Author: Alan

Life, to be sure

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?

Continue reading “Life, to be sure”

Lexicographic

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.

Though it is not Spring

I am a huge fan of MacNeice now. Read this poem out loud. He is a poet who has such a mastery over sounds that I often care very little about his themes – though they are nothing to sneeze at, either. (It is almost embarrasing to love a poem so much that has “sunshine” in the title.)

Spring Sunshine

by Louis MacNeice

In a between world, a world of amber,
The old cat, on the sand-warm window-sill
Sleeps on the verge of nullity.

Spring sunshine has a quality
Transcending rooks and the hammerings
Of those who hang new pictures,
Asking if it is worth it
To clamour and caw, to add stick to stick for ever.

If it is worth while really
To colonize any more the already populous
Tree of knowledge, to portion and reportion
Bits of broken knowledge brittle and dead,
Whether it would not be better
To hide one’s head in the warm sand of sleep
And be buried without hustle or bother.

The rooks bicker heckle bargain always
And market carts lumber–
Let me, in the calm of the all-humouring sun
Also indulge my humour
And bury myself beyond creaks and cawings
In a below world, a bottom world of amber.

By far the most impressive part of this, for me, are the lines: The rooks bicker heckle bargain always/And market carts lumber–

The Poet of Ceder St.

Never mind the long silence, I have enjoyed Hoke’s posts and thoughts on Nietzsche. I plan to take some time with him and his solitudes and renunciations.

I have recently been spending some evenings with a fine poet named Warren Carrier, father of Wintry-Minded Ethan. Conversations with him have inspired me to try again to memorize poems – an effort that I was rather serious about for a time right after graduating St. Johns. My plan is to memorize one from each poet who I admire. Perhaps, as my view of each poet changes, I will switch to a new poem of theirs… Plans, plans, treacherous plans.

I want to post two poems to commemorate my new resolve. One from Warren (which I have not yet tried to memorize) and one from Louis MacNeice, which I have. I’ll post the MacNeice separately in case anyone wants to comment on one poem and not the other.

Postcard

by Warren Carrier

He gazed beyond the rocky edge where turning
maples stretched for miles, particulars
of his mind, a village, a white spire.
Above the turquoise atmosphere, an unseen
gravity held all light within itself,
burst like a melon, scattering galaxies.
He thought of the momentary hues of maples,
of human generations, the same, and never
the same, of randomness, of order as change.
The black that cracked into its separate stars,
bloomed from bent and distant light, had come
to this: himself here, gazing and musing,
maples the tint of the sun, a village of beings
unseen under leaves, their immaculate spire.

epic verse

Words uttered by Heidi after she has begrudgingly agreed to lend her husband a pen:

Goodbye noble pen! Ah me, your purchase was bitterness!
Why did I, with such dutiful care, select you from among
the many inscribers of ink that rested in their caps
upon the shelf? If only you could live out your days until
the last drop of black liquid were delicately applied
to the fragile pages, being a delight to your caretaker,
unmatched in your value for the setting down of thoughts
in sweet correspondence and the making of lists.
Now it has befallen that your life must be brief and bitter.
Never again shall you return to the drawer of your fathers
to lie beside the sharpies and rulers and staples in good order.
Rather will you be misplaced and disregarded, dispersed
into the darkness of your own ink as so many pens
less effective than you have been before.

Long Winded

Mike’s posting of the Masters poem “Silence” made up my mind to post this Nemerov poem that I just encountered.

Life Cycle of Common Man

by Howard Nemerov

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,
This average consumer of the middle class,
Consumed in the course of his average life span
Just under half a million cigarettes,
Four thousand fifths of gin and about
A quarter as much vermouth; he drank
Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee,
And counting his parents’ share it cost
Something like half a million dollars
To put him through life. How many beasts
Died to provide him with meat, belt and shoes
Cannot be certainly said.
                           But anyhow,
It is in this way that a man travels through time,
Leaving behind him a lengthening trail
Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes,
Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown
Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers.

Given the energy and security thus achieved,
He did…? What? The usual things, of course,
The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting,
And he worked for the money which was to pay
For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary
If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera,
But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones
Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded
Steadily from the front of his face as he
Advanced into the silence and made it verbal.
Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime
Would barely suffice for their repetition;
If you merely printed all his commas the result
Would be a very large volume, and the number of times
He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please,”
Would stagger the imagination. There were also
Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning
“It seems to me” or “As I always say.”
Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man
Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic
Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding
Steadily out of the front of his face, the words
Borne along on the breath which is his spirit
Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word
Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.

I love the part about the commas. A book of commas… that would be a very quiet book.

Heidi and I had a discussion when I read this poem to her about whether commas indicate silence. I insisted that they do—what else?—but, as I look again at the poem, it seems that Nemerov may think otherwise: the commas are one of the chief players in the long, noisy babbling of life. I suppose the fact that one needed to take a breath during speech that many times (assuming this roughly as the function of the comma) indicates that one did a lot of yaking. Talking gives over, in fact, to breathing, as the poem closes.

Nancy Willard

For You, Who Didn’t Know

by Nancy Willard

At four A.M. I dreamed myself on that beach
where we’ll take you after you’re born.
I woke in a wave of blood.

Lying in the back seat of a nervous Chevy
I counted the traffic lights, lonely as planets.
Starlings stirred in the robes of Justice

over the Town Hall. Miscarriage of justice,
they sang, while you, my small client,
went curling away like smoke under my ribs.

Kick me! I pleaded. Give me a sign
that you’re still there!
Train tracks shook our flesh from our bones.

Behind the hospital rose a tree of heaven.
   You can learn something from everything,
   a rabbi told his Hasidim who did not believe it.

   I didn’t believe it, either. O rabbi,
   What did you learn on the train to Belsen?
   That because of one second one can miss everything.

There are rooms on this earth for emergencies.
A sleepy attendant steals my clothes and my name,
and leaves me among the sinks on an altar of fear.

“Your name. Your name. Sign these papers,
authorizing us in our wisdom to save the child.
Sign here for circumcision. Your faith, your faith.”

   O rabbi, what can we learn from the telegraph?
   asked the Hasidim, who did not understand.
   And he answered, That every word is counted and charged.

“This is called a dobtone,” smiles the doctor.
He greases my belly, stretched like a drum,
and plants a microphone there, like a flag.

A thousand thumping rabbits! Savages clapping for joy!
A heart dancing its name, I’m-here, I’m-here!
The cries of fishes, of stars, the tunings of hair!

   O rabbi, what can we learn from the telephone?
   My shiksa daughter, your faith, your faith
   that what we say here is heard there.

Every time I come back to this poem, there is more there. Let me just point out that the three interjections about the rabbi are quite artfully placed. First, as she speeds to the hospital she considers what can be lost if they lose any time, stopping at the lights, as it is only just for a citizen to do. Then, as she signs papers that she can’t possibly be in a state to understand the meaning of and that could mean her own or the child’s life or death she considers the real significance of words, when put in certain context — as in a contract. Finally, in her relief at the end of the ordeal she considers the power of prayer, believing (for the moment anyway) that what is said here is heard there.

Lee and I have discussed how hard it is to memorize the lines or pieces of ‘free verse’ poems, even the best ones. But I have had those three interjections of the rabbi in my head for days now — in the phrasing that the poet delivers them.

Forget it

Here are two poems on a related theme. If I have already put up the Bishop poem before, I apologize. First, Billy Collins:

Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Now, Elizabeth Bishop:

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

A long swat

Brian’s post about the early bird, lovely post that it was, left a small, very nasal fly inside my head who has been buzzing away, demanding a good swatting. This little essay is meant to be a rolled up piece of paper with which to do away with him.

Brian began by pointing out that metaphors are mortal. He then went on to talk about ‘proverbs’—“lockets with fossils inside”—a suggestion that they die too. I think perhaps Brian was conflating two things here that can be teased apart. Thus the fly.

My question then—Metaphors die, do proverbs?
Continue reading “A long swat”

Nemerov’s Sweeper

The Sweeper of Ways

by Howard Nemerov

All day, a small mild Negro man with a broom
Sweeps up the leaves that fall along the paths.
He carries his head to one side, looking down
At his leaves, at his broom like a windy beard
Curled with the sweeping habit. Over him
High haughty trees, the hickory and the ash,
Dispense their more leaves easily, or else
The district wind, hunting hypocrisy,
Tears at the summer’s wall and throws down leaves
To witness of a truth naked and cold.

Hopeless it looks, on these harsh, hastening days
Before the end, to finish all those leaves
Against time. But the broom goes back and forth
With a tree’s patience, as though naturally
Erasers would speak the language of pencils.
A thousand thoughts fall on the same blank page,
Though the wind blows them back, they go where he
Directs them, to the archives where disorder
Blazes and a pale smoke becomes the sky.
The ways I walk are splendidly free of leaves.

We meet, we smile good morning, say the weather
Whatever. On a rainy day there’ll be
A few leaves stuck like emblems on the walk;
These too he brooms at till they come unstuck.
Masters, we carry our white faces by
In silent prayer, Don’t hate me, on a wave-
length which his broom’s antennae perfectly
Pick up, we know ourselves so many thoughts
Considered by a careful, kindly mind
Which can do nothing, and is doing that.

I would really like to hear any thoughts people have about this poem, which strikes me more and more each time I read it. Something is most certainly standing for something else here, I would say. But it is not in the way that I have grown accustomed to with Mr. Kooser– where the two ends of the analogy are made quite obvious and it is the striking likeness of them that lends power to the poem. Here, the poet poses more of a puzzle.

I feel pretty certain that this poem is about how I felt often at college watching the parade of nameless black folks cook for and clean up after white students (well, nameless outside of the gym– a credit to the sports program of St. John’s for sure). And how I feel at work now with Hispanic employees doing most of the same thing. There is one woman in particular… she cleans the bathrooms on the floor where my office is. I visit the bathroom a lot. She wears a lot of makeup and is fat. She cleans the bathroom twice a day during the hours I am there. Of course she has to wait outside the door of the men’s room, blocking the entrance, while the people doing business inside finish and come out. I’m not sure how she knows that it is all clear. Maybe they tell her to wait X amount of time and then go in. In any case, I think about her waiting there outside the room nodding to men like me as we come out of the bathroom, an awkward moment for sure. Need I point out that its a little sad and that I do– in a way– pray she doesn’t hate me?

But in this poem the sweeper is given a lot of dignity. To me he seems like the prophet in common clothes; Knight of infinite resignation, maybe. And why so much lingering in the poem on the sweeping, the leaves, trees, wet leaves? This is what stands for something I feel. But I can’t sort out what. With the line “The ways I walk are splendidly free of leaves” I start to feel certain that a clean walkway is a semblance of justice– an appearance that things are acceptable as they are, though the way is never and never can be finally free of leaves. There is more to expose, I think, in this analogy.