Tuesday, March 19, 2024

'Amid Tremendous History, New Pity'

Oscar Williams (1900-4) was a middling poet with a gift for compiling excellent anthologies, thirty of which he published during his lifetime. Early on, several of them were my primers, an inviting way to learning the poetic tradition in English on the cheap. One of them, the paperback edition from Washington Square Press that I bought more than half a century ago, Immortal Poems of the English Language, cost seventy-five cents. I only recently encountered his War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (John Day Co., 1945). 

The collection is divided into three sections: World War I poems, poems by American and English poets in the armed services during World War II, and those written during that war by civilians. The second section is largest, with fifty-eight poets represented. I recognized only 15 of the names, including Howard Nemerov, Karl Shapiro and William Jay Smith. Auden’s influence is everywhere. In the introduction, Williams explains his criteria for inclusion:

 

“I have included in this collection only such poems as seem to me written with an emotional comprehension of all that war implies. There are no sham patriotics; there are poems of sensitive patriotism, such as that of Gervase Stewart who offered his life willingly for an England which he wished to be better than the old.  While he yet honestly expressed his fear that the desired social changes might not come to pass.”

 

Not all of the poems in the second and third sections are about war. Roy Fuller (1912-91) was an English poet who served for five years in the Royal Navy beginning in 1941. His six poem are taken from his second and third collections, The Middle of a War (1942) and A Lost Season (1944). Here’s an interesting one, "January 1940," that has nothing to do with military service:

 

“Swift had pains in his head.

Johnson dying in bed

Tapped the dropsy himself.

Blake saw a flea and an elf.

Tennyson could hear the shriek

Of a bat. Pope was a freak.

Emily Dickinson stayed

Indoors for a decade.

Water inflated the belly

Of Hart Crane, and of Shelley.

Coleridge was a dope.

Southwell died on a rope.

Byron had a round white foot.

Smart and Cowper were put

Away. Lawrence was a fidget.

Keats was a midget.

Donne, alive in his shroud,

Shakespeare in the coil of a cloud,

Saw death as he

Came crab-wise, dark and massy.

I envy not only their talents

And fertile lack of balance

But the appearance of choice

In their sad and fatal voice.”

 

And here is a name new to me, Keidrych Rhys (1915-87), a Welsh poet and journalist whose surname is not Thomas. He served as a gunner in the British Army. The poem is "Tragic Guilt":

 

“N0. I’m not an Englishman with a partisan religion.

My roots lie in another region,

Though ranged alongside yours.

 

“Here I sense your stubbornness and your cohesion

And can even feel pride in your recent decision

That anger reassures.

 

“I know no love for disembodied principles, improbable tales.

The strength of the common man was always the strength of Wales,

Unashamed of her race.

 

“May this be also England's role to bring to birth.

May she draw opposite new powers from the earth.

Huge Shakespeare has his place.

 

“I have felt in my bones comradeship and pity,

I have seen wonders in an open door blitz city.

 

“Amid tremendous history, new pity.”

Monday, March 18, 2024

'Richly, Sometimes Dreamily, Melodic'

A friend has given me an unexpected gift: a first American edition of Poems for Children (Henry Holt and Co., 1930), with a printed note before the title page: 

“Three hundred copies of ‘Poems for Children’ have been specially printed and bound, and have been signed by the author. Of these two hundred and eighty are for sale.

 

“This copy is Number 83.”

 


The number is written in black ink, as is the author’s spidery though legible signature beneath it: Walter de la Mare. The volume collects poems previously published in Songs of Childhood (1902), Peacock Pie (1913) and various periodicals. Here is an early poem, “The Fly,” reminiscent of Blake:

 

“How large unto the tiny fly

Must little things appear! -

A rosebud like a feather bed,

Its prickle like a spear;

 

“A dewdrop like a looking-glass,

A hair like golden wire;

The smallest grain of mustard-seed

As fierce as coals of fire;

 

“A loaf of bread, a lofty hill;

 A wasp, a cruel leopard;

 And specks of salt as bright to see

            As lambkins to a shepherd.”

 

Unlike many writers, de la Mare seems not to have stylistically evolved over time. The early poems are generally indistinguishable from later work. He was a master of sorts from the start. He is also unusual in having blurred his audiences. His poems for children can be appreciated by adults without embarrassment or tedium, and vice versa. I remember reading the poems in Peacock Pie as a kid, first in anthologies, then in the volume itself. De la Mare’s charms will be lost on the tin-eared and his poems will be dismissed as kiddie fodder or a species of nonsense verse, like the unreadable Edward Lear’s. Anthony Hecht wrote of him:

 

“De la Mare’s poetry is richly, sometimes dreamily, melodic, and the subtlety and skill of his prosody probably derives in part from his familiarity with folk literature and traditional English nursery rhymes.”

 

Here is a poem from Peacock Pie, “The Bookworm,” that can be fully appreciated by an adult who remembers what it’s like to be a child:

 

“'I'm tired -- Oh, tired of books,' said Jack,

        ‘I long for meadows green,

    And woods, where shadowy violets

        Nod their cool leaves between;

    I long to see the ploughman stride

        His darkening acres o’er,

    To hear the hoarse sea-waters drive

        Their billows ’gainst the shore;

    I long to watch the sea-mew wheel

        Back to her rock-perched mate;

    Or, where the breathing cows are housed,

        Lean dreaming o’er the gate.

    Something has gone, and ink and print

        Will never bring it back;

    I long for the green fields again,

        I'm tired of books,’ said Jack.”

Sunday, March 17, 2024

'Little Towns Should Have Had Their Chroniclers'

Every St. Patrick’s Day my mother pinned on my shirt before I walked to school a green and white knitted shamrock and reminded me of the origin of my first name. Her father was born in County Cork, as were her mother’s parents. I waited until the third grade to rebel against wearing the shamrock. Not coincidentally, that was the year I developed an unrequited crush on my teacher. The shamrock embarrassed me and I had no  sentimental attachment to the Old Sod. Only as a teenager did Ireland again become important to me, by way of its literature – Yeats and Joyce, and a little later, Beckett, MacNeice and Flann O’Brien, and then Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor. 

Something similar occurred with the other half of my genetic inheritance. My paternal grandparents emigrated from Poland early in the last century, and in high school I gravitated to Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Witold Gombrowicz and other Polish writers – a natural, unconscious decision.

 

Like many Americans, I’m a mutt. I speak American. Sponge-like parts of me, many of which I’m not aware of, are Irish and Polish – and Jewish and Italian. The one thing I remember Ralph Ellison saying when I heard him speak my freshman year at university was that all of us in the audience were, culturally speaking, Afro-American. We came by our various inheritances honestly. Every American is multiple.

 

Only in the 1990s did I internalize another Irish writer and add him to the private pantheon, the essayist Hubert Butler (1900-91). Late in life he collected a lifetime of essays in three volumes published by Lilliput Press in Dublin. Two more followed posthumously and, finally, in 1996, a selection titled Independent Spirit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was published in the U.S. Butler was a cosmopolitan devoted to the local. Born in County Kilkenny, he traveled widely but lived in the family house on the River Nore all of his life. He was an amateur archeologist, translated Chekhov and worked with Quakers to save Jews in Austria. In his 1984 essay “Beside the Nore” he writes:

 

“There are many beautiful little towns along the Nore, but since ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ it is perhaps unsafe to admire them. Their beauty depends on humpbacked bridges and winding streets and large trees, all of which obstruct the motorist in his race to progress. The curves of the bridge are now being straightened with cement but often you can see the great stone slabs of the parapet jutting out of the stream below the bridge.

 

“All these little towns should have had their chroniclers, for one chronicler attracts another and a village, conscious of its history, can resist the tyranny of the government official.”

Saturday, March 16, 2024

'The Laurels All Are Cut'

A thoughtful reader, knowing of my fondness for A.E. Housman’s poems, has sent me the English composer John Ireland’s 1928 setting for a verse from Last Poems (1922, that literary annus mirabilis). The baritone is Mark Stone; the pianist, Sholto Kynoch. Here is Housman’s poem, which serves as the foreword to his second volume of verse: 

“We’ll to the woods no more,

The laurels all are cut,

The bowers are bare of bay

That once the Muses wore;

The year draws in the day

And soon will evening shut:

The laurels all are cut,

We’ll to the woods no more.

Oh, we’ll no more, no more

To the leafy woods away,

To the high wild woods of laurel,

And the bowers of bay no more.”

 

Common language, nothing exotic. Housman, of course, would know that in Ovid’s account, Daphne was pursued by Apollo and turned into a laurel tree. The Romans awarded laurel leaves to victors. Larkin calls Housman the “poet of unhappiness” and there’s something to it, though in this poem the mood is closer to melancholy. Published four years after the Armistice, it may reflect an era bereft of heroism, honor, patriotism, echoing the title of the second novel, No More Parades (1924), in Ford Madox Ford’s great tetralogy, Parade’s End.

 

Housman’s poems endure thanks to their clarity and directness. They appeal to emotions almost universally understood. In The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988), Kingsley Amis writes:  

 

“Of course I think it ungrateful and wrong that Housman should never have been conventionally admitted as a great English poet, one of the greatest since Arnold, but not so surprising when you consider some of the people who have been so admitted. What are the objections to him? His themes are restricted: I started to make a list of them until it occurred to me that the same objection would exclude from the canon Milton, Herbert, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats. . . . He turns his back on the modern world: next question. He made no technical innovations: get out of my sight.”

 

[The Larkin tag is drawn from “All Right When You Knew Him,” a review of Richard Perceval Graves’ A.E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (1979), collected in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (1983).]

Friday, March 15, 2024

'Anticipating Since Morning a Successful Hunt'

The neighbors had several tall ash trees growing in their backyard behind the garage and the trunks were a favorite perch for Polyphemus and especially cecropia moths. These are large insects, beautifully colored, with “eyes” on their wings. To budding lepidopterists they were irresistible. The moths were probably attracted to the sap dripping from the trunks of the ash trees. 

In one of the entomology books I read as a kid I found a recipe for moth bait -- sugar, overripe bananas, pancake syrup and beer, mixed in a bowl and applied to the trunks with a paint brush. Why the beer, I don’t know, but we had plenty of it at home and nobody would miss a bottle.

 

On this date, March 15, in 1922, Vladimir Nabokov published a Russian poem titled in English, “Moths,” in Rul’ (The Rudder), an émigré newspaper in Berlin. As translated by his son Dmitri, it’s seventy-three lines long and it too contains a recipe for moth bait:

 

“For you,

moths, I prepare a lure:

anticipating since morning a successful hunt,

I mix flat beer half and half

with warmed molasses, then add rum.”

 

The speaker will then “smear the damp oak trunk / with sticky gold, and juice drips from the brush, / trickles down into the cracks, gleaming and heady. . . .” He describes the tree as “my accomplice” and observes as five moths “soak up the intoxicating juice, / blissfully unfurling their coiled proboscises.”

 

From childhood, Nabokov was a lepidopterist-in-training, a serious scientist, not a dilettante like me. Looking back, I feel some shame about capturing, killing and mounting so many moths and butterflies – as close as I ever got to hunting. I can rationalize it as scholarship but that’s flimsy and even I don’t buy it. I learned more from observing the living insects in their habitat and from reading than I ever did from pinching their thoraxes. Now I think of the beautiful final paragraph of Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947):

 

“Across the lane, two windows only were still alive. In one, the shadow of an arm was combing invisible hair; or perhaps it was a movement of branches; the other was crossed by the slanting black trunk of a poplar. The shredded ray of a streetlamp brought out a bright green section of wet box hedge. I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.”

 

Nabokov reports that an editor questioned whether “mothing” was a typo for “nothing.” It was not. Otherwise, the novel would have had a most un-Nabokovian finish.

 

[Go here to read the complete poem, which is published in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (eds. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, Beacon Press, 2000).]

Thursday, March 14, 2024

"The Saint’s Strange Way to Practice Death"

Among the road kill I’ve tallied on Houston streets, the most common casualty is the strangely spelled opossum (from the Powhatan). The least common, incidentally, is the armadillo, with two KIAs sighted in twenty years, both being pecked at by crows. Natives here seem uncommonly fond of opossums, adopting them as the state or regional marsupial mascot. I once helped a neighbor rescue a litter of baby opossums, apparently deserted by their mother, hiding in another neighbor’s junk-filled garage. He bottle-fed them until they were old enough to want to escape. 

 


Up close, they are primitive-looking creatures, even savage, yet with an odd sense of vulnerability about them. They have hairless rat tails and teeth resembling hacksaw blades. They hiss when bothered. Yes, they do “play opossum.” Roughly a dozen times in the last decade our dog has caught one in the backyard, always after dark. Only one was a confirmed kill. The rest walked off after we yanked Luke inside. In the photo above you can see one he treed in the crepe myrtle several weeks ago. In 2022, Benjamin Myers published “Possum” in, of all places, First Things:

 

“On feet bare like a desert saint’s, it pads

across the porch and toward the dry cat food

my wife pours out for strays. It doesn’t scare

when I stomp, bellow, toss a pebble

at its rump, just hisses at me, geezerly,

and keeps on chewing. Eyes like little radio

dials and fur like coal snow, smog sky, or anything

smudged, dirty, it reminds me of the boy

in school we called Possum for how he slept

through class and how his eyes were beaded black,

his nose sharpened to needle fine. When at last

I knock it off the porch with one quick blow

from a snow shovel, it scuttles under

a shrub and disappears into the house’s

cracked stone foundation, knowing more than I—

beneath the sound of footfall, chair-scrape, voice

descending like the ash of distant fire—

the saint’s strange way to practice death.”

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

'Cloudy, Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones'

The best-known and still unchallenged refutation of the Irish Anglican Bishop George Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism – he called it “immaterialism” -- is recounted by James Boswell on August 6, 1763: 

“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’”

 

Dr. Johnson’s demonstration of common sense is at once amusing, convincing and somehow quintessentially English, the sort of act Jonathan Swift would have applauded (though not Yeats). Johnson’s critics have dismissed his logic as fallacious and dubbed his approach argumentum ad lapidem – “argument to the stone” -- so freshmen in Philosophy 101 and other sophisticates can feel vindicated. For the rest of us it’s QED. A friend sent me a photo of Johnson in the act of refutation:

 


The bronze sculpture is located in the Garden of Heroes and Villains, a privately owned sculpture garden in Warwickshire. Johnson strikes a Baryshnikovian pose. Among his fellow heroes are Billie Holiday, Charles Babbage and Shakespeare. What more to say? In the first stanza of “Epistemology” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950), Richard Wilbur endorses Johnson’s reasoning:

 

“Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.”

 

Tom Disch performs a similar poetic service, without quite naming Johnson, in “What to Accept” (Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems, 1989):

 

“The fact of mountains. The actuality

Of any stone — by kicking, if necessary.

The need to ignore stupid people,

While restraining one's natural impulse

To murder them. The change from your dollar,

Be it no more than a penny,

For without a pretense of universal penury

There can be no honor between rich and poor.

Love, unconditionally, or until proven false.

The inevitability of cancer and/or

Heart disease. The dialogue as written,

Once you've taken the role. Failure,

Gracefully. Any hospitality

You're willing to return. The air

Each city offers you to breathe.

The latest hit. Assistance.

All accidents. The end.”