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Poems: Six O’Clock

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-16
in Poetry
. Closed

Today, two poems on the same theme, the first by Joe Stickney, published in 1905.   The image is a famous Australian painting, Collins St, 5pm, by John Brack, painted in 1955 and now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Six O’Clock

Now burst above the city’s cold twilight
The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:
For day is done. Along the frozen docks
The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.
Thro’ factory doors a stream of dingy light
Follows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks
To hut and home among the snow’s gray blocks.-
I love you, human labourers. Good-night!
Good-night to all the blackened arms that ache!
Good-night to every sick and sweated brow,
To the poor girl that strength and love forsake,
To the poor boy who can no more! I vow
The victim soon shall shudder at the stake
And fall in blood: we bring him even now.

Brack Collins Street, 5 pm

 

The second poem, by TS Eliot, was published in 1917, and is number I from the Preludes:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

References:

T. S. Eliot [1917]:  Prufrock and Other Observations.  From: Collected Poems 1909-1962. London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1963.   (Prelude I, page 23.)

Trumbull Stickney [1966]: The Poems of Trumbull Stickney. Selected and edited by Amberys R. Whittle.  New York, NY, USA:  Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. (Poem XXXI, page 174.)

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Poems: Six O'Clock

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-16
in Poetry
. Closed

Today, two poems on the same theme, the first by Joe Stickney, published in 1905.   The image is a famous Australian painting, Collins St, 5pm, by John Brack, painted in 1955 and now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Six O’Clock

Now burst above the city’s cold twilight
The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:
For day is done. Along the frozen docks
The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.
Thro’ factory doors a stream of dingy light
Follows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks
To hut and home among the snow’s gray blocks.-
I love you, human labourers. Good-night!
Good-night to all the blackened arms that ache!
Good-night to every sick and sweated brow,
To the poor girl that strength and love forsake,
To the poor boy who can no more! I vow
The victim soon shall shudder at the stake
And fall in blood: we bring him even now. 

Brack Collins Street, 5 pm

The second poem, by TS Eliot, was published in 1917, and is number I from the Preludes:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
 
And then the lighting of the lamps. 

References:

T. S. Eliot [1917]:  Prufrock and Other Observations.  From: Collected Poems 1909-1962. London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1963.   (Prelude I, page 23.)

Trumbull Stickney [1966]: The Poems of Trumbull Stickney. Selected and edited by Amberys R. Whittle.  New York, NY, USA:  Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. (Poem XXXI, page 174.)

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Poem: The Workman’s Friend

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-01
in Poetry
. Closed

One of my favourite poems, by Irish comic novelist and journalist Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan aka Myles na gCopaleen) (1911-1966):

The Workman’s Friend

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A pint of plain is your only man.

When money’s tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A pint of plain is your only man.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A pint of plain is your only man.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A pint of plain is your only man.

In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A pint of plain is your only man.




Poem: The Workman's Friend

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-01
in Poetry
. Closed

One of my favourite poems, by Irish comic novelist and journalist Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan aka Myles na gCopaleen) (1911-1966):

The Workman’s Friend

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A pint of plain is your only man.

When money’s tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A pint of plain is your only man.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A pint of plain is your only man.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A pint of plain is your only man.

In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A pint of plain is your only man.




Poem: Tu ne quaesieris

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-26
in Poetry and Prophecy
. Closed

Ode I:XI of Horace, Tu ne quaesieris (translated by David West), ending with the advice, carpe diem.

Don’t you ask, Leuconoe – the gods do not wish it to be known -
what end they have given me or to you, and don’t meddle with
Babylonian horoscopes. How much better to accept whatever comes,
whether Jupiter gives us other winters or whether this is our last

now wearying out the Tyrrhenian sea on the pumice stones
opposing it. Be wise, strain the wine and cut back long hope
into a small space. Even as we speak, envious time
flies past. Harvest the day and leave as little as possible for tomorrow.

Reference:

Horace [1997 AD/23 BCE]: The Complete Odes and Epodes. Translation by David West. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Science and poetry

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-16
in Logic, Poetry and Rhetoric
. Closed

The Asian scholar Arthur Waley once wrote:

All argument consists in proceeding from the known to the unknown, in persuad­ing people that the new thing you want them to think is not essentially different from or at any rate is not inconsistent with the old things they think already. This is the method of science, just as much as it is the method of rhetoric and poetry. But, as between science and forms of appeal such as poetry, there is a great difference in the nature of the link that joins the new to the old. Science shows that the new follows from the old according to the same principles that built up the old. “If you don’t accept what I now ask you to believe,” the scientist says, “you have no right to go on believing what you believe already.”   The link used by science is a logical one. Poetry and rhetoric are also concerned with bridging the gap between the new and the old; but they do not need to build a formal bridge. What they fling across the intervening space is a mere filament such as no sober foot would dare to tread. But it is not with the sober that poetry and eloquence have to deal. Their te, their essential power, consists in so intoxicating us that, endowed with the recklessness of drunken men, we dance across the chasm, hardly aware how we reached the other side.”    (Waley 1934, Introduction, pp. 96-97)

Reference:

Arthur Waley [1934]: The Way and its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and its Place in Chinese Thought. London, UK: George Allen and Unwin.




Creative writing

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-15
in Creativity, Mathematics and Poetry
. Closed

The English poet T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) talking about creative writing compared it to geometrical drawing.   Hulme had studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, although without graduating.

The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognize how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect’s curves – flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that “approximately”. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.”

Reference:

T. E. Hulme, in the essay, “Romanticism and Classicism”, quoted in:   A. Alvarez [2003]: Making it new. The New York Review of Books, 15 May 2003,  Volume L, No. 8, pp. 28-30.

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Poem: Cheyenne Mountain

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-12
in Poetry
. Closed

Today a poem by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), a schoolmate and life-long friend of Emily Dickinson. In 1881, after moving west, she wrote an account of the US mistreatment of American Indians, “A Century of Dishonour”.  On learning of her death, Emily Dickinson said: “Dear friend, can you walk, were the last words that I wrote her.  Dear friend, I can fly – her immortal reply.”

Cheyenne Mountain CO

Cheyenne Mountain

By easy slope to west as if it had
No thought, when first its soaring was begun,
Except to look devoutly to the sun,
It rises, and has risen, until, glad,
With light as with a garment, it is clad,
Each dawn, before the tardy plains have won
One ray; and after day has long been done
For us, the light doth cling reluctant, sad
To leave its brow.
Beloved mountain, I
Thy worshipper, as thou the sun’s, each morn,
My dawn, before the dawn, receive from thee;
And think, as thy rose-tinted peaks I see,
That thou wert great when Homer was not born,
And ere thou change all human song shall die!

 

Previous poems are here.

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Poem: 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Published
by
peter
on 2009-08-19
in Poetry
. Closed

Today the poem is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens, first published in 1917.  I don’t know if Stevens had in mind the popular meaning of depression, aka the black bird  – as, for example, in the 1926 song Bye, Bye Blackbird (music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by Mort Dixon).  Viewing the meaning that way changes the poem from simple descriptions of nature to something more moving.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.




Poem: Dreams

Published
by
peter
on 2009-08-09
in Poetry
. Closed

From the poem, Dreams, by Thomas Traherne (c. 1637 – 1674), whose poetry was only first discovered 200 hundred years after his death, and quite by accident, and with new writing being found as recently as 1997.

May all that I can see
Awake, by Night be within me be?
My childhood knew
No Difference, but all was True,
As Real all as what I view:
The World its Self was there: ‘Twas wondrous strange,
That Heav’n and Earth should so their place exchange.

Things terrible did awe
My Soul with Fear:
The Apparitions seem’d as near
As Things could be, and Things they were;
Yet were they all by Fancy in me wrought,
And all their Being founded in a Thought.

O what a Thing is Thought!
Which seems a Dream: yea seemeth Nought,
Yet doth the Mind
Affect as much as what we find
Most near and true! Sure Men are blind,
And can’t the forcible Reality
Of things that Secret are within them see.

Previous poetry posts are here.




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