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WP: He's made the things that bring him near

2012-05-25T20:46:19Z

Some while back I mentioned poet Christian Wiman. I like his work, and his story even more. In the space of a few years in his early thirties, he found God, fell in love and married, and was diagnosed with incurable blood cancer. He writes, as you’d imagine, with attention and poignancy, and, as you might not expect from a contemporary poet, with a good deal of investment in things like rhythm and structure. As a way into this poem, here’s a line or two from a biographical essay he wrote called “Love bade me welcome” (a quote from George Herbert): “I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought.” This poem, with its echo of Hopkins and its Herbertesque conceit, is called “Every riven thing”, a title which on its own tells multitudes about a view of the world.

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.

WP: I that knew what harbour'd in that head

2012-05-12T09:19:27Z

Yesterday I bought Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel's sequel to her 2009 smash hit Wolf Hall - and so far it's just as unputdownable as the original. She continues the story of Thomas Cromwell's ascendancy in the court of Henry VIII, with the same wild energy and gorgeous embodiments. See James Wood's review of both novels for a much better overview than I can give here. This is more by way of an introduction to this weekend's poem.

When I was reading Wolf Hall, you might remember, I posted a poem by Thomas Wyatt, a minor character but (at the time) a major poet. The other major poet from the early sixteenth-century was Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who died in 1547 at the venerable age of 30. Wyatt and Surrey were both published in Tottel's Miscellany, an anthology important in collecting and shaping the poetic experience of the early English Renaissance. They were precursors to Sidney and Spenser, who in turn precursed Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. This poem is Surrey's sonnet on the death of Wyatt - a touching tribute, and a fitting way to mark the lives of both. Fans of Midsummer Nights Dream should enjoy the reference to Pyramus and Thisbe in the final line.

Divers thy death do diversely bemoan:
Some, that in presence of thy livelihed
Lurked, whose breasts envy with hate had swoln,
Yield Cæsar's tears upon Pompeius' head.
Some, that watched with the murd'rer's knife,
With eager thirst to drink thy guiltless blood,
Whose practice brake by happy end of life,
With envious tears to hear thy fame so good.
But I, that knew what harbour'd in that head ;
What virtues rare were tempered in that breast ;
Honour the place that such a jewel bred,
And kiss the ground whereas the corpse doth rest ;
With vapour'd eyes : from whence such streams availe,
As Pyramus did on Thisbe's breast bewail.

Wind, willows and water

2012-05-07T09:16:11Z

Among my favourite novels are two animal tales: Wind in the Willows (1908) and Watership Down (1972). Both involve animals whose lives unfold in the English countryside; animals with powers of speech and reason and even wit. Both are charming books, but only in one does the charm arise from watching animals be animals. In Watership Down, the rabbits are rabbits. In Wind in the Willows the animals are arguably humans.

Rat and Mole, Badger and Toad certainly have animal qualities like heightened sense of smell and the homing instinct, but they are essentially Edwardian gentlefolk living fairly gracious riparian lives. They all wear clothes and walk upright (Toad seems to have hair); they inhabit a carefully stratified social world, and affect the diction of characters from Wodehouse and Waugh. They buy their food from shops; they eat (at tables or in wicker chairs) sumptuous breakfasts washed down with ale and coffee; delicious al fresco luncheons; and suppers accompanied by cheeses and wines. There’s one scene that’s always troubled me: Rat and Mole sit at ease by the fire in Rat’s bijou sitting room; they are apparently alone in the house when ‘dinner is served.’ By whom? This is not the only passage that suggests servants are one of the several luxuries these mild-mannered beasts enjoy. In a wonderful 2009 article Rosemary Hill regards the book as a sigh of nostalgia for the lost world of Edwardian suburbia, when boating and picnicking filled the long days of the leisured classes. The story, too, turns on behaviour more proper to adult humans than rats and toads: dangerous addictions and excesses, fraud, theft, imprisonment, escape, and in the end, violent overthrow of interlopers. Charmed though I always am by this book (Kenneth Grahame’s prose is radiant) it’s certainly not because it offers any real insight into animal life.

The rabbits of Watership, on the other hand, are wild animals whose lives are governed by weather, terrain, predation, and instinct. They speak, but they speak a language called Lapine. They have social structures, but these resemble the structures that abide in real warrens, according to Richard Adams’ careful research. The human world, and even other animals, are utterly strange to them. They are a band of brothers who come to value each other deeply, but they never transcend their animal desire to fight each other in mating season, or their animal pragmatism about defacating and breeding. (One can’t imagine the genteel Rat even excusing himself to use the lavatory, and certainly not courting a lady-rat; he and his friends are indubitably bachelors.) Inhabiting the rabbits’ world, far from evoking nostalgia, makes you feel how alien and menacing humans and ‘man things’ are to wild creatures.

Yet, without disowning this animality, Watership Down is an intensely political novel as well. It’s about freedom; about the treacherous compromise between safety and liberty. In their travels, Hazel and Fiver and their companions come across two other warrens: one is the Brave New World of rabbitry, where the rabbits are sleek sophisticates who engage in a conspiracy of glazed silence about their mortal danger. The other is 1984. A highly militarised warren run by a lapine tyrant, Efrafa is full of pitiful creatures, brutally oppressed in the name of safety. Hazel’s band comes to embody the perils and the promise of true freedom.

The Willows are a world away from such political concerns. The animals’ highest goods and deepest joys come from eating, drinking, communing, and resting. Their freedom is simply the fresh air in which they pursue their simple pleasures. Looked at one way, that makes them just the parasitic aristos for whom they stand in. Looked at another, it makes them creatures in the best, blessed sense.

WP: All leaflife and starshower

2012-05-04T02:00:16Z

A couple of weeks ago I came across this extraordinary little poem by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose translater is the American poet Christian Wiman - of whom, more soon.

In 1934, Mandelstam was arrested for writing an epigram critical of Stalin. He and his wife were exiled, then later given a reprieve. He wrote that only in Russia was poetry taken seriously: "Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" During the Great Purge, he was again arrested for anti-Soviet views, and sent to a Siberian concentration camp where, in December 1938, he died.

This poem was written on 4 May, 1937. It's one of the best expressions I've ever seen of the fleeting fitful beauty of being alive, the futility and absolute urgency of trying to say what it is. It has added plangency given Mandelstam only lived another nineteen months. This poem, ‘And I was Alive,’ is going straight to the top shelf of poems that help me live.

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird–cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self–shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.

WP: Not unwelcome waves the wood

2012-04-27T21:21:12Z

It's undoubtedly time for some Autumn poetry. There's Keats, of course, and Shelley and Blake. There's Rossetti and Browning and Stevenson and Frost. Almost everyone who's put poem to paper has written about this stirring season. One of the lesser known offerings comes from eighteenth-century Scottish minister and editor, John Logan. His ecstatic poem (the full version contains no fewer than 26 exclamation marks), "A visit to the country in Autumn" contains some of the cliches of Autumn, but has I think some fine and lovely phrases, and deserves a place at Autumn's altar. These are five of its nine stanzas.

 ‘Tis passed! No more the summer blooms!
	Ascending in the rear,
Behold congenial Autumn comes,
	The sabbath of the year!
What time thy holy whispers breathe,
The pensive evening shade beneath,
	And twilight consecrates the floods;
While Nature strips her garment gay,
And wears the vesture of decay,
O, let me wander through the sounding woods.

Ah! well known streams! Ah! wonted groves,
	Still pictured in my mind!
Oh! Sacred scene of youthful loves,
	Whose image lives behind!
While sad I ponder on the past,
The joys that must no longer last;
	The wild flower strown on Summer’s bier,
The dying music of the grove,
And the last elegies of love, 
 Dissolve the soul and draw the tender tear!  

Alas! misfortune's cloud unkind 
	May summer soon o’ercast; 
And cruel fate's untimely wind 
	All human beauty blast! 
The wrath of Nature smites our bowers, 
And promised fruits, and cherish d flowers,
	The hopes of life in embryo sweeps; 
Pale o’er the ruins of his prime, 
And desolate before his time, 
In silence sad the mourner walks and weeps! 

Relentless power! whose fated stroke 
	O’er wretched man prevails! 
Ha! love's eternal chain is broke, 
	And friendship's covenant fails! 
Upbraiding forms! a moment's ease 
O memory! how shall I appease 
	The bleeding shade, the unlaid ghost? 
What charm can bind the gushing eye? 
What voice console the incessant sigh, 
And everlasting longings for the lost?

Yet not unwelcome waves the wood 
	That hides me in its gloom, 
While lost in melancholy mood 
	I muse upon the tomb. 
Their chequered leaves the branches shed, 
Whirling in eddies o’er my head, 
	They sadly sigh, that Winter’s near: 
The warning voice I hear behind, 
That shakes the wood without a wind, 
And solemn sounds the death-bell of the year.

Avatars

2012-04-24T06:36:53Z

I'm not much given to personal vanity, but a traumatic passport photo has unmasked a hidden streak of narcissism. (It was really, really awful.)

It made me think about how in this digital age, where private, public and celebrated are on a compressed continuum, we all exercise control over our image. We painstakingly construct online personas (I'm doing it now!) and make our happy snaps the avatars onto which we project our constructed selves. We press our social intercourse between the leaves of a book of faces.

It also made me think about a line I gleaned from somebody else's online persona, that the self has replaced the soul in modern culture. This goes beyond social media. It's about the way the good life has come to mean organic food, exercise and calorie counting, renewable energy, work-life balance, self-help in its manifold forms. The good life used to be much more to do with the ground of being than the mechanics of living. And almost nothing to do with faces.

So, as photos become the avatars of our constructed selves, our constructed selves become the avatars of our neglected souls: the projection of who we would like to be onto what we think the world demands of us. A bad passport photo (really, really bad, seriously) becomes far more traumatic than it would be if I accepted that it was not, nor was ever meant to be, a window on my soul.

Parks and gardens

2012-04-24T06:35:25Z

Another great American environmentalist has been since early last year among my favourite poets. Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, essayist and poet who has had much to say about conservation, climate and creation. Like Ansel Adams, he calls beauty as witness to our responsibility. Here's his 'Speech to the Garden Club of America' - a speech in verse.

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

WP: Live lifted up in light

2012-04-21T09:32:07Z

The Tetons - Snake River

Ben’s Autumn photos made me think of his favourite photographer, Ansel Adams, who died on 22 April 1984, and Adams’ collaboration with writer and critic Nancy Wynne Newhall. She also worked with Edward Weston, but it was the text she wrote for the 1960 exhibition This is the American Earth that earned her the most acclaim. Adams’ photographs of the American West, particularly of Yosemite national park, made a lasting and inestimable contribution to conservation in the middle decades of the last century - and all in black and white. He combined a conservationist’s zeal with an extraordinary sensitivity to the spiritual and the sublime. He complained that sublime photographs were all too often accompanied by lacklustre text. So when he found Nancy Newhall, he rejoiced. He called the text she wrote for American Earth “paeonic and evocative ... explicit and miraculous.” Her lines should be read “as though they were parts of Genesis.” She certainly added lustre to Adams’ already luminous world.

You shall know the night - its space, its light, its music.

You shall see earth sink in darkness and the universe appear.

No roof shall shut you from the presence of the moon.

You shall see mountains rise in the transparent shadow before dawn.

You shall see - and feel! - first light, and hear a ripple in the stillness.

You shall enter the living shelter of the forest.

You shall walk where only the wind has walked before.

You shall know immensity,

and see continuing the primeval forces of the world.

You shall know not one small segment but the whole of life, strange, miraculous, living, dying, changing.

You shall face immortal challenges; you shall dare,

delighting, to pit your skill, courage, and wisdom

against colossal facts.

You shall live lifted up in light;

you shall move among clouds.

You shall see storms arise, and, drenched and deafened,

shall exult in them.

You shall top a rise and behold creation.

And you shall need the tongues of angels

to tell what you have seen.

Were all learning lost, all music stilled,

Man, if these resources still remained to him,

could again hear singing in himself

and rebuild anew the habitations of his thought.

Tenderly now

let all men

turn to the earth.

WP: Fair Silence, fall, and set me free

2012-04-15T03:39:34Z

This poem resonates with me today. It’s CS Lewis: ‘The Apologist’s Evening Prayer.’ As religion becomes more and more a public possession, we need reminding that the public square is not its natural home. The narrow gate and the needle’s eye are good correctives.

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and needle's eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

On Dickens (Part 2): Heavenly creatures

2012-04-12T02:00:06Z

Reading Dickens at university, I found myself searching, thirsting in the end, for a female character that united strength with charm in something resembling reality. All I could see were grotesques at one extreme, coquettes at the other, and in the middle spineless, simpering, mawkish Agnes Wickfield or Ada Clare - veritable Victorian angels. Though there were many to amuse, I couldn’t find a single female character that inspired admiration. The only one that came close was Mrs Bagnet in Bleak House, but even she was a caricature.

Miriam Margulyes’ one-woman show places the women in Dickens’ life alongside the women in his books. As an answer to my question about where these women came from, it’s illuminating, and a little bit scary. A writer of comic genius and apparently boundless sympathy, he was a man of strong, strange and often cruel passion towards women.

It begins with his mother, who famously sent him back to the blacking factory after his father rescued him. He wrote with palpable bitterness, “I never afterwards forgot, I never can forget, I never shall forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.” She is punished for this in the character of Mrs Nickleby, one of the most unwise, unfeeling mothers to be found in his work.

Then there’s his first love, Maria Beadnell, on whom Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield is based. Pretty, silly, shallow and utterly self-absorbed, Dora dies early in their marriage. After a horrifying reunion with Maria years afterward, Dickens resurrected Dora as Little Dorrit’s Flora Finching. Flora is Dora twenty years older, fatter and giddier. A spoiled and artless girl might be enchanting, but to be spoiled and artless in rotund middle age was unforgivable.

Catherine Hogarth DickensPerhaps most disquieting is Dickens’ ultimate marriage to Catherine Hogarth, who doesn’t seem to have warranted a literary vengeance, though Dickens came to regard his marriage to her as his greatest mistake. Two of Catherine’s sisters lived with the couple, first Mary and then Georgina; Dickens was deeply attached to both these women, but less and less to his wife, from whom he separated after 22 years of marriage. It’s hard to imagine and impossible to guess what estranged them, but it looks as though an original personal incompatibility was compounded by Catherine’s severe depression.

This seems to have begun after the birth of their first baby, whom Catherine had trouble breast-feeding. Mary wrote, “every time she sees her baby she has a fit of crying.” Not long afterwards, Mary died suddenly, causing Catherine to have the first of several miscarriages, and causing Dickens acute misery from which he never recovered. He wore her ring and carried a lock of her hair, called her a “perfect creature,” and expressed a wish to be buried in her grave. Whatever state of mind this portended in Dickens, it cannot have conduced to Catherine’s mental health. Nine more children followed, included a baby girl that died at nine months. Dickens seemed baffled by the arrival of so many children. Of their last, a son, he said: “on the whole I could have dispensed with him.” Soon after this they separated, surrounded by rumours of Dickens' infidelity.

Perhaps the most heart-tearing glimpse into the truth of their marriage comes from a comment Dickens’ friend Henry Morley made after he had met Mrs Dickens. “One sees in five minutes that she loves her husband and her children, and has a warm heart for anybody who won't be satirical.” How was such a temper to be the wife of the greatest satirist of the age?

It seems she looked in vain, as I did, for something in Dickens that would allow women who were less than angelic to escape satire.