…died.

His great poem, The Graveyard by the Sea, is a long stroll through mortality, a mental narrative that begins in an attitude of post-human calm, and then gradually returns to the agon of ongoing existence.

The poet is walking through a cemetery that overlooks the sea. He begins with an epigraph from Pindar, reminding him to “make what you can of the possible.”

Here are some excerpts (I’ve just given a link up there to the entire poem. Here’s another translation.), with a bit of commentary.

The sea, the sea, the recommencing yet!
O recompense, in long abstraction set
Over the gods’ own calm, to gaze and gaze.

The poet begins by feeling the vast sense of calm anyone would feel perched above quiet waves, beneath a quiet blue sky, and adjacent to silent white tombstones and mausoleums. Yet the sea itself is a principle of infinite movement – recommencing yet – always beginning anew – and the poet must know that he gazes at it not as a god but as a man whose own movement through the world will end.

… what a peace we fancy here below!
Over a blue abyss the noon at pause
– Pure products, then, of an eternal cause
Time’s all a shimmer, and to dream’s to know.

The poet still fancies himself a god, one among many pure products in an eternal noontime pause.

O silence, mine! … and structure in the soul
With domes of gold, tile over tile… you, Roof!

The silence is not merely the world’s; it is the poet’s. He continues to align himself with the architecture of eternity (structure in the soul).

I scale pure heights and grow at home here …

I could get used to this place, to this sense of immunity from my own humanity.

But now the poet smells perishable fruit from nearby trees, and

I sniff in this my drift – to ash in air.
Soul’s worn away…

I’ll burn to nothingness under this same hot sun; my very life is a process of erosion.

On mansions of the dead my shadow trails
With many a lesson in its meager length.

Yes, this is my reality. I’m a meager body with a meager shadow, pretending the world is my mansion.

My true location is

Between the nothing and the pure event.
I on the edge of grandeur hang and hark:
The reservoir reverberant, surly, dark
– Threats of erosion in the echo sent.

Here is where I live – after the nothingness that prevailed before my birth, and before the realm of the eternal into which I will eventually be absorbed. I struggle to write from this place, always just on the edge of grandeur, always stuck in the realm of relative inexpressivity. I throw my words into the reverberating ocean, but what comes back is precisely a reminder of my transience.

Yet there’s something therapeutic about this stark encounter with death and infinity:

Once here, the future yawns, an empty stare.
The curt cicada grates the bone-dry air.
All’s burnt away, undone, in sky refined
To some astringent essence. Wide debris –
Life, with its wild addiction not to be!
Here bitterness is sweet, and clear the mind.

What a line – life with its wild addiction not to be… Exclaimed as the poet surveys the immensity of death strewn all about him. As if we can’t wait to go, as if the very pleasure and even obsession of our lives is to achieve the end of our lives. A bitter thought but clarifying, like this essential scene.

Yet while we live, we alone can give voice to the earth and its mysteries. And so we are not negligible; we are in fact indispensable:

Impeccable head, tiara without flaw,
See I’m the secret change astir in you.

… The fears you move – I hold them, I alone.
Repentance, doubt, compulsion, moods I’ve known
Show as your noble diamond’s only blur.

Still, dead is dead, and it’s no good pretending that

When you’re a mist, your singing lips can live…
Away! The world’s in flight! My flesh a sieve.
Days of the holy hankering finish too.

A few more stanzas of wry and melancholy meditation on our fate (“Shovels of earth sent packing to your beds.”) follow; and then there’s a dramatic transition:

Off with those poses of a thoughtful dunce!
Revel in wind; it quickens! Drink and thrive!
A coolness breathing from the open sea
Restores – O vigor of salt! – my soul for me!
Plunge in the surf! Come springing out, alive!

… The freshening wind! Let’s live, or try to! Look,
The vast air ruffles, and claps shut my book;
Reckless, the surf goes geysering on the rocks.
Sun-spangled pages, dazzled, blow away!
Shatter in a jubilant spray
This quiet roof…

No more writing, reading, pondering; time rather to put bittersweet astringency behind me and take up my life, just as it is, once again.

… are staggering.

*****************

Poets like dust – the brief, lovely word itself, and the image. Dust conveys our dissolution into insubstantiality at death. Dust to dust.

*****************

Take Dust, by Rupert Brooke:

When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;

And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know—poor fools, they’ll know!—
One moment, what it is to love.

***************************

It’s a simple, three-part argument about the way love transcends death.

1.) When we two lovers are almost dead – immobile, each of us alone in our bed, barely breathing, but still thinking – our spirits will be released to fly about like dust to all the places we spent time in when we were living.

2.) Eventually we’ll zoom in on one place in particular – the place of our ultimate rendezvous, our final merging, with one another.

3.) This will be an enclosed garden, safe from the wind that we’ve been riding to get here, and it will be sunset in the garden. A pair of young lovers will be there, and they will witness our strange and amazing passage from earth-bound dying lovers to heavenly eternal lovers. The “shattering ecstasy” of our passion for one another will be a brief but intense lesson to those lesser, sublunary lovers as to what true love is.

******************************

Fleetwood Mac.

It’s everywhere. So many of the stories that present themselves to the general world, and to university-minded UD, are, lately, all about SEX.

Like the ongoing tale my friend Philip calls “the profs and pros scandal.”

But there are so many others… And so I thought we might take a look at a sex poem. A poem that wants to share some thoughts about sex.

Here we go, stanza by stanza.

****************************

Unnatural Selections: A Meditation upon Witnessing a Bullfrog Fucking a Rock

by Jim Dodge

Amalgam of electric jelly,
constellated neural knots
in the briny binary soup,
as surely as stimulus prods response
brains are made to choose.

[Starts with a physical description of the human brain, center of understanding and volition, starry glory of that most divinely advanced animal, the human, who can use it to choose. To act intelligently.]

And through a major error in pattern recognition
or a significant cognitive fault,
the bullfrogs brain has selected
a two-pound rock
as the object of his rampant affection,
a rock (to my admittedly mammalian eye)
that neither resembles
nor even vaguely suggests
the female of his species.

[Pity the cerebrally underdeveloped frog, whose brain has chosen poorly.]

He does seem to be enjoying himself
in a blunted sort of way,
but since the rock so obviously remains unmoved
one suspects it’s not the blending of sweet oblivions
that fuels his persistence,
but a serious kink in a feedback loop–
or perhaps just kinkiness in general.
The less compassionate might even call him
the quintessentially insensitive male.

[More on that last thing here. Plus, there’s no knowing what floats your boat, and it’s not my place to judge… What’s sneaking in here is a sense that the frog may not be so different from us. Us being men.]

Assuming a pan-species gender bond
and a common fret,
I advise my amphibious pal,
“Hey, I don’t think she’s playing hard to get.
That’s the literal case you’re up against, Jack–
true story, buddy; stone fact.
And I’d be fraternally remiss if I didn’t share
my deep and eminently reasonable doubt
that she’ll be worn down
however long and spectacular the ardor.”

[We’re both guys; lemme tell you. I know what it’s like to pursue a woman and come up against frigidity or rigidity or whatever. I know the difference between a cockteaser and rockteaser. Give it up.]

Ignoring my counsel
as completely as he has my presence,
the bullfrog continues his fruitless assault
with that brain-locked commitment to folly
which invariably accompanies
dumb, bug-eyed lust.

[With “dumb, bug-eyed lust,” our John Donneian metaphor sheds its clothing and steps forth as a naked truth about frog and man. Under the influence of lust, the high mammalian and low amphibian brain are equally dumb.]

But, in fairness,
whose brain hasn’t shorted out in a slosh of hormones
or, igniting like a shattered jug of gas,
fireballed into a howling maelstrom
where a rock indeed might seem a port?

[Grenouille, c’est moi. Although I think he’s still claiming only men are this dumb.]

One can only conclude
that such impelling concupiscence
serves as a species’ life-insurance,
sort of a procreative override
of any decision requiring thought,
thought being notoriously prey to thinking,
and the more one thinks about thinking
the thinkier it gets.

[An argument from evolution here. If we (men?) weren’t like this, the human species would have died out, since the bigger your brain gets, the more you think, and the more you think, the less you act. Sexually. All the out-of-control-sexually guys we’ve been reading about lately are hopelessly caught in procreative override.]

Therefore, though the brain is made to choose,
its very existence ultimately depends
on the generative supremacy of brainless desire–
for with all respect to Monsieur Descartes
you am before you can think you are.
Dirt-drive compulsions riding powerful desires
render any choice moot, along with
reason, morality, taste, manners,
and all those other jars of glitter
we pour on the sticky and raw.

[You wouldn’t even get a brain – you wouldn’t even be born – if the human world weren’t full of mindlessly horny men humping anything. The rest of it – reason, etc. – is icing on the horn.]

The hard truth is we never chose to choose:
not the brains we use to pick
between competing explanations for our sexual mess
nor these hearts we’ve burdened with our blunders
in the name of love.
Do whatever we decide we will,
the choice isn’t free;
we live at the mercy of more pressing needs.

[The turgid truth is that we’re always between a rock and a hard place, always at the mercy of evolutionary drives. We can put on little Freud suits and come up with “explanations for our sexual mess,” but it’s nature-driven hormones.]

Thus, urges urgently surging,
we mount a few rocks by mistake.
A bit more embarrassing than most of our foolishness, true–
but so what?
The power of the imperative
coupled with the law of averages
virtually guarantees enough will get it right
to make more brains to be made up
about exactly what steps to take
toward what we think we need to do
on this stony journey between delusion and mirage–
when to move, where to hide our dreams–
a journey where we finally learn
freedom is not a choice
a brain is free to choose.

[We’re condemned by birth to this bizarre unfree freedom in which we hop about trying to do this and to do that until we eventually land on a live one.]

Fortunately, my warty friend,
the soul is built to cruise.

[A very Donneian conclusion. Wanton-prisoners we may be, but we have a soul as well as body, and the soul can truly wander free.]

Paul Durcan’s poem, Glocca Morra, will mark Father’s Day at University Diaries. It’s a cheery miserable morbid sort of thing which UD discovered in this morbid volume. She doesn’t find the poem online, so she will simply quote parts of it here – enough to give you a sense of the thing. (The poem also appears in this collection.)

It’s a longish unrhymed casually expressed series of thoughts the writer has while gazing at his father dying in a hospital bed.

The whole poem, beginning Dear Daughter and ending Love, Dad is a letter to Durcan’s daughter, who “one day … will watch me die” as the poet now watches his father die. Generation after generation, the poet suggests, people closest to one another, who most love one another, remain painful mutual mysteries. (Norman Maclean’s father says to him, in A River Runs Through It, “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”)

Someone a few beds over has a little radio, on which the treacly How are Things in Glocca Morra?, from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, is playing. The song evokes a “fine day” in an idealized Irish village, nostalgically yearned after by the speaker, who has left it.

The cheap Irish sentimentality of that song counterposes itself throughout the poem to the bitter reality of the poet’s unfinished business with his always-remote, soon to vanish, father. When the poet was young, he and his father played games together in Phoenix Park:

Football, hurling, cricket, golf, donkey,
Before he got into his Abraham-and-Isaac phase
And I got the boat to England
Before he had time to chop off my head.

The transistor reminds him of

The day you bought your first transistor
You took us out for a drive in the car
The Vauxhall Viva,
Down to a derelict hotel by the sea,
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent,
And, you used add with a chuckle,
Scandalous.

This is stream of consciousness, thought association, random music prompting a memory of a place in time when that same song emerged — in this particular case, as the name of a seaside hotel. The poet recalls the same irony that animates his reflections in the poem — the distance between that name’s winsome evocations, and the derelict reality to which the name is affixed.

You dandled it on your knee
And you stated how marvellous a gadget it was
A portable transistor,
And that you did not have to pay
A licence fee for it,
You chuckled.
A man not much known for chuckling.
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent and scandalous.

Dandled it, like a child; stated how marvellous it was, this beautiful thing you could lift and carry around with you, like a child. In the silent dereliction of the father’s emotionless world, and now in the roofless windowless silence of the dying father’s ultimate vulnerability, this will turn out to be the best his son will get by way of paternal love — this moment of oblique joy. It will do.

Realizing this now, the poet begins to cry (The tears are lumbering down my cheeks ), and the tears awaken another, equally important memory – the memory of his father’s handwriting:

You had a lovely hand,
Cursive, flourishing, exuberant, grateful, actual, generous.

The son has been able, at the father’s moment of death, to reanimate him, to recall, in an act of filial blessing and love, the most intensely vivid life within the man. He has been able to decode a little bit the mystery of the transistor, the mystery of human transmission; and he shares that mystery – for what it’s worth – with his daughter.

If she too one day watches him die, as he has just watched his father die, the poet advises her to

Consider the paintwork on the wall
And check out the music in the next bed
‘How are Things in Glocca Morra?’
Every bit as bad as you might think they are –
Or as good. Or not so bad. Love, Dad.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Either you dislike it (most people dislike it) or you really love it.

This is from Josephine Hart, 1942 – 2011.

… cornucopia.

*********************************

A LIGHT STORM OVER THE OCEAN

A light storm over the ocean!
As if day were trying to wedge itself back in.
Flashes over clouds are like flashes over mountains.

After days of heat, a hard cold wind!
And the sheeting of clouds without rain.
A light storm over the ocean.

**********************************

Gjertrud Schnackenberg, who just won the Griffin Poetry Prize for her long elegy, Heavenly Questions, considers in that collection of poems the very sketchy life of a seashell, and the very sketchy life of human beings.

As in Is That All There Is?

I mean, sure, she spends a lot of time, in this consideration of the life of a shell, “Fusiturricula Lullaby,” on the miracle of life, yadda yadda… And not just life, accomplishment!

…Underwater ink enlarges, blurs,
In violet-brown across a spiral shell:
A record of volutions fills a scroll
With wondrous deeds and great accomplishings,
A record of a summons not refused:

Itself the writing, and itself the scroll
The writing’s written on; and self-aware
With never-ever-to-be-verbalized
Awareness of awareness of awareness…

The elegy is about Schnackenberg’s husband, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, and here, with the shell becoming a scroll of ideas, pearled not merely with wisdom but with the deep-lying, word-transcending convolutions of the philosopher’s self-consciousness, Nozick begins to appear.

And then disappears:

Fusiturricula slowly withdraws
Its being; self-enfolding; self-enclosed;
And all it toiled for turns out to be
No matter—nothing much—nothing at all—
Merely the realm where “being” was confined
And what was evanescent evanesced…

The historian Perez Zagorin was interviewed two years before his death about life with his wife, the artist Honoré Sharrers; and among the things he said about their existence together was this:

The greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western tradition and quite possibly of the literature the whole world is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it begins with the theme that all men aim at happiness. But how do you – you don’t aim at happiness. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is the byproduct of the things you do. And I could say, truly, I’ve had a happy life and I know Honoré’s had a happy life, and that was because we were all the time doing just what we wanted to be doing. Happiness emerged, it effervesced.

Emerged, effervesced, evanesced. These are the realms where being was confined and where it evanesced.

But – a shell. The poet undeniably chooses a shell, and this leaves open the possibility of life being a shell. Nothingness, emptiness, a shell game, a mere tantalizing taste of water on a tongue. Joan Didion writes about “the unending absence that follows” the death of her husband, “the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which [I] confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

Still, Schnackenberg’s final stanza consoles, with images of heaven.

All heaven and earth appear; and evanesce;
A self-engulfing spiral, ridge by ridge,
That disappears in waves that come and go
And all that could be done is done; and seven;
And six; and five; and four; and three; and two;
And one…and disappearing…far away…
Enraptured to the end, and all in play,
A spiral slowly turns itself in heaven.

Walking in the Stars

One still, clear night in Galilee
The stars dripped silver in a midnight sea.
He and his platoon went wading out
Far from shore so that they could shout
Loud among the stars and be heard by God.
He ends before he ends the story:
A sentence cut in half is his last word.
His exultant voice clamours to be heard:
‘I, walking in the stars, in great glory…’

***************************

Ian McDonald

… the DSK mess.

An earlier suggestion here.

Kenneth Turan reviews a Korean film whose main character, an aging woman, makes a

typically impulsive decision to take a poetry course at a local adult education center. Attracted by the hand-lettered sign that reads “You Can Be A Poet,” she finagles her way into the class and sits spellbound as the charismatic teacher tells the group “the most important thing in life is to see. Poetry is all about discovering true beauty in our everyday life.”

As she tries to write a poem, true ugliness intervenes.

[W]hat’s difficult [the character’s poetry teacher tells her] is not writing the poem but finding the heart to write one, and as Mija becomes aware of the corruption of the society she lives in, the intensity of her quest for purity and poetry increasingly impresses us.

The film’s trailer.

Love calls us to the things of this world, say Augustine and Wilbur.

Pablo Neruda says the same thing. Perhaps we would rather escape the earth or transcend it or ignore it. But (MacNeice this time) the earth compels.

************************************

Still Another Day: I

Pablo Neruda

Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.

[trans. William O’Daly]

******************************************

Neruda wrote only in green ink – color of earth’s plants – so we’ll do that too… Here you have a hard-hearted person, dead to the light of the world, estranged from his own memories, living under a dull pelting rain.  Let’s say he’s the poet himself, impervious to what used to be the sources of his aesthetic energy.

Confusingly and compellingly, however, the earth’s outburst on this day amounts to a kind of visitation: the bell-like rain now echoes with the remembered rain of the poet’s childhood, and this sets going a welcome, tentative, awakening in him.  As opposed to the old morning/noon/night story the sun begins each day to tell,  there’s a particular “slant” here, an edginess that’s the poet’s own.  Now can he live and write?

Not quite.  Kissed awake by the kiss of mud the rain kicks up, the poet concludes with a love song to the earth, mysterious origin of his physical and spiritual life.  But how to love this dark lady?  The sun’s old clarity might be a bore; but this deeper, truer, carbon-coated body, this muffled vehicle of song, frustrates and exhausts the muse.

So the muse simply has to keep at it.  The earth compels.  “I must still uncloud my earthly duties.”

Christopher Hitchens reviews Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica.

[Somehow from Larkin’s drab, resentful life he evolved] his own sour strain and syncopation of Words­worth’s “still, sad music of humanity.” And without [his personal] synthesis of gloom and angst, we could never have had his “Aubade,” a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counter­poise between the stoic philosophies of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion.

Aubade.

The New York Times reviews David Orr’s book about the experience of really seriously loving poetry. The reviewer notes the universal opiate pull of Philip Larkin’s poetry …

Regular UD readers know that UD was hooked on Larkin decades ago… She likes both of his modes — the timid depressive realist, harshly self-appraising and defensively cynical; and the supremely sensitive lyricist, singing an insinuating cosmos.

Everybody can recite lines from the first mode (They fuck you up, your mum and dad…), but UD prefers the second — which is, in fact, quite druggy, since it’s about evoking haunted, depleted, distorted forms of consciousness… Consciousness trying and trying and failing to assimilate a fugitive, enigmatic world.

Out of a sheaf of life-is-but-a-dream poems by Larkin, look at two: Absences, and Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. Here’s the first:

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

*********************************

A person stands on a beach on a rainy day and ponders the immensity of nothingness that is the earth, a nothingness whose most striking feature is its indifference, in its massive heedless workings, to the absence of the speaker. There are no ships, no shallows – there are no objects at all in this view. And yet there is a world, tirelessly at play in a kind of autistic redundancy. All of the play of the world goes on without me — all of it, and all I’ve got to say for myself is my consciousness of it.

My consciousness of the earth seems in itself a massive thing, though.

After all, it’s the only thing, for me. I may be insignificant like hell, but my human mind is a power, and a power that matters, since the world can’t be said to exist self-consciously, as it were, without my thinking self at work on it, giving it words, meanings, understandings…

The speaker shifts his perspective from the sea to the sky, and here things are even emptier. At least the ocean has a shore, a sandy point of definition, a boundary that offers a shape of some sort; up there, it’s a yet more shoreless day (there’s an echo of even less sure day).

Just as the water is chaotically tumbled by enigmatic forces, so enigmatic (riddled) forces tumble the day into chaos and disintegration. We can trace a certain narrative – of disintegration – by watching clouds which, like evaporating ships, reveal galleries, and then ribbing, and then nothing at all.

The ribbing evokes the body of the speaker as well – his at best skeletal presence in a churning, self-consuming, reconstituting drama.

Now the second poem.

************************************

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

******************************

From her travels through Europe with her parents and siblings when she was eight, UD has retained an image eerily similar to this poem’s image. She recalls being in a large empty hotel in the evening. She recalls glancing into its empty dining room – many white clustered curtained tables, weak ceiling lights, a frightening and depressing atmosphere.

I suppose it’s the atmosphere, above all, that UD has retained with such emotional and even visceral clarity – the tense, hopeful, hopeless expectation of that room, its existence as an elaborated space meant to be filled. Forks meant to be lifted sat flat on linens. This place should have been filled with life, with people — not with the fraught waiting-for-something that now permeated it.

I suppose UD sensed the extraction of the human – such absences! – from that room… Maybe it was her first encounter with her irrelevance, even in some horrible sense her invisibility… The startle of nothing – I encountered this phrase in a poem ages ago. I’ve never been able to recall who wrote it. The phrase haunts me.

So in the Royal Station Hotel poem it’s not nature that prompts a sort of lucid dreaming about life as mere dream; it’s culture. The almost-extinguished traces of the human – ashes in the ashtrays – left in the abandoned hotel prompt the poet to feel our exile, our having-been, our occasional presence in the corridors of the world, but mainly our flickering transience in regard to it. We are elsewhere, exiled from fullness of being.

And always we are menaced by death (Waves fold behind villages…).

The poet confers a kind of life on the objects left in the dining room; they, not we, have solidity, agency, existence. The dining-room declares. The lights burn.

There’s much to like in this story of plagiarism in a British prison.

A prison source said lags took poetry ‘very seriously’ and were furious when poems were ripped off.

He said: “It wasn’t just the prison worker who complained, it was at least eight prisoners…”