intertext

Many on my flist are posting Wilfred Owen, or Siegried Sassoon, and those poems are vivid and harsh and awesome, in the fullest sense of the word. I had my 150 students read "Dulce et Decorum Est" yesterday, and it was wonderful. But as I was thinking about what to post, I remembered this one, which is not as in your face as some of the WW1 poems, but which I find inexpressibly moving:

Patterns, by Amy Lowell

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the plashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles
on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon --
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
"Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday se'nnight."
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
"Any answer, Madam," said my footman.
"No," I told him.
"See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer."
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, "It shall be as you have said."
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

This is one of those quote-within-a-quote-within-a-quote things that happen in blogs.

Litlove, in a post for the Sunday Salon is writing about reading Rilke's Duino Elegies.

This post on its own is worth reading, as she captures vividly the ecstacy of reading Rilke (and I have lidocafe to thank that I am now in the company of those who share that ecstacy).

But I particularly loved this quote from the critic William Gass, writing about Rilke:

The poet, while composing, struggles to rule a nation of greedy self-serving malcontents; every idea, however tangential to the main theme it may have been initially, wants to submerge the central subject beneath its fructifying self as though each drizzle were scheming a forty-days rain; every jig and trot desires to be the whole dance; every la-di-da and line length, image, order, rhyme, variation and refrain, every well-mouthed vowel, dental click, silent design, represents a corporation, cartel, union, well-heeled lobby, a Pentagon or NRA, eager to turn the law towards its interests; every word wants to enjoy a potency so supreme it will emasculate the others.

That is why I read. That is why I teach.

I'm spending some enjoyable time sampling the pleasures of this CD, which arrived from Amazon yesterday. It's some of Shakespeare's sonnets, read by wonderful British Actors. Some of them are put to music, too, but I haven't tried any of those yet. There are some treats: Ralph Fiennes, reading "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame" as if in the middle of love-making, complete with orgasm and post-coital relaxation. John Gielgud, Diana Rigg, Richard Briers, Jonathan Pryce, Timothy Spall, and many many more.

For a taste (and a marvellous one - you may be hooked) try a version of Sonnet 130 read by Alan Rickman. I have to send you to a link in someone else's blog - and I'm sorry that I don't remember who or what led me there, but am grateful to aslowhite for the post. Alan Rickman reads Sonnet 130 as a seduction - you'll swoon. One of my colleagues, to whom I sent the link, pointed out that he falls victim to the common misreading of "any she belied," reading "she" as a pronoun, subject of "belied," rather than, as it should be, noun, object in the phrase "as any she." Thus he promotes the interpretation "she's hideous, but I love her anyway." I tell my students I will beat them, or throw them out the window, if any of them interpret the sonnet that way, but lots do anyway, and now they have Alan Rickman supporting them. But, oh, you'll swoon, and it's worth it.

PS: lidocafe: I have already ordered a copy for the library.

PICKING AND CHOOSING

Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it,
the situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly,
what one says of it is worthless.
The opaque allusion, the simulated flight upward,
accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment
but is otherwise rewarding; that James
is all that has been said of him. It is not Hardy the novelist
And Hardy the poet, but one man interpreting life as emotion.
The critic should know what he likes:
Gordon Craig with his "this is I" and "this is mine,"
with his three wise men, his "sad French greens," and his
"Chinese cherry"
Gordon Craig so inclinational and unashamed - a critic.
And Burke is a psychologist, of acute and racoon-like curiosity.
Summa Diligentia; to the humbug whose name is so amusing -
very young and very rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps
on the top of a "diligence"!
We are not daft about the meaning,
but this familiarity with wrong meanings puzzles one.
Humming-bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn nipping the linen and saying
that you have a badger - remember Xenophon;
only rudimentary behavior is necessary to put us on the scent.
"A right good salvo of barks," a few strong wrinkles puckering
the skin between the ears, is all we ask.

Marianne Moore

Approaching a Significant Birthday,
He Peruses The Norton Anthology
of Poetry



All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall—
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.

If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain

And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

R.S. Gwynn


I could start a meme trying to guess the source of all these lines. I can get about half of them... maybe. Maybe a third...

for lidocafe

TIGER DRINKING AT FOREST POOL

Water, moonlight, danger, dream.
Bronze urn, angled on a tree root: one
Slash of light, then gone. A red moon
Seen through clouds, or almost seen.

Treasure found but lost, flirting between
The worlds of lost and found. An unjust law
Repealed, a wish come true, a lifelong
Sadness healed. Haven, in the mind,

To anyone hurt by littleness. A prayer
For the moment, saved; treachery forgiven.
Flame of the crackle-glaze tangle, amber
Reflected in grey milk-jade. An old song
Remembered, long debt paid.
A painting on silk, which may fade.

Ruth Padel

After a stressful day yesterday and a restless night last night, this was what I found in my "Daily Zen" page, perfect:

Overnight At a Mountain Monastery

Massed peaks pierce
The sky’s cold colors;
Here, the trail junctions
With the temple path.
Shooting stars pass
Into sparse-branched trees;
The moon travels one way,
Clouds the other.
Few people come
To this mountaintop;
Cranes do not flock
In the tall pines.
One Buddhist monk,
Eighty years old,
Has never heard
Of the world’s affairs.


- Chia Tao (779-843)

A colleague gave me the heads-up on this: a previously unpublished Plath sonnet discovered by a grad student! (wow - can you imagine?)

Here's the poem, and here's the Guardian article about it.

I discovered this site while doing other things, and it seems have some interesting possibilities for teaching.
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/

This appears to be a kind of poetry "blog". They post a new poem every day, and include thoughtful comments about it and invite comments from visitors. It's a truly interactive site and one that really does celebrate poetry. I found it by chance when doing a Google search on Auden's "Villanelle" for my dissertation... I love the serendipity of research :)
In case you were wondering, "Villanelle" is a character in Jeanette Winterson's _The Passion_, upon which I'm writing a chapter in my dissertation on Winterson. The themes of this poem - our feeling of helplessness in the face of the passing of time, bewilderment about the instability of the world, in contrast to the permanence of art - are echoed to some extent in the novel. One of the other main characters in the novel grows roses, by the way.