Years ago, at a private school Run on traditional lines, One fellow used to perform Prodigious feats in the dorm; His quite undevious designs Found many a willing tool.
On the rugger field, in the gym, Buck marked down at his leisure The likeliest bits of stuff; The notion, familiar enough, Of ‘using somebody for pleasure’ Seemed handy and harmless to him.
But another chap was above The diversions of such a lout; Seven years in the place And he never got to first base With the kid he followed about: What interested Ralph was love.
He did the whole thing in style – Letters three times a week, Sonnet-sequences, Sunday walks; Then, during one of their talks, The youngster caressed his cheek, And that made it all worth while.
These days, for a quid pro quo, Ralph’s chum does what, and with which; Buck’s playmates, family men, Eye a Boy Scout now and then. Sex is a momentary itch, Love never lets you go.
Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so, For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure: then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell; And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Since I’m in Germany I thought I’d have a look around for a poem related to the area I’m staying in at the moment. I found this, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have the feeling he didn’t particularly enjoy his visit to the fine city of Cologne…
In Kohln, a town of monks and bones, And pavements fang’d with murderous stones And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye Nymphs that reign o’er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
All the flowers of the spring Meet to perfume our burying; These have but their growing prime, And man does flourish but his time: Survey our progress from our birth; We are set, we grow, we turn to earth. Courts adieu, and all delights, All bewitching appetites! Sweetest breath and clearest eye, Like perfumes, go out and die; And consequently this is done As shadows wait upon the sun. Vain ambition of kings Who seek by trophies and dead things To leave a living name behind, And weave but nets to catch the wind.
I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they fetch their girls, And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly, Sour the boiling honey; The jacks of frost they finger in the hives; There in the sun the frigid threads Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves; The signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers Split up the brawned womb’s weathers, Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs; There in the deep with quartered shades Of sun and moon they paint their dams As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing Stature by seedy shifting, Or lame the air with leaping from its heats; There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse Of love and light bursts in their throats. O see the pulse of summer in the ice.
II
But seasons must be challenged or they totter Into a chiming quarter Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars; There, in his night, the black-tongued bells The sleepy man of winter pulls, Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
We are the dark deniers let us summon Death from a summer woman, A muscling life from lovers in their cramp From the fair dead who flush the sea The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp And from the planted womb the man of straw.
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning, Green of the seaweeds’ iron, Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds, Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth To choke the deserts with her tides, And comb the county gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly, Heigh ho the blood and berry, And nail the merry squires to the trees; Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry, O see the poles of promise in the boys.
III
I see you boys of summer in your ruin. Man in his maggot’s barren. And boys are full and foreign to the pouch. I am the man your father was. We are the sons of flint and pitch. O see the poles are kissing as they cross.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.
Not much time to post these days, what with one thing and another, but music is always a good standby. In fact I’ve had this at the back of my mind for some time; hearing it on the radio last week gave me the nudge I needed to post it. I always feel a but uncomfortable about posting just a movement from a classical piece, but I think it is justifiable in this case. This is the 3rd Movement of String Quartet No. 15 (in A minor) by Ludwig van Beethoven (Opus 132).
The third movement is headed with the words
Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart
I take the liberty of translating the first two words, using my schoolboy German, as “A Holy Song of Thanksgiving”; Beethoven wrote the piece after recovering from a very serious illness which he had feared might prove fatal. The movement begins in a mood of quiet humility but slowly develops into a sense of hope and deeply felt joy. The most remarkable thing about this movement to me, though, is that the music possesses the same restorative powers that it was written to celebrate. This music has a therapeutic value all of its own.
I don’t know if William Wordsworth (of whose poetry I am also extremely fond) ever had the chance to hear Beethoven’s Quartet No. 15 , and in Tintern Abbey he was writing about the therapeutic power of nature rather than music, but surely the “tranquil restoration” described in that poem is exactly the feeling Beethoven achieves in his music:
These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration: — feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: — that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, — Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
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In the Dark 