The cruelest month: sail beyond the sunset

I’ll confess that I struggle with today’s offering for National Poetry Month. Or, at least—my relationship with it has changed over the years I’ve known it.

The poem is Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, but he’s not talking about the youthful or middle-aged hero, the Sacker of Cities or the guy who kept Circe happy for months on end. This is the old Ulysses, the guy with arthritis and probably insomnia. This King of Ithaca is pretty much looking at his life in the rear-view mirror and it’s giving him the pip.

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though 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 grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

               This 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 through 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.

               There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Here’s my, uh, well—okay, not a problem, really. But a changing viewpoint, I guess.

Back in high school, when I first read it, the poem really struck me quite deeply. Why, I even titled my college thesis (on the contribution of women to World War I) “Work of Noble Note”. So many “captain-of-my-fate” elements to it, yeah?

I thought Ulysses was brave and valiant. You know—he’s thinking about getting the band back together and taking it on the road, even if it’s the last tour. He’s going to model his final time units on the template he established in his early years.

But that’s because he had that brilliant career back in the day.

I’m suddenly reminded of a comment someone—a woman, to be sure—made about a photograph of Sophia Loren taken when she was maybe 60. The observation was along the lines of, “You see—a woman can be quite attractive at 60 if she was stunningly gorgeous in her youth.”

And there you are. When I was in high school, I thought there was a life ahead that involved righting wrongs, going on adventures and mad moments of exquisite happiness. (Only, when you’re a teenager, you really don’t expect exquisite happiness to be meted out in moments; you reckon on years.) And now that I have this apparently permanent relationship with ibuprofen, and sleep is a hard-won thing, I wonder what adventures I could possibly find in the future, when they’re so thin on the ground of the past?

Well, what the hell. I’ve dredged this one up from my past. Must be a reason for that. 

Besides self-torment, I mean.

& for your main course...

Well—this is one you don’t hear every day: the camel given French President François Hollande by the government of Mali is being replaced. Because the family that was looking after it ate it.

An unnamed source from north Mali assures us that it will be a “bigger and better-looking camel”. I get how it could be bigger, but I’m not sure how you measure beauty amongst camels.

I’m quite interested in the choice of a camel—given personally in gratitude for France sending ground troops to repel Al Qaeda invaders. I mean, weren’t there some nice native crafts they could have presented to Hollande? Cloth? Gold jewelry? A camel’s a big responsibility.

I’m also interested in the idea that the family (unnamed) didn’t put it to work, but instead put it on the menu. Must have been the extended family. And a hell of a barbecue.

The cruelest month: recite what history teaches

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is from Gertrude Stein.

I do not have a particularly close relationship with Stein as a writer; rather, I’ve always been interested in her as a patron of the arts and an ex-pat historical figure, an American Jew living in France who managed to wait out the Nazi occupation without losing either her life or her collection of modernist art.

I’ve enjoyed The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and a while ago I read a couple of decent biographies of her. But I’ll confess I find her non-representational poetic style difficult to assimilate.

(Although, as a cultural observer she certainly got Oakland right when she mused, “There’s no there there.” She’d lived in the city; she knew what she was talking about.)

And I’ll give it up to my Hungarian-born French professor: if you want to take in one of Stein’s poems, you should really listen to it, because you can’t separate the sounds from…well, whatever it is I think she means.

Here’s Stein reading "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso".

When I listen to this and think about the paintings Picasso did while Stein was one of his patrons, it somehow makes sense, although I couldn’t analyse it for you.

If you feel you just have to read it, you can find it here.

The auld triangle

Today’s post for National Poetry Month got me thinking about the Behan boys again.

I mentioned before that Dominic has written songs, including the widely-known “Patriot Game”. But thinking about that college paper I wrote on Brendan (and Dylan Thomas) reminded me of his play, The Quare Fellow, set in Dublin’s Montjoy Prison. It’s not a completely uplifting work, but Behan certainly knew prisons, having served time in a British borstal for his IRA activities.

The thing I really recall from the play is the song “The Auld Triangle”, which Dominic wrote; I’m sure that the first version I heard of it was by the Clancy Brothers.

It had been a long time since I’d heard it by the time I got to Dublin, but when I found myself walking beside the Royal Canal, I went ahead and sang what I remembered of it anyhow. It’s not meant for a solo soprano voice, but what the hell; it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Here’s a version that’s spot on. I love the harmonies hit on the words, “Royal Canal”.

The cruelest month: Sing the sun in flight

Well, of course you can’t have a National PoetryMonth without something from Dylan Thomas. I expect Thomas is the best-known poet to come out of Wales, and he’s been part of my life since my friend Gretchen Pullen introduced me to him in high school. Gretchen was crazy mad for Thomas in the way I was besotted with Yeats.

To tell you the truth, I might just have been too young in high school to appreciate Thomas, but he grew on me. So much so that in my freshman year in college I chose to do a paper comparing his life and poetry with those of Brendan Behan. On the surface they had similarities—larger-than-life personas, hard-drinking, womanizing and poem-making Celts; pretty much everything that sends Sassenachs purse-lipped and pucker-arsed into tut-tutting tizzies.

There were major differences, of course; one being that Behan had politics in his blood, while I have this memory of finding a quote from Thomas that “politics is bloody awful”, although I’ve not been able to track it down recently. (That is a maxim that I have adopted to technology, by the way: technology is bloody awful. If you're not careful.) Another is that the general public (certainly in America) is much more familiar with the Welshman’s work than the Irishman’s.

(When I lived in Britain, I was driving somewhere with one of my English colleagues, a technocrat at the data networking company that employed me, and he mentioned "that Welsh poet" and vaguely referred to "…some really famous poem" by him. I chirped, “Do not go gentle into that good night?” He was quite pleased that I knew about it.)

If you’re a fan of Paul Simon, you might recall the line from “A Simple Desultory Philippic”:

“He doesn't dig poetry. He's so unhip that when you say Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. The man ain't got no culture.”

Well, I got culture.

I could haul out something reasonably obscure for you of my back pocket, because Gretchen really, really loved Thomas and she was really, really persuasive, but I’m going to go with one of his most famous poems, the one my mate Rob was talking about, written as the poet watched his father growing old and frail:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

You should read this one aloud; you need to hear it. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, I give you this reading by Welsh actor Philip Madoc:

Gaming the classics

Since I have a maximum of about 11 readers for this blog, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I was once a contestant on Jeopardy.

I’m not proud of it; and since I didn’t win, I only had the ugliest couch in Christendom to show for it (which I ditched when I left Virginia for Washington, enough being enough). And I certainly don’t think about it, ever.

But while putting together today’s post on Ovid for National Poetry Month I was reminded of another famous Roman poet, and his masterwork, which I read for a humanities course at Scripps College. I’d already had an Ancient module—Greek—but I enjoyed that so much I went back for more with a lecture course on Roman culture. The Aeneid was part of that, of course, and that’s what brings me to that irritating experience on a game show.

(As an aside: can someone tell me why MSFT Word’s spellchecker accepts Aeneas but not Aeneid?)

I have enough of the Puritan poker up my butt to fervently believe you can’t/shouldn’t get something for nothing, and I have to say that I find all game shows cringeworthy in their appeal to contestant greed. I’d never have touched Jeopardy with a barge pole but my friend Jan (who’d tried out and been rejected) kept insisting that with my compendium of trivial knowledge, I’d be a shoo-in.

Well, reader, I did make it to the taping and I did get chosen to play. I don’t recall the category (classical lit opening lines?), but the answer was, “Arms and the man I sing”, and I buzzed first with the question, “What is the Aeneid?”

Fine. But that complete plonker Alex Trebek, whose ego is so huge I don’t know how he gets it through the door, wanted to show off. He asked if I could recite it in Latin and I said I couldn’t. I read it in translation. (And, BTW, “Arms and the man I sing” is only one translation, by John Dryden; but it’s pretty famous.)

So he smirked, “Arma virumque cano,” like he should get the Nobel Prize in literature.

So that’s why Ovid won out over Virgil for today’s poetic entry.

I suppose you’re going to ask, so I’ll go ahead and tell you: I won the final jeopardy round on the answer “The number of children in the Cunningham family on ‘Happy Days’”. The question was, “What is three?” I was the only contestant to get it right and I only knew it because a couple of weeks earlier I’d been channel surfing and came across a syndicated episode from the first year that had an older brother named Chuck. I’d bet everything on my answer, but it wasn’t enough to beat this one guy who was a complete juggernaut, thus validating my belief in not getting something for nothing.

We live in a bizarre old world when knowing the number of Cunningham children and the opening line to one of the great classics carries equal weight in any kind of contest.

The cruelest month: Femina sola superstes

For today’s National Poetry Month offering, we’ll enter the WABAC Machine and set the clock for…a long, long time ago. All the way to the cusp of the Common Era.

Give it up, folks, for Publius Ovidius Naso, one of the mainstays of the romantic poets. I met Ovid at UCLA, in my third-year Latin class. But we read Metamorphoses, not Amores or Ars Amatoria.

Metamorphoses is your basic ancient Greco-Roman mythology, writ large in dactylic hexameter. The part I’m sharing with you is about Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only two humans left on earth after Zeus floods the place in one of his periodic snits.

Redditus orbis erat; quem postquam vidit

inanem et desolatas agere alta silentia terras,

Deucalion lacrimis ita Pyrrham adfatur obortis:

  ‘o soror, o coniunx, o femina sola superstes,

  quam commune mihi genus et patruelis origo,

  deinde torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt,

  terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus,

  nos duo turba sumus; possedit cetera pontus.

  haec quoque adhuc vitae non est fiducia nostrae

  certa satis; terrent etiamnum nubila mentem.

  quis tibi, si sine me fatis erepta fuisses,

  nunc animus, miseranda, foret? quo sola timorem

  ferre modo posses? quo consolante doleres!

  namque ego (crede mihi), si te quoque pontus haberet,

  te sequerer, coniunx, et me quoque pontus haberet.’

If you want an English translation, here you go:

When Deucalion saw that earth was empty

and observed the solemn silence over

devastated lands, with tears in his eyes

he spoke to Pyrrha:

                                 O sister, O wife,

  the only woman alive, linked to me

  by common race and family origin,

  then by marriage, and by these dangers now,

  we two are the total population

  of the entire world, every place spied out

  by the setting and rising sun. The sea

  has taken all the others. Even now,

  there is nothing secure about our lives,

  nothing to give us sufficient confidence.

  Those heavy clouds still terrify my mind.

  O you for whom I have so much compassion,

  how would you feel now, if you had been saved

  from death without me? How could you endure

  the fear all by yourself? Who would console

  your grief? For if the sea had taken you,

  dear wife, I would follow you, believe me,

  and the sea would have me, too.

And here’s my connection. I was a transfer student at UCLA, meaning I went in as a junior. And three of my four upper division courses were lectures with more than 75 students in each one of them. Latin was the exception—I think there were maybe eight of us in that class. And we were reading Metamorphoses.

One day the professor instructed us to read aloud the passage that begins with “O soror, O coniunx!” and read it with passion.

One after another of my classmates droned on like they were performing an autopsy phonetically. When my turn finally came up I gave it everything I’d have done if I were playing Tosca, which the material deserved. Last man and woman left on earth? Are you kidding me?

When I finished there was silence. The professor made some comment about that being the sort of delivery she’d been looking for. I let my fellow students off the hook by replying, “Well, my professor at my former college was Italian, so…”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh—Carmen Brunol?”

“Yep.”

Well, there you go.

Dr. Brunol had lived through the 30s and 40s in Italy. Her memories of the League of Nations’ sanctions were, uh, vivid.

Also, in comparing ancient Rome with Fascist Italy (a reference Mussolini was always making) she made a couple of points. We were discussing second person singular and plural (often thought of in various non-English languages as familiar and formal forms of address) she mentioned that all the caesars were addressed as “tu”. I asked if anyone ever called Il Duce by that form and she just howled with laughter.

She also commented on the differences between Roman and modern Italian engineering: “The allies would drop a bomb next to a Roman bridge and it would stand; ten miles away three Mussolini bridges would collapse.”

And you thought Latin was desiccated and boring? That’s just what we want you to think.

The cruelest month: Belie with false compare

Well, alrighty, then—time to haul out the big guns for National Poetry Month. I’m talking Shakespeare, baby; the one and only.

The challenge with the Bard is, of course, being spoilt for choice. Do I go for Hamlet’s soliloquy? Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”? “All the world’s a stage,” from As You Like It?

No, I do not.

And which of the sonnets? Number 18—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Number 116—“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”?

Hmm—not so much.

No, you can get plenty of romantic hyperbole out of many of the sonnets—Shakespearean and otherwise. I happen to like number 130—the one where Will gets real about his mistress and still prefers her. You know—kind of like Charles and Camilla.

Sonnet 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare.

There’s love for you.

As for the plays—I’m picking the Saint Crispian’s Day speech from Henry V:

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember, with advantages,

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words-

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

I love that speech. And squawk me no squawk about the lack of rhyme. You didn’t grouse about “The Waste Land”, did you?

Here’s the power of that speech: you can have Kenneth Branagh give it before the field of Agincourt in full regalia and that’s as it should be. But here it is in a different setting, a field exercise in a basic training camp in the 1994 film Renaissance Man.

Here’s the deal: Danny DeVito is an unemployed advertising guy who slums taking a job trying to teach some misfit recruits how to take instructions. Gregory Hines’ drill sergeant thinks teacher and students are collectively and individually a waste of space. They’re studying Hamlet in class, but a trip to Ontario to watch a production of Henry V on the hoof captures the soul of Private Benitez, as you can see in this clip:

The filmmakers cut about three lines and threw in a couple of words, but still.

I cannot watch this sequence dry-eyed, hearing Henry’s words coming out of a Brooklyn-bred mouth on a guy with the army-issued eyeglasses that everyone knows are a key birth-control device, and seeing the way it captures the universal spirit of the warrior, as the drill sergeant clearly recogizes.

And that’s why you can’t have a poetry month without Shakespeare.

The cruelest month: Richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow

So far, my poems for National Poetry Month have been by the great and the good. Or at least the well-known. My entry for today comes from a collection of poems and drawings from the children of Terezín, the “model” ghetto the Nazis built as part of their Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

Terezín was the Nazis’ Potemkin lager—a transit camp-cum-ghetto for Jews removed first from Prague, then from other areas of the Reich. Built on the old Hapsburg town of Theresienstadt (pre-war population around 5000), it housed tens of thousands in ghetto conditions, although it was considered posh enough to show to visiting Red Cross officials as an example of benign treatment of Jews. Of those who didn’t die of starvation, disease or brutality at Terezín, most were murdered at Auschwitz.

I first saw I Never Saw Another Butterfly while working at the Children’s Room of the Pasadena Public Library. There’s a newer edition on Amazon, with about 50 more pages than mine, so I’m thinking more context setting.

Anyhow, the poem that gives the collection its title is “The Butterfly”, by Pavel Friedmann:

The Butterfly

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

   Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing

   against a white stone...

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly ’way up high.

It went away I'm sure because it wished to

   kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto

But I have found my people here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut candles in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don't live in here,

   In the ghetto.

The poem was dated 4^th June 1942, when Friedmann was 21. He was transported to Auschwitz and murdered 29^th September 1944.

You should see the picture that faces “The Butterfly” in my edition. It’s by Eva Bu (Bulová), undated.

Bulova was born 12^th July 1930, deported to Terezín 12^th September 1942, and killed in Auschwitz 4 October 1944.

Years after my introduction to Terezín, I was reading some poems written by German soldiers who’d been caught by Russia’s greatest military leader, General Winter. I can’t remember the source, or even where they were—Stalingrad? Leningrad? Moscow? Dunno. But from their frozen hell they expressed the same kinds of longing the children of the model ghetto spoke of.

Just a butterfly. Just a flower. Just a smile from a young woman. Just a hint that life holds out something good, when in fact as far as you can see it's ugly and painful and fearsome.

That's one of the functions of poetry, to focus on that hope.

The cruelest month: 'Satiable curtiosity

I believe there must be an entry from Rudyard Kipling in National Poetry Month. You gotta have a representative of that muscular Christianity style of the late Victorians, don’t you?

For a guy who never wore the uniform, Kipling did a whole lotta evangelizing for empire and the military effort it took to support it; he’s the one who enjoined the Brits to “take up the white man’s burden”. He also wrote shedloads of wonderful stories, collected in such offerings as The Jungle Book and Just-So Stories; and every once in a while I haul out Kim to reread, just because it’s a great adventure about the Great Game.

One of my favorites of his Just-So stories is “The Elephant’s Child”, because that Elephant’s Child was just full of ‘satiable curtiosity. Which is how elephants got their long trunks. Don’t believe me? Here’s how it starts:

“IN the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant--a new Elephant--an Elephant's Child--who was full of 'satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.”

I don’t know how exactly it works out, but it turns out that I’m actually related to that Elephant’s Child, maybe second cousin once removed, because I’m always asking ever so many questions. And, like the Elephant’s Child, I’ve had my share of spankings by way of answers.

Anyhow, at the end of the story (which I do recommend highly; you can find it here), Kipling adds this poem:

I Keep six honest serving-men:

  (They taught me all I knew)

Their names are What and Where and When

  And How and Why and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

  I send them east and west;

But after they have worked for me,

  I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five.

  For I am busy then,

As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

  For they are hungry men:

But different folk have different views:

  I know a person small--

She keeps ten million serving-men,

  Who get no rest at all!

She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,

  From the second she opens her eyes--

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

  And seven million Whys!

Anyone ever trained as a journalist knows this six honest serving men. And anyone who’s read the story knows what a workout the Elephant’s Child gave them.