Malcolm Guite in the New Year - 'Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace' (Lord Tennyson)

 What better way to see in the New Year than with the scholar, poet, and musician Malcolm Guite, in his cosy study sipping his whisky and puffing away on his pipe. And all to the sound of the majestic 106th part of Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. The message is powerful, full of what we need in the world; ringing out all that is old and worn and destructive, and ringing in a life of renewal.

As Malcolm points out, there is a long tradition of Church bell-ringing in England, and the very intricate art of 'change-ringing', in which, as he says, 'the sequences of the bells alter on a sort of mathematical principle'. 

Here is the link to the short video, and below, the full text of the poem he recites. He then goes on to recite one of his own poems about the deep effect on him of the sound of church bells in contrast to the "electronic squawking" coming from our mobile devices:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

   The flying cloud, the frosty light:

   The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

   The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind

   For those that here we see no more;

   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

   And ancient forms of party strife;

   Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

   The faithless coldness of the times;

   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

   The civic slander and the spite;

   Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

   Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

   Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

New poem by John F. Deane

 A while ago I was asked by the Temenos Academy Review to write a review of a collection of poems by the Irish poet John F. Deane, called Achill Island, which I strongly recommend:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Achill-Island-John-F-Deane/dp/1782188991/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2WYKPRIKS377E&dchild=1&keywords=john+f+deane&qid=1615188704&sprefix=john+f+deane%2Caps%2C381&sr=8-2

 It was a wonderful time, because I got to discover this extraordinary poet. He has just released this new poem, which I would like to share on the blog. It finds great resonance with our times, of health crisis, lockdowns, curfews, and restricted freedoms - a time unique in human history, all the more for it being a planetary event. Deane has responded beautifully to the sense of release brought by openness to the natural world, the sense of "emergence" at last. Here it is:

Ted Hughes: The Birthday Letters

Ted Hughes is widely regarded as one of the greatest post-war British poets. He came from Yorkshire, and wrote mainly nature poetry, expressing the ruggedness and an often dark side to the animal world. He is also known for having been the husband of American poetess Sylvia Plath, until she took her life in 1963. Late on in life, and many years after his marriage to Plath, Hughes wrote a powerful set of poems addressed to her, published in 1998, and called Birthday Letters. This verse stands out starkly from his other work, and is deeply intimate and personal, expressing his love and pain, as he tries to come to terms with this difficult period of his life.

By following the link below, you will find the deeply symbolic poem, 'Sam', about an incident during which Sylvia Plath loses control of her horse:

Poetry by Vernon Watkins - for HK and anyone who loves a good poet!

Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was a Welsh poet, translator and painter. During his lifetime he was highly regarded, though never at the height of fashion. He has since been rather neglected, unlike his friend and fellow Welshman, Dylan Thomas. Watkins took poetry very seriously, from his ealiest years: "I was already writing poems when I was seven or eight, and between that age and twelve bought the English poets one by one". These early years were marked by great ambition and determination to become recognised, but he came to care little, if not at all, for fame or recognition, only for the vision and craftsmanship needed in all good poetry. This is grounded, in Watkins' verse, in an uncompromising modernity, at the same time as drawing on tradition. As he said: "The fountain, what is it? What is ancient, what is fresh".

Here is a sonnet he wrote about poetry itself, from Fidelities (1967):

The prose purveyors of doubt, the dismantlers of

Ecstasy, who traffic without a god

In broken metre, would have their Pegasus shod

Wth discord, not strict numbers. At love they scoff,

And then, in the revolution of anti-love,

Unsheathe chaos, the death of the period,

While a new Sibyl, shrieking above her tripod,

Proclaims transformation, treachery, trough.

Yet even the disenchanted, disordered, fret

For lost order. Breakers recall rhyme,

Anchors weighed, and divine proportions set.

As hawk hovers, as compass needle in time

Flies unswerving, steadied, where the stars climb,

Fixed laws hallow what none can forget.

Review of Achill: The Island - by John F. Deane

There are still many very good poets writing today. One of my favourites is the Irishman John F. Deane, who is greatly influenced by Kathleen Raine herself, and by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, the Romantics, and many more besides. I would highly recommend this beautiful collection inspired by his island of birth, off the coast of Ireland. It contains twenty-five remarkable poems, illustrated by John Behan.

A Tribute to Kathleen Raine, her work and vision - Paris, March 2021

We are organising an international event around the work of the poet Kathleen Raine which will take place in Paris in March 2021. It will include guest speakers from France and abroad, talks on her poetry, her essays and autobiographies, her work on Yeats and Blake and other poets, as well as "tables rondes" on translations of her work into French and the Temenos Academy, which she founded in the early nineteen nineties. Here are the links to the Sorbonne pages for further information:

Alec Guinness reading 'Journey of the Magi'

For those who don't know the connection between Star Wars and T.S. Eliot...

Here is a reading of Journey of the Magi by the English actor Alec Guinness. He can also be heard in a famous recording of Eliot's Four Quartets. He has quite an old style of delivery, but full of subtlety and delicate feeling for nuance. 

Alec Guinness is one of Britain's greatest stage and screen actors. He was a favourite of the director David Lean, who gave him star roles in his 1940's cinema adaptations of Dickens' Oliver Twist (playing Fagin) and Great Expectations (as Herbert Pocket), as well as the epic Doctor Zhivago. Then came fame for a new generation of cinema goers when he played the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first ever Star Wars film released in 1977. 

Click on the video link below to hear the poem:

Journey of the Magi - T. S. Eliot

Happy Christmas to all visitors!

 Whatever our beliefs, we can hardly fail to be moved and simply struck by the greatness of T.S. Eliot's poem Journey of the Magi, published in 1927. It is a monument of Modernist poetry, a monologue by one of the Magi journeying from Palestine to visit the newborn Christ-child; a story of alienation, pain, exile, and curious homecoming where nothing can be as before. The Modernists wanted to break with tradition in the early 20th century, but it could never happen entirely. Eliot was one of the many Modernists whose culture embraced hundreds of years of Western tradition, which he reworked and integrated in brilliantly original ways; in free verse, modern existential questioning,  and an idiosyncratic conversational tone combined with lofty poetic speech. Here is the complete text:

Hilaire Belloc's 'Tarantella'

Hilaire Belloc, who wrote The Servile State quoted in the post below, was a popular poet in his day, and is famous for collections for children, including The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, More Beasts (for Worse Children), The Modern Traveller and Cautionary Tales for Children.

When I was child, I was given this poem at school, 'Tarantella', to learn by heart and recite in front of the class. I remember the sensation distinctly; I think it was the first time I really connected with poetry, because it is so musical, almost incantatory, and the rhythm in the middle part so vigorously expresses the movements of dance. I loved it, and still do!

More of Autumn - Lawrence's 'Autumn Rain'

As a teenager I got obsessed with D. H. Lawrence, largely thanks to my A-level English teacher Mr 'Laddie' Laing, who remains the best teacher I ever had. He made everything passionately interesting, and we read together the very great novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. We began with Women in Love, although chronologically it comes later, and I think it is the better introduction to Lawrence, if not the earlier Sons and Lovers. Later, I came to appreciate Lawrence the modernist poet. In his writings he wanted to break through the constraints of Victorian morality still prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century with a fresh expression of sexuality. This brought him condemnation as a 'pornographer', and Britain only allowed publication of his more explicit novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) in 1960 after the trial of Penguin publishers.
He saw mankind as having taken a wrong turn in excessive industrialisation, wanting to dominate and control others and the natural world, trapped in a mechanistic way of seeing the world. This links with thoughts on Shakespeare's more animated nature of Sonnet 97 below.

Autumn Rain was first published in The Egoist under the editorship of Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, in February 1917. It is written in free verse, a sign of modernist poetry at the outset of the twentieth century. Lawrence captures the vitality of the natural world as a dynamic creation, and here he interestingly inverts the world, placing in the 'heaven' what you would see below, fields, sheaves of corn, a 'muffled floor', seeds dropped down in a transformative process as rain on the face. The 'dead men that are slain' might be a reference to the industrial slaughter going on in the trenches at the time, or not. In any case, the image embodies the pain we feel, 'the grain of tears', 'the sheaves of pain', which are gently transformed by the workings of the sky as the pain is "winnowed soft". The last lines remain ambiguous, as does the whole poem, but I feel a sense of the gentle rain falling as a balm to our individual and collective hurt, the manna of autumn's healing power.

The Symbol

Here are two of my favourite Yeats poems, dreamy romantic ones. They show that the imaginative world Tolkien evokes, of castles, swords, knights and a host of other ‘archaic’ things are not archaic at all but still speak to us down the ages perhaps more strongly than what we know as modern. This is because they are not so much ‘old’ as ageless, and this is an important distinction. There is a quality about the cup, the stone, the sword, the throne, the tree, the sky, the unicorn, the lion, the eagle, the plough, which touches us in some fundamental place. It’s not ‘old fashioned’ or reactionary. And does not, of course, exclude references to things of the modern world; yet these images-become-symbols are the DNA of the imagination. They were there before we were, and have always been.

This is what Kathleen Raine says in her essay On the Symbol: 

“We should do wrong if we think of symbols as single poetic images, used to obtain some literary effect; rather symbol is a language in each of whose parts a whole is implied, and each symbol in some measure makes known to us that whole, as a whole, and in its wholeness...”(...) “none of these, surely, were deliberately chosen by the poets, but, rather, chose them; they come, not as allegory in which the poet searches for an apt symbol for some abstract idea – the sword of justice or the scales of equity – but rather as epiphanies, awe-inspiring glimpses that move us deeply and inexplicably. These images seem put into our hands like clues which we are invited to follow back and back, for they draw us irresistibly as by magic; and this is no less so when we encounter them in nature than in dreams of vision. By their numinous nature we recognise them; and not with academic curiosity do we pursue them to their mysterious source, but as we follow the beloved person, unable to keep away, or watch all night before a closed door hoping for a glimpse or a sign. We live under the power of their compulsion: for they do not present themselves, like academic problems, from outside, as tasks to be taken up by will-power, to which we must drive ourselves. They arise, rather, as living impulses, urges of our own being and therefore compelling. We cannot rest until we have followed them to their source, or as far as our understanding allows.”

What a beautiful and meaningful comparison between the compelling symbol and the beloved. The beloved’s face doesn’t “equal” anything, it isn’t a conundrum to get your head around. It draws us ever onward, opening up ineffable, immeasurable vistas.

 

The Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

WHEN my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded from the world;

The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled

In shadowy pools, when armies fled;

The love-tales wrought with silken thread

By dreaming ladies upon cloth

That has made fat the murderous moth;

The roses that of old time were

Woven by ladies in their hair,

The dew-cold lilies ladies bore

Through many a sacred corridor

Where such grey clouds of incense rose

That only God's eyes did not close:

For that pale breast and lingering hand

Come from a more dream-heavy land,

A more dream-heavy hour than this;

And when you sigh from kiss to kiss

I hear white Beauty sighing, too,

For hours when all must fade like dew,

But flame on flame, and deep on deep,

Throne over throne where in half sleep,

Their swords upon their iron knees,

Brood her high lonely mysteries.

Aspens

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees

William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793)

The Romantics arose much earlier in England than in France, in response to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, and their legacy has been immense for later, even modern artists. We still very much have a Romantic turn of mind when it comes to Nature. A century on from them, Edward Thomas wrote this beautiful poem called “Aspens”, a tree whose small bright green leaves give the impression of shimmering, or trembling, in a gentle breeze (hence its French name, le tremble). An Old English name for it was cwicbeam, literally "quick-tree". Thomas, like many of his generation, and those before like John Clare, and Thomas Hardy, found Mankind’s insensitivity towards our natural world, and the rapid disappearance of age-old communities, difficult to bear. The poet sees the trees as living, participating in the local community of inn and smithy, and as a natural embodiment of his own grieving for its loss, grief over “lightless pane”, “footless road”, “silent smithy”, “silent inn”. Both tree and poet “unreasonably grieve[s]” in the eyes of the world. But “we cannot other than an aspen be...”. The poets have a duty to speak, whether the world listens or not, because they see metaphorically the deeper dimensions to reality. Thomas’s poem expresses the universal feeling of loss with great delicacy. In this respect too it is “Romantic”, as the Romantics hearkened back to an idyll, but in another it is twentieth century, Modernist, in its broken rhythms. 

All day and night, save winter, every weather,

Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,

The aspens at the cross-roads talk together

Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

Out of the blacksmith's cavern comes the ringing

Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn

The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing—

The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,

And over lightless pane and footless road,

Empty as sky, with every other sound

Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails

In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,

In tempest or the night of nightingales,

To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

And it would be the same were no house near.

Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear

But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves

We cannot other than an aspen be

That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,

Or so men think who like a different tree.

 

W. B. Yeats

Difficult to resist. I just have to publish a Yeats poem.

A slight one for starters, but perhaps not so slight. It is very beautiful, and typical of Yeats' later writing. It was written in 1938, and is one of his last. An irreverence, a sort of "mask", beneath which you can feel the true reverence of the heart. To begin with, it is deliberately unlyrical, as suits title and subject matter, but in the last four lines in come alternating, lilting tetrametre and trimetre, as the poet expresses his true longing, for beauty. Although a Senator at one point in his life, Yeats preferred to avoid directly mentioning politics in most of his poetry, in favour of what his friend the artist AE (George Russell) would call "the politics of eternity" as opposed to "the politics of time". Here, what more worthy subject in our age of conflict? Love, nostalgia and tenderness, at seeing a girl standing there:

'The Hollow Men' by T. S. Eliot

The Hollow Men


Mistah Kurtz - he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Hollow Men - spoken

T. S. Eliot

Synchronicity... In two conversations, with two friends, over the past two days, T. S. Eliot came up. So I followed the golden thread to one of my favourite poems, the incredibly deep and powerful The Hollow Men. It can only strike a chord in us today, as it has since its creation following on from The Waste Land. Although a dark poem, facing the fragmentation and sometimes apparent meaninglessness of modern life and the modern world, at the same time it brings us light. We are made starkly aware of our hollow selves on the edge of the abyss created by our collective disconnection from perennial sources of transcendence. Broken verse, snatches of nursery rhymes, unfinished lines from the Lord's Prayer...

Here are two very different readings! One by the poet himself. Do not be put off by his rather antiquated mannered speech, the solemn recitation in Eliot's own unique anglo-American accent. Perhaps only the poet himself can touch in his own voice the depths of his creation, however imperfect the rendering. 

And the other, possibly more accessible;  Marlon Brando as Kurz, reciting the poem in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now.