April soft and cold: A long anguish

Last year I overcame my aversion to Tang poetry and shared several from Li Bai. Look, he had me at the title “Wine Song”.

So this year I’m revisiting the Tang dynasty and sharing examples from Li’s contemporary, Du Fu. I find Du interesting partly because his greatest desire was to be a civil servant, but couldn’t somehow manage that.

I know my thinking on this matter is colored by the fact that many contemporary office holders at all levels of our government are so incompetent and disinterested in actual service that I picture the barrier to entry as being at ground level.

But the administrative world’s loss was China’s cultural gain, because Du is widely held to be about as good as it gets, among a field of poets that was considered to be as bright as a meteorite shower.

Here are three of his poems; the last one is one he wrote about his friendship with and admiration for Li Bai.

“Moonlit Night”

Tonight my wife must watch alone

    the full moon over Fu-zhou;

I think sadly of my sons and daughters far away,

too young to understand this separation

or remember our life in Chang'an.

In fragrant mist, her flowing hair is damp;

In clear moonlight, her jade-white arms are cold.

When will we lean at the open casement together

while the moonlight dries our shining tears?

“Pounding the Clothes”

You won’t return from the front.

I clean the laundry stone in autumn.

The bitter cold months are near;

My heart aches with long separation.

Can I shirk the toil of pounding your clothes?

No, they must go to the Great Wall.

Let me use all my woman’s strength.

May you, my lord, hear the sound o’er the vast.

“Dreaming of Li Bai”

Separation by death must finally be choked down,

but separation in life is a long anguish,

Chiang-nan is a pestilential land;

no word from you there in exile.

You have been in my dreams, old friend,

as if knowing how much I miss you.

Caught in a net,

how is it you still have wings?

I fear you are no longer mortal;

the distance to here is enormous.

When your spirit came, the maples were green;

when it went, the passes were black.

The setting moon spills light on the rafters;

for a moment I think it's your face.

The waters are deep, the waves wide;

don't let the river gods take you.

April soft and cold: big love-crumbs

Y’all know how much I love e.e. cummings—I’ve shared a variety of his poems with you over the years, about Spring, about both love and the shells of humans, about World War I, and the ultimate (in my view) distillation of war.

In this one I think cummings gives Andrew Marvell a run for his money in terms of sending frissons of heat throughout various parts of the reader’s body.

“i like my body”

i like my body when it is with your

body. It is so quite a new thing.

Muscles better and nerves more.

i like your body. i like what it does,

i like its hows. i like to feel the spine

of your body and its bones, and the trembling

-firm-smooth ness and which I will

again and again and again

kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,

i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz

of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes

over parting flesh...And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

Frail forms

On the 150^th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, I’m going to fudge the rules of National Poetry Month just a little. I’m giving you a song—which I propose is basically a poem with music. So you’re really getting a two-fer, you lucky dogs.

The song is by Stephen Foster. When I was in school, everyone knew Foster—come on: “Camptown Races”? “Oh, Susanna”? “My Old Kentucky Home”? “Old Folks at Home”? “Beautiful Dreamer”? (Seriously—did you not see Mighty Joe Young?) “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair”? (A local kiddie-TV host used to sing, “I dream of Brownie with the light blue jeans. She is as sweet as licorice jelly beans.” Well, that may be TMI.)

But I’m sharing something I did not learn in grade school. Even though it was written in 1854, I think it sums up the event that marked the end of the War Between the States. (Because although Lee only surrendered one army, as one of his generals predicted, every other Confederate command followed suit shortly.)

As a New Military historian, my focus is on the human side of warfare. I wrap my head around how wars affected people—those who caused them, those who fought them, those who were overrun by them. And the image that I have of those April days at Appomattox is of all those men, exhausted, hungry, ragged, covered in mud, sick in the soul, turning over their arms and colors to men perhaps not as gaunt or ill-clad, but every bit as weary and soul-shattered.

Blue or grey, they wanted nothing so much as to go home, rebuild their lives and put the hard times behind them. So I’m giving you Mavis Staples singing “Hard Times, Come Again No More.”

Here are the full lyrics.

“Hard Times, Come Again No More”

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears

While we all sup sorrow with the poor:

There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

Chorus:

'Tis the song the sigh of the weary;

Hard Times, Hard Times, come again no more;

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay

There are frail forms fainting at the door:

Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away

With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:

Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

'Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,

'Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore,

'Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave,

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

To which I say—amen.

Appomattox April

When we last left the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, they were arrayed around Petersburg, with the former, under Robert E. Lee, defending and the latter, commanded by Ulysses S. Grant, positioning to take Richmond, 20 miles or so to the north.

That siege started in June of 1864, and it didn’t break until 1 April 1865, when Phil Sheridan’s cavalry turned Lee’s flank at the Battle of Five Forks. Grant followed through the next day, ending the siege. The Confederates evacuated the next night. Lee had intended to regroup, connect with Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and find a way to turn against Grant, but he lost time when his men had to forage for provisions.

(It was always a wonder to me that the eleven states that seceded from the Union actually chose a confederate form of government—a loose affiliation with little power and even less will to enforce laws across state boundaries. Since this form of government had totally screwed the pooch when the original 13 states had attempted it following independence from Britain. A “confederated” government meant that fielding armies in fighting strength with all the equipment, supplies and services such forces require, was always pretty much a crap shoot. And that was even before the various Federal armies cut their supply lines.)

By the time Lee got to Appomattox Station, where a supply train was waiting, his army was down to one cavalry and two small infantry corps. Grant’s men harried them along the way, with Sheridan’s cavalry cutting right through the Army of Northern Virginia.

On 7 April, when Grant sent Lee a note inviting his surrender, Lee refused, but inquired about terms. By that time he’d been cut off from the hoped-for supplied, had lost considerable portions of his force and was running out of plans to realistically pull his men out of the Union vise.

There was a battle early on 9 April, but what that basically did was make it blindingly obvious that Lee’s army was vastly outnumbered. He sent a note to Grant requesting terms of surrender. Grant, en route to meet with Sheridan, replied inviting Lee to name a meeting place: The Confederates scouted the little village of Appomattox Court House and chose the house of Wilmer McLean as the best option.

(It is a true irony that McLean had lived near Manassas Junction in 1861. He’d fled Northern Virginia to escape the violence of the war, and had resettled in Appomattox. He witnessed the beginnings of the war in Virginia, and he hosted its end.)

It’s passed into lore how Lee received Grant wearing an immaculate uniform. You wonder how he was able to do that, given the condition of his army, but then you never hear of Lee being out of uniform, or mussed or dusty or rain-soaked, no matter what. Grant, on the other hand, showed up unshaven and muddy, from his boots to his rumpled shirt. Anyone viewing it from a distance would have thought he was the hired hand meeting with the boss. Or that he was the one surrendering his army.

And yet, it was Grant who—with the power hand in the relationship—was generous and scrupulous in his surrender terms. You have to understand that there were Radical Republicans in Congress and the Administration who wanted every Confederate commander and politician hanging as traitors from trees lining the roads from Richmond to Washington. Grant had considerable power to set terms that would shape subsequent surrenders and set the tone—one way or the other—for policies toward the Confederacy.

Officers gave parole not to take up arms against the Union; company and regimental commanders took responsibility for similar commitments by their men. Arms, artillery pieces and public property to be collected and turned over to Grant’s designated agent. Officers could keep their sidearms, personal horses and effects.

And then, “each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.”

Grant also permitted soldiers to take their personal horses and mules home for the spring planting, and he directed that a supply of rations be handed over to the gaunt army.

When all was agreed, the two generals shook hands and Lee rode away. At first the Federals cheered in celebration, but Grant put a stop to it. It took a few days to get everything sorted; for one thing, no Confederate commander wanted to subject his troops to a formal surrender ceremony. But on 12 April Lee’s armies massed to stack arms and colors in accordance with the terms of surrender.

Grant had assigned General Joshua L. Chamberlain (one of my personal heroes and the embodiment of the idea of a citizen-soldier) to oversee the parade. Chamberlain was still in pain from the wound he suffered in the battle of the Crater (and fortunate to be alive; it was deemed mortal at the time).

First up was General John B. Gordon’s division, marching in column between Chamberlain’s troops lined up on either side of the road. Chamberlain ordered his men to come to attention and “carry arms”, a profound gesture of respect. In his account:

“Gordon, at the head of the marching column, outdoes us in courtesy. He was riding with downcast eyes and more than pensive look, but at this clatter of arms he raises his eyes and instantly catching the significance, wheels his horse with that superb grace of which he is master, drops the point of his sword to his stirrup, gives a command, at which the great Confederate ensign following him is dipped and his decimated brigades, as they reach our right, respond to the ‘carry.’ All the while on our part not a sound of trumpet or drum, not a cheer, nor a word nor motion of man, but awful stillness as if it were the passing of the dead.”

Chamberlain knew that his order might generate blowback from Unionists, and it did. But it was the on-the-spot manifestation of the spirit of Grant’s terms—no gloating or retaliation, just respectful acknowledgement. His troops were just about as tired as Gordon’s and all the successive divisions; better fed and equipped, maybe, but every bit as ready to shed their uniforms and go home, where they could take a bath, kiss a loved one and do anything that didn’t involve discharging weapons at other men.

It’s odd—the mythos that has come down to us about the surrender at Appomattox is built heavily around the dignity and gallantry of Lee, his immaculate uniform, his grave demeanor, his impeccable manners all contrasting with Grant’s slovenliness. And yet if you look only at the actions and the results, Grant was the one who set the tone for respect, reconciliation and rebuilding a stronger, fraternal Union. No reparations; no hostages; no prisoners. Feed the hungry, discharge them with the means of livelihood to go home.

“Go home”—possibly the only two words any soldier ever wants to hear after so much as one campaign. After four years…they must have brought entire divisions to tears.

Because it brings me to tears even now, 150 years later.

April soft and cold: Opposition of the stars

A couple of years ago I shared what is probably Andrew Marvell’s most widely-known poem, “To His Coy Mistress”. You know, the one that every adolescent boy pulls out when trying to impress an adolescent girl with bluestocking tendencies. Um.

This time around let’s have “The Definition of Love”, which takes us around and around the conundrum of this powerful emotion, which exists for the Other, yet separate from the Other. The perfect love is essentially unattainable, which I’ll confess is certainly a bummer, so you can see how “Coy Mistress” would grab all the attention over the centuries.

But I guess I’ve reached a point where I find this one more interesting than I would have done in high school.

“The Definition of Love”

My love is of a birth as rare

As ’tis for object strange and high;

It was begotten by Despair

Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone

Could show me so divine a thing

Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,

But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive

Where my extended soul is fixt,

But Fate does iron wedges drive,

And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see

Two perfect loves, nor lets them close;

Their union would her ruin be,

And her tyrannic pow’r depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel

Us as the distant poles have plac’d,

(Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel)

Not by themselves to be embrac’d;

Unless the giddy heaven fall,

And earth some new convulsion tear;

And, us to join, the world should all

Be cramp’d into a planisphere.

As lines, so loves oblique may well

Themselves in every angle greet;

But ours so truly parallel,

Though infinite, can never meet.

Therefore the love which us doth bind,

But Fate so enviously debars,

Is the conjunction of the mind,

And opposition of the stars.

April soft and cold: Croak and wither

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month is from Sylvia Plath.

If you have any inclination whatsoever towards clinical depression, I don’t recommend Plath. (You probably also want to stay away from Doris Lessing. Just sayin’.)

Plath is pretty much the poster child for the creative woman who had the life sucked out of her and her creativity by getting hooked up with a creative man who exploited her gifts even as he disrespected them. In her case it was English poet Ted Hughes.

She reminds me a lot of Zelda Fitzgerald, actually. Neither Plath nor Fitzgerald had the emotional strength or the community support to tell her husband to get stuffed. Both died prematurely.

Fitzgerald spent most of her last years in a mental hospital. She was burnt to death in locked in a room while awaiting electroshock therapy when a fire broke out.

At age 30, Plath committed suicide by sealing the rooms between herself and her two small sleeping children, and turning on the gas in the oven.

Listen—poetry is not for the weak-willed.

Anyway, I could have given you “April 18”, which is pretty grim (you know that any poem that starts out “the slime of all my yesterdays/rots in the hollow of my skull” is not going anywhere close to Disneyland), or “Lady Lazarus” (“…my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade…”), or others. But let’s try something that—while plaintive—is more in the natural scheme of things.

I mean—poets’ two major subjects seem to be love and death, so fair enough.

“Frog Autumn”

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.

The insects are scant, skinny.

In these palustral homes we only

Croak and wither.

Mornings dissipate in somnolence.

The sun brightens tardily

Among the pithless reeds.

Flies fail us. the fen sickens.

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly

The genius of plenitude Houses

himself elsewhere. Our folk thin

Lamentably.

April soft and cold: Hearts aghast

One hundred years ago the major European powers had found themselves locked in an excruciatingly slow form of mutually-assured destruction. Trenches gouged farmland across Belgium and Northern France, and across Galicia in Poland and Russia. Men—soldiers—lived like the vermin they shared their patches of filth with. Nothing was certain except the choice between death and misery.

1915 was the year that German Zeppelins began bombing cities in Britain. Deliberately targeting civilians—a first.

1915 was the year that the Germans used poison gas, firing it in shells at Russian positions west of Warsaw. Later in the year they discharged it from more than 5,000 cylinders around Ypres, in Belgium, letting the winds carry it wherever they happened to go. Chemical warfare—a first.

1915 was the year Turks began deporting Armenians in forced marches, murdering thousands and permitting thousands more to die of starvation, exposure and disease. Genocide as a policy—a first.

1915 was the year Germans embarked on their U-Boat campaign of unrestricted attacks on merchant and passenger shipping in the waters around the British Isles. Indiscriminate preying on civilian targets with the new submarine technology—a first.

1915 was the year Britain imposed a total sea blockade on Germany, interdicting all shipping from all countries. Deliberate policy of starving a country, civilian population and all—a first.

1915 was the year Allied troops landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in an attempt to clear the Dardanelles Straits and open shipping lanes to Russia. The campaign was haphazardly planned, hesitantly led and ended a few months later when remnants of the mostly Anzac troops reboarded transports, after never having left the beaches. Amphibious campaigns—a first.

1915 was the year that the Germans introduced the Fokker monoplane, with a synchronized machine gun that fired through the propeller blades, allowing the pilot to attack straight ahead. The Fokker Scourge terrorized ground troops and other aircraft over the Western Front until the Allies caught up with the technology about a year later. Combining machinegun killing capacity with aerial maneuverability—a first.

1915 was the year the British deployed poison gas via cylinders, against the Germans in the Artois. Using technology because the enemy has it it, without considering unintended consequences (or even whether it’s effective at its purpose)—well, no, not a first. But it just shows you what kind of war that was.

And, as you know, the way many people processed this conflagration was through poetry. I’ve given you several before: Akhmatova and cummings, Yeats, Sassoon and, of course, Owen. You’ll see a couple of them again this year. But today let’s look at Isaac Rosenberg.

Rosenberg was the son of Latvian Jews who immigrated to England before he was born. Like William Blake, his formal education ended in his mid-teens and he became an engraver. While working this trade, he took night classes at Birkbeck College’s art school, and then went full-time to attend the Slade School of Fine Art. Chronic bronchitis drove him to try South Africa, where he was when war broke out in 1914.

He was opposed to the war from the beginning, but he saw enlistment as a way to earn a steady income, which he needed to support his mother. He served from October 1915 until April 1918, when he was killed on the Somme. He was 27.

Rosenberg left a stunning body of work, and it’s hard to choose among them. But I’ll give you “Break of Day in the Trenches”, because it reminds me of the description of that life I once heard from an old guy who’d served in the Gordon Highlanders.

“Break of Day in the Trenches”

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

There are several elements that (in Rilke’s metaphor) pierce my eye and plunge into my heart, but that egalitarian/politically-agnostic rat kind of finishes me off. In the end, it doesn't care whose corpses it feeds on.

Also not a first.

Gratitude Monday: A whole month of poems

I’m taking a bit of time on Gratitude Monday today to express my thanks for National Poetry Month. I love that sucker.

It gives me the opportunity to focus on poems I’ve loved for decades, as well as to go out exploring to find new ones to love. For one-twelfth of the year, I get to discover and share all sorts of poetry with you.

It just don’t get any better than that.

April soft and cold: All his goings graces

For Easter, I don’t think I could give you any better poet than Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose short life (1844-1889) perhaps contributed to the intensity of his works. He converted to Roman Catholicism while at Oxford and spent his adult years as a Jesuit priest. He wrote some poems while at university, but almost nothing was known of his poetry until after his death. Had he not sent some to his friend Robert Bridges (eventually Poet Laureate of Britain, I shudder to consider what we might have lost.

Hopkins used assonance, onomatopoeia and alliteration as well as rhyme. He had no fears about pushing the limits of form to make his point. His “Pied Beauty” is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard, and I dare you to read it without your face wanting to smile and your heart wanting to lift. It is joy captured like a butterfly resting momentarily in your cupped hands.

I’m hard pressed not to shower you with sonnets from this man; I’m hard pressed to pare the offerings down to two, which is kind of my limit for a post. But what the hell—it’s Easter, and this is Hopkins. Bugger the form, I’ll give you three, for the Trinity.

“The Windhover”

            To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it, sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Yes, dedicated to Christ, through the imagery of a falcon; “windhover” is English dialect for the kestrel.

“God’s Grandeur”

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

And finally, one I cannot resist—it makes me want to reach out and touch the kingfishers and the dragonflies, and consider how the just man justices. It’s astonishing to me that this was written in the 19^th Century.

“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.