The pedigree and breed of Poseidon

Somewhere between Durham and North Wales a little old lady with a deeply-lined face is subjecting the bittersweet memories of a lifetime to the alchemical processes known only to the true poets. Her name is Anne Stevenson.

In the UK at least Stevenson has hardly any profile whatsoever, although her star shines a little more brightly in the USA (the country of her birth), where an edition of selected poems compiled by Andrew Motion was published in 2008 by the Library of America.

I’ll go out on an adamantium limb and say that although she’s one of the greatest poets writing today, she has no chance of finding the readership she deserves until she dies, and even then there are no guarantees. Until that happens (and I hope it won’t come to pass soon), I’m determined to do my bit to help her sell a few more books.

This week I celebrated re-registering with my university library by spending a couple of hours reading from her most recent collection, A Report from the Border, as well as a shabby UK Selected Poems, and I copied out the following poem to share on this blog for reasons which I hope will soon become apparent.

On Watching a Cold Woman
Wade into a Cold Sea

The way that wintry woman
walked into the sea
was as if, in adultery,
she strode to her leman.

Something in the way she
shrugged off her daughters’
moping by the sea’s hem
as if they were human

but she of the pedigree
and breed of Poseidon,
slicing through the breakers
with her gold-plated knees,
twisting up her hair
with a Medusan gesture,

something in the augury
she shook from her nature
made women look at women
over stiff cups of tea,
and husbands in their season
sigh suburbanly to see her.

Oh go dally with your children
or your dogs, naked sirs;
the venom of the ocean
is as kindness to hers.

I’m not sure which collection this poem appeared in first – I’ll have to find that out and post an update here later. However, I think I can clear up a few of the poem’s more pressing difficulties straight away. ‘Leman’ is an archaic word for lover/sweetheart which has been around for more than 800 years – its use here suggests that the bold femininity embodied by the poem’s central figure is timeless. Timelessness (or eternality) is also suggested by the references to ‘Poseidon’, the ferocious god of the sea in Greek mythology, to Medusa, and to ‘augury’, a practice associated with Ancient Roman priests who prophesied based on the activities of certain animals.

So what does the phrase, ‘the augury / she shook from her nature’ actually mean? Simply that she examined her nature (as a priest would examine the activities of flocks of birds) and determined a course of action from that examination – in this case plunging into the sea. There’s more going on here, but that’s the gist.

The ‘husbands’ in the poem also present some difficulties. For example, why do they sigh ‘suburbanly’? My feeling is that the unusual adjective use here draws attention to the gulf between the way they live their lives (sleepily in the suburbs) and the way in which the poem’s central figure lives hers – i.e. excitingly, daringly. Why, also, are they described as ‘naked sirs’ in the poem’s final stanza? Probably because their desires are so utterly transparent to the poet who knows that they are better off ‘dallying’ with their children and their dogs than entangling themselves with this wonderful, ‘venomous’, cold woman.

Stevenson and the tea-drinking men and women she describes in her poem all witnessed an astonishing act; but it was her abilities as a poet which allowed her to take that astonishment and turn it into a sublime piece of poetry.

Now go and buy this.

The Gentleman Bomber

You probably know the Coen Brothers as brilliant, relatively high-profile film-makers whose affectionate celluloid depictions of daft Americans have earned them ‘cult+’ status in the US and UK. But did you know that Ethan Coen is also a poet of sorts? He’s had two collections published, neither of them particularly well-received, but someone has drawn my attention to the following from The Drunken Driver Has The Right of Way and I think it’s intriguing, in a good way:

“Mr. Sands”

He had an accent, “Mr. Sands;”
Was fond of wearing four-in-hands;
His friends, like him from parts unknown,
Wore four-in-hands much like his own.

They’d jabber loudly in his room
But mumly smile at lodgers whom
They’d genuflect past on the stair;
Some had soup stains on their neckwear.

Our Mr. Sands was neat at tea
But, finished, he’d rise instantly
And bow, adjusting his cravat,
Then fly up to his third-floor flat.

He puttered quite a bit up there.
He’d much the neatest facial hair
Of any roomer; we surmised
That that absorbed him, or his ties.

We left him to his own affairs
Until the bomb blew up upstairs.
We tie his ties now; Mr. Sands
Cannot knot knots, not having hands.

– Ethan Coen, ca. 2001

I had to look up ‘four-in-hands’ – it’s a common type of tie knot (and obviously ironic in Mr. Sands’ case); I also had to look up ‘genuflects’ – it means to bend ones knee to the ground in a gesture of servility – and is the perfect word to describe the extreme civility which Mr. Sands’ terrorist friends use to cover their uncivil intents. I assume “Mr. Sands” is in quotation marks because it’s an assumed name, and one which the speaker of the poem has more than enough reason to doubt following the explosion in the final stanza.

The intensely economic manner in which the plot of “Mr. Sands” is communicated is one of its most appealing features, as is its use of homophones (words which sound the same even though they’re spelt differently) – consider, for example, the exuberant and blackly comic last line, “Cannot knot knots, not having hands.”

The poem does float around in time and space quite a bit – words like ‘mumly’ and references to taking tea suggest an English setting, but ‘puttered’ putts the mind back firmly to the US of A. It’s not possible to be exact, but I’d say that the boarding-house setting (implied by references to ‘lodgers’ and ‘roomers’) dates the story told by the poem to between 1900 and 1950. This assessment is supported by the depiction of terrorism in the poem, which is more ‘domestic’ than that associated with Islamic extremism in the popular imagination.

As some of you may have already realised, it’s all very reminiscent of an Ealing Comedy. The Coen brothers’ films reveal a strong Ealing influence and they even went so far as to remake The Ladykillers in 2004. It’s a safe bet that Coen wrote this having just gone on an Ealing Comedy viewing spree in preparation for that remake in the early Noughties.

Reading this poem gave me a richer appreciation of Ethan Coen’s talent; hopefully it’s done the same for you. However, if it has and you want to preserve that gain, I’d recommend you don’t read the rest of the collection; it’s possible to be too fond of limericks.

Riding in cars with John Donne

Why can’t they just let a player play? You write some of the sexiest poems in the English language, run off with the daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower of London and they throw you in the Fleet Prison and cast you out into the professional wilderness for your pains. Then you try and get back into the establishment and they say, “okay – as long as you come back in on the side of the angels.” But you don’t know what to do with yourself on Heaven’s team – there’s too much starch in the collars and it’s boooooring. But you’re pretty good at it anyway, and you write some awesome, mostly sex-less, poems, but it’s not quite the same, and you miss the days when you could turn any bad dating situation (finding a flea in your armpit, for example) into a bid for some hot unprotected sex. And then you die. What’s that all about?

No doubt John Donne could tell us, but he’s been dead for…a while.

One of the poems he wrote from the bench angelic was this sonnet (which has an obvious connection with the previous entry on this blog):

[Holy Sonnet] 10

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, not yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

– Est. date of composition: 1633; spelling modernised

For someone who wasn’t afraid of death, Donne seems to have thought and written about it a lot. That suggests to me that this poem and others like it were written to bolster his own faith as much as that of his contemporary readership. The theology underpinning the poem is obviously Christian and the event looked forward to in the last two lines of the poem is the Resurrection of the Dead.

In my opinion the poem’s best ideas include the description of ‘rest and sleep’ as pleasant ‘pictures’ of man’s final state, and the description of Death as ‘a slave’ to ‘fate, chance, kings and desperate men’.

Incidentally, the thought, ‘And soonest our best men with thee do go’ in the seventh line of the poem is an early form of the popular modern sentiment, ‘only the good die young’. Donne himself lived to a decent age, a certain exception to the rule.

CM.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

I started this blog for my own sake as much as for any imagined reader. I wanted to sustain my passion for poetry – a passion which has been half-starved since I left university in 2009. I also wanted to consolidate what I had already learnt, by writing about it in a freeform manner.

That consolidatory process is already proving extremely fruitful. In regard to today’s post, it has inspired me to make a connection between two poets I’ve never ‘put together’ before.

My first post was about Cecil Day Lewis’ ‘Learning to Talk’; you can read it here. Since I wrote about it, the last two lines of the poem, ‘From our horizon sons begin; / When we go down, they will be tall ones’, have been swirling around in my head, reminding me of something I couldn’t quite bookmark.

Until now, that is – because I have realised what it is I have been thinking of – a poem entitled ‘And death shall have no dominion’ by Dylan Thomas. When I read the poems one after another it was easy to see why my subconscious mind had made the connection: both celebrate the triumph of life over death in the voice of a prophet channelling a transcendent vision, and both have a slightly abstract lyrical quality.

Strangely, I had never before thought about the obvious biographical links between the two men: they lived at the same time (Day Lewis’ life bookending Thomas’ tragically short one) and moved in the circles of literary London at the same time. Both men were ‘Anglo hyphen’ poets – Day Lewis, Anglo-Irish, Thomas, Anglo-Welsh – and I’d like to say that the poetry of both is infused with a Celtic sensibility – but I don’t know what that is. Day Lewis’ poetic concerns were more overtly political, of course, but there’s enough overlap in their chosen subject matter to make a comparison worthwhile.

That comparison will have to wait for another time, though, because this is only a blog and we’ve got a poem to get to. Here’s the Thomas:

And death shall have no dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the men in the wind and the west moon:
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

 – Dylan Thomas, April 1933 (according to his notebook)

Before you ask, no, I don’t understand it all. But part of the fun of poetry is trying to work out what it means. The other part is arguing about what it means with other people.

In this case we might argue about the meaning of ‘they lying long shall not die windily’, the paradoxical phrase ‘unicorn evils’, and most of all about: ‘heads of the characters hammer through the daisies / Break in the sun till the sun breaks down’, all of which defy straightforward explanation. However, I think I’d rather talk about the uplifting beauty of ‘They shall have stars at elbow and foot’ and the perfect, muted simplicity of ‘No more may gulls cry at their ears’.

Some of you will no doubt have picked up on the mention of ‘faith’ in the second paragraph and wonder if Thomas wrote this in support of religious martyrs. My belief is that this is just one of the (worthy) groups of the dead to whom the poem is dedicated—lovers being another, for example—and that the overall feel is that Thomas is writing to honour all those whose lives represented something noble for which they later died; the editor of my inexpensive edition of Thomas’ selected poems agrees, describing this as a ‘pantheistic’ work.

Nevertheless, there is no denying that the stanza dedicated to religious martyrdom stands out, and not only because of the masterful and visceral use of onomatopoeic vocabulary (listen again to, ‘Split all ends up they shan’t crack’). Rereading it now, I am reminded that Friday was Holocaust Memorial Day – and that we all have need of the consolation expressed in this poem at this time.

There’s so much more I could say about this poem – about the use of rhyme, repetition, alliteration, and so on, but I think I’ll leave it there for now. Do investigate further in your own time – it will only leave you with a greater appreciation of Thomas’ immense and somewhat raw talent.

Deer or Woman? continues on Third Reading

Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace,
   Seeing the game from him escapt away,
   sits downe to rest him in some shady place,
   with panting hounds beguiled of their pray:
So after long pursuit and vaine assay,
   when I all weary had the chace forsooke,
   the gentle deare returnd the self-same way,
   thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke.
There she beholding me with mylder looke,
   Sought not to fly, but fearlesse still did bide:
   till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke,
   and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde.
Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld,
   So goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.

– Edmund Spenser, Sonnet LXVII

Having recounted Thomas Wyatt’s hunting exploits on Sunday I thought it only proper that I dig up something similar for this midweek post – if only to prove to you once and for all that poetry spares no expense when it comes to investing in niche genres. Seriously, though, it’s no wonder that hunting metaphors come up a lot in the poetry of the early Early Modern period – there wasn’t that much else to do. Short of actually warring it was probably the gentleman’s activity of choice. Had GQ existed at the time, 95 per cent of the articles would’ve been about hunting. But I don’t want to labour the point.

The sonnet above is by Edmund Spenser, another Renaissance great and the inventor of the word ‘crag’. This is knottier than the Wyatt. Let me know what you think in the comment box below (*echoes in the void*)…

for Caesar’s I am

Whoso List to Hunt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
    But as for me, alas, I may no more:
    The vain travail hath wearied me so sore.
    I am of them that farthest cometh behind;
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
    Draw from the deer: but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
    Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
    As well as I may spend his time in vain:
    And, graven with diamonds, in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
    Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am;
    And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

– Thomas Wyatt, ca. 1520-40  (Source: Egerton manuscript)

This isn’t just a poem in which an unrequited lover uses a deer-hunting metaphor to describe his frustrations. Oh, no, no, no. It’s the best poem in which an unrequited lover uses a deer-hunting metaphor to describe his frustrations. I’ve chosen to post it here–although it might seem something of a standard choice– because ever since I first read it, the opening 4 lines have been stored in my memory. I don’t know why.

Why do I think it’s the best deer-hunting-as-metaphor-for-love-chase poem? The answer is in the last two lines. ‘Noli me tangere’ is Latin for ‘touch me not’ and was believed by Renaissance commentators to be the phrase which adorned the collars of the Roman Emperor’s deer. Wyatt was a courtier to King Henry VIII, the Caesar of his day, and the reference to Caesar in this poem may be a reference to the King. The deer which ‘belongs’ to the King has been identified with Anne Boleyn, his second wife, with whom Wyatt was romantically linked. Conclusive proof that Anne is the deer (pun intended) of the poem is lacking but the metaphor works so ridiculously well if it’s true that I’ve decided the dangerous historicists must be right. Feel free to make up your own mind…

I don’t know about you, but I think ‘ Whoso list to hunt’ (‘list’ = ‘likes’, by the way) is also a wonderfully eloquent and perfectly paced lament; every line of the poem has a distinctly unhurried feel about it, and anyone who’s ever tried to write a sonnet knows that that’s difficult to achieve with the rhymes piling up and the syllables running out. There’s no doubt that Wyatt’s poetic apprenticeship translating Petrach’s sonnets from the Italian had paid dividends.

One last thing: the spelling of the poem copied out above has been modernised. In Wyatt’s day spelling had not been regularised; he spelt words based on the way he heard them. The manuscript copy of ‘Whoso list to hunt’ has been preserved so we actually know how his ear worked, and I think reading the poem as originally written down is a richer experience. Marvel at it yourself in this version from Norbrook and Woudhuysen’s fastidious and comprehensive anthology The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659:

Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde
    but as for me helas I may no more
    the vayne travaill hath weried me so sore
    I ame of theim that farthest cometh behinde
    yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde
    drawe from the Deere but as she fleeth afore
    faynting I folowe I leve of therefor
    sethens in a nett I seke to hold the wynde
Who list her hount I put him owte of dowbte
    as well as I may spend his tyme in vain
    and graven with Diamondes in letters plain
There is written her faier neck rounde abowte
    noli me tangere for Cesars I ame
    and wylde for to hold though I seme tame

Ah, the days when punctuation was ‘optional’.

Quote of the day: Cecil Day Lewis

Say what endurance gives or death denies us.
Love’s proved in its creation, not eternity:
Like leaf or linnet the true heart’s affection
Is born, dies later, asks no reassurance.

– C. Day Lewis, ‘Suppose that we’

When we go down, they will be tall ones

Learning to Talk

See this small one, tiptoe on
The green foothills of the years,
Views a younger world than yours;
When you go down, he’ll be the tall one.

Dawn’s dew is on his tongue—
No word for what’s behind the sky,
Naming all that meets the eye,
Pleased with sunlight over a lawn.

Hear his laughter. He can’t contain
The exquisite moment overflowing.
Limbs leaping, woodpecker flying
Are for him and not hereafter.

Tongue trips, recovers, triumphs,
Turning all ways to express
What the forward eye can guess—
That time is his and earth young.

We are growing too like trees
To give the rising wind a voice:
Eagles shall build upon our verse,
Our winged seeds are tomorrow’s sowing.

Yes, we learn to speak for all
Whose hearts here are not at home,
All who march to a better time
And breed the world for which they burn.

Though we fall once, though we often,
Though we fall to rise not again,
From our horizon sons begin;
When we go down, they will be tall ones.

– from A Time to Dance (1935)

I was rooting around in Henry Pordes Books between Christmas and New Year 2010/11, when I came across a first edition of C. Day Lewis’ Selected Poems. It’s a beautiful book, worthy of being given as a gift – and this particular copy happened to be in mint condition, its self-consciously modern dust-jacket still very much in place.

At that time the only poem of C. Day Lewis’s that I knew was ‘Newsreel’ and all that I knew about Day Lewis himself was that he was the father of Daniel Day-Lewis, and that he was a member of the ‘Auden Generation’, overshadowed, of course, by Auden. I bought the book then and there (it was only £12 – bargain!) and have discovered since that it is full of many, many heart- and mind-gripping poems.

Biographical information suggests that the child which provided the inspiration for Learning to Talk was one of Day Lewis’ sons from his first marriage. Obscure references in the second half of the poem may relate to the situation in Europe in 1935 – specifically the rise of Nazi Germany (‘the rising wind’). In this reading the ‘we’ of the fifth stanza relates to the group of poets to which C. Day Lewis belonged – who ‘learn to speak for all / Whose hearts here are not at home’. Incidentally, I had trouble unpicking the quotation just given until I read ‘hearts’ as ‘dear-hearts’ i.e. loved ones, which resolves the difficulty. The poets are also learning to talk to the soldiers, those men and women who will ‘march to a better time / And breed the world for which they burn’. The poem ends very strongly, the poet asserting that the future has been secured by the breeding of the next generation and the generations to come: ‘When we go down, they will be tall ones.’ Stirring stuff.

N.B. In my edition ‘Day Lewis’ isn’t hyphenated. I’ve seen different publishers adopt different versions. If anyone knows why, please use the comment box below to tell me.

Also: Here’s the Google Books link to The Collected Poems.

Update: I am reminded (by my grandparents) that Day Lewis could also have been thinking about the lead-in to the Spanish Civil War when he wrote about a ‘rising wind’ and ‘burning’ in this poem.