… at 91.
Indomitable is one of those words, like poignant, that always seems to end up in a cliché; yet Spender was that sort of person, able always to rise up again from downfall.
Natasha Spender’s courage was never more severely tested than when, two months after her … book [in praise of the Spenders’ restored house and garden in France] came out, [the house, Mas St Jerome,] was completely destroyed in a forest fire. Luckily [friends] were staying with her at the time and woke up in time to rescue her and raise the alarm, or she would almost certainly have been killed. The fire not only destroyed the house and the garden but also Spender’s library, a loss his widow felt particularly keenly. But she remained philosophical and typically down-to earth. “I lived through the Blitz and this is remarkably similar,” she told an interviewer. “I must buy some secateurs … and start work cutting back in the garden.”
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I don’t know if this poem of Spender’s (my parents loved Spender, so I grew up reading his poems) was written for Natasha, but since they had a long and happy marriage, I wouldn’t be surprised:
The Trance
Sometimes, apart in sleep, by chance,
You fall out of my arms, alone,
Into the chaos of your separate trance.
My eyes gaze through your forehead, through the bone,
And see where in your sleep distress has torn
Its path, which on your lips is shown
And on your hands and in your dream forlorn.
Restless, you turn to me and press
Those timid words against my ear
Which thunder at my heart like stones.
‘Mercy,’ you plead, Then ‘Who can bless?’
You ask. ‘I am pursued by Time,’ you moan.
I watch that precipice of fear
You tread, naked in naked distress.
[Pause here, at the midpoint of the poem, and consider its peculiarly uxorious tableau … Long-married people share the intimacy and vulnerability of the marriage bed, in which sometimes one of them, awake while the other sleeps, can witness an anguished muttering bad dream state of the other… Spender calls this the separate trance, the starkly personal grappling with specific demons, memories, fears: I am pursued by Time…]
To that deep care we are committed
Beneath the wildness of our flesh
And shuddering horror of our dream,
Where unmasked agony is permitted.
Our bodies, stripped of clothes that seem,
And our souls, stripped of beauty’s mesh,
Meet their true selves, their charms outwitted.
This pure trance is the oracle
That speaks no language but the heart
Our angel with our devil meets
In the atrocious dark nor do they part
But each forgives and greets,
And their mutual terrors heal
Within our married miracle.
[The separate trance somehow transfigures into a mutual terror, a true meeting place of selves stripped of disguise, their mortal agony unmasked. The eye of love sees even into this atrocious dark (note the origin of the word atrocious). Indeed love brings angelic light to it; and, in a specifically married miracle, frees, wakens, the loved one from nightmare.]
December 16th, 2010 at 2:45PM
[…] something about these poems of the long-married… Like this similar one by Stephen Spender… These poems can feature a peculiar intimacy with the unconscious of the much-loved, […]