Proud-pied April: Poems in the lap of death

First off, you knew we weren’t going to get out of National Poetry Month without anything by e. e. cummings, right? Does anyone else cover the range of what we might call “word play” with such power and so few actual, you know, words?

Second—I’ll just get right to today’s entry, because I don’t need to ‘splain to you the power of his images of the crimes of and against Humanity. This is poetry, folks.

“Humanity i love you”

Humanity i love you

because you would rather black the boots of

success than enquire whose soul dangles from his

watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you

unflinchingly applaud all

songs containing the words country home and

mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because

when you’re hard up you pawn your

intelligence to buy a drink and when

you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and

because you are continually committing

nuisances but more

especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you

are perpetually putting the secret of

life in your pants and forgetting

it’s there and sitting down

on it

and because you are

forever making poems in the lap

of death Humanity

i hate you

Proud-pied April: Deceitfulness and suavity

We’ve not had any T.S. Eliot for a long time—not since I started out National Poetry Month in 2013 with a clip from “The Waste Land”. On account of April being the cruelest month.

If you’re a young person looking for existential angst and despair, Eliot’s your man. I mean, really—if “The Waste Land” doesn’t do it, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" will. There’s no better description of what youth fears (when youth thinks about it) in old age than “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

(He also perfectly described the academic environment when he said of his time at Merton College, “I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls… Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.”)

But there’s another side to Eliot, as evidenced by Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of light verse. You’ll know a lot of the pieces if you’ve heard anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber. But if you can divorce yourself from those earworms, tuck into “Macavity: The Mystery Cat”.

I’ve got an edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats illustrated by Edward Gorey. Here’s the one for Macavity:

This is a great poem to read with kids, especially with all the repetition of his name. The notion of a cat outwitting the best that grownups have to offer (Scotland Yard, the Foreign Office) is just so delicious. The descriptions link Macavity to Professor Moriarty and the Scarlet Pimpernel; you know—elusive, triumphant scofflaws. Precisely what you’d expect from a Feline of the World.

This is definitely one you should read aloud.

“Macavity: The Mystery Cat”

Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw—

For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.

He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair:

For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,

He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.

His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,

And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!

You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air—

But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!

Macavity’s a ginger cat, he’s very tall and thin;

You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.

His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;

His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.

He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake;

And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s always wide awake.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,

For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.

You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square—

But when a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there!

He’s outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)

And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard’s

And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,

Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled,

Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair

Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty’s gone astray,

Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,

There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair—

But it’s useless to investigate—Macavity’s not there!

And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:

It must have been Macavity!’—but he’s a mile away.

You’ll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumb;

Or engaged in doing complicated long division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,

There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.

He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:

At whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!

And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known

(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)

Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time

Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

Proud-pied April: Sleeping Dragon and Leaping Horse

Okay, even though a little Tang poetry goes a long way, once a year is manageable. And I’ll revisit Du Fu, the writer who had intended to be a courtier and administrator, but ended up giving us some spectacular word images.

For example, “Night in the Pavilion”, where in the pre-dawn hour the Milky Way is waning, and two heroes come to naught. A lot of Du Fu’s poems evoke the elements of awaiting news of fighting at varying distances; a mark of the times, I guess.

“Night in the Pavilion”

At year’s end, yin and yang hurry the shortened day,

At sky’s end, frost and snow clear the frozen night.

Fifth watch: the drum and horn sound out mournful and strong,

Three gorges: the river of stars casts its trembling shadow.

Countryside cries from a thousand homes hearing news of the fighting.

Barbaric songs here and there rise from fishers and woodsmen.

Sleeping Dragon and Leaping Horse both ended in yellow dirt;

Waiting for news of worldly affairs brings me useless grief.

Proud-pied April: C'est mon étoile

In 1916, the Swiss-born poet and novelist we know as Blaise Cendrars became a French citizen. He was not quite 30 and already a leader of the Modernist movement.

He had also lost his right arm fighting in the French Foreign Legion in Champagne. When the next war rolled around, Cendrars was with the British Expeditionary Force during the German invasion in 1940; the book he wrote about it was seized by the Gestapo before it could be published.

Like that was ever going to silence him.

Cendrars wrote many poems about his experience in World War I. I love today’s because of him likening his lost hand to a constellation.

“Orion”

C'est mon étoile

Elle a la forme d'une main

C'est ma main montée au ciel

Durant toute la guerre je voyais

Orion par un créneau

Quand les

Zeppelins venaient bombarder

Paris ils

venaient toujours d'Orion

Aujourd'hui je l'ai au-dessus de ma tête

Le grand mât perce la paume de cette main qui doit

souffrir

Comme ma main coupée me fait souffrir percée qu'elle

est par un dard continuel

It’s my constellation

It’s shaped like a hand

It’s my own hand high in the sky

All through the war through a gap I saw Orion

The Zeppelins that came to bomb Paris always came from Orion

Today it’s above my head

The long pole pierces the palm of the hand that must suffer

As my severed hand makes me suffer pierced constantly by a spear

Proud-pied April: Nothing matters in hiding

This year marks the 60^th anniversary of the Hungarian revolt against its Communist government (and Soviet overlords). What started as a student march on the Parliament building in Budapest on 23 October looked for a few days as though it would crack open the Warsaw Pact. But within a couple of weeks the Red Army invaded and even more repressive measures were imposed on the country, symbolized in such photos as this one:

Hungary’s in one of those dicey geopolitical situations, standing in the path between Russian and German interests. During the Second World War the country was an Axis ally, and engaged in some unsuccessful secret attempts to negotiate an armistice with the Western Allies while fighting off the Soviets, which resulted in a German invasion in March, 1944. Between then and Germany’s surrender in April, 1945, 450,000 Jews and 28,000 Roma were murdered; there was almost no Hungarian resistance to this policy of deportation and murder.

One of the victims was the poet Miklós Radnóti. During the war Radnóti was conscripted into the Hungarian army; being a Jew, he was assigned to an unarmed labor battalion on the eastern front. He continued to write poetry, which we know about because, as the end approached, he bribed one of his Hungarian guards to smuggle his notebook of poems out. In November 1944, on a forced march, Radnóti was killed, with about 3200 comrades.

Like poets everywhere, Radnóti wrote about the human experience. In his case, of course, that experience included imprisonment and the expectation of being murdered. For example:

“The Hunted”

From my window I see a hillside,

  it cannot see me at all;

I’m still, verse trickles from my pen

  but nothing matters in hiding;

I see, though cannot grasp this solemn,

  old-fashioned grace: as ever,

the moon emerges onto the sky and

  the cherry tree bursts into blossom.

Since the end of the war, Radnóti has been recognized as a national treasure in Hungary. Funny how that works out.

Proud-pied April: Change rooms in your mind

As a culture, Persia has given us a good number of poets. Omar Kayyam, Rumi and a whole flock of others, including the one for today, a 15^th Century writer known as Hafiz.

A common theme for these poets is love, in all its complexities. Hafiz is no exception. For example:

“All the Hemispheres”

Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season

Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.

Make a new water-mark on your excitement

And love.

Like a blooming night flower,

Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness

And giving

Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself

In your thousand other forms

As you mount the hidden tide and travel

Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven

Are sitting around a fire

Chatting

While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of

You.

Gratitude Monday: Walking in all weathers

Yesterday I participated in a WalkMS event, as I’ve done for a few years. This time it was in Northern Virginia, where the temperature was about 25 degrees lower than it’s been for the walks I did in the Valley They Call Silicon.

I’ll confess that I found the organization of this event somewhat slapdash in comparison with the West Coast ones. Well—smaller and less collegial. It was a nice walk through some of the newest and oldest parts of Reston, but the start and finish were underwhelming. They put up the MS arch only minutes before the start:

And it didn’t last for even the first finishers less than an hour later:

I also missed the encouragement we got along the way in years past. Perhaps it’s because they run a bunch of these things all over the greater DC area during the month of April (the one in Manassas on Saturday actually had snow), and they’re a little pro forma about it.

Nothing pro-forma about the participants; there may not have been the numbers of teams I’ve seen in the past, but everyone is serious about the reason for the walk.

And thus my reason for gratitude. I’m thankful for the people who haul their asses out of bed on weekend mornings to walk one or three miles in the snow and cold (or the sunshine and heat) to raise money to help bring an end to a miserable bastard of a disease. And I’m grateful that I was part of it again.

Proud-pied April: Shaking scythes at cannon

Time for another round of Irish for National Poetry Month. So let’s hear from Seamus Heaney, who was born in Ulster, but whose Nationalist sensibilities led him to move to the Republic.

Heaney was a master of language—in addition to his own works, he translated Irish poetry, Beowulf and Horace, to much acclaim. He was also a teacher, notably in distinguished appointments to Harvard and then Oxford. Here’s what he had to say about his work: “When a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprised and extends the fixed relations between words that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit.”

When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the committee cited his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

Many of those works were about Ireland and Irish history, including “Requiem for the Croppies,” which he published on the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The poem commemorates the 1798 rebellion, which was Heaney’s way of honoring the events of 1916. What you need to know is that the rebels of 1798 were called croppy boys (reference to their close-cropped hair, which contrasted with the perukes of the ruling English); they fought with pikes (Catholics could not legally own firearms); and the grain they carried was their rations.

“Requiem for the Croppies”

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.

The imagery of the mass graves sprouting grain invokes both ineffable sorrow and the hope of resurrection. In Heaney’s view, the barley fed by the blood of the croppy boys grew like dragons' teeth into the Easter Rising, and—eventually—to the independence of Ireland.