Archive for the Literature Category

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To his love, by Ivor Gurney

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on November 11, 2015 by telescoper

He’s gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We’ll walk no more on Cotswolds
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.

His body that was so quick
Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn River
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.

You would not know him now…
But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.

Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers-
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.

by Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)

Ivor Gurney enlisted in the Gloucestershire Regiment of the British Army in 1915. He was seriously wounded in the shoulder in April 1917. He recovered and was soon sent back into battle. In September 1917, at Passchendaele, he was gassed and hospitalized again. He suffered a serious nervous breakdown in 1918 and spent much of the rest of his life in mental hospitals of various kinds. He died in 1937, of tuberculosis, in such an institution – the City of London Mental Hospital. He was a composer as well as a poet, and a short piece by him was played this morning on BBC Radio 3. I’m posting this poem today, Armistice Day, when we remember the fallen, as a reminder that the legacy of war can be brutal also for those that survive.

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Aftermath, by Siegfried Sassoon

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , on November 8, 2015 by telescoper

I think it is appropriate to post this poem by Siegfried Sassoon this Remembrance Sunday. I think it was composed sometime in 1919 and it appears in a collection published in 1920 with the same title as the poem. I think its message is clear, but it is also notable for its unusual metrical structure; it’s basically iambic but each line ends with a succession of three stressed syllables that causes the iambic rhythm to stumble. It’s a device used in classical Greek and Roman poetry to emphasize pain or discomfort on the one hand or struggle and determination on the other. Here it seems to convey both.

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

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

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

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

by Siegfried Sassoon (1896-1967)

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Fog

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on November 2, 2015 by telescoper

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

 

by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

 

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The Applicant

Posted in Poetry with tags , on October 23, 2015 by telescoper

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit——

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

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pity this busy monster, manunkind

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on October 17, 2015 by telescoper

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
— electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born — pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

by e e cummings (1895-1962).

 

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The Importance of Being Earnest

Posted in Film, Literature with tags , , , on October 16, 2015 by telescoper

I passed through Worthing on the train on the way to Brighton on  Monday – the line is immaterial. Today, Friday 16th October 2015,  is the 161st anniversary of the birth of Oscar Wilde. From that tenuous connection I offer you this glorious clip from the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest. The principals are Michael Redgrave as Mr Ernest Worthing, Joan Greenwood as Gwendolyn and the wondrous Edith Evans as the formidable Lady Bracknell. It’s an absolutely brilliant scene, but if I had to choose one particular excerpt from the script it would be this:

“I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.”

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Love Excels, by Brian Bilston

Posted in Poetry on October 10, 2015 by telescoper

image

by Brian Bilston.

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September’s Baccalaureate

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on September 28, 2015 by telescoper

September’s Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets – Crows – and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming –
An Innuendo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.

by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

 

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A Life – R.S. Thomas

Posted in Poetry with tags , on September 25, 2015 by telescoper

A Life

Lived long; much fear, less
courage. Bottom in love’s school
of his class; time’s reasons
too far back to be known.
Good on his knees, yielding,
vertical, to petty temptations.
A mouth thoughts escaped
from unfledged. Where two
were company, he the unwanted
third. A Narcissus tortured
by the whisperers behind
the mirror. Visionary only
in his perception of an horizon
beyond the horizon. Doubtful
of God, too pusillanimous
to deny him. Saving his face
in verse from the humiliations prose
inflicted on him. One of life’s
conscientious objectors, conceding
nothing to the propaganda of death
but a compulsion to volunteer.

An obituary of his own hand.

posted on the 15th anniversary of the death of R.S. Thomas (1913-2000).

 

 

 

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A Botanic Garden of Planets

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff on September 19, 2015 by telescoper

I’ve been reading, with rapidly growing delight and astonishment, an amazing poem called The Botanic Garden , which was written by Erasmus Darwin in 1789. It is a truly wonderful work which depicts the Universe as a vast laboratory set up by a Divine Creator through verses that generate a thrilling sense of  momentum and vitality. Take this example, a passage from the First Canto, dealing with the creation of the stars and planets:

‘Let there be Light!’, proclaimed the Almighty Lord,
Astonish’d Chaos heard the potent word: – 
Through all his realms the kindly Ether runs,
And the mass starts into a million suns; 
Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issue from the first; 
Bend, as they journey with projectile force, 
In bright ellipses bend their reluctant course; 
Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll, 
And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole.

It doesn’t quite fit with modern theories of star and planet formation, but it’s certainly beautifully expressed!

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