Remains

When this week began, I did not intend to devote any time to pondering the fate of my mortal remains and of my soul.  Then, mid-week, I happened upon this:

                         On Himself

Some parts may perish; die thou canst not all:
The most of Thee shall scape the funeral.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648).

Poetry is funny that way:  you never know where you are headed next.

As it turns out, Herrick derived his thought from two lines of one of Horace's Odes:  "I shall not all die, and a large part of me will escape the Goddess of Death." Horace, Odes, Book III, Ode XXX.  Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), page 675.  Here is a verse translation:

I shall not wholly die:  large residue
Shall 'scape the queen of funerals.

Horace (translated by John Conington), in The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace (Fifth Edition 1872).

Kenneth Rowntree, "Old Toll Bar House, Ashopton" (1940)

But this was not the end of the journey.  On the opposite page, I noticed this:

                  Great Spirits Supervive

Our mortal parts may wrapt in seare-cloths lie:
Great Spirits never with their bodies die.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648) (italics in original).

"Supervive" means "survive."  OED.  "Seare-cloths" is a variant spelling of "cerecloth," which is defined as:  "cloth smeared or impregnated with wax or some glutinous matter:  (1) used for wrapping a dead body in; a waxed winding-sheet or a winding-sheet in general."  Ibid.

Is this whistling past the graveyard?  I have no theological agenda, nor do I have a sectarian bone to pick.  However, something has always told me that we all possess a soul (for lack of a better word -- and it is, actually, a fine word), a soul whose fate is beyond our ken.

As to the "Great Spirit" part:  well, none of us are in a position to lay claim to that epithet, are we?  Something unknown, inscrutable, and silent makes that determination.  I do know this:  if you come to believe that you are a "Great Spirit," then you most certainly are not.

Kenneth Rowntree, "The Livermore Tombs, Barnston, Essex" (1940)

Something about "Great Spirits never with their bodies die" rang a bell. When Herrick italicizes a phrase it signals that he has obtained it from another source, usually classical or Biblical.  Cain and Connolly, in their thorough annotations to Hesperides, do not, however, identify a source for this phrase.

But I have a thought.  As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers will recall, I spent some time earlier this year wandering through The Greek Anthology.  I do not have the scholarly credentials to claim the following epigram as the source for Herrick's phrase, but it does provide an interesting parallel:

In sacred sleep here virtuous Saon lies;
'Tis ever wrong to say a good man dies.

Callimachus (translated by William Dodd), in The Hymns of Callimachus, Translated from the Greek into English Verse, with Explanatory Notes (1755).

An alternative translation:

Here Saon, wrapp'd in holy slumber, lies:
Thou canst not say, the just and virtuous dies.

Callimachus (translated by John Merivale), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from The Greek Anthology (1849).

Thus ends this week's journey.

Kenneth Rowntree, "Bridge to Cox's Farm, Ashopton" (1940)

"Like Music At Night, Distant, Fading Away"

Recently, I have been trying to remember my grandfather's voice.  He passed away more than twenty years ago, but I can still "hear" him -- although I know the sound is all in my head.

His parents immigrated to America from Sweden near the turn of the twentieth century.  My grandfather and his four brothers -- each of them blue-eyed, tall, reticent, and skillful at fixing things -- spoke with a sort of Scandinavian lilt and cadence, even though they were born here.  Swedish must still have been spoken on the farm when they were growing up.

I have a photograph of me, at the age of 4 or 5, watching my grandfather as he stood at a wood table cleaning a fish he had caught in a northern Minnesota lake.  I remember fishing with him.  If I caught a small sunfish he would say:  "That's a keeper."

Thomas Henslow Barnard, "Landscape with Ludlow Castle" (1952)

                      Voices

Voices, loved and idealized,
of those who have died, or of those
lost for us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams;
sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.

And with their sound for a moment return
sounds from our life's first poetry --
like music at night, distant, fading away.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems: Revised Edition (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (Princeton University Press 1992).  In the original version of their translation, Keeley and Sherrard translated the final line as follows:  "like distant music fading away at night."  C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (Princeton University Press 1975).  The line is so wonderful, it is difficult to choose, isn't it?

As I have suggested before, the versions of Keeley and Sherrard are the best place to start when seeking out translations of Cavafy's poems.  However, it is instructive to consider other translations as well:  although the details differ, the underlying emotional core of the poem usually remains intact.

Clarence MacKenzie (1889-1948), "Ludlow Castle, Early Morning"

                       Voices

Ideal voices and dearly loved
Of those who have died, or of those who are
To us lost like the dead.

Sometimes in our dreams they speak;
Sometimes in thought the brain hears them.

And with their sound return for a moment
Sounds from the first poetry of our life --
Like music, at night, far off, that fades away.

C. P. Cavafy (translated by Robert Liddell), in Robert Liddell, Cavafy: A Biography (Duckworth 1974).

The two versions are fairly close, aren't they?  The entire poem is lovely, but the final two lines are hard to beat.  It is interesting to see how similar the two versions are:  "our life's first poetry" versus "the first poetry of our life"; "like music at night, distant, fading away" versus "like music, at night, far off, that fades away."  I lean towards Keeley and Sherrard.

C. H. H. Burleigh (1869-1956), "Ludlow"

Derek Mahon has referred to his translations (mostly from French, but from a number of other languages as well) as "adaptations."  Thus, in the Foreword to his most recent collection of translations, he writes:  "These aren't translations, in the strict sense, but versions of their originals devised, as often as not, from cribs of one kind or another. . . . My own versions, looking to recreate the spirit and employing many extraneous devices, belong in another category, that of poems adapted from their originals."  Derek Mahon, Echo's Grove: Translations (The Gallery Press 2013) (italics in the original).

For those adept at Greek, this sort of approach might set the teeth on edge. But, because Mahon is such a gifted poet, I am more than willing to give him some slack.  (Easy for me to say, given my ignorance of Greek!)  Here is his version of Cavafy's poem.

                    Voices

Definitive voices of the loved dead
or the loved lost, as good as dead,
speak to us in our dreams
or at odd moments.

Listening, we hear again,
like music at night,
the original poetry of our lives.

Ibid.

Keeley, Sherrard, and Liddell replicate the eight-line, three-stanza form of the original.  Mahon shortens the poem.  He certainly preserves what I called above the "emotional core" of the poem.  I particularly like "the loved lost, as good as dead."  But I confess that I miss "like music at night, distant, fading away." I think that it is the Ernest Dowson in me that gets hooked by that line.

David Birch, "Lord of the Marches" (1958)

How To Live, Part Twenty-Two: "A Quiet Normal Life"

I am not qualified to render any opinions on the subject of How to Live. The little that I have learned during my time on Earth can be reduced to a few phrases.  "Here today, gone tomorrow."  "Pull down thy vanity."  "We should be careful/Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time."  Things like that.  Things we all ought to know.  But I have to re-learn them time and time again.

 As a practical matter, one should find what one loves, and pursue it with purity of heart.  All mysteries are then resolved (but not solved).  "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.521, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Pears/McGuinness translation) (1921).

Robin Tanner, "June" (1946)

                                   The Just

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alastair Reid), in Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).  Regarding "Stevenson" (line 10): Borges was a great admirer of the work of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Robin Tanner, "Still Is The Land" (1983)

When I read Borges's poem, I think of tranquility and repose, peace and quiet.

                 A Quiet Normal Life

His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not
In anything that he constructed, so frail,
So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,
He became an inhabitant, obedient
To gallant notions on the part of cold.

It was here.  This was the setting and the time
Of year.  Here in his house and in his room,
In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

And the oldest and the warmest heart was cut
By gallant notions on the part of night --
Both late and alone, above the crickets' chords,

Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.
There was no fury in transcendent forms.
But his actual candle blazed with artifice.

Wallace Stevens, The Rock (1954), in Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997).

The repetition in "gallant notions on the part of cold" and "gallant notions on the part of night" is lovely.  In the modern era, "gallant" is usually used in the sense of "chivalrously brave, full of noble daring."  OED.  But earlier senses included "gorgeous or showy in appearance" and "splendid, fine, grand."  Ibid.  All of these senses seem to work together here, I think.

Lines 3 through 6 ("a world in which, like snow . . .") bring to mind Stevens's "The Snow Man."  "A Quiet Normal Life" was written within the last two years of Stevens's life.  As I have noted before, this was a time when he had softened his view of the primacy of the Imagination in life, and had begun to accept the "First Warmth" of the World around him.  Not that he hadn't noticed the World, and written of it beautifully, of course -- but perhaps he began to doubt (just a bit) his long-held belief that Imagination trumped Reality.  Thus, the lines may be an intentional evocation of "The Snow Man," which he wrote more than 30 years earlier.

Robin Tanner, "The Wicket Gate" (1977)

The Passing Bell

The best-known use of "the passing bell" in English literature comes from John Donne: "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."  John Donne, Meditation 17, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) (italics in the original).  But, given the preoccupation of Elizabethan and 17th-century poets with Mortality and Death, the bell's echo is often heard in the poetry of those times.

     Upon a Passing Bell

Hark how the passing bell
Rings out thy neighbour's knell,
And thou for want of wit,
Or grace, ne'er think'st on it,
     Because thou yet art well.

Fool!  in two days or three,
The same may ring for thee;
For Death's impartial dart
Will surely hit thy heart;
     He will not take a fee.

Since then he will not spare,
See thou thyself prepare
Against that dreadful day
When thou shalt turn to clay,
     This bell bids thee beware.

Thomas Washbourne (1606-1687), in Norman Ault (editor), Seventeenth Century Lyrics (1928).

Charles Oppenheimer, "The Old Tolbooth, Kirkcudbright" (1931)

None of this ought to be viewed as gloomy.  I'm not one to be preoccupied with death.  But it ought not to be pushed away.  A thought of death once a day is a useful corrective, a bestower of perspective.

                    Fatum Supremum

All buildings are but monuments of death,
     All clothes but winding sheets for our last knell,
All dainty fattings for the worms beneath,
     All curious music but our passing bell:
Thus death is nobly waited on, for why
All that we have is but death's livery.

Anonymous (c. 1640), in Ibid.  "For why" (line 5) means "because."  Ibid, page 150.

Charles Oppenheimer, "From a Tower, Kirkcudbright"

Finally, there is this, which is harrowing, but marvelous.

               My Midnight Meditation

Ill-busied man!  why shouldst thou take such care
To lengthen out thy life's short calendar,
When every spectacle thou look'st upon
Presents and acts thy execution?
     Each drooping season and each flower doth cry,
     'Fool!  as I fade and wither, thou must die.'

The beating of thy pulse (when thou art well)
Is just the tolling of thy passing bell:
Night is thy hearse, whose sable canopy
Covers alike deceased day and thee.
     And all those weeping dews which nightly fall,
     Are but the tears shed for thy funeral.

Henry King (1592-1669), in Ibid.

I'm very fond of "Ill-busied man!" and of "The beating of thy pulse (when thou art well)":  the parenthetical addition of "(when thou art well)" is a lovely touch.  And there's that wonderful "Fool!" again -- as in the sixth line of "Upon a Passing Bell."

Charles Oppenheimer, "Kirkcudbright under Snow" (1934)

"But Well To Say And So To Mean, That Sweet Accord Is Seldom Seen"

I recently posted here a few poems by Robert Herrick from his Hesperides. Since then, I have continued to wander amongst the 1,130 poems in that volume.  (I didn't count them!  They are numbered in the edition that I am reading.)  A book consisting of more than a thousand poems may sound forbidding, but the entire enterprise is airy, light (albeit with some darkness here and there), delightful, and -- above all -- wise.

Each time that I read Herrick, I come away with a refreshing and invigorating sense of having encountered the world and its denizens in all of their variety.  Here is but a tiny instance.

                         Distrust

To safe-guard Man from wrongs, there nothing must
Be truer to him, than a wise Distrust.
And to thy self be best this sentence known,
Hear all men speak; but credit few or none.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648).

"Sentence" (line 3) is used in an older sense: "A quoted saying of some eminent person, an apophthegm.  Also, a pithy or pointed saying, an aphorism, maxim."  Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2013), pages 541 and 563, citing OED.

Gilbert Spencer, "Air Raid Warning" (1940)

Herrick's poem brings to mind this:

Throughout the world if it were sought,
     Fair words enough a man shall find;
They be good cheap, they cost right nought,
     Their substance is but only wind.
But well to say and so to mean,
That sweet accord is seldom seen.

Thomas Wyatt, in E. M. W. Tillyard (editor), The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Selection and a Study (Chatto & Windus 1949).

This has long been one of my favorite poems, no doubt for its music.  It is one of those poems that you inadvertently have in your memory after having read it a few times.  As an example of pure poetry, it falls into the same class (for me at least) as Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal," upon which I have apostrophized on a previous occasion.

Gilbert Spencer, "Summer Evening, Hook End Farm" (1957)

In offering these poems, I do not have in mind the private sphere.  I am merely in one of my periodic grouches about the disingenuous dissembling that goes on in the public sphere.  I turn to the following poem whenever I fall into this mood.

             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 apotheosized
Into a cul-de-sac will go
And be not even despised.

Patrick Kavanagh, Poems (1955).

Gilbert Spencer

"The School on Peggy Hill, Ambleside" (1952)

No Escape, Part Thirteen: "Switch Love, Move House -- You Will Soon Be Back Where You Started"

I am intimately familiar with both the dream of Escape and its companion, the Siren song of the Ideal Place.  A long-time reader of this blog recently commented that he had spent his holiday in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Being unfamiliar with the area, I did some Internet research.  Upon seeing how lovely the area is, I soon began dreaming of spending my remaining years in a secluded vale amid the Wolds, "and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made."  With occasional treks eastward to the North Sea for a walk along the shingle.  And so it goes . . .

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Summer" (1940)

The theme of this "No Escape" series of posts is:  "Wherever you go, there you are."  As I have noted before, this notion is not a contemporary pop psychology platitude.

"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).

Two centuries or so later Samuel Johnson retraced Montaigne's steps:

"The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. . . . [H]e, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove."

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).

Yes, yes, well said, sirs.  But easier said than done.

Harry Epworth Allen, "The Caravan"

                         Ideal Home

                                   1

Never would there be lives enough for all
The comely places --
Glimpsed from a car, a train, or loitered past --
That lift their faces
To be admired, murmuring 'Live with me.'

House with a well,
Or a ghost; by a stream; on a hill; in a hollow: breathing
Woodsmoke appeal,
Fresh paint, or simply a prayer to be kept warm,
Each casts her spell.

Life, claims each, will look different from my windows,
Your furniture be
Transformed in these rooms, your chaos sorted out here.
Ask for the key.
Walk in, and take me.  Then you shall live again.

                                   2

. . . Nor lives enough
For all the fair ones, dark ones, chestnut-haired ones
Promising love --
I'll be your roof, your hearth, your paradise orchard
And treasure-trove.
With puritan scents -- rosemary, thyme, verbena,
With midnight musk,
Or the plaintive, memoried sweetness tobacco-plants
Exhale at dusk,
They lure the footloose traveller to dream of
One fixed demesne,
The stay-at-home to look for his true self elsewhere.
I will remain
Your real, your ideal property.  Possess me.
Be born again.

                                   3

If only there could be lives enough, you're wishing? . . .
For one or two
Of all the possible loves a dozen lifetimes
Would hardly do:
Oak learns to be oak through a rooted discipline.

Such desirableness
Of place or person is chiefly a glamour cast by
Your unsuccess
In growing your self.  Rebirth needs more than a change of
Flesh or address.

Switch love, move house -- you will soon be back where you started,
On the same ground,
With a replica of the old romantic phantom
That will confound
Your need for roots with a craving to be unrooted.

C. Day Lewis, The Gate and Other Poems (1962).

Harry Epworth Allen, "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

Fish

A confession:  I don't find puns humorous.  Mind you, I find much in life and in the world that is quite humorous.  But puns?  No, not puns.  I realize that there are those who find puns delightful and highly entertaining.  Just as there are those who find mimes and limericks and clowns to be delightful and highly entertaining.  I shan't pass judgment.

William Wigley (1880-1943), "Mevagissey Quay, Cornwall"

I do reserve the right to make rare (extremely rare) and wholly arbitrary exceptions.  Thus, I shall give Derek Mahon a pass on the following poem.

                    Soles

'I caught four soles this morning'
said the man with the beard;
cloud shifted and a sun-
shaft pierced the sea.
Fisher of soles, did you reflect
the water you walked on
contains so very many souls,
the living and the dead,
you could never begin to count them?

Somewhere a god waits,
rod in hand,
to add you to their number.

Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).

As a child 50-odd years ago in Scandinavian, Lutheran Minnesota, I attended what was called "Sunday school."  Every so often we would sing, as a group, a song called "I Will Make You Fishers Of Men."  As we sang, we made casting and reeling-in motions with our arms and hands.  I offer this simply as a random recollection of a lost world, not in the service of any message or creed.

William Peters Vannet, "Arbroath Harbour" (c. 1940)

"Soles" puts me in mind of this:

     Fisherman and/or Fish

There was a time when I,
The river's least adept,
Eagerly leapt, leapt
To the barbed, flirtatious fly.

Thrills all along the line,
A tail thrashing -- the sport
Enthralled: but which was caught,
Which reeled the other in?

Anglers aver they angle
For love of the fish they play
(Arched spine and glazing eye,
A gasping on the shingle).

I've risen from safe pools
And gulped hook line and sinker
(Oh, the soft merciless fingers
Fumbling at my gills!)

Let last time be the last time
For me with net or gaff.
I've had more than enough
Of this too thrilling pastime.

The river's veteran, I
Shall flick my rod, my fin,
Where nothing can drag me in
Nor land me high and dry.

C. Day Lewis, The Gate and Other Poems (1962).

C. Day Lewis is usually lumped together with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender as one of the "Thirties Poets."  I prefer the more personal lyrical poetry of his later years.  His earlier poetry has a political cast (no pun intended!) that I find boring.

But I am one of those who believes that "political poetry" is an oxymoron. Hence, for example, a phrase such as "the poetry of witness" gives me the willies.  (And makes me want to immediately immerse myself in the poetry of, say, Ernest Dowson or Philip Larkin or Emily Bronte.)  But to each their own.  We all have our own peculiar axes to grind and oxen to gore.

Richard Eurich, "Coast Scene with a Rainbow" (1952)

Watermills

Given that windmills were the subject of my previous post, I ought to consider watermills as well.  Those that were once bustling, but are now abandoned, have often been an evocative subject for poets.

          Requiem for a Mill

They took away the water-wheel,
Scrap-ironed all the corn-mill;
The water now cascades with no
Audience pacing to and fro
Taking in with casual glance
Experience.

The cold wet blustery winter day
And all that's happening will stay
Alive in the mind: the bleak
Water-flushed meadows speak
An enduring story
To a man indifferent in a doorway.

Packaged, pre-cooked flakes have left
A land of that old mill bereft.
The ghosts that were so local coloured
Hiding behind bags of pollard
Have gone from those empty walls.
The weir still curves its waterfalls
But lets them drop in the tailrace
No longer wildly chivalrous.

And with this mention we withdraw
To things above the temporal law.

Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960).

Stanley Bryan, "Botley Flour Mill Loading Barn" (1955)

Like Kavanagh, Edward Thomas notices the ghostly feel of an idle mill.

                    The Mill-Water

Only the sound remains
Of the old mill;
Gone is the wheel;
On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.

Water that toils no more
Dangles white locks
And, falling, mocks
The music of the mill-wheel's busy roar.

Pretty to see, by day
Its sound is naught
Compared with thought
And talk and noise of labour and of play.

Night makes the difference.
In calm moonlight,
Gloom infinite,
The sound comes surging in upon the sense:

Solitude, company, --
When it is night, --
Grief or delight
By it must haunted or concluded be.

Often the silentness
Has but this one
Companion;
Wherever one creeps in the other is:

Sometimes a thought is drowned
By it, sometimes
Out of it climbs;
All thoughts begin or end upon this sound,

Only the idle foam
Of water falling
Changelessly calling,
Where once men had a work-place and a home.

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

Perhaps I am overreaching, but I hear in the fifth stanza a hint of what was to come in Thomas's second-to-last poem.  The poem has appeared here before, but here is its final stanza:

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

Edward Thomas, "Out in the Dark," Ibid.

In connection with "The Mill-Water," Edna Longley points us to a prose passage by Thomas about "a lifeless mill":

"Each evening, just when the first nightjar was skimming the wood, the sedge-warblers began to sing all together round the pool.  The song might have been the abstract voice of some old pain, feebly persistent.  It went far into the night with a power of ghostly alarms, and attuned to such thoughts as come when night in certain places is malign, reverses the sweet work of the day, and gives the likeness of a dragon to the pleasant corner of a wood. The birds were full of prelusive dark sayings about the approaching night."

Ibid, page 253, quoting from Edward Thomas, "Isoud with the White Hands," Horae Solitariae (1902), pages 178-179.

"Prelusive dark sayings about the approaching night" is wonderful, isn't it?

George Vicat Cole, "Iffley Mill" (1884)

The following poem could pass for a haiku, save for its length, and save for the fact that it was written in Victorian England.

                       A Mill

Two leaps the water from its race
     Made to the brook below,
The first leap it was curving glass,
     The second bounding snow.

William Allingham, By the Way: Verses, Fragments, and Notes (1912).

John Aldridge, "Old Mill, West Harnham" (1948)