Mind of Winter

Limerick (III)

from Generic Literature by Steve White

There once was an X from place B
That satisfied predicate P
He or she did thing A
In an adjective way
Resulting in circumstance C

Maybe my brain is not functioning entirely properly, being three days from freedom, but I found this poem to be rather fun. There’s some more good generic stuff at Mr. White’s website.

Jon pointed me years ago to this nearly perfect poem by A.E. Houseman:

by A.E. Houseman

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

I have been reflecting on this very deep poem and, last night, composed an essay of sorts:

Life is nothing much to lose. Who says this? Who could say such a thing? The voice of the poem couldn’t be the young man who was the living first person referred to in the first line. The one who lies and the one who did not choose to live. That man believes that life is something much to lose. The voice speaking the lines must be very old. Either old in the old familiar way of years– old enough to be ready to let life go without going to pieces – or old as the universe, so that the extinguishing of life really seems like nothing.

Can one learn to not hate death? Can one come to say that life is nothing much to lose since ‘life’ is what is left of life, not what has been lived? A young man sees the worth of living in the potential of living. Who will I marry? What will my kids be like? What shape will my career take? How will I gain notoriety? What will I learn? What experiences will I live through? What hills will I climb? The life left for a man entering his prime is surely something indeed to lose – from his own perspective at least. Can one live enough to change this perspective?

I have had some wonderful things occur in my life. I went to St. John’s. I made great friendships. I met my wife, Heidi, and have lived two wonderful years, growing into marriage with her. Is life getting to be less and less ‘something much to lose’ as these attainments of satisfaction pass behind me? We do speak of an old man or woman as having ‘had their life,’ and it is common sense ethics to side with the preservation of the young for whom ‘so much lies ahead.’ An old man might say ‘life is nothing much to lose’ – but only if he means his life.

What of this ‘to be sure?’ To whom is the voice of the poem speaking? Who is in on this conspiracy with the speaker? Who shares with him such a clear and distinct presupposition that life in nothing much to lose? It sounds like is a person trying to persuade through intimidation. “Surely,” he says, “you know!” “Surely you are not one to think that life is something indeed to lose!” This is not, it seems, simply the perspective of an old person who has lived enough to be philosophical about death. Rather it is the voice of one who has grown into cynicism of the most severe kind. He has come to know that life (not just his life) is nothing much to lose.

When did the man who has died young get so old as to enter into this cynical circle of embittered age? Is he simply aged or is he, perhaps, much older than the ones who have lived long enough to accept death? He has crossed death’s threshold and is speaking from the other side. Perhaps we should take his voice, then, to be one that can not be modeled by the perspective of any earthly creatures. His ‘to be sure’ is not a nudge-nudge for fellow cynics or a bullying of the hopeful. Rather it is a voice of authority from a place where agelessness comes with the territory. Life – make no mistake about it – is nothing much to lose.

Let’s back up though. ‘Here dead lie we…’ Why is this ‘we’ and not ‘I’? It is the ‘we’ of a soldier. The voice is not an individual’s but that of a collective, content to speak from the grave in unison. The whole battalion speaks as one, as they might in declaiming their oath of obedience or their pledge. Is this poem approachable by one like me who has never put himself in the position of risk that these speakers have?

‘Here dead lie we because we did not choose’ – the sentence could end here and, indeed, in my ear, it always does for a moment. The sense is ‘we did not choose and so we are dead.’ The implication is ‘we did not choose to die.’ But this is exactly the opposite of what is being said. “To choose” can be intransitive (I did not make a choice – I did not choose) or transitive (I did not choose cherry over rhubarb; I did not choose to come see you this night). The moment at the end of the first line is an indirection, added to by the twisted syntax of the first words – as if for a moment the voice of the poem wants you to hear – ‘we did not choose – so here we lie.’

But the verb phrase is only half complete at the enjambment. ‘We did not choose… to live.’ We did not choose the path that meant certain continuation of our life. I stop short of saying ‘we did not choose to live.’ Of course we chose to live. But choosing can be the reaching out for a good or the willful evasion of an evil. This seems to be the latter. ‘we did not choose to live and (by living—by having chosen to guarantee our living) shame the land from which we sprung. Can we find a positive choice in this formulation of what we did not choose? Did ‘we’ (the voice) choose to fight for the exhilaration of being young and in action? For the experience of something as new as skating on the edge of death? Did we choose to fight for the pride we felt or the pride we anticipated from praise we would receive? Likely all these, but the voice of them poem only tells us ‘we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung.’ We fought for fear of the shame (wrong) of not fighting.

Have we widened the scope of ‘we’ enough? Could the ‘we’ voicing this poem be more than the soldiers whose corpse(s) lie(s) beneath the stone with these words on it? We all, we as parents, friends, human beings, have made a choice to fight one another. Or we have had this choice thrust on us (because we did not choose). It is hard to say which is right. But we have died with the young who have died. We have lost our next generation, our replenishment of everyday, aging men with jobs and opinions. Here dead lies a part of us, of our body politic, our community. Because we are who we are we must die – and out of our natural season, but perennially nonetheless.

‘But young men think it is,’ Young men do indeed. All men do. But here at this moment of the poem, we are still entranced by the ‘to be sure.’ We are reassured by it – young men lie in the ground, how could we not be glad to think that life is nothing much to lose. It is the seduction of nihilism, perhaps, but it is a warm bed to lie in. So, at the comma in the last line we disdain the foolishness together with this voice of timeless (and soulless) wisdom. But we pay for it at the conclusion – ‘and we were young.’ Because, of course, nothing matters but how it seems to the man who crossed the threshold. Life could not be nothing much to lose if he thought it was something, indeed. Youth, with its stake in possibility, can not hand over its gifts without remorse. Youth can not think of ‘life’ in the face of death. Only my life. Our life.

Jenny Kissed Me

by Leigh Hunt

Jenny kissed me when we met,
  Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
  Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
  Say that health and wealth have missed me;
Say I’m growing old, but add—
  Jenny kissed me!

Dearest Cynara, I have broken faith; come what may, life is beautiful today.

I had the greatest lexicographic moment of my life when I looked up the word ‘cromlech’ after reading this poem.

The Cromlech

by Louis MacNeice

From trivia of froth and pollen
White tufts in the rabbit warren
And every minute like a thicket
Nicked and dropped, nicked and dropped,
Extracters and abstracters ask
What emerges, what survives,
And once the stopper is unstopped
What was the essence in the flask
and what is Life apart from lives
And where, apart from fact, the value

To which we answer, being naive,
Wearing the world upon our sleeve,
That to dissect a given thing
Unravelling its complexity
Outrages its simplicity
For essence is not merely core
And each event implies the world,
A centre needs periphery.

This being so, at times at least
Granted the sympathetic pulse
And granted the perceiving eye
Each pregnant with a history,
Appearance and appearances –
In spite of the philosophers
With their jejune dichotomies –
Can be at times reality.

So Tom and Tessy holding hands
(Dare an abstraction steal a kiss?)
Cannot be generalized away,
Reduced by bleak analysis
To pointers demonstrating laws
Which drain the colour from the day;
Not mere effects of a crude cause
But of themselves significant,
To run-of-brain recalcitrant,
This that they are and do is This…

Tom is here, Tessy is here
At this point in a given year
With all this hour’s accessories,
A given glory – and to look
That gift-horse in the mouth will prove
Or disprove nothing of their love
Which is as sure intact a fact,
Though young and supple, as what stands
Obtuse and old, in time congealed,
Behind them as they mingle hands –
Self-contained, unexplained,
The cromlech in the clover field.

The other day, I decided to try my hand at composing a more modern piece of poetry, but the results were dismal:

A Meta-Analysis of Free Verse in Free Verse
or
Ode on Itself

by Michael Hoke

Imagine
    how beautiful
    this poem could have been
    had you but written it
Yourself

I was struck today, however, when I read a review of Billy Collins’ newest book in the NYT [registration may be required]. It turns out that Collins’ book begins with a poem that starts thusly:

from The Trouble with Poetry

by Billy Collins

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you

I wrote my piece having Billy Collins particularly in mind, though I did not mean it to be an homage or an imitation, strictly speaking. I haven’t read the rest of the Collins poem, but just looking at the first stanza, I like mine better. [Some less than friendly discussion of the NYT review may be found at MetaFilter.]

Also, I tried to compose a pwoermd today:

by Michael Hoke

VISUALEYES

…but it turns out someone beat me to it.

I think I’m giving up my career ambitions in poetry. I’ll stick to law school.