Writing in the manner of TSE's Ariel Poems

 

At the Verge

Sometimes, at the edge of feeling, there is fear—
Not the child's fright at darkened halls,
Nor the candle's twitch at unseen breath—
But the quiet fear that wakes at four,
Where silence hangs like wet linen in alleys of the soul.

The hour is neither dream nor waking,
But the bell between two bells—
A waiting, a weight, a windless turning
Where no angel guards the lintel.

Sometimes a turbulence appears—
Not of the sky, nor sea, nor the city’s restless thrum,
But beneath the ribcage:
A ripple, a grinding, a storm that will not pass—
Madness.

Madness not in flame or thunder,
But in the order of things unhinged—
The tea poured into a shoe,
The child answering the empty chair,
The mother forgetting her child’s name
As if it were never spoken.

And so madness manifested in monstrous and fearful ways:
The eyes that gleam too bright in crowds,
The voice too calm in confession,
The laugh that echoes where laughter does not belong.

Sometimes the world turns inside out—
And we, gentle bearers of reason,
Are no more than cracked vases on the altar,
Spilling the dust of meaning into the wind.

Yet still, the bird sings at the chimney pot,
The clock ticks its futile benediction,
And the bread rises.

So we go, between verse and void,
With pocket-watches and whispered prayers,
Hoping the threshold holds.

DB June 2025

A Poem in the Manner of EP

 

The ages fade daily from memory,
but an instant calls to mind,

times thought lost through dull decay.

-- Tours: Nov 1972

Palimpsest

An ink-smudge on papyrus—
ghost-hand of Charax in the margin,
"νοῦς ἀνθρώπου—" and the reed bends.

Clamour of looms in Nineveh,
threads humming patterns
no eye remains to read.

Rust eats the bronze mirror
at the base of the Acropolis;
I see my face in it,
fractured—
half Helen, half the boy from Tyre
whose sandals wore a path to the salt market.

A gull cries.
Concrete breaks its own silence.

Words come in fragments:
"– et in Arcadia…"
"—ye towers of Ilium…"
They lie like bone shards
in the posthole of a vanished hut.

No elegy is whole.

Yet, in a metro tunnel,
fluorescent and wet with transit hum,
I glimpse her—
an eyelash curve,
a gesture from an older grammar.

Time uncoils.
Memory is not kind,
but sudden.

Oxon: May 2025

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Encounter Near Cefn Coed : A Memory

This picture by Van Gogh, painted in 1890, two months before his death, appeared in the recent (May 2019) Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. It is called “At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man” and was made in the institution at St. Remy de Provence. 

At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man

At the exhibition, it appeared below a paraphrased quotation by the artist, written in 1880. The paraphrased quotation  was:

“You may not always be able to say what it is that confines you and yet you feel I know not what bars … and then you ask yourself Dear God, is this for long? Is this forever? Is this for eternity?”

The word “bars” triggered in me a memory of a ditty I wrote 45-odd years ago now, where the word “bars” also appears. The ditty follows below.

Encounter Near Cefyn Coed

Cefn Coed Hospital is a mental health facility in the Sketty area of Swansea, Wales. It is currently managed by the Swansea Bay University Health Board.

A man was a joker and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger, alone
He asked, in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
For a hint of the secrets he’d known

He should have been wiser, but nevertheless
His mind was the kind that would roam
The reason was hard, it was everyone’s guess
He’d not come from a broken up home

“Won’t you tell me, my friend” he said as he stopped
“What you’re doing out here in the night?
And can you explain why your hair is all cropped
And your coat isn’t buttoned up right?”

“It’s not easy for me,” the other replied
“To show you the place I have been
All my life I have tried, to finish the ride
On an endless and circular dream

I was born in a pain, as I think, I don’t know
I cannot remember so well.
These strange things you see I had hoped would not show
They belong to another, you can tell?

Now I amble alone all over the earth
Though my wisdom would reach for the stars;
And all because of a difficult birth
Which has put my whole world behind bars.”

A man was a joker, and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger alone
He learned in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
How secrets are a burden, once known

Swansea: May 1973

The Rhapsody of Time Passing

Today I thought about time measured objectively by a watch or clock, and the uncertainty behind the act of observing the device. , I always marvelled at that strange experience of looking at a wrist watch, and how the second hand briefly appears to go into reverse when we check  for the time. A common experience I think, but with much to educate us on how our physiology is not always giving us the right - or rather, any consistent - conduits to reality.

An approach to the problem is to consider this: if the arrow of time moves from past to future in units of days, hours, seconds, nanoseconds and so on, is there any smallest unit beyond which time can be divided no further? And if there is such a smallest unit, does the essence of time consist in the flicking by of such units like the beads on some vast cosmic abacus? (This image, and this idea is entirely lifted from the remarks of a good friend with whom I discussed the subject).

And if time proceeds thus – as my friend pointed out - then two big questions arise: What happens within the units? and what happens between the units?   That moment between the decision to observe the time, and to consciously identify its measure, is a place where it is possible to believe in a dimension which is outside of both time itself, and is indecipherable by the time-bound mind of the individual.

Some of these thoughts have been prompted through a recent reading of a new critique of T.S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night”. This poem is the one which describes an arc of time in which a flâneur is wandering the streets with an ostensible purpose: to get to his numbered apartment at the end of his wandering. 

On the way, we are given time checks.  But we are also given a stream of unconscious memories filtering and surfacing in his mind. The poem sets up a juxtaposition on the one hand between objective moments - " 12 o'clock ", "half-past one", etc: and on the other hand a subjective flow of memories which by definition are elastic, qualitative, time-indeterminate, coming from, as it were, "nowhere". And so also a juxtaposition of "habit" and "dreams" where time has two (at least) separate qualities. 

I learnt from reading Jewel Spears Brooker's 2018 critique on Eliot, that Eliot wrote the poem after becoming disillusioned with the teachings of Bergson, whom he briefly championed, and whose lectures he attended in 1910/11 in Paris. The tension between pure consciousness and the challenges of a time-bound, time-dictated existence is palpable in these lines at the end of the poem.

      The bed is open; the toothbrush hangs on the wall,
      Put your shoes by the door, sleep, prepare for life.

      The last twist of the knife.

Bergson’s lectures in Paris in 1910–11 featured a concept of ‘pure duration’, contrasting it with the rigid demarcations of the clock. In ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, written in 1911, the clock time is announced at regular intervals and again, there is a tension and a discrepancy between those objective markers of time and the speaker’s experience of pure duration in these lines:

     Twelve o’clock.
     Along the reaches of the street
     Held in a lunar synthesis,
     Whispering lunar incantations
     Dissolve the floors of memory
     And all its clear relations
     Its divisions and precisions,
     Every streetlamp that I pass
     Beats like a fatalistic drum  

The progress of time through the deep of night drives Eliot’s speaker forward like a ‘fatalistic drum’, through ‘Half-past one’, ‘Half-past two’, ‘Half-past three’ and finally ‘Four o’clock’.

By contrast, the speaker’s consciousness points backwards, as every new thing he encounters takes him back though linked associations, to painful, difficult or banal memories. 


For Eliot, in this poem, the ‘divisions and precisions’ of the clock, its ‘clear relations’, conflict with a human consciousness which can only exist from retrospective constructs, insulated against fresh experiences by a time-bound crust of memory. No “pure duration” here. 

Bergson’s optimism that this artificial construct of clock-time, or time as an arrow, could be cauterised and dissolved in the experience of pure duration, is refuted in Eliot’s rhapsody. There is a much more pessimistic reality here, with the speaker’s thoughts ushering him robotically and despairingly forward, with no sense of a dimension where a creative peace might exist.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

“I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things steadying the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on the sea shore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles, before finally coming up against these trees and their two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming accross those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all.. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyesand imagined that this was the spot where everything I’d lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it..”

These are the words of Kathy H., the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. She reflects on her solitude after the demise of her lover Tommy, and her progression towards the gruesome destiny defined by society for her and her closest friends. When I lived on that same Norfolk coast, at the time believing that this place indeed was where I also had washed up,  I knew they had to belong, at least geographically, to this Miscellany.

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

This novel by Kazuo Ishiguro has details of boarding-school existence which captures some truths for those who have gone through the experience. The formation of cliques, the petty rivalries, the attachment to benevolent teachers, the management of feelings in a parent-free environment are all in the mix, and it is this mix that key individuals discover and explore their core humanity, in spite of the controlling regimentation of daily life. But the novel is not, of course, only or even at all about boarding school existence.

Kathy is a thirty-one year old carer. Those for whom she cares, as we soon discover, are a special set of people, of whom she is one. She is good at her job – she has been doing it for eleven years. But now she is about to give it up for what is, it turns out, to be the beginning of the last phase of her life.  We find her now, reflecting back over that life, and its unique experiences. She calls to mind her days at Hailsham, the idyllic boarding school she went to and which had a major influence on her later years.

But we soon find out, through arcane references and the odd vocabulary that peppers Kathy’s narrative, that Hailsham was no ordinary school, in fact not quite a school at all. It is recogniseable as a boarding school, but differs from the norm in fundamental ways.  A key difference, we soon learn, is that the children here have no parents to go home to, and so that important rhythm of mixing different worlds, is lost to them.

Some of the teachers are distant, uncomfortable with the children. The unspoken secret between controllers and controlled weighs heavy. The punishment for Miss Lucy, who one day reveals all to the class, is immediate dismissal. The class, however, is strangely muted at the revelation. It is a secret which remains unwelcome and quiety shelved as life, of a kind, continues.

But in this mix, Kathy’s friends Tommy and Ruth want to discover more about their destiny. As they grow older, they find themselves working through their emotional bonds which grow from the seeds planted in their time at Hailsham, and it is this love story of possessiveness and then self-sacrifice that provides the background to our exploration of the parallel political, social and emotional world of the novel.

Paths from a White Horse

As an introduction to an author of whom I had been hitherto ignorant, this one was a gentle and pleasant surprise. In April 2012 I was in the Salvation Army shop in Histon, near Cambridge. I believe us males, when pushed by wives or by circumstance into such stores, are known always to make a bee-line for the CD racks or the bookshelves. This wintery February day was no exception for me as I made for the far end of the warm mustiness within. My eyes scanned the row of books before me,. I checked out the covers on the few volumes which had been chosen for special display. As I did so, a rather fine-looking tome caught my gaze – a hardback with a deep green cover with the unmistakable image of the Uffington White Horse emblazoned upon it. I was looking at the cover of Peter Vansittart’s “Paths From a White Horse”, his memoirs.

I paid my 50p and felt enriched. All things associated with this iconic figure deliver to me warm feelings of connection.  Never mind that I had no idea who this man was, shame on me ( * … but see below). But the opening paragraph of the memoirs made sure I knew I was in good company. Here was a man who knows was it is like to have this creature embedded in his consciousness.

“1923: I was three. A White Horse lay bare and solitary, cut into a hillside. It changes whenever I return to it, like a book, painting, friend, but remains fixed in my imagination, a reminder of the multiple transformations that enthuse life. All is provisional. Memory contracts and enlarges as if in a dream that does not cease in the morning”.

Vansittart’s words resonate. Being North Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) bred, and with various members of my extended family living in villages in the Vale of the White Horse, how could they not? The image of this unique creature was and is everywhere: on milk bottles, vans, church magazines, dry cleaners’ shop fronts, cafes. Living away from the downland on which the hill is dominant, my early experience was always of the printed image, which beguiled me.

 It was to be many years before I could stand on the hill itself, for reasons which I still hardly understand. But travelling on the A420 from the age of six, in the truck  laden with pigs and driven by my father to the slaughterhouse at  Stratton-St-Margaret, I had glimpses on the unmistakable contours of the hill. On good days, I could make sense of the fleeting outline of the beast itself, always incomplete, always demanding a closer look. My father is not here to tell me why he never took time to take me to get that closer look. I had to wait for boarding-school days. But I have a lesson from Vansittart when I read this:

“Adults seemed strangely unaware of the White Horse, or reluctant to mention it. Here, already, was the first of the countless secrets that helped to awaken me. The Horse, existing without breathing or eating, though, in days of shadow and sun, it sometimes appeared to move, seemed mysteriously more real than an actual white horse assiduously cropping the pastures.”

In those few words, I am given permission to believe absolutely in the value of symbols.

White Horse Hill, Uffington June 2010

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* .. or perhaps not. This is the intro to the obituary by the Daily Telegraph

Peter Vansittart, who has died aged 88, was among the most prolific writers of historical fiction, with 15 such novels to his credit; but while he attracted much critical acclaim his books achieved only modest commercial success, none selling more than 3,000 copies.

“My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no sign of enjoying them at all,” he ruefully observed. “This must be partly due to my obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others.” >>> more

Read more in; Peter Vansittart Biography – Peter Vansittart comments: – London, Owen, York, and Historical – JRank Articles

Thoughts After Thoreau

First written May 10th 2012 in Kelling, Norfolk

On recommendation from an old friend, I have taken to listening to Radio Four’s “Something Understood“. This week’s programme was dedicated to the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.   ( Link to synopsis here )

In listening, I enjoyed hearing that Thoreau achieved a balance, a middle ground, in the cabin he built near Walden Pond Massachusetts, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. The austerity evolving from ideas of transcendentalism always risks a disappearance into an abyss of anarchy otherwise. Yes it is true that too much attachment to civilisation and its “progress” eats away at the soul, but it is very necessary to be intelligent about how this is all managed in the time-bound state.

I was taken by the extract from the essay “Life Without Principle” which mentioned the “panting of the steam train” which interrupted his sleep and was a reminder of the push of progress and “business”.

That was then. Now, as I stand in my garden and rake the ground to prepare for the runner-bean sticks, I hear in the distance that self-same “panting”, by now a friendly “chuff-chuff” and short tooting whistle as the North Norfolk  Poppy Line steam train takes holidaymakers on their short journey to the beach and pubs of Sheringham.

This is the ”glory”  which Thoreau sought:  to see “mankind at leisure for once”.  The circle comes around, the hard prices have been paid, and the essence of human endeavour seems not so aggressively unhappy: it becomes a matter of attachment to the right bits, if one is to survive realistically and not as some kind of mad Eremite.

I reflect also in the same essay, on his discussion of the man walking in the woods being perceived either as a “loafer”  or as “industrious” . Will he enjoy the  beauty of the woods, or will he despoil them in the name of “business”? Making the earth “bald before its time” of course brings about this inevitable result  caused by too much industrious and enterprising endeavour.

This reminded me of Hopkins’ poem below      ( and yes, Hopkins is found among  myriad others, who were attuned to the essence of what was coming, as the industrial age developed apace,  and saw  its insidiousness weaving into the old rhythms of existence).

Binsey Poplars, felled 1879
Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

But actually, Hopkins was more of a Romantic than an Environmentalist. Poplars last only about 60 – 100 years or just a little more depending on type, and the ones at Binsey were replanted immediately. They  have similarly since been cropped and managed, as is required for trees which are prone to canker and other pests. I also read somewhere, that the wood from the Poplars in Hopkins’ day was taken and used for brake shoes on locomotives on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. So I guess this would have further dismayed the Romantic.

But I am sure Hopkins would have enjoyed the sound of similar steam trains wafting across the fields from Weybourne yesterday afternoon.

John Craske - A Delicate Life

I am reading a book by Julia Blackburn, who spends her time between Suffolk and Italy. Her book pursues the life and art of one John Craske, local man to Norfolk: fish- and sea-connected born 1881 and who after the 1914-18 war at the age of 36, fell into some kind of mental stupor, from which he hardly recovered.

c. John Craske Postcard Painting
- The Duigan Collection

The book, suitably enough, is called “Threads” and is a meditation on loss and memory, with scenes local to North Norfolk, and reports of conversations in her pursuit of this man’s story.

John Craske spent most of his “saner”  time from 1923 painting images of the sea, and later, when too ill even to stand, he took to his bed and embroidered instead of using paints for these images. They are extraordinary in detail.  He is more or less forgotten, and Julia Blackburn has written in an affectionate and often moving way about her attempt to find traces of him in the memory of local people, and in museums / homes where his work remains scattered, abused and forgotten.

More about John Craske is here.

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In homage to John Craske, I made the picture below. It takes the shape of one of his boats, on a sea of my own making. The top bit was chiselled by God over time – it is the grain and the colour of the wood I am using.

Brown / White Study

The Cruellest Month

London Bridge 1896 

The adage “April is the cruellest month” proliferates at this time of year: we are exposed to the greatness of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land through this popular line expressing distress at the prospect of springtime and renewal.  When pushed to find another famous line from the poem, I find most folk who have some acquaintance with the poem will recall the image:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge..

The crowd flowing over London Bridge is taken straight out of Dante. Eliot’s notes at the end of the poem  acknowledge this, referring to Canto III  (“sì lunga tratta di gente, ch'i' non averei creduto
 che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta”). Eliot saw this crowd every morning, and I feel sure sometimes was part of it, in his commute to LLoyds Bank in Lombard Street.

In Dante’s Inferno, these souls are forever trapped in limbo ( but see * below ), since they have lived in a moral neutrality, just half-alive in this life, and so having no hopes of death. Death, of course, is just a step on the path to unified consciousness. Such souls have no hope of this, and so their death undoes them. “I had never thought death had undone so many”. and they are left in a void, symbolised by the Waste Land. Folk in the Waste Land do not participate in the great cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth toward that elusive unified consciousness.

There is a great beauty in such fragments. Eliot weaves into the poem, bits from Western and Eastern culture and philosophy. It is a “heap”.

The Waste Land - Images from a Walk 1998

I like the image of a “heap”. Looking at the heap, you can see the occasional glint of hope, amongst the dross. Each glint, each shard of light, references a major body of traditional thought, culture, legend,
myth and belief system. cf Dante, the Bible, the Upanishads, Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Buddha, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Webster etc. etc.  and leads you onwards. But the poem also – and primarily – stands uniquely by itself, enabling an emotional response such as those evoked by the idea of a “flow” in those few lines.

And so, amongst lines evoking isolation and despair, there are also instances of a perceived and exquisite harmony – eg a small section  from Line 257 in Lower Thames Street and Magnus Martyr Church .

The Church of Magnus Martyr

O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold

Sadly of course, in our modern era, all that river-facing activity has gone. How much of it was it there in the 1920′s? I don’t know, but it was there in the poet’s imagination. And it maps anyway to a time when Lower Thames Street was full of folk from nearby Billingsgate Market (the old one, of course),  where fish was traded and the place teemed with life and purpose and which looked out towards the water, sea and hope. So these rich images are now only echoes of a past of promise and fortune against a present dullness.  And so the voices which speak of the cruelty of April are locked against the opportunity to renew towards a life of promise.

Note * My old friend Nick Parker ( il miglior studente ) pointed out to me quite rightly that one should be careful with the word "limbo". The ideas expressed here come from observations in the scholarship ( e.g. Elizabeth Drew T.S.Eliot: The design of His Poetry 1950 p99 ; F.O. Mathiesson "The Achievement of T.S.Eliot 1935 p22). But as Nick pointed out, it is not correct to associate these lines with Limbo (capital "L"). They refer to 'gli ignavi' who appear in Canto 3 and not those who are "dinanzi al cristianismo".

Der Lesender Klosterschüler

This wooden sculpture is by Ernst Barlach (1870-1938), the German expressionist sculptor, printmaker and writer. I came across it in 1969 in the novel by Alfred Andersch “Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund” (Zanzibar or the Last Reason), and it made a deep impression on me.  I only saw the actual carvings by Barlach much later in Nuremberg in 2003: these were exciting to see, but the photo in the text book remained iconic in my mind.

The figure, made in 1930 is now in the town of  Güstrow, in Northern Germany,  where Barlach lived until his death in October 1938.   Though a supporter of the German cause in the First World War, Barlach grew to despise the futility of war and developed a pacifist position at odds with the rise of Nazism in the 1920s. His sculptures were seen as degenerate art, but Barlach did not passively accept the destruction of his sculptures, but protested the injustice, and continued to produce.


From 1933 Barlach’s sculptures were removed from churches and public spaces. In 1936 and 1937 the persecution grew more intense:  Barlach’s galleries were closed, public art collections removed and sculptures torn down. Even his collections of drawings were not allowed to appear in book form. This was tantamount to a complete ban on working and without doubt contributed to Barlach’s early death in 1938.

Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund

In the novel, the Reading Monk has a central role as a trigger of consciousness and is a starting-point for the external action. “Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund” is about moral choices in a tale of escape, pursuit, persecution, crises of faith and political disenchantment. The statue, which must be smuggled out of Nazi Germany as an act of defiance, is a focus for the inner dialogue or practical desires of each of the five protagonists in the tale.

Among those characters is  Knudsen the rough-and-ready fisherman to whom the task falls to take the figure to Sweden. He is touched by the figure as “a strange creature from wood in the dark”. The Boy, his helper and the seeker of the “Last Reason” to leave his home, is captivated by the aura of the character.

Helander the priest the sculpture embodies an age-old spirituality that is timeless, in stark contrast to the indifference of the populace to the rise of a godless and inhuman regime. To save the figure will be an act of defiance and a show of his faith. Not least, a show of faith to himself, which is sorely tried by the absence of God and His failure to act against the totalitarian state.
For Judith, the monk is one who can read all he wants, and is free to read anywhere. As a Jew in flight from Germany, this is emblematic of her bid to escape from a place where reading is done only in a background of fear and entrapment.

Gregor, the Communist Party official tasked with the safe removal of the figure to Sweden, is the character most in thrall to the Reading Monk.  He recalls his time at the Lenin Academy when the reading was intense, but all about getting lost in the uncritical acceptance of words echoing party ideology. Gregor can see that this monk is very different. He is not lost. He reads easily, attentively and closely. But he also one who is able to close the book, stand up and turn his attention elsewhere, and do something entirely different and of his own choosing.

Gregor’s reaction echoed my own in those days. But for me the emphasis was different. This Reading Monk was enjoying an engagement in study and a peace in spirit. There would be a time to walk away, to have new experiences.  But whatever these were, there would always be this place of serenity awaiting.

Images of the Lesender Klosterschler and Barlach

Barlach website:  http://www.ernst-barlach-gesellschaft.de/

Hawk Roosting

Today at Benjamins Cottage, I saw a sparrowhawk through the conservatory and managed to get a picture from our upstairs window.  Though in a tame garden environment, the bird recalled to mind the poem by Ted Hughes from wilder scenes.

It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

In our post-enlightenment western civilisation we have indeed tried to hold creation in our grasp. The poem demonstrates  that this must be seen, in the end, as a thoroughly misguided pride. In the process, the civilised values of human life that give it significance have been forgotten. Man in our times is driven by mad impulses and obsessions.

Still, my hawk looked benign, though a little preoccupied.

Hawk Roosting

Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998)

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -

I kill where I please because it is all mine.

There is no sophistry in my body:

My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.

No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this. 

_____________________________
Published 1960

Age, Art and Withering

The Coming of Wisdom with Time

(Published 1916)

Though leaves are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;

Now I may wither into the truth

  - W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

We learn today that David Bowie has released a new record after 10 years. I was never a fan in his earlier incarnations, though was aware of the effect he was having on the new wave of youth which I was already leaving behind at the time. And because his music is woven now into the fabric of the past 45 years, it is impossible to deny his brilliance, and the huge paradox of his revolutionary, esoteric art combined with his appeal to a huge mass audience.

I really like this song “Where are we now”, which is an honest exploration of how it is to start feeling older. The video with it is extraordinary. No vanity, much depth. I particularly like the images of Berlin in the late 1970s, where Bowie lived for 3 years.  I feel lucky to have had several trips there in the same era.  Didn’t see him though!

The announcement of Bowie’s  record was on BBC news in the morning. In the same programme they had Andrew Motion on to talk about a Poetry competition for teenagers. At the end of the interview, and weaving in an earlier comment about age and Bowie, he chose a Hardy poem, which I found I half-remembered as I had learnt it verbatim for my college exams.

I Look Into My Glass
(Published 1898)

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, "Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!"

For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
 - Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

No withering into the truth there, then.

Oddly enough, as part of the focus of past couple of days, on themes of growing older, I was looking at some poems of Yeats, including the short 4-liner above. This one seemed highly appropriate

An Acre Of Grass
(Published 1939)

Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

My temptation is quiet.
Here at life's end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew

That can pierce the clouds, 

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds;

Forgotten else by mankind, 

An old man's eagle mind.
   - W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

This was part of his “Last Poems”  written in 1939, the year of Yeats’ death, and 20 years after “The Coming of Wisdom with Time” (1919) . Here, rather than withering, he is calling out in his old age, to become like these raging figures of old, who “beat upon the wall” to get truth to show itself, so that he can express it, externalise it (in poetry).  for fear that his “eagle mind” is forgotten to posterity.

Random thoughts.

T. S. Eliot and Football Supporters

Dublin October 2012

A trip via North Wales to Dublin with friends from Swansea University days, included an extended visit to Ireland's National Gallery.  This gallery is intuitively laid out to take the visitor though the various eras of art history, all helpful.

Back this enjoyable weekend we were travelling on a train back from Bangor to Euston. At Milton Keynes, the carriages were suddenly invaded by crowds of football supporters heading for some London-based fixture. They were a boisterous, good-humoured lot, but the contrast between the peace of the earlier part of the trip, and the chaos we were now subjected to, was palpable.

Here is the set of words (somewhat more judgmental)  from TSEliot about the “Inner Voice”  They are from an Essay called “The Function of Criticism” and actually addresses the relative merits of an understanding of “Classical”  and “Romantic” in art and literature.  In this section, he focuses on the importance of “Tradition” to advance a civilisation via its literature  – the Classical mode,  as preferable to the Romantic mode which relies on reference to the self, the “inner voice”.

North Wales October 2012

“My belief is that those who possess this inner voice are ready enough to hearken to it, and will hear no other. The inner voice, in fact, sounds remarkably like an old principle which has been formalised by an elder critic in the now familiar phrase of “doing as one likes”. The possessors of the inner voice ride ten to a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear and lust.”

Thus the themes of our trip were joined, fragmentally, with Swansea and football hooligans!