What power disbands the Northern Lights After their steely play? The lonely watcher feels an awe Of Nature’s sway, As when appearing, He marked their flashed uprearing In the cold gloom– Retreatings and advancings, (Like dallyings of doom), Transitions and enhancings, And bloody ray.
The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone Portent or promise–and gives way To pale, meek Dawn; The coming, going, Alike in wonder showing– Alike the God, Decreeing and commanding The million blades that glowed, The muster and disbanding– Midnight and Morn.
It’s St David’s Day again. Tonight I’m off to the St David’s Day concert at St David’s Hall, which is being broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and which should have a cracking atmosphere because it’s sold out. Since we’ve got front-row seats you might even hear me coughing! I’ll try to post a review in due course, either this evening or tomorrow morning.
In case you’re wondering, I’m up early this morning in order to get a full day’s work in before the concert which starts at 7pm and which will need me to leave work earlier than usual.
Last year I marked the occasion of St David’s Day with a poem by Dylan Thomas and I’ve noticed that quite a few people have been reading that post in the last few days. It seems appropriate therefore to post another poem this year. It’s only since coming to Wales – which I did less than four years ago – that I’ve discovered the poetry of R.S. Thomas and in that short time I’ve developed a respect bordering on reverence for his work. It seems entirely fitting that I put up an example of his poems on St David’s Day. I hope you enjoy it!
There Is A Being, They Say by R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)
There is a being, they say, neither body nor spirit, that is more power than reason, more reason than love, whose origins are unknown, who is apart and with us, the silence to which we appeal, the architect of our failure. It takes the genes and experiments with them and our children are born blind, or seeing have smooth hands that are the instruments of destruction. It is the spoor in the world’s dark leading away from the discovered victim, the expression the sky shows us after an excess of spleen. It has gifts it distributes to those least fitted to use them. It is everywhere and nowhere, and looks sideways into the shocked face of life, challenging it to disown it.
Another busy day – mainly filled with form-filling but also including a tutorial and a meeting of our cosmology discussion group – and tonight, for the second week running, I’m off to a lecture at Cardiff Scientific Society. This time it’s by our own Haley Gomez entitled Smoking Supernovae. And here am I trying to give up!
Anyway, I’m going to do what I usually do when I haven’t got time for a proper post and that is put up a bit of poetry. Appropriate for the time of year, in hopeful anticipation of the forthcoming spring, I offer you this (from a poem entitled In February written by Alice Meynell).
Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,
Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,
And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers;
A poet’s face asleep in this grey morn.
Now in the midst of the old world forlorn
A mystic child is set in these still hours.
I keep this time, even before the flowers,
Sacred to all the young and the unborn
Since I posted an item about Shelley a couple of days ago I’ll use that as an excuse to post this famous poem by him.It’s a well-known piece, but not a lot of people know that it was actually written in 1817, as part of a sonnet-writing contest between Shelley and Horace Smith.
I wonder why it always makes me think of STFC?
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.
I was tidying up this morning. During this rare episode of fastidiousness, I picked up a book of poetry called A Recipe for Water by Gillian Clarke. Among the lovely poems in this collection are a few inspired by Wales’ Grand Slam in the 2005 Six Nations Rugby. This is one of them, called Number 8. For those of you who aren’t rugby fans, the Number 8 is one of the forwards, the one who plays at the back of the scrum. In fact, it’s the only position that doesn’t have a name (other than “Number 8”); Numbers 1 and 3 are the props, 2 is the hooker, 4 & 5 are the locks, 6 and 7 are the flankers, 9 is the scrum-half, 10 the fly-half, 12 and 13 the inside- and outside-centres respectively, 11 and 14 the wingers and 15 the full-back. But the Number 8 is just the Number 8…
The poem is beautifully descriptive of the classic “pick-and-go” move from a set scrum during which, instead of channelling the ball to the scrum-half, the Number 8 unbinds, picks up the ball and surges forward (usually on the blind side, away from the backs in the three-quarter line).
And sometimes he’ll slip the knot of the scrum with the ball on his palm, and run with it hand on heart, out of the mud and bone,
the way a lovely muscle of river will loosen the branchy tangle that blocks its way,
and making a break for it flow, sleek and dangerous over the weir.
The order from which the cosmos took its name has been dissolved;
The heavenly legions are a tangle of monsters,
The universe – blind, violent, strange – assails us.
The sky is strewn with horrible dead suns,
Dense sediments of mangled atoms.
Only desperate heaviness emanates from them,
Not energy, not messages, not particles, not light.
Light itself falls back down, broken by its own weight,
And all of us human seed, we live and die for nothing,
The skies perpetually revolve in vain.
by Primo Levi (1919-1987), translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann.
I’ve been thinking of sharing this poem – and especially the superb reading of it by Alan Bates – with you for quite a while. There’s no compelling personal reason for choosing today to so, in fact. I’m not myself labouring in the “fell clutch of circumstance”; neither have the “bludgeonings of chance” fallen particularly hard on my head recently. Nevertheless, this poem has been on my mind for quite a while and, anyway, we all need a bit of inspiration from time to time. This certainly does that job for me, as I hope it will for those who are having a tough time of it these days.
Invictus was written by Victorian poet W.E. Henley as a response to having much of his left leg amputated. I’m not a particular fan of Henley’s verse in general – some of it is unpleasantly jingoistic – but I love this poem’s dignified yet forceful expression of resolute defiance in the face of adversity and injustice. It may be a bit “stiff upper lip” for some of you, but there you go.
Among those who have found solace or inspiration in this poem is Nelson Mandela, who kept it close by during the long years of his incarceration in the dreadful prison on Robben Island, a place I visited on a trip to Cape Town a few years ago; I can tell you that it’s every bit as grim as you might imagine. I’m sure he could teach all of us a thing or two about dignified defiance.
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
And here’s the magnificent reading of the piece by the late Alan Bates.
As often as he let himself be seen We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored The inscrutable profusion of the Lord Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean— Who made him human when he might have been A rat, and so been wholly in accord With any other creature we abhorred As always useless and not always clean.
Now he is hiding all alone somewhere, And in a final hole not ready then; For now he is among those over there Who are not coming back to us again. And we who do the fiction of our share Say less of rats and rather more of men.
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In the Dark 