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POEM: H.D.’s “The Gift”

12 June 2013

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THE GIFT

Instead of pearls—a wrought clasp—
a bracelet—will you accept this?
You know the script—
you sill start, wonder:
what is left, what phrase
after last night? This:

The world is yet unspoiled for you,
you wait, expectant—
you are like the children
who haunt your own steps
for chance bits—a comb
that may have slipped,
a gold tassel, unravelled,
plucked from your scarf,
twirled by your slight fingers
into the street—
a flower dropped.

Do not think me unaware,
I who have snatched at you
as the street-child clutched
at the seed-pearls you spilt
that hot day
when your necklace snapped.

Do not dream that I speak
as one defrauded of delight,
sick, shaken by each heart-beat
or paralyzed, stretched at length,
who gasps:
these ripe pears
are bitter to the taste,
this spiced wine, poison, corrupt.
I cannot walk—
who would walk?
Life is a scavenger’s pit—I escape—
I only, rejecting it,
lying here on this couch.

Your garden sloped to the beach,
myrtle overran the paths,
honey and amber flecked each leaf,
the citron-lily head—
one among many—
weighed there, over-sweet.

The myrrh-hyacinth
spread across low slopes,
violets streaked black ridges
through the grass.

The house, too, was like this,
over painted, over lovely—
the world is like this.

Sleepless nights,
I remember the initiates,
their gesture, their calm glance,
I have heard how in rapt thought,
in vision, they speak
with another race
more beautiful, more intense than this.
I could laugh—
more beautiful, more intense?

Perhaps that other life
is contrast always to this.
I reason:
I have lived as they
in their inmost rites—
they endure the tense nerves
through the moment of ritual.
I endure from moment to moment—
days pass all alike,
tortured, intense.

This I forgot last night:
you must not be blamed,
it is not your fault;
as a child, a flower—any flower
tore my breast—
meadow-chicory, a common grass-tip,
a leaf shadow, a flower tint
unexpected on a winter branch.

I reason:
another life holds what this lacks,
a sea, unmoving, quiet—
not forcing our strength
to rise to it, beat on beat—
a stretch of sand,
no garden beyond, strangling
with its myrrh-lilies—
a hill, not set with black violets
but stones, stones, bare rocks,
dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty
to distract—to crowd
madness upon madness.

Only a still place
and perhaps some outer horror
some hideousness to stamp beauty,
a mark—no changing it now—
on our hearts.

I send no string of pearls,
no bracelet—accept this.

—H.D.

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FRESH LOOKS: Laura (Riding) Jackson’s “The Wind Suffers”

7 June 2013

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THE WIND SUFFERS

The wind suffers of blowing,
The sea suffers of water,
And fire suffers of burning,
And I of a living nature.

As stone suffers of stoniness,
As light of its shiningness,
As birds of their wingedness,
So I of my whoness.

And what the cure of all this?
What the not and not suffering?
What the better and later of this?
What the more me of me?

How for the pain-world to be
More world and no pain?
How for the old rain to fall
More wet and more dry?

How for the wilful blood to run
More salt-red and sweet-white?
And how for me in my actualness
To more shriek and more smile?

By no other miracles,
By the same knowing poison,
By an improved anguish,
By my further dying.

The general deadening risk of anaphoric structure in “The Wind Suffers” is interrogated by Jackson’s abandonment of connectives and conjunctions (‘And what the cure of all this?’ ‘How for the old rain to fall,’ ‘What the more me of me?’), her refusal to yield to the gerund (or, if you like, her refusal to be ‘presently progressive’), and, most importantly, a palpable sincerity, an existential thrownness that speaks to both meaning and grammar.

‘The wind suffers of blowing’—how immediately early Renaissance paintings spring to mind, featuring Aeolus or Zephyr with pink and puffy cheeks; on the heels of that, I chide myself for anthropomorphism relating to this natural thing, the wind; as a lasting coda, I wonder how wind can ‘blow’ without a force to expel or propel it (trees can be ‘blown’ by wind, obviously), and what it must mean for the wind to be ‘made,’ and in being made, suffer. This quandary grows knives following:

The sea suffers of water,
And fire suffers of burning,
And I of a living nature.

Notice how cleverly Jackson mixes gerunds (and thus paces) here: ‘The sea suffers of water’—that is, of the thing which composes it, which defines its ‘seaness,’ without which it would cease to be a sea—the fire of ‘burning,’ without which it cannot be ‘progressively present’; and ‘I,’ the speaker, ‘of a living nature,’ a nature—a manner of being—that is defined by getting on. In all quarters, it is the pressure to be extant that causes suffering, and the action of life is shown as rooted in plain ‘living,’ subsistence, implying that even stasis is restive with the demand to ‘live on.’ This collapse of subsistence and action is further illuminated, in the next stanza, by the trials of ‘stone,’ ‘light,’ the bird for her ‘wingedness’ and the speaker, again, for her ‘whoness’—the next thing that her ‘living nature’ demands is a definition, apparently, an object to which her signifier points. 

The speaker begins to experience psychic vertigo, listing barely intelligible oppositions (‘What the better and later of this?’ or ‘How for the old rain to fall/More wet and more dry?’) and resolutions (the ‘pain-world’ is solved by becoming ‘more world and no pain’) as the experiential ‘outside’ pressures her senses: one can almost see the speaker sitting in a tight corner, head-in-hands. It is only through something like defiance, a refusal to either placate or be placated

And how for me in my actualness
To more shriek and more smile?

that the formerly boundless suffering (that is, suffering that began at conscious ‘being’) is confronted: it is by ‘the same knowing poison’ (by the poison that already ‘knows’? by the poison known as Knowing?) and an ‘improved anguish’ that the speaker approaches cessation, the end of being. ‘Improved anguish’ . . . is this, via Jean-Paul Sartre, embracing the verges of death while one lives? an anguish that lives to unapologetically reveal what binds anguish to being?

Which, in the second case, may be ‘everything.’

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Stephanie Rose Adams’ “The Honey Jar”

28 May 2013

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Salient in Ezra Pound’s too-profuse stream of Modernist poetic dictates is his admonishment that poetry be ‘as well written as prose.’ What’s most amazing about the surety of his directive is its absolute vagary: Moby-Dick is not ‘well written’ in the way that Austen is, nor Melmoth the Wanderer, nor Walden, nor even “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” This may account for the dissipation of Pound’s Imagist group in general; more likely, however, such attempts to make of poetry a calculus fail because, as Dickinson intimates, the ‘Possibility’ of poetry is ‘a fairer house than Prose’—the kind of prose that imagines itself erected on reason alone, at least (which, of course, Moby-Dick or To the Lighthouse or Wuthering Heights never did).

Stephanie Rose Adams’ “The Honey Jar” strikes me as a poem whose power accumulates via ‘possibility,’ ambience, charges. Lain down ‘dripping’ in darkness for a century, this ‘strange one’—who acts as a kind of ghost protagonist in “The Honey Jar,” commanding the pace of the poem from a deeply inhabited silence, one with the force of a relic—is importantly devoid of a readable ‘history’ outside his dying. He projects from ‘death’s hard yellow womb,’ ‘mellified . . . folded and macerated’—Adams’ refusal to locate the subject as king or peasant or regular unfortunate transforms a would-be colonialist exhumation narrative into Death’s—or is it Sublimnity’s?—paean.

Adams handles the resulting ‘reveal’ (‘the underground-of-man, the sea’) like an adept psychologist: the ‘cold’ fear of the tradesmen becomes ‘feign[ed] cool waiting and looking about’—one can’t help but recognize the method of blasé repose that keeps us, ourselves, distant and safe from the sincerity that wonder demands. The echo of Dickinson’s [372]

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

is likewise impossible to ignore, whatever its origin. 

Of the many things the resultant ‘lingering stink of the living’ might imply—that the once-life and resonance of this mummified man might stay with the tradesmen, that their own continuance as men living in the world is suddenly more electric to their senses—I like to sit with one result of “The Honey Jar” best: that, given the chance to investigate the historical antecedent of the poem (if there was one), the poem itself, its own ‘distant color/come too near’ was absolutely adequate; that Adams’ metaphysik, stanza by stanza, convinced me its particular method of ‘telling’ is knowledge enough.

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POEM: Steven Spender’s “The Truly Great”

24 April 2013

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THE TRULY GREAT

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

—Stephen Spender

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For Valentine’s Day: Joanna Klink’s “I Would Remain by Night with You”

14 February 2013

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I WOULD REMAIN BY NIGHT WITH YOU

 

I would remain by night with you

who, having held me once, wrapped everything I knew

into my sleeping body’s hold and held fast and stayed.

You shuttled in sleep against me and away, not sleeping,

beached and exhausted by wine and rushes from

another life whose body my body meant to alter.

But I am wayfaring and recently wrecked;

I understand the cost of pulling free from what once loved you.

I would remain by night with you, if the night is clear enough

to see by, and the wind light enough to draw the stars

in the skin’s skies open, and the waves you sensed

through the dress in the wind are real, and only mine.

 

—Joanna Klink

Picture by J. Lou.

POEM: Sylvia Plath’s “Words”

13 February 2013

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WORDS

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road—

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

—Sylvia Plath

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POEM: Emily Dickinson’s [458]

8 January 2013

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[458]

Like Eyes that looked on Wastes—
Incredulous of Ought
But blank—and steady Wilderness—
Diversified by Night—

Just Infinities of Nought—
As far as it could see—
So looked the face I looked upon—
So looked itself—on Me—

I offered it no Help—
Because the Cause was Mine—
The Misery a Compact
As hopeless—as divine—

Neither—would be absolved—
Neither would be a Queen—
Without the Other—Therefore—
We perish—tho’ We reign—

 
—Emily Dickinson

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Robin Robertson’s “The Fishermen’s Farewell”

4 January 2013

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After several weeks of quiet, Robertson’s poem is just the place for the PACK to rile again. I hope everyone had a happy round of holidays.

I find this piece a moving (‘enchanting’ seems too buoyant an adjective) meditation on the nature of itinerancy, and, perhaps following, a poem couched in the conflict of weight, of sylph and earth. Robertson’s first two couplets are consonance-heavy (‘foam-flecked’ and ‘blue banners’ and ‘whipping west’), and my association of that stylistic choice with fourteenth century conventions (in, say, “Piers Plowman”), lends the piece an historical weight; to my taste, this is complimented by the mysterious facelessness of the fishermen, who aspire to be ‘rumor[s],’ ‘smoke-walkers.’ For all their association with the sea and with the insubstantial, the fishermen are heavy here, locked in land. This elemental conflict is marked pointedly in the eighth stanza, where ‘Their houses, heeled over in the sand [. . .] become ‘ruins,’ ‘cairn for kites’: the land-bound leg kicks up in ‘heeling,’ and the cairn is counterpoint to kite in three ways: as flying toy; as memory of spinnaker; as the drifting bird of prey, herself half-pilgrim on any ground.

Robertson’s use of cretic feet like ‘Callanish’ and ‘Dunnottar’ is especially poignant to this elemental end: the fishermen arrive from the sea fresh with puissance, live in abeyance on land, and then return to the ocean with renewed verve; the world of “The Fishermen’s Farewell,” then, occupies the breath between stresses. ‘[D]own by the quay/past empty pots, unmended nets, and boats[,]‘ the fishermen find themselves in a different drink, but wager on that partial conduit to sea nonetheless. I wonder: have seals as symbols ever seemed as grave and wise as this?

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POEM: Ted Hughes’ “The Horses”

22 October 2012

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THE HORSES

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird—
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the mooring—blackening dregs of the brightening grey—
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey—ten together—
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging—
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays—

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

—Ted Hughes