Re: poetry thread

[eddie]

An Arundel Tomb

by Philip Larkin

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigures them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

*******************************************************************************

NOTE: His brother Dave reports that musician and songwriter Ray Davies believes, in direct contradiction to Mr Larkin, that what will survive of us is hate.

In this sentiment Ray is at one with Mr Shakespeare who once opined that:

The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.

[eddie]

^

Illustration of the above from what is probably Larkin's best-known poem:


This Be The Verse

by Philip Larkin


They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

[eddie]

Actually, this Larkin couplet is probably better known:

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP.

[eddie]

...speaking of which:

The Whitsun Weddings

By Philip Larkin


That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn't notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And
someone running up to bowl - and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

[eddie]

Have we had any Restoration filth from John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester yet?

If not, here's one:

*******************************************************************************

A Satyre on Charles II

According to a letter dated 20 January 1673/4, whose testimony is corroborated by the headings in several early texts of the following poem, "my Lord Rochester fled from Court some time since for delivering (by mistake) into the King's hands a terrible lampoon of ihs own making against the King, instead of another the King asked him for." ... The opening lines of the poem, contrasting the peaceful interests of Charles II with the belligerent ambitions of Louis XIV, apparently refer to the approaching end of the Third Dutch War. By the Treaty of Westminster, signed on 9 February 1673/4, Charles withdrew from this confluct which the English and French had waged jointly against the Dutch since Early 1672, leaving Louis to pursue his military conquests on the continent for another four years.


I' th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive,
The easiest King and best-bred man alive.
Him no ambition moves to get renown
Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
---Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th' other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Poor prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.
'Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't,
'Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
---To Carwell, the most dear of all his dears,
The best relief of his declining years,
Oft he bewails his fortune, and her fate:
To love so well, and be beloved so late.
For though in her he settles well his tarse,
Yet his dull, graceless ballocks hang an arse.
This you'd believe, had I but time to tell ye
The pains it costs to poor, laborious Nelly,
Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs,
Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.
---All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
---From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.

[Guest]

I just read some Philip Larkin's poems in Spanish to really understand them. And somehow they have reminded me of this one:

Insomnio

Madrid es una ciudad de más de un millón de cadáveres (según las últimas estadísticas).
A veces en la noche yo me revuelvo y me incorporo en este nicho en el que hace 45 años que me pudro,
y paso largas horas oyendo gemir al huracán, o ladrar los perros, o fluir blandamente la luz de la luna.
Y paso largas horas gimiendo como el huracán, ladrando como un perro enfurecido, fluyendo como la leche de la ubre caliente de una gran vaca amarilla.
Y paso largas horas preguntándole a Dios, preguntándole por qué se pudre lentamente mi alma,
por qué se pudren más de un millón de cadáveres en esta ciudad de Madrid,
por qué mil millones de cadáveres se pudren lentamente en el mundo.
Dime, ¿qué huerto quieres abonar con nuestra podredumbre?
¿Temes que se te sequen los grandes rosales del día, las tristes azucenas letales de tus noches?



Insomnia

Madrid is a city with more than one million corpses
(according to the last statistics)
Sometimes in the night I struggle and stand up in this niche where I rot since 45 years ago
and I spend many hours hearing the hurricane's wail, or the dogs' bark, or the moonlight softly flowing
and I spend many hours wailing like the hurricane, barking as an angry dog, flowing like
milk in a big yellow cow's warm udder
and I spend many hours asking God, asking him why my soul slowly rots
why more than a million corpses are now rotting in this city of Madrid
why one thousand million corpses are now slowly rotting in the world
tell me, what orchard do you wish to fertilize with our decay?
Are you afraid of the day's big roses withering,
these sad, lethal lilies in your nights?


Dámaso Alonso 1944

[eddie]

Philip Larkin's reputation here in the UK nosedived after his posthumous correspondence laid bare not a confused Everyman (like the rest of us) but a rather nasty crypto-Fascist porn-loving misogynist.

That's as maybe, but I still think the poems themselves have merit- if you manage to disassociate them in your own mind from the rather unpleasant creep who wrote them, that is.

[Guest]

but a rather nasty crypto-Fascist porn-loving misogynist.

That quite describes my ideal soul mate...


Is that known from his poems?? I guess the answer is no but I'm asking because I read somewhere that he was very private apart from his work.

[eddie]

I read somewhere that he was very private apart from his work

There's the story of a man standing next to Larkin at a Hull bus stop in the pouring rain edging closer to the great man's umbrella.

LARKIN: Don't think you're sharing my umbrella.

Larkin worked as Head Librarian at the Brynmor Jones library of Hull University.

He once faced down a student sit-in in the library lobby, staged by representatives of other colleges in the area who were not allowed to use the Brynor Jones' facilities, by explaining that he was very deaf and couldn't hear what they were protesting about.

This tactic completely flummoxed the unwashed youths and they had to sheepishly slink back out again.

[eddie]

Here's Alan Bennett's review in the London Review of Books of Andrew Motion's biography of Philip Larkin:

*********************************************************************************

Alas! Deceived

Alan Bennett

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion
Faber, 570 pp, £20.00, April 1993, ISBN 0 571 15174 4


‘My mother is such a bloody rambling fool.’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties”.’ Eva Larkin was 79 at the time so that to see herself presiding over the Pick’n’ Mix counter was a little unrealistic and her chances of winning the football pools were remote as she didn’t go in for them. Still, mothers do get ideas about cocktail parties, or mine did anyway, who’d never had a cocktail in her life and couldn’t even pronounce the word, always laying the emphasis (maybe out of prudery) on the tail rather than the cock. I always assumed she got these longings from women’s magazines or off the television and maybe Mrs Larkin did too, though ‘she never got used to the television’ – which in view of her son’s distrust of it is hardly surprising.

Mrs Larkin went into a home in 1971, a few months after her son had finished his most notorious poem, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. She never read it (Larkin didn’t want to ‘confuse her with information about books’) but bloody rambling fool or not she shared more of her son’s life and thoughts than do most mothers, or at any rate the version he gave her of them in his regular letters, still writing to her daily when she was in her eighties. By turns guilty and grumbling (‘a perpetual burning bush of fury in my chest’), Larkin’s attitude towards her doesn’t seem particularly unusual, though his dutifulness does. Even so, Woolworth’s would hardly have been her cup of tea. The other long-standing lady in Larkin’s life (and who stood for a good deal), Monica Jones, remarks that to the Larkins the least expenditure of effort was ‘something heroic’: ‘Mrs Larkin’s home was one in which if you’d cooked lunch you had to lie down afterwards to recover.’ Monica, one feels, was more of a Woolworth’s supervisor than a counter assistant. ‘I suppose,’ wrote Larkin, ‘I shall become free [of mother] at 60, three years before the cancer starts. What a bloody, sodding awful life.’ His, of course, not hers. Eva died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.

Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the City Treasurer of Coventry. He was also a veteran of several Nuremberg rallies, a pen-pal of Schacht’s, and had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece that gave the Nazi salute. Sydney made no secret of his sympathies down at the office: ‘I see that Mr Larkin’s got one of them swastika things up on his wall now. Whatever next?’ Next was a snip in the shape of some cardboard coffins that Sydney had cannily invested in and which came in handy when Coventry got blitzed, the Nazi insignia down from the wall by this time (a quiet word from the Town Clerk). But he didn’t change his tune, still less swap the swastika for a snap of Churchill, who had, he thought, ‘the face of a criminal in the dock’.

To describe a childhood with this grotesque figure at the centre of it as ‘a forgotten boredom’ seems ungrateful of Larkin, if not untypical, even though the phrase comes from a poem not an interview, so Larkin is telling the truth rather than the facts. Besides, it would have been difficult to accommodate Sydney in a standard Larkin poem, giving an account of his peculiar personality before rolling it up into a general statement in the way Larkin liked to do. Sylvia Plath had a stab at that kind of thing with her ‘Daddy’, though she had to pretend he was a Nazi, while Larkin’s dad was the real thing. Still, to anyone (I mean me) whose childhood was more sparsely accoutred with characters, Larkin’s insistence on its dullness is galling, if only on the ‘I should be so lucky’ principle.

As a script, the City Treasurer and his family feels already half-written by J.B. Priestley; were it a film Sydney (played by Raymond Huntley) would be a domestic tyrant, making the life of his liberal and sensitive son a misery, thereby driving him to Art. Not a bit of it. For a start the son was never liberal (‘true blue’ all his life, Monica says) and with a soft spot for Hitler himself. Nor was the father a tyrant; he introduced his son to the works of Hardy and, more surprisingly, Joyce, did not regard jazz as the work of the devil, bought him a subscription to the magazine Downbeat (a signpost here) and also helped him invest in a drum-kit. What if anything he bought his daughter Kitty and what Mrs Larkin thought of it all is not recorded. Perhaps she was lying down. The women in the Larkin household always took second place, which, in Motion’s view, is half the trouble. Kitty, Larkin’s older sister (‘the one person in the world I am confident I am superior to’), scarcely figures at all. Hers would, I imagine, be a dissenting voice, more brunt-bearing than her brother where Mrs Larkin was concerned and as undeceived about the poet as were most of the women in his life.

Whatever reservations Larkin had about his parents (‘days spent in black, twitching, boiling HATE!!!’), by Oxford and adulthood they had modulated, says Motion, into ‘controlled but bitter resentment’. This doesn’t stop Larkin sending poems to his father (‘I crave / The gift of your courage and indifference’) and sharing his thoughts with his mother (‘that obsessive snivelling pest’) on all manner of things; in a word treating them as people rather than parents. Its nothing if not ‘civilised’ but still slightly creepy and it might have come as a surprise to Kingsley Amis, in view of their intimate oath-larded letters to one another, that Larkin, disappointed of a visit, should promptly have complained about him (‘He is a wretched type’) to his mother.

‘Fearsome and hard-driving’, Larkin senior is said never to have missed the chance of slipping an arm round a secretary and though Larkin junior took a little longer about it (twenty-odd years in one case), it is just one of the ways he comes to resemble his father as he grows older, in the process getting to look less like Raymond Huntley and more like Francis L. Sullivan and ‘the sort of person that democracy doesn’t suit’.

Larkin’s choice of profession is unsurprising because from an early age libraries had been irresistible. ‘I was an especially irritating kind of borrower, who brought back in the evening the books he had borrowed in the morning and read in the afternoon. This was the old Coventry Central Library, nestling at the foot of the unbombed cathedral, filled with tall antiquated bookcases (blindstamped Coventry Central Libraries after the fashion of the time) with my ex-schoolfellow Ginger Thompson ... This was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access public library generates.’ When he jumped over the counter, as it were, things were rather different though father’s footsteps come into this too: it you can’t be a gauleiter being a librarian’s the next best thing. When called upon to explain his success as a librarian, Larkin said: ‘A librarian can be one of a number of things ... a pure scholar, a technician ... an administrator or he ... can be just a nice chap to have around, which is the role I vaguely thought I filled.’ Motion calls this a ‘typically self-effacing judgment’ but it’s also a bit of a self-deluding one. It’s a short step from the jackboot to the book-jacket and by all accounts Larkin the librarian could be a pretty daunting figure. Neville Smith remembers him at Hull stood at the entrance to the Brynmor Jones, scanning the faces of the incoming hordes, the face heavy and expressionless, the glasses gleaming and the hands, after the manner of a soccer player awaiting a free-kick on the edge of the penalty area, clasped over what is rumoured to have been a substantial package. ‘FUCK OFF, LARKIN, YOU CUNT’ might have been the cheery signing-off in a letter from Kingsley Amis: it was actually written up on the wall of the library lifts, presumably by one of those ‘devious, lazy and stupid’ students who persisted in infesting the librarian’s proper domain and reading the books.

It hadn’t always been like that, though, and Larkin’s first stint at Wellington in Shropshire, where in 1943 he was put in charge of the municipal library, was a kind of idyll. Bitterly cold, gas-lit and with a boiler Larkin himself had to stoke, the library had an eccentric collection of books and a readership to match. Here he does seem to have been the type of librarian who was ‘a nice chap to have around’, one who quietly got on with improving the stock while beginning to study for his professional qualifications by correspondence course. Expecting ‘not to give a zebra’s turd’ for the job he had hit upon his vocation.

Posts at Leicester and Belfast followed until in 1955 he was appointed Librarian at the University of Hull with the job of reorganising the library and transferring it to new premises. Moan as Larkin inevitably did about his job, it was one he enjoyed and which he did exceptionally well. The students may have been intimidated by him but he was popular with his staff and particularly with the women. Mary Judd, the librarian at the issue desk at Hull, thought that ‘most women liked him more than most men because he could talk to a woman and make her feel unique and valuable.’ In last year’s Selected Letters there is a photo of him with the staff of the Brynmor Jones and, Larkin apart, there is not a man in sight. Surrounded by his beaming middle-aged assistants – with two at least he was having or would have an affair – he looks like a walrus with his herd of contented cows There was contentment here for him, too, and one of his last poems, written when deeply depressed, is about a library.

New eyes each year
Find old books here,
And new books, too,
Old eyes renew;
So youth and age
Like ink and page
In this house join,
Minting new coin.

Much of Motion’s story is about sex, not getting it, not getting enough of it or getting it wrong. For a time it seemed Larkin could go either way and there are a few messy homosexual encounters at Oxford, though not Brideshead by a long chalk, lungings more than longings and not the stuff of poetry except as the tail-end of ‘these incidents last night’. After Oxford Larkin’s homosexual feelings ‘evaporated’ (Motion’s word) and were hence-forth seemingly confined to his choice of socks. At Wellington he starts walking out with Ruth Bowman, ‘a 16-year-old schoolgirl and regular borrower from the library’. This period of Larkin’s life is quite touching and reads like a Fifties novel of provincial life, though not one written by him so much as by John Wain or Keith Waterhouse. Indeed Ruth sounds (or Larkin makes her sound) like Billy Liar’s unsatisfactory girlfriend, whose snog-inhibiting Jaffa Billy hurls to the other end of the cemetery. Having laid out a grand total of 15s. 7d. on an evening with Ruth, Larkin writes to Amis:

Don’t you think it’s ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL that men have to pay for women without BEING ALLOWED TO SHAG the women afterwards AS A MATTER OF COURSE? I do: simply DISGUSTING. It makes me ANGRY. Everything about the ree-lay-shun-ship between men and women makes me angry. It’s all a fucking balls-up. It might have been planned by the army or the Ministry of Food.

To be fair, Larkin’s foreplay could be on the funereal side. In the middle of one date with Ruth, Larkin (22) lapsed into silence. Was it something she’d said? ‘No, I have just thought what it would be like to be old and have no one to look after you.’ This was what Larkin would later refer to as ‘his startling youth’. ‘He could,’ says Ruth, ‘be a draining companion.’

In the end one’s sympathies, as always in Larkin’s affairs, go to the woman and one is glad when Ruth finally has him sized up and decides that he’s no hubby-to-be. And he’s glad too, of course. Ruth has Amis well sussed besides. ‘He wanted,’ she says, ‘to turn Larkin into a “love ’em and lose ’em type”,’ and for a moment we see these two leading lights of literature as what they once were, the Likely Lads, Larkin as Bob, Amis as Terry and Ruth at this juncture the terrible Thelma.

Looking back on it now Ruth says: ‘I was his first love and there’s something special about a first love, isn’t there?’ Except that love is never quite the right word with Larkin, ‘getting involved’ for once not a euphemism for the tortuous process it always turns out to be. ‘My relations with women,’ he wrote, ‘are governed by a shrinking sensitivity, a morbid sense of sin, a furtive lechery. Women don’t just sit still and back you up. They want children; they like scenes; they want a chance of parading all the empty haberdashery they are stocked with. Above all they like feeling they own you – or that you own them – a thing I hate.’ A.C. Benson, whose medal Larkin was later to receive from the Royal Society of Literature, put it more succinctly, quoting (I think) Aristophanes: ‘Don’t make your house in my mind.’ Though with Larkin it was ‘Don’t make your house in my house either,’ his constant fear being that he will be moved in on, first by his mother and then, when she’s safely in a home, some other scheming woman. When towards the finish Monica Jones does manage to move in it’s because she’s ill and can’t look after herself, and so the cause of a great deal more grumbling. With hindsight (Larkin’s favourite vantage-point) it would have been wiser to have persisted with the messy homosexual fumblings, one of the advantages of boys that they’re more anxious to move on than in. Not, of course, that one has a choice, ‘something hidden from us’ seeing to that.

[Guest]

eddie wrote: William Butler Yeats was a deranged crypto-Fascist occultist who had himself injected with monkey-gland extract in a Swiss clinic in order to enhance his sexual prowess.

Two slates short of a Tower roof.

He also happened to have a sublime ear.

It's not necessarily about being Irish, at all; it's about having a sensitivity to/appreciation of the beauty of the spoken word- whatever your nationality or ethnic background.

...Yeats, Larkin...
even if there's mud at the bottom of the stream, if the water is beautiful, you can immerse yourself in it and the mud won't stick.

[eddie]

Poem of the week: When summer's end is nighing by AE Housman

A characteristically melancholy lyric on ageing, Housman's huge skill brings memorable music to his theme

Carol Rumens guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 August 2011 09.46 BST


AE Housman in 1912. Photograph: EO Hoppé/Corbis

This week's poem is my favourite of AE Housman's superbly melancholy lyrics. The poem beginning "When summer's end is nighing" is numbered but untitled, like all the others in the 1922 collection, Last Poems, Housman compiled and published this collection specifically so it could be read by Moses Jackson, the object of his life-long, probably unrequited love, who, by this time, lay terminally ill in Canada.

The metre is typical of Housman's most sigh-laden style: iambic trimeter, with alternating feminine and masculine endings. His stanza form of choice is often the quatrain, rhyming a/b/c/b or a/b/a/b. But, in the current poem, he expands the a/b/c/b unit to five lines. And his "b" rhyme gets a further rhyme, so each stanza, in effect, ends on a couplet. This extra rhyme-line gives him scope to widen the thought or heighten the emotion of the particular stanza, and to avoid the patness that a neat quatrain can have. It's the same stanzaic form he uses for the much-loved earlier lyric, "On Bredon Hill".

The fifth line may also signal a new direction, and work against the cadence to look forward to the subsequent stanza. "When I was young and proud," the first stanza's last line, connects us to the next episode, and a remembered experience of watching the sun go down, sketched in wonderfully compressed images of the weathercock losing "the slanted ray", and the young speaker climbing the hill for a larger view.

Housman is a poet who often seems to be on the verge of saying the conventional poetic thing, and then, in a flash, turns it in a new direction. It may simply be the matter of an unexpected phrase or even a single word. A less original poet would have chosen "nearing" rather than "nighing" for the first-line end-verb. This is not a choice decided by the need for a rhyme, because the "a" line in the poem never rhymes. "Nighing" is a curious archaism: it's not even a particularly melodious word, but perhaps the fact that it rhymes with another present participle that the poem resists, "sighing", underlies its haunting effect. Finally, the verb reappears in a different tense. This time, "nighs" meets with its natural word-mate, "sighs". It's one small example of an enormous technical skill in the shaping and integration of individual units and whole poem. But this skill is un-showy. It serves something that, for Housman, was all-important to a poem: its emotion.

The device of ending with a couplet serves him particularly well in the last stanza, where the line "And then the heart replies" suggests a fresh volume of feeling that is left to the reader's imagination. It turns an elegy for lost youth into a near love-poem, and suggests the complexity of the loss, and its difficulty of articulation.

One aspect of the art of rhyme is to avoid grammatical monotony by rhyming varied parts of speech. In the first stanza the grammatical pattern of the rhyme is noun ("cloud"), verb ("vowed") and adjective ("proud"). Such variation is not always followed, but it is always sufficient to create energy in the movement of the verse. In the last stanza, though, Housman rhymes three intransitive verbs – "nighs", "sighs", "replies". The repetition is deliberate. Such verbs create a strong sense of forward movement halted. This is the end of the poem, but Housman wants to say, in effect, there is more, the emotions are still working silently in my heart, though I cannot tell you what they are.

While concerned with the melancholy closure of ageing, the poem conveys in parenthesis the limitlessness of adolescent aspiration. The narrative slows luxuriantly in stanza five, and pauses on the easy confidence of "the air of other summers". But then, all at once, it accelerates. Those awaited summers have arrived, and evaporated, remaining somehow unlived: "They came, and went, and are not …" At this point it's absolutely clear that Housman is not writing in the comfortable afterglow of nostalgia. He is writing about a dark absence of fulfilment, now irredeemably faced in the light of "the only end of age" – to quote a poet who learned much from him, and seems to have been temperamentally similar, Philip Larkin.

Housman was a great classical scholar, and his intimacy with Latin, in particular, dictates the shape of his poetry. He makes our cumbersome language seem graceful, flexible and swift. His enduring popular reputation over the years is partly because of his ability to express emotions of a certain universally appealing kind (The Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since 1896) but also testifies to a remarkable style, both epigrammatic and musical, which produces lyric poems that are simple to remember – and simply memorable.


XXXIX (from Last Poems)

When summer's end is nighing
  And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
  And all the feats I vowed
  When I was young and proud.


The weathercock at sunset
  Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
  That looked to Wales away
  And saw the last of day.


From hill and cloud and heaven
  The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
  And hushed the countryside,
  But I had youth and pride.


And I with earth and nightfall
  In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
  And darkness hard at hand,
  And the eye lost the land.


The year might age, and cloudy
  The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
  Breathed from beyond the snows,
  And I had hope of those.


They came and were and are not
  And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
  That ever can ensue
  Must now be worse and few.


So here's an end of roaming
  On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
  For summer's parting sighs,
  And then the heart replies.

[Guest]

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
by Dylan Thomas
(1914-1953, Welsh)

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Irony: it's assumed Thomas wrote this to his dying father..."[the poem] is generally interpreted as a plea to his dying father to hold onto life". Dylan's father died soon after...but Dylan himself then died 11 months after his father. He was only 39.

[eddie]

"Into my heart an air that kills..."

by A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

[Nah Ville Sky Chick]

I'm wonderin' what in the devil could it all possibly mean

No, come on Moony, what did you REALLY think of my love poem?

I need to know because I'm thinking of actually presenting it to the fair maid in question.

Do you think this would be a REALLY bad idea?

Eddie, did you give it to her? I hope that's the reason you haven't looked in since Sunday

[Guest]

...eddie...your last post was on the 19th of August...that's ten days ago. Ten days without a word. Are you okay?

[Guest]

Wind on the Hill
by A.A. Milne

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

[Guest]

^ Nice.



EL VIENTO EN LA ISLA

El viento es un caballo:
óyelo cómo corre
por el mar, por el cielo.

Quiere llevarme: escucha
cómo recorre el mundo
para llevarme lejos.

Escóndeme en tus brazos
por esta noche sola,
mientras la lluvia rompe
contra el mar y la tierra
su boca innumerable.

Escucha como el viento
me llama galopando
para llevarme lejos.

Con tu frente en mi frente,
con tu boca en mi boca,
atados nuestros cuerpos
al amor que nos quema,
deja que el viento pase
sin que pueda llevarme.

Deja que el viento corra
coronado de espuma,
que me llame y me busque
galopando en la sombra,
mientras yo, sumergido
bajo tus grandes ojos,
por esta noche sola
descansaré, amor mío.



WIND ON THE ISLAND

The wind is a horse:
hear how he runs
through the sea, through the sky.

He wants to take me: listen
how he roves the world
to take me far away.

Hide me in your arms
just for this night,
while the rain breaks
against sea and earth
its innumerable mouth.

Listen how the wind
calls to me galloping
to take me far away.

With your brow on my brow,
with your mouth on my mouth,
our bodies tied
to the love that consumes us,
let the wind pass
and not take me away.

Let the wind rush
crowned with foam,
let it call to me and seek me
galloping in the shadow,
while I, sunk
beneath your big eyes,
just for this night
shall rest, my love.


By Pablo Neruda.

[eddie]

Eddie, did you give it to her? I hope that's the reason you haven't looked in since Sunday

No discernable reaction yet. A couple of cryptic anonymous texts/emails, but- since I've recently changed my ISP- it's difficult to be sure.

I believe my beloved is presently befriending sharks off the coast of North Africa, so I won't be seeing her for weeks. Plodding on with my sensational LU Memoirs in the interim. It's just as well, really: "The pram in the hallway is the enemy of Art"- and all that.

[Constance]

I'm wonderin' what in the devil could it all possibly mean

No, come on Moony, what did you REALLY think of my love poem?

I need to know because I'm thinking of actually presenting it to the fair maid in question.

Do you think this would be a REALLY bad idea?

Eddie, did you give it to her? I hope that's the reason you haven't looked in since Sunday

Eddie wrote a poem? Where is it? I've scrolled through and I can't find it!

[Constance]

. It's just as well, really: "The pram in the hallway is the enemy of Art"- and all that.

The truest thing of all.

[Guest]

...hi constance, this is on page 12.

RENEGADE PRIEST SEEKS TREACHEROUS YOUNG WITCH (*)

(* Ad spotted in the Personal column of the London listings magazine Time Out c 1979 referencing a line from Bob Dylan's Changing of the Guard)

Tip toe-er
Ballet pointer
Jaw dropper
Shape shifter
Caul wearer
Wart charmer
Cobweb spinner
Sun bather
Changeling stealer
Phrase hurler
Mirror cracker
Gryffindorer
Sign scryer
Sky walker
Ticket puncher
Arsenal mugger
Swine preserver
Tomato purer
Groat counter
Quiche Lorrainer
Apple scrumper
Quorn hunter
Egg scrambler
HP saucer
Shark befriender
Sleep disturber
Nose twitcher
Cupid gooser
Periwinkler
Hair slider
Dietrich mover
Hufflepuffer
Back turner
Getawayer
Luciferens


by Eddie

[Guest]

...in a fit of desperation re your whereabouts eddie I consulted the I Ching, which led me to believe you were marrying...it didn't specifically say what type of MS....book or babe.

[Guest]

Monet Refuses The Operation
by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

[Constance]

...hi constance, this is on page 12.

RENEGADE PRIEST SEEKS TREACHEROUS YOUNG WITCH (*)

(* Ad spotted in the Personal column of the London listings magazine Time Out c 1979 referencing a line from Bob Dylan's Changing of the Guard)

Tip toe-er
Ballet pointer
Jaw dropper
Shape shifter
Caul wearer
Wart charmer
Cobweb spinner
Sun bather
Changeling stealer
Phrase hurler
Mirror cracker
Gryffindorer
Sign scryer
Sky walker
Ticket puncher
Arsenal mugger
Swine preserver
Tomato purer
Groat counter
Quiche Lorrainer
Apple scrumper
Quorn hunter
Egg scrambler
HP saucer
Shark befriender
Sleep disturber
Nose twitcher
Cupid gooser
Periwinkler
Hair slider
Dietrich mover
Hufflepuffer
Back turner
Getawayer
Luciferens


by Eddie

Thanks, Moonie!

I like the Dietrich mover. Is that Marlene?

But what's a Quorn?

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