away beyond many a far meridian
Ljova and the Kontraband have today released a video of their song, Mnemosyne, a setting of the poem by Joe Stickney which I posted here. I mentioned listening to their superb album here.
The evocative video uses footage from Ilya Khrjanovsky’s film 4, and is available here.
In recognition of the heavy snow-falls in some places this week (eg, Cottonopolis under cotton), here is a poem by Japanese poet, Saigyo Hoshi (1118-1190):
No one visits here
In the dark mountain hut
where I live alone.
But for this sweet loneliness
it would be too bleak to bear.
Reference:
Sam Hamill (Editor and Translator) [1997]: Only Companion: Japanese Poems of Love and Longing. Boston, MA, USA: Shambhala, page 55.
The superb winning entry of a competition run by New Statesman magazine (2009-12-14) to summarize a work of literature with a limerick, due to performance poet and photographer Anneliese Emmans Dean:
From the farm they banished the people.
“Hurrah!” cried the beasts. “We’re all equal!”
But superior plotters,
With trotters, the rotters,
Took over. The End. (There’s no sequel.)
Following Michael Dransfield’s poem about conflicted love, I remembered a seasonally-appropriate poem written four centuries before: Robert Southwell’s Joseph’s Amazement, which imagines the torment and self-questioning Mary’s husband would have felt to discover that Mary was pregnant. Southwell moves between first and third persons to describe Joseph’s anguish, which he does not resolve, instead ending in a similar place of uncertain quandary to Dransfield. Perhaps this lack of resolution is another reason Southwell’s poetry sounds so modern, and so fresh.
Joseph’s Amazement
When Christ, by growth, disclosed his descent
Into the pure receipt of Mary’s breast
Poor Joseph, stranger yet to God’s intent,
With doubts of jealous thoughts was sore oppressed
And, wrought with diverse fits of fear and love,
He neither can her free nor faulty prove.Now sense, the wakeful spy of jealous mind,
By strong conjectures deemeth her defiled,
But love, in doom of things best loved blind,
Thinks rather sense deceived than her with child
Yet proofs so pregnant were that no pretence
Could cloak a thing so dear and plain to sense.Then Joseph, daunted with a deadly wound,
Let loose the reins to undeserved grief.
His heart did throb, his eyes in tears were drowned,
His life a loss, death seemed his best relief.
The pleasing relish of his former love
In gallish thoughts to bitter taste doth prove.One foot he often setteth forth of door
But t’other’s loath uncertain ways to tread.
He takes his fardel for his needful store,
He casts his Inn where first he means to bed.
But still ere he can frame his feet to go,
Love winneth time till all conclude in no.Sometime, grief adding force, he doth depart.
He will, against his will, keep on his pace.
But straight remorse so racks his ruing heart,
That hasting thoughts yield to a pausing space;
Then mighty reasons press him to remain.
She whom he flies doth win him home again.But when his thought, by sight of his abode,
Presents the sign of mis-esteemed shame,
Repenting every step that back he trod,
Tears drown the guides; the tongue, the feet doth blame.
Thus warring with himself a field he fights,
Where every wound upon the giver lights.“And was my love,” quoth he, “so lightly prized?
Or was our sacred league so soon forgot?
Could vows be void, could virtues be despised?
Could such a spouse be stained with such a spot?”
O wretched Joseph that hast lived so long,
Of faithful love to reap so grievous wrong.Could such a worm breed in so sweet a wood?
Could in so chaste demeanour lurk untruth?
Could vice lie hid where virtue’s image stood?
Where hoary sageness graced tender youth?
Where can affiance rest to rest secure?
In virtue’s fairest seat faith is not sure.All proofs did promise hope, a pledge of grace,
Whose good might have repaid the deepest ill.
Sweet signs of purest thoughts in saintly face
Assured the eye of her unstained will.
Yet in this seeming lustre seem to lie
Such crimes for which the law condemns to die.But Joseph’s word shall never work her woe:
“I wish her leave to live, not doom to die.
Though fortune mine, yet am I not her foe,
She to herself less loving is than I.
The most I will, the lest I can, is this,
Sith none may salve, to shun that is amiss.Exile my home, the wilds shall be my walk,
Complaints my joy, my music mourning lays,
With pensive griefs in silence will I talk;
Sad thoughts shall be my guides in sorrow’s ways.
This course best suits the care of cureless mind,
That seeks to lose what most it joyed to find.Like stocked tree whose branches all do fade,
Whose leaves do fall, and perished fruit decay,
Like herb that grows in cold and barren shade,
Where darkness drives all quick’ning heat away,
So must I die, cut from my root of joy,
And thrown in darkest shades of deep annoy.But who can fly from that his heart doth feel?
What change of place can change implanted pain?
Removing moves no hardness from the steel.
Sick hearts that shift no fits, shift rooms in vain.
Where thought can see, what helps the closed eye?
Where heart pursues, what gains the foot to fly?Yet still I tread a maze of doubtful end.
I go, I come, she draws, she drives away,
She wounds, she heals, she doth both mar and mend,
She makes me seek and shun, depart and stay.
She is a friend to love, a foe to loathe,
And in suspense I hang between them both.”
Notes and Reference:
A fardel is a package. Affiance is a binding marriage pledge. I have modernized the spelling and added punctuation. Previous poems by Robert Southwell are here and here.
Robert Southwell [2007]: Collected Poems. Edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney. Manchester, UK: Fyfield Books, pp. 19-21.
While quoting poetry by Michael Dransfield, here is another of his fine poems, along with Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Cape Arkona at Sunrise (1803):
“Pas de deux for Lovers”
To wake
and go
would be so simple.Morning ought not
to be complex.
The sun is a seed
case at dawn into the long
furrow of history.Yet
how the
first light
makes gold her hairupon my arm.
How then
shall I leave,
and where away to go. Day
is so deep already with involvement.
Reference:
Thomas W. Shapcott (Editor) [1970]: Australian Poetry Now. Melbourne, Australia: Sun Books.
Writing just now about Mendelssohn’s sorrow at the death of his close friend, Edward Rietz, brought to mind this poem by Australian poet Michael Dransfield (1948-1973):
Lines for a Friend 1948-1964
“Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath.” – Tennyson
over before you knew it
misdiagnosed and done for
they cremated their error
you became some ashes a little placque a case history
paintings you did are lost also your poems
nothing but ashes in a wall of dead remains
you will not see again the way
the morning sun floods down O’Connell Street
perhaps you are the sun now
perhaps notchildhood was the salt edge of the Pacific
was the school under the old trees
it was soon after that they disposed of you
I went to the funeral you and I were the only two
there really the only two who knew the gods had gone
death and morning the only two,
damned because poetsover before we know it
we pack our lives in little souls and go
out with the tide the long procession
the ant the elephant the worker the child
even those doctors who stood around they will die sometime
their money cannot buy them out of it
we know what is to come a silence teeming
with the unfinished spirits good and bad,
and how we’ve lived determines what we’ll be
next time around, if time’s not buried with us.
Reference:
Thomas W. Shapcott (Editor) [1970]: Australian Poetry Now. Melbourne, Australia: Sun Books, p. 210.
Today’s poem is a sonnet by George Santayana (1863-1952), whom I have blogged about here and here.
Sonnet III
O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
Today’s poem is by Australian poet Michael Dransfield (1948-1973):
Chaconne
The most significant fact about this room is that nothing else
exists. Beyond the walls, nothing. Outer space, perhaps, infinite
and invisible. The windows are mirrors. Why look out when one
can look in?
There is no furniture. It is more amusing to imagine new, different
fittings each day, than it would be to wake to the same shapes,
colours, textures. Today, next year,
yesterday, it is one. On a wall – or is it the floor – is a clock
I built once, or shall build, or am building. Its hands are
identical / their mute semaphore. Opposite, a pool of green,
blue, sometimes colourless liquid, sometimes reflects and
sometimes invents.
I think of this room as a filing-cabinet, a memory bank where the
history of fantasy is stored. The fantasy is history. Dreams are
sculptures, names are poems, nobody comes for there is no-one else,
and nowhere from which to come. Proust, de Vigny, Owen Aherne,
my identities are interchangeable. The mind is an entertainment,
a circus where philosophers perform. I inhabit the drawing room
Rimbaud imagined at the
bottom of a lake, purple tincture of opium. And identical self
represents me on the previous planet, they will not
notice I have gone. It is difficult sometimes
for me to remember that I too am imaginary. The world has
neither ended nor begun / creativity and hallucination /
perhaps a huge joke gone awry,
a lysergic acid rave, Robinson Crusoe on the wrong island.
But still an island, bounded by seas I shall never sail.
Solitudes. Pacing impatiently
the cage of body, of self. An exit glitters brightly in my hand.
Reference:
Thomas W. Shapcott (Editor) [1970]: Australian Poetry Now. Melbourne, Australia: Sun Books, p. 206.
Today a poem by Kath Walker, aka Oodgeroo Noonuccal, (1920-1993), Australian poet and civil rights activist. Ms Walker was the first person of Australian Aboriginal descent to publish a book of poetry.
Song
Life is ours in vain
Lacking love, which never
Counts the loss or gain.
But remember, ever
Love is linked with pain.Light and sister shade
Shape each mortal morrow
Seek not to evade
Love’s companion Sorrow,
And be not dismayed.Grief is not in vain
It’s for our completeness
If the fates ordain
Love to bring life sweetness,
Welcome too its pain.
Reference:
Kath Walker [1966]: The Dawn is at Hand: Poems. This edition published 1992 in New York NY USA, by Marion Boyars, page 110.
Another great poem by Judith Wright (1915-2000), clearly influenced by the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins (whose rhythm was influenced by the triple repetitions of Robert Southwell). She captures here particularly well the change in mood of the Australian beach after sunset but before dark.
The Surfer
He thrust his joy against the weight of the sea;
climbed through, slid under those long banks of foam -
(hawthorn hedges in spring, thorns in the face stinging).
How his brown strength drove through the hollow and coil
of green-through weirs of water!
Muscle of arm thrust down long muscle of water;
and swimming so, went out of sight
where mortal, masterful, frail, the gulls went wheeling
in air as he in water, with delight.Turn home, the sun goes down; swimmer, turn home.
Last leaf of gold vanishes from the sea-curve.
Take the big roller’s shoulder, speed and swerve;
come to the long beach home like a gull diving.For on the sand the grey-wolf sea lies snarling,
cold twilight wind splits the waves’ hair and shows
the bones they worry in their wolf-teeth. O, wind blows
and sea crouches on sand, fawning and mouthing;
drops there and snatches again, drops again and snatches
its broken toys, its whitened pebbles and shells.
Reference:
Judith Wright [1971]: Collected Poems. Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson. Page 21. From The Moving Image, published 1946.