
I scraped a living, will they not admit
They've lost the secret of some things I did,
As making good pots from this gritty clay
And music from a certain kind of shells?

James Reeves, Subsong (1969).

It doesn't sound half-bad, really, "perching on a ledge out of the wind." Like Alexander Selkirk, but with more comforts.  And the thought of leaving certain things behind, while taking certain secrets with you, is worth considering as well.

                          Richard Eurich, "The Road to Grassington" (1971)