Proud-pied April: Peaceful share of Time

It’s the last Wednesday in National Poetry Month, so one final poem from World War I.

Siegfried Sassoon is one of the best-known of the war poets. His experiences at the Western Front transformed him, moving from patriotic support to bitter, public opposition. Like Wilfred Owen, Sassoon used poetic language and structure to convey the kinds of things that newspapers did not report: filth, vermin, rotting corpses; terror, incompetence, futility.

In response to writing what became a public anti-war statement, Sassoon was sent to a military psychiatric hospital. If he’d not been part of the county-Cambridge-and-cricket set, he might instead have been jailed for voicing such opinions. He enjoyed quite a long and distinguished career as poet, novelist and editor following the war, which is kind of an anomaly for many of his contemporaries, who were not granted the reprieve of life or health.

He wrote “Aftermath” in 1919, and it was published the following year.

“Aftermath”

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

But the past is just the same-and War’s a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench-
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

Proud-pied April: The cicada's cry

A recent Washington Post story announced that many states in the Northeast are about to experience a 17-year cicada awakening. Cicadas, in case you’ve never experienced them, are members of the locust family, and when they come (in either 13-year or 17-year cycles) you understand why they were one of the plagues God visited upon Egypt as encouragement to let the Children of Israel go.

It’s not just the singing, although there’s something very apocalyptic about their aggregate sound. It’s their omnipresence in numbers you cannot imagine. Especially splattering on your windscreen.

(Note to self: get new wiper blades and check that windscreen fluid is topped up.)

At any rate, in honor of what we may be about to experience here in the Old Dominion, let’s have some haiku about cicadas from the master, Basho.

A cicada shell;

It sang itself

Utterly away

In the cicada’s cry

There’s no sign that can foretell

How soon it must die

Stillness—

The cicada’s cry

Drills into the rocks

Proud-pied April: A circle with no God

I’ve been hanging my daily poems this month around my office walls. One of my colleagues caught a few of them and wondered why I’ve got such dreary poetry decorating the place. Well, first off—he overlooked Shakespeare and Carroll. But I’ll concede the point that this year I’ve been pulling in some difficult topics. And here’s another, this time from Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Amichai was born in Germany, but his family emigrated to the (then British) Palestine Mandate territory when he was 11. Like some of my other choices this month (Sidney, Gurney, Radnóti), Amichai served in the military. First in the British army during World War II, then in the Israeli army in various wars against the Arabs.

He took as subjects the everyday world he found around him, which is one of the reasons I find “The Diameter of the Bomb” so gripping. The everyday world around him was violent, and the way he measures out the impact of that violence here, juxtaposing all the impersonal numbers and geometry against the dreadful human cost, is poetry at its most powerful.

“The Diameter of the Bomb”

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters

and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,

with four dead and eleven wounded.

And around these, in a larger circle

of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered

and one graveyard. But the young woman

who was buried in the city she came from,

at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,

enlarges the circle considerably,

and the solitary man mourning her death

at the distant shores of a country far across the sea

includes the entire world in the circle.

And I won't even mention the howl of orphans

that reaches up to the throne of God and

beyond, making

a circle with no end and no God.

Translation by Chana Bloch

Gratitude Monday: Throwing plagues and asking questions

It’s been a number of years since I’ve been to a Seder—well into the last century, now that I think of it. So I was very happy to be invited to one held on Friday by friends I’ve “met” in the past year.

(Thank you, Internet.)

A Seder, if you are at all unclear, is the meal that commemorates the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. It’s a little like Thanksgiving, because it is a giving of thanks, and also because the food is inextricably woven into the Tradition. Meaning: just as it can be a real Bone of Contention if your family has cornbread stuffing at Thanksgiving and it turns out that your partner’s has oyster stuffing, there may need to be UN-level negotiations as to whether you have potato latkes or matzo latkes at your Passover Seder.

Thankfully, this was not an issue on Friday. There were both potato and matzo latkes, as well as two kinds of charoset, multiple kugels and every other holiday thing you could think of.

Depending on your family background, at Seder you can spend literally hours reading the Haggadah, with or without heated interpretive discussions; or you can do an extremely abbreviated version, ask the Four Questions and get straight to the brisket. There are certain elements common to every iteration, but you can take it from there.

As I said, it’s been a while since my last Seder, and mine have always been, uh, unorthodox. (I’m thinking in particular about the one with people from film school, where we watched the Passover portion of The Ten Commandments, and had the youngest black, male Catholic ask the Four Questions.) There were two elements of Friday’s that I don’t recall from the past: the Throwing of the Plagues, and the Asking of the Questions in multiple languages.

What languages, you inquire? Well, English, Latin, Russian, Yiddish, German, Dutch, French, Norwegian, Arabic, Spanish and Klingon.

It was a lovely family meal, with more than 20 people at long tables stretched across two rooms. And I’m very grateful to have been part of it.

Proud-pied April: We know their dream

As this is the actual hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising (24 April 1916), and as it is not possible to get through National Poetry Month without something from William Butler Yeats, let’s have the granddaddy of them all, “Easter 1916”. It’s the one that has, in its closing lines, come to define modern Ireland.

Yeats was an Irish nationalist, but not a revolutionary. He decried the use of violence, until the Brits began summary executions. He was so appalled by the response that he was even willing to count John MacBride as a hero/martyr, naming him in the litany that also includes Pearse and Connolly. MacBride was the "drunken, vain-glorious lout" who married Maude Gonne, the woman Yeats loved hopelessly his whole life, thus twice-loathed by the poet. But in the face of the institutional barbarism of the British authorities, he was willing to give his rival some props.

You can see Yeats trying to feel his way through his reaction to the rising—moving through chitchat at the club, speculating on what contributions the individual Fenians might have made and wondering if such a blood sacrifice was necessary, because "England may keep faith". In the end, though, what's done is done, and nothing will be the same.

“Easter 1916”

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent

In ignorant good will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our winged horse.

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter, seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute change.

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim;

And a horse plashes within it

Where long-legged moor-hens dive

And hens to moor-cocks call.

Minute by minute they live:

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death.

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead.

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse –

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Proud-pied April: Never a bargain better driven

You could spend the entire month on various Elizabethan poets. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Donne, Jonson…the age doesn’t get more golden as far as English lit goes.

So let’s have Sir Philip Sidney today. Like Marlowe and Raleigh, Sidney was one of those utility players: soldier, courtier, poet, politician. He was part of the Dudley family, which put him in close proximity to Elizabeth, and embarked on diplomatic missions before he was 20; at the age of 22 he was in Paris and witnessed the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre, which must have shaped his already strong Protestant convictions.

By age 25 he wrote an open letter the Queen detailing why she should not marry the (French Catholic) Duc d’Alençon. Among his objections was the fact that d’Alençon was a son of Catherine de Medicis, “the Jezebel of our age”, who of course had been critical to the Saint Bartholomew Day events of five years earlier. Pretty bold for a young man, although of course it was a different age, and he’d already paid a lot of dues.

Sidney was as bold a military leader against Spain as he was a matrimonial advisor. He was wounded at the Battle of Zutphen. I have to think that the 26 days it took to die from gangrene must have been ghastly. He was not yet 32 years old.

As a man of letters, Sidney held that the purpose of poetry is “to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” He wrote in a variety of formats. Here’s an example.

“My true love hath my heart”

My true-love hath my heart and I have his,

By just exchange one for the other given:

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;

There never was a bargain better driven.

His heart in me keeps me and him in one;

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

He loves my heart, for once it was his own;

I cherish his because in me it bides.

His heart his wound received from my sight;

My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;

For as from me on him his hurt did light,

So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:

Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,

My true love hath my heart and I have his.

Proud-pied April: Pomme qu'y n'échelle

We last saw poems from Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames a couple of years ago, so we’re due for more.

If you’ll recall, these are definitely meant to be read aloud, by a Francophone, but not one who’s a language Nazi. What I love about them is that you have to completely disengage your preconceptions about order and sense, and concentrate on the sounds.

Then you read the footnotes and just crack up. I do love footnotes.

As with our previous outing, I have included a more usual translation of the rhymes at the bottom of the post, in invisible writing. If you need to ch, uh, look, run your mouse over the area to highlight.

Pis-terre, pis-terre

Pomme qui n'y terre¹

Ah! de ouilles² fenil³ coup ne qu'y perd⁴

Il peut terrine et pomme qu'y n'échelle⁵

Iéna équipe soeur verrou elle.⁶

1.  Woe to the earth left to lie fallow. It is not quite clear whether a lack of apples or potatoes is meant.
2.  Ouiller (verb). The practice of filling a half empty wine barrel with wine of the same vintage up to capacity. Air tends to sour wine.
3.  Fenil. A hay press or baler.
4.  Nothing must be wasted?
5.  Terrine refers, of course, to the earthenware cooking pots of French farm kitchens, and apples that need no ladders are, we suppose, windfalls. These must be gathered and made into conserves.
6.  Iéna, town in Thuringia, Germany, pop., 70,000. Famous for its manufacture of optical and precision instruments. Also Napoleon I's victory against the Prussians in 1806. In the balance of the line, "to equip a sister with a bolt (or latch)," the poet refers to the use of chastity belts, in this case of German silver. In bold, broad strokes we have here a magnificent portrait of the thrifty, cautious French farmer.

Reine, reine,

gueux éveille.

Gomme à gaine,

en horreur, taie.¹

1.  "Queen, Queen, arouse the rabble
Who use their girdles, horrors, as pillow slips."

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,

Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.

He put her in a pumpkin shell

And there he kept her very well.

Rain, rain, go away.

Come again some other day.

Proud-pied April: Nose and thumb

Dorothy Parker is another mainstay of my National Poetry Month; I couldn’t get through it without her. She’s not someone you want to binge-read, because poem after poem of biting wit begins to feel like the death of a thousand cuts. She's like the very best Courvoisier: sip a little and savor it.

Parker’s life wasn’t happy; she repeatedly loved not wisely but too well, and her longest relationship was with booze. So it’s not surprising that her short stories are deeply depressing and that her poetry is bitter. Still—like Courvoisier—in moderation, there’s nothing like a bit of her verse to say what you’d like to; if you only had both the skill and the nerve.

“Neither Bloody nor Bowed”

They say of me, and so they should,

It’s doubtful if I come to good.

I see acquaintances and friends

Accumulating dividends,

And making enviable names

In science, art, and parlor games.

But I, despite expert advice,

Keep doing things I think are nice,

And though to good I never come—

Inseparable my nose and thumb!

Proud-pied April: Purple from Severn side

Another poem from World War I today, this time from Ivor Gurney, who was not quite 25 when he enlisted as a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment in 1915. He’d already had one mental breakdown (what we would now call bipolar disorder) and had been rejected from service due to poor eyesight, but by that time the British Army wasn’t being too picky about who enlisted.

Gurney was wounded in the shoulder in 1917, but returned to battle and gassed a few months later. Interestingly, at the time he rather dismissed those effects, “Being gassed (mildly) with the new gas is no worse than catarrh or a bad cold.” But in March 1918 he suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized, where he wrote songs and poetry.

After the war he was regarded as very promising, studied under Ralph Vaughn Williams at the Royal College of Music, but had problems sustaining the effort. He continued composing, but by 1922 his family had him declared insane. He spent his last years in various psychiatric hospitals, dying in 1937 of tuberculosis.

Gurney wrote and composed on a wide range of themes. His collection of poems about the war, Severn and Somme, includes “To his love”, which was written in 1917. His restraint in juxtaposing the violence of the manner of death against the bucolic loveliness of his dead friend’s home is extremely powerful.

“To his love”

He’s gone, and all our plans

Are useless indeed.

We’ll walk no more on Cotswolds

Where the sheep feed

Quietly and take no heed.

His body that was so quick

Is not as you

Knew it, on Severn River

Under the blue

Driving our small boat through.

You would not know him now…

But still he died

Nobly, so cover him over

With violets of pride

Purple from Severn side.

Cover him, cover him soon!

And with thick-set

Masses of memoried flowers-

Hide that red wet

Thing I must somehow forget.

Proud-pied April: The rude bridge

I’m guessing that unless you are of a Certain Age (meaning, Boomer or possibly Gen-X) you’ve never had to memorize poetry and recite it in front of your classmates. Dunno whether that makes you lucky or culturally deprived; perhaps someone can do a doctoral dissertation on that.

At any rate, one of the poets that we in the U.S.A. used to have to declaim was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Either “The Song of Hiawatha”, “Evangeline” or “Paul Revere’s Ride”.

You’d never get “Hiawatha” today on account of Cultural Appropriation, which would save countless children from lengthy psychotherapy. I suppose “Evangeline” might be hauled out by the anti-colonial crowd, if they want to close their eyes to the fact that the victims of British imperial expansion in this poem were French colonists. And “Paul Revere” may still be saddling up in schoolrooms around the country round about now.

That’s because the historical event commemorated in the poem took place on 18 April, 1775, as Revere and two others rode into the hinterlands to warn colonists that the British Army was going to be marching out to seize arms that had been thought to be stockpiled in Concord. (As it happens, British intelligence was faulty; the matériel had been moved. But the militia were ready to take a stand on principle.)

The Redcoats came under fire at Lexington, and then went on to Concord. Fire was exchanged at the North Bridge, with casualties on both sides. The British regrouped and withdrew to Boston.

(There’s an early Bill Cosby routine, where he describes the pre-battle Toss of the Coin, which went to the Americans, who decided that the British had to wear red uniforms and march in a straight line, while they got to hide behind rocks and trees and shoot at the slowly moving targets. I always thought that was hysterical.)

So today let’s have a poem about these opening shots in the War of Independence. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the patron saint of anyone who ever lived in a commune and could pronounce Transcendentalism (even if not quite understanding the meaning). When a memorial to the militia was erected at the North Bridge, Emerson wrote “Concord Hymn” and gave us one of the other recital pieces, invoking “the shot heard round the world”.

In revisiting it, I’m reminded of why I never much liked it, or any of Longfellow’s stuff. But what the hell—in honor of, etc.

“Concord Hymn”

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

   Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

   And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

   Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

   Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

We set today a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem,

When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

    To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee.