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)

"Isles Of Paradise"

Yearning is one of the defining characteristics of the poems written by the Decadent poets of the 1890s.  I will state at the outset that I find nothing wrong with yearning per se.  It is the twin of hope (albeit with more of an edge of desire and longing), which Samuel Johnson was wont to identify as an essential feature of what it means to be human.

For me, at least, the yearning of the Nineties poets is yearning at its best. Resigned, yes; melancholy, yes; but, for the most part, not querulous.  This is in contrast to our modern world, in which the yearning is whiny, and all about things.  The Decadent poets were not materialists.  Their yearning was romantic and spiritual and aesthetic.  I cannot fault them for this.  Did they sometimes take their yearning too far?  Perhaps.  But better that than, say, placing one's faith in Science and Progress and Politics.  We can all see where that has gotten us.

Harald Sohlberg, "Midsummer Night" (c. 1910)

                 Vanitas

Beyond the need of weeping,
     Beyond the reach of hands,
May she be quietly sleeping,
     In what dim nebulous lands?
Ah, she who understands!

The long, long winter weather,
     These many years and days,
Since she, and Death, together,
     Left me the wearier ways:
And now, these tardy bays!

The crown and victor's token:
     How are they worth to-day?
The one word left unspoken,
     It were late now to say:
But cast the palm away!

For once, ah once, to meet her,
     Drop laurel from tired hands:
Her cypress were the sweeter,
     In her oblivious lands:
Haply she understands!

Yet, crossed that weary river,
     In some ulterior land,
Or anywhere, or ever,
     Will she stretch out a hand?
And will she understand?

Ernest Dowson, Verses (1896).

Yes, it all seems -- to use Dowson's own words -- "dim" and "nebulous," doesn't it?  Who is "she"?  I haven't a clue.  The practical-minded among us will say "bosh!" or "humbug!"  Not I.

Harald Sohlberg, "Night" (1904)

On the other hand, we mustn't think that the late-19th century was all of a piece.  Consider, for instance, this:

I have trod the upward and the downward slope;
I have endured and done in days before;
I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;
And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896).

One is not likely to think of Stevenson as a dreamy Nineties aesthete. There is a note of fortitude sounded here which one seldom finds in the Decadent poets.  Bear in mind that Stevenson, given his poor health, was always staring Death in the face.  He is certainly entitled to invoke some Decadent fatalism and melancholy.  And perhaps he does, just a bit:  "I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope."  But overall the tone is resolute -- similar to that of his "Requiem" (which has appeared here previously):  "Glad did I live and gladly die,/And I laid me down with a will."

Moreover, Stevenson was willing to allow for the attainment, however brief, of Paradise on Earth.

Fair Isle at Sea -- thy lovely name
Soft in my ear like music came.
That sea I loved, and once or twice
I touched at isles of Paradise.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Poems (1916).  The "fair Isle at Sea" is Samoa.

A small poem, a slight poem some might say, but I can never get over its loveliness.

Harald Sohlberg, "Flower Meadow in the North" (1905)

"This Is The End Of All The Songs Man Sings"

The arrival of poetic moods is a funny thing.  In this part of the world, we are in the midst of a summer-like week:  all is bright and warm and abloom.  Yet, I have unaccountably found myself drawn into the twilit, misty, dream-laden, death-haunted world of the Decadent poets of the Nineties (the 1890s, that is).  Moreover, I am feeling perfectly serene and equable.  I am not cultivating gloom and melancholy.  As a matter of fact, reading their poetry makes me feel quite cheerful and at peace with the world.

Here, for instance, is the quintessential Nineties poem by the quintessential Nineties poet.  And a lovely poem it is.

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
          Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
          We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
          Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
          Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, Verses (1896).

The title of the poem comes from Horace's Odes, I.iv, line 15, and may be translated as: "the short span of our life forbids us to indulge in a long-term hope."  Ernest Dowson, Collected Poems (edited by R. K. R. Thornton) (University of Birmingham Press 2003), page 225.

Paul Maitland, "Kensington Gardens" (c. 1890)

"Vitae summa brevis" is a carefree stroll in the park compared with this:

                                Dregs

The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropt curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.

Ernest Dowson, Decorations: In Verse and Prose (1899).

The basic elements of a Nineties poem are all here: "golden wine," ghosts, "pale, indifferent eyes," and wormwood (the source of absinthe, mais oui). And I cannot help but be seduced by the music of it all.  "This is the end of all the songs man sings" is wonderful, both in sound and sense.

Paul Maitland, "The Flower Walk, Kensington Gardens" (c. 1897)

Every respectable Decadent poet has to pay a visit to Hades and its five rivers.  In this case, the river is Acheron, haunt of Charon the Ferryman. However, Charon does not make an appearance here.  In his stead, we have a more illustrious figure:  Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.

          Villanelle of Acheron

By the pale marge of Acheron,
     Methinks we shall pass restfully,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

There all men hie them one by one,
     Far from the stress of earth and sea,
By the pale marge of Acheron.

'Tis well when life and love is done,
     'Tis very well at last to be,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

No busy voices there shall stun
     Our ears:  the stream flows silently
By the pale marge of Acheron.

There is the crown of labour won,
     The sleep of immortality,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

Life, of thy gifts I will have none,
     My queen is that Persephone,
By the pale marge of Acheron,
     Beyond the scope of any sun.

Ernest Dowson, Ibid.

Mind you, I am not in any way mocking these poems.  I admire them a great deal, and they always bring me pleasure.  No one does this sort of thing better than the Nineties poets.

Paul Maitland, "Fall of the Leaves, Kensington Gardens" (c. 1900)

"It Is A Sort Of April-Weather Life That We Lead In This World"

"But it is a sort of April-weather life that we lead in this world.  A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm."  So writes William Cowper in a January 3, 1787, letter to the Reverend Walter Bagot.  Cowper, who endured much, knew whereof he spoke.  It is he who wrote two of the most despairing lines in English verse:

I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
                                     Buried above ground.

The entire harrowing poem may be found here, where I suggest a comparison with John Clare's equally  harrowing "I am -- yet what I am, none cares or knows."

However, I do not wish to misrepresent Cowper with those two lines: despite his periods of deep melancholy, he seems to have been a good-natured, amiable, and kind man.  This is revealed in his correspondence, which is a delight to read.

Allan Gwynne-Jones, "Spring Evening, Froxfield" (1922)

                            Spring

There lurks a sadness in the April air
     For those who note the fate of earthly things;
     A dreamy sense of what the future brings
To those too good, too hopeful or too fair.

An underthought of heartache, as it were,
     Blends with the paean that the new leaf sings;
     And, as it were, a breeze from Death's great wings
Shakes down the blossoms that the fruit-trees bear.

The tide of sap flows up the forest trees;
     The birds exult in every bough on high;
The ivy bloom is full of humming bees;

But if you list, you hear the latent sigh;
     And each new leaf that rustles in the breeze
Proclaims the boundless mutability.

Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894).

Lee-Hamilton led an "April-weather life":  for 20 years he was confined to bed and sofa with a paralytic illness that has never been identified. Sonnets of the Wingless Hours was published in the year in which he recovered from the malady, which departed as mysteriously as it had arrived.

James Bateman, "Pastoral" (1928)

                           April Gale

The wind frightens my dog, but I bathe in it,
Sound, rush, scent of the Spring fields.

My dog's hairs are blown like feathers askew,
My coat's a demon, torturing like life.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

Gurney, like Cowper, was a gentle and afflicted soul.  Of course, things are much more complicated than that.  In most poets, a line such as "My coat's a demon, torturing like life" would seem over-dramatic -- an affectation. (So might:  "If one's heart is broken twenty times a day."  Or:  "The heart burns -- but has to keep out of face how heart burns.")  But not so with Gurney.  His was indeed an "April-weather life."  And he is only reporting exactly how it is.

Arthur Hathaway, "Spring Morning after Rain" (1940)

Peace

A few posts ago, I offered this bit of wisdom from Joseph Conrad:  "When once the truth is grasped that one's own personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown the attainment of serenity is not very far off."  Joseph Conrad, Letter to Edward Garnett (March 23, 1896), in Edward Garnett, Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924 (1928), page 46.  I remarked in the post that it was nice that Conrad used the word "serenity" rather than "happiness."

Happiness is overpromoted and overrated.  I cannot presume to speak for the universal order of things, but I venture to say that we are not put on Earth to be happy.  A quick look at popular culture (wherever you hail from) will convince you that "the pursuit of happiness" is a hollow business indeed.  "Distracted from distraction by distraction."

Serenity is another matter entirely.  As are peace of mind, tranquillity, and repose.  One can be sad but serene, unhappy but tranquil.  Peace of mind and repose can be maintained amid cacophony and chaos (the normal state of the world).

James Bateman (1893-1959), "Haytime in the Cotswolds"

Which is not to say that the attainment of serenity is easy, or, once attained, permanent.

                                          Peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?  I'll not play hypocrite

To own my heart:  I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace.  What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good!  And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter.  And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
                                         He comes to brood and sit.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (editors), The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press, Fourth Edition, 1967).  In a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins stated that "reave [line 7] is for rob, plunder, carry off."  Ibid, page 278.

"Your round me roaming end" is very nice.  As is:  "And so he does leave Patience exquisite,/That plumes to Peace thereafter."  Yes, the pursuit of happiness tends to breed impatience.

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

Charles Stuart Calverley wrote light verse and comic verse.  Thus, as I have noted in a previous post, we are perhaps supposed to view the subject of the following poem as a figure of fun.  However, I've never thought so.  I greatly admire him, and I would be pleased to follow in his footsteps.

                       Peace
                     A Study

He stood, a worn-out City clerk --
     Who'd toiled, and seen no holiday,
For forty years from dawn to dark --
     Alone beside Caermarthen Bay.

He felt the salt spray on his lips;
     Heard children's voices on the sands;
Up the sun's path he saw the ships
     Sail on and on to other lands;

And laughed aloud.  Each sight and sound
     To him was joy too deep for tears;
He sat him on the beach, and bound
     A blue bandana round his ears:

And thought how, posted near his door,
     His own green door on Camden Hill,
Two bands at least, most likely more,
     Were mingling at their own sweet will

Verdi with Vance.  And at the thought
     He laughed again, and softly drew
That Morning Herald that he'd bought
     Forth from his breast, and read it through.

C. S. Calverley, Fly Leaves (1872).

Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959), "The Cornish April"

"As Under The Sea"

John Drinkwater's poem "The Wood," which appeared in my previous post, wonderfully evokes the feeling of late winter within a grove of trees.  At this time of year, all is silent and still and half-lit -- an impression heightened by the damp, leaf-strewn ground, which deepens the silence and stillness.

But, as Drinkwater's poem suggests, things are alive underfoot.  There are tiny hints of emerging green in the leaf-mouldy mud.  We seem to be on the verge of something.

Felicity Charlton (1913-2009), "Porthkerry Park from the Artist's Studio"

The following poem is not necessarily set in late winter, but it captures the feeling I am struggling to articulate.

          Dirge in Woods

A wind sways the pines,
               And below
Not a breath of wild air;
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine-tree drops its dead;
They are quiet, as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase;
               And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
               Even we,
               Even so.

George Meredith, A Reading of Earth (1888).

"As under the sea" (line 8) in particular gets at the still and hushed feeling on the forest floor at this time of year, as does the image of clouds moving quickly overhead, while nothing stirs in the all-day twilight of the world that lies beneath the empty branches.

Felicity Charlton, "Llandaff House"

Here is another similarly evocative poem out of the Victorian era.

                            The Pool

A wood obscure in this man's haunt of love,
     And midmost in the wood where leaves fall sere,
A pool unplumbed; no winds these waters move,
     Gathered as in a vase from year to year.

And he has thought that he himself lies drowned,
     Wan-faced where the pale water glimmereth,
And that the voiceless man who paces round
     The brink, nor sheds a tear now, is his wraith.

Edward Dowden, Poems (1914).

Call me old-fashioned, but I love "Wan-faced where the pale water glimmereth."  The world becomes a poorer, less enchanted place when a word such as "glimmereth" passes out of use.  Or so it seems to me.

"The Pool" brings to mind some lines from T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" -- likely due to the haunted feel of both poems.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943).

Felicity Charlton, "Cadoxton Methodist Church" (1969)

By The Sea, Part Two: "So Of The Soul"

By happenstance I have lived beside salt water since the age of eleven:  the Pacific Ocean (to the west, with the exception of one year in Japan), Puget Sound (a meandering inland arm of the Pacific), and the Indian Ocean (for two years).  I've become accustomed to having an expanse of blue or grey at my shoulder.

Don't get me wrong:  I love the nearly waterless wide-openness of, say, the high desert of Utah and Arizona and New Mexico or the plains of the Midwest ("amber waves of grain" is quite accurate).  And one of the finest drives I have ever taken was along the green-walled and green-vaulted Natchez Trace Parkway from Natchez on the Mississippi River to the outskirts of Nashville.

But there is something about having water out on the horizon.  "The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one's dreams, to all one's speculations. . . . The sea tells us that everything is changing and that nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, that all existence is a rhythm."  Arthur Symons, "In a Northern Bay," Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands, (1918), page 296.

Robert Lee, "Whitby Harbour" (1951)

                         By the Sea

In tottering row, like shadows, silently
The old pier-timbers struggle from the sea;
Strained in old storms by those wild waves that creep
So gently now, no longer do they keep
The pier that on them rested long ago,
But stand as driven piles in tottering row.
The sky sails downward, upward creeps the wave,
For countless clouds toward the sun's bright grave
Move curiously with grey and misty wing;
So thickly all the sky environing,
That only by one pale bright spot is known
Where still the sunken light is upward thrown,
And lately sunk the weary king of day:
Still on the sands below in stealthy play
Arise the billows of the nightly tide;
Each with its own clear layer doth override
The spreaded calm where its last brother rolled;
Each upon other rippling draws the fold
Of its thin edge along the soaked sand,
And stirs the spongy foam 'twixt sea and land,
And lifts the dark waifs higher on the shore.
Yet in this quietness resides the roar
Of ocean floods; one rising of that wind,
And those slow clouds would leave the night behind
In bitter clearness; those cold waves would roll
In snarling billows white.  So of the soul.

Richard Watson Dixon, Historical Poems and Other Odes (1864).

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

"The sea is austere, implacable, indifferent; it has nothing to tell us; it is an eternal question. . . . Yet, as ecstasy is only possible to one who is conscious of the possibility of despair, so the sea, as it detaches us from the world and our safeguards and our happy forgetfulnesses, and sets us by ourselves, as momentary as the turn of a wave, and mattering hardly more to the universe, gives us, if we will take them, moments of almost elemental joy."  Arthur Symons, Ibid, page 297.

                    By the Sea

Why does the sea moan evermore?
     Shut out from heaven it makes its moan,
It frets against the boundary shore;
     All earth's full rivers cannot fill
     The sea, that drinking thirsteth still.

Sheer miracles of loveliness
     Lie hid in its unlooked-on bed:
Anemones, salt, passionless,
     Blow flower-like; just enough alive
     To blow and multiply and thrive.

Shells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike,
     Encrusted live things argus-eyed,
All fair alike, yet all unlike,
     Are born without a pang, and die
     Without a pang, and so pass by.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1875).

"Blow" (line 10) is used in the sense of "to blossom, bloom."  OED.  Its use in line 9 could be either to bloom or "to move before the wind" (or, in this case, the underwater currents).

Kenneth Roberts (1932-1995), "Souvenir of Istria"

"Autumnal"

I cannot let October slip away without once again visiting the 1890s.  I began the month with two twilight poems by Arthur Symons.  The following poem is by Ernest Dowson.  If Symons is the Nineties poet of twilight, then Dowson is the Nineties poet of dreams and mist.  As one might expect, they are both quite at home when it comes to Doomed Love.

                           Leonard Appelbee (1914-2000), "Fruit" (1963)

                   Autumnal

Pale amber sunlight falls across
     The reddening October trees,
     That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer:  summer's loss
     Seems little, dear! on days like these!

Let misty autumn be our part!
     The twilight of the year is sweet:
     Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
     Eludes a little time's deceit.

Are we not better and at home
     In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
     No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
     A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
     Winter and night:  awaiting these
     We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
     Beneath the drear November trees.

Ernest Dowson, Verses (1896).

Pretty doleful stuff, isn't it?  But the dolefulness is so well done that one is willing to surrender oneself to the mood.  There is something endearing and alluring about it.

The third stanza is particularly fine, I think, with its "dreamful Autumn," as well as the lines "A little while and night shall come,/A little while, then, let us dream."  Those two lines echo what is perhaps Dowson's best-known poem, which has appeared here before, but is always worth visiting again.

                                 Leonard Appelbee, "Flower Piece" (1958)

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
          Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
          We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
          Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
          Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, Ibid.

                          Leonard Appelbee, "Still Life No. 10" (1940-1950)

Twilight

At this time of year, I find it difficult to resist the dreamy, twilit, death-haunted pull of the Nineties poets.  No falling or fallen leaves are to be found in the following poem.  However, it was written on August 22, 1895. Thus, according to my definition of autumn, it qualifies as an autumn poem.

What's more, the poem contains a variation on the word "rustle."  Autumn is the season of rustling, wouldn't you say?  Sooner or later, everything rustles in autumn -- not just the leaves.  In this case, the rustling is done by the darkness, which makes perfect sense.

                       Maxime Maufra (1861-1918), "Landscape with Mill"

                 Twilight

The pale grey sea crawls stealthily
Up the pale lilac of the beach;
A bluer grey, the waters reach
To where the horizon ends the sea.

Flushed with a tinge of dusky rose,
The clouds, a twilit lavender,
Flood the low sky, and duskier
The mist comes flooding in, and flows

Into the twilight of the land,
And darkness, coming softly down,
Rustles across the fading sand
And folds its arms about the town.

Arthur Symons, Amoris Victima (1897).  In a note to the poem, Symons states that it was written at Dieppe -- a favorite retreat of Decadent poets and artists.

Earlier in his career, Symons wrote a series of three poems that appeared under the heading "Colour Studies."  ("Twilight" itself is a fine "colour study," what with its "pale grey sea," "pale lilac," "dusky rose," and "twilit lavender.")  The following poem is the first of the three.  Symons dedicated it to the painter Walter Sickert.  It was written on September 16, 1893.

                Maxime Maufra, "Autumn Landscape at Goulazon" (1900)

                At Dieppe

The grey-green stretch of sandy grass,
Indefinitely desolate;
A sea of lead, a sky of slate;
Already autumn in the air, alas!

One stark monotony of stone,
The long hotel, acutely white,
Against the after-sunset light
Withers grey-green, and takes the grass's tone.

Listless and endless it outlies,
And means, to you and me, no more
Than any pebble on the shore,
Or this indifferent moment as it dies.

Arthur Symons, London Nights (1895).  "Indefinitely desolate" and "acutely white" are very nice.

                                      Maxime Maufra, "Twilight" (1896)

"Autumn Silences The Turtle Dove; -- In Blank Autumn Who Could Speak Of Love?"

There are two sides to Christina Rossetti.  On the one hand, she can seem to be a fairly "typical" Victorian poet:  sentimental and/or pious.  (As I have noted before, a large number of Rossetti's poems consist of devotional verse.)  I hasten to add that the fact that a poem may be sentimental and/or pious does not mean that it cannot be a good poem.  Rossetti wrote many fine poems of this sort.

          Autumn

Fade tender lily,
     Fade O crimson rose,
Fade every flower
     Sweetest flower that blows.

Go chilly Autumn,
     Come O Winter cold;
Let the green things die away
     Into common mould.

Birth follows hard on death,
     Life on withering:
Hasten, we shall come the sooner
     Back to pleasant Spring.

Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems (Penguin 2001).

         William Ratcliffe (1870-1955), "Regent's Canal at Hammersmith"

On the other hand, Rossetti can be as complex, deep, penetrating, and emotional as any poet you care to name.  When you read one of these poems, you realize that you are in another world altogether.

          Autumn

Care flieth,
     Hope and fear together,
Love dieth
In the Autumn weather.

For a friend
     Even care is pleasant;
When fear doth end
     Hope is no more present:
Autumn silences the turtle dove; --
In blank Autumn who could speak of love?

Ibid.

Well, now, what is that all about?  Is it about lost or unrequited love?  Is it about the ways of God?  Or is it simply a poem about autumn?  It sounds Elizabethan, like something (dare I say?) that Shakespeare or Donne might have written.  It sounds ancient and timeless.

                                  William Ratcliffe, "Bodinnick, Fowey"

"The Long September Evening Dies"

As one might expect, the "Decadent" poets of the 1890s -- with their wistfulness, melancholy, and obsession with death -- found autumn to be congenial.  I confess that I, too, am a pushover for the autumnal dreamland (without the death).  Thus, although some might find it old-fashioned, quaint, and predictable, I am quite fond of the following poem by Arthur Symons, which has it all:  "mist-enfolded lanes," "a few faint stars," "lingering twilight" (which, of course, "wanes"), and a "darkening vale" -- not to mention "lover with lover wandering."

           Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "Near Leatherhead, Surrey"

            Autumn Twilight

The long September evening dies
In mist along the fields and lanes;
Only a few faint stars surprise
The lingering twilight as it wanes.

Night creeps across the darkening vale;
On the horizon tree by tree
Fades into shadowy skies as pale
As moonlight on a shadowy sea.

And, down the mist-enfolded lanes,
Grown pensive now with evening,
See, lingering as the twilight wanes,
Lover with lover wandering.

Arthur Symons, London Nights (1895).  Symons indicates in a note that the poem was written on September 12, 1891.

                           Christopher Nevinson, "The Weir, Charenton"

Blue

As a lover of autumn, I am guilty of attributing powers to the season that it probably does not possess.  For instance, it seems to me that colors are more vivid this time of year.  I ascribe this (with absolutely no scientific evidence to support my view) to the slanting yellow sunlight and the cool, atmosphere-cleansing winds of this time of year.

Thus, on a clear, breezy day, the waters of Puget Sound seem the bluest of all blues:  azure, cerulean, cobalt, lapis lazuli, and ultramarine rolled into one.  With a few white-caps, sails, and seagulls for contrast.

                           Henry Moore, "Catspaws Off The Land" (1885)

              L'Oiseau Bleu

The lake lay blue below the hill.
     O'er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
     A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,
     The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
     It caught his image as he flew.

Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).  My high school and college French at last comes in handy:  "l'oiseau" is "the bird"; "bleu" is "blue."

For another fine evocation of blue, I recommend Andrew Young's "The Nest," which has appeared here previously.

                      James Dickson Innes, "Arenig, North Wales" (1913)

Lists, Part Eight: "A Shy Person's Wishes"

In keeping with the musical theme of C. Day Lewis's "Hornpipe," I offer the following poem by Dora Greenwell (1821-1882).  According to the OED, a "scherzo" is "a movement of a lively character, occupying the second or third place in a symphony or sonata."  It is an Italian word meaning "joke" or "jest."  Hence, like "Hornpipe," "A Scherzo" is, I presume, intended to be read in a sprightly fashion.

As such, the poem may be classified (perhaps) as "light verse" (at which the Victorians were quite good).  That being said, we should bear in mind that good "light verse" can be every bit as truthful and keen about the world and its occupants as good "serious verse."

             Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

                         A Scherzo
           (A Shy Person's Wishes)

With the wasp at the innermost heart of a peach,
On a sunny wall out of tip-toe reach,
With the trout in the darkest summer pool,
With the fern-seed clinging behind its cool
Smooth frond, in the chink of an aged tree,
In the woodbine's horn with the drunken bee,
With the mouse in its nest in a furrow old,
With the chrysalis wrapt in its gauzy fold;
With things that are hidden, and safe, and bold,
With things that are timid, and shy, and free,
Wishing to be;
With the nut in its shell, with the seed in its pod,
With the corn as it sprouts in the kindly clod,
Far down where the secret of beauty shows
In the bulb of the tulip, before it blows;
With things that are rooted, and firm, and deep,
Quiet to lie, and dreamless to sleep;
With things that are chainless, and tameless, and proud,
With the fire in the jagged thunder-cloud,
With the wind in its sleep, with the wind in its waking,
With the drops that go to the rainbow's making,
Wishing to be with the light leaves shaking,
Or stones on some desolate highway breaking;
Far up on the hills, where no foot surprises
The dew as it falls, or the dust as it rises;
To be couched with the beast in its torrid lair,
Or drifting on ice with the polar bear,
With the weaver at work at his quiet loom;
Anywhere, anywhere, out of this room!

Dora Greenwell, Poems (1867).

                          Harry Epworth Allen, "The Road to the Hills"

"Yes! In The Sea Of Life Enisled"

By chance, my posts this month have taken a turn towards the sea.  Which leads me to Matthew Arnold.  The sea turns up quite a bit in his poetry, even though one might not think of Arnold as a margins-of-the-land, vasty-deep type of person.  (As opposed to, say, Thomas Hardy, who is quite at home standing on the brink of a windy cliff above crashing waves   -- more often than not in rain, mist, or fog.)

Arnold's best-known poem is probably "Dover Beach," which begins:  "The sea is calm to-night./The tide is full, the moon lies fair/Upon the straits." The poem then proceeds onward to the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of "the Sea of Faith," before ending on the famous "darkling plain . . . Where ignorant armies clash by night."

                                Edward Wadsworth, "Gasteropoda" (1927)

But the sea is present in a number of other poems of his as well, including the following poem addressed to "Marguerite."  Arnold first met "Marguerite" in September of 1848 on a sojourn in Switzerland, saw her again when he returned a year later, and then parted from her for ever.  Her identity is unknown (despite the detective work of scholars).  Some argue that she was an invention.  I prefer to think not.

       To Marguerite -- Continued

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour --

Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain --
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who ordered, that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire? --
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852).

If one were being less than charitable to Arnold, one could argue that the poem is Arnold's after-the-fact philosophical/ontological/theological rationalization for failing to pursue the love of his life.  I can see the point. Sort of.

But then there is line 4:  "We mortal millions live alone."  Call me sappy and sentimental, but those italics speak volumes.

Well, what does one do with a life-long regret?

                                  Edward Wadsworth, "Still Life" (c. 1926)

"Crossing The Bar"

Charles Kingsley's "The Three Fishers" (which appeared in my previous post) revolves around the image (and sound) of the "moaning" of "the harbour bar."  According to Christopher Ricks, who has edited Alfred Tennyson's poetry, Tennyson owned a copy of Kingsley's Andromeda and Other Poems (1858), in which "The Three Fishers" appeared.  Christopher Ricks (editor), Tennyson: A Selected Edition (1989), page 665.  Further, Tennyson's wife Emily noted in her journal that he read some of Kingsley's poems to her in 1858.  Ibid.

Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar" in October of 1889 when crossing the Solent to the Isle of Wight.  Although the poem was prompted by that journey, Kingsley's "Though the harbour bar be moaning" may have been hovering somewhere in the back of his mind as well.

              Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "Silver Estuary" (c. 1925)

            Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
     And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
     When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
     Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
     Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
     And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
     When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
     The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
     When I have crost the bar.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (1889).

Commentators on the poem usually link "bourne" in line 13 to Hamlet's description of death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns."  Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene i, 79-80. Coincidentally, Christina Rossetti wrote a poem titled "The Bourne," which I have previously posted here.  The poem was published in 1866, but I am not suggesting that it influenced Tennyson, merely noting another use of the word in Victorian poetry.

Commentators also suggest that "face to face" in line 15 may be an allusion to 1 Corinthians 13.12:  "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face."

                                  Christopher Nevinson, "Saint-Malo"

"Three Fishers Went Sailing Away To The West . . ."

The best-known poem about "fisher-folk" in the Victorian era was probably "The Three Fishers" by Charles Kingsley.  This is most likely due to the fact that it was set to music soon after it was published, and became a popular song.  Versions of it are still sung today.

                                 Richard Eurich, "Fawley Beach" (1939)

                    The Three Fishers

Three fishers went sailing away to the West,
     Away to the West as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,
     And the children stood watching them out of the town;
     For men must work, and women must weep,
     And there's little to earn, and many to keep,
               Though the harbour bar be moaning.

Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower,
     And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down;
They looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,
     And the night-rack came rolling up ragged and brown.
     But men must work, and women must weep,
     Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
               And the harbour bar be moaning.

Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
     In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
     For those who will never come home to the town;
     For men must work, and women must weep,
     And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep;
               And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.

Charles Kingsley, Andromeda and Other Poems (1858).

                                         Seattle Fishermen's Memorial

The "moaning" of "the harbour bar" is explained by Kingsley Amis in a note to the poem:

"The late Philip Hope-Wallace told me that, in the common estuary of the rivers Taw and Torridge in Barnstaple (or Bideford) Bay, the joining of their waters and the incoming sea can between them, if conditions are just right, produce a loud moaning sound above the sand-bar at the mouth of the inlet.  Kingsley had lived in that part of north Devon and was no doubt referring to a local superstition."

Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (Hutchinson 1988), pages 328-329.  The "superstition" of which Amis writes is the belief that, if the bar is moaning, it is betokening the coming death of those who cross it.

                                            Photograph by J. Clark

Lest we think that the poems that I have recently posted by Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson are quaint relics of a by-gone era, I have included images of the Seattle Fishermen's Memorial with this post.

The Memorial is located at the Fishermen's Terminal, which is about two miles from where I live.  Flowers may usually be found at the Memorial, together with personal items that have been left by the family and friends of those whose names appear on the engraved plaques that are to the left and right of the statue.

                                  Metal sculpture at the base of the statue

"The Soonest Mended, Nothing Said"

"Least said, soonest mended" is a proverb that I had not heard of until I came across the following poem by Christina Rossetti.  One of the earliest versions of the proverb appeared in John Heywood's Three Hundred Epigrams Upon Three Hundred Proverbs in 1562:  "little said, soon amended."  Rossetti's version appears in the first line of her poem.

Given the subject matter of the poem, "mending" (as in the mending of fishing nets) gives the proverb an added resonance.  Further, Rossetti's use of "nothing said" (rather than "least said" or "little said") establishes a theme of silence that works its way gracefully (and movingly) through the entire poem.

                   Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "The Old Harbour"

               A Fisher-Wife

The soonest mended, nothing said;
     And help may rise from east or west;
But my two hands are lumps of lead,
     My heart sits leaden in my breast.

O north wind swoop not from the north,
     O south wind linger in the south,
Oh come not raving raging forth,
     To bring my heart into my mouth;

For I've a husband out at sea,
     Afloat on feeble planks of wood;
He does not know what fear may be;
     I would have told him if I could.

I would have locked him in my arms,
     I would have hid him in my heart;
For oh! the waves are fraught with harms,
     And he and I so far apart.

Christina Rossetti, A Pageant and Other Poems (1881).

           Thomas Henslow Barnard, "Fishing Boats, Mevagissey" (1954)

"Fisher-Folk"

The first stanza of Ernest Dowson's "In a Breton Cemetery," which comments upon the harsh life of Breton "fisher-folk," puts me in mind of a poem by Arthur Symons, Dowson's fellow Nineties poet.  Symons's best-known poems are set in the usual urban Decadent haunts: London, Paris, Venice, et cetera.  But Symons also spent a fair amount of time in out-of-the-way seaside towns in England, Wales, and Ireland, and these places find their way into a number of his poems.  (With the requisite twilit, grey-tinted melancholia and world-weariness of the Decadents still intact, of course.)

                            Richard Eurich, "In Falmouth Harbour" (1935)

          The Fisher's Widow

The boats go out and the boats come in
Under the wintry sky;
And the rain and foam are white in the wind,
And the white gulls cry.

She sees the sea when the wind is wild
Swept by the windy rain;
And her heart's a-weary of sea and land
As the long days wane.

She sees the torn sails fly in the foam,
Broad on the skyline grey;
And the boats go out and the boats come in,
But there's one away.

Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (1889).

                                        Richard Eurich, "P.Z. 576" (1974)

I like the recurrence of "the boats go out and the boats come in":  as with the movement of the tide.  The alliteration throughout the poem seems to embody the sound and the motion of the sea as well:  "wintry sky;/ . . . white in the wind,/And the white gulls cry."  And:  "She sees the sea when the wind is wild/Swept by the windy rain."  

I wonder about line 8: "As the long days wane."  The source would seem to be Tennyson's well-known lines in "Ulysses":  "The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep/Moans round with many voices."  Symons, like most Victorian poets, was brought up on Tennyson's verse.  Was this a conscious or an unconscious borrowing?  I suspect that it was done in homage to Tennyson, but that is just a guess.

                                   Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)

"Let There Remain Of Me Less Than A Word -- A Little Passing Look"

In a recent post I suggested that we might wish to consider what our epitaph will be.  Another way of looking at this sort of thing may be: what trace, if any, will our soul leave behind?

Before proceeding further, I should make clear that I am not using the term "soul" in any religious or sectarian sense.  Heaven, Hell, Paradise, Nirvana, et cetera, et cetera are of no moment to me.

But I do believe that we each have a soul.  Call it, say, an animating spirit -- indefinable, ineffable, untouchable . . . flitting and transient. "Animula vagula blandula."  What trace will this fluttering, fleeting thing leave behind?

                                     Adrian Stokes, "Olive Trees" (1958)

Mary Coleridge considers this subject in the following untitled poem.

Some in a child would live, some in a book;
     When I am dead let there remain of me
Less than a word -- a little passing look,
Some sign the soul had once, ere she forsook
     The form of life to live eternally.

Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (1954).

      Frances Macdonald, "Tympanum, Abbey Porch, Malmesbury" (1941)

Coleridge's poem brings to mind the following untitled poem by William Allingham.  The poem is not necessarily about souls, but I think that it nicely complements Coleridge's "less than a word -- a little passing look" and "some sign the soul had once."

Everything passes and vanishes;
     Everything leaves its trace;
And often you see in a footstep
     What you could not see in a face.

William Allingham, Evil May-Day (1883).

                  Adrian Stokes, "Landscape, West Penwith Moor" (1937)