Poets have long, long noticed that the moon’s a nice figure for the sense we sometimes have, ‘neath the frenzy of daily life, of obdurate nothingness.

Here’s a seasonal poem, by Jacob Polley, that freshens up the old girl.

October

Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn’t turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home-time dark.

Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered or complete,

the moon’s no fruit and has no seed,
and turns no tide of leaves on paths
that still persist but do not lead
where they did before dark.

Although the moonstruck pond stares hard
the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.
Each mind’s a different, distant world
this same moon will not leave.

Such a packed, elegant evocation of human isolation, of our conviction, at times, of the impossibility of understanding one another at all! Each mind, like the moon, seems a cold, distant, different world from each other mind.

Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn’t turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home-time dark.

Some natural tide turns the trees different colors in autumn; their leaves turn yellow, orange, red, then fall off and die. But though the enormous moon shines in the sky above the leaves as day becomes “bluer home-time dark,” it has nothing to do with them. It is not that tide. The moon makes nothing happen.

Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered or complete,

The moon’s everywhere; we see it, as we walk the dark leafy park, in all its stages — halved, quartered, complete — and again we feel as though its power and presence must have something to do with us, our earth, the seasonal tides… Indeed, we know that there are watery lunar tides; but the moon’s gravity seems uninterested in the leaves.

Yellow shallows is nice as a kind of near-rhyme in itself; and it reminds us of the water, of the lunar pull on water.

the moon’s no fruit and has no seed,
and turns no tide of leaves on paths
that still persist but do not lead
where they did before dark.

We halve and quarter grapefruit, melon; yet the moon’s halving and quartering are illusions. There’s no fruit, no life, within the moon, and the moon has nothing to do with the color and fall of the leaves.

Now a new idea enters: We are lost in the October dark. The paths beneath our feet are still there, but invisible, and we lose our way. Bluer home-time dark sounds pleasantly domestic; we are on our way home. But the paths home are obscure. The disconnected moon, and the dark, and the buried paths, create a world of confusion; we are, like the moon, disconnected.

Although the moonstruck pond stares hard
the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.
Each mind’s a different, distant world
this same moon will not leave.

The eye of that pond, lit by the moon, insists that there must be a connection between the world and the heavens. Yet the autistic moon averts its eyes; it has nothing to do with us.

Meanwhile, as we breathe out of our mouths, as our mechanical, lifeless manholes exhale in the cold air, the poem concludes its morbid meditation:

We are all to one another as the moon is to us; each of us is a mystery, so distant in our private meanings from one another… But then how can it be that we’re so powerfully influential upon one another? How can we be cold isolates, frigid enigmas, when we cast such powerful spells back and forth? We love one another! Passionately! All that heat – what is it? Nothing?

Each mind’s a distant, different world / This same moon will not leave.

We end with a pun; the moon will not depart; we are stuck to the end of life with what we are; there’s no tidal turning, no seasonal coloring; we’re stuck in the mind and the body of the human being we were born into.

But also — The moon will not leaf, not turn into anything, not produce foliage. Like us, it’s sterile, becalmed, an ashen skull, a darkly orbiting mind that cannot overcome distance and difference to touch another mind.

Here’s the same idea, also poetically impressive.

Bloomberg’s Middle East correspondent visits the Cavafy Museum in Alexandria, Egypt:

… Much … has disappeared from Alexandria: the taverns where Cavafy’s illicit liaisons took place, the exotic interaction of a diverse population and a tolerance that inspired the late Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and the novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid.

… In Cavafy’s era, the Mediterranean port city was a mix of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Maltese, British and other nationalities adding to the majority Arab-Egyptian population, all lured there by trade in cotton and wheat.

The city, and Egypt as a whole, grew more homogenized after the ouster of the monarchy in 1952, the rise of Arab nationalism and the confiscation of private property by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser.

In the past two decades, the emergence of Islam as a prime source of identity among many Egyptians made Cavafy’s sensuous subject matter unfashionable. By all accounts, Alexandria is a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s biggest opposition party. The brotherhood wants Egypt ruled under Islamic law. Alexandria was once a place where women strolled in sun dresses, not headscarves and caftans, and where religion was a matter of personal choice …

After visiting the museum, I discuss Cavafy at the office of Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood member of parliament. Saleh says Islamic law precludes publishing Cavafy’s poetry.

“Cavafy was a one-time event in Alexandria,” he says. “His poems are sinful.” …

Cavafy wouldn’t be surprised. Long ago he wrote a poem, Walls, about the failure to pay attention to the killers of cities, the builders of burqas.

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

T.S. Eliot has won a BBC-sponsored vote on England’s favorite poet.

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

VIRGINIA

Red river, red river,

Slow flow heat is silence

No will is still as a river

Still. Will heat move

Only through the mocking-bird

Heard once? Still hills

Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,

White trees, wait, wait,

Delay, decay. Living, living,

Never moving. Ever moving

Iron thoughts came with me

And go with me:

Red river, river, river.

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

On the page the poem looks like a river, its banked lines holding the poet’s fluency as it moves down the white of the page — or, now, the screen. But the words don’t really move on the page, just as the river which the poet observes seems not to move.

His feelings as he faces the water’s impassive lines flow in the direction of the river’s paradox: Visually unmoving, it nonetheless, he knows, moves massively along to some mouth.

Slow flow heat is silence

The poet’s consciousness, his emotions, are aflame in the face of the river’s beauty and power; but his is a silent intensity — the first of many paradoxes to come in this impossibly compact poetic utterance. He crackles, but only within.

No will is still as a river
Still.

Willfulness suggests forward motion; yet the powerful will of the river is still. The second still carries another meaning: The river endures in a way the poet will not. The river’s will is still there; will always be there. And perhaps the secret of its longevity is precisely its self-stilled, silent trick – its way of being both powerful and impassive.

Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once?

Slow/flow, will/still, bird/heard — Within his narrow simple lines the poet’s wordplay is almost silly, almost infantile in its obviousness. The feel is that of a litany, a sort of chant or prayer, from a simple consciousness, or from a consciousness in search of a certain simple purity of call and response. Then too, like the river, the poem seems to progress; the rhymes aren’t static rhymes, they’re language moving forward by small substitutions of letters, small increments, to gather up more and more meaning as it goes, the way the river gathers up limbs and leaves and carries more and more of them forward as it goes. Content is beginning to accumulate so subtly, so slowly, that we barely register it.

As to a paraphrase of the poet’s question about the mocking-bird: Am I right to feel anxious and sad that my poetic inspiration seems so random and fleeting a thing – the mocking-bird heard only once? Does the earth offer me more enduring forms of bliss? Why does my experience of my life feel so mockingly brief and stingy?

Still hills

Delay, decay.

How shall we read this? Shall we say that the poet speaks to himself here, reminds himself that despite the apparent tumbling contingency of his world the deeper reality is that the beauty of the world awaits him, holding open for him its gates that disclose lovely purple and white trees and a vast patient landscape of creative richness? Shall we say the poet anticipates heaven’s gates, heaven which awaits him and is beauty’s only permanent place? Shall we read this instead as a kind of demand — Wait! Don’t change! Delay the decay (Again the river poem’s curious movement forward via one small new letter.) that moves, unnoticed but undeniable, within me; let me live longer in this world. Let me learn the river’s secret of endurance — a certain self-calming, self-quieting, self-slowing, underneath which persists the heat of life.

Living, living,

Red river, river, river.

Final paradoxes: The deepest form of life never moves; it lacks, let us say, the agitation of the poet, the agitation of the human being. The human being who comes at the world with anxiety and restlessness, with questions and insistences, with an absurd headstrong commitment to unnaturally rapid motion through the world… This is the wrong form of will, a will that has not grasped the enigma of stilled power. Ever moving iron thoughts… Iron’s the toughest word in this poem, the most obdurate and mysterious. The powerful hot flow of creative blood through the poet – inspired for a moment by the mocking-bird – is iron now: cold, unflowing. The poet ends the poem with a deathly final thought – my thoughts will die with me. They will never move, like a river, beyond me.

Yet iron is precisely why the river’s red, perhaps; iron in nearby rocks will redden a river’s water. So the purity of the river in comparison with the impurity of the poet isn’t quite what it seems. Both poet and river are stained by the world, stained into existence… The poet’s thoughts enter fully here into the paradox of the natural world: Their very redness — readness? — constitutes their ever-moving endurance.

Stain, taint
Of the world
Is on them.

… about Tony Harrison, is now up.

… about the British poet Tony Harrison, first recipient of the PEN/Pinter prize.  I’ll let you know when it’s up on the site.

Matthew Zapruder, Los Angeles Times:

Form is the literary expression of our need to be consoled by some kind of order. This is why funerals have rituals and procedures, so we can keep it at least a little bit together in times of great grief and disruption. It is also why, right after Sept. 11 — when sitting together silently would have been too difficult and weird and sad — people read poems, more often than not ones that had meter and rhyme, such as W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”

There is a great satisfaction in hearing rhyme, either in poetry or song, and knowing the world is at least for a moment orderable, that the seemingly disconnected elements can be convincingly fitted together. But while rhyme can be funny or witty, or a lovely, even essential consolation, it is obviously not necessary for poetry: Too many great poets have written free verse for the past 150 years for that to be the case.

Indeed, nowadays there’s simply no way to rhyme and not sound a bit out of time. Our world is too wary and conscious of the different space rhyme and meter create. This doesn’t mean great formal poetry can’t be written today. But because rhyme and meter are not essential, formal poetry is by its nature a subcategory of poetry as a whole.

Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind. This is why it is translatable, even from a language such as Chinese, which has very little in common with English. What can be translated is the leap from one thought to another: what I call the associative movement particular to poetry. That leap, that movement, is what makes poetry poetry.

When I look at the poems I wrote in my early 20s, I realize they are bad not because they are written in forms, but because they are essentially fake. Whatever moments are true and good in them exist despite the formal elements. Poems in rhyme and meter don’t suit my mind or the way it needs to move. It’s like style: It might seem cool every once in a while to wear a vintage suit, but the fact of the matter is it just doesn’t work for me.

One thing I do notice about my poems is that, though they might not have overt formal elements, there is always a rhythm that develops, subtly, in the voice of the speaker. Maybe something more like a cadence. Most poetry is “formal” in that way.

And I think, secretly, that my poems actually do rhyme. It’s just that the rhyme is what I would call “conceptual,” that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn’t have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the “obscurity of an order, a whole.”

… never thought seriously for a moment, about ending University Diaries. But the cruel university events I’ve been compelled to follow lately, so early in the new school year, have certainly brought me back to this Philip Larkin poem.

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

Forget What Did

Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,

One no longer cicatrized
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.

l wanted them over,
Hurried to burial
And looked back on

Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the windows
Of an opaque childhood.

And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed

Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.

Rap for the JAP, von Stuck for the Stuck Up, Beardsley for if you went to Brearley, Plath for the Upper Clath — Frederick Seidel’s suddenly much-talked-about poetry offers pilled-up and plastic-surgeoned Americans an insider’s view of their insides. Listen to his comic drawl as he recites tons of his poems here.

Frederick Seidel affords access to Bernard Madoff’s mentality, and we need that. But looked at from the point of view of literature, Seidel’s poems are barely poems. They’re one-offs. William Logan is correct to complain that “Seidel’s jet-set tastes and upmarket sinning get pretty tiresome.”

Sinning itself is of course far from tiresome. UD could sun herself under a sinning sky all day long. But the sky must speak to her; it must have poetry in it.

Seidel finds clever ways to express his hellcats-of-the-gravy world (“I want to date-rape life.”), but these are not poetic ways. His poems are bunches of what Logan calls “blunt phrasings.” He declaims. His recited poetry is riotous because he’s a performer. The poems are performances.

Superficiality is super and – as a take on twenty-first century Manhattan – illuminating; but the poems become tiresome because Seidel refuses depth of any kind, even as a sort of faintly recalled antiphony. There’s no Why am I what I am? There’s only This is what I am. The obsessive childish word pairings throughout Seidel’s work (china vagina), coupled with the crystal-shattering self-presentation, eventually makes you feel you are reading The Cat in the Hat, with Seidel as the Cat, Thing One, and Thing Two.

In an excellent appraisal of Seidel in The Nation, Ange Mlinko compares him to one of UD‘s favorite novelists. “Mostly I’m reminded of Michel Houellebecq, another quiet chap with a virulent literary persona and a thing about sex and Islamic fundamentalism.” I see her point, and yet there’s an important difference: Houellebecq actually does use language to explore the vile bodies and minds of his dissolutes. By the time his best-known novel, The Elementary Particles, is over, its main character, in a gesture toward seriousness, has decided to move to Ireland — a country that attracts him in part because, unlike France, it’s still seriously Catholic.

But hey. How about a poem. Nothing like talking about a poet without giving you a sample. Here goes.

ODE TO SPRING

I can only find words for.
And sometimes I can’t.
Here are these flowers that stand for.
I stand here on the sidewalk.

I can’t stand it, but yes of course I understand it.
Everything has to have a meaning.
Things have to stand for something.
I can’t take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.

I say to the flower stand man:
Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.
I’ll take a dozen of the lilies.
I’m standing as it were on my knees

Before a little man up on a raised
Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed
Along the outside of the shop.
I take my flames and pay inside.

I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface.

Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes — our strongest poets make immediate experience present for us. They make language that makes the world right now, as we feel it and see it, alive in what Lawrence called its quivering momentaneity.

UD thought of this threesome while watching, with Mr. UD, from 5:30 to 6:30 this morning, a sunrise that started with blue rays over a dark sea and then proceeded to total cosmic pink.

Watching its changes, UD recalled this little Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

(John Tavener put this to music.)

It’s one of your nice neat paradoxes – try to stop the world and you’ll kill it; live life on the fly and you’ll live forever.

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

In a great essay about Hughes, Alice Oswald describes her discovery of him at a time in her life when she had a job as a gardener at the Royal Horticultural Society:

… I’d been up at dawn that morning, pruning apples all day. I was fed up with people floating past me using the word “idyllic” and I was fed up with reading about nature at one remove. I thought I’d rather hear a gardener’s or a farmer’s account of the landscape than any poet’s. Then I opened The Hawk in the Rain (Hughes’s first collection) and there was my worked-in world alive in all its freshness.

She mentions in particular a sunrise poem by Hughes, “The Horses.”

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird –
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey – ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays –

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

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

Oswald comments:

This non-nostalgic way of writing is, to my mind, the only way of getting through to the animate part of nature, the soft growing tip. Hughes called it “the vital somewhat terrible spirit of natural life which is new in every second”. DH Lawrence, whose poems Hughes admired, called it “quivering momentaneity”. He spoke of the need for an “unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present”, which is a pretty good prediction of what Hughes was to write 50 or so years later.

It’s very strange to me, the way poems like this one by Hughes are in fact nostalgic, if you like — maybe very nostalgic. After all, the poem is remembering a transcendent moment in the speaker’s past, and remembering it not all that differently from the way Wordsworth, or Yeats – a later Romantic – would remember and render it … He tells it in the past tense, while a lot of contemporary poets would tell it in the present; and he ends his misty narrative with a prayer, for goodness sake:

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place…

Or call it a hope, or whatever, but my point is that for a momentaneous poem, this one spends its time either in the past or anticipating the future.

And, I mean, a sunrise. What could be more Romantic? Romantic to the point – this poem being written in the twentieth century – of kitsch?

Well, but language matters. A world cast in frost. Every word snapped shut with a d or a t: world, cast, frost. Short shut lines. Frigid, tapping on the page like a frosty twig tapping on a window. Icy shivery words and lines that makes us feel, and shudder.

And this is no Romantic sunrise, with its blackening dregs of the brightening grey.

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

Megalith.

Breathe.

The sounds take us from the cold shut-in world to the exhaling horses — the world begins to make noise. Not language, but noise. The poet’s breath, the horses’ breath — breaths that conjure tortuous statues now coming to life in the sunlight. I listened in emptiness; and may I – he writes at the very end of the poem, continue hearing the horizons endure.

Sensory funny business here: You can’t listen in emptiness, and you can’t hear horizons. You listen in silence and you see horizons. Or so tightass literalist Scathing Online Schoolmarm would insist. Yet it’s precisely the weird momentous momentary sense of merging with the physical and metaphysical world, the experience of transcending your senses, that the poet recalls, brings back — by writing the poem, by explicitly asking in the poem that it be brought back, and by, perhaps, if you’re the right reader, like Alice Oswald, somehow conjuring it back — your version of it back — for you.

And NOT Dover Beach!

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

UD (to Mr. UD, who just this moment returned from sitting on the beach for two hours): Why are there no good beach poems?

Mr. UD: There are many good mountain poems.

UD: No there aren’t.

Mr. UD: Name a bad mountain poem.

UD: “The Mountain in Your Butt.”

Mr. UD: Our daughter is absolutely wonderful, but the day she taught you to end your sentences with in your butt was not a good day.

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

Rhode Island, by William Meredith, is the best I can do at the moment.

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

Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over
again, like the rented animals in Aïda.
In the late morning the land breeze
turns and now the extras are driving
all the white elephants the other way.
What language are the children shouting in?
He is lying on the beach listening.

The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels.
He tries to remember snow noise.
Would powder snow ping like that?
But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow.
Why doesn’t the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?

He tries to remember snow, his season.
The mind is in charge of things then.
Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic,
all that openness and swaying.
No matter how often you make love
in August you’re always aware of genitalia,
your own and the half-naked others’.
Even with the gracefulest bathers
you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises,
mammals disporting themselves in a blue element,
smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard
watches himself awhile, like a blue movie.

In the other hemisphere now people
are standing up, at work at their easels.
There they think about love at night
when they take off their serious clothes
and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets.

Today the children, his own among them,
are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese,
using the colonial dialect of Brazil.
It is just as well, they have all been changed
into small shrill marginal animals,
he would not want to understand them again
until after Labor Day. He just lays there.

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

Eh. I don’t say it’s great. Drifty thoughts of a middle-aged daddy lying, laying, lieing, alie, on the beach, his kids nearby. The bit about eroticism is sort of okay, all that openness and swaying. Gives you a sense of the guy’s orientation, summer for him being perturbingly messy and bestial, an out of joint season during which Yalies misspeak and his own kids sound Portuguese.

The speaker, Hazard, looks at his own, what, tenting little erection or something, “like a blue movie.”

He doesn’t like summer, in short. Can’t wait for Labor Day, when we go back to work. Summer creatures have morphed from sandless serious citizens to shrill marginal animals, and he doesn’t like it.

He ends with a joke which links him — drily, ironically — to the gibberish world around him: He just lays there.

Higgledy piggledy
Gloria Bachmann
When asked why she ghosted
Said “Shaddap you face!

I’ve made a big fortune
Postmenopausally
Find your own cashbox
And get off my case.”

Details on this verse form here.

The reopening of Keats’ house in London, and the release soon of a film about his love affair with Fanny Braun, has UD reopening a poem of his that she’s always found difficult.

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

Ode on Melancholy

No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

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

Three stanzas, three sentences, in praise of sadness. An ode, after all, a song of praise, directed to you, emphatically, from its first lines: NO. Don’t go killing yourself.

Fine, you are experiencing deep sorrow, yes; but suicide, or doping yourself into a living suicide, so that you don’t feel anything anymore, and therefore have rid yourself of the depression that seems to be killing you — this can’t be the answer. Don’t drown your soul’s anguish. That anguish is in fact wakeful; and you ought to attend to that wakefulness, and see what it’s about.

When depression descends, when it hits out of nowhere, and hits hard, go with it. As Charles Wright puts it in one of UD‘s favorite poems, let what’s taking you take you. Glut thy sorrow on a morning rose… on the wealth of globèd peonies.  Go to the natural world with it, and feel grief fully as it deepens, with wistfulness and poignancy, the beauty of the world.  Or if those soft emotions – wistfulness and all that – go by the wayside, and  your sorrow explodes into rage, go there too.  Let it rave; feed deep on it.

Sorrow lives with, lives in, beauty.  Death is the mother of beauty, writes Wallace Stevens.  And Keats: “In the very  temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”  Our brevity, the brevity of the world, the brevity of love —  these brevities give beauty to our moments.  To experience our lives with the depth and often harsh clarity of this awareness is the only way to experience our lives fully, strongly: “whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape.”  This is, among other things, a sexual poem.  It evokes sensual power, the strength to

…tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.

After all, Marvell also writes, in To His Coy Mistress:

The grave’s a fine and private place
But none I think do there embrace.

To take the path sick sorrow took is to take the only path that matters — the path of the fully lived life, which tastes the sadness of her might.

“We just stood there and stared for a long
while, because what is there to say?’’

A Washington Post article quotes a
‘thesdan. She’s talking about fireflies
in her yard.

Brad Leithauser says the same thing in
“Hundreds of Fireflies” —

Merely
to watch, and say nothing,

gratefully,
is what is best…

The poem’s a mite precious for rough
and tumble UD, but it’s got its moments:

… three, four of them
lighten nightfall of all

solemnity; ten or twelve
and the eyes are led
endlessly astray;

and in deeper night
it’s twenty, fifty, more—a number
beyond simple reckoning—

and still they keep
coming.

I like eyes led endlessly astray.

That’s just what it was, last night, as I stood
at the bottom of my half acre wood looking up,
down, and all around at the spots on the
lawn, the trees, the sky. On my arms.

Each arhythmic light a trinket / to entice
some wayward mate. That’s good too.
Arhythmic, with trinket picking up on the
sound of arhythmic. Suggestive too of
the heart’s pulse as it watches fiery pulses
on the bushes. Night-blooming bugs.

For Souter’s departure today, much reciting of poetry, all of it written by Robert Frost. In his farewell letter to his colleagues, Souter describes the joy of his work at the court as he and his fellow justices contended over “those things that matter to decent people in civil society.”

He quotes from Frost’s poem Two Tramps in Mud Time — a poem, he writes, that expresses “the ideal of the life engaged, ‘…where love and need are one…’ … That phrase accounts for the finest moments of my life on this court…”

The poem describes the poet and his love of chopping wood. He both needs the wood for his fires, and loves in itself the act of chopping the wood:

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

These are goods in themselves, the ideal here that of the human body deeply engaged, in zenlike self-transcendence, in an act. But beyond the engrossing physical pleasure of this natural movement lies something else:

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

The only really meaningful act has this double aspect of vocation — a job that must be done to satisfy a human need — and avocation — a playful gratuitous act of sheer joy. Iris Murdoch calls art “close dangerous play with unconscious forces.” It’s the same idea: Souter is evoking the serious play — often, indeed, at the court, with dangerous forces — that work as a justice has represented for him. Play for mortal stakes.

Longtime readers know that UD likes to make poems out of words and phrases in newspaper articles.

Here’s one. Article first.

Quiet please — Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is preparing to have her swans counted.

Buckingham Palace has announced that the annual Swan Upping, a tradition dating back to the 12th century which involves a census of the swan population on the River Thames, will be conducted by the queen’s official Swan Marker from July 20-24.

“With the assistance of the Queen’s Swan Warden, Professor Christopher Perrins of the University of Oxford, the swans and young cygnets are also assessed for any signs of injury or disease,” Buckingham Palace said in announcing the count.

The process involves the Swan Marker, David Barber, rowing up the Thames for five days with the Swan Warden in traditional skiffs while wearing special scarlet uniforms and counting, weighing and measuring swans and cygnets.

It may seem eccentric, but it is very important to the queen.

According to custom, Britain’s sovereign owns all unmarked, mute swans in open water, but the queen now exercises the right only on stretches of the Thames and its nearby tributaries.

In medieval times, the Swan Marker would not only travel up the river counting the swans, but would catch as many as possible as they were sought-after for banquets and feasts.

This year, the Swan Marker and the Swan Warden are particularly keen to discover how much damage is being caused to swans and cygnets by attacks from dogs and from discarded fishing tackle.

It is also an important year because Queen Elizabeth has decided to join her team of Swan Uppers for part of the census.

She will follow them up the river and visit a local school project on the whole subject of swans, cygnets and the Thames.

“Education and conservation are essential to the role of Swan Upping and the involvement of school children is always a rewarding experience,” Buckingham Palace said.
 

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Swan Upping

Up the Thames the Marker rows,
Swans and cygnets counting.
Buckingham’s announcing
This year the sovereign follows.

Swan Warden, particular keen,
Eyes discarded tack,
And signs of dog attack,
On the mute unmarked of the queen.

Swan Uppers when medieval
Sought after fowl for feast.
Now they assess disease
On tributary travel.