BELINDA’S BOOK NOTES

DECEMBER 2024 BOOK NOTES

–– Paradise Lost, an epic for our time, for all time.

On the 350th Anniversary of John Milton’s death, on November 8th this year, there was a Miltonathon organized by Milton’s Cottage in the UK and The Milton Society of America –– a global reading over a twenty-four hour period, via Zoom, of Paradise Lost. I was lucky enough to take part in this grand event by reading a few lines from Book lll. Being more familiar with some sections than others, I thought I should at least re-read the first three books, but found that I was irresistibly swept away by the whole narrative, over 10,000 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter in twelve books.

Here is what Milton’s friend and champion, the poet Andrew Marvell, had to say:

“On Paradise Lost

When I beheld the poet blind, yet bold
In slender book his vast design unfold –
Messiah crowned, God’s reconciled decree,
Rebelling angels, the forbidden tree,
Heaven, hell, earth, chaos, all – the argument
Held me a while misdoubting his intent,”

and for the next several lines Marvell questions whether Milton “Through that wide field how he his way should find”? But then, as he reads, he recognizes:

“At once delight and horror on us seize;
Thou sing’st with so much gravity and ease,
And above human flight dost soar aloft
With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft.
The bird named from the paradise you sing
So never flags, but always keeps on wing.

Where could’st thou words of such compass find?
Whence furnish such a vast expanse of mind?

“Such a vast expanse of mind” and “his vast design” is so exactly right. Milton had a musical education from his musician father, was widely read from a very young age, was fluent in French, Italian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic, had travelled in Europe where he met with the aged Galileo and became acquainted with the glories of Renaissance art.

But his “vast design” was written at a time of deep divisions, social, religious and political, a time of civil war ending in the unimaginable act of regicide, a time riven by conspiracy theories and fears from foreign wars.

Milton served in Cromwell’s government and in 1660, on the restoration of Charles II, was sent to the Tower of London to await execution. It is thought that it was Marvell, among others, including Milton’s Royalist brother, who persuaded the King to grant Milton clemency. In one of the great pivotal moments of history, he retreated to the life of poverty and banishment from public life that gave him the freedom to write the great epic that he had been brewing in his imagination for many years. Milton’s sight had been failing for some time and by 1652 he was totally blind. But here in the opening lines of Paradise Lost the poet calls on the “heavenly Muse” to the aid of his “adventurous song”, “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.”

“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos:
…. …. … I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss,
And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support:
That to the height of this great argument,
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”

These first twenty-six lines, in just two sentences, set the scene, proclaim the aim and set the tone, its drama of both “delight and horror” never failing. It begins, as the best stories do, in media res, in the midst of things.

Integral to this “vast design” is the linking theme of music in all its forms, adding its notes to the music of the verse itself As Joseph Summers writes in his 1962 study “As a poet he employed the sensuous medium of sound. Milton used the sounds of his verse to suggest, to reinforce, and even to create meanings…” (On The Muse’s Method p.178). Music, whether as song, harp or lyre and

“the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders….
Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage
With solemn touches troubled thoughts and chase
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain
From mortal or immortal minds.” (BkI ll 556-559).
Or the
“Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds:
At which the universal host upsent
A shout that tore hell’s concave, and beyond
Frighted the reign of Chaos and Old Night.”( II 540-543.)

It is this constant variety and change that are one of the many delights that the poem offers. The two narrative arcs in Paradise Lost, the fall of Satan, his vengeful rage, envy and despair, and the creation and fall of Adam and Eve, run parallel and then intertwine, moving back and forth, weaving the whole vast scheme together in what Samuel Johnson called the “peculiar power to astonish”.

It is this constant movement and change in the narrative that Joseph Summers calls the “Grateful vicissitude” that is described in the opening lines of Book VI –– ‘vicissitude’ in Milton’s day did not have the negative connotation it now has – it meant change, variety and movement of the most “grateful” kind. (On The Muse’s Method p.71).

“There is a cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his throne,
Where Light and Darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns–– which makes through heaven
Grateful vicissitude, like day and night;” (II 4-8)

Like a great symphony, the two narratives move, in perfect harmony and infinite variety, from dark to light and back to dark. In his morning hymn, a transcendent lyric of praise to God, Adam offers up a prayer:

“Hail universal Lord, be bounteous still
To give us only good; and if the night
Have gathered aught of evil, or concealed,
Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark.” (Bk. V. ll 205-208).

But we know that Eve falls prey to the Serpent’s wiles, and darkness descends. Forgiveness and mutual understanding prevail after much travail and agony of soul, reflecting the sacrifice of the Son:

“Dwells in all heaven a charity so dear?” (Bk. III l.216).

“Behold me, then, me for him, life for life,I offer;” (Bk. III: ll 236-7)

And in the final lines of the poem, “thy theme sublime”, we have not an end, but a beginning:

“The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide;
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.” (Bk. XII ll 646-9).

But “delight” is the over-arching element and here are a few of these “Grateful vicissitudes.” Satan’s shield calls up the memory of the poet’s meeting with Galileo:

“his ponderous shield,
Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round,
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fesolé,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe.” (Bk.I ll 284-291).

Going from great to small, in Bk.VII, hidden in the seismic events of story of The Creation, we have this tender portrait of the ant:

“First crept
The parsimonious emmet, provident
Of future, in small room large heart enclosed ––
Pattern of just equality perhaps
Hereafter –– joined in her popular tribes
Of commonality;” (II 484-489)

And back to great, the building of Pandemonium, Satan’s “high capital”, is likened to:

“As in an organ, from one blast of wind,
To many a row of pipes the sound-board breathes.
Anon out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose like an exhalation, with the sound
Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet––“ (Bk.I ll 708-712)

But an epic for our time, for all time? Like that little ant, “in small room large heart enclosed”, in a scene of high drama, the foot-soldier seraph, Abdiel, alone stood up to the rebelling angels:

“Among the faithless faithful only he;
Among innumerable false unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst them forth he passed,
Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained
Superior, nor of violence feared aught;
And with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers, to swift destruction doomed.”
(Bk.V ll 896-907)

“Where could’st thou words of such compass find?
Whence furnish such a vast expanse of mind?”

A gift to us all in this Holiday Season.

NOVEMBER 2024 BOOK NOTES

Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, A Friendship in Poetry, and a touch of Keats:

Edward Thomas, (1878-1917) a Welsh/English poet of the early Twentieth Century who, though perhaps not very well known, wrote, in the space of two years, between December 1914 and his death on the battlefields of France on Easter Day in1917, some of the loveliest and most enduring of nature poems, many shadowed by war, 142 in all. Edna Longley, who edited and annotated the Collected Poems,(2008) describes Thomas as an “ecocentric” poet – a beautiful step beyond a “nature poet” – a poet who saw all life as of equal value, humans being but a small part of Life. This is lyric poetry that rejects Victorian English attitudes, that is post-Darwinian, and one that speaks loudly to us today.

But it was the friendship between Edward Thomas and Robert Frost that brought about a tectonic shift in the development of English poetry and the lives of these two poets. This serendipitous friendship and its results are described in Matthew Hollis’s engaging biography of Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France. In brief, they recognized each other as soulmates in their belief in the poetry of plain speech, in “the sound of sense”. It was Frost who recognized the poet in Thomas’s prose writings and gave him the courage to write poetry after a career struggling to make a living writing reviews, essays and biographies, and it was Thomas’s influential reviews of Frost’s second book, North of Boston, that launched Frost’s career in England and the United States. In 1921 Frost acknowledged “He gave me standing as a poet –– he more than anyone else” (Hollis: p.149). The outbreak of the First World War parted them forever, but the fruits of their long “poet-walks” in the English countryside remain to this day. Both men had difficult, even tragic, lives but there is something beautiful in the flowering of this friendship and a poetry in which the “medium is common speech” that influenced so many writers, among them poets such as W. H. Auden and Seamus Heaney.

Because it is November, here are two Edward Thomas poems to give eyes and ears to this season:

“There’s nothing like the sun”

“There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning’s storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang.”

“Birds’ Nests”

“The summer nests uncovered by autumn wind,
Some torn, others dislodged, all dark,
Everyone sees them: low or high in tree,
Or hedge, or single bush, they hang like a mark.

Since there’s no need of eyes to see them with
I cannot help a little shame
That I missed most, even at eye’s level, till
The leaves blew off and made the seeing no game.
…. …. …. ….
And most I like the winter nest deep-hid
That leaves and berries fell into:
Once a dormouse dined there on hazel-nuts,
And grass and goose-grass seeds found soil and grew.”

And here is the “plain speech” of Robert Frost in his Autumn poem “After Apple Picking”:

“My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now,
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
…. …. …. …. ….
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
….. …. …. …. ….
For I have had too much
Of apple -picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.”

Maybe it is that scent of apples that calls up this season of Autumn, that takes us back to Edward Thomas, for whom all roads lead, not only to France, but also to Keats – John Keats who wrote in one of his famous letters: “If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” That same sensibility that is found in Thomas’s “Birds Nests”. In his 1916 critical study of Keats, Thomas explored his voice and vision, both in the letters and in the poems, and that enduring voice and vision is woven into Thomas’s poetry.

So this Thanksgiving season, to celebrate the fruits of friendship, the beauty of Fall and the gift of poetry, here are some lines from Keats’ “To Autumn” –– famous, familiar, yes, but its sweet melody ever a fresh delight to our hearts and ears:

“Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.
…. …. …. …. …. …. ….

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, ––
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

OCTOBER 2024 BOOK NOTES

A Celebration to Honor the life and work of James Longenbach, September 17th 1959-July 29th 2022, will take place at Stonington Free Library on Sunday, October 13th at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. A group of his friends and colleagues, led by his wife, the acclaimed novelist Joanna Scott, will read and discuss his work.

When James Longenbach died two years ago, at the age of 62, he had just completed his seventh collection of poems, Seafarer, which was published this July along with two previous volumes, Forever (2021) and Earthling (2017). As it says on the book jacket – “Standing on the shore, preparing to journey into the unknown, James Longenbach wrote these final poems with astonishing courage and clarity.”

“We live in a house
With many windows.
… … … … …
I don’t imagine
We’ll live forever,
Nobody does.
My goal here
Is clarity.”
(“We Can Say”, Seafarer)

The light touch of these luminous, beautifully constructed, lyrics masks a deep learning – “vast learning worn lightly”, as one critic wrote. There is something infinitely generous in the way he addresses, for himself, yes, but also for us, his readers, the challenge of mortality.

These poems are grounded so firmly in place and time (Stonington Borough, New York, Venice,) and yet the basso continuo of ancient myth, of Homer, Dante and Ruskin, like the quietest of cello accompaniments, lends both a universality and a gravitas to these lyrics of loss and heartbreak, of memory and joy. In “Two And A Half Odes” we have, calling to us from 23 BCE, Horace’s“carpe diem” ode 1.xi. That phrase, so familiar as “seize the day”, more correctly translates as “harvest the day”. In James Longenbach we have a poet who did just that, and shared that harvest in the lyrics gathered in this volume. He lived “in a house/ With many windows”.

Because he had an especial love for the Library and, like so many before him, would spend time reading and working up in the gallery, always in the same chair in the same corner, these Notes are dedicated to the memory of this scholar poet who brought so much to the study and understanding of the craft of poetry, as well as words to lighten our days. And how else to honor him but in words that he himself knew and loved?

First, in tribute to this Shakespeare scholar, Sonnet # 73:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

He also wrote seminal studies of Wallace Stevens, Yeats and Pound as well as of many modern poets, among them Louise Glück. Here are lines from Wallace Stevens’ ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’:

“Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly around us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one. . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

There is an echo from this Stevens’ poem in ‘In The Village’ from his 2021 volume, Forever, written in the shadow of his cancer diagnosis:
1.
“Shortly before I died,
Or possibly after,
I moved to a small village by the sea.

You’ll recognize it, as did I, because I’ve written
About this village before,
The rocky sliver of land, the little houses where fishermen once
lived––
…. …. ….

The sentences I’ve just written
Took it out of me.

…. …. ….

Now, listening to them again, what I hear
Is not so much nostalgia
As a love of beginning. A wish

Not to be removed
From time but
Always to be immersed in it,
The boats come in, the boats go out ––“

A poet and a poem that James Longenbach loved and which, in my mind, never fails to summon his spirit, is Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’. Here are stanzas 6 and 7:

“Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, the ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits, and sings
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.”

But let’s end this tribute with James Longenbach’s own words – the closing lines of ‘Pastoral’, the final poem in Earthling:

“But you know how this ends as well as I do.
The lutes come out,
The birds begin to sing,
The boys and girls are lying in the grass. If anything
Earth looks a little younger now.
I love you earth.
What space I inhabit
You’ll fill with water and sky.”

On behalf of Stonington Free Library I invite you to join us on October 13th at 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

 

SEPTEMBER 2024 BOOK NOTES

The Desert Experience

But first a reminder for your calendar: Charles Hartman and Martha Collins will give a Poetry Reading at Stonington Free Library on Sunday, September 8th at 5p.m.

Essays and articles about books are an endless source of conversation and connection, sending one’s thoughts off in unexpected, serendipitous, directions. It was just such a connection that I found In a recent article in The Times Literary Supplement ( the TLS as it is known to all its devoted readers). Under the heading “Sanctity and sanctimony”, Irina Dumitrescu – described as a teacher “of medieval literature in a small town in Germany”- writes about her fascination with the Desert Fathers, the monks of the 3rd and 4th centuries who “devoted themselves to lives of prayer and asceticism in desolate locations. For them the “desert was not just a geographic location, but a symbol of renunciation and rigorous purity.” This sent me on hunt through my bookshelves for a treasured book that I had not looked at for a while, The Desert Fathers by the English medieval scholar and translator Helen Waddell.

In her Introduction, Helen Waddell quotes from Paulinus of Nola, (CE 353-431)

“Not that they beggared be in mind, or brutes,
That they have chosen their dwelling place afar
In lonely places: but their eyes are turned
To the high stars, the very deep of Truth.
…. …. …. …. ….
that which they see they spurn
That they come at what they do not see,
Their senses kindled like a torch, that may
Blaze through the secrets of eternity.”
(tr. Helen Waddell, Medieval Latin Lyrics pub.1929)

She describes how these experiences and experiments in holiness of these monks influenced thought down the ages. It was St. Anthony, the most beloved of the Desert Fathers, whose writings brought about the conversion of St. Augustine. In the Seventeenth Century, the poet and divine, John Donne, in his “Litanie” asks to be delivered

“From being anxious, or secure,
Dead clods of sadnesse, or light squibs of mirth,
From thinking, that great courts immure
All, or no happinesse, or that this earth
Is only for our prison frame’d,
Or that Thou art covetous
To them Thou lovest, or that they are maim’d
From reaching this world’s sweet, who seek Thee thus.”

And forward to Twentieth Century and W.H. Auden’s elegy to W.B. Yeats:

“Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
…. …. …. …. ….

“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”
(“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”)

The Desert Fathers is full of gems, full of enchanting stories. In “The Life of St. Paul The First Hermit” St. Jerome tells of how St. Antony finds the dead body of his friend the hermit Paul and is at a loss as he has nothing with which to dig a grave. “But even as he pondered, behold two lions came coursing, their manes flying, from the inner desert, and made towards him. At sight of them, he was at first in dread: then, turning his mind to God, he waited undismayed, as though he looked on doves. They came straight to the body of the holy dead, and halted by it wagging their tails, and then couched themselves at his feet, roaring mightily; and Antony well knew they were lamenting him, as best they could. Then going a little way off they began to scratch up the ground with their paws…. ’til they had dug a grave roomy enough for a man: and thereupon, as though to ask reward of their work, they came up to Antony, with drooping ears and down-bent heads, licking his hands and feet. He saw that they were begging for his blessing.” He blessed them and sent them on their way and buried his friend in the grave.

In a quotation from a Seventeenth Century lives of the fathers, Helen Waddell gives this description of these holy men:

“The place called Scete is set in a vast desert; and it is reached by no path, nor is the track shown by any land-marks of earth, but one journeys by the signs and courses of the stars. Water is hard to find… Here abide men perfect in holiness;…. yet is their chief concern the loving kindness which they show one another and towards such as by chance may reach that spot….”
(Introduction p. 5)

This is the loving kindness of perfect hospitality that is found in George Herbert’s poem “Love III”. There is, in all literature, nothing more gentle, in its true sense, than the exchange between the poet and his “quick-ey’d”, “sweetly questioning” host,Divine Love. This Seventeenth Century priest and poet had his own “desert experience”in his poor parish of Bemerton, far from the intellectual riches of court life. But from that “desert” sprung The Temple, the record of his spiritual struggle, poems that continue to have universal appeal.

In contrast to George Herbert, St. Jerome, having the freedom of choice, fled the desert, (though not before his own famous encounter with a lion), and returned to Rome. There he pursued, to our everlasting benefit, the life of the intellect and the pen.

This time spent with the desert fathers reminds me of a very different poet from a different time and place. Emily Dickinson, struggling as she did in her own desert place, but so deeply attuned to the natural world around her, wrote what is, perhaps, the ultimate September poem. This elegy in praise of the cricket’s”unobtrusive” song is sung in the minor key of a canticle –– “The Cricket is [Nature’s] utmost/ of Elegy, to Me –“. She also celebrates the Druids, those ancient priests of the natural world who predate the Desert Fathers in their search for the sacred:

“Further in Summer than the Birds –
Pathetic from the Grass –
A minor Nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive Mass.

No Ordinance be seen –
So gradual the Grace
A gentle Custom it becomes
Enlarging Loneliness–

Antiquest felt at Noon–
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify –

Remit as yet no Grace–
No furrow on the Glow,
But a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now–“
(#895)

But as we began this conversation with the desert fathers, let’s give the last word to Paulinus of Nona who wrote in his poem of that longing for ––

“an emptiness apart
From worthless hopes: din of the market place
And all the noisy crowding up of things,”

 

August 2024 Book Notes

Here are some poems and melodies in answer to a world that is a little out of tune -and a date for our September calendars.

“Poetry always reserves the right to reach for the stars”: Seamus Heaney to Dennis O’Driscoll (Stepping Stones p.196). And in a 1997 Paris Review interview with Henri Cole, he says: “there’s a poem in Field Work called “The Singer’s House” which is really about the poet’s and the poem’s right to a tune in spite of the tunelessness of the world around them.”

“The Singer’s House” opens in the ancient Northern Irish town of Carrickfergus (subject of a famous Irish song and an early Irish epic). But it is a city as cold as the salt mine beneath it and, in Biblical phrasing, the poet laments:

“What do we say any more
to conjure the salt of our earth?”

in this world beset by The Troubles? So, to lift his spirits,
the poet turns his thoughts to Gweebarra on the Donegal shore, home of his friend, the singer David Hammond:

“I see the glittering sound

framed in your window,
knives and forks set on oilcloth
and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,
scanning everything.

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam for a singer

Who might stand at the end of summer
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in evening.”

These lines recall another song on another Atlantic shore, in Nova Scotia. In her poem “At the Fishhouses”, Elizabeth Bishop makes one of her inimitable turns in the middle of a thought, as she gathers her breath for the heights where she will finally take the poem:

“Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgement.”

When Heaney and Bishop met at Harvard they became immediate friends. Their friendship was cut tragically short by her sudden and untimely death – a friendship reflected, as in a mirror, in these vignettes of seals and their songs. Heaney’s close reading of “At The Fishhouses” in the title essay of his collection The Government of the Tongue is a joy to read, as is his study of her poetry in his Oxford lectures, The Redress of Poetry. Such riches sprang from such a brief acquaintance.

More than 300 years earlier, the English poet Andrew Marvell was looking to the garden to find “Fair Quiet” and “Innocence” amid its “delicious solitude” while wondering:-

“How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the oak, the palm, the bays,”
…. …. …. ….

“Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
For other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.”

There are echoes of Marvell in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”:

“Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

Heaney describes “Sailing to Byzantium” as reading “like discharges of pure, self-possessed energy,” “from which the accidental circumstances have been excluded so that all that remains is the melody and stamina of resurgent spirit––.” It was from this poem that Heaney took the title “Singing School” for the sonnet sequence that forms the coda to North, his fourth book. In these sonnets, full of self-doubt–– “As I sit weighing and weighing/My responsible tristia./For what? For the ear? For the people?” the poet questions “Who, blowing up these sparks/For their meagre heat, have missed/ The once-in-a-lifetime portent,/ The comet’s pulsing rose.” But we know that, far from marking an end, it was a pivotal moment of new beginning. Heaney went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and gave the world book after book of poems, translations and critical essays in which, in Yeats’ words, “Soul” will “clap its hands and sing, and louder sing…” and summon––

“O sages, standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.”

“The Soul”, Czeslaw Milosz says, “exceeds its circumstances.” His words draw their peculiar power from having been spoken from the imprisoning shadow of a 20th Century Soviet hell; words echoed by Seamus Heaney who experienced the hell of life during The Troubles. Like Milosz, his great friend and fellow poet, Heaney recognized the transcendent power of poetry, containing the power, in its high art, as he said, “to redress”.

A Date for Our Calendars: on Sunday, September 8th, at 5 pm the Library will be hosting a joint reading by Charles O. Hartman and Martha Collins. Professor Hartman is Poet in Residence Emeritus at Connecticut College and has published eight collections of poetry and several works of criticism. He will be reading from his new book Downfall of the Straight Line. Martha Collins is the author of eleven books of poetry. She founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston and was the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. Both these poets are voices for our time as they seek “to redress”, Charles Hartman, who is also a jazz musician, through the music of poetry, Martha Collins by challenging social injustice through the power of words.

“the melody and stamina of resurgent spirit”.

A Tribute to Charles Harding III. (1937-2024)

It was with great sadness that we heard of Charles Harding’s death on May 26th, deeply mourned by his wife, Beth, and all his family and friends. The Library also lost a very special friend and a faithful supporter. Over many years, Charles brought his expertise as a successful advertising executive to advising and guiding the production of the library monthly newsletter, both during the years when it was a print edition and when it went digital. His support and sound advice were invaluable, providing continuity and knowledge to the staff who headed up this key element of the Library’s all-important outreach to the community.

But Charles’ long lasting contribution to the life of the Library came in 2017, two years after the Board began work on a Strategic Plan to “Refresh: Renew: Reimagine” the Library. The Plan outlined three goals – 1: to engage the community and extend the reach of SFL – 2: to restore, renew and reimagine the spaces of SFL – and 3: to “Ensure Our Sustainability For Future Generations”. It was to achieve this third goal, the key to the success of the first two, that a Capital Campaign Committee was formed. The Library was blessed, yet again, with individuals who gave unstintingly of their time and talents because of their unwavering belief in the vital role that Stonington Free Library plays in the life of the community.

It was to this great effort that Charles brought his expertise as a wordsmith and communicator. He spearheaded the production of the 2017 brochure, Campaign to Upgrade and Fund A Library for the 21st Century – a document that had the brevity, the clarity and the information needed to take the Library’s message to potential donors and supporters – the right illustrations to support the right words. This brochure complemented the vision expressed in the Strategic Plan. It showed the way to make a vision into a reality. It meant that the Board of Trustees, and all those involved in this grand enterprise, with these two documents in their hands, had tools to support them in their efforts to get their message out.

Reading it today, this campaign brochure still carries the persuasive punch that it did the day it came out. Charles’s commitment was patient and tireless, showing the care and attention to detail that were the hallmark of all his enterprises, and that demonstrated his belief in the power of the written word to convey a message that is read, that is heard, and that is understood. A document that will surely serve as a model for all future campaigns.

Over time, many, many people have given, and continue to give, in abundance, and beyond measure, of their time, talent and treasure, to support and sustain Stonington Free Library, as it evolves to meet the changing needs of our community.

Today, Stonington Free Library honors , and remembers with gratitude, our friend and neighbor Charles Harding, and the gifts that he shared so selflessly with his community, gifts that have made, and will continue to make, a difference to present and future generations.

Thank you, Charles; you are missed.
Belinda de Kay,
Director Emeritus, Stonington Free Library

JUNE BOOK NOTES 2024

A Poet’s Journey, Persephone and Shakespeare.

With “every wink of an eye some new grace will be born:”
( The Winter’s Tale, Act V: sc. 2, ll: 119-120)

On Sunday, June 9th at 5 pm at Stonington Free Library, Sebastian Merrill will read from his poem Ghost::Seeds, published last year and the recipient of many awards. Mr Merrill is the great-nephew of the poet Amy Clampitt and will be introduced, and the program moderated, by Willard Spiegelman the author of the highly acclaimed 2023 biography, Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt.

In this graceful and moving poem, set on an island off the coast of Maine, Sebastian Merrill courageously explores his journey as a transgender man and, by evoking Persephone, seeks the self that he has lost.

The story of Persephone, seized by Hades and dragged down into the sunless underworld, leaving her grief struck mother, Demeter, is perhaps one of the most retold tales from time immemorial. Her story is the subject of poems by Sylvia Plath and Edna St. Vincent Millay and most recently in Nobel Laureate Louise Glück’s “The Wanderer” in her 2006 book Averno.

But reaching back a few thousand years, Ovid, one of Shakespeare’s favorite reads, tells the tale in Book V of The Metamorphoses – though with the Latin names of Proserpina and Pluto. In this telling, the idyllic landscape heightens the tragic drama that unfolds:
“Not far from Enna’s wall are deep waters.
…. …. …. ….
Tall hills circle
that lake. Woods crown the slopes –– and like a veil,
the forest boughs abate the flames of Phoebus.
Beneath those leaves, the air is cool, the soil
is damp ––with many flowers, many colors.
There spring is never-ending. In that grove
Proserpina was playing, gathering
violets and white lilies. She had filled
her basket and within her tunic’s folds,
had tucked fresh flowers,
…. …. …. ….
There Pluto––almost in one instant––saw,
was struck with longing, carried that girl off––
so quick––unhesitating––was his love.

The goddess-girl was terrified. She called––
in grief––upon her mother…
She had ripped
her tunic at its upper edge, and since
the folds were loosened now, the flowers fell.
So simple is the heart of a young girl
that, at that loss, new grief is what she felt.”

That torn tunic, those fallen flowers, are forever part of our common memory. And here, in Shakespeare’s fairy tale, The Winter’s Tale (for it is a fairy tale) Perdita––whose name means Lost–– recalls the lost Proserpina as she addresses Camillo, who is, unbeknownst to her, a lord of her father’s court:

“Now, my fair’st friend
I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might
Become your time of day;
O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall
From Dis’s wagon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses ,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength––a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,”
Act IV: sc. iv. ll:112-125.

Also straight out of Ovid,is Autolycus, that rogue of such outrageous proportions that only a fairy tale could accommodate him He is the offspring of Mercury and Chione, “a connoisseur of wiles and guiles, an heir/ who passed off black as white and white as black, he fully matched his father’s art and craft.” (Metamorphoses Bk. XI).

This late play is a tragicomedy, a tale told in two distinct parts – a form that broke with tradition, as did the long (16 year) lapse of time. Winter, with its darkness and tragedy comes to an end, as winter will, at the end of Act III, and Spring, with its promise of new birth and forgiveness, is the tale told in Acts IV and V.

It is Leontes’ insane fit of jealousy that brings about all the tragic events of the play, a clear echo from the tragedy Othello:

Emilia speaking to Desdemona:
“But jealous souls will not be answered so;
They are not ever jealous for a cause,
But jealous for they are jealous: ’tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.” Act 3: iv l.159.

“The green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on.” that is the basso continuo of the play, and which destroys Othello and all around him, has morphed in The Winter’s Tale into the grief stricken penitence and restoration of Leontes. In this fairy tale, its fabric interwoven with gods and goddesses––Apollo, Persephone, the Oracle at Delphi, Mercury’s son, Autolycus––Shakespeare brings us a world of both dark and light. In this world the lost child is found, the dead wife restored to life, spring follows winter. We have a feast of time warps, disguises and dances, a prince, Florizel, and his beloved Perdita, his shepherdess princess, tricks and misfortunes––good Antigonus, the gentle lord, loyal member of Leontes’ entourage,who is eaten by a bear, sacrificed to the needs of the story. It is his death that makes his wife, Paulina, and all at Leontes’ court, believe that the babe and he had perished together. Paulina is a woman whom everyone would wish to have at their side in a tough situation––a worthy companion to the noble Hermione.

And so we have come to the end of our fairy tale. Everyone is united and Paulina, and Shakespeare, convince us all that the beloved Hermione, dead to the world for sixteen years, is restored to life, the statue breathes again and steps down from its pedestal. Paulina commands Hermione “come away,/ Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him/ Dear life redeems you.” “Our Perdita is found”. (Act V: sc.3). This is Persephone returning to the upper world from Hades, for that time of summer that she and her mother, Demeter, are allowed. In Othello life is “insupportable”. In The Winter’s Tale, Cleomenes, a lord in Leontes court, says this to the king:
“Sir, you have done enough, and have performed
A saint-like sorrow:
…. …. …. ….
at the last,
Do what the heavens have done, forget your evil:
With them, forgive yourself.” (Act V: sc. 1)

With “every wink of an eye some new grace will be born:”

Book Notes for May 2024 –

A Bouquet of Poems To Celebrate May:
“I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:” George Herbert, “Easter”

But first, a reminder for our calendars. On Sunday May 12th at 5 p.m. (Mother’s Day) the Library is very fortunate to have Professor David Leeming speak on the occasion of James Baldwin’s centennial. His talk will focus on the life-long, and life-changing, friendship between James Baldwin and the artist Beauford Delaney. Professor Leeming is the author of many books, including the definitive biography of James Baldwin, who was a close friend.

Now some poems of May, of flowers and of music, both glad and sad:

“Take thy lute, wench: my soul grows sad with troubles;
Sing, and disperse ‘em, if thou canst:

Song
Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.

Every thing that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads, and then lay by
In sweet music is such art,
Killing care and grief of heart
Fall asleep, or hearing, die.”

Queen Katherine in Act III, Sc. 1 of Shakespeare’s The Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII:

Poor Katherine, it did not end well for her, but perhaps songs gave her, even for a moment, much needed courage.

And here is Shakespeare, again, as he gives us the loveliest, and most poignant, bouquet in all of literature:

Ophelia “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
…. …. …. ….
There’s fennel for you, and columbines: there’s rue for you, and some for me: we may call it herb-grace o’ Sundays: O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy: I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died:”
(Hamlet: Act IV, sc, v)

“Ophelia is a character almost too exquisitely touching to be dwelt upon. Oh rose of May, oh flower too soon faded! Her love, her madness, her death, are described with the truest touches of tenderness and pathos. It is a character which nobody but Shakespeare could have drawn….”
(William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays)

In a change of tune, here is John Milton’s “Song on May Morning”:

“Now the bright morning star, Day’s harbinger,
Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.
Hail bounteous May, that dost inspire
Mirth, and youth, and warm desire!
Woods and groves are of thy dressing;
Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long.”

This little gem of a poem, a quatrain and a sestet (an almost, or “curtal”, sonnet ) has all the qualities of song – as promised in the title, which, with its lack of a definite, or indefinite, article (what weight they carry in their small presence or absence!) delivers an immediacy all its own. The quatrain is a single sentence in iambic pentameter, with enjambments that knit the whole together in a kind of lyric joy. Then the sestet offers a shift in tone, with tetrameter lines of rhyming couplets, before returning to the iambic pentameter in the final couplet. So much variety within such a small, curtailed, space is beautiful to contemplate. Written around 1629, it remains, a long time later,–– “we…wish thee long”–– a joyful song to lift the heart on May morning, or any morning.

To add to our bouquet, here is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet “Spring”, a poem of “juice and joy”. The musical energy in the alliteration, the enjambments and the rhyme scheme are quite breathtaking:

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring ––
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden’s garden. –– Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.”

With all the variety of spring bird song, here is a very different, but equally passionate and intense voice, Emily Dickinson’s serenade to the trailing arbutus, or mayflower. She looked for its arrival each year as the glad herald of spring and the end of winter:

“Pink –– small –– and punctual ––
Aromatic–– low ––
Covert–– in April ––
Candid –– in May ––
Dear to the Moss ––
Known to the Knoll ––
Next to the Robin
In every human Soul ––
Bold little Beauty
Bedecked with thee
Nature forswears
Antiquity––“

Emily Dickinson mentions the trailing arbutus in letters throughout her life – here are quotes from just two of her letters:
To Louise and Frances Norcross – dated early spring 1870:
“The mud is very deep – up to the wagons’ stomachs – arbutus making pink clothes and everything alive.”( Letter #339, Selected Letters edited by Thomas H. Johnson):
and in a letter (possibly the last that she wrote) to Mrs. J. G. Holland dated early spring 1886, she writes of news being “sweet as the first arbutus”. (letter # 1038, ibid.).

The poem is quite Blakean in the way it contains “heaven in a wild flower” – this punctual harbinger, “Dear to the Moss ––.”

“Punctual” seems to be a treasured quality for Dickinson, it appears in other of her poems – in one she even ascribes that virtue to her favorite bird, the robin. Here she lifts this humdrum word out of the mundane and gives it a new face, making it, in George Herbert’s words, “new, tender, quick.”

With its promise of return and renewal, “Punctual” is Nature’s foreswearing of the poem’s final word –– a word which, Dickinson fashion, jumps off the page–– “Antiquity”. With that single word, the ancient idea of the flower as an image of mortality is rejected. It was some 3000 years ago that David, the Psalmist, wrote: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field so he flourisheth. / For the wind passeth over it and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” (Ps. 103: vs. 15-16). Down the ages many poets have linked flowers with mortality; here are two to add to our bouquet. In the 17th Century, Robert Herrick, in his poem “To Daffodils”, saw the flowers as such reminders, no orphic “lasting spring” here:

“Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
…. …. ….
We have short time to stay as you,
We have as short a spring;”

Herrick’s contemporary, George Herbert, used the same image in many of his poems, “The Flower” being among the best known. Here in “Life” he looks at mortality with his characteristic clear-eyed serenity:

“I made a posy while the day ran by:
…. …. …. ….
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And withered in my hand.
…. …. …. ….
Farewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaint or grief,
Since, if my scent be good, I care not if
It be as short as yours.”

I hope these lyrics lift your spirits as they do mine –– “such art,/ Killing care and grief of heart”.

“I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree.”

 

Book Notes April 2024 –

Anton Chekhov, (1860-1904) a writer for today. And an important note for our May calendars.

“I am reading a wonderful book ––– I don’t know whether you would like it or not ––– it’s Chekhov’s The Island of Sakhalin –– his account of his trip to the prison island in 1890. My Brazil book isn’t like that at all ––– but if mine could turn out one tenth as good, I think I’d die happy.” Elizabeth Bishop in a letter to her friend, Frani Blough Muser, September 19, 1968. (One Art, Elizabeth Bishop Letters, p. 496)

In an earlier letter, this time to Anne Stevenson dated January 20th 1964, Bishop writes: “What I mean is more than “observation”…. It is a living in reality that works both ways, the non-intellectual sources of wisdom and sympathy. …. someone I have read & read since I have been in Brazil, is Chekhov. If only more artists could be that good as well as good artists.”

And in a letter to Robert Lowell from Brazil in March 1963:
“I spent two days in Samambaia reading a long, bad but fascinating new life of Chekhov……What a wonderful man really –– almost a saint. The son of serfs yet a greater gentleman than the estate-owning novelists.”

This was the Chekhov that came to my mind on seeing, on television, the forty-seven year old Alexei Navalny lying in his open coffin. Navalny, a man of extraordinary courage and humanity, who “laid down his life for his friend”, whose life had been ended in a harsh penal colony like the one on Sakhalin Island that Chekhov knew.

As described in Bishop’s letter, in 1890 Chekhov made the arduous, 6,000 mile, journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island to see for himself, as a medical doctor and biologist, seeking empirical evidence, to “observe” and to record, in meticulous detail, the conditions of the prisoners and indigenous people living there. The book he wrote to describe this “descent into hell”, remains, to this day, a powerful indictment of all such systems, just as his stories are stories of the human heart in all its “infinite variety”, told with the high art of a genius and a heart full of compassion for his fellow human beings. As a medical doctor he served the poorest of the poor and never accepted any payment for his work. From a young age he made his living, and supported his family, with his writings. He was three years younger than Navalny when he died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four.

Seamus Heaney, whose friendship with Elizabeth Bishop was cut short by her sudden death in 1979, would surely have met her criteria, along with Chekhov, of “good as well as good artists”. In Heaney’s 1984 volume Station Island, the lyric “Chekhov on Sakhalin” recalls Chekhov’s journey – the moment when he is returning from Sakhalin by sea. In seven rhymed quatrains, the reader travels with Chekhov to Tyumen, Siberia’s 16th Century city, and to gaze with him down into the depths of Lake Baikal:

“But first he drank cognac by the ocean
With his back to all he had travelled there to face.
His head was swimming free as the troikas [open carriages drawn by a team of three horses abreast]

Of Tyumen, he looked down from the rail
Of his thirty years and saw a mile
Into himself as if he were clear water:”
…. …. …. ….
“No cantor
In full throat by the iconostasis
Got holier joy than he got from that glass

That shone and warmed like diamonds warming
On some pert young cleavage in a salon
Inviolable and affronting”.

Heaney paints a portrait of a man who enjoyed all that life had to offer, but also a man who was haunted by what he had just experienced on Sakhalin:

“He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.

When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones
It rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains
That haunted him. All through the months to come
It rang on like the burden of his freedom

To try for the right tone –– not tract, not thesis ––
And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze
His slave’s blood out and waken the free man
Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.”

The last lines of Heaney’s poem refer to a famous letter that Chekhov, grandson and son of a serf (freed under Tsar Alexander’s reforms), wrote from Moscow to his life-long friend Alexei Savorin, dated January 7th, 1889, in which he describes how he “squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.” (Letter # 15) [my bold]

But, as Heaney says, “the free man” who “ Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin” felt “the burden of his freedom/ To try for the right tone––not tract, not thesis ––“A burden that Heaney himself found very heavy, as a poet, as an Irish Catholic, at the time of The Troubles which form the back story and subtext to Station Island. In Stepping Stones, the 2008 book-length interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, he discusses the struggle “To try for the right tone ––not tract, not thesis––“, the burden of whether or not to engage politically, “If I had followed the logic of the Chekhov poem, I’d have gone to the prison [The Maze] and seen what was happening to the people on that hunger strike and written an account of it, “not tract, not thesis.” (p. 259).

While working on the book about Sakhalin, Chekhov found this “right tone” in his story “Ward No.6”. It describes in slow, incremental detail, several characters and their life in the insane ward of a local hospital. In Chekhov’s inimitable manner, the story draws you along, the characters come alive on the page with details that stay vivid in your mind for no apparent reason, and then there is the stab to the heart and you are left, book still open in your hand, short of breath. So many of his stories are about people not listening to each other –– the sledgedriver Iona Potapov in “Misery”, or the unfortunate Ryabovitch with “with whiskers like a lynx’s.” in “The Kiss”–– Chekhov hoped the world would listen to “Ward No. 6”

One person especially listened. The dissident Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, who somehow survived Stalin’s Russia while witnessing terrible suffering, and who was no fan of Chekhov’s writing (she called it “muddy and gray”), said that “Ward No. 6” captured perfectly the conditions that she lived with every day.

Another of Chekhov’s longer stories, “The Steppe”, is told from the point of view of a nine-year old boy “in a red shirt”, Yegory, going off to school accompanied by his merchant uncle and a kindly old priest, (perhaps the only such in Chekhov’s universe), Father Christopher, who “always smelled of cypress and dried cornflowers”. But the steppe itself is also a central character. We experience the coming of dawn when “the whole wide steppe flung off the twilight of early morning and was smiling and sparkling with dew. The cut rye, the coarse steppe grass, the milkwort, the wild hemp, all withered from the sultry heat…. now washed by the dew and caressed by the sun, revived, to fade again”. And then there are all the birds, petrels, partridges, lapwings; there are marmots and hares and “In the grass crickets, locusts and grasshoppers kept up their churring, monotonous music.” There is heat and monotony and the “lilac horizon” and a terrible storm. There is abundant life, as in all his stories, along with unforgettable characters drawn with the lightest touch of the pen.

His stories remind me so much of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, poetry that is so rich with closely observed detail, like the “big hirsute begonia” in “The Filling Station” and characters like the unforgettable Miss Breen in “Arrival at Santos”, and Crusoe in “Crusoe in England” with his “Friday, my dear Friday”. Crusoe’s “knife there on the shelf ––/ it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix./ It lived. …. I knew each nick and scratch by heart,/ the bluish blade, the broken tip, /the lines of wood grain on the handle. …. the parasol that took me such a time/ remembering the way the ribs go./ It will still work but, folded up,/looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.” In “The Moose”, that long bus journey through the Nova Scotia night, stanza upon stanza of vivid, closely observed, details of everyday life, the travelers on the bus who might themselves have been in a Chekhov story, and, when the moose finally appears, that haunting question:

“Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?”

This, and so many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, are open ended – leaving the reader the gift of an open space for possibilities. Chekhov’s stories have the same quality, questions without obvious answers, which make them astonishingly twenty-first century.

Anton Chekhov and his two older brothers were cruelly beaten every day as children, not just by their father but also by the choir master at the church in Taganrog, the city on the Black Sea where he was born. It left Anton with an abhorrence for any violence, physical or verbal, and a deep empathy for the sufferings of his fellow man. When he was a teenager, his father fled to Moscow to escape debtors prison, taking the family but leaving Chekhov alone to finish his studies. As well as attending school, he “read voraciously” in the Taganrog public library.

Which brings to mind that other young boy who found safety, intellectual nourishment and escape from a difficult world in the public library in New York City – James Baldwin, whose centenary will be celebrated at our Library on May 12th (Mother’s Day). David Leeming, Baldwin’s biographer and close friend, will talk about the life-changing and life-long friendship between James Baldwin and the artist Beauford Delaney.

To close, here is a vignette from David Leeming’s book describing James Baldwin when a young child. It is a salute to libraries, to kindliness, to hope and yes, in this Poetry Month, to the power of words:

His “smallness and shyness made him a natural victim of his peers, but Mrs. Ayer (the principal at P.S. 24 – “the first black principal in New York City”) made sure that teachers helped Jimmy to develop.
…. …. … … …
His teachers encouraged him to visit the public library at 135th Street, where he read voraciously [my bold and italics] in the newly established Schomburg Collection. The library became his sanctuary and, in his mind, as he never went to college, his alma mater –– the place where on his deathbed he was to ask that his papers be deposited.” (James Baldwin, a biography by David Leeming, p. 13. Knopf 1994)

Rest In Peace, Alexei Navalny.

 

Book Notes for March –

A Visit to The Enchanted Island, and a tale of “Melodies unheard”:

One cold, grey February day, I thought what better play to read than The Tempest, what better place to be than on Prospero’s enchanted island? As William Hazlitt says in his1817 essay, the play “is full of grace and grandeur, the human and imaginary characters, the dramatic and the grotesque, are blended together with the greatest art. … He has here given “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” (Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays). The Tempest, the play that was chosen, so interestingly, by his friends and fellow actors, to be the first in the First Folio, even though it was the last work that he wrote on his own; the play in which Shakespeare has his Prospero, in a speech of glorious lyricism, bid his farewell to the world of the stage – the great Globe Theater itself:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.” (Act IV: sc. 1 ll. 148-158).

Every generation brings its own readings to Shakespeare’s plays, that is his chameleon genius, his perpetual gift. But even taking into account modern sensibilities – post-colonial questions, Prospero as patriarch – the magic spell cast by the play remains, and at the core of this magic, a thread that weaves the fabric of the play into a harmonious whole, is the music and songs of Ariel, Prospero’s servant and spirit of the air, who promises to “do my spiriting gently”. Even the bruised spirit of Caliban is soothed by these “Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” Such music, as he says, that:

“Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after a long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop on me, that, when I waked
I cried to dream again.” (Act III: sc.3. ll.143-152).

Again, it is Ariel’s most loved songs with their “sweet air” that bring balm to Prince Ferdinand, grief struck, believing his father to have been drowned in the tempest:

“Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Courtsied when you have and kiss’d,
The wild waves whist,[into silence] Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burthen[refrain]bear.
Hark, hark!
Bow-wow.
The watch-dogs bark:
Bow-wow.
…. …. …. ….
Ferdinand: Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?
…. …. …. … ….
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have followed it,
Or it hath drawn me rather. But it is gone:
No, it begins again.

Ariel sings:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:” (Act I: sc. 2. ll 376-402).

And it is Ariel who persuades the vengeful Prospero to abandon his tormenting of the wrecked mariners, his usurping brother and all the crew:
Ariel: “Your charm so strongly works ‘em
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
Prospero: Dost thou think so, spirit?
Ariel: Mine would, sir, were I human.
Prospero: And mine shall.
…. …. …. …. ….
Go release them, Ariel:
My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore,
And they shall be themselves.”

Thus the moment arrives when, left alone, Prospero muses on his powers and all that he has done with his “so potent art”. The time has come to close the chapter with “heavenly music”, “a solemn air and the best comforter/ To an unsettled fancy.”

“But this rough magic
I here abjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.” (Act V: sc. 1 ll. 15-57).

And then, as Ariel attires Prospero in the robes of the Duke of Milan, one of his final tasks as servant before he gains his long promised freedom, he sings:

“Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Prospero: Why that’s my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee.”

Ariel, spirit of the air, and his “solemn music”, summon thoughts of the music of the spheres – first conceived of by the Ancient Greek mathematician, Pythagoras. Johannes Kepler, the 17th Century astronomer, thought such music could be heard, not by the ear, but by the soul, as did his near contemporary, the physician and divine, Sir Thomas Browne:

“For there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musicke of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.” (Religio Medici: bk.2 section 9).

A thought captured by George Herbert in this line in his sonnet “Prayer 1” – “Music beyond the stars heard”.

Or, in T. S. Eliot’s words:
“the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, …..” (“The Dry Sauvages” ll. 206-212.)

Or again, the deep silence and musical enchantment of Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” – ever en-chanting, however familiar to our ears it might be:

“Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
…. …. …. …. ….
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:”

As a coda, let us go to the late 20th Century and another “soft pipe” that delivers another kind of music. “The Rain Stick” is the first poem in Seamus Heaney’s 1996 collection The Spirit Level:

“Upend the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for. …..
…. …. …. ….
You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it lightly

And dimuendo runs through all its scale
Like a gutter stopping trickling. …….
…. …. …. ….

Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.”

Indeed, yes, let us “Listen now again” to these “sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”

 

BOOK NOTES FOR FEBRUARY 2024 -–

The First Valentine’s Day, stories of love and heartbreak from Chaucer and Shakespeare and poems by Donne, Bishop and Heaney about love in some of its myriad forms:

This is the story of Geoffrey Chaucer being sent, in 1380, as an envoy to negotiate the marriage of Anne of Bohemia to the young Richard II. It was about this time that he began to write his dream poem The Parliament of Fowles that is thought to be in celebration of the royal marriage, particularly since the principal bird among the fowles is a beautiful female eagle, the eagle being Anne’s symbol. An entrancing, and wildly imaginative, fantasy grounded in realistic detail, (in the magic garden all the trees are named along with their attributes, all the fowls have distinct, and recognizable, characters), it is a poem of courtly love as well as a satire poking fun at parliamentary procedure (Chaucer was a Member of Parliament for a short time). It is this poem that brought attention to a rather obscure Roman saint, St. Valentine, from the 3rd Century C.E., a priest and physician who was martyred for aiding persecuted Christians and who became the patron saint of betrothed couples and those seeking love. It is from this tale that Chaucer told in the 14th Century, that urges “Be glad, thou redere, and thy sorwe ofcaste”, that we have the Valentine’s Day that we know today.

Of some 700 lines, The Parliament of Fowles is written in Rime Royale – stanzas of seven lines, a tercet and two couplets rhyming aba, bb and cc – the Chaucerian invention so perfect for storytelling.

Here is the famous opening, taken from the Latin quip of the Greek physician Hippocrates (c.450-c.380 BCE) “ars longa, vita brevis”:

“The lif so short, the craft so long to lerne,
The assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The dreadful joye always that slit so yerne
[that slides away so swiftly]
All this mene I by Love, that my feelings,
Astonisheth with his wonderful werking
So sore, ywis, that whan I on him thinke
Nat woot I wel wher that I flete or sinke.”

The spirit of Hippocrates appears again at line 127:
“Thurgh me men good into the blisful place
hertes hele [heart’s healing] and deadly woundes cure:
Thurgh me men good unto the welle of Grace
Ther greene and lusty May shal ever endure;
This is the way to al good adventure.
Be glad, thou redere, and thy sorwe ofcaste.
Al open am I; passe in, and speed thee faste!”

We soon come to a description of the bewitching young female eagle who is a central character in the tale:

“Nature heeld on hir hond
A formel eagle of shap the gentileste
That ever among his werkes fond,
The most benigne, and the goodlieste;
In her was every virtu at his reste
So ferforth that Nature hirself had blisse
To look on hire and oft her bek to kisse.” (ll. 172-178)

And at last, around line 300, we come to the heart of the story:

“And in a launde [grassy clearing] upon an hil of floures
Was set this noble goddesse Nature;
…. …. …. ….
For this was on Saint Valentines day,
When every foul cometh to choose his make.” [mate]

So the vying and jostling and the parliamentary-style debates begin until all is resolved:

“Saint Valentine, that art ful hy on lofte; ––
Thus singen smale foules for thy sake ––
Now welcome somer, with thy sonne softe,
Thou hast this wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nightes blake!” (ll. 683-687).

Alas, as we know, it did not end well for the hapless Richard and his Queen. Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard ll, first performed in 1597, tells a tale of a fall from grace and tragic end, a “longe nightes blake”, after the promise of sun-filled days that are the delight of Chaucer’s poem. Among the most lyrical of all Shakespeare’s plays, it is written entirely in iambic pentameter with frequent rhyming couplets. It is this lyricism and formal structure, as well as the historical subject and time frame, that find echoes in The Parliament of Fowles.

Richard is defeated and deposed by Bolingbroke (the soon to be Henry IV), and led in disgrace through the London streets, vilified by his former subjects, “dust was thrown upon his sacred head”, he will go to prison and death. But it is the love that Richard and Anne hold for each other, the betrothal that Chaucer, in his office as envoy, helped to arrange and which he celebrated in his joyous poem, which links poem and play. Richard urges his queen, in a scene of poignant tenderness, to flee to France, his queen who “came adorned hither like sweet May/ Sent back like Hallowmas, or short’st of day” (Act V: sc.I ll.79-80)

Richard: “So two together weeping make one woe.
Weep for me in France, I for thee here;
Better far off than near, be ne’er the near.
Go count thy way with sighs; I mine with groans.
Queen: So longest way will have the longest moans.
Richard: Twice for one step I’ll groan, the way being short,
And piece the way out with a heavy heart.
Come, come, in wooing sorrow let’s be brief,
Since wedding it, there is such length in grief:
One kiss shall stop our mouths, and dumbly part;
Thus give I mine, and thus take I thy heart.” (Act V: sc. 1, ll. 89-96).

But leaving behind Valentine’s Day, here are poems that speak of love in some of its many guises.

Here is another farewell to another Anne – John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” – Anne his beloved wife, for whom he gave up a career at court when he married her in secret, and by whom he had twelve children. The year is 1611 or 1612, Donne is about to leave on a journey to France:

“Our two souls therefore, which are one
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two.
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if the other do.
…. …. …. …. ….
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th’other foot, obliquely runne;
Thy firmnes drawes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.” (ll: 21-28 & 33-36)

As Donne wrote in another poem, “Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,/ Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.” (“The Sunne Rising”). So, with that encouragement, we will jump ahead to the 20th Century, to the poetry of Seamus Heaney and one of the many vignette’s in which he immortalizes his deep love for his mother . This if from “The Swing” in his 1996 volume The Spirit Level, a memory of childhood play, with George Herbert overtones, that, like so many Heaney poems, offers a vision far beyond the immediate moment. His mother is with the children in the barn as they play on the swing-
“With an old lopsided sack in the loop of it,
Perfectly still, hanging like pulley-slack,
A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.

Even so, we favored the earthbound. She
Sat there as majestic as an empress
Steeping her swollen feet one at a time
In the enamel basin, feeding it
Every now and again with an opulent
Steaming arc from a kettle on the floor
Beside her. The plout of that was music
To our ears, her smile a mitigation.
Whatever light the goddess had once shone
Around her favorite coming from the bath
Was what was needed then: there should have been
Fresh linen, ministrations by attendants,
Procession and amazement. Instead she took
Each rolled elastic stocking and drew it on
Like the life she would not fail and was not
Meant for.
…. …. …. …. ….
In spite of all, we sailed

Beyond ourselves …….”

And finally, a little earlier in the 20th Century, another basin and another washing, as simple and domestic as the one in the barn, and just as intimate and sacramental. Here is the lyric “The Shampoo” by Elizabeth Bishop, (whose February birthday we celebrate!). Published in 1955, the final poem in her second volume, A Cold Spring, it is addressed to her lover and partner, Lota De Macedo Soares,

“The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
––Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.”

[You can find a recording of James Merrill reading “The Shampoo” at a 1993 seminar in Key West, and also find any of these poems on line].

I hope you have enjoyed these poems. I have enjoyed sharing them with you, and may they the “wintres wedres overshake,/And drive(n) away the longe nightes blake!”

Book Notes January 2024 –

Winter Poetry that you read and “the soul’s sap quivers.”

“A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucie’s Day, Being the shortest day”, John Donne’s cry from the heart on the death of a beloved, a cry mirrored in the darkness of the year’s shortest day:

“T’is the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarece seaven houres herself unmaskes,
The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
…. …. …. … …
I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
of all, that’s nothing. …..
… … … … … …. …
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am None, nor will my Sunne renew.”

But our poems will carry us past that shortest day and our sun will renew as December becomes January. In contrast to his contemporary, John Donne, George Herbert in his poem” The Flower” speaks, in his inimitable way, to the “whole world’s sap is sunk”, and instead offers a promise of life renewed. Anthony Hecht, whose Collected Poems edited by Philip Hoy, has just been published by Knopf, who suffered from severe bouts of depression, found this promise of renewal in George Herbert’s poem. He sent a copy to a friend who was also struggling with clinical depression. He writes “I know of nothing more irrelevant than glib advice to cheer up…” and, later in the letter, he continues “There’s a beautiful poem by George Herbert, called “The Flower,” which bears directly and persuasively on the kinds of fluctuation you and I are both subject to.” (The Selected Letters edited by Jonathan F. S. Post p.342) Here is the George Herbert poem in part – one that will be familiar to readers of these Notes:

“How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;
…. …. …. ….
Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
…. …. … …. …
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing:”

Continuing with our theme of winter, we find a different kind of return in the Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot’s poem of spiritual exploration of time and place. The first line of the second movement, “East Coker”, is “In my beginning is my end” and the last, “In my end is my beginning”,just one instance of the deeply satisfying circularity that informs the poem’s 190 lines. Here are the opening lines of “Little Gidding”, the final movement of the Quartets, with their promise of “Midwinter spring”, lines that echo from the 17th Century both Donne’s “The world’s whole sap is sunke,” and Herbert’s “How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean/ Are thy returns!”, while making a 20th Century poetry that is miraculously new:

“Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden toward sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit; no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant.”

Reading these lines, each one so beautifully crafted, the “soul’s sap” does indeed quiver. We began with “midwinter spring” and we arrive at “This is the spring time/ But not in time’s covenant.”

But perhaps the ultimate January poem is “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens. Like Four Quartets, it is a poem of pattern and repetition created by words and the sound of words. The entire poem is an astonishing single sentence, with each of the five tercets at once complete in itself, but linked by enjambments to the following stanza, achieving an energy of forward movement while, at the same time, creating a deep well of stillness. The poem begins with “to regard” and “to behold”:

“One must have the mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

“To behold the junipers shagged with ice
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; …..”

And then moves to “the sound” and “the listener” who, in the final lines, again “beholds”, but also now hears

“….the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves.

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Again the mystery of “nothing” to make us pause. But this “nothing himself” would seem to be at peace, not the lost soul of Donne’s poem, “the grave of all, that’s nothing.”

“Poems” as the late poet and critic James Longenbach wrote, “are works of art that people make out of words” and “a poem creates the moment as we enter it.” (The Lyric Now: 2020 U.Chicago Press). Such a moment and such a work of art is “The Snow Man” – the title itself a surprise, two words, not the single one we expect. In the snow man we have a mysterious presence that haunts the whole poem, though never mentioned again.

But how can we think of winter without Shakespeare and singing along with Amiens in As You Like It? The Duke’s attendant who is always ready to take on the world with a song:

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember’d not.
Heigh-ho! sing etc.”
(Act II scene 7 ll.174-190).

As always, Shakespeare brings the human to center stage. Stevens’ snow man is there too, center stage, “the listener who listens”, and “beholds”.

In this “Midwinter spring” we can look forward to many new events at Library. Here are two for your calendar. In October we will be celebrating the publication of James Longenbach’s book of poems that he completed shortly before his death in July 2022, with a memorial reading in his honor by Joanna Scott. Earlier in the season, in May, there will be a tribute on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of James Baldwin’s birth by his friend and biographer, David Leeming.

I hope you have enjoyed, as I have, this sampling of winter poems, with their promise of new beginnings, as we all step out into a New Year.

Belinda’s Book Notes –  November 2023

Honoring Louise Glück (1943-2023). Poetry as conversation –– Poetry that is “one person talking to another”:  poets “and the poets of ages past” who “coexist in the here and now.” A new translation of Homer.

Since the sudden, and much lamented, death of Louise Glück on October 13th, there has been an outpouring of remembrances and essays honoring her as a great poet and a vital figure in the contemporary American literary landscape. Author of fourteen collections of poetry, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, and recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she was “acclaimed as one of America’s greatest living writers… whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world… was broadly accessible, both to critics, who praised her clarity and precise lyricism, and the broader reading public.”  (The New York Times)

Her first book was published in 1962 and her latest, Winter Recipes from the Collective, in 2021. Throughout this large body of work are woven the threads that affirm that circular nature of our poetic heritage that is celebrated by her fellow laureate, T. S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets –– “In my beginning is my end.”

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Louise Glück said:

“The poems to which I have been most ardently drawn are poems in which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator. As with Emily Dickinson ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you –– Nobody –– too? / Then there’s a pair of us!’ – and Eliot in ‘Prufrock’

‘Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table; …’’’

With these words she seems to be calling up not just “Prufrock,” but the Eliot who wrote in his 1945 essay, “The Music of Poetry,” “while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another” (my italics). And further, “poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which we use and hear.”

If Louise Glück was drawn to Eliot and classical mythology, it was to the 17th Century priest poet, George Herbert, that Eliot looked for perfection in simplicity of speech and “ordinary everyday language.” In a talk given at Salisbury Cathedral in 1938, Eliot says of Herbert “It is by an easy conversational familiarity, even homeliness, that Herbert communicates with us as one person to another.” Here is Herbert’s “Jordan (1)”:

“Who says that fictions and false hair
Become a verse? Is there no truth in beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?”

Eliot wove these thoughts about language into Movement V of “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets:

“(where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
.   .   .   .   .   .   .
The complete consort dancing together)”

Continuing in this tradition, Glück’s poems are just that, conversations between the poet and the reader or listener, “as one person to another.”

This is from “President’s Day” (2019), an unrhymed lyric with varying line lengths, mostly trimeter, but starting off with an iambic pentameter running on to the next line, giving a warm conversational effect that immediately engages the reader:

“Lots of good-natured sunshine everywhere
making the snow glitter ––– quite
lifelike I thought, nice
to see that again;”

And then–––

“And sure enough
the clouds came back, and sure enough
the sky grew dark and menacing,
.   .   .   .   .   .
And yet moments ago
the sun was shining.  How joyful my head was,
.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
Joyful–––now there’s a word
we haven’t used in a while.”

Here are lines from the lyric “The Wild Iris,” the title poem of her 1992 book:

“At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
.   .   .   .   .   .   .
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:”

In these lines we can hear echoes of Eliot in Movement V of “Little Gidding”:

“We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.”

“The modern poet and the poets of ages past coexist in the here and now.” This is Eliot in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”   It is, again, in this tradition that Louise Glück in her 1996 book, Meadowlands, tells the story of Penelope, Odysseus, and their marriage, with frequent commentary from their son Telemachus. In their broad and deep range of reference –– Dante was a rich source for them both –– T. S. Eliot and Louise Glück were both modern poets who coexisted with poets of ages past.

Which brings us to today, to Homer and the much anticipated new translation of The Iliad by Emily Wilson, following on her translation of The Odyssey of two years ago – the first Homer translations by a woman.  Like Louise Glück’s poems, these ancient stories are rendered by Emily Wilson “in the here and now.”

The Odyssey, an epic of love and loyalty, adventure, and trouble (often trouble intentionally sought out by Odysseus!), is as immediate and alive today as when Homer proclaimed these tales to audiences millennia ago, in spoken conversation, then as now, “as between one person and another.” And just as the griefs and pities of war described in The Iliad are, once again, too much with us, Homer offers, in his telling of that tale of unfathomable grief and pity, what the Greeks called catharsis –– the release, literally purgation, from overwhelming emotions of grief or loss.  

So it is that Homer brings us back, full circle ––“the complete consort dancing together” –– to Louise Glück’s poetry “of trauma and loss,” –– poems that offer catharsis to the reader she describes in her Nobel Speech, the reader who is the “recipient of a confidence or an outcry,” and who is sometimes “a co-conspirator.”

Let’s close our conversation with these closing lines from “The Wild Iris”:

“from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.”

And let’s close the circle, as Eliot did, with the last words of “East Coker” ––– “In my end is my beginning.”

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – October 2023

Sonnets Made Anew, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau and the Songs of the Crickets, Keats’ “To Autumn” and Shakespeare:

 

Henri Cole, the American poet, who will be reading from his new collection Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets 1994-2022 at Stonington Free Library on Sunday, October 8th, wrote this in the book’s Afterword, describing the time when he was living in Japan, the country of his birth:

 

“I wanted to write poems that conveyed the intensity of my life there –– the wildness and innocence, and the freedom.  The sonnet –– with its infrastructure of highs and lows, with its volta and the idea of transformation, with its asymmetry of lines like the foliage of a tree growing above a trunk, and with its mix of passion and thought –– seemed to me about perfect”

 

There are nearly 130 of these sonnets, selected from five books plus some that are new.  A review in the New York Times on April 18th this year – with the enticing title “A Poet Whose Swerves Capture the World in 14 Lines” –  closes with these words –  “Cole’s sonnet is a form both economical and maximal, which, through artifice and resistance to artifice, feels and makes you feel, thinks  and makes you think.”

 

It is impossible, almost, to select lines to quote from these poems that are at once deeply personal and universal, often deeply painful yet joyful, but here are the last seven lines (no neat octet, sestet here) of the final sonnet in the book –– “with its mix of passion and thought”––  called “Sow with Piglets”:

 

“But here, under a dispassionate night sky,

in pig-time, with blue moonlight filtering

through the cedars, I ask, Why do you leave 

for happiness?  Why not stay around awhile?

With muddy sneakers and thick torso,

I feel saner in this place.  I’ve paid my price

and am here for the duration.”

 

The next poems were chosen just for delight in their celebration of late Summer and Fall, or Autumn, as Keats would name it. 

 

Here is Emily Dickinson’s hymn to the end of Summer heard in song of the crickets: 

 

“Further in Summer than the Birds –

Pathetic from the Grass –

A minor Nation celebrates

Its unobtrusive Mass.

 

No ordinance be seen –

So gradual the Grace

A gentle Custom it becomes –

Enlarging Loneliness –

 

Antiquest felt at Noon –

When August burning low

Arise this spectral Canticle

Repose to typify –

 

Remit  as yet no Grace –

No furrow on the Glow,

But a Druidic Difference

Enhances Nature now –

 

For further celebration of the season, we can turn to Keats’ “To Autumn” and the song of the crickets again.  This is a poem, however often read, however much, as the Book of Proverbs says, written “on the tablet of your heart”, it remains perpetually fresh to mind and ear:

 

“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,––

.      .      .      .      .

 Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

     Among the river sallows, borne aloft

         Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

     Hedge-crickets sing;  and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

 

It was while listening to the “minor Nation’s” not so “unobtrusive Mass” in our back yard, that I came on this essay in the New York Times (September 23rd) titled “What Thoreau Heard In The Song of the Crickets” by Lewis Hyde. Thoreau, he wrote, heard “the requiem of the year” in the crickets’ song,  an “earth song” and the sound of “the creaking of the earth’s axle” telling us that “time is limited and time is endless” – and “If the setting sun seems to hurry (a man) to improve the day while it lasts, the chant of the crickets fails not to reassure him, even-measured as of old, teaching him to take his own time henceforth forever.”

 

Reading this carried me back to that captured moment of timeless peace and contentment in Henri Cole’s sonnet –– “Why not stay around awhile? … I have paid my price and am here for the duration”.    What T. S. Eliot called “The point of intersection of the timeless/ With time, ….” (“The Dry Salvages l.201- the glorious third poem of the Four Quartets).

 

It seems a natural coda to these October musings to turn to Shakespeare’s Sonnet #97, a lament for his absent beloved, with its “time removed” and “The teeming autumn big with rich increase,” and its “wanton burden” that is echoed by Keats,  again in “To Autumn”: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;/ Conspiring with him how to load and bless/ With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run  … And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;/ To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells/With a sweet kernel;”

 

“How like a winter hath my absence been

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year?

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen?

What old December’s bareness everywhere?

And yet this time removed was summer’s time,

The teeming autumn big with rich increase,

Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,

Like widowed wombs after their lords’ decease:

Yet this abundant issue seemed to me

But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit,

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,

And thou away, the very birds are mute.

    Or if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer

    That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.” 

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – September 2023

September Book Notes -A Time To Wander on The Sea Shore 

in the company of Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, all poets who found, as people have found, from time immemorial, inspiration and solace in that elemental, mysterious place where the land meets the sea; all poets who transmuted the memories and emotions of the lyric “I”, beyond the limits of the personal, into the highest art. 

It is such a transmutation that we find in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map”, the first poem in her first volume, North & South, (1946).   A poem that, with its questionings, repetitions and corrections (metanoia) bears her signature mark as a poet, a poet whose travels along the coast line from north (Nova Scotia) to south (Brazil) informed so much of her life and of her writing:   

“Land lies in water; it is shadowed green,

Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges

showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges

where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.

Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,

drawing it unperturbed around itself?

Along the fine tan sandy shelf

is the land tugging at the sea from under?”

There are echoes in “The Map” of T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”, written in 1941, in London during the Blitz.   In this, the third of The Four Quartets, in the opening section,  Eliot recalls his boyhood and youth sailing off the coast of Cape Ann, north of Gloucester, Massachusetts, but, like Bishop, he transmutes those deeply cherished memories and knowledge of sailing and the sea, into lyric poetry of breathtaking loveliness:

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us;

The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite 

Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses

Its hints of earlier and other creation:

The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;

The pools where it offers to our curiosity

The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.

It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,

The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar

And the gear of foreign dead men.  The sea has many voices,

Many gods and many voices.

                        The salt is on the briar rose,

The fog is in the fir trees.”

From here we can drift with the tide, south to the shores of Long Island, or Paumanock as Walt Whitman called it, its Native American name.   Whitman’s “Out of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is a deeply moving epic of 183 lines of varying lengths,  in which he describes the pivotal moment in his life when, as a young boy, for several days and nights, he watched a pair of birds nesting on the shore, the poet was awakened within him, along with a sense of mortality:

“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,

Down from the shower’d halo,

Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,

Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, 

From the memories of the bird that chanted to me.”

We wander further south with Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.”  Now we are standing on the sea shore of Florida’s Key West, in the presence of the singer, “the maker,” who is the lone creator of order in the face of the chaos that is the sea.  The repetition of “sang”, “sing” and “song” intertwined with “sea” gives this poem an astonishing melodic force, where sound and meaning become inseparable:  

 “She was the single artificer of the world

 In which she sang.   And when she sang, the sea,

 Whatever self it had, became the self

 That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

 As we beheld her striding there alone,

 Knew that there never was a world for her

 Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”

The words “That was her song, for she was the maker” take us back north to Duxbury Massachusetts and Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The End of March” – “It was cold and windy, scarcely the day/ to take a walk on that long beach”.  But she and her friends, John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read, did take that walk -“The rackety, icy, offshore wind/ numbed our faces on one side:” – and from that walk on the sea shore, Bishop, “for she was the maker”, wove a magical poem of closely observed reality, beach detritus, “lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string” – “A kite string?––But no kite.”,  blended with fantasy, a “proto-dream house” and a playful “lion sun” “who’d walked the beach the last low tide/ …… who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.”    A magical close that lifts the reader into the realm of dreams on a lingering note of joy.

But we can’t end our wander on the shore without another Bishop poem, “Sandpiper” – the intensely observed little shore bird that, thanks to her poem, is now forever “a student of Blake,” and the poet who is, forever, “looking for something, something, something.”, the poet whose eye (“no detail too small”) gives us the exquisite final couplet, words that, with their rising note, linger in the air.

This lovely pen and water-color drawing of a sandpiper is by Susan Gallick, local artist and Stonington resident, who graciously allowed me to include it with these Notes:

                                                 “a sheet/

of interrupting water comes and goes

and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.

He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

 

–Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,

where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains

rapidly backwards and downwards.  As he runs,

he stares at the dragging grains.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

looking for something, something, something.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

The millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray,

mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.”

These are just a few of very many sea shore poems and these, and many others, can all be found in a google search  and can be listened to on YouTube – or found in the quiet stacks in the Library gallery, another good place to wander on a summer afternoon!  I hope you enjoyed this end of summer wander beside the sea shore in the company of our beloved poets.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – July 2023

A Tribute to James Longenbach through the poetry of Wallace Stevens:

James Longenbach (1959-2022)  a beloved member of our community,  distinguished scholar, critic, teacher and poet, he was the author of many books of poetry and literary criticism.  His later work focused on contemporary poets, but his earlier critical studies were of W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, including The Plain Sense of Things,(Oxford University Press,1991) an in-depth study of Stevens.  

Here, offered in tribute to James Longenbach on this one year anniversary of his death, is a look at three poems of summer by Wallace Stevens. Stevens’ life was shaped by two World Wars and the Great Depression. Throughout his career as a poet he explored, and questioned, the function and uses of poetry in the face of world disorder, seeking, and, as he wrote in the last line of his last poem, “Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself,” perhaps finding “A new knowledge of reality”. In his poems we see what Stevens called  “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” Poetry, imagination, he wrote “the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.” (“The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” last para.; from The Necessary Angel, Essays on Reality and the Imagination,1942) 

In a review of Transport of Summer in the New York Times in April 1947,  F.O Matthiessen said that Wallace Stevens wrote his poems “against the realization that we live in a time of violent disorder”  and that out of his imagination “a man can recreate afresh his world.” Matthiessen described Stevens as a poet who expressed such truths with “gaiety of language” and “with the mellowness and tang of a late-summer wine.”

The first of these poems is “Variations on a Summer Day,” written in 1942 and published in the same year in Parts of a World, a world shaken by the “violent disorder” of the Second World War. The title evokes a musical composition as much as a poem, the two being inextricably entwined in form and sound:

   I

“Say of the gulls that they are flying

  In light blue air over dark blue sea.

II

  A music more than breath, but less   Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech,

  A repetition of unconscious things,

  Letters of rock and water, words

           Of the visible elements and of ours.

V

  The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken.

           There was a tree that was a father,

           We sat beneath it and sang our songs.

VII

    One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,

            When it sings.  The gull sits on the chimney-tops.

    He mocks the guinea, challenges 

    The crow, inciting various modes.

    The sparrow requites one, without intent.”

 

There is a tenderness in that last line that, for this reader,

calls up those sparrows in the New Testament:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?  ….  ye are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matt: ch 10. v.29-31)

And again an arresting musical image in canto VIII:

“But one looks at the sea

    As one improvises, on a piano.”  

And in canto XIV: 

“Words add to the senses.  The words for the dazzle

Of mica, the dithering of grass,

The Arachne integument of dead trees,

Are the eye grown larger, more intense.”

We have, indeed, “gaiety of language” in these “Variations”.

These images and ideas are pursued in Transport of Summer in his long poem“Credences of Summer.”  Written in 1947, the summer that followed the end of the war,when people might, as we now might, just for a moment, suspend disbelief and believe in the promises, the credences, of summer, when “the mind lays by its trouble” even as we know, as Stevens’ knew, in Shakespeare’s words, “summer’s lease has all too short a date.”   

I

“Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered

  And spring’s infuriations over and a long way

To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods

Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight

Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.

 

And here we have that “eye grown larger…”

II

“Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.

.   .   .   .   .   .

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky

Without evasion by a single metaphor.

Look at it in its essential barrenness

And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

Fix it in an eternal foliage.

 

And fill the foliage with arrested peace – “

In the same collection, he wrote of that “arrested peace” of summer in his lyric “The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm”. Written in eight non-rhyming iambic pentameter couplets (with Stevensian variations) the repetitions of words and phrases suggesting both a villanelle and a sestina, without being quite either one of these, the poem conveys that sense of perfect form with variations found in “Variations” and “Credences”, “that mellowness and tang of a late-summer wine”:

“The house was quiet and the world was calm.

  The reader became the book; and summer night

  Was like the conscious being of the book.

  The house was quiet and the world was calm.

.   .   .   .   .   .   .

    And the world was calm.   The truth in a calm world,

            In which there is no other meaning, itself

    Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

    Is the reader leaning late and reading there.”

The calm, and sense of oneness, that this lyric conveys, recalls Jim Longenbach’s beautiful lyric “Thursday” from his last book, Forever (Norton, 2021) – a poem about making, about making poetry, about making risotto:

“Because the most difficult part about making something,   also the best, 

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I simmered a broth: onion, lemon, a big handful of mint.

.    .    .    .

The miracle, it’s easy to miss, is the moment when the husks

     dissolve,

Each grain releasing its tiny explosion of starch.

 

If you take it off the heat just then, let it sit

While you shave the parmesan into paper-thin curls,

It will be perfectly creamy,

But will still have bite.

There will be dishes to do,

The moon will rise,

And everyone you love will be safe.”

In the simplicity of this, and all Jim Longenbach’s carefully crafted lyrics, “The miracle, it’s easy to miss”.  It is good to be able to say that a new collection of his poems will be forthcoming.  Something to look forward to – poems to “help us to live our lives”! 

And in grateful tribute to this scholar poet, here are these lines from Wallace Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour:

“We say God and the imagination are one….

How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

FINALLY AN IMPORTANT NOTE FOR YOUR CALENDAR:

ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 13TH AT 5PM IN THE LIBRARY, JONATHAN POST WILL READ AND DISCUSS POEMS FROM THE WORK OF ANTHONY HECHT IN A CELEBRATION OF THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH.   PROFESSOR POST IS EDITOR OF THE SELECTED LETTERS OF ANTHONY HECHT (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)AND AUTHOR OF THE THICKNESS OF PARTICULARS:  A CRITICAL STUDY OF ANTHONY HECHT’S POETRY (Oxford University Press, 2015).

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – June 2023

It’s June, Let’s Take Wing:

With Andrew Marvell in “The Garden”:

“Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,

Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,

Casting the body’s vest aside,

My soul into the boughs does glide;

There like a bird it sits, and sings,

Then whets and combs its silver wings;

And, till prepared for longer flight,

Waves in its plumes the various light.”

Or with Shakespeare as, in a moment of despair, it is the thought of his beloved that makes his spirit rise like the soaring song of the skylark:

“Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee – and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” (Sonnet #29).

Staying with Shakespeare’s magic, it is the dueling songs of the lark and the nightingale that accompany what is surely one of the sweetest, and saddest, duets between lovers ever conceived:

Juliet: “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly he sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo: “It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”

Romeo goes along with Juliet’s “Yon light is not daylight, I know it,…”

“Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat/The vaulty heaven so high above our heads:”

But Juliet, her heart breaking, speaks the truth that they both wish not to be so, that the lark is heralding the dawning day and they must part:

“It is, it is: hie hence, begone, away!

It is the lark that sings so out of tune,

Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.”

Act 3: sc.V

Of course, for us, the nightingale will always call to mind Keats’ Ode:

“The voice I hear this passing night was heard

   In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,

        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;”

In Keats’ miraculous turn of phrase, it is the song that is, here, the active agent, finding “a path/ Through the sad heart of Ruth” just as the poem finds a path through the heart of every reader.   Keats composed this Ode in 1819, calling the nightingale “Darkling”, and it was on the last day of that century, when the threat of war was already looming, that Thomas Hardy wrote his lyric “The Darkling Thrush.  In a landscape where “The tangled bine-stems scored the sky/like strings of broken lyres” he found “Some blessed Hope” in the “evensong of “An aged thrush”:

“At once a voice arose among

      The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.”

But back to Keats and a letter where he wrote that “if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”   These words remind me of the Seventeenth Century Welsh metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan, and his tender lyric “The Bird.”  With echoes of the Psalmist, “the sparrow hath found a house and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young” (Ps. 84), we have Vaughan as he imagines the little bird, taking “part in its existence:”

“Hither thou com’st, the busie wind all night

Blew through thy lodging, where thine own warm wing

Thy pillow was.   Many a sullen storm

(For which coarse man seems much the fitter born,)

Rain’d on thy bed

And harmless head.

And now as fresh and cheerful as the light

Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing

Unto that Providence, whose unseen arm

Curb’d them, and cloath’d thee well and warm -“

Here is a two-fold simplicity – the poet, identifying with the little bird while seeking for himself that “unseen arm” of Providence to guard him also until the light of dawn appears.

Some three hundred years later, Elizabeth Bishop put a life-time of observation and love of birds into her poems – “thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward/ freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing in brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets” (“Cape Breton”).    And in “North Haven”, her heart-wrenching elegy for her dear friend Robert Lowell – “The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,/ and the White-throated Sparrow’s five note song,/ pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.”     As she says in “Poem” – “—the little that we get for free,/ the little of our earthly trust.  Not much./ About the size of our abidance…”   “Not much” maybe,  but in these and all her poems, it is her seeing eye and hearing ear that makes that “little” so abundantly rich.  But it is her last published poem, “Sonnet,” with its “rainbow-bird”, with its truncated lines, its reversed sestet and octet, that we carries us back to “The Garden” of Marvell, where, “casting the body’s vest aside/ My soul into the boughs does glide”:

Here is the octet from “Sonnet” with its “joy illimited” –

“Freed—the broken 

thermometer’s mercury

running away;

and the rainbow-bird

from the narrow bevel

of the empty mirror,

flying wherever

it feels like, gay!”

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – May 2023

A 400th Anniversary, John Keats, Amy Clampitt, Joanna Scott and a Date for your Calendar.

“To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare

and what he hath left us” – Ben Jonson

(An 80 line elegy prefixed to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works in 1623)

          “Soul of the age!

The applause!  delight!  the wonder of our stage!

My Shakespeare, rise;

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

Thou art a monument without a tomb,

And art alive still while thy book doth live,

And we have wits to read and praise to give.

.    .    .    .    .    .   .    .   .    .   .

Sweet swan of Avon what a sight it were

To see thee in our waters yet appear,

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .   .    .

But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere

Advanced and made a constellation there!

Shine forth, thou star of poets….”

And Milton – “On Shakespeare”, a sonnet written for the frontispiece of the second edition in 1631 –

“What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones

The labor of an age in piléd stones?

Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid

Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame,

What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thyself a livelong monument.”

And of course we know that Shakespeare understood what his monument would be –

Sonnet 18

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

and Sonnet 55

“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.”

Words addressed to his beloved but also to the written word that will outlive all “gilded monuments”.  This was the truth that Shakespeare understood, as Ovid did before him and Keats after him.  

But in this 400th Anniversary Year we celebrate an act of friendship on the part of Heminges and Condell inspired by “wonder and astonishment” for their fellow player and author of their plays, seven years after his death, in bringing the First Folio into being, his true monument.   This is a dramatic story of team effort, devotion and persistence in the face of obstacles that is set out in Emma Smith’s 2016 study, just republished, and Shakespeare’s Book by Chris Laoutaris, published this year.    It was the vision and dedication of all those involved in the creation of the First Folio that preserved 36 of the plays, 18 of which might have been lost forever – words that have been the basso continuo of “wonder and astonishment”, as well as wisdom and comfort, for countless generations of readers, playgoers, poets and writers.   It is that image from baroque music of the underlying, connecting theme that best describes for me the part that Shakespeare has played in the artistic lives of so many writers.  You might recall the moment when Melville, at age 29, first read Shakespeare – whom he called his “Divine William” –  when he found an edition with large enough print for his poor eyes that were “as tender as young sparrows”.  Seven volumes that changed his life.

That was in February 1849.   Three thousand miles away, on another continent, and thirty-two years earlier, in April 1817, the young John Keats set off for the Isle of Wight, intent on attempting to write an epic poem (Endymion).  He carried with him a new purchase,  “a copy of Shakespeare in seven small volumes.” According to his biographer, Walter Jackson Bate, “the book was to serve almost as a talisman or charm”, and, as we know, a key to his development as a thinker and poet.  As he wrote to his friend, the artist Benjamin Haydon, at this, a time of great loneliness and spiritual trial, “I never quite despair and I read Shakespeare – indeed I shall I think never read any other Book much -”

And of course Keats himself became the lodestar for many poets who came after him, among them Gerard Manley Hopkins – Keats was a presence from his early childhood – and Amy Clampitt, whose biography Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt by Willard Spiegelman has just been published by Knopf.

In this delightful book, at once scholarly and highly readable, Willard Spiegelman beautifully links the poet to her poetic forebears – the basso continuo in her life.  At one point, describing Clampitt’s ability to enter into the world around her, to enjoy it in a Keatsian fashion, he quotes from a letter of Keats – “ – or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” (pp. 108-109).      

But now, in this 400th anniversary year, a celebration of the Book if ever there was one, nearly one quarter a way through the 21st Century, we find ourselves in a world where physical books are disappearing from the shelves of academic and other libraries and are being replaced with digital versions.   AI is suddenly a very present reality.  Both are new phenomena for which we don’t have a map, while the resurgence of book banning brings history to our doorstep, with a map, if we care to read it.  And, “while we have wits to read,” we will find, as people always have, truth in fiction, in stories.    A mirror is held up to this challenging new world in Joanna Scott’s short story collection, Excuse Me While I Disappear.  Through startling feats of imagination, combining depths of perception and humanity with the lightest touch, these stories, like all the best stories, tell us about our world and about ourselves.  

But now let us return to Shakespeare,”Soul of the Age!”, whose words are the basso continuo that still weaves our age together, and, for a coda, turn to Emily Dickinson, another poet of great importance to Amy Clampitt.   This lyric of four quatrains, like all Emily Dickinson poems, has as many readings as readers, but for me it speaks of the “Sweet Swan of Avon” –

“This was a Poet –

It is That

Distills amazing sense

From Ordinary Meanings –

And Attar so immense

From the familiar species

That perished by the Door –“

(#446)

And with that, the Note for Your Calendar – On Sunday, May 14th, Mother’s Day, at 5 pm at Stonington Free Library, Willard Spiegelman will discuss his biography of Amy Clampitt – a fascinating figure in the world of 20th Century poetry – a much anticipated event and one not to be missed.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – April 2023

 Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney and The Redress Of Poetry, and a joy that catches “the heart off guard…”

First, lines from two poems by Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), written in Warsaw in1945:

“Dedication”:

“What is poetry which does not save

Nations or people?” 

“In Warsaw”:

“What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins

Of St. John’s Cathedral on this sunny

Day in spring?

.       .      .      .      .

I want to sing of festivities,

The greenwood into which Shakespeare

Often took me.   Leave 

To poets a moment of happiness,

Otherwise your world will perish.

It is madness to live without joy.”

It is this question, what is the function of poetry in the face of the devastation, the horrors, of war that Milosz sought to answer. How, he asked,  is poetry “of present use?”  This is the same question that haunted T.S. Eliot as he sat writing  at his desk in the London Blitz of WWII, and that haunted Seamus Heaney, born a Roman Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland and living through the violence, cruelties and betrayals, on all sides, that were the mark of The Troubles. 

“The soul exceeds its circumstances” was Czeslaw Milosz’s life-affirming response, born of a lifetime’s dedication to poetry.  Heaney’s response is found throughout his poetry, but is most specifically addressed in the lectures titled The Redress of Poetry that he delivered when he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford between 1989 and 1994, ten of which were published in 1995, the year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

In redress we have a word freighted with many meanings, but, as Heaney explains in the title essay, it is this obsolete definition, taken from the OED, that is the defining theme throughout, “To set (a person or a thing) upright again…” In The Door Stands Open, his 2004 tribute to Czeslaw Milosz in The New Republic, Heaney writes of “the immemorial belief in the saving power of poetry” and “the delicious joy-bringing potential of art and intellect.” And as Milosz himself wrote, “poetry by its very essence has always been on the side of life.” (Redress p. 158). The very means by which “the soul exceeds its circumstances.”

Here are lines from Heaney’s “The Swing”, a joyous memory of childhood and of his mother:

“Fingertips just tipping you would send you

Every bit as far….

Not Fragonard. Nor Brueghel. It was more

Hans Memling’s light of heaven off green grass,

Light over fields and hedges, the shed-mouth

Sunstruck and expectant, the bedding-straw

Piled to one side, like a Nativity

Foreground and background, waiting for the figures.

And then in the middle ground, the swing itself

With an old lopsided sack in the loop of it,

Perfectly still, hanging like a pulley-slack,

A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.

.      .     .      .     .

                     In spite of all, we sailed

Beyond ourselves.”

Poetry that is “on the side of life,” that is “joy-bringing”. It is this sailing “beyond ourselves” that Heaney examines in his close reading of several of George Herbert’s poems. In “a pulley-slack/ A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise”, we hear George Herbert’s “The Pulley”, as well as “Prayer 1” – those “Church-bells beyond the stars heard.” The redressing joy that is found in Herbert’s intensely musical lyrics is the Latin “gaudium”, rejoice, praise. This is the essential element of George Herbert’s poetry that Heaney describes in the final paragraph of the first essay as “the redress of poetry at its most exquisite.” 

In his essay on Elizabeth Bishop, “Counting to One Hundred”, Heaney suggests that it is in her great poem, “The Moose,” that we find one of the most sublime examples of redress – that moment of mystery when, two thirds of the way into this perfectly controlled narrative of twenty-eight six line stanzas, the “otherworldly” moose appears “out of/ the impenetrable wood”:

 “Why, why do we feel/(we all feel) this sweet/sensation of joy?” 

Words that never lose their power to be heart-stopping, no matter how often you read them. This is poetry that, yes, “sets one upright again.”

But let’s turn back, one more time, to “The Swing,” to “the shed-mouth/ Sunstruck and expectant, the bedding-straw/Piled to one side, like a Nativity/ Foreground and background waiting for the figures”, an image that recalls  “this old Nativity” in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Over 2,000 Illustrations and A Concordance” – the transcendent final stanza:

“—the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,

an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,

colorless, sparkless, fed on straw,

and, lulled within, a family with pets.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins offers us similar moments of gaudium, joy and praise in his pure hymn of redress – his sonnet “Spring”: (Elizabeth Bishop took this first line as the epigraph to her own lovely Spring lyric, “Cold Spring):

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –

     When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

     Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

.      .     .      .     .

What is all this juice and all this joy?”

But let us end with Seamus Heaney and “Postscript,” the final poem in The Spirit Level, published in1996, the year after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.     The first eleven lines of this sixteen line lyric are one sentence that gathers ecstatic energy as it describes a shoreline and then an inland “slate-grey lake” that is 

“lit

 By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

 Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,”

 a sight to

 “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

 

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – March 2023

Henry James and Company – And a Note for Your Calendar

Browsing, as I do, through book reviews and book essays I came across this in one of those “What our readers have read this year” columns, a piece by Tony Bentley, author of Serenade: A Balanchine Story:  “In time of great need .. I read only classics.

…. I returned to Henry James – I can think of no greater pleasure than getting lost, entirely lost, in the four-page paragraphs and half-page sentences … I feel more intimacy with the beautiful windings of James’s mind than I ever could with a mere human.” The writer continues by describing “exclamation points and

‘Ha!’s of delight, the occasional post-it note for easy re-visitation of the transcendentally wise.” 

It was that “Ha! of delight” that found me turning to W.H Auden’s “At The Grave of Henry James,”, finding myself in my imagination standing alongside Auden by “the small taciturn stone that is the only witness/ To a great and talkative man…. O poet of the difficult, dear addicted artist.”    And then reading on to these very Audenesque lines in this passionate elegy (Cynthia Ozick called it “an incantation”):

“As I stand awake on our solar fabric,

That primary machine, the earth, which gendarmes, banks

    And aspirin presuppose,

On which the clumsy and sad may all sit down,

    and any who will

Say their a-ha to the beautiful, the common locus

    Of the master and the rose.”

And so through twenty-four six line stanzas, held together with an almost Jamesian rigor of structure of iambic pentameter and hexameter lines, with every third and sixth line a rhyming tetrameter, we come to the penultimate stanza and a plea that all writers should be judged by their “works” that “Are in better taste than their lives.”  This was something which Henry James himself believed, following the writers and artists he most admired, Sainte-Beuve, Proust, Ruskin and, above all perhaps, Turgenev, that “a book is the product of a self other than that which we display in our habits, in company, in our vices….. the self that has been waiting while one was with others, which one feels clearly to be the only real self, for alone artists end by living, like a god… to whom they have sacrificed a life that serves only to do him honor.”  (Proust – Contre Sainte-Beuve).  A god that James referred to as his “Bon” – his good.

The final stanza reaches an apogee of incantatory, operatic even, music, with Old Testament echoes made more poignant in that they were written in 1941:

“Because the darkness is never so distant,

And there is never much time for the arrogant 

     Spirit to flutter its wings,

Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry

For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author

      And giver of all good things.”

On August 4th 1914, at the outbreak of World War 1,James wrote to Emerson’s son, Edward, “It fills me with anguish and dismay – it gives away everything one has believed in & lived for.”  He died on February 28th, 1916, having become a British citizen so that he could join the war effort. 

It is, yes, exhilarating to spend time in the company of this great and extraordinary man. Among all the biographies, the editions of his letters, and his Notebooks, I have recently been reading Henry James: A Life in Letters edited, with copious notes and commentary, by Philip Horne.  Henry James knew everyone: Ruskin, Darwin, Tennyson, George Eliot, Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev to name some; and in these letters – his voice springing from the pages – one meets with the literary, social and political world of the second half of the Nineteenth Century.   You learn of the writers who were his inspiration and mentors, how young he was when he was an acclaimed writer, how hard he worked! How, in those early days, the demands of his social life often left him little space to work, making the novel he was thinking about (Portrait of a Lady) “a lingering ache.”  You learn in London of “the times when the fog, the smoke, the universal uncleanness – overwhelm the spirit…. Considering that I lose all patience with the English about fifteen times a day & vow that I renounce them forever, I get on with them beautifully and love them well.”  (L. to Charles Eliot Norton, Nov. 13th 1880). You travel with him to Europe and you are with him when he begins a life-long love affair with Venice, Ruskin’s Stones of Venice his inspiring guide.

It is fascinating to see in The Prefaces to his novels how much Ruskin’s principles of architecture, as well as Turgenev’s vision, became building blocks for his own writing.  This passage in the Preface to Portrait of a Lady reads to me as though it came from Stones of Venice, though it was Turgenev whom James had in mind as he wrote:   “it took nothing less than technical rigor… to inspire me with the right confidence for erecting on such a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned pile of bricks that arches over it, and was thus to form, constructionally speaking, a literary monument… a structure reared with an “architectural” competence…though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation of an interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale or perspective.  I would build large – in fine embossed vaults and painted arches… yet never let it appear that the chequered pavement, the ground under the reader’s feet, fails to stretch at every point to the base of the walls.” (p.24).   In his essay on Turgenev James could be describing his own creative process, what he called his “donnée”:  “he is a story-teller who has taken notes.   … he notes down an idiosyncrasy of character, a fragment of talk, an attitude, a feature, a gesture, and keeps it, if need be, for twenty years, till just the moment for using it comes…” ( Ivan Turgenev LoA p. 969.)  James continues, “He has an eye for all our passions, and a deeply sympathetic sense of the wonderful complexity of our souls.”( Ibid. p.973.)   Here is one artist, one genius, recognizing another.

But for all that Henry James has written about his art and for all that has been written about Henry James – captivating as it is – what we have are his novels and stories – twenty novels and one hundred and twelve short stories and novellas. For this reader there is nothing to compare to the delight of taking up, say, Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl or The Wings of a Dove, The Aspern Papers or The American, The Bostonians or Washington Square, and being drawn into a drama of the mind and consciousness that will not let you go until its often ambiguous, always surprising, and somehow very modern ending.  There are no easy resolutions.  Debates continue about the fate of Isabel Archer, we realize that Lambert Strether can only do what he does if he is to be true to himself, and in The Golden Bowl, which James called “the solidest of all his fictions”,  Maggie Verver, faced with “the horror of finding evil, seated all at ease, where she had only dreamed of good”, reacts to her situation with strength, wit and courage – a psychological drama that is very 21st Century.    All are told with the sublimely “beautiful windings” of his sentences, sentences which are guaranteed to leave you in a different place after a transcendent journey.   This is time richly rewarded, always, and we will say our “a-ha to the beautiful”.

As Henry James observes at the end of his Preface to Portrait of A Lady, “There is really too much to say.”!!

But most fortunately for us, on Sunday April 16th, we will have the opportunity to hear more about these “beautiful windings” from Julie Rivkin, the Charles MacCurdy Professor of American Studies at Connecticut College – 5 pm at Stonington Free Library in our Sunday Evening Lecture Series.   Please join us.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – February 2023

A Meditation on The Saving Grace of Poetry and The Imagination,  Dedicated to Ukraine.

“The poet… brings the whole soul of man into activity …. imagination the soul that is everywhere … and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.”  Coleridge: Biographica Literaria ch. xiv.“We say that God and the imagination are one.  .  .

How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

Wallace Stevens: “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” v.5.

The Hebrew prophet Ecclesiastes’ describes failure of the imagination, the spirit, in this way – “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.” (ch.12: v 6) ,a waste land of the mind and spirit. 

As this February marks the one-year anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, reducing it to a waste land, it is poetry, music, art that makes it possible to have our spirit not fail, to not turn away from such heart-wrenching devastation, a vision of Hell that Milton shows us in Paradise Lost.  Satan, “Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,/ With hideous ruin and combustion, down/ To bottomless perdition,” sees “The dismal situation waste and wild:/A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,/As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames/No light, but rather darkness visible.”   (Bk 1: ll. 36 -63).  A vision of “the burning marl,” “darkness visible” that has become, yet again, tragically familiar.

Many millennia on from Ecclesiastes, and nearly three hundred years after Milton, T. S. Eliot presents to our imagination in his 1922 poem “The Waste Land,” a blasted post-war landscape of destruction and spiritual despair,  a despair repeated in his earlier dramatic monologue “Gerontion.”   The speaker, (gerontion is Greek for ‘little old man’)is recalling the horrors of the First World War and asks  “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

In 1937 Picasso painted Guernica, an immense canvas (11.5×26.5 feet) in matte black, grey and white, as a cry of protest against the horror of the Spanish Civil War.   It was this painting that Elizabeth Bishop had in mind in 1940 when she was was thinking about  her poem “Roosters”.   As she wrote in October of that year to her friend and mentor, Marianne Moore, she “had in mind the violent roosters that Picasso did in connection with his Guernica picture.” (One Art, p.96). In the same letter she says that she “wants to emphasize the essential baseness of militarism.” Not yet come to America, the war in Europe was already casting a long shadow. 

This poem, in part an allegory of male military aggression, is a tour de force of the imagination, and it speaks as powerfully today as when Elizabeth Bishop conceived it.   Like Guernica, “Roosters”with its forty-four rhyming tercets, is a broad canvas, a poem that possesses the three qualities that Bishop said she admired “in poetry I like best – Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery.”   Beginning with a dawn filled with the echoing cries of the roosters, the scene of increasing violence is depicted with the accuracy of this poet’s “famous eye”.  Yet perhaps, of these three qualities, it is in Mystery that the special magic of this poem lies as, half way through, it moves from a violence filled dawn to a night of grief, of spiritual mystery and forgiveness, before closing with an aubade of spontaneous beauty, a hymn to a new day:

At four o’clock

In the gun-metal blue dark

we hear the first crow of the first cock

just below

the gun-metal blue window

and immediately there is an echo

off in the distance,

then one from the backyard fence,

then one, with horrible insistence,

grates like a wet match

from the broccoli patch,

flares, and all over town begins to catch.”

 

Here is what Bishop called “the rattletrap rhythm” with its two, three and four or five beat lines, each running on to the next until coming to rest at that chilling “grates” and “flares”.  Roosters,  heralds of a new day as well as ancient symbols of combat and war, “brace their cruel feet and glare/ with stupid eyes/while from their beaks there rise/ the uncontrolled, traditional cries.  Deep from protruding chests/in green-gold medals dressed,/ planned to command and terrorize the rest,”

The violence and tension mount, the roosters mimicking an aerial battle of war planes, until:

“…one has fallen,

.   .   .   .   .

his torn-out bloodied feathers drift down;

and what he sung

no matter.   He is flung

on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung.”

Then, with a sudden change of key, we are no longer in a backyard in Florida in 1941, but some two thousand years earlier, in the courtyard with St. Peter as he follows Christ to his place of trial, “to see the end.”  We witness his thrice denial of Christ before the rooster crows. (Matthew ch.26 vs. 74-75)

“St. Peter’s sin

was worse than that of Magdalene

whose sin was of the flesh alone;

of spirit, Peter’s.” 

How startling is that reversal of sense, that brevity of line in the next stanza. 

And with, yet again, a change of key, we are in the presence of an “old holy sculpture” – “Christ stands amazed/Peter, two fingers raised/ to surprised lips, both as if dazed./ But in between/ a little cock is seen/ carved on a dim column in the travertine/ …There is inescapable hope, the pivot; ….  that even the Prince/ of the Apostles long since/had been forgiven.”   With the simplicity and ease that is at the heart of her poetry, Elizabeth Bishop takes us from the cruelty of war to the mystery of forgiveness and the life-giving role of art that “could set it all together/in one small scene, past and future,”  –   in this case a little carving, an “old holy sculpture,” that offers “inescapable hope.” 

Thus it is, offered the balm of forgiveness and hope, we are brought to the dawn of a new day:

“In the morning 

a low light is floating

in the backyard, and gilding

from underneath

the broccoli, leaf by leaf

how could the night have come to grief?

gilding the tiny

floating swallow’s belly

and lines of pink cloud in the sky,

the day’s preamble

like wandering lines in marble.”

What high art to be returned to the broccoli patch, with “gilding” twice repeated!  The poem is answering, as though antiphonally, that harsh “gun-metal blue”, the “green-gold medals”, “the baseness of militarism,” just as it recalls “the old holy sculpture” in the “wandering lines in marble” of the travertine. 

That Bishop took the form of her poem from the 17th Century metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw’s lyric ,“Wishes to his (Supposed) Mistress,” again highlights the power of art to speak across the ages.  In “Roosters,” with its musical form, with all its layers of meaning, richness of vocabulary and allusion, we find the saving grace of poetry’s resistance in the face of “hideous ruin,” a poet’s response to Gerontion’s despairing question: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

As Wallace Stevens says of the imagination -“How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – January 2023

My Love Letter to Mr. T. S. Eliot

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I am sure it’s a good one – and the same goes for painting” – Elizabeth Bishop in a letter to Robert Lowell.

T.S. Eliot writes of the same experience in his essay on Dante – only he calls it “poetic shock”. To many readers and to this reader that phrase, and Elizabeth Bishop’s famous remark, describe the experience of reading a poem, sometimes for the first time, sometimes after long familiarity, and, on looking up from the page, seeing the world in different colors, a world that is, in George Herbert’s words “new, tender, quick.”  

Here are some such lines that I read recently.  They are from the opening stanza  of Little Gidding, the fourth of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, his final masterpiece, composed over six years and first published in its entirety in 1944.  It was the crowning work of his spiritual and poetic journey – in a sense, his Paradiso after the bitter darkness of his great poem The Waste Land”, first published one hundred years ago, in 1922:

“Midwinter spring in its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic,

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,

The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,

In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,

Reflecting in a watery mirror

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

A glow more intense than blaze of branch or brazier,

Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire

In the dark time of the year.   Between melting and freezing

The soul’s sap quivers.”

In these few lines we experience a midwinter afternoon, its light, its chill, its hints of spring and then the surprise of that lovely composite word, ‘sempiternal’ – unchanging, everlasting.  Here we have what Eliot describes, again in his essay on Dante, as “the intense pleasure – the poetry in the poem” –  the music of alliteration, the sustained movement of the line and variation in the line length, the underlying structure supporting the whole.  At one and the same time we can see ’the brief sun’ that flames the ice while feeling  the mysteries of pentecostal fire that makes the ‘soul’s sap’ quiver.

This opening stanza contains all the elements of this last Quartet – time, fire, pentecostal fire – along with all the elements of the previous quartets, magically woven together into a perfect whole.  Helen Gardner, in her 1950 study The Art of T. S. Eliot compares the structure of the poem to that of Beethoven’s Last Quartets with all their complexity and sublimity, “music beyond the stars heard” in George Herbert’s words in “Prayer 1” or Keats’ “melodies unheard” or Eliot himself in the fifth movement of The Dry Salvages (the third Quartet) – “music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/While the music lasts.”

The Four Quartets is a single poem, each Quartet having five movements,  and it is meant to be read that way.   Eliot felt that the way to approach any poem was just to read it and not be concerned initially with allusions or meaning.   One could hardly ask for more persuasive advice!  However if you enjoy, like Melville, a ‘deeper dive’, this is a work rich in allusion and reference.  As you read you will find a glorious company, Shakespeare, Milton, Vaughan, Crashaw,  Dante, the Psalms of David, Mary Queen of Scots, Julian of Norwich as leitmotif, and yes, if you look, George Herbert, the abiding spirit of Little Gidding, the home of the religious order of his close friend Nicholas Ferrar –  “If you came this way,/ Taking any route, starting from anywhere/At any time or at any season/… You are not here to verify,…You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid.” 

Along with the underlying motif of time, a thread that runs throughout each movement, Little Gidding has the element Fire at its core (the other Quartets address Air, Earth and Water respectively) – the pentecostal fire even appearing as “The dove descending breaks the air/ With flame of incandescent terror,” recalling the bombing raids over London in World War II. 

But then, here, in Little Gidding, there ever remains the subtext of a fire that did not happen. 

On his death bed George Herbert commissioned the friend who was tending him in his last days, a Mr. Duncon, with these words – ‘Sir, I pray deliver this little book to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul….. desire him to read it; and then, if he think it may turn to the advantage of any poor soul, let it be made public, if not, let him burn it: for I and it are less than the least of God’s mercies’.  So it was in January of 1633 that Mr Duncon rode on horseback the nine miles from George Herbert’s rectory at  Bemerton through the lanes to Little Gidding and delivered “this little book,” The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations by Mr. George Herbert, late Oratour of the Universitie of Cambridge. This according to another learned and gentle soul among this company of learned and gentle souls, Izaak Walton writing in 1670 in his Life of Herbert.  Walton continues:  “Mr Ferrar would say, there was in it the picture of a divine soul in every page:  and that the whole book was such a harmony of holy passions as would enrich the world with pleasure and piety.”

This was the fire, the burning of George Herbert’s “little book” that did not happen, thanks to Nicholas Ferrar, this perceptive, faithful friend since their student days at Cambridge.   And so it was, some three hundred years later, T. S. Eliot made his own poetic journey to Little Gidding. 

And as we began with the opening lines, here we come to the close of this sublime poem:

                           “So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

.   .     .    .   .   .   .   .    .   .   .

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.”

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – December 2022

Voices Across Time:  

“Without looking at his book he spoke the poem again; and his voice deepened and softened, as if the words and sounds and rhythms had for a moment become himself:

‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’s the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

   This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’

The speaker here is Sloane, a frustrated, short-tempered English Professor, addressing Stoner, the protagonist of John Williams’ novel of that title.  

“Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner, do you hear him?”.   

Stoner does hear him.  Sloane, again: “What does he say to you, Mr. Stoner? What does his sonnet mean?”

…..”It means,” he said, and with a small movement raised his hands up toward the air….”It means” he said again, and could not finish what he had begun to say.” (ch.1)

As a result of this encounter with Shakespeare, Stoner, solitary, doggedly determined, abandoned his agricultural studies, which would lead him back to a life of drudgery on the family farm, for studies in the humanities.  Two years later, about to complete his bachelor’s degree, here he is leaving another meeting with Professor Sloane who had told him he should be a teacher.   “He went out … into the morning, and the grayness no longer seemed to oppress the campus; it led his eyes outward and upward into the sky, where he looked as if toward a possibility for which he had no name.”

It was in fact Sonnet 29, not 73, that recalled this extraordinary novel and this passage to my mind:

“When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heavens gate.”

And then, as often happens with a re-reading, I was struck by the effect of Shakespeare’s words on Professor Sloane –  “as if the words and sounds and rhythms had for a moment become himself:” This was the experience that John Keats described as “Negative Capability” – in simplest terms, the ability to lose the self in something larger – “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.  Keats, as we know, heard the voices of Shakespeare, Milton, Homer speaking to him across the centuries. He also spent many hours in the British Museum gazing at the Elgin Marbles, returning again and again to sit in front of them, his first experience of the sublime in the art of Ancient Greece, of which he wrote – “That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude/ Wasting of old time —with a billowy main —/ A sun — a shadow of magnitude.”  It was out of this “shadow of magnitude” that he would come to write his famous “Ode on A Grecian Urn”, a poem which still delights with its images –  “To what green altar, O mysterious priest,/ Lead’st thou that heifer lowing to the skies,/  And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?”-   its mysteries and music, its “melodies unheard”, “forever piping songs forever new:”

In this great Ode Keats is using a structural device called anaphora – from the Greek meaning repeat or return to— repetitions, as with the ritornello in a fugue, that give shape and control to the tumbling, ecstatic thoughts and images that fill the poem’s five ten-line stanzas.  

Some 125 years later, we have Elizabeth Bishop’s unusually lineated, double sonnet titled simply “Anaphora”.  The elegant compression of the two fourteen-line stanzas is a far remove from the extravagance of the Ode, yet each achieves the same lyric intensity and each expresses what Elizabeth Bishop called “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration”. The poem begins in celebration, descends into “mortal fatigue” and, in the musical elegance of its form, returns:

“Each day with so much ceremony

begins, with birds, with bells,

with whistles from a factory:

such white-gold skies our eyes

first open on, such brilliant walls

that for a moment we wonder

“Where is the music coming from, the energy?”

The day was meant for what ineffable creature

We must have missed? Oh promptly he 

appears and takes his earthly nature

    Instantly, instantly falls

    victim of long intrigue,

    assuming memory and mortal

    mortal fatigue.

More slowly falling into sight,

and showering into stippled faces,

darkening, condensing all his light;

in spite of all the dreaming

squandered upon him with that look,

suffers our uses and abuses, 

sinks through the drift of bodies,

sinks through the drift of classes  

to evening to the beggar in the park

who, weary, without lamp or book

   prepares stupendous studies:

   the fiery event 

   of every day in endless

   endless assent.”

Assent and ascent, “like to the lark at break of day arising …”  But who is this “he” and who is this “beggar in the park”?  The poem teases us with many possibilities.  Perhaps it is enough to assent to being, as Keats says, “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts…”.  

But now, in this season of Mysteries, let’s turn to George Herbert and the sonnet that opens his poem “Christmas”.  With a simplicity of vocabulary and structure that belies a work of the highest art, we are drawn immediately into the old story, its gentle unfolding a balm to our tir’d minds:     

“All after pleasures as I rid one day,

      My horse and I, both tir’d, bodie and minde,

      With full crie of affections, quite astray.

I took up in the next inne I could find.

There when I came, whom found I but my deare,

      My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief

      Of pleasures brought me to him, readie there

To be all passengers most sweet relief?

O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,

      Wrapt in night’s mantle, stole into a manger,

       Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,

To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger.”

And, perhaps recalling her beloved George Herbert, Elizabeth Bishop,” in “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” says of “this old Nativity”    

“—the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,

an undisturbed, unbreathing flame.”

 

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – November 2022

A Thanksgiving for Poetry and the Life of the Imagination told in some Poems:

Imagine London, England, and a bleak November night in 1816. The twenty-one year old Keats is walking across Hampstead Heath in the dark, down to his lodgings in Cheapside, a distance of  nearly six miles. This sonnet is how he wrote of that walk, a pivotal moment in his life:

“Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there

    Among the bushes half leafless and dry;

    The stars look very cold about the sky,

And I have many miles on foot to fare.

Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air,

     Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily,

     Or of those silver lamps that burn on high,

Or of the distance from home’s pleasant lair:

For I am brimful of the friendliness 

      That in a little cottage I have found;

Of fair-haired Milton’s eloquent distress,

       And all his love for gentle Lycid’ drowned;

Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,

       And faithful Petrarch gloriously crowned.”

He has spent the evening with his new found friend, Leigh Hunt, and is “brimful of the friendliness/ That in a little cottage I have found” and his mind is turned towards his chief inspiration, Milton, and his model for the sonnet, Petrarch and his “lovely Laura.” His first poem, the sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” had been published just two weeks before, it is in this famous sonnet’s final sestet that we find that enduring image of the capacity for wonder in the human spirit, a wonder that stands silent in the face of the mysterious unknown. 

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

     When a new planet swims into his ken:

Or, like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

     He stared at the Pacific — and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise —

     Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

“Surmise,” that word of questioning wonder, is from Milton’s “Lycidas”, his heart-broken elegy for his friend Edward King, “for gentle Lycid’ drowned;” – but here it is “false surmise” (l.153) as the poet, after venting all his grief and raging against the gods, says:

  “Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor,

….

Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,

Through the dear might of him who walks the waves,

….

There entertain him all the saints above,

…

And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.

…

    Thus sang the uncouth swain  to th’ oaks and rills,

While the still morn went out with sandals gray;

…

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:

Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.”  (ll.165-194)

As the young Keats walked that night across Hampstead Heath he dreams of emulating Milton, of writing great epics, odes and elegies. In the very short span of years still left to him (he was but twenty-five when he died) he created immortal works whose music and imagination have been an inspiration to poets ever since.

The great (certainly among the greatest) American poet of the first half of the 20th Century, Wallace Stevens, was about the same age as Keats on his Hampstead Heath walk, when, at 20 years old in1899 and a student at Harvard, on a vacation in the country, he read Keats’ “Endymion”. It was a moment of revelation to him that changed the way he saw the world. The music of Keats’ poetry is the same music that we find in Stevens’ poems, as is the role that the imagination plays in the work of both poets, giving us, the readers, new ways of experiencing the world, what Stevens in a letter called “a refreshment of life.”  

Here are lines from two of Stevens’ most famous poems, both being explorations of the poet as maker, the creator of order in the face of the chaos of the world. In the first, that chaos is represented by the sea –

“The Idea of Order at Key West

For she was the maker of the song she sang,

The ever-hooded, tragic gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea 

That rose, or even colored by many waves:

If it was only the outer voice of sky

And cloud, of the sunken coral water- walled,

However clear, it would have been deep air,

…

And sound alone. …

 

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

…

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker.”   

 

And then this late poem where he sets forth, in six tercets, the role of poetry and the imagination in our lives. It has the sublime quality of a sung lyric, that mysterious sublimity found in a Bach motet that lifts words and meaning into the wordless realm of music – what George Herbert calls that “music beyond the stars heard”.

“Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one….

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.”

So, perhaps, in this month of Thanksgiving, we can say in gratitude in the words of another poet whose poems are full of Keatsian echoes,  Emily Dickinson –

“I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose- 

….

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise -“

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – October 2022

Remembering J. D. (Sandy) McClatchy and Revisiting The Memorial Poetry Corner in Stonington Free Library

“There is a solitude of space,” a line from an Emily Dickinson lyric that comes to mind as you climb – as writers, scholars, students and readers have done for over 120 years – those steep, rather twisty, narrow, marble stairs to the Gallery in the Library and walk across the sea-glass floor.  On a sunny afternoon the glass seems to catch and hold the blue green of the sea,  recalling the lyric’s second line, “A solitude of sea.” You can look down to the terrazzo floor below and the daily flow of library traffic.  Delightfully, somehow, you are both a part of that daily flow while still in “a solitude of space.”    

It is here, up among the acanthus leaves that top the Corinthian columns of scagliola marble, at the east end of the Gallery that houses the Library’s poetry and literature collection, that you come on the J.D.(Sandy) McClatchy Memorial Corner.  It was created in January of 2019 following Sandy’s death on April 10th, 2018.   Here you find a selection from his library of books that were chosen to be “a mirror of an extraordinary creative mind and serve as a lasting memorial to our distinguished neighbor and friend.” These books, and the mind and life of which they speak, are a significant part of the literary heritage of this community, a living memorial that connects the Library and The James Merrill House and the Writers-in-Residence Program that Sandy established.  That Sandy’s typewriter sits on the table to the right of the shelves, with its open invitation to write a poem, deepens that connection even more. A gift of Robert Palm, the typewriter appears on the cover of Sandy’s 2016 commonplace book Sweet Theft, the last book that he published. 

The citation beneath the central photograph reads “J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy, August 12th 1945 – April 10th 2018. Distinguished man of letters, scholar, poet, critic, editor, translator, anthologist, librettist.” It is impossible in the space allowed to these Notes to do full justice to this towering figure in the world of poetry, academia, and music. So here are a few lines to add some dimension to the words of that citation and the face that looks out at us from the two photographs.   

Sandy was the librettist for sixteen operas. The framed tributes that hang on either side of his photograph are from Ned Rorem, for whose opera, Our Town, Sandy wrote the libretto.  These, along with another framed musical score, speak to the way that music was the architectural underpinning of his writing. Both Langdon Hammer, in his 2019 memorial tribute to Sandy in The Yale Review,  and Donald Hall in an interview in The Paris Review in 2002, describe the profound influence that music had on his life from the very young age when his grandmother took him out of school every Friday afternoon to attend performances by the Philadelphia Opera. In the essay in his 1998 collection Twenty Questions, about his friend James Merrill (he was Merrill’s editor along with Stephen Yenser and then his literary executor), he writes this about Merrill’s relationship with opera : “Opera – its ecstasies and deceptions, its transcendent fires and icy grandeurs – is above all a stylized dramatization of our inner lives, our forbidden desires and repressed fears.” (p. 157). Surely Sandy is also writing about himself.  

“Distinguished Man of Letters” encompasses such a broad sweep of achievement – Editor of The Yale Review for over thirty years, President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of many fellowships, among them the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. At Yale he was famous as a teacher and mentor of young writers. He published six collections of poetry, his fifth, Hazmat, being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and four works of literary criticism. The twentieth-century American poet, Anthony Hecht, whose poetry McClatchy admired, along with that of W.H. Auden, above all others, said this: “There are very few poets writing today who, poem by poem, move me from admiration to admiration, and always with renewed and novel delight. There is no poet whose intelligence, dexterity, wit or depth of thoughtfulness and feeling is greater or more telling than J.D. McClatchy’s.” 

In his beautiful and powerful poem “At A Reading – Anthony Hecht’s”, J.D. McClatchy and Anthony Hecht join hands in their understanding of the transformative power of words. 

“Between us at the reading—

……..

That couple conspicuous in the front row

You must have thought the worst audience:

He talked all the while you read, she hung

On his every word, not one of yours.

…………

It was then I realized that she was deaf

And the bearded boy, a line behind you,

Translating the poem for her into silence,

Helping it out of its disguise of words,

……..                 those words she saw

And seeing heard — or not heard but let sink in,

Into a darkness past anyone’s telling,

There between us.”  (Plundered Hearts p. 49)

The last two stanzas spring directly from the poem that Hecht is reading, “The Transparent Man”, a dramatic monologue by a young woman dying of leukemia, described in Jonathan Post’s seminal study of Hecht’s poetry, The Thickness of Particulars, as an “ascent to the sublime.” In the way that only poetry can achieve, the closing words weave together all the threads of both his and Hecht’s poem, creating a circle of connection that catches at your breath:  

“The words, as they came—

Came from you, from the woman, from the voice 

In the trees—were his then, the poem come

From someone else’s lips, as it can.” 

Above all else, Sandy believed that the poet is “a maker who works in words.” In his deeply affectionate elegy for W. H. Auden, “Auden’s OED,” Sandy McClatchy wove together his own and Auden’s credo about the power and value of words – “He knew what he called the truth always lies/ in the words.”   This OED, which Sandy inherited,  “in the old oxblood edition, the color/ of the mother tongue, all foxed and forked,/ Its threadbare edges dented,” is now in the Beinecke Library at Yale. 

Langdon Hammer said that Sandy felt that Stonington was his “Grover’s Corners,” the little village community where the action of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town takes place. In his long lyric poem, “My Plot”, he describes  his visit to the Stonington Cemetery and its Poets’ Corner to choose the grave site for himself and his husband, Chip Kidd. The poem, with its plot about a grave plot, was published in the January 15th, 2019 issue of The New Yorker:

“It seemed a good a time as any to buy

     A cemetery plot, the price is bound 

     To spike, the local real estate being what it is

      For both the living and the dead,”

This poem of fourteen stanzas of varied line lengths has an elegant abcdbca rhyme scheme that gives a musical shape and movement to the narrative.  In its slightly frenetic, Chaucerian description of “the village Costume Ball,” we have “in fact life itself —fizzy and full/Of contrivances to keep itself afloat”.   But then there is a change of key from the “fizzy and full/Of contrivances” to the quiet lyric acceptance of the inevitable last act of the story:

“But the view from our private boxes will make nothing plain.

       Where are the shepherds, the king’s lost daughter, the prince?                   

                            Now, nothing.

       “Bravo!” is a boy calling his dog to come.

We’ll never know how the story ends, since

The applause will only be the autumn rain.”

Somehow, again in the mysterious way that poetry has, that view from those “private boxes” – (boxes at the theater?  coffins? both?) –  takes us back to Emily Dickinson and the lyric with which we climbed those marble stairs: 

  “A solitude of death,…

  That polar privacy

  A soul admitted to itself—

    Finite infinity.”

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – September 2022

In Memoriam James Longenbach September 17th, 1959 – July 29th, 2022.

As the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, and a highly regarded figure in the field of literary criticism and poetry, there are many, and will be many more, tributes to Jim Longenbach, online and in academic journals from friends, scholars, fellow poets, and writers. What follows here is a tribute from one person in his Stonington Library community as we mourn the loss of a friend who brought richness to our lives in the wealth of his poetry and critical works and in his deep love of this place and the people in it. Many of you will remember with delight the readings that he and his wife, the author Joanna Scott, gave at the Library and the Merrill House, events that can still be seen on YouTube. Apart from his family, his lasting gift is eight books of prose and six collections of poetry, with another book of poems to be published next year.

Here are just a few of his lines that remain with this reader.

From the final lyric in his 2010 collection The Iron Key, titled “On Beauty”:

“Our capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful

Survives, unlike beauty,

Amid the harshest distractions.”  

From Forever – the book of lyrics published in 2021 in which he confronts his own mortality – this is from the six part lyric sequence “In The Village”:

              1.

“Shortly before I died,

Or possibly after,

I moved to a small village by the sea.

You’ll recognize it, …..

The rocky sliver of land, the little houses where the fishermen once lived—

How did I know we’d be happy there,

Happier than ever before?

                 6.

The sky fills with stars.   The sun

Climbs every morning

Over Watch Hill, dropping behind the harbor at dusk.

Water Street runs past

Church and Wall,

Harmony and School,

Until it crosses Omega, by the sea.”

In a conversation in 2017 with Mitzi Rapkin of First Draft Podcast, Jim said this of the process of writing poetry: “It’s not magic, but it feels magical.”

He describes this act of creation in his 2018 collection, Earthling, in the lyric sequence “Climate of Reason”: 

“Essentially, an artist’s work consists of giving life

To the dead matter of the material world.

That matter is the artist’s medium.

….

Moments when the artist in each of us created

The material world by finding the unfamiliar in the familiar,

By finding what we’d never known to be ourselves

In what seemed dead—

Such moments are forgotten by most people.

Or else they’re guarded in a secret place of memory,

Too much like visitations of the gods

To be mixed with everyday thinking.” 

This is an idea that he repeats often in his essays.  In his 2020 book The Lyric Now he writes “whatever else it may be, a poem is a work of art made of words.” (p.x), while in the opening paragraph of the Preface we find this – “The title of this book may be read in two ways, but I mean the word now to function primarily as a noun, modified by an adjective – the lyric now: whether written in 1920 or 2020, a poem creates the moment as  we enter it. The poem is happening now.”

Here we are again in the village, this time on “School Street” – in the poignancy of the lyric now.

“The person I once was found himself

In the present, which was the only place he could be.

….

The stars were still shining,

Though the brilliance of the sun obscured them so completely

You’d believe they’d disappeared.

….

The things we made 

Ourselves seemed permanent,

But like the stars invisible, even the things

We made from words.   Downstairs

The kitchen, the living room, everything in place:

…

But upstairs a ladder where each evening, one by one,

We’d climb into the crow’s nest 

To rehearse the stars.”

(Forever p. 57)

It seems fitting to close this tribute with these words of René Descartes that are the epigraph to Jim’s 1998 collection Fleet River:

“Wonder is the first of all the passions.  It has no opposite.”   

Somehow, miraculously, James Longenbach never lost that gift of wonder, and shared it with all of us.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – August 2022

From Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

“And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed:”

It is a comfort when our lease on so much, our very planet, seems to have “all too short a date” and indeed “too hot the eye of heaven shines”, to read a great epic, to find a place where the mind can soar.   I found such a place one recent hot day when I pulled from the shelf  Dante’s Divine Comedy in Dorothy Sayers’ translation.  Since 1314 (the publication date as near as is known) Dante’s “il dolce stil nuovo – sweet new style”, his terza rima, the poetic form that he invented, has been a voice speaking for us all, the poem that he himself referred to in the Paradiso (XXIII l. 62) as a ‘poema sacro’ – sacred poem – although it wasn’t until the 16th Century that it came to be called The Divine Comedy.

Here are the opening lines – the dark wood, the ‘selva oscura’ that is so familiar.

“Nel mezzo de cammin de nostra vita

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.

Ché la diritta via era smarrìta.”

(Inferno: Canto 1: ll:1-3)

And Dorothy Sayers translation:

“Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.” 

Then in line 8, “Yet there I gained such good,” Dante offers the note of hope and promise that is the signature feature of his Comedy as he sets out on his great journey, supported by the wise and gentle Virgil, spurred on by his vision of Beatrice, his beloved.

This is how Ruskin describes Dante in one of his many writings:

“Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness….  Hence, I suppose that the powers of the imagination may always be tested by accompanying tenderness of emotion: and thus (as Byron said,) there is no tenderness like Dante’s.” 

(Comments of John Ruskin on the Divina Commedia: compiled by George P. Huntington, pub. Houghton, Mifflin 1903 p.9)

And, as an example of this tenderness, here is the famous passage in The Inferno, Canto V,  when Francesca da Rimini tells Dante how she and her brother-in-law Paolo fell in love – over a book!

“One day,

For our delight we read of Lancelot,

How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no

Suspicion near us. Oft-times by that reading

Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue

Fled from our alter’d cheek. But at one point

Alone we fell. When of that smile we read,

The wished smile so raptorously kiss’d

By one so deep in love, then he, who ne’er

From me shall separate, at once my lips

All trembling kiss’d. The book and writer both

Were love’s purveyors. In its leaves that day

We read no more.”

(Tr. Henry F. Cary, 1909, Harvard Classics)

And then, Dante, overcome with emotion – 

“And all the while one spirit uttered this,

  The other one did weep so, that, for pity,

  I swooned away as if I had been dying,

And fell, even as a dead body falls.” (ll. 139-142 Tr. Robert Hollander.)

And here is the Italian –

“Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto

di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;

soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto. 

Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse

quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;

ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso

esser basciato da cotanto amante,

questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.

Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:

quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”.  ll.128-142

Even if, like me, one cannot read Italian, it seems to bring the poem alive to have a ‘facing page’ translation.   Having that makes it possible to experience the effect of the terza rima, with its energy and forward movement, and which, as it says in the Very Short Introduction to Dante, “makes the poem easier to memorize and binds its texture together” (p.61) and “is a celebration of the underlying order of the universe.” (p.63).  It is, too, a reflection of the tenderness of which Ruskin speaks that Dante insisted in breaking with tradition and writing in the Italian vernacular rather than Latin, so that everyone could read it.  As Dorothy Sayers says in her introduction, “he wrote for the “common reader”.” (p.49).

For ‘the common reader’ there are many guides and commentaries – several in the Library collection -even though, as is often pointed out, one can gain much joy from just reading the poem, a voice for our times, for all times.  It was as an exile for much of his life, that Dante, with deep empathy, wrote in the Paradiso, Canto XVII ll: 58-60

“Thou shalt make trial of how salt doth taste another man’s bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount another man’s stairs.”

(Tr. The Rev. Philip Wicksteed, Temple Classics 1899.)

(“Tu proverai sì come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle

Lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.”)

The American theologian Frederick Buechner, in an essay titled “The Mystery of Words”, wrote “Here then is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: that not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. … They move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human.”

From A Room Called To Remember.

It is this very power of words that is described in the opening to the VSI  to Dante, in a discussion of Dante’s encounter with Ulysses.  

“Fatti non foste a viver come bruti

ma per seguir virtue e conoscenza.”

(You were not made to live like brute beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.) Inferno XXVI ll: 119-20.    In If This Be A Man Primo Levi recounts that it was these lines that he recalled at one of his worst moments in Auschwitz.”  p.1.

Finally, talking of “great distances of time and space,” here are some lines from a poem that Boccaccio, the 14th Century author of The Decameron, wrote to his friend the poet, Petrarch, he who brought us the sonnet, on sending him a copy of Dante:

“Sure ornament of Italy, whose temples

The Roman leaders crowned, receive this work

Which pleases learned men, amazes common,

Its like composed in no prior age.

The verses of an exiled, uncrowned poet,

Resounding merely in his native tongue –

His studies drew him to the snowy heights,

Through nature’s secret spots and hiding places

And through the ways of heaven and earth and sea,

Hence virtue gave him the illustrious name

Of poet, theologian and philosopher.”

(Tr. by David Thompson, Everyman’s Pocket Poets: Books and Libraries)

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – July 2022

Book Notes are taking a brief summer break, but meanwhile, of course, the life of the Library continues in all its richness. As you know from the June Book Notes, on Sunday, July 10th, Professor Stuart Vyse will discuss his new book The Uses of Delusion: Why It’s Not Always Rational To Be Rational and on Sunday, August 14th, Professor Jonathan Post, will talk about the life and work of the Twentieth Century American poet, Elizabeth Bishop. His book, Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction, was published in June by Oxford University Press. In anticipation of this event and to provide background, here is the full text of the conversation I had with Jonathan Post back in February to celebrate Bishop’s birthday month, (due to space limitations only an edited version appeared at the time).

BDK: ‘How did you happen to land on this topic’?
JP: Interesting question. Behind every book, there is a little backstory, and this one says something about Bishop’s status as a poet. I had enjoyed writing the Very Short Introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems in the same series. I like the compressed format and the idea of writing for a more general audience, plus the pricing. At $11.95 apiece, the books are a steal. When Oxford asked if I’d like to propose another title, I mentioned Elizabeth Bishop, which initially drew puzzlement from the editors. But her name had been floated and Bishop was becoming a ‘set text’ in the English curriculum, it seems. For this and more general reasons having to do with her increasing visibility, I was invited to put together a proposal, which was eventually approved.

BDK: Much of your previous work, including the Shakespeare book, has been in the earlier fields of the English Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century. Was it difficult to set your sights in a more modern direction?
JP: Not really. For the last two decades, my teaching and scholarly life had been fairly evenly divided between, say, teaching Donne and the poets surrounding him, and Eliot, and those around and stemming from him. (Shakespeare and Milton remained constants throughout my teaching years.) There are also strong connections between the two historical periods, and Bishop participated in some of these. George Herbert was one of her favorite poets, as you know. In this, Bishop, like Merrill, participated in a long, literary continuum, thank heavens; so while she is wonderfully strange and unique, she is, like the best lyric poets, also available on her own immediate terms to general readers willing to think about these matters.

BDK: How did you go about writing your book?
JP: The crucial idea belonged to my wife, Susan, who also provided a lovely map for the book, based on Bishop’s travels and some of the poems associated with specific locales. Almost all of my writing had been shaped by my experience as a teacher, and here I was in Stonington, in retirement, without a class. She suggested why not set up a reading group in Stonington, which I did, and it worked wonders. The beauty of the idea had to do also with the breadth of readership in the group since that was central to the introductory nature of the project. First-time readers of Bishop were in the same room, talking about her poems, with some very experienced, professional readers. The Borough has long been a haven for bookish and boat people alike as well as artists. The climate was a hospitable one. Bishop also possesses a few advantages helpful to the continued vitality of any reading group. She wrote very few poems; she saw about 90 in all into print. This meant that selecting the bi-weekly readings was a fairly simple matter for both the discussion leader and the group. No excuse for not being prepared. I was especially interested in the issues voiced by new readers of her poetry. The writing of the book then proceeded apace, with the usual pitfalls and problems and the occasional Eureka.

BDK: Can you say more about the surprises?
JP: Yes, leaving aside for another occasion those that occurred in the seminar. One was initially something of a pitfall. Because of Covid, access to the Vassar College Special Collections, where Bishop’s archive is located, became physically off-bounds at the time when I wanted to visit it. But since much of Bishop is in print, including much unpublished and unfinished verse, this proved to be less of a hindrance than it might have been. A happier surprise was running across several rarely seen photos of Bishop taken by Rollie McKenna. As you know, she lived in Stonington in the latter part of her life. One photo I found on the wall of a friend’s house in the Borough, of Bishop, head tilted upwards, exhaling smoke from a cigarette as if she were the Oracle of Delphi herself. I came across a second in a book of McKenna’s photos that had been overlooked by Bishop scholars, in part, I suspect, because the original photo was in the Stonington Historical Society (!) and not in the McKenna archive in Arizona, much of which is available on-line. As a photographer of literary stars—her photos of Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot are often reprinted– McKenna met Bishop in Brazil in the early 1950s, where she took a number of shots now familiar to Bishop scholars. But not this particular one, which shows an attractive, relaxed, and decidedly cheerful Bishop, looking very much at home in Brazil with her partner Lota de Macheda Soares. Along with the seminar, there was now, for me, a glimmer of Bishop’s visual presence around the village, one to accompany her longtime friendship with Merrill, recorded in his letters and his elegiac “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia.” The greatest surprise for an author is always the sense of discovery, the sense of seeing something as if for the first time, which only happens in the act of writing. In my case, it included, as Jim Longenbach has said, remembering a teacher of his, the recognition that “our experience of a poem is always greater, more diverse / Than our imperfect ability to describe it.” That recognition is what makes writing literary criticism a high wire act—trying to get the right balance in the hope that others too might be led to share in the process of discovery.

BDK: Are there things that make your book unique?
JP: Whatever interests individual chapters might hold—on love, on looking, on her late travel poems, for instance– I would want to single out the book’s introductory nature. At this late stage in Bishop studies, we’re at a point not of market saturation but of increased scholarly specialization, something that often follows the discovery or recovery of an author. There are
two societies named after her and now a new scholarly journal, three or four biographies, and more critical books than you can shake a fist at. But for all these good works, it’s hard to get both a sense of the general outline of her great gifts as a poet and also a detailed understanding of the poems themselves, which is why we want to read about her in the first place. My book seeks to address this lack.

BDK: On behalf of all our Book Note readers, I do thank Professor Post for taking the time to share these thoughts about the way this book came into being. One of the many remarks that stand out for me is in the question about surprises. “The greatest surprise for an author is the sense of discovery, the sense of seeing something for the first time” and then he goes on to say “the hope is that others too might be led to share in the process of discovery.”

This “general reader” can say that, yes, Jonathan Post’s book does share a sense of discovery, an entirely new and fresh insight into the life and work of this beloved poet. As in his book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, compression goes hand in hand with deep scholarship, yet written in such a way as to appeal to the general reader. Throughout the book Professor Post connects Bishop’s life to her art, with the poetry, not the biography, remaining paramount. He gives close readings of the poems that, like all her readers, I will return to again and again, promising as they do”the sense of seeing something for the first time.” Elizabeth Bishop, one of the great American poets of the second half of the Twentieth Century who, as we learn from this conversation, has an enduring connection to this community.

Belinda’s Book Notes – June 2022

Midsummer, the Summer Solstice, June 24th or thereabouts, that time when the world is seen “mysteriously anew.”  Where better to experience that mystery than in those woods outside Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when “the soft moonlight,” as Isaac Asimov says in his Guide to Shakespeare, “will make things seem not quite as they are.” (p.23)

In Act V. Scene 1 we meet Theseus, the Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, his betrothed, just as they have heard the tale of the lovers lost in the woods all the moonlit night.

Hippolyta – “Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.

Theseus – More strange than true: I never may believe

These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name”

But for all the Duke’s rational eloquence and Athenian logic, so dismissive of the imagination, it is Hippolyta, in her brief but thoughtful response to her espoused lord, who understands the truth that lies at the heart of the irrational events that the lovers describe.

“But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images

And grows to something of great constancy; 

But, howsoever, strange and admirable.”

These few words of Hippolyta’s are, perhaps, the heart of the play. Hippolyta is the mortal mirror image of the fairy Puck, he who will ”put a girdle round about the earth/ In forty minutes” (Act II, sc.1).  They each, at once, in their own way, inhabit both worlds, the moonlit woods and the banqueting hall.

This scene came to my mind when I was reading Stuart Vyse’s informative and engaging new book, published this May by Oxford University Press, The Uses of Delusion:  Why It’s Not Always Rational to be Rational.  As one reviewer puts it, “With his usual crisp and delightful prose Vyse explores the tension … between our rational and irrational impulses”.  He has us walk in company with a whole pantheon of thinkers, writers and philosophers – beginning with William James and ending with Homer. In between we meet Camus, Pascal, Descartes and Aristotle among others, with fascinating stories woven throughout, including that of the discovery and translation of the text of Gilgamesh. In responding to Camus’ complaint about “ridiculous reason”, Professor Vyse looks at “the ridiculous bits of unreason that are … central to our humanity”. His concluding words tell it all – “One of the goals of this book has been to remind us that we all are complicated people.  We are a mixture of reason and magical thinking, intelligence and emotion.” (p.170)

This, in my mind, connects perfectly with our other new book, Jonathan Post’s Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction, also published by Oxford University Press. (The US edition is available this month.)  An enthusiastic review in the Los Angeles Review of Books (May 2nd) points out that out of some 700 titles “Elizabeth Bishop is the only 20th Century poet to receive her own volume in the OUP V.S.I. series – she is in company with Chaucer, Dante, Homer, Ovid and Shakespeare. That’s some company Elizabeth is keeping.”  Indeed – but no surprise to those who have come to know and love her work.

The English publication of the book had already received strong praise in April on the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary Blog.  The reviewer notes the “vast knowledge of the poetic tradition through the centuries” that marks the study and yet, with Professor Post, ‘one feels in the company of a master’ who makes the act of reading a poem seem easy.  

The connection to Stuart Vyse’s book might seem unlikely perhaps, but then my Notes this month are all about the unlikely likely, the rational irrational that is life.   In his discussion of surrealism in a chapter on “Poetry and Painting,” Jonathan Post describes Bishop’s poetry as “characterized by a fascination with the bizarre, the incongruous and the irrational, including the subconscious and dreams.” (p.72). One of his many close readings is of “The Filling Station”, an example, he writes, of “thought in process,” and which concludes with the phrase “Somebody loves us all.”  The final line, he notes, “seems so simple and yet it is among her most mysterious in a stanza that is among her most enchanting, literally.” After listing a number of readings of this last line, he notes, “I think it is possible to read this gesture rhetorically; that is, on its own terms, as an evocation of hope by someone momentarily ‘filled’ by what she has just seen.   Bishop’s poems often end in an open space, leaving us not so much reaching irritably after facts, as simply recognizing, as in ‘The Moose,’ that ‘Life is like that.’” (pp. 19-20).  The “perceptive mastery” (Bishop Blog Review) of his discussion of “Brazil January 1, 1502” could just as equally apply to “The Filling Station” and so very many of her poems – poems that reveal “a world long familiar to the reader but now seen mysteriously anew, as only the closely woven fabric of her marvelous art can do.”   

But back to The Uses of Delusion in which the famous 19th Century philosopher, William James, figures large.  His major writings cover the spectrum of the rational and irrational. On one side is his transformative treatise Pragmatism and, on the other, his transcendent Varieties of Religious Experience – its lucid prose still widely read by those seeking to explain life beyond the purely pragmatic. William James, a brilliant and rational mind, was driven to distraction by his equally famous younger brother, Henry,  by his convoluted sentences with their many subordinate clauses. In his writing Henry James echoes Emily Dickinson’s “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” (#1129). As one critic wrote “he wants you to see, to visualize, the inner life of his characters – all the action is inside…” novels that are “existential mysteries, stories you understand piece-meal, along with characters (quite often) thinking their way through.”   As Elizabeth Bishop said of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poetry “not a thought but a mind thinking.” James’s novels recall Bishop’s poems that, again, as Jonathan Post says, “often end in an open space … simply recognizing “Life is like that.”   Portrait of a Lady is the one that most immediately comes to mind as ending “in an open space”, along with his last major novels, especially The Ambassadors.  Many of his short stories are disturbing, frightening even, in their evocation of the unexplained presence. Virginia Woolf wrote in the Times Literary Supplement (December 22nd, 1921) that “His ghosts have their origin within us – wherever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange.”  She continues “James’s ghosts remain always a little worldly – we cannot feel afraid.   What does it matter then if we do pick up The Turn of Screw an hour or so before bedtime? After an hour of exquisite entertainment we shall…. end with this fine music in our ears, and sleep the sounder.” – But, an hour later – “We are afraid of something, perhaps in ourselves. In short, we turn on the light.” Henry James, she writes, “has conquered.  That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark.” 

All the essays that Virginia Woolf wrote for the TLS are collected in The Common Reader – quirky, thought provoking and fun. Where they fall in the rational/irrational spectrum I will leave you to decide, but they are pretty safe as bed time reading.  Though for “fine music in (your) ears” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose” takes us, most beautifully, back to the dreaming, moonlit woods where we came in. “A moose has come out of/ the impenetrable wood …. Grand, otherworldly”. In his close reading of this great poem, which he suggests recalls the woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jonathan Post writes: “Whatever was simple earlier has become suddenly complex, the synoptic view growing to something of great constancy” (Hippolyta’s beautiful phrase again), ‘Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?.” “A long moment of magical transformation …” that “ends … typically, with a question that hovers over everything.” (p. 112)   Again, that gift of the “open space”.

Sweet delusions, perhaps, but so very useful – with “such fine music in our ears,” our imaginations filled with moonlight, need we, just for this moment, be afraid of the dark?   

Dates for your calendars – upcoming Sunday Evening Lectures at the Library.   On June 12th poet Sue Ellen Thompson will be returning to Stonington to speak about the American poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) “The Man Who Loved Women”.  Sue Ellen writes “The lecture will explore how his relationship with women influenced Gilbert’s work and will include close examination of several of his poems.”   Sue Ellen’s latest book of poems Sea Nettles was published in January of this year.

Sunday, July 10th Professor Stuart Vyse will be talking about The Uses of Delusion: Why It’s Not Always Rational To Be Rational. Sunday, August 14th Professor Jonathan F. S. Post will talk about his new book, Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – May 2022

The Enduring Life of the Written Word – Poetry of War and  Exile

Memory and Imagination:

Paul Fussell’s book The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975 and re-issued in 2000, still has startling relevance today.  As Fussell says, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress became “one of the inevitable clichés of memory.” (p.139) for those who fought in WW1.  One of these “clichés of memory” cited often by the soldiers, The Valley of the Shadow of Death,  echoing Psalm 23, seems as powerful today as we look at Ukraine as when Bunyan wrote it in 1678 – a tale of exile and pilgrimage as much for our secular world as the one of religious strife that Bunyan knew.   

“The pathway here was also exceeding narrow … for when he (Christian) sought in the dark to shun the ditch on the one hand, he was ready to tip over into the mire on the other; also when he sought to escape the mire, without great carefulness he would be ready to fall into the ditch…..  the pathway was here so dark, that oft-times when he lift up his foot to set forward, he knew not where, or upon what, he should set it…..  And .. flame and smoke would come out in such abundance, with sparks and hideous noises… yet still the flames would be reaching towards him; also he heard doleful voices, and rushing to and fro so that sometimes he thought he would be torn to pieces, or trodden down like mire in the streets.” (Fussell, p.141.)

And, commemorating another war, here are words from the Polish poet,  Adam Zagajewski (June 21,1945-March 21, 2021). You will remember his famous “poem of 9/11”, “Try To Praise The Mutilated World.”  He was a babe in arms when he traveled with his parents for two weeks in a cattle car to Gliwicie  in Germany, “a place of empty streets,” exiled, banished, from their beloved Lvov (now Lviv),in Ukraine, never to return.  He recalls, in his imagination, that dreadful journey:

“A Trip From Lvov To Silesia In 1945 

And again the rusty cars trundle slowly 

It set out on my father’s name day

and Mrs Kolmer brought us a fedora cake 

to the station, it didn’t last long

Behind us lay mass graves and homeless suffering

Now we are homeless

and there is only this moment 

and glistening spiderwebs and hawthorn bushes”

The state of being exiled, banished, a kind of death, so much a part of human history, was given voice and caught forever, in our web of memory, over two thousand years ago by Ovid in his Tristia, Poems of Exile.  In a terrifying storm at sea on the way to Tomis “on the left-hand shore of the Black Sea,” his place of banishment from his beloved Rome, Ovid wrote

“— with what fierce strength the waves/  pound at our beam!  Enough that Jove is angered at me – / show mercy you gods of the blue deep,/ rescue this weary spirit of mine from a fearful/ death – if one dead already may not die!” (Tristia, Bk 1:4 ll. 24-28).

But it is the exiled poet’s faith in the immortality of words and the power of memory that is echoed by the exiled Zagajewski.  “To Go To Lvov”is an elegy to his beloved city, his homeland that, as I write, is being destroyed by Russian bombs.  A free verse poem of 79 lines, translated by Rita Gorczyinski, it is a feat of poetic imagination, “that synthetic and magical power” that Coleridge describes as bringing “the whole soul of man into activity” (Bio. Lit. P.319 Oxford World Classics).  The opening lines have become a shared language of fellowship among exiled Ukrainians: 

“To go to Lvov. Which station

for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew

gleams on a suitcase,…..

  But the cathedral rises,

you remember, so straight, as straight

as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket

full of raspberries standing on the floor, and

my desire which wasn’t born yet,

only gardens and weeds and the amber

of Queen Anne cherries,” 

Adam Zagajewski’s named city, Lvov, is given life in his poetry, just as Shakespeare claims immortality for the unnamed person he is addressing in his Sonnet 55, (the sonnet that echoes the closing lines of Book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work deeply familiar to Shakespeare, confirming Ovid’s conviction!)

“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

‘Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room,

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

    So, till the judgment that yourself arise,

    You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.”

Memory and Witness:

“round he throws his baleful eyes,

That witnessed huge affliction and dismay,

  yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible.”  (Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. 1, ll. 56-57 & 63-64.)

Jonathan Post, in the recently published essay collection Evaluations of US Poetry Since 1950, quotes Elie Wiesel on the call to write in the manner “of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.” (Vol II, ch. 6).   The essay examines, in fine detail, Anthony Hecht’s legacy to us as a poet of witness to the atrocity of the Holocaust and the waste and horror of war, answering, through his extraordinary poetic gifts, Wiesel’s challenge.  In a close reading of Hecht’s sestina, “The Book Of Yolek,” Professor Post demonstrates how the poet, and thus the poem, is a true witness to the events it describes. – “remembering all those children taken in the war and sent to the camps,”(p.162-3). Here are the closing lines with their challenge to us all:

“Prepare to receive him in your home some day.

Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,

He will walk in as you are sitting down to a meal.”

This essay further illumines Hecht’s poetic stature with readings of the brutally stark “More Light! More Light!” a lyric based on an incident from Buchenwald the poet found in Eugen Kogon’s The Theory and Practice of Hell– and “Venetian Vespers”, the epic narrative poem that blends the immediacy of the speaker’s voice, sublime scenes of Venice and battle scenes – “Lights. I have chosen Venice for its light,/ Its lightness, buoyancy, its calm suspension/ In time and water, its strange quietness.” These interludes of beauty only serve to heighten the horror of a soldier’s death in battle, a young soldier “brought up in an orphanage” “who carried with him into combat/A book of etiquette by Emily Post.” The narrator says “He haunts me here, that seeker after law/In a lawless world…”  He haunts us too, haunts our imagination.  Shakespeare again – “’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity/ Shall you pace forth….”  

From Anthony Hecht, l turn to Walt Whitman, who also experienced the cruelty and waste of war first hand, this time the Civil War, and transmuted his experience as a wound dresser in the army hospitals into a poetry of witness, to honor and memorialize the dead.  “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” evokes, with his signature tenderness, the haunting images we see today in the cities, towns and villages of Ukraine:

“As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the 

first just lift the blanket;

Then to the second I step —

Then to the third —

Young man I think I know you — I think this face is the face

of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.”

Imagination and the enduring life of Poetry:

In his last poem, addressing his “Fancy,” his Imagination, the dying Whitman reverses the classic salute of Ave atque Vale, “Hail and Farewell,” to  “Good-bye— and hail! My Fancy.”  We are his “invisible listeners,” the inheritors of his vision, his “Fancy,” his readers in the future. (Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners pp. 55-56). 

But to return to Ovid in exile. He never lost faith in the immortality of his writings and his “invisible listeners.”  Here are lines addressed to his beloved daughter, Perilla, lines that return us, again(!) to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, lines that over 2000 years later, jump off the page:

“In brief, there’s nothing we own that isn’t mortal

      save talent, the spark of the mind.

Look at me — I’ve lost my home, the two of you, my country,

      they’ve stripped me of all they could take,

yet my talent remains my joy, my constant companion:

over this, Caesar could have no rights.  What if

some savage’s sword should cut short my existence?

       When I’m gone, my fame will endure,

I shall be read.”  (Tristia, Bk III, 7 ll. 43-51)

And, as we have seen, he has, indeed, been read, over the last two thousand and more years.  Henry Vaughan, the 17th Century English poet, translated verses from The Tristia.  Perhaps in Ovid he found an answering voice, feeling as he did that he was an exile in his own country because of the political and religious upheavals of the English Civil War, in which he had fought on the defeated Royalist side.   And perhaps it is in Vaughan, that we can find a small reversal of Satan’s baleful vision, a different kind of darkness? Here are the first two lines of the final stanza of “The Night,” his transcendent lyric about Nicodemus, the Pharisee, who, searching for truth, “came to Jesus by night” (John 3.2):

“There is in God, some say, /A deep but dazzling darkness,”

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – April 2022

A TAPESTRY OF POETRY, WITH THREADS BOTH DARK AND LIGHT

The first thread, a tribute to Ukraine in its agony.  It was in a passion of outrage that John Milton wrote his sonnet about the massacre of Protestants by Catholics in Piedmont on April 24th, 1655.  Oliver Cromwell was so moved by the power of Milton’s language that he made a diplomatic protest as well as raising a large sum to aid the survivors.  Here is the opening with its many unstoppable, run-on lines:

‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;

Even those who kept Thy truth so pure of old

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones

Forget not: in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled

Mother and infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To Heaven.”

But there are other, lighter, threads to weave for April, Poetry Month, the month of Chaucer, ever April’s poet, and the birthday of Shakespeare and George Herbert.

Threads of Love – Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98

Shakespeare sets out the whole springtime story in the first line – the beloved, the lover, the you and the I, and the absence.  April  has ‘put the spirit of youth in everything’ – even melancholy Saturn.   And, as only Shakespeare can, the beloved, ’you the pattern of all those’, is given a painterly brilliance by the focus on the flowers’ color – ‘the lily’s white’, ‘the deep vermilion in the rose’.  

‘From you have I been absent in the spring,

When proud-pied April (dressed in all his trim)

Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,

That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.

Yet, nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odor and in hue,

Could make me any summer’s story tell,

Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.

Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;

They were but sweet, but figures of delight

Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

   Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,

   As with your shadow, I with these did play’.

Threads of Flowers – this time Perdita’s speech from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, recalling the sad fate of Proserpina (Ovid tells the story in Bk. V of The Metamorphoses). 

‘O Proserpina,

For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall

From Dis’s wagon!   daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses…..

bold oxlips and

The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,”  (Act IV. sc.4)

Threads of hope, rebirth-

The 17th Century poet, George Herbert’s The Flower:

‘How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! Ev’n as the flowers in spring;

……

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart

Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone 

quite under ground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root

…

Dead to the world, keep house unknown.’

And, more soberly, his exquisite lyric ‘Virtue’: 

‘Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;

My music shows ye have your closes,

And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like seasoned timber never gives,

But though the whole world turn to coal,

Then chiefly lives.’

Moving forward to 1921, William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, the first line seems a sad ritornello for 2021, but the poem digs down to find a sturdy seasonal wakening 

‘By the road to the contagious hospital 

….…..muddy fields

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

…..   small trees 

With dead, brown leaves under them 

leafless vines —

They enter the new world naked,

cold ….All about them

the cold, familiar wind —

— Still, the profound change

has come upon them: rooted, they

grip down and begin to awaken.’

Threads of elegy, flowers that speak of grief

Milton’s Lycidas – for his beloved friend Edward King:

‘Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,/

The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

And every flower that sad embroidery wears;

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffadillies fill their cups with tears.” (ll. 142-150)

And repeated in a different key by Elizabeth Bishop in her pastoral elegy for Robert Lowell, North Haven

‘The islands haven’t shifted since last summer,

even if I like to pretend they have

— drifting in a dreamy sort of way, 

……

This month, our favorite one is full of flowers:

Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,

Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,

the Fragrant Bedstraw’s incandescent stars,

and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.’

Threads of Joy

In Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

What is all this juice and all this joy?

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden.

And Here Is Eden, from Milton, again:

‘Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.

……

while  universal Pan,

Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,

Led on the eternal Spring.’   (Paradise Lost ll 256 & 266-268)

Lines which lead us, through Ovid, again, to 

Threads of Spring in Painting

In Botticelli’s famous painting of Spring, La Primavera, with flowery Spring coming into being on the right, we see Venus, blind Cupid and the three Graces, together with Mercury, in a  tapestry of color and myth woven in paint. After more than 600 years, it remains, still, the ultimate image of Spring.  You can view the painting and its history by clicking on the link below:

http://www.italianrenaissance.org/a-closer-look-botticellis-primavera/

The final thread in this tapestry of words must be April’s beloved poet

‘When that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veine in swish licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

…… and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halve course yronne,

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”.  (Chaucer, The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales)

(Note for your calendar:  Professor Kenneth Bleeth will present a lecture on Chaucer at the Library on Sunday April 24th at 5 p.m.)

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – March 2022

MY HYMN TO SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

Reading Shakespeare, like listening to great music, every time is like the first time, or, maybe, is the first time. So it was when, on a recent chill and gloomy February afternoon, I pulled my copy of Shakespeare’s King Lear off the shelf to read again this ‘play for our times’ as it has come to be called in our Pandemic world. Expecting a play that I had been familiar with all my life, both on the page and on the stage, I found myself drawn in from the first moments and read on until I came to the last line – the last light gone from the winter sky so that I could barely see the printed page – quite speechless with – with what? Such overwhelming sadness, yes, but also with a new sense of wonder at that mystery of genius that leaves us wordless in the face of such tragedy. Lost as to what to think, I looked to my familiar friend in things Shakespeare, the Nineteenth Century essayist, William Hazlitt. Turning to the chapter on King Lear in his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, I found that I was in good company – Hazlitt too was struck speechless!  He begins –

‘We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it.   All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even what we ourselves conceive of it. ….  yet we must say something. — It is then the best of all Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart.’ He continues ‘The character of Lear itself is very finely conceived for the purpose. It is the only ground on which such a story could be built with the greatest truth and effect. It is his rash haste, his violent impetuosity, his blindness to everything but the dictates of his passions or affections that produces all his misfortunes… that enforces our pity for him’. 

That word ‘earnest’ rings perhaps a little strange in our 21st century ears, but at the time that Hazlitt wrote, its primary meaning was honesty or truth. It is a word that for me recalls Melville’s description of Lear – ‘Tormented into desperation, Lear, the frantic king, tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth’. (Hawthorne and His Mosses). Yes, Shakespeare ‘most in earnest’.

Indeed, along with our horror and dismay at the events that Lear’s actions unleash, our pity is ‘enforce(d)’ as is the love and pity for Lear, not just of Cordelia, but of Kent and Edgar, Gloucester and the faithful Fool, as he descends into madness – ‘…/You think I’ll weep;/ No, I’ll not weep:/ I have full cause of weeping; but this heart/ Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,/ Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad.’ (2, iv, 285). 

As we well know, it was Cordelia’s bleakly honest  ‘Nothing, my lord’ that struck the first note of the ‘Nothing will come of nothing’ (1.i.89)  that is the basso continuo, Hazlitt’s ‘ground’, of the play, the frightening ‘Nothing’ that appears throughout in every possible guise. As the Fool says to Lear in Act 1, ‘Thou art an 0 [a zero] without a figure’. But in all the heartbreaking moments of this journey into Nothing, perhaps one of the most searing is when Edgar, disguised as Tom O’Bedlam, cries ‘Edgar I nothing am’ (2.1v.21). Words that find an echo George Herbert’s ‘Affliction [iv], ‘Broken in pieces all asunder, ….A thing forgot’, words which, in turn,  are taken from Psalm 31, v.12 – ‘I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind:’. 

The second leitmotif that weaves together this perfect, harmonic, almost operatic, structure is that of eyes, of sight, of inner vision, of Kent’s plea ‘See better, Lear; and let me still remain/ The true blank of thine eye’ (1.i.160), of eyes plucked out, of the blinded Gloucester who responds to the old man’s offer to show him the way-‘I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;/ I stumbled when I saw: (4.i.19) of Lear, who, cast out and battered by ’the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,’ begins to see the

‘Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm 

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have taken

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just.’ (3.iv.l28)

Lear begins to understand his own humanity and to call on ours. Shakespeare offers a piercingly small, yet infinitely large, image of that humanity – twice. Once when Lear is bewailing Edgar’s naked state, ‘Is man no more than this?’ and begins to tear off his own clothes, ‘Off, off, you lendings! come, unbutton here.’(3.iv.110)  An un- buttoning that foreshadows the final moments of the drama and what is, perhaps ,the most poignant request ever made – ‘Pray you, undo this button: thank you sir.’ (5.iii.309) (my italics).

As Emily Dickinson writes in her lyric #446

‘This was a Poet –

It is That

Distills amazing sense

From Ordinary Meanings –

And Attar so immense

From the familiar species

That perished by the Door -‘

‘Distills amazing sense/ From Ordinary Meanings -’

A play for our times, but very much for Shakespeare’s own time, it was first performed on December 26th, 1606. Shakespeare began to work on Lear while the Plague raged through London, a time also of civil, political and religious unrest that swirled around King James’ wish for Union with Scotland and the failed, but potentially devastating, Gunpowder Plot of 1605. A conspiracy that sowed seeds of distrust and fear in every community throughout the land, pitted neighbor against neighbor, brought about punitive laws against Roman Catholics and rigorous censorship, especially in the theater. It was a time when Equivocation, a fairly new word in the language, took on the meaning of deliberately saying one thing while meaning another, the 17th Century version of our Fake News. The Jesuits intentionally traveled from Rome to tell the English priesthood that it was not a sin to equivocate, to lie, in this way. A corruption of truth that Sir Robert Coke, the Attorney General, found to be a greater threat to national stability than any conspiracy. (James Shapiro The Year of Lear – Shakespeare in 1606 )

If you have a mind, you can browse the Library stacks in company with Lear.  Upstairs in the Gallery there is a wealth of Shakespeare texts and studies.    Downstairs you will find Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel, A Thousand Acres, the recent Learwife by J.R. Thorp and, yes,  Moby Dick – Lear and his Fool reimagined as Ahab and Pip (cf. Charles Olson’s 1947 study, Call me Ishmael). 

But back to the play – in all previous tellings, as far back as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History in the 12th Century to Spenser’s Faerie Queen of 1596, and the earlier, 1590, stage play The History of King Leir, the story is given a happy ending.  Perhaps for Shakespeare, tragedy was more truthful to the time? A tragedy of such woe that, as, Harold Bloom says, it is ‘not to be borne’, woe that causes the faithful Kent (and us) to cry out at the end, ‘Break, heart; I prithee, break!’ (Act V, sc.3 l.313).  

Maybe the effect is not so much catharsis, Aristotle’s famous medical metaphor for purging of the emotions, but the experience of art which helps ‘us participate in a sense of shared humanity’? (Stanley Wells, VSI p.123). Maybe Shakespeare felt his times called for ‘the sane madness of vital truth’, for the need to be ‘in earnest’? Scholars have pondered, and continue to ponder, these questions. What we do know, what we all can know, is that we have, in the perpetual gift of his genius, ‘a play for our times’.

Finally, let us recall the all-but-naked Edgar, guised as Poor Tom in his ‘loop’d and window’d raggedness’, and Lear’s declaration to him – ’Thou art the thing itself’ (3.iv). Then let us take a bridging leap over 400 years to the 20th Century to this Wallace Stevens’ poem. It seems a good way to Exit this stage:              

 ‘Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself’ (my italics)

‘At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,

In the early March wind.

………………………….

That scrawny cry — it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away.   It was like

A new knowledge of reality.’

I had no idea that I would be wandering down this path when I curled up on the couch on that grey afternoon with my worn and yellowed copy of King Lear, but I hope you have found some interest while keeping me company.

Exeunt.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – February 2022

FEBRUARY BOOK NOTES.  CELEBRATING ELIZABETH BISHOP – IN CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN POST

Elizabeth Bishop is among the finest American lyric poets of the second half of the Twentieth Century.  She was adored (not too big a word) by her contemporaries Robert Lowell and James Merrill, her work was revered by John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney, also her contemporaries, and her genius was early recognized by fellow poets such as Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell.  

February is Bishop’s birthday month, her birthday recalled many years later in the small, bracketed head note to ‘The Bight,’ a poem that appeared in the Pulitzer prize winning, A Cold Spring (1955).  As is true for so many of her poems, ‘The Bight’ had its origins in something she actually saw.  Writing in 1948, from Key West to Robert Lowell, she observed, ‘the water looks like blue gas – the harbor is always a mess, here, junky little boats all piled up, some hung with sponges and always a few half sunk or splintered up from the most recent hurricane.  It reminds me a little of my desk”.   These words to Lowell were the seeds of ‘The Bight’, which opens with this beautifully flowing line –

‘At low tide like this how sheer the water is.’

and continues –

‘The color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.’

And further on, as she said, reminding her of her desk –

‘Some of the little white boats are still piled up

against each other…..

Like torn-open, unanswered letters.

The bight is littered with old correspondences.’  

But let us turn back to the beginning, to the second line, ‘White, crumbling ribs of marl’ that ‘protrude and glare’. The ancient world rises (or is dredged) up.   One of Earth’s basic materials, marl has been used, since time immemorial, as a fertilizer and as clay for bricks. And here, in our world of poetry, we find an echo of marl, albeit ‘burning’, in the ancient, the primeval, landscape of Paradise Lost.

Geography and water, along with travel, are key themes in much of Bishop’s poetry.  The word ‘Bight’ itself is many-layered, with its own geology, and, as always with Bishop, every word is layered with meaning. When she read this poem in public, courteous as ever towards her readers and audiences, she spelt out Bight to avoid confusion with ‘bite’. In the OED we find  ‘byhte’ is an Old English word that means a shallow or slightly receding bay, also, in its non-geographical definition, an elbow or curve. So when we read of ‘Pelicans’ who ‘crash/into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,/it seems to me, like pickaxes,/ rarely coming up with anything to show for it,/and going off with humorous elbowings.’, followed by ‘man-of-war birds’ who ‘soar/ on impalpable drafts/ and open their tails like scissors on the curves.’ (my italics) we have Bishop’s – and our – joy in the play of words, or, as one critic wrote, her ‘magical illumination of the ordinary.’   For this reader, too, ‘humorous’ illumines, in all its significance, in perfect poetical construction, the poem’s final word –‘cheerful’.

‘All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful’.

These last two lines became a mantra for Bishop in her, often, very difficult life. They appear on her gravestone (the last line at her request), and they can be seen today in Hope Cemetery in Worcester, Mass.  Worcester, where she was born, is the scene of her other famous ‘birthday’ poem, ‘In the Waiting Room’.

Ordinary, and yet, not, ‘The Bight’ is a landscape of ‘untidy activity’, surprising sounds, similes and ‘correspondences’ – this last a word that makes us loop back again, this time to the color of the water, ‘the gas flame turned as low as possible’, and, suddenly, we have the 19th Century French poet, Charles Baudelaire (one of her three favorite poets, the other two being George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins) – Baudelaire who saw the world in terms of ‘correspondences’, words in terms of music, colors in terms of scents and so on.

‘One can smell it [the water] turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock

already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.’

 

And to those, like myself, unfamiliar with marimba music, it is played on an instrument akin to a xylophone, hence those ‘perfectly off-beat claves’. 

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,

and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful. 

These final lines contain a lifetime of humor and meaning, dredging depths but always lightly.

 

      *  *  *  *

 

To help celebrate Bishop’s birthday month, I thought an appropriate way would be through a brief conversation with Jonathan Post, whose Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction is due out from Oxford in March (June in the USA).  As some of you know, Professor Post and his wife, Susan Gallick, are members of the Stonington community.  He taught initially at Yale and for many years after that at UCLA, where he is Distinguished Research Professor in English.

BDK: ‘How did you happen to land on this topic’?

JP:  Interesting question.  Behind every book, there is a little backstory, and this one says something about Bishop’s status as a poet.  I had enjoyed writing the Very Short Introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems in the same series. I like the compressed format and the idea of writing for a more general audience, plus the pricing.  At $11.95 apiece, the books are a steal.  When Oxford asked if I’d like to propose another title, I mentioned Elizabeth Bishop, which initially drew puzzlement from the editors. But her name had been floated and Bishop was becoming a ‘set text’ in the English curriculum, it seems.  For this and more general reasons having to do with her increasing visibility, I was invited to put together a proposal, which was eventually approved.

BDK:  Much of your previous work, including the Shakespeare book, has been in the earlier fields of the English Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century.  Was it difficult to set your sights in a more modern direction?

JP:  Not really.  For the last two decades, my teaching and scholarly life had been fairly evenly divided between, say, teaching Donne and the poets surrounding him, and Eliot, and those around and stemming from him. (Shakespeare and Milton remained constants throughout my teaching years.) There are also strong connections between the two historical periods, and Bishop participated in some of these.  George Herbert was one of her favorite poets, as you know.  In this, Bishop, like Merrill, participated in a long, literary continuum, thank heavens; so while she is wonderfully strange and unique, she is, like the best lyric poets, also available on her own immediate terms to general readers willing to think about these matters.  

BDK:  How did you go about writing your book?

JP:  The crucial idea belonged to my wife, Susan, who also provided a lovely map for the book, based on Bishop’s travels and some of the poems associated with specific locales.  

Almost all of my writing had been shaped by my experience as a teacher, and here I was in Stonington, in retirement, without a class.  She suggested why not set up a reading group in Stonington, which I did, and it worked wonders. The beauty of the idea had to do also with the breadth of readership in the group since that was central to the introductory nature of the project. First-time readers of Bishop were in the same room, talking about her poems, with some very experienced, professional readers.  The Borough has long been a haven for bookish and boat people alike as well as artists. The climate was a hospitable one.  Bishop also possesses a few advantages helpful to the continued vitality of any reading group.  She wrote very few poems; she saw about 90 in all into print.  This meant that selecting the bi-weekly readings was a fairly simple matter for both the discussion leader and the group.  No excuse for not being prepared.  I was especially interested in the issues voiced by new readers of her poetry.  The writing of the book then proceeded apace, with the usual pitfalls and problems and the occasional Eureka.

BDK:  Can you say more about the surprises?

JP:  Yes, leaving aside for another occasion those that occurred in the seminar.  One was initially something of a pitfall.  Because of Covid, access to the Vassar College Special Collections, where Bishop’s archive is located, became physically off-bounds at the time when I wanted to visit it. But since much of Bishop is in print, including much unpublished and unfinished verse, this proved to be less of a hindrance than it might have been. A happier surprise was running across several rarely seen photos of Bishop taken by Rollie McKenna.  As you know, she lived in Stonington in the latter part of her life. One photo I found on the wall of a friend’s house in the Borough:  of Bishop, head tilted upwards, exhaling smoke from a cigarette as if she were the Oracle of Delphi herself. I came across a second in a book of McKenna’s photos that had been overlooked by Bishop scholars, in part, I suspect, because the original photo was in the Stonington Historical Society (!) and not in the McKenna archive in Arizona, much of which is available on-line. As a photographer of literary stars—her photos of Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot are often reprinted– McKenna met Bishop in Brazil in the early 1950s, where she took a number of shots now familiar to Bishop scholars.  But not this particular one, which shows an attractive, relaxed, and decidedly cheerful Bishop, looking very much at home in Brazil with her partner Lota de Macheda Soares.  Along with the seminar, there was now, for me, a glimmer of Bishop’s visual presence around the village, one to accompany her longtime friendship with Merrill, recorded in his letters and his elegiac ‘Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia’. 

The greatest surprise for an author is always the sense of discovery, the sense of seeing something as if for the first time, which only happens in the act of writing.   In my case, it included, as Jim Longenbach has said, remembering a teacher of his, the recognition that ‘our experience of a poem is always greater, more diverse / Than our imperfect ability to describe it.’  That recognition is what makes writing literary criticism a high wire act—trying to get the right balance in the hope that others too might be led to share in the process of discovery.

BDK:  Are there things that make your book unique?

JP:   Whatever interests individual chapters might hold—on love, on looking, on her late travel poems, for instance– I would want to single out the book’s introductory nature.  At this late stage in Bishop studies, we’re at a point not of market saturation but of increased scholarly specialization, something that often follows the discovery or recovery of an author. There are two societies named after her and now a new scholarly journal, three or four biographies, and more critical books than you can shake a fist at.  But for all these good works, it’s hard to get both a sense of the general outline of her great gifts as a poet and also a detailed understanding of the poems themselves, which is why we want to read about her in the first place.  My book seeks to address this lack.  

BDK – this has been wonderfully illuminating and on behalf of all our Book Note readers, I do thank Professor Post for so graciously taking the time to share these thoughts about the way this book came into being.   One of the many remarks that stand out for me is in the question about surprises.  ‘The greatest surprise for an author is the sense of discovery, the sense of seeing something for the first time’ and then he goes on to say ‘the hope is that others too might be led to share in the process of discovery’.  

This ‘general reader’ has had the privilege of reading a pre-publication copy of the book and I can say that, yes, it does share a sense of discovery, an entirely new and fresh insight into the life and work of this beloved poet.  As in his book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, compression goes hand in hand with deep scholarship, yet written in such a way as to appeal to the general reader. Throughout the book Professor Post connects Bishop’s life to her art, with the poetry, not the biography, remaining paramount.  He gives close readings of the poems that I will return to again and again, promising as they do ‘the sense of seeing something for the first time’.  

We will all look forward to hearing more about Elizabeth Bishop, her poetry and her connection to this community on July 10th when Professor Post will be at the Library to deliver a talk in our Sunday Evening Lecture Series.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – January 2022

First Sight by Philip Larkin

Lambs that learn to walk in snow

When their bleating clouds the air

Meet a vast unwelcome, know

Nothing but a sunless glare.

Newly stumbling to and fro

All they find, outside the fold,

Is a wretched width of cold.

 

As they wait beside the ewe,

Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies

Hidden round them, waiting too,

Earth’s immeasurable surprise.

They could not grasp it if they knew,

What so soon will wake and grow

Utterly unlike the snow.

This little lyric by the twentieth-century English poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is perhaps one to give us courage as we look forward into the uncertain year before us, feeling perhaps very like the lambs, meeting ‘a vast unwelcome.’  But in the second stanza we have the promise – ‘….there lies/Hidden around them, waiting too,/ Earth’s immeasurable surprise’.    

Amid all the unknowns and uncertainties of the year ahead, Covid still with us, the threats of climate change, the challenges to our humanity posed by the abused of the world, we are blessed as a community to be able to look to our Library, a place, in the words of T.S. Eliot “at the still point of the turning world…. Where past and future are gathered.”  This, the beginning of a New Year, seems a perfect moment to review what is in store for us in Library programs, to celebrate the wealth of talent that this community is blessed with and take a moment to acknowledge the generosity of so many who are willing to share that talent with us. 

Here are just some of the offerings for 2022 in our Sunday Evening Lecture Series. 

Stonington resident, Professor Stuart Vyse, a behavioral scientist,  teacher and author of many books, has a gift for presenting complex subjects in a way that is at once scholarly and entertaining.  Many will remember his highly informative talk last year on his book Superstition: A Very Short Introduction, so we look forward to welcoming him back on March 13th when he will give a talk, in collaboration with the Stonington Historical Society, on the history of The Steamboat Hotel, a house on Gold Street in the Borough whose fascinating story he has been researching over the past few years.  Then in August, Professor Vyse, will discuss his latest book The Uses of Delusion: Why it’s not always Rational to be Rational which will be published by Oxford University Press in May. 

In April to celebrate Poetry Month, we have two poetry programs.   The first, on April 10th, will be a reading by former Merrill Fellow, poet and biographer, Peter Filkins from his new book of poems ‘Water/Music’. Pre-pandemic, Peter gave a talk to a packed audience at the La Grua Center on his biography of H. G. Adler, Holocaust survivor and renowned author. We are very grateful that he has agreed to return to Stonington to read at the Library. As it has been for many years, this April program is a collaboration with the Merrill House.

The second, on April 24th, will be Kenneth Bleeth presenting a program on Chaucer. Stonington neighbor, Chaucer scholar, and Professor Emeritus of Medieval Studies at Connecticut College, Professor Bleeth has devoted his life to the study of Chaucer, and it is difficult to imagine anyone more qualified to share with us the riches of The Canterbury Tales.

Here are the familiar, seasonally fitting, opening lines of The General Prologue :

‘When that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veine in swich licour

 Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

 Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth

 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

 The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne

 Have in the Ram his halve cours yronne,’

Chaucer’s take on Larkin’s “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” some 600 years earlier!

On May 8th we go from poetry to a close cousin, the visual arts. Our guide will be another friend and neighbor of the Library, the distinguished Professor of English Literature, author and art critic, Willard Spiegelman. The title of his talk is ‘How I Became An Art Critic By Looking’, a description of his time writing about art for the Wall Street Journal in the weekend ‘Leisure & Arts’ section. Many of his essays have been published in his book If You See Something, Say Something. As Harvard literature professor and painter Peter Sacks wrote, ‘he brings a literary scholar’s gift for close reading to what one might call “close looking”.

Which makes a perfect segue to our July 10th program on Elizabeth Bishop, once described by Robert Lowell as the poet ‘with the famous eye’. Stonington resident Jonathan Post, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, and noted author of many books and studies of both seventeenth and twentieth-century poets, will discuss his new book on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, his second in Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series. His study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems, published in 2017, was called ‘a little gem’ in the TLS, and in 2019 he generously gave a PowerPoint illustrated talk in the Library on the Sonnets.

The February Book Notes will be devoted to Elizabeth Bishop, it being her birthday month, and they will include a discussion with Professor Post that will highlight not only Elizabeth Bishop’s connection with Stonington in her lifetime, but the way this community became involved in the writing of the book, keeping this most loved poet a living presence among us today.  

(Just a reminder, most of the Library’s lectures and programs can be viewed on YouTube).   

As you see, we have much to look forward to, ‘What so soon will wake and grow/ Utterly unlike the snow.’ I wish you, with all my heart, a Happy, Hopeful and Healthy New Year. Thanks to you and your generous support, the Library will continue to serve the community and enrich our lives as it has always done.   

 

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – December 2021

BOOK NOTES FOR DECEMBER

Over the span of centuries, poets, writers, priests and historians, people of faith or of none, have found new ways of hearing one of the world’s oldest stories, finding, perhaps, a little hope, feeling again a wistful wonder, recalling the courage of sainthood along the way.

This from 7th Century Britain, a story retold by Rudyard Kipling, in a simple ballad meter and rhyme to fit the tale it tells.

Kipling gives the date AD (what would now be CE) 687. The little chapel still stands in the Sussex marshes, the cool salt wind still blowing off the sea, ‘the windows’ still ‘show(ing) the day’ on the bare white washed walls and worn flagstone floor. St. Wilfrid (CE 633-709) was a powerful figure in the early English church. He came to Britain to convert the Southern Saxons, and he figures often in The Venerable Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ (CE 731), especially in ch. 13 of Bk. 4. St. Wilfrid’s chaplain and biographer Eddi, Eddius Stephanus, was, perhaps, the saint in this story, with his courage and faithfulness in the face of mockery and the dark, wild night. The poem has been set to music several times and, perhaps most enchanting of all, Kipling gave a typed and signed copy to his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner. It is there in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to be seen today, or, of course, it can be viewed on Google, the small sheet of yellowed paper with its smudgy old type lending an immediacy to the old story.  

In contrast to Brother Eddi in his simple black robe and sandals, St. Wilfrid is portrayed in rich and colorful vestments as befitted his position in the Church, portraits that could have been done by Brother Anselm, the monk illuminator in Anthony Hecht’s poem ‘Illumination’. This poem in his ‘Florilegium’ series, features the crocus which, as the poem describes, is not native to the British Isles – ‘from sunlit Eden, the palmed and plotted banks/ Of sun-tanned Aden’.  The  source of saffron, the crocus also provided a paint used in illuminated manuscripts. This lovely lyric compacts so much into its short span. From its opening of ‘Ground lapis for the sky, scrolls of gold,’ the ‘Illumination’ unfolds before our eyes, 

‘But to the camel’s-hair tip of the finest brush

Of Brother Anselm, it is the light of dawn,

Gilding the hems, the sleeves, the fluted pleats

Of the antiphonal archangelic choirs

Singing their melismatic pax in terrum.

And then moves to 

‘The child lies cribbed below, in bestial dark,

Pale as the tiny tips of crocuses

That will find their way to the light through drifts of snow.’

From that promise of new life, we move to one of wistful questioning, a Nativity scene in the final stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s travel poem ‘Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ – the title taken from the cover of her old family bible – a poem that the poet John Ashbery calls ‘possibly her masterpiece’ (the New York Times, June 1, 1969).  The opening lines set the scene and the tone, ‘Thus should have been our travels:/ serious and engravable’.  Some sixty lines later, every word, as always with Bishop, demanding our full attention, we come to –

‘Everything only connected by “and” and “and”.

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges

of the pages and pollinates the finger tips.)

Open the heavy book.   Why couldn’t we have seen

this old Nativity while we were at it — the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, 

an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,

colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,

and, lulled within, a family with pets, 

— and looked and looked our infant sight away.’

This silent mystery of ‘ — the dark ajar’ found in the candlelit interiors, candles with their ‘unbreathing flame’, are reminiscent of the 17th Century French painter George de la Tour.  Here, in these paintings, as in Bishop’s words, we find a deep stillness, an unbroken silence.  The final line of the stanza, with its repeated ‘ands’ that so perfectly mirror the ‘ands’ of the first line, leaves us with the mystery of the wordless infant, who is the Word. 

S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ is another poem of questioning, of doubt.   Here is the speaker looking back on their journey, not quite able to grasp fully its significance.

‘All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.   I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; This Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.’

T.S. Eliot took the first five lines of this poem directly from the 1622 Christmas Sermon of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes. Churchman, scholar and linguist (he knew fifteen languages), Bishop Andrewes was one of the chief translators of the King James Bible.  For the 17th Century poet George Herbert, Lancelot Andrewes was teacher, mentor and friend, his ‘father in God’. Several of Herbert’s poems, notably ‘The Sacrifice’, are drawn from Andrewes’ sermons.   Elizabeth Bishop carried a copy of Herbert’s poems with her always. And it is here, with Herbert’s sonnet, the first part of his poem ‘Christmas’, that we find a change of perspective. It is not the enigma of the Nativity, seen from without, ‘— the dark ajar’ of Bishop, or Eliot’s ‘Then we came to a tavern …Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver;’ this is not ‘the word/Swaddled with darkness’, but a speaker entering into the inn to find within that ‘glorious, yet contracted light,/ Wrapt in night’s mantle,’

‘All after pleasures as I rid one day,

My horse and I, both tir’d, body and mind,

With full cry of affections, quite astray,

I took up in the next inn I could find.

There when I came, whom found I but my dear,

My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief

Of pleasures brought me to him, ready there 

To be all passengers’ most sweet relief?

O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,

Wrapt in night’s mantle, stole into a manger;

Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,

To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger;

Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have

A better lodging than a rack or grave.’

But to return to saints and the words of the old Magus, ‘this Birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,’ The late British poet Geoffrey Hill’s lyric ‘Christmas Trees’ is a tribute to, the German theologian and Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.   The title refers to the parachute flares lit by the Allies to guide their bombs, flares which would light up Bonhoeffer’s cell in the Flossenberg concentration camp as he awaited execution.

Bonhoeffer had always known that, by resisting Hitler, he would be called on to lay down his life, as had so many of his family and friends.  He was 39 when he was hung, stripped naked in the freezing air of the pre-dawn, on April 9th, 1945.  Just two weeks later, on April 23rd, the 97th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army arrived to liberate Flossenberg, the young Anthony Hecht among its ranks.  The horror that confronted him on that and the following days, haunted Hecht for much of his life and he became one of the foremost poets to bear witness to the Holocaust.  

Geoffrey Hill’s poem, its strict form of three, rhyming, tetrameter triplets, adding force to the words, just as Bonhoeffer’s writings, still today, ‘encourage(s) our borrowed days/by logic of his sacrifice.’

‘Against wild reasons of the state

His words are quiet but not too quiet.

We hear too late or not too late.’

Antiphonal to Geoffrey Hill’s stylized lyric, is the poem written by Bonhoeffer in the final days of his life, a cry from the heart of a young man facing his own gethsemane moment.

‘O God early in the morning I cry to you./I cannot do this alone.’

He describes himself as full of darkness, feeble of heart, lonely, restless and ends with a plea for his liberty:

‘Lord, whatever this day may bring,

Your name be praised.’

Reading this one has to hope that his God, the God of George Herbert’s Christmas sonnet – ‘To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger’ – was there with him at the end.

Finally, here is a medieval lyric, translated from the Latin by the English scholar and poet Helen Waddell.  It speaks, so quietly, to the words that link us to each other, to our history, our stories, over time, over space, especially at Christmas.

Hrabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz, (776-856)

‘To Eigilus On The Book He Has Written

No work of men’s hands but the weary years

      Besiege and take it, comes its evil day:

The written word alone flouts destiny,

      Revives the past and gives the lie to Death.

God’s finger made its furrows in the rock

      In letters, when he gave his folk the law.

And things that are, and have been, and may be,

      Their secret with the written word abides.’

  

Belinda’s Book Notes – November 2021

NOVEMBER BOOK NOTES – SHAKESPEARE, MELVILLE AND SEASONS OF THE MIND

‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

     This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

      To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.’

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 is one of the most familiar and most beautiful poems in all literature, and yet each close and careful reading always yields new treasures. The slow rhythm with its three pauses in the second line,  the melancholy music of those ‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’, all magic that never fades.  There is, too, a poignancy that is heightened by the turn from the speaker, ‘In me thou seest’ at the beginning of the second and third quatrains, to the addressee in the final couplet – a change startling in its power which no familiarity can lessen. 

Then we have Sonnet 97, another season of the mind when it is winter in the speaker’s heart, ‘old December’s bareness everywhere’ , even though ‘this time removed was summer’s time’. A love poem of heart wrenching absence.  We do, again, have mute birds and pale leaves,  but in a different guise, a different time perspective and the ‘I’ is present throughout.

‘How like a winter hath my absence been

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year?

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen?

What old December’s bareness everywhere?

And yet this time removed was summer’s time,

The teeming autumn big with rich increase,

Like widowed wombs after their lords’ decease:

Yet this abundant issue seemed to me

But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit,

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,

And thou away, the very birds are mute.

     Or if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer

     That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.’ 

These seasons of the mind, universal and perennial as they are, appear again some 250 years later in a seaport on the New England coast when we hear Ishmael declare ‘….whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; … I quietly take to the ship’.  (‘Moby Dick’ ch.1, p.1)   So begins the epic adventure of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick, the great White Whale, a voyage of discovery for the reader, excursions into the depths of the human soul as well as the history of whales and whaling and all the mystery of the ocean, that Ishmael, our companion and narrator, calls ‘the image of the ungraspable phantom of life’. As Melville said ‘I love all men who dive.  Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more;  ….  I’m talking of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began’. (Melville Log, p. 292).    Melville himself was one of these ‘thought-divers’. He records in April of 1849 that he bought  ‘a set of Bayle’s Dictionary… & on my return to New York intend to lay the great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro’ the summer, with (Plato’s) Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown (Sir Thomas Browne) in the other’. These books, along with Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, were his guides in his ‘deep dives’, he himself was ‘a great whale’.

When Melville was working on ‘Moby Dick’ he was already an established writer of sea stories, ‘Omoo’, ‘Typee’, ‘White Jacket.’   However, two things happened to him that changed the course of his life as an author as well as our literary history, events that gave us the epic prose poem that is ‘Moby Dick’ and the four novellas, stories of the human heart, of which ‘Bartleby The Scrivener’ and ’Billy Budd’ are perhaps the best known. 

The first event was in 1849 when he acquired an edition of Shakespeare with print large enough for him to read, his eyesight having been very poor since childhood. In a letter to his friend Evert Duyckinck, dated Boston, February 24th, he vividly describes his reaction. 

‘I have been passing my time very pleasantly here…. reading Shakespeare.  It is an edition in glorious great type, every letter whereof is a soldier, and the top of every “t” like a musket barrel.  Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made a close acquaintance with the divine William. ….  But until now, any copy that was come-atable to me, happened to be in a vile small print unendurable to my eyes, which are as tender as young sparrows.   But chancing to fall in with this glorious edition, I now exult over it, page after page -.’ (The Melville Log, edit. Jay Leda p. 288-9). 

The second occurred the following year, on August 5th, 1850 – his famous meeting with Nathaniel Hawthorne at a picnic on Monument Mountain in the Berkshires. It was reading Shakespeare and meeting Hawthorne that changed his vision as a writer. Shortly following this meeting he wrote in his essay ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’- ‘Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne….that so fixes and fascinates me’.  He goes on to compare this with the blackness ‘against which Shakespeare plays his grandest conceits,…..Through the  mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear and Iago, he craftily says …. the things that we feel to be so terrifically true, …. Lear… tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth.’  (Melville Log, p.389).   It was this changed vision that led him to scrap what he had written and to write the novel he wanted to write – the ‘Moby Dick’ that we have today.

Heroic epics are, by their nature, long and ‘Moby Dick’ is, we all know, no exception, but November is here and maybe ‘the leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near’ and it is hard to imagine a better voyage to take than on The Pequod along with Ishmael, Queequeg and all their ship mates and that modern Lear, Captain Ahab. It won’t be boring! And if you are able to take a day trip, you will find Ishmael’s gentle ghost wandering the cobbles of New Bedford.  A little further travel will take you to Melville’s farm, Arrowhead, in Pittsfield, Mass. where you can see the desk where he sat writing ‘Moby Dick’ and look out at the view of pastures and mountain that he looked at with those ‘eyes as tender as young sparrows’.  Miraculously, it is all quite unchanged. 

But with Melville, Shakespeare is always close by in the wings. In his seven-volume edition of Shakespeare’s plays, Melville scored and annotated many passages.  In Measure for Measure he scored part of Isabella’s plea to Angelo to spare the life of her brother Claudio, (II:2, cited in the Melville Log p.289.)  ‘…. Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt/ Split’st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,/ Than the soft myrtle: – But man, proud man!/ Dressed in a little brief authority, – most ignorant of what he’s most assured,/ His glassy essence, – like an angry ape,/ Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven,/As make the angels weep.’   Melville found an answering echo for his own vision in the play’s themes of justice and mercy especially of justice that can be cruel and the plea for mercy towards all, even those we do not like or agree with, themes underscored by the title, taken from ‘The Sermon on the Mount’, ‘judge that ye be not judged… with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again’. (Matthew 7:1-2).     

William Hazlitt wrote in his 1817 essay on Measure for Measure in his ‘Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays,’  ‘Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depressions and elevations.  The object of the pedantic moralist is to find out the bad in everything: his was to show that ‘there is some soul of goodness in things evil.’  (Henry V, Act 4, sc.1). Shakespeare showed the greatest knowledge of humanity with the greatest fellow-feeling for it’. 

In Shakespeare Herman Melville found his inspiration and his soul mate, the man he called ‘the divine William’.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – October 2021

REDISCOVERING JOHN KEATS’ ‘ODE TO AUTUMN’

In October – Fall – Autumn – of all poems that speak to this moment in the year, Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ has to be, after 200 years, still the truest, the best loved, the most familiar and yet always fresh and new.   

In a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds from Winchester in the south of England, dated September 22nd 1819, Keats writes –

‘How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air.  A temperate sharpness about it.   Really, without joking, chaste weather – Dian skies – I never liked stubble fields so much as now – Aye, better than the chilly green of the spring.  Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm–in the same way that some pictures look warm–   this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.’   

Although he was to die at the tragically young age of 25, in February of 1821, he is, assuredly, as he felt he would be, ‘among the immortals’ – and this was to be the last poem published in his lifetime.

‘To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? 

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, 

   Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: 

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 

   Steady thy laden head across a brook; 

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, 

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? 

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— 

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; 

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft 

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; 

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft 

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; 

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

One of the riches that Keats left us, along with his miraculous poems, are his letters.  I found them upstairs in the Library gallery in an 1899 edition, musty smelling, with pages that tear if not turned very gently, but words that remain as vibrant as the day they were written. Letters that are not only remarkable for their deep affection for his family and friends, for their spontaneity and lively curiosity,  but as Elizabeth Bishop said about Gerard Manley Hopkins, quoting the essayist and scholar Morris W. Croll, you see ‘not a thought, but a mind thinking’.   Letters that make excellent company for a  Fall or Winter afternoon!

Keats, of course, was steeped in Shakespeare and there is in ‘To Autumn’, an echo of Sonnet 97,  “The teeming autumn big with rich increase,/ Bearing the wanton burden of the prime”.  But this is, in Shakespeare, the lover in summertime so bereft of his beloved that in his heart it is autumn or winter – “How like a winter hath my absence been/ From thee,…’.  The lover’s poignant plaint is heightened by the tight constraints of the sonnet form.   Yet, perhaps the greater difference between the Shakespeare sonnet and the Keats ode is that there is no self present in the latter, none.   It is as though the poet is absorbed into the being that is Autumn.   In his sonnet, ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’, the closing lines are 

         ‘ – then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink’.

Nearer our own time, the late Philip Levine,(1928-2015), 2011 United States Poet Laureate and recipient of many awards, describes Keats in his book of essays ‘My Lost Poets’, as ‘a man who failed to find a distinction between himself and the creatures and beings of the world he inhabited; “if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel’. 

Elizabeth Bishop has already been mentioned here, but Keats’s sparrow does remind me of her poetry, as far removed as she is from the young Nineteenth Century romantic poet as it is possible to imagine.  Yet she wrote ‘what one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration’.  A statement you feel Keats would fully understand.    Here is her lyric ‘Sandpiper’ – the pretty little shore bird being  identified in the first stanza as ‘a student of Blake’ (‘seeing the world in a grain of sand’).  

‘His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something,

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

The millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray,

Mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.’ 

Or ‘The Moose’  where ‘the fog, shifting, salty, thin,/comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals/ form and slide and settle/ in the white hens’ feathers,/in gray glazed cabbages/ on the cabbage roses/ and lupins like apostles;

And finally the moose appears – in stanza 26 of 28 six line stanzas … watched in wonder by the passengers through the windows of the bus.

‘Why, why do we feel/ (we all feel) this sweet/ sensation of joy?’

To return to Keats, in his 1819 letter to his brother George he talks about transforming the world from what others called a “Vale of Tears” to what he called a “Vale of Soul-Making”.  This letter is a window, our window, on ‘a mind thinking’, on that ‘vale of soul-making’, that sees the sparrow and ‘takes part in its existence’  To fill out this portrait, we have George Keats’ words describing his beloved younger brother- “He was not merely the favorite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high- mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf that I never heard a word of disapproval from anyone, superior or equal, who had known him’.

But now let us give the last word to the young, dying, John Keats as he wrote what was to be his last letter, addressed to his close friend Charles Armitage Brown, dated Rome, November 30th 1820.

“I can scarcely bid you goodbye, even in a letter.  I always made an awkward bow.

God bless you!

John Keats”.

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – September 2021

HONORING THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF SEPTEMBER 11TH.  POETRY, WORDS WE CAN LIVE BY.  A DEFENSE OF CHAUCER, THE FATHER OF ENGLISH POETRY,  A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY PERSPECTIVE ON FAKE NEWS.

 

‘Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice 

Still persuade us to rejoice;

 

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

 

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise’.

 

These are the final stanzas of W.H. Auden’s elegy ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ written at another of history’s darkest moments, February 1939. ‘With the farming of a verse/Make a vineyard…./Teach the free man how to praise.’

It was Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s poem, with its echoes of Auden, that appeared in the September 24th special 9/11 edition of the New Yorker, ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’. He died on March 21st this year and as Clare Cavanagh, his translator and friend, writes in her tribute to him (The Times Literary Supplement, May 14th, 2021) ‘one obituary mistakenly claimed it was written in response to the terrorist attack it came to commemorate. It wasn’t, of course. The poem came from a deeply personal experience inflected by history.’  He had lived and witnessed the horrors of Twentieth Century Europe.  

‘Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June’s long days

And wild strawberries, drops of rosè wine,

The nettles that methodically overgrow

The abandoned homesteads of exiles.

 

Praise the mutilated world

And the grey feather the thrush lost

And the gentle light that strays and vanishes

And returns.’

As she points out, a variation on the phrase ‘Try to Praise’, ‘you must praise’, ‘you should praise’, ‘praise’ appears four times in twenty one lines. This is the poem that spoke to the suffering of that terrible day and all that has come after. Words to live by.

Professor Cavanagh goes on to bemoan ‘the stock phrases used to define Adam in Poland (his work was banned from official publication in 1975) … clichès that dispense with actually seeing the person or reading the poems …. The truisms, the lazy ways of thinking about the poet and his work.’  Poland is the land of so many great poets, including 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and 1980 Nobel Prize recipient Czeslaw Milosz and others.  

A recent target of such ‘lazy ways’ – perhaps also described as ‘fake news’ – is Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English Poetry (1341or 1343 (?) – 1400). In an effort to remove Chaucer from the curriculum of the UK University of Leicester in favor of feminist, multi-cultural and other studies, he has been described as ‘a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence.’  

Accusations manifestly untrue but, of course, ones that grab newspaper headlines. As we know, in our world turned upside down, medieval, classical and Shakespearean studies are under attack, but this one stands out in its mindless virulence. How poor our world would be without ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and ‘Troilus and Cressida’, without the translation of Boethius’ ‘Consolation of Philosophy’? How would any student understand the fundamentals of English poetry without Chaucer? Robert Frost said ‘I can HEAR Chaucer’s voice!’.   

As Peter Ackroyd describes so vividly in his biography of Chaucer, from his earliest youth his’ ‘ditties and glad songs’ ‘testify both to what has been called the natural music of (his) verse and to his mastery of poetic diction.  … He introduced the rime-royal stanza and the terza rima into English verse; he was the first to employ the French ballad form, but he changed the French octosyllabic measure into what has become characteristically English decasyllabic: …

He invented the native measure.” But, as Ackroyd goes on to say, the court of Richard II, in which Chaucer served, was the first since the Anglo-Saxons that made English the principal language and Chaucer chose to write in his own language, ‘to adopt his native music.’ His travels as a diplomat for the royal court afforded him an introduction to the work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. The profound influence that this had on his development as a poet created the priceless legacy we have today – what tales, what folk, and none so different from ourselves.

At the close of her poem ‘At The Fishhouses’,  Elizabeth Bishop likens knowledge to the cold water of the Atlantic (after a magical diversion involving a seal) 

‘Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal, ……..

 

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.’ (My italics)

 

Over continents, oceans and centuries we hear the voices of the writers, poets, essayists who have gone before us, making our knowledge ‘historical, flowing and flown’. We need them all!

  

In this 21st Century fever of fake news it is encouraging to recall that the 17th Century physician and theologian Sir Thomas Browne (a frequent guest in these columns) wrote his great work the ‘Pseudoxia Epidemica’ – the book of Vulgar or Common Errors – in direct response to an epidemic of fake news that deeply troubled the scholars and scientists of the day. As Coleridge said ‘he is a quiet and sublime Enthusiast with a strong tinge of the Fantast, the Humorist constantly mingling with and flashing across the Philosopher, as the darting colors in shot silk play upon the main dye.’ Irresistible.  Browne with his endlessly curious and enquiring mind, his gentle wit and tolerance, all expressed in the finest prose in the English language, has been, and remains, a source of inspiration and delight to writers, readers and thinkers down the ages, those, along with Coleridge, such as Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, (Browne was a key influence in his writing of ‘Moby Dick’), and Elizabeth Bishop. He was, in many ways, the embodiment of Chaucer’s ‘verray, parfit, gentil knight’.

But now I have a sense of a need to close where we came in, honoring 9/11. Not with praise but in stark recall of that brilliant blue day that turned to ashes. Here are a few lines from a poem by Wislawa Szymborska,(1923-2012) Adam Zagajewski’s compatriot and contemporary.  Like him she too was, in Robert Frost’s words ‘one acquainted with the night’.

In an article in the New York Times Magazine of December 1, 1996, on the occasion of her being awarded the Nobel Prize, Edward Hirsch wrote “Szymborska … investigates large unanswerable questions with terrific delicacy. She pits her dizzying sense of the world’s transient splendor against unbearable historical knowledge”. Unbearable. Historical. Knowledge.

 

                        Photograph From September 11

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

They jumped from the burning floors –

One, two, a few more,

higher, lower.

 

The photograph halted them in life,

and now keeps them

            above the earth toward the earth –

 

I can only do two things for them –

describe this flight,

and not add a last line’

 

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – August 2021

DOG DAYS AND DREAM DAYS WITH SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY

What better way to spend a hot August afternoon than to read ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’? – Shakespeare’s masterpiece of the most exquisite lyric poetry ever written, laughter and enchantment, merriment and magic, love and its jealousies, plays within plays, and confusion piled on confusion by the ever mischievous, but never malevolent, Puck. You can hear the laughter in his voice as he rains down judgement on us all – “Oh what fools these mortals be”. And how much in the moment – the forever moment – is Puck’s promise ‘to put a girdle round about the earth/ In forty minutes’. Has forty minutes ever been so witty and so tangible?

William Hazlitt, the 19th Century essayist and author of ‘Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays’, writes, ‘the reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by moonlight, the descriptions breathe sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers’.   And again, ‘His (Shakespeare’s) delicacy and sportive gaiety are infinite’. That sweetness – that intimate immediacy – is found in Oberon’s ‘I know….’.  Just in that ‘I know’ we are invited to know also, to know this place of enchantment; we are given the key to the dream:

‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows

Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;

And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:’ (Act II.i)

(A brief digression: ’Weed’ here means garment, and as you see, best fits the rhythm and meter of Oberon’s song. A romp through the O.E.D. reveals that Weed is an early, 9th century, Middle English word, probably derived from weave, and was widely used until it morphed, in the Nineteenth Century, to refer mostly to ‘widow’s weeds’ and all the heavy black sadness that the phrase connotes. A long step in language from that ‘enamelled skin’.that airy garment ‘wide enough to wrap a fairy in’.)

Moving to life in another key, all the heat of August (and another snake!) is in Andrew Marvell’s Mower poems, those mower songs of unrequited love in the dog days of summer. Here is Damon the Mower’s sad lament:

‘Oh what unusual heats are here,

Which thus our sunburned meadows sear!

The grasshopper its pipe gives o’er;

And hamstringed frogs can dance no more.

But in the brook the green frog wades;

And grasshoppers seek out the shades.

Only the snake, that kept within,

Now glitters in its second skin.’

But –

‘This heat the sun could never raise,

Nor Dog Star so inflame the days.

……..

Not July causeth these extremes,

But Juliana’s scorching beams.’

Yes, the poem is set in July, to match with the troublesome Juliana – but, since according to my almanac, the Dog Days begin in late July I think this fits the pattern without too much trouble?

Poor Damon! He gets in such a state that he ends up cutting his foot with his scythe.

In ‘The Mower to the Glowworms’ – a quite

lovely lyric of four rhyming quatrains in iambic tetrameter and, amazingly, one sentence – the glowworms ‘whose officious flame/to wandering mowers shows the way’

‘Your courteous lights in vain you waste,

Since Juliana here is come,

For she my mind has so displaced

That I shall never find my home’.

No Oberon or Puck here to make all things well. No midsummer night’s dream, just the heat of the dog days, and a broken heart.

Nearer our time and place, Twentieth Century New England, in Robert Frost’s sonnet ‘Mowing’ we still have fairies, and yet another snake, as we wander gently through a pastoral summer afternoon. We also have, in this dreamy moment of summer, something new. A sonnet, yes, fourteen lines with a ‘turn’ at the ninth, but with an irregular rhyme scheme and line length and the surprise in the movement from the satisfying act of swinging the scythe – ‘My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make’ – to a meditation on the creative act of writing poetry -‘The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.’ Frost breaking the mold once again. Making new, making what he called ‘the sound of sense’, letting us hear so clearly the sounds of summer. A Twentieth Century sensibility with a nod to Shakespeare.

‘There never was a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered?  I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound-

And that is why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.’

But circling back to Shakespeare, let’s fast forward to Act V in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. The Duke, Theseus, and his betrothed, Hippolyta, have heard all the strange adventures of the four lovers, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia and Helena. Theseus is skeptical and says: ‘as imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/ Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing /A local habitation and a name.’ But Hippolyta thinks there must be some truth in the story, she is brief and to the point: ‘But all the story of the night told over/And all their minds transfigured so together,/ More witnesseth than fancy’s images/And grows to something of great constancy;/But, howsoever, strange and admirable.’ Hippolyta gets the last word, never mind Theseus’ eloquence and his conquering sword!

Let the magic of August stay with us a little longer since, in Shakespeare’s words, ’summer’s lease has all too short a date’ – and turn to another Twentieth Century American poet, Richard Wilbur, and the last lines of his sonnet ‘Praise in Summer’: 

‘To a praiseful eye

Should it not be enough of fresh and strange

That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,

And sparrows sweep the ceiling of the day?’

But perhaps the last word in this ‘wandering in a grove by moonlight’ goes to our familiar friend, the 17th Century physician and theologian Sir Thomas Browne, who so loved life’s ‘wingy mysteries’ and believed in the regenerative power of laughter.   With him let us pause a moment and hear what he called ‘the unextinguishable laugh of heaven’.   ( The Religio Medici)

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – July 2021

ON JULY 10TH 1871 Marcel Proust was born and this month we celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the author of In Search of Lost Time – À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu –  three thousand pages in seven volumes, four of which appeared in print before his death on November 18, 1922, the remaining three between 1923 and 1927. He continued writing and revising his monumental life’s work until the day of his death. Roger Shattuck, the Proust scholar, in his illuminating study ‘Proust’s Way – a Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time’ describes ‘the sheer sense of life’ in the novel that ‘reawakens us to our own existence’ (p.xvii). In its pages we find art and music, characters made immortal by his pen, a vision of life that becomes the reader’s own.

For a moment though, reflecting on Proust takes us back to our own Library and our own community. James Merrill, when he was a student at Amherst ‘developed an obsession with memory and a transformative interest in Proust’. In an interview with J.D. McClatchy published in the Paris Review in 1982, Merrill agreed with McClatchy’s assessment that Proust had been the greatest influence on his career (Collected Prose, edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, Knopf, p.119). There are, for the interested reader, many references to Proust throughout this volume of Merrill’s prose. And here we are, in Stonington Free Library, a small library in a small East Coast village which probably has one of the most comprehensive collections of books by and about Proust anywhere outside of an academic library. This is entirely thanks to the gift to the Library of books from the collection of J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy, who shared James Merrill’s passion for Proust, now in the McClatchy Memorial Corner upstairs in the gallery. The Library also has in its holdings, thanks to the generosity of longtime Library supporter Charlie Clark, the complete In Search of Lost Time as a book on CD. Another way of discovering this twentieth century masterpiece.  

And don’t forget that Sandy’s typewriter, the gift of friend and neighbor Robert Palm, is also there in the gallery, silent for over a year but waiting once again for poems to be written on it – what better way to celebrate our newly opening world? 

But back to James Merrill and his moving tribute, his brilliant poem ‘For Proust’. The elegiac tone, heightened by the witty homonyms and stanzaic enjambments carry the narrative forward with a touching urgency as the dying Proust leaves his bed to go out into society one more time. In the third quatrain, the first line, with its pressing assonance, an internal rhyme and enjambment create an overwhelming sense of ‘fracas’ ‘until your palms/ Are moist with fear’ And then – 

‘Back where you came from, up the strait stair, past

 All understanding, bearing the whole past….

 You make for one dim room without contour

 And station yourself there, beyond the pale

 Of cough or gardenia, erect, pale.

 What has happened is becoming literature.’   

But of the myriad of words written about Proust, for me those by the distinguished American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) capture the essence of Proust most perfectly in his poem ‘Proust on Skates’. In this poem, the description of him skating reflects, in the manner of an homage, a sense of Proust’s creative process.

‘He glides with gaining confidence, inscribes

Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,

        Comes to a minute point,

Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,

Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,

         Preoccupied, intent

On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script

Incised with twin steel blades and qualified

        Perfectly to express,

With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped

Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,

        A glancing happiness.

It will not last, that happiness; nothing lasts;

But will reduce in time to the clear brew 

       Of simmering memory

Nourished by shadowy gardens, music, guests,

Childhood affections, and, of Delft, a view

       Steeped in a sip of tea.’

For much of his life, Hecht himself was haunted, too, by memories, though of a more horrific order. As a young soldier, he was part of the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945. ‘The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts, were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking’. He addressed the Holocaust and the horrors of war in his large body of work, work which won him many awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Award, and his appointment as National Poet Laureate. Perhaps the most painful of all Holocaust poems is his sestina ‘The Book of Yolek’. Yolek was five years old. Thanks to Anthony Hecht

 ‘Wherever you are, Yolek will be there too.

 His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

 Prepare to receive him in your home some day.

 Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,

 He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal’.  

Memory.

Just a reminder that you can access all these poems online at thepoetryfoundation.org, as well as finding them in the Library along with letters and criticism, including the newly published letters of James Merrill and Jonathan Post’s critical study of Anthony Hecht, The Thickness of Particulars, as well as his edition of Hecht’s letters. 

But let’s circle back to Proust who exulted in life and its endless joys as he battled his own mortality. In the June Book Notes (below) I likened the lyrics of the 17th Century English poet Henry Vaughan to ‘a carving hidden away in the organ loft of a medieval cathedral, awaiting the seeing eye of the curious traveler.’ I realized later that it was Proust that I was recalling and his book of essays ‘Days of Reading’ where he describes his experience reading Ruskin. In a famous passage he quotes Ruskin’s description of ‘a small figure, a few centimeters high, lost amidst hundreds of minuscule figures, in the portal of the Booksellers in Rouen cathedral’.  On Ruskin’s death Proust felt he must go and find this tiny figure – which, miraculously, he did. He felt that, in drawing the figure, Ruskin had conferred on it a kind of immortality. ‘The monstrous, inoffensive little figure was to be resurrected… from that death which seems more absolute than others, that disappearance into the midst of an infinite number made anonymous… I was touched to rediscover it there; nothing then dies of what has once lived, the sculptor’s thought any more than that of Ruskin.’ Proust calls the figure ‘poor little monster… your poor face, that I would never have noticed… ‘but somehow he finds a sense of resurrection here in this ‘smallest figure, framing a tiny quatrefoil, resurrected in its form, gazing at us with the same gaze that seems to fit inside no more than a millimeter of stone.’ ‘The fellow is vexed and puzzled in his malice; and his hand is pressed hard on his cheek bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under the eye by the pressure. The whole indeed looks wretchedly coarse…. But considering it as a mere filling of an interstice on the outside of a cathedral gate…. It proves very noble vitality in the art of the time…’ (p. 25 in Days of Reading, Penguin Great Ideas series)

Proust devoted nine years to translating Ruskin, who had a profound influence on his development as a writer, especially in his conception of ‘artist as interpreter’ and his ‘belief that beauty resided “in the simplest of objects … [in] the most beloved sights that you see every summer evening along thousands of footpaths, the streams of water on the hillsides…. Of your old, familiar countryside.” (Monsieur Proust’s Library Anka Muhlstein, p.30).  Proust understood the world through painting and music as well as literature and if you are not ready to read the novel itself there are many delightful windows on his world. Anka Muhlstein’s book is one, another is Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, a collection of all the paintings that figure in the novel, fine color reproductions appearing alongside the relevant texts. It is a feast of a book whether you are already familiar with the novel or a newcomer to its treasures. 

As John Ruskin wrote in The Bible of Amiens ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and to tell what it saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion – all in one’ This, as we have already seen, became Proust’s credo in his writing. More than three hundred years earlier, far removed from the worlds of both Ruskin and Proust, in an obscure English country parish, the poet/priest George Herbert wrote these lines in a plea for the soul to honor God by telling ‘what it saw in a plain way’.

‘Who says that fictions onely and false hair

 Become a verse? Is there no truth in beautie?

 Is all good structure in a winding stair?

 May no lines passe, except they do their dutie

 Not to a true, but painted chair?

Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines,

  Catching the sense at two removes?’                 Jordan (1)

Perhaps we can leave all three of these gifted and visionary minds on the same page and share in ‘A glancing happiness’?

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – June 2021

Travel, Travelers, Journeys of the Foot and the Heart

June 13th is the birthday of William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet and one of the greatest poets of the Twentieth Century. This is what he heard ‘in the deep heart’s core’ while standing on London’s ‘pavements grey’ – 

‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine-bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’

 

Lines so familiar and yet always fresh and new. For many of us, though, it is not within our gift to ‘arise and go now’, so I have been thinking about the gifts of travelers who have shared their journeys with us through their writings. In fact, ‘A Time of Gifts’ is the title of the first of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s many travel books, this one being the record of his journey on foot across Europe in the mid 1930s as it prepared for war. As well as being a gifted writer, he is the most observant and sensitive of traveling companions and probably the most charming of any you will ever meet.  

Another of my perennial favorites among pioneer explorers/travelers is Freya Stark. Out of an early life blighted by tragedy and potential limitation, she became the first Western woman to travel alone through the Middle and Far East. Her writings, with their humanity and deep insights, give us a wide window on that world, some of it vanished, most of it present with us today. ‘Alexander’s Path’ and ‘Dust in the Lion’s Paw’ are among many that come to mind.

Yet of all the classic travel books, Charles Darwin’s ‘Voyage of the Beagle’ stands out as a surprising delight. An enthralling account by a young and enquiring mind venturing into the unknown with note book in hand,(he was 23 when he embarked on the Beagle on the 27th of December, 1831) – notes that would change our world forever. 

This was one of the favorite books of Elizabeth Bishop, a poet possibly without peer among modern writers of travel poems. Her first poem in her first book is ‘The Map’, and for most of her life she was a traveler, physically and spiritually, always looking, like her ‘Sandpiper’, for ‘something, something, something.’ In her poem ‘Questions of Travel’ – she reflects on what it mean to be a tourist. ‘Is it right to be watching strangers in a play/in this strangest of theaters?’ – and her answer is in the last line of the earlier poem ‘Arrival at Santos’,  /’We leave Santos at once;/ we are driving to the interior’. She was, in Herman Melville’s words, ‘a thought diver’,a traveler on a quest, asking questions of herself and us, the reader, not the tourist with ‘immodest demands for a different world,/and a better life, and complete comprehension/ of both at last, and immediately,’ (again ‘Arrival at Santos’)

In her quest to ‘go to the interior,’ Elizabeth Bishop was deeply read in the history and culture of Brazil, a quest that took her on a journey up the Amazon, a journey which, years later, produced her quintessential poem of Brazil, ‘Santarém’. ‘That golden evening I really wanted to go no further;/ more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile/ in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajos, Amazon,’ …..’I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place./ Two rivers. Hadn’t two rivers sprung from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four/ and they’d diverged. Here only two/and coming together’……’in that watery, dazzling dialectic.’ There is an echo of Yeats in the yearning for a place as well as, in the language and tone, echoes of Milton. But, being Bishop, she ends her reminiscence on a note of practicality and humor, bringing herself, and us, back into the real world, waking from the dream of Santarém just as Eve woke from her dream in the Garden. ‘Then- my ship’s whistle blew.  I couldn’t stay.’ The poem ends with the description of a gift of an empty wasp’s nest, ‘small, exquisite, clean matte white/ and hard as stucco’ – that she had admired ‘In the blue pharmacy’ and the pharmacist had given her. In the closing lines of the poem we too wake from this memory of Santarém, its vibrant color palette of blues and yellows and vignettes of life being so fully lived:

‘Back on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr. Swan,/ Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric,/ really a very nice old man,/ who wanted to see the Amazon before he died,/ asked, ‘What’s that ugly thing?

And so, for poet and for reader, the journey continues and the world awaits, but, as in so many of her poems, it ends on an open note, a music that continues.     

In the reference to the Garden of Eden, another open note, another journey brought to mind by ‘Santarém’, involves the closing lines of Paradise Lost, not as an ending but a new beginning for Adam and Eve

‘The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and providence their guide;

They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.’

This is the narrator, but within the poem, it is Eve who speaks the last heroic lines: ‘In me is no delay; with thee to go/ Is to stay here; without thee here to stay/ Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me/ Art all things under heaven, all places thou’ (Paradise Lost, Book XII ll. 615-618). Circling back to May you might recall that we left Ruth standing ‘amid the alien corn’ ‘and it is her promise to her bereft and beloved mother-in-law, Naomi, that is echoed here by Eve ‘…. whither thou goest I will go, where thou lodgest I will lodge’. And as with Eve, a new beginning for Ruth.

But all journeys are not forward, as we learn from the 17th Century poet Henry Vaughan, whose 400th anniversary, like Andrew Marvell’s, is celebrated this year. In his lyric ‘The Retreat’ he expresses the longing to return to his soul’s first home. ‘O, how I long to travel back /And tread again that ancient track!’ Within a tight structure of tetrameter rhyming couplets, we are offered a moment of private grace transmuted into art. So finely made, this poem reminds me of one of those details in a stained glass window that calls for our close attention, or an exquisite carving hidden away in the organ loft of a medieval cathedral, awaiting the seeing eye of the curious traveler. 

‘Some men a forward motion love;

But I by backward steps would move,

And when this dust falls to the urn,

In that state I came, return.’ 

But let’s return to today and Sebastian Junger’s new book ‘Freedom’ that tells of the journey of four companions seeking freedom and healing from the noise and trauma of war that they have suffered.

Surely a journey of the foot and of the heart.

 

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – May 2021

Celebrating a Poet, Walking, Nightingales and Owls. Thinking of Immigrants, the Un-Sheltered.  Looking at New Books and Books that are Old Friends.

This year marks the 400th Anniversary of the poet Andrew Marvell. His poem ‘Upon Appleton House’,  97 eight-line stanzas in tetrameter rhyming couplets, celebrates this English country house, its history, the grounds and its owner, Lord Fairfax, a famous political and military figure of the time, his wife, Lady Anne Vere Fairfax and Maria their daughter, Marvell’s pupil.  It is indeed a symphony of a poem, but let us join the poet in a lyric interlude as he walks in the woods of Appleton House:

 ‘In fragrant gardens, shady woods,

Deep meadows, and transparent floods.

While with slow eyes (my italics)we these survey,

And on each pleasant footstep stay…..’

But I…

Take sanctuary in the wood…

The arching boughs unite between

The columns of the temple green;

And underneath the winged choirs

Echo about their tuned fires.

The nightingale does here make choice

To sing the trials of her voice.

…highest oaks stoop down to hear,

And listening elders prick the ear.

But I have for my music found

A sadder, yet more pleasing sound:

The stock-doves, whose fair necks are graced

With nuptial rings, their ensigns chaste.’

Staying with this lyrical world, recent additions to the Library collection are three books by the British nature writer John Lewis-Stempel:   ‘Still Water: The deep life of the pond ’, ‘Glorious Life of the Oak’ and ‘The Secret Life of the Owl.’ These essays, full of information, quotes, references and charming illustrations, remind me of another gem – ‘The Natural History of Selborne’ by the 18th Century English cleric, Gilbert White. His observations and records of the natural world, day by day, season by season, are as alive and immediate today as when he made them.  Verlyn Klinkenborg, the American naturalist and author, has written a book about a tortoise who lived in  Gilbert White’s garden, ‘Timothy, or Notes of An Abject Reptile’ – ‘abject reptile’ being Gilbert White’s description of the tortoise. I remember recommending ‘Timothy’ to a patron who read it whenever life felt overwhelming. That tortoise helped her to get through the days.  I would say the same about ‘The Natural History’. It is good to know that it is here at Stonington Free Library along with many other books on nature, gardens, birds and walks in the woods. Among old friends in this genre, there is Thoreau of course, but not just ‘Walden’. His account of climbing Mount Ktaadn is one of the most rewarding of armchair wilderness hikes, offering an experience of wild-ness, wonder and awe. Robert MacFarlane’s ‘The Old Ways’ is another classic, while two recent additions are ‘In Praise of Paths: Walking through Time and Nature’ and ‘In Praise of Walking: A new scientific exploration’. But, it being May, for pure magic – and perhaps with Marvell’s ‘slow eyes’ – I would join the young Marcel in his walk on the Meseglise Way, rejoicing in the hawthorn blossom. (‘Swann’s Way’ – Volume 1 of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust).  

‘Swann’s Way’ takes me to a remembrance of how literature can sustain life. During World War II, the remnant of the Polish officer corps, imprisoned by the Soviets, starving, frozen, worked to the point of death, kept themselves from despair, turning their minds from the appalling conditions of their lives by taking turns to give, from memory, lectures on any subject for which they had a passion.  By some miracle, notes from one of these lecture series survived and has been translated into English, ‘Lost Time, Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp’ by Jozef Czapski. These words remain forever a record of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of the unimaginable.

Which returns us to the present. How books and libraries have changed lives is a story often told,  yet always new. Below is a link to a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review by Min Jin Lee, author of the best-selling novel of the immigrant experience, ‘Pachinko’ 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/books/review/min-jin-lee-writer.html?smid=em-share

Here Ms. Lee recounts the experience of her family and the role that books and libraries played in shaping that experience and, as she says, rescuing them. Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure’ is among the books she mentions. Intrigued, I decided to re-read it, remembering it as a story of unbearable despair. It is! But reading it in today’s world and thinking of the young Min Jin Lee, I found it to be a story of how a life without options becomes, inevitably, one that only offers poor choices. Re-reading so often rewards us with new perspectives!

In May, the theme of the Library Book Display will be immigrant literature – the voices of the immigrant, the exile, the displaced, the outsider, the lost, the survivor.   Hosseini, Ishiguro, Kincaid, Danticat, Nafisi, Lahiri are a few in a long list of Twentieth Century and contemporary authors. We also have the voices that come to us over time, telling us our story.  I think of just two. Henry James, in his self-imposed, but, for him essential, exile, confronts the difficulties that face the American in Europe, the  New World meeting the Old, particularly in ‘The American’ and ‘The Ambassadors’ and even in ‘The Aspern Papers’. Herman Melville, who on his voyages had lived among cannibals, celebrates our common humanity in the late-night meeting of Ishmael and Queequeg at the Spouter Inn  (‘Moby Dick’ Chs. 3 & 4).   In this moment Melville confronts the idea of ‘the stranger’ and gives us one of the great friendships in all literature.   

Circling back to Marvell’s nightingale, we hear an echo in the ‘Ode to A Nightingale’ of John Keats: 

‘The voice I hear this passing night was heard

    In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path

 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

 She stood in tears amid the alien corn;’ 

Circling  back yet again, this time to owls.  In Lewis-Sempel’s ‘The Secret Life of the Owl’ there is a poem by the English poet Edward Thomas(p.79). Written shortly before his death in the First World War, Thomas describes his gratitude at finding food and shelter at the end of a day out walking –

‘All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry.

…one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered too, by the bird’s voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.’

Lines that recall the moment in ‘David Copperfield’ when the young David has walked all the way from London to Dover, sleeping in the open for six nights, robbed, chased, hungry, ragged, dirty and footsore and is now safe with his aunt, Betsy Trotwood. ‘I thought of all the solitary places under the night sky where I had slept… I prayed that I never might be houseless anymore, and never might forget the houseless.’ Dickens is surely the genius of the human heart.

All this seems a long way from that lyrical moment in the Appleton woods, but thoughts and ideas have a way of wandering down unexpected paths. I hope you have enjoyed the walk and thank you for keeping me company.

 

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – April 2021

POETRY MONTH, NEW BOOKS FROM OLD FRIENDS, ‘TRIBUTES OF PLEASURE’ – SPRING!

‘The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.’  (George Herbert, ‘The Flower’)

That sense of a gift freely given is echoed in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Cold Spring’, perhaps  one of the loveliest of Spring poems – ‘Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies/begin to rise:/up, then down, then up again:/ lit on the ascending flight,/ drifting simultaneously to the same height,/ – exactly like the bubbles in champagne….. And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer/ these particular glowing tributes/ every evening now throughout the summer.’ 

As an added gift, the epigraph to ‘A Cold Spring’ is from Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet ‘Spring’ – ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring’. All these poems can be found on Poetry Foundation.org.

So, in these Notes for April, I offer ‘tributes of pleasure’ to some of those who are contributing to the life of the Library, making it, in George Herbert’s words ‘new, tender, quick’, words from his poem ‘Love Unknown’ that belong to any time or season but somehow especially to now. Incidentally, his birthday is April 3rd! Something to celebrate!

‘Waking Up To The Earth’ is the title of the anthology that Connecticut Poet Laureate, Margaret Gibson, will be presenting on Sunday, April 11th with a group of Connecticut poets reading their poems. As Keats wrote ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’.  Margaret is devoted to helping us hear that poetry, through her own work and as an advocate for that of others.

An exciting publishing event this month is a collection of James Merrill’s letters edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser entitled ‘A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill’. It is hard to imagine two more qualified people to handle such a project – and that it is coming out on the anniversary of the death of James Merrill’s close friend and fellow poet Sandy McClatchy has a powerful significance. Life continues and is indeed ‘new, tender, quick’.

Gregory Dowling in his review of the letters in the Wall Street Journal (3/6/21) writes “the art, the music, the reading in esoteric subjects, the daily life of shopping and cooking – and, most important, the friendships…This book immerses us in that world, and enriches our understanding of the poetry that came out of it.” We have a taste of that friendship, food and poetry in James Merrill’s life here in Stonington – those parsnips in Eleanor Pereny’s garden immortalized in his poem From the Cupola – “Finally I reach a garden where I am to uproot/ the last parsnips for my sisters’ dinner….. I look at them a long while/ mealy and soiled…blind… with tender blindness. Then I bury them/ once more in memory of us.” 

Other book news, local author, friend and neighbor, David Leeming, James Baldwin’s biographer and author of many books on myth, has two new books that will be published later this year.  One is ‘a discussion of Native American creation myths in the context of and as opposed to American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny and the reality of a nation built on stolen people and stolen land’. The second is in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series and is on world mythology. It is a survey of the various cultural treatments of universal topics – deity, creation, the flood, the trickster and the hero. David has kindly agreed to give talks on both these books once we can have in person programs again.   

Thanks to the thoughtful generosity of James Longenbach, we have some important additions to our poetry collection, his highly regarded works on the art of poetry as well as volumes of his own poetry.  Here I want to pay tribute (‘tributes of pleasure’) to James’s father, artist and educator,  Burton Longenbach, for his enchanting drawing on the cover of ‘Stone  Cottage, Pound, Yeats & Modernism’, James’s acclaimed critical study of the friendship of Yeats and Pound. Mr Longenbach’s line drawing of Stone Cottage matches exactly the description of the cottage and Ashdown Forest and its history at the beginning of the book – Ashdown Forest, haunt of The Venerable Bede when he wasn’t at Lindisfarne, and home to the Five Hundred Acre Wood, scene of the adventures of Winnie the Pooh! Land of enchantments. No wonder it appealed to Yeats.

It also seems appropriate in Spring and in Poetry Month to recall Ezra Pound’s famous dictum ‘Make it New’ – which in turn echoes the 17th Century physician Sir Thomas Browne – inspiration to Herman Melville in his writing of ‘Moby Dick’ and a favorite author of Elizabeth Bishop’s. In his introduction to his essay ‘The Garden of Cyrus’, Browne wrote to his friend Nicholas Bacon, ‘of old things we write something new.’   

Which brings me to another book donated by James Longenbach and just added to our collection – ‘Conversations with Joanna Scott’. In one of these interviews Joanna says ‘I have always appreciated the power of fiction to make us responsive…. To give us the ability to go out and see the world with freshness and intensity’.  Again, new – new ways of seeing.  

Jim and Joanna will be giving a reading for the Library from their new work on June 17th – Jim from his new book of poetry, ‘Forever’ and Joanna from her new collection of stories, ‘ Excuse Me While I Disappear’.

Still celebrating poetry, the ‘Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt’ has been added to the collection as has ‘Love Amy’, her selected letters. As I mentioned in an earlier Notes, Willard Spiegelman’s biography of Amy Clampitt will be published later this year, as will Jonathan Post’s ‘Elizabeth Bishop, A Very Short Introduction’. This is his second book in this Oxford University Press series following his study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems published in 2017 – a happy reminder that April is Shakespeare’s birthday – let ‘..sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child/Warble his native wood-notes wild,’(Milton, ‘L’Allegro’).  

Both Willard and Jonathan have kindly agreed to give talks on their much awaited books later this year. What a wealth of talent and generosity we enjoy. So much to look forward to. So much that is new happening at the Library – always!

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Belinda’s Book Notes – March 2021

“I sing of the Spring flower-crowned,

I sing the praises of the Rose,

Friend, help me sing my song….”

An invitation to think Spring by the Greek, Anacreon (5th Century BCE) – quoted on the cover of a seed catalogue that Katherine White chose as her frontispiece in the first of her fourteen essays in the New Yorker, published on March 1st 1958. These essays were collected together after her death by her husband E. B. White (‘Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, et al) into one of the most enchanting gardening books ever written – “Onward and Upward in the Garden’.  It is even more enchanting as it can be enjoyed and savored even if you have neither the opportunity nor the inclination to garden – enjoyed for its wit and wisdom, its warmth and wonderful writing, her voice as clear and real as when she first wrote. 

Many will know Katherine White as the distinguished editor at the New Yorker whose correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop is among the finest of any epistolary exchanges, their voices and their friendship alive on the page. (The book is ‘Elizabeth Bishop at the New Yorker’ edited by Joelle Biele.) I recently came across a quote from the 20th Century English novelist, Henry Green – ‘Prose is an intimacy between strangers’. A comforting observation in this time of imposed isolation – especially as the word intimacy seems to cancel the idea of stranger and replace it with friend – the friend who will help us sing our song. (By the way, Henry Green’s novels are delightful if you don’t know them.)

When I read the first essay in ‘Onward and Upward in the Garden’, the paean of praise to the writers of seed catalogues, my mind leapt to our upcoming program on March 18th with Master Gardener Noreen Kepple!

Surely, everything does connect! Noreen has given delightfully informative presentations on gardening at the Library and it was she who established our very popular Seed Library several years ago – which our staff member Ivy Hope Burns, has kept going in spite of the pandemic restrictions. Thank you Ivy! It was these restrictions that made gardening and seed planting a number one activity for all ages last year and this Spring it will have the same life giving appeal.

Noreen’s program is the second in our new lecture series – at present still via Zoom – and it will follow Stuart Vyse’s talk on March 14th on his book ‘Superstition – A Very Short Introduction’– an engaging and fascinating read which I highly recommend. We are very grateful that he has agreed to do this for us. It promises to be both informative and entertaining!

Like superstitions, gardens have been around forever and maybe longer than that. Milton’s Eden was wondrously beautiful but very labor intensive, which caused Adam a lot of stress and then disagreements between him and his beloved  (Bk IX) and, alas, as you know, things did not end well. On the other hand, the Roman poet, Ovid, (whose birthday is March 20th, 43 BCE) had a more relaxed approach and said that, when his time came, he would be content to die while planting his cabbages, and, what is more, did not care if he had not finished doing so! He and Adam should have had a chat. Meanwhile, a bit nearer our time, 18th Century Voltaire’s Candide concluded that the best answer when the world falls apart is that ‘We must cultivate our own garden’. What interesting shoes we walk in as we journey on into another Spring.

My other all time favorite book about gardening was written right here in our own backyard. ‘Green Thoughts – A Writer in the Garden’ by Eleanor Perenyi. Eleanor was a resident of Stonington for over thirty years until her death in 2009, author of a biography of Liszt and an enchanting memoir of her life in Hungary before the war, ‘More Was Lost’ – reprinted to much acclaim by the New York Review of Books in 2016 with an introduction by J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy.

Published in 1981, ‘Green Thoughts’ was republished in 2002 as a very attractive paperback by the Library of America and, like Katherine White’s book, can be read with enjoyment by gardeners and non-gardeners alike. Full of strong opinions, huge breadth of knowledge as well as an infectious passion for gardens, this book has that same quality –  the experience for the reader of being in conversation and being the richer for it.

Eleanor and her mother, the novelist Grace Zaring Stone (‘The Bitter Tea of General Yen’ was one of her many novels) were large presences in the community and even make a cameo appearance in a James Merrill poem.   In fact, in a delightful neighborly pas de deux, James Merrill makes an appearance in ‘Green Thoughts’ in a touching and lyrical passage in ‘From the Cupola’, a poem in the volume ‘Nights and Days’. I cannot quote it for copyright reasons, but if you go to Poetry.org you will find it, ‘Finally I reach a garden where I am to uproot the last parsnips’. Or look in ‘Green Thoughts’ under ‘Reward’ – the book has the easy charm of arranging each subject in alphabetical order.   It is worth the trip I promise, as is Eleanor’s ecstatic comment – ‘The parsnips have made it into literature. Onward!’.

Friends helping each other sing their song. And talking of song, Eleanor took her title, as many of you will know, from the 17th Century poet Andrew Marvell’s beloved lyric poem ‘Thoughts in A Garden’

“Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness;

The mind, that Ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find;

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas;

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.’

Which seems to be a perfect segue to April, Poetry Month, when Connecticut Poet Laureate and good friend to the Library, Margaret Gibson, will present poets reading from a new anthology ‘Waking Up The Earth’ on Sunday April 11th. 

Friends, always more thoughts, more books, more connections as we help each other sing our song. 

 

 

Belinda’s Book Notes – February 2021

         ‘Who would have thought my shriveled heart 

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone 

         Quite underground; as flowers depart 

To see their mother-root, when they have blown, 

                   Where they together 

                   All the hard weather, 

         Dead to the world, keep house unknown.’  (George Herbert – ‘The Flower’)

Here at the Library, looking forward to Spring and our new programs, ‘recovered greenness’ is what I feel. Reaching out to the writers, poets, biographers, scholars all, in our community whose programs had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, I feel a sense of renewal and hope for new beginnings. 

In his memorial tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill quoted the Italian poet and essayist Eugenio Montale – “The ancients said poetry is a staircase to God’ – maybe with our 21st Century sensitivity we might say it is a staircase to new ways of seeing.

It is this new way of Seeing that stands out as a theme in all that is happening around books old and new and friends old and new here at the Library.

Which leads me to “the famous eye’ of Elizabeth Bishop that Merrill refers to, quoting Robert Lowell, and the upcoming book about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop by our neighbor and friend of the Library, Jonathan Post, that will be published by Oxford University Press later this year. We eagerly await his study of this, one of the greatest of American Twentieth Century Poets – her eye, a staircase to a new vision for all who read her – compassionate as in “Filling Station’ – (‘Somebody loves us all’) – visionary as in ‘The Moose’, painterly in detail as in ‘At The Fishhouses’, all seeing as in ‘Jeronimo’s House’, knowing as in ‘The Shampoo’ (“The still explosions on the rocks,/the lichens, grow/by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.’) heart wrenching in ‘The Armadillo’ and, oh, the birds, the sandpiper, the owls, the song sparrows.

‘life and the memory of it…

– the little that we get for free,

the little of our earthly trust.  Not much.

About the size of our abidance

along with theirs: the munching cows,

the iris, crisp and shivering, the water

still standing from spring freshets,

the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

Elizabeth Bishop ‘Poem’ 

Professor Post’s other works include a critical study of Anthony Hecht, “A Thickness of Particulars”, and he is the editor of Hecht’s Letters. He has written extensively on English lyric poetry of the early 17th Century as well as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne and is a distinguished  Shakespeare scholar. In 2019 he gave an illuminating talk at the Library on his book “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems – A Very Short Introduction’ that is also a very engaging read, a delightful page turner for this general reader!  

Continuing on the theme of seeing, our friend and neighbor Willard Spiegelman had his talk on his collection of essays on art -’If You See Something, Say Something’ – postponed by the pandemic and we look forward to the day when we can once again all gather in the Library and enjoy another of his lively and informative presentations. Meanwhile, however, Professor Spiegelman is working on a biography of the poet Amy Clampitt which will be published early next year.   He writes: “AC was an inspiration to many because she was a patron saint for late bloomers. She lived in total obscurity for almost forty years before appearing on the literary scene. She made a splash, and was a major figure, but only for a decade and a half. Between 1978 and 1994, her poems appeared in The New Yorker. She gave readers things they had not seen in years, if ever. And even if she had never achieved fame, she would be an admirable figure in her private capacity as a reader, thinker, and consumer of high culture.” 

Something we can all look forward to – meanwhile I find our collection is sadly wanting when it comes to Amy Clampitt’s books and this is being rapidly addressed! Willard’s books of delightful and surprising essays can be found in our catalogue, as can the books by Jonathan Post and those of all the writers mentioned here.  

More immediately, former Merrill Poets in Residence and now neighbors, James Longenbach and Joanna Scott both have new books. Joanna, author of several acclaimed novels, has a collection of short stories -”Excuse Me While I Disappear”-  coming out in April and James, a book of criticism, ‘The Lyric Now’, was recently published (as he explains, Now is a noun, ‘inviting readers into a nowness that makes itself new each time we read…’ ) and his new poetry collection -’Forever’ -is being published in June. Jim and Joanna will be giving a Library Zoom talk in June – many will remember their reading at the Library two years ago which gave us a foretaste of their new books – it is very exciting to welcome them back again! 

On Sunday, March 14th Stuart Vyse, Connecticut College Professor, author of many books, Stonington resident, a familiar friend of the Library, will give a talk – this time via Zoom – that was postponed a year ago on his book “Superstition: A Very Short Introduction” – one of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series.  (We own quite a selection of this series and will be adding more.) In it Stuart ‘explores the nature and surprising history of superstition from antiquity to the present. …..He looks at the varieties of popular superstitious beliefs today and the psychological reasons behind their continued existence, as well as the likely future course of superstition in our increasingly connected world.’ Guaranteed, we will find ourselves looking at old things in a new way

Then, on Sunday, April 11th, (Poetry Month!) Connecticut Poet Laureate, Margaret Gibson, long time colleague and friend of the Library, will present a program of Connecticut poets reading from a new anthology, ‘Waking Up to the Earth’, that addresses the urgent and painful challenges of climate change. Margaret also has a new book of poetry, ‘The Glass Globe’, coming out in August and we hope very much to be able to welcome her to an in-person reading in the early Fall. In her introduction to the anthology  Margaret brings us back to our theme of seeing, with echoes of Elizabeth Bishop –

“These poems call us home to ourselves as human inhabitants who are not separate from the other inhabitants on this earth, …”

‘Poetry allows us to wake up and to see; it teaches us how to sustain our gaze, paying attention…’

So my friends, I give you, from the heart of the Library, in this winter moment, thoughts of ‘recovered greenness’ and Montale’s staircase and hopes for a new day for us all.