Poetry

One for Sally Porter: ‘Wives In The Sere’, a poem by Thomas Hardy

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herbgarden to be.JPG
Where Nasturtiums Rule, back garden 21 August

I was looking through the Helen Gardiner OBEV  for something to read this morning and came upon this short lyric by Thomas Hardy which I’ve not read before. I was  lingering around TH because I’d noticed a tweet from Sally Porter, English teacher extraordinaire of this parish, in which she was searching twitter for Thomas Hardy memes.

I don’t  think I  really understand what a meme is, but I got Sally’s drift. No memes, she says, mention his novels or poetry… and somewhere in back of my mind, I thought, I’ll mention him.

I suppose it is because I am approaching my 34th wedding anniversary  that I was struck – almost offended I might say – by the title of this poem. ‘Sere’ is a word I only know from Macbeth – ‘My way of life/ Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf’ – and I think it means dried up. Let’s check. Yep, dry or withered. Wives in the Sere. Oh dear, not a good start to Monday. But let’s read it. Let’s read it in the spirit of meeting someone on the road and wanting to know – who are you?

Wives in the Sere

I

Never a careworn wife but shows,
If a joy suffuse her,
Something beautiful to those
Patient to peruse her,
Some one charm the world unknows
Precious to a muser,
Haply what, ere years were foes,
Moved her mate to choose her.

II

But, be it a hint of rose
That an instant hues her,
Or some early light or pose
Wherewith thought renews her –
Seen by him at full, ere woes
Practised to abuse her –
Sparely comes it, swiftly goes,
Time again subdues her.

Some lovely things in this, despite my initial grim feminist annoyance at TH  looking at me in this way. Yes, it felt that personal.

But… thinking of the poem as a fellow-creature I might meet on the road… I know Tom Hardy of old and can forgive him much. After all, he did also write ‘I Look Into My Glass’:

I LOOK into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”

For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

But back to ‘Wives in the Sere’. let’s read the first stanza:

Never a careworn wife but shows,
If a joy suffuse her,
Something beautiful to those
Patient to peruse her,
Some one charm the world unknows
Precious to a muser,
Haply what, ere years were foes,
Moved her mate to choose her.

It is cares that do us in, not just the passing of time. I’ve been reading a book about play (search Just Started) and have in the back if my mind the  famous quote (from variously wrongly attributed sources) ‘children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth,’ (Wikipedia tells me these words  actually come from G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904). Could playfulness be the long-sought anti-ageing serum? But back to the poem.

The poem starts  with the doom-laden bell clanging word  ‘Never’ and yet by the end of the line something else is happening. By the end of the line we get to ‘but shows’. You see the pattern but something can break it. As cares attach to us, so they wear us down. And this is a norm. ‘Never a careworn wife’  points at a class of human beings. There are many of us.  Against ‘careworn’ Thomas Hardy sets ‘joy’ and between them, that small balancing act, tipping point, ‘if’. And by the end of the verse we are back in youth, at the moment when someone fell in love with her – moved to choose her.

But I want to look at the rhymes! I don’t know what it is called when a rhyme spreads over several words, but it is a characteristic of  Hardy’s verse-making:

suffuse her/peruse her/a muser/choose her

You’ve got to be patient, looking at her, to catch this swift rollback of years.  Good that ‘shows’ rhymes with ‘unknows’, isn’t it? Something is shown that the world cannot (or cannot any longer?) see. The world  knew it once, and now it unknows, because the woman is careworn, sere.  But it is still there.

I’m still fighting the idea that ‘years are foes’. I’ve been fighting this thought in this part of Thomas Hardy since I first met it in ‘I look into my glass’ in  thirty-five years ago. Of course, these days, I do look into my glass and I do view (what a horribly true word) my wasting skin. But I fight it! Not so much with anti-ageing cream, though I do  slap that on from time to time, but mentally, I fight it. I do not want to embrace myself as wasted, sere, no, nor feel the years as ‘foes’.  So that’s why I balk at the second verse, where Hardy rubs my nose in it:

But, be it a hint of rose
That an instant hues her,
Or some early light or pose
Wherewith thought renews her –
Seen by him at full, ere woes
Practised to abuse her –
Sparely comes it, swiftly goes,
Time again subdues her.

I know, I know! ‘sparely it comes, swiftly it goes’ that whatever we had that was lovely once and yes, ‘time again subdues her’. Hhm. It is a way of seeing but I want to object. I want something else.  Though when I read this I think of my Nan, Annie Smith, and my grandad Syd, and I wonder if these words work in my memory of them together? I think they do.

But on Saturday when my son arrived and I was in the garden happily lopping off the sere and yellow leaves of old geraniums, he said ‘Mum! you’ve turned yourself into one of those old gardening ladies!’ He meant my  garden boots and unkempt hair ( no time, it might rain soon) and those very unattractive – but no one will be looking at me –  long  khaki shorts, which I’d slightly rolled up, and that handy  but horrible sleeveless deep-pocketed jacket.  Hhm, there I was,  not so much  at that moment care-worn as careless, though perhaps weather-beaten.

And yes –  I had  turned myself into that old gardening lady.  And to my own surprise I later  went to the shops that get-up.  I didn’t care! I  needed some horticultural grit for my gardening game! But you know what, I thought my 21-year-old self would have recognised me. She didn’t care, either.

So what is lost – if it is not simply what Shakespeare called rosy lips and cheeks? What does time wipe out? Well,  yes, it shows in looks, Tom, but as you know,  the damage takes place much deeper. As you say in ‘I look into my glass’

‘…Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;’

and that’s the painful mix. I’m sixty-one and twenty-one at the same time. It’s the grieving that does us in. Let’s not grieve for looks!

Is there anyone writing  poetry about this kind of thing?

Perhaps some Sharon Olds will help?

Paradise Lost for Beginners: in which, with no critical apparatus, and only my own consciousness for a tool, I almost begin to read one of the greatest poems ever written

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jap gdn.JPG
The Japanese Garden at Calderstones, 18 August, after heavy rain

Celebrating 350 years since the first publication of Paradise Lost, tomorrow at Milton’s Cottage, readers will stage a complete promenade-style reading of the poem. I wish I could be there! So in spirit of gratitude to Milton, tomorrow I am going to make a start on  the poem and I plan to add it to my list of things I’m working here on this blog.

The event brings together three things I love, Paradise Lost, reading aloud shared among a group of people, and an ancient and lovely Grade 1 building and its  garden (filled with plants mentioned by Milton.)

For Reader Leaders running Shared Reading  groups in  care homes,  prisons or probation hostels,  community libraries, cafes, or mental health drop-ins, chronic pain clinics or addiction rehabs, Paradise Lost might look a step too far. As someone who has read in each of the above I have to agree, it is no easy sell.  But do not be daunted. This is one of the greatest works of art ever created – why not try it?

Don’t rush into it.  Take it as you’d take a trip to Everest: do some prep, get some fellow-explorers, get some tents and provisions, and get a guide.

But that’s the problem, I think. For Paradise Lost there are no oxygen tanks and very little in the way of guides. And if you chose a guide, very likely, it would be an academic guide, which would make it hard to understand, more like an engineering manual.  We need straight from the box usability.  As anyone who has ever  got a new phone or new computer or even a new coffee maker, knows, straight from the box usability is never as simple as it sounds – you will have to set aside time and brace yourself as you  learn to press the on/off switch. Where is that one/off switch anyway?

I begin by taking courage from  a line in Book 4 of the poem:

And I will place within them as a guide
My Umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear, 
Light after light well us’d they shall attain,
And to the end persisting, safe arrive.

For me, in Paradise Lost, as in any work of literature,  I begin, unashamedly, with myself. I’m reading this to get something huge and complex in my head, to learn some things about being human, and to  go through a long meeting of minds with Milton. Only I can really do that – it is an experience I’m going to have. It’s not something someone else – however  well-versed in history, critically intelligent or well-practiced they are – can do for me.  I have within me this thing Milton calls  an umpire, ‘conscience’, and that piece of human equipment is what I’m going to use to make a start on this poem. I’m going to  ask myself what I think, I’m going to make judgement calls, I’m going to think.  You might be asking the following questions:

Question: There will be many things I don’t understand – doesn’t that matter?

Answer: Reading Milton is like (I imagine ) going to China. You have to expect there will be millions of things you don’t understand.  Don’t let that put you off.  Go!

Question: The language is difficult, I won’t be able to understand it

Answer: That’s not a question. Accept that the language is foreign to you but so what? Read aloud slowly, learn about the rhythm of sentences as you go,  and perhaps listen to other readings (you tube, bbc, naxos)  to get your ear tuned to it. Don’t panic – you’ll get into it.

Question: It’s religious and I’m not!

Answer: Again, not a question. These are simply statements of anxiety! This is the big one, though.  For  people who are not religious there’s a mental, spiritual leap to made. You have to read the poem as a story. Which is how Milton sets it up – it’s a human trying  to explain a puzzling state of affairs in the experience of the world. It’s worth reading Genesis, the first book of the Bible,  Milton’s source,  to have an idea of the differences. You read it as a story but then you let the story come to life.

For the reading, I like the old Longman edition, edited by Alastair Fowler, which is what I used for my first readings of the poem thirty odd years go. I know its shape, can remember particular pages. But Oxford World’s Classics is also good, and there are lots of online texts (I like this one with each line numbered, and this one from Dartmouth College, which has sometimes helpful  notes. Think of those notes as what mountain climbers call pitons.  You might be glad of them, other times they may seem irrelevant or even dangerous).

I’m very choosy – some parts bore me and I skip over them. I’m here for the bits that don’t bore me, that burst into life in my head and seem to offer  creative fire to make me think thoughts about some of the most difficult bits of life. That’s why I’m doing this! I need help.

 

Tomorrow, I’ll make a start on the opening:

BOOK 1

THE ARGUMENT

This first Book proposes, first in brief, the whole Subject, Mans disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was plac’t: Then touches the prime cause of his fall, the Serpent, or rather Satan in the Serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to his side many Legions of Angels, was by the command of God driven out of Heaven with all his Crew into the great Deep. Which action past over, the Poem hasts into the midst of things,presenting Satan with his Angels now fallen into Hell, describ’dhere, not in the Center (for Heaven and Earth may be suppos’d as yet not made, certainly not yet accurst) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest call’d Chaos: Here Satan with his Angels lying on the burning Lake, thunder-struck and astonisht, after a certain space recovers, as from confusion, calls up him who next in Order and Dignity lay by him; they confer of thir miserable fall. Satan awakens all his Legions, who lay till then in the same manner confounded; They rise, thir Numbers, array of Battel, thir chief Leaders nam’d, according to the Idols known afterwards in Canaan and the Countries adjoyning. To these Satan directs his Speech, comforts them with hope yet of regaining Heaven, but tells them lastly of a new World and new kind of Creature to be created, according to an ancient Prophesie or report in Heaven; for that Angels were long before this visible Creation, was the opinion of many ancient Fathers. To find out the truth of this Prophesie, and what to determin thereon he refers to a full Councel. What his Associates thence attempt. Pandemonium the Palace of Satan rises, suddenly built out of the Deep: The infernal Peers there sit in Councel.

OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, [ 5 ]
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill [ 10 ]
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues [ 15 ]
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread [ 20 ]
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence, [ 25 ]
And justifie the wayes of God to men

 

Finally: Paradise Lost  translated…

 

 

 

See the possibilities? Thomas Traherne’s ‘Shadows in the Water’

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japanese anenomes.JPG
Japanese anenomes, white hydraganea and couchgrass, 6 August

I’ve been reading Thomas Traherne’s poem ‘Shadows in the Water’ for a few days: search ‘Traherne’ and you’ll find the posts. Here’s the poem – always worth re-reading aloud to get into the flow;

I’m adding numbers to the stanzas, for easy of reference.

Shadows in the water

1

In unexperienced infancy
Many a sweet mistake doth lie:
Mistake though false, intending true;
A seeming somewhat more than view;
That doth instruct the mind
In things that lie behind,
And many secrets to us show
Which afterwards we come to know.

 

2

Thus did I by the water’s brink
Another world beneath me think;
And while the lofty spacious skies
Reversèd there, abused mine eyes,
I fancied other feet
Came mine to touch or meet;
As by some puddle I did play
Another world within it lay.

3

Beneath the water people drowned,
Yet with another heaven crowned,
In spacious regions seemed to go
As freely moving to and fro:
In bright and open space
I saw their very face;
Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine;
Another sun did with them shine.

4

’Twas strange that people there should walk,
And yet I could not hear them talk;
That through a little watery chink,
Which one dry ox or horse might drink,
We other worlds should see,
Yet not admitted be;
And other confines there behold
Of light and darkness, heat and cold.

5

I called them oft, but called in vain;
No speeches we could entertain:
Yet did I there expect to find
Some other world, to please my mind.
I plainly saw by these
A new antipodes,
Whom, though they were so plainly seen,
A film kept off that stood between.

6

By walking men’s reversèd feet
I chanced another world to meet;
Though it did not to view exceed
A phantom, ’tis a world indeed,
Where skies beneath us shine,
And earth by art divine
Another face presents below,
Where people’s feet against ours go.

7

Within the regions of the air,
Compassed about with heavens fair,
Great tracts of land there may be found
Enriched with fields and fertile ground;
Where many numerous hosts
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.

8

O ye that stand upon the brink,
Whom I so near me through the chink
With wonder see: what faces there,
Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear?
I my companions see
In you, another me.
They seemèd others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.

9

Look how far off those lower skies
Extend themselves! scarce with mine eyes
I can them reach. O ye my friends,
What secret borders on those ends?
Are lofty heavens hurled
’Bout your inferior world?
Are yet the representatives
Of other peoples’ distant lives?

10

Of all the playmates which I knew
That here I do the image view
In other selves, what can it mean?
But that below the purling stream
Some unknown joys there be
Laid up in store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin skin
Is broken, be admitted in.

and had got to  this point in stanza 4:

Strange….

…We other worlds should see,
Yet not admitted be;
And other confines there behold
Of light and darkness, heat and cold.

As I reread this morning I was arrested by the opening of stanza 3 which I’d passed over rather quickly the first time round;

Beneath the water people drowned,
Yet with another heaven crowned,
In spacious regions seemed to go

It was ‘drowned’ that struck me – partly because yesterday I’d been thinking of the oddness of this world being vulnerable to a thirsty ox, and thinking of  in almost sci fi way about ways to move between worlds or modes. That thoughts developed after I’d read ‘drowned’ yesterday and I didn’t go back to  this word – but now with the odd thought firmly established in my mind, as I reread, ‘drowned’  is a clue.

A clue to what? To the strange point of  view Traherne is inhabiting – where he can see two worlds, he’s in a virtual doorway. Looked at from one point of view (this world) the people  he can see are drowning. Looked at from  inside the puddle-world they are not drowning they are ‘freely moving to and fro’.

If I was reading this in a group I’d want to open up a conversation about what we all know about different worlds, different possible worlds, and whether we ever sense them.  I’d be looking for an example.  Time and chance  offer the easiest examples, perhaps. You meet an old boyfriend after twenty years in some unexpected situation, there he is, selling you a new car, working as an ambulance driver, the police detective who comes about your burglary, at a school reunion/  Possible lives – what if we had stayed together? – open up. You look at them briefly. Most likely the possible closes down.

Another example? You were injured in an accident when you went on a VSO project, you lost a hand. Wouldn’t the moment of choosing to go on that adventure keep replaying? Possible lives where you chose something else?  How close are those worlds?

Of course, these examples  are linked by choices, and Traherne’s are not – his are wild and unpredictable  glitches in the universe.  Have you ever  experienced anything like that? Sometimes landscape seems to open up other ways of seeing – for me, very big landscapes – the Lake District, the Bay of Kotor, the Pembroke Coast seem to offer intimations of  the world in a different mode – rather like  in the Coventry Patmore poem last week.

But Traherne’s vision is odder than that. That’s what  I love about Traherne. It’s all very strange for him.

So in stanza 3 Traherne sees that double vision, and in stanza 4 he comments the strangeness of his own (our own) position, ‘strange’ he says ;

We other worlds should see,
Yet not admitted be;
And other confines there behold
Of light and darkness, heat and cold

The experience seems increasingly about vision – I am just noticing all the words that are about seeing, a list which begins early on with the word ‘seeming’; which contains ‘seeing’ ; it’s Traherne’s eyes which are initially tricked by the experience (stanza 2) in stanza 3, ‘saw’, stanza 4 ‘see’, stanza 5 ‘saw’ ‘seen’, stanza 6 ‘view’, stanza 8 ‘see’ ‘see’ and ‘seemed’, stanza 9 ‘look’ ‘eyes’, stanza 10 ‘image’ ‘view’.

Here is something we can see but not enter, not touch, not talk or otherwise communicate with and yet the seeing is strong;

I called them oft, but called in vain;
No speeches we could entertain:
Yet did I there expect to find
Some other world, to please my mind.
I plainly saw by these
A new antipodes,
Whom, though they were so plainly seen,
A film kept off that stood between.

‘Antipodes’ is a great word to have here ; it means ‘having the feet opposite’ and signifies usually  in English, Australia and New Zealand – the opposite sides of the earth.  These were places people once couldn’t imagine. In flat earth days it would have been impossible that there could be another side to the planet.  butthat thinking about possibility grew outmoded – we found ‘the antipodes’ and learned  more about our planet.

What is the child who plays in this puddle learning ? (Thinking of Emerson asking what does the wave teach the fisherman).  The child is learning that things can look very different – that there are other worlds, other beings…that we can’t communicate with them in the usual ways – because

though they were so plainly seen,
A film kept off that stood between

How important is this ‘film’, this thin but apparently impermeable barrier? And is it a metaphor for something else? I’m not sure yet, so I read on into stanza 6;

By walking men’s reversèd feet
I chanced another world to meet;
Though it did not to view exceed
A phantom, ’tis a world indeed,
Where skies beneath us shine,
And earth by art divine
Another face presents below,
Where people’s feet against ours go.

This joining at the feet, this mirroring, seems very important now.  This is the place of the film and yet it is also the place of view – not a doorway, as I thought earlier, but a window which opens a view –  yes, a view of a phantom, yet ’tis a world indeed’. The repetition of the joining point, the keeping coming back to it ‘where people’s feet against ours go’.

Now I come to  stanza 7 which I’ve found  most hard to understand when I’ve been reading through;

Within the regions of the air,
Compassed about with heavens fair,
Great tracts of land there may be found
Enriched with fields and fertile ground;
Where many numerous hosts
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.

Does Traherne look up at this point? He has been (remembering) looking down at the world in the puddle, but suddenly now he’s talking about ‘the air’, ‘heavens’. The puddle world wasn’t so much a metaphor as a clue to possibility: there may be such worlds in other  places and look up! there’s all that space up there. Given what we have just seen in the puddle, is it possible that there are worlds, lands;

Great tracts of land there may be found
Enriched with fields and fertile ground;

And beyond the land, may there be creatures, my yet unknown friends, (walking foot to foot with us?)

Where many numerous hosts
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.

Host is often a word for angels – the heavenly host – and if they are there – we may not know what they are doing, we will not understand their ‘great and glorious ends’, just as there is no communication between the people in the reversed world of the puddle. Now we come to stanza 8 where Traherne makes his leap of thought explicit:

O ye that stand upon the brink,
Whom I so near me through the chink
With wonder see: what faces there,
Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear?
I my companions see
In you, another me.
They seemèd others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.

 

But that’s it for today – will read  this stanza tomorrow. But look at the skies today, look up.

Shadows in the Water

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fennel shivering.JPG
Fennel shivering in front garden, August 4

This morning I have used up some of my hour looking for what to read next. I’ve been reading more Coventry Patmore and then drifted over towards Wordsworth, but neither seemed to be what I wanted to  think and write about this morning.  I plan to write about some more Denise Levertov poems, but must get organised to get  permissions sorted first. I glanced through  All The Days of My Life, thinking, is there anything in there that I haven’t already read? And here, there was this poem by Thomas Traherne, whose work I love, that I don’t think I’ve ever read. It’ll take more than  one post  to read it.

I’ve glanced at the poem, I’ve scanned it. I’ve realised ‘I don’t know it.’ Now I’m going to read it slowly and try to get the lie of the land – not understanding or even trying to understand most of it, but  getting the feel of its shape and outlines, areas of  difficulty, the words or clauses or lines that seem most important.  If not writing on-screen, I’d be doing this reading with a pencil –  marking bits even when I didn’t really know why I was marking them. I’m going to use a different colour to mark  those points here – but read it yourself at The Poetry Foundation, with none of my marks, first.

Shadows in the water

In unexperienced infancy
Many a sweet mistake doth lie:
Mistake though false, intending true;
A seeming somewhat more than view;
That doth instruct the mind
In things that lie behind,
And many secrets to us show
Which afterwards we come to know.

Thus did I by the water’s brink
Another world beneath me think;
And while the lofty spacious skies
Reversèd there, abused mine eyes,
I fancied other feet
Came mine to touch or meet;
As by some puddle I did play
Another world within it lay.

Beneath the water people drowned,
Yet with another heaven crowned,
In spacious regions seemed to go
As freely moving to and fro:
In bright and open space
I saw their very face;
Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine;
Another sun did with them shine.

’Twas strange that people there should walk,
And yet I could not hear them talk;
That through a little watery chink,
Which one dry ox or horse might drink,
We other worlds should see,
Yet not admitted be;
And other confines there behold
Of light and darkness, heat and cold.

I called them oft, but called in vain;
No speeches we could entertain:
Yet did I there expect to find
Some other world, to please my mind.
I plainly saw by these
A new antipodes,
Whom, though they were so plainly seen,
A film kept off that stood between.

By walking men’s reversèd feet
I chanced another world to meet;
Though it did not to view exceed
A phantom, ’tis a world indeed,
Where skies beneath us shine,
And earth by art divine
Another face presents below,
Where people’s feet against ours go.

Within the regions of the air,
Compassed about with heavens fair,
Great tracts of land there may be found
Enriched with fields and fertile ground;
Where many numerous hosts
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.

O ye that stand upon the brink,
Whom I so near me through the chink
With wonder see: what faces there,
Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear?
I my companions see
In you, another me.
They seemèd others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.

Look how far off those lower skies
Extend themselves! scarce with mine eyes
I can them reach. O ye my friends,
What secret borders on those ends?
Are lofty heavens hurled
’Bout your inferior world?
Are yet the representatives
Of other peoples’ distant lives?

Of all the playmates which I knew
That here I do the image view
In other selves, what can it mean?
But that below the purling stream
Some unknown joys there be
Laid up in store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin skin
Is broken, be admitted in.

By stanza 8, I was lost, couldn’t work out what was being said. I marked it all, and thought I’ll stop reading here, mind overload. Start again more slowly.

Did I get a  glance at the shape of the poem, a rough outline?  Yes – something about the sense of  other worlds, other modes of being perhaps,  which Traherne gained from seeing reflections in a puddle. That this leads him to think something about … hmm, but  I’ve lost it. Need to start again and get it bit by bit.  Odd feeling, because much of the poem is very simple but then you have the suddenly down a rabbit-hole feeling.

In unexperienced infancy
Many a sweet mistake doth lie:
Mistake though false, intending true;
A seeming somewhat more than view;
That doth instruct the mind
In things that lie behind,
And many secrets to us show
Which afterwards we come to know.

I felt at first, I’ll understand this better when I know more about the rest of the poem. But I’ve read through the rest of the poem and am still not very clear, so going to start making a stab at understanding it, knowing that I’ll have to come back later with more understanding… But now I read the opener… I see that may be what he is talking about – that learning process I’ve just described.

As I read this stanza again, I’m thinking of two things: (i) how babies learn and (ii) how I learn.  ‘Inexperienced infancy’ might apply to a child learning something for the first time but it also applies to me  now – with regards to  this poem, I am in ‘inexperienced infancy’, it’s all new to me. I might make a mistake – and as Owl said to Winnie the Pooh, ‘no blame can be attached’, it is a ‘sweet mistake because it comes from ‘inexperience’.

It’s a mistake but it was ‘intending true’, so the intention behind was good – was in itself true – though what you did with it wasn’t quite right. Thomas Traherne  explains this with that series of clauses – look at the punctuation – colon, semi colon, semi colon – as if one thought leads on to another and comes from or winds up inside another.

I look again at the line ‘a seeming somewhat more than view’ – not sure whether it is coming out of the line that preceded it;

Mistake though false, intending true;
A seeming somewhat more than view;

or leading to the line that follows;

A seeming somewhat more than view;
That doth instruct the mind

Now I’ve split them out like that I can it is both, it’s a transitional line – you make a mistake out of ignorance because you had a slightly false/unclear idea of  something rather than a clear view. That  ignorant, unmeant, misapprehension, ‘doth instruct the mind’. It’s not your fault! It is a fault of not knowing.

At the beginning of learning to understand something, the something – let’s say someone else’s state of mind – it is cloudy: you often can’t see it clearly because you have don’t have the mental sight lines, coordinates to  get the perspective.

Ok – that’s all about me, me thinking about how I make mistakes and the effect of not knowing… but when I look again at the stanza, and an hour into my reading of this poem, I can see that Traherne is talking about how kids misunderstand things and sometimes that  creates something beautiful. A silly example:

My mum told me that when she was a child they called the cupboard under the stairs  ‘The Glory Hole’ or The Glory for short. At the end of the Lord’s Prayer, Anglicans say or said in her day, ‘For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory…’ Mum, in her child ignorance made the ‘sweet mistake’ as Traherne would call it, of  assuming that meant that God somehow owned ‘The Glory’ under their stairs, that it was a  His place. Lovely mistake, does no harm, is sweet. Based on a ‘seeming’ rather than on clear sight.

Thomas Traherne is now going to tell us such a story of his own. But that’s for tomorrow.

 

Taking comfort from the experience of the Victorian Patriarch

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front garden in rain.JPG
Front garden and a hard rain, 3 August

Yesterday I’d started reading ‘The Toys’, which I’ll reread here, now:

The Toys

My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
“I will be sorry for their childishness.”

I’d read to the end of the first sentence yesterday  so I am going to pick up here:

Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.

It’s interesting that the word ‘grief’ comes in straight after the line about the mother being dead. I’d had the feeling that the father was feeling grief too, grief at hitting the child, at being unkind, harsh, not kissing him goodnight. So this line ‘Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep’ feels to me  as much about the father as the child. The father is feeling remorse and wants now to comfort the child.  How closely he looks at the child, seeing his eye lashes are wet. This isn’t just putting your head round the door and thinking , oh, he’s gone off!  The distressed father, crying himself now, kisses the child. He was moved before he entered the room  but he is moved even more now. The wet eyelashes, the bruised looking lids, play a big part in agitating the father’s feelings, but it is the comforts to which the child has turned which really get him:

For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.

Lovely things, loved by the child and all of them standing in for his father’s kiss. You love these things, the father is thinking, you havedrawn them close when I should have been close.

As someone who has sometimes  lost her tempter with children, and others,  and as someone who was once a child sometimes sent angrily to bed, crying myself to sleep, who has felt these feelings of sadness and remorse, I find this poem very moving, very real. but now we reach ‘God’ and I have to do my usual exercise of reading what Coventry Patmore has written and trying to understand, get inside it. and at the same time doing some sort of  spiritual translation for myself so that  ‘God’ can  mean something to me.

So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
“I will be sorry for their childishness.”

Coventry Patmore prays to God ‘that night’ as, I imagine he does every night.  for non-God readers, what might this translate into? A period of meditative reflection?  You are thinking over  the events of the day and evaluating how you did ?  Patmore’s God is God The Father, and I suddenly feel, as if for the first time, what a burden that might have been for Victorian patriarchs – not just backup and authority but an impossible role model.

If the child broke the father’s law seven times and got a whack for doing so, how many times has the father broken God’s law? Which includes forgive people not seven times but seventy times seven. Patmore the father will be  thinking of his own failure – ‘how weakly understood/Thy great commanded good’ just as his little son did not understand the meaning or reality of Patmore’s law. and what comforts does Patmore the child of God the father seek – things like  ‘a box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,/A piece of glass abraded by the beach/And six or seven shells,’…. stuff, things, worldly comforts? when all the time there is a possible comfort in god – not always a wrathful Old Testament patriarch, but one who can kiss your head and say  “I will be sorry for their childishness.” This isn’t a biblical quotation so far as I can see, though I do wonder if it is an echo  or memory of Psalm 38.

When you don’t have God, you are left with your own feelings and what’s happened. That can be extremely lonely, and it is hard to control the remorse, you are (I am) left to suffer guilt.  Believing in God who would forgive and understand your weakness, failures, would be a great comfort.  This poem contains that comfort, and offers, as it were through the story of the poem, indirectly, a model of such a feeling, which, reading, I too can feel. I can feelingly imagine a comforter, even as I am feeling with Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Oh Comforter, where is thy comforting?’

Imaging that possibility – for Patmore, if not for myself –  introduces that possibility into my range of thought. Putting the shape – even through a fiction –  into my mind helps create it. So it is the poem helps me feel better.

 

 

Not a Victorian Dad Thing: ‘The Toys’ by Coventry Patmore

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greengage
Greengage (and fairy lights) enjoying a stiff August breeze, August 2 

Yesterday I finished reading Coventry Patmore’s ‘Magna est Veritas’, and realised that I’d been unconsciously thinking of ‘The Toys’ while reading. So here is that poem:

The Toys

My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
“I will be sorry for their childishness.”

Here’s a poem that confounds conventional stereotypes about Victorian fathers.

The first sentence  tells us what’s happened:

My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

I’d want to go  very slowly through these opening lines  and get my group to think about the order of  the various bits of information here. First, we are set down right in front of the child, ‘my little Son’, where the adjective ‘little’ seems almost an endearment as well as a descriptor.

Then we see him in a wider, more extended context:

…who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,

This child, is normally well-behaved, ‘thoughtful’ and easy to parent,  he ‘moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise.’ Does the father treat him as an adult? and could that be part of the problem – was he expecting too much? No childishness?

I realise as I am reading that this feels like overhearing a confession or a counselling session. The father is remembering and thinking about this painful incident, but he’s not just telling the story of the incident. He is telling us his feelings about what happened. There’s much love, tenderness, in the first two lines as he  recounts how much he loves the child and how good the child is normally. Which makes the next part so much the more painful:

Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

The father has a law – rules, we might call them, or, these days,  boundaries. But there is huge authority in that word law, and it does make me think (I know we are not there yet but I know it is coming, having read the poem through a couple of times) God The Father.

The child has tried his father’s patience and seven times. That’s quite a lot of times that your child has stepped over the boundary.  I imagine some small child-crime – pushing the sibling off the slide – once, three times – I’m getting pretty angry. Seven times?  Getting very cross indeed…But  is that ‘seven’ an echo of something? It must be a reference to the Bible:

(Romans 12:14-21)

21Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? 22Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

We no longer think it right to strike children, but in Patmore’s day that would have been not simply socially acceptable  but considered the right way to enforce disciple – it was in my childhood and  in my own children’s childhoods. But as bad as the  blow, possibly worse, is the emotional pain of rejection –  it’s the father who did the rejecting –  in the name of parental authority – but he suffers it now :

I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

We get to a key pain here for the father – the word ‘unkiss’d ‘ seems to raise the memory, ghostly presence, of the mother. That mother, ‘who was patient’, would  not have done this or let it happen, and is dead. ‘Being dead’  – that’s an odd way to put it. It feels raw.

Thre’s a kind of paraphrase I want to make:  ‘his motherbeing dead, I  hit the child and sent him away unkindly, unkissed. She’d never have let that happen.’

We are likely  to think of the poem at first as showing us a classic stern Victorian father stereotype but what we’re getting here is actually a different kind of classic: difficulty of the single parent, having to be both father and mother, having to set a boundary, stick to it and pull back when a line is crossed.  It’s hard that the little clause, ‘who was patient’, is  set in  the middle of that line about death, that patience is unavailable. The father has not been patient; certainly not to seventy times seven.

It’s so recognisable – every parent must have had this experience or something like it at some point.

But I want to think for a moment about that ‘recognisable’. ‘Relevance’ is another of those troubling matters which are not easy to resolve with a rule of thumb or principle. Does what you take to a  group of people who are  – or are about to become – a Shared Reading group have to be ‘relevant’ ?  Do you only take ‘The Toys’ to a group of parents?  For a group of men who like fishing, do you only take a fishing magazine? And for those who follow the Kardashians or Love Island what should you be taking?

But most groups aren’t made up of  single issue members: fathers or fishing fans or Kardashian followers, people with a fear of horses, single parents or  those who only live in odd-numbered houses. All those people might well attend the same group. So catering for a specific interest group, or what one assumes is a specific interest  or single issue group (people who live round here, people with no qualifications, people engaged with mental health services)  is rarely the best way to go.  ‘People who live round here’ are all different individuals  and  yet also share some underlying human experience which is not necessarily ‘living round here’. The ‘underlying human’ is more powerful, in my experience, than the ‘connected by our living round here’. Good poems will work well with most people.

There are exceptions. I wouldn’t in the first instance think of reading ‘The Toys’ with a parent in prison for  abusing a child. As a man at Reader event once said to me, poems are like poems, they can go off, they can  hurt people. But that is not to say that I wouldn’t think of reading the poem later, when we had been reading together long enough, when we trusted one another, if it seemed as if it might help. Read in The Reader magazine about my colleague Megg, reading Charles Bukowski’s poem, ‘Bluebird’ in Send prison -sorry can’t remember which issue.

And of course, you do not know, you never know, the individual private experience of members of your group, who might have been abused by parents  or others, or have been perpetrators or sufferers of domestic violence.

Most people know quite a lot about most human experiences, wherever they live, whatever their educational experience, whether or not they work, live with a chronic illness or are in recovery from addiction. Poems will touch a spot in someone in your group. That  isn’t a  thing to be too afraid of –  though be a bit afraid, because it helps keep your mind on the likely responses – that is what poems do. That is what they are for, to find, activate  and connect the underlying human experience.

Almost everyone can relate to ‘The Toys’ because it is about feeling guilty after a bad mistake. That’s a human thing, not just  a Victorian dad thing.

Finish reading ‘The Toys’ tomorrow

 

 

 

Truth is great and what else matters? What to read in a Shared Reading group

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oleander.JPG
Oleander shivering on the back step, 1 August

Yesterday I was reading this poem from Coventry Patmore’s :

Magna est Veritas

Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

And had  got as far as the last four lines. Yesterday I’d finished:

Now I reach the line that troubled me at the beginning: ‘when all its work is done, the lie shall rot’.  the pronoun, ‘its’, refers to  the world, or the world’s course,  to the great unfolding of time and history and the planet. Then, when that work is done, ‘the lie shall rot’. Seems like one bog, obvious lie. Just one of it  – ‘the lie’.

Could it be the lie about human value –  every life matters?  Could it be the lie about  the material work of humanity in the world – we’re doing all this, getting money, bringing our children up,  working – but  that’s not what it’s all about? I don’t know why I say ‘children’, because the word Coventry Patmore uses is ‘work’.

Starting again here, now, today I go back to that thought about children/work.

I realised overnight that I was thinking about children here because the only other poem of Coventry Patmore I’ve read is The Toys  – a poem about making a mistake as a parent and suffering for your temper after the child has gone to sleep. Perhaps that sense of his fatherhood was unconsciously in my mind when I was  wondering about what kind of thing he had walked away from.

It’s a strange feeling isn’t it, contemplating the world without ‘me’ in it? Which is, I think, what he has been doing and partly where the poem comes from. Patmore goes on to imagine the world’s ‘work’ – I ask myself as I read, what is that?  The course of human business? Mammon? If so, that leads me back to ‘the lie shall rot.’ Is that the one big lie we’re all involved in:  that what we  do matters? I don’t think that is quite right, but not sure it is completely wrong, either. I’m leaving it there while I go on to the next two lines:

The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

There’s a division between  human concerns and  bigger-than-human truth.  The truth (like the lie, a single, particular thing) ‘shall prevail’.  My understanding of grammar is poor, so I looked ‘shall’ up, not so much for its definition  – I think  it is a future form of the verb ‘be’  – as to understand  what it does as a part of speech.

‘Shall’ is a way of creating the future tense and is distinguished from  – the more commonly used – ‘will’. The key differentiator is that ‘shall’ does not indicate and desire or command, whereas  ‘will’ does. ‘Shall’ is going to happen whether you want it to or not. Which well  fits with the overall meaning here.

I’m now noticing, for the first time, the word ‘rot’ here.

It’s an organic, matter-based word.  It’s what happens to bodies after death. ‘The lie’, then, may be to do with the human world, partly geophysical – it will all go, in the end , won’t it? – but also partly everything we have created or invented or made – the world of philosophy,  the world of banking, the world of  public reputation. It will all rot…so our busy commitment to it, is that the lie?

I’m wondering now if  this poem about two kinds of belief about what the world is? They have clashed together somehow in the poet and forced this –  angry, disappointed, resolved ? – poem out. One is a materialist and human-centred view, apparently, but not actually,  purposeful(the huge town set in opposition to the natural movement of the tide, ‘purposeful, glad’). The other is something else.  It is not defined. It doesn’t get a mention, other than as ‘The truth is great’.

I wonder, on rereading the last line, ‘when none cares whether it prevail or not’, whether this was in fact the origin impulse for the poem’s creation. Did someone, did Patmore, care about whether truth prevailed in a specific instance?  Did he suffer  the fact that someone else did not care?

I imagine a story behind the poem… this is a way in which  I would  extend discussion in a Shared Reading group, to help  get the group more deeply into the  poem rather than rest on the surface.

What’s the story?  Someone did not care about the truth. Someone’s not caring about the truth affected Coventry Patmore’s ability to do his job – could have been him, himself, cold have been someone else. He walks out to get away from it.  Up the cliffs, perspective, smallness of human. Well, truth exists aside from everything human, he feels, as he looks at the  landscape, the ocean, the aeons.  Our pettiness won’t, matter, doesn’t matter now.

I’d read this poem again now, in my group, to give us all a chance to  listen to it and read it, with whatever thoughts we’ve assembled amongst us, in our heads.

I don’t end up feeling it is an abnegating poem. It feels more like a rest and a breath – and a re-assertion: truth is great.  I’ve just noticed, as I run out of time, that the word great appears twice – first at line 2, ‘great repose’. But time’s up.

Maybe tomorrow,  reread The Toys.

 

 

 

 

Walk away and look back: some perspective from Coventry Patmore

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Huge Cliffs overlooking

Perast.JPG
Perspective in Kotor Bay, July 2017

This morning marks my return to work after a three-week break.  Odd to have the back-to-school feeling at the end of July instead of the beginning of September!

I loved those September mornings during my  unhappy and unsatisfactory years at secondary school: sunny mornings with the  scents of  early autumn and the possibility of  starting again. And even now, in January and after a break like this, I love the feeling of a new start.

I woke before my alarm and came to my desk to read, wondering if I should set myself some reading task this year, rather than wandering all over the place as usual. So, a brief stock-take:

I’m reading Silas Marner intermittently here on the blog, usually at least once a week. Will continue – know it well, love rereading.

I’m reading some Denise Levertov, maybe a poem or so each month. Great to be meeting an author  whose work is relatively unknown to me. Will continue.

Have been reading in a dip in and out way in the Oxford Book of English Verse and will continue to do that.

Am recording everything I start reading (‘Just Started’) and writing ‘Just Finished’ about things I want to recommend.

But I want something else?

I’m aware of the need for more contemporary poetry here but  the need to clear copyright means I need to be organised in advance. Not sure I can manage that.

I wonder about the possibility of starting a long poem – The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, The Prelude. That would be good  for me as  a regular effort and  I miss those  works when not teaching them on the Reading in Practice MA

Also wondering about my own Anthology of things I love or poems that have built me… that could be a tag.

This morning I wanted to read an old poem I had not read before and leafed through some Emily Bronte, Tennyson and Browning and Clough mainly noting old  friends before coming to this poem by Coventry Patmore which I’m sure lots of people know, but which I think is new to me. It struck a note lingering since my time away and some of the feelings and thoughts arising out of reading Emerson’s Essays. The Latin title (truth is great) is a  glance at a quotation from the Apocrypha – the uncanonised books of the Bible – the truth is great and shall prevail.

I was thinking of Emerson writing about what a fisherman learns from the action of the sea. that seems the same kind of action that is taking place in Coventry Patmore as he writes.

 

Magna est Veritas

Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

I’m immediately bothered on my first reading by ‘the lie shall rot’. I don’t know which lie Patmore is talking about. But that’s not a good place to get into the poem! I tell myself to read it again. I read it again.

A second slow reading brings home to me the  clear sense of two halves of the poem –  the before ‘I sit me down’ and the after.  It’s as if the poem takes place at a point of balance, a fulcrum. At this point, ‘I sit me down’ , Coventry Patmore can see both before and after.

There seems to be a lot about perspective, relative size, point of view. First, the Latin title makes me  think – Latin, the classics, ancient thinking, old-time. Then  when I found it was a biblical or apocryphal quotation that time span seemed to open up even more. So, literally, big is truth, sets the scale of this very small poem. It’s like some kind of telescopic viewer! We  start big and shrink down:

Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,

On this spot, ‘here’,  we experience or  remember, or watch from a great  distance a huge scene, which seems to be set in a massive geographical perspective.  The bay looks little, is little. I imagine Scarborough, walking up out-of-town on the cliff paths to a point where you can look back and see the shape of the bay as part of the coast’s huger geography. Yes, it is ‘little’. but as someone who has just walked from the  huge town and in view of the ocean, I see ‘tumultuous life and great repose’, all at once, both of those apparently opposed  things. The view from here, of the  little bay offers me a chance to see it all at once.

I thought at first that the ‘tumultuous life and great repose’ was about the town, but realise now on a fourth reading that it is  the entire bay and everything in it, the town yes, but also the landscape and the seascape. it is everything we are going to see in the next few lines:

Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town

The ocean and the movement of the ocean, the height of the cliffs, the distance from/to the town and the hugeness of the town itself are all visible at once, from ‘here’.

I note the ocean is ‘ purposeless, glad ‘ – that these two words are jammed together inside the line.

I note there’s a sudden rhythmic relief in the next line ‘I sit me down.’I read it all again. I wonder if there’s a separate Biblical echo in ‘I sit me down’? (By the rivers of Babylon).

Feels like a long look round, a long gaze takes place – and if we were Emerson, we’d be thinking, yes, this is how nature teaches. And then we come to the thought:

For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

I wonder about the  piece of life that has been happening before the poem emerged, and which in some sense caused the poem to be born. Why is he out gazing at this huge view? what has he walked away from? What’s the mood?

In the line ‘for want of me the world’s course will not fail’ I might feel a straight forward estimation of reality: it’s just true, each of us is very small and hardly matter in the least to the big sweep.

But I am also thinking, is this an abnegation of responsibility? Could he be imagining a world without him in it, is he suicidal? is he merely frustrated? Has his work gone badly?

When I reread the lines, the ‘;me’ seems very small, very intimate. It’s a very private inner feeling. Is it like thinking  ‘I can’t fix all this?’ But the ‘want of me’  – he’s thinking of not being there. Will it make any difference if he is dead? No, he thinks, it won’t.

Funny thing to balance here between sanity and reality –  you can’t save the world! and abnegation of responsibility – if I go it won’t matter.

Now I reach the line that troubled me at the beginning: ‘when all its work is done, the lie shall rot’.  the pronoun, ‘its’, refers to  the world, or the world’s course,  to the great unfolding of time and history and the planet. Then, when that work is done, ‘the lie shall rot’. Seems like one bog, obvious lie. Just one of it  – ‘the lie’.

Could it be the lie about human value –  every life matters?  Could it be the lie about  the material work of humanity in the world – we’re doing all this, getting money, bringing our children up,  working – but  that’s not what it’s all about? I don’t know why I say ‘children’, because the word Coventry Patmore uses is ‘work’.

Yikes time is way up – I’m late! Will finish tomorrow.

 

 

Beyond The Utmost Bound

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bee on hebe
A bee enjoying a Hebe, front garden, 2 July

Day Four of my  slow reading of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ – an idea for a Shared Reading group, which will take a full session, and won’t be suitable for every group. But for a bunch of people who may be in a give up/don’t give up situation, or for those of us facing the growing closeness of age… really worth reading. Search ‘Ulysses’ to find previous posts. Go here to find the whole poem and don’t forget to read it all aloud before you start trying to get into it!

Yesterday I was writing in the back garden to keep the birds away from the cherries, and I am back there today, late to my writing for a number of reasons, one of which is the  big online sleep experiment.  Scientists are trying to  see how much sleep or lack of sleep affects brain function. My goodness, some of those puzzles are scary!  I realised while I was doing them that even the word ‘test’, as in ‘Take the Test!’  makes me feel anxious. All those years of failure at school leave their mark.  But I enjoyed participating and am hoping that the study will encourage me to get my sleep  hours up to at least  seven a night.

However, to ‘Ulysses’. I was in this section:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

I think I was about up to ‘but every hour is saved/from that eternal silence’, which is sometimes how I feel on days when I wake up early and have the dawn hours to myself to read and write. Ulysses doesn’t just want the time, he wants time for a purpose, to him time gained is time as a ‘bringer of new things’. He makes his own argument for movement, for change, against  staying put, and  as he slightly thinks about his stay-at-home life we’re back to the frustrated vocabulary of the opening – ‘vile’, ‘store’, ‘hoard’.

What does he mean by ‘for some three suns’?  It’s a period of time and I guess years – though why that would be a sun I do not know.  But I don’t think it is months. This is the kind of thing someone in the group might want to look up on their phone but I’d ask them to hold off until we’ve tried to work it out a bit – we want the sense that we can either understand it or not be  bothered by not understanding it. It’s not the time period but the feeling of ‘hoard’ that is important here, the feeling of going ‘grey’ when you still have

                         spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This ‘utmost bound of human thought’ seems connected to the arch we read about yesterday:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

This is that sense of what Wordsworth calls ‘something ever more about to be’, the uncatchable,  the ineffable, the  reaching after which is the engine of human endeavour. There is always more, and a person like Ulysses will always want to pursue it.  And so he does, turning now to his son, and handing on the duties of  rulership:

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

You can feel him reaching for his coat and heading for the door as he speaks. Telemachus is suited to one kind of job – and that job is not nothing, either –  building a civilisation:

by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.

This is good work, but not  the kind  of work Ulysses  could fancy.  And Telemachus seems damned by his father’s faint praise: he is described as  discerning, prudent, blameless, decent and ‘centred in the sphere /of common duties’.

I would want to stop here, in my Shared Reading group, to talk about ways in which the good can seem mundane, or even boring. The wildness of a Ulysses, or any great hero who goes beyond the bounds of human experience, human thought, is enormously attractive, but as a species we need our Telemachuses as much as our great adventurers, don’t we? Is it simply because the great adventurers are rarer spirits that we  prize them more?  (If we were making a film of this poem, who would you cast to play Ulysses? Clint Eastwood, Russell Crowe?  and Telemachus? Some quiet, well-behaved bod I can’t even  remember the name of… This is a game  I often play in groups, because most people have ideas about actors, and know they stand for something when you are trying to cast them, it gives us a clue into the character we are reading about).

And the faint praise continues: Telemachus can keep everything ticking over, even ‘pay/Meet adoration to my household gods’.

I would want to ask what might be lost by not paying  ‘meet adoration’ to your own household gods –  loss of domestic security, the quiet comforts of home, or of being well-ordered at home.  How much does that matter?

But the poem presses on and Ulysses manages a  generous wave as he leaves the palace:  ‘He works his work, I mine.’ And he is about to get to his work now… but we’ll leave the last movement til tomorrow, as I must stop now for today.

Slowing Down for Deep Waters

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under th tree.JPG
My guard-station under the Cherry tree

Day three of my appallingly slow reading of Tennyson ‘Ulysses’ – an idea for a shared Reading group, which will take a full session, and won’t be suitable for every group. But for a bunch of people who may be in a give up/don’t give up situation, or for those of us facing the growing closeness of age… really worth reading. Search ‘Ulysses’ to find previous posts. Go here to find the whole poem and don’t forget to read it all aloud before you start trying to get into it!

I’m writing this in the back garden where I am keeping guard on the cherry tree – today is the day of the major battle between me and the starlings, crows and blackbirds. The cherries are nearly ripe and if the sun stays out, they will mainly ripen today. Birds are loitering on nearby rooftops and telephone wires.  I don’t mind the blackbirds and crows, it’s the starlings, descending in a ravening locust-like horde… I have to keep jumping up and running shouting and clapping under the tree… was it Jude the Obscure who began life as a bird-scarer? Not an easy job! And I’ve got to go out this afternoon and lleave them to do their worst….

But back to the poem! I’d got to this point:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

This part of the poem always affords me a stopping place. ‘I am a part of all that I have met’ is wonderful account of the permeable nature of human experience: everything from (in Ulysses case) stormy seas to battlefields to abandoning your wife, become part of what or who you are. That seems straightforward and just true, doesn’t it? Until you look forward and see where you haven’t been yet or what you haven’t done. And the pull of that, for a rover (like Ulysses, and like, a little, myself) all those prior experiences form ‘an arch’. That’s an interesting  metaphor, and he means, I guess, a kind of gateway, through which one must pass to get to a bigger set of experiences, ‘that untravell’d world whose margin fades/ For ever and forever when I move…’  He is, and always will be, as he has said earlier, ‘roaming with a hungry heart’.

An aside: Was thinking last night about Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’  and the connections between the guy from who walked out on his wife and kids in Baltimore and Ulysses, who also ‘went out for a ride and never came back…’ (well not for ten years, anyhow.) Springsteen influenced by Homer? I expect so.

Let’s get back in:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

Don’t be afraid to stay in a part of a poem or story or novel for as long as it takes – there’s no rule that says you have to finish the story, finish the poem. the experience of live reading – picking up on the feeling of the group, the depth of involvement, is as important as anything else we might do in Shared Reading. More important than finishing, or getting through to a certain point, is depth : how deep can you make your hour or two of reading?  When you find a place where there are deep waters, stay there for as long as you can!

The arch of what you’ve already experienced, what you know and have become, is merely way into the future ‘that untravell’d world’. That’s exciting to Ulysses and he does not seem to care that the ‘margin fades/for ever and forever when I move.’ It’s possible to imagine a person for whom is a nightmare – people want security and to know what is coming. But not this man – look back to the beginning of the poem and his sense of revolt at quiet stability. Ulysses loves that  movement of ‘forever and forever’.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

He’s like a suit of armour thrown down in a corner! I look at the language here: ‘dull’, ‘unburnished’, ‘not to shine in use’, and feel the sense of massive frustration building up. ‘Use’ that is the key – to be used, and he can’t do that in any way other than adventure. The quiet life of an adventurer retired to merely being King seems to him like doing nothing ‘as though to breathe were life’ – that’s to say just continuing to breathe, to stay alive is not ‘life’.

How hungry his heart is! he wants tons of lives, and if he can’t have them, he wants to use every minute of the life he has got:

Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains:

In my Shared Reading group I’d be stopping here to talk about  the passing of time, how long life felt when I was ten and a day at the Riveacre Road open air baths  seemed to last for months. And how  much shorter all days now seem, all weeks, all months, all years. I remember talking to  Miss Stella Pope, a lady who taught at the Queen’s School, Chester, when my mother was pupil there. Miss Pope (you couldn’t call her anything else) must have been Very Old Indeed when she  attended my Victorian Literature course at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Birkenhead – years before the birth of The Reader. Miss Pope always wore a hat and she kept it on in the class. Sometimes she fell asleep but when she woke up she’d be wide-awake and spot on the mark of whatever we were  reading. She told me, the years go by like days in the end.  It all speeds up just as you come to value it.

Little remains, he says and I wonder … how old is this man ? Would you put him at a modern sixty?  and then the question the poems poses for us: what are you going to do with your remaining time? This is a  difficult area of conversation and almost certainly will get very serious. I’ve had a man talking about living with bowel cancer, a man talking about drinking himself to death. You have to be ready for anything. But what are you ready with?  Why, what we’ve actually got: human companionship, another cup of tea, being there, at the table together with the hard question in front of us. As a reader said to me yesterday, you’re not on your own, you’re going through with the others.

Let’s read on. Oh, no, time is up!

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View from under the  tree