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Category: a poem to ponder

October 1, 2012

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” – Thomas Gray

                                            for Wills (and June)

 
when a friend told of her sister’s sudden death only
a day after they’d laughed over the phone together
I could only think of words for her of condolence,
but which could never reach the depth of compassion
I intended in so grievous a fall 
 
I looked for an appropriate poem in my recall of
those that had profoundly touched me to do with
bereavement
 
came first to my memory despite the very nearly half
century since I’d read it, “tolling” still despite those
many intervening years 
 
it is no wonder I remembered, it is upon reading it
again the most beautiful poem I’ve ever come upon 
 
 
it isn’t a short poem, 128 lines
 
but give yourself a private moment  just to ponder,
assimilate, it’s searing wisdom 
 
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
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September 20, 2012

the Chopin Scherzi‏

 
“scherzo” is Italian for “joke”, it’s also a specific
musical mode, quick and delightful, usually
the third movement in a larger piece – sonata,
symphony, concerto – as a contrast to the
preceding adagio, or slower, more melancholic
tonal statement  
 
once again Chopin extracts the mode from the
larger composition, where it had sat as a merely
supportive entity, thereby giving it its own
distinction, having achieved the transcendental
ability to turn secondary material into resplendent
and incontrovertible gold   
 
 
to tell the truth I don’t much get the humour
either, what joke do these scherzi tell, though
I intuit a kind of slapstick, initial grunts for
instance, like engines gunning, before
undertaking a more ethereal flight in the 
second scherzo, the stardust that suddenly falls
on the more languid, forlorn notes, in the third
– contrasts that are, were, subversive surely
then, idiosyncratic, potentially aesthetically
controversial
 
or, is this music, people might’ve wondered 
 
except that Chopin invariably enchants, doubtless
did also then  
 
and turned the rules, as artist do, upside down  
 
maybe that’s the joke, and Chopin was already
onto it 
 
music, he meant, is in the eye of the beholder,
there is no explicit, dare I say Platonic, or
absolute, standard, music is fraught with 
merely imagination, rules do not apply 
 
perhaps his enduring fame rests on our own
complicity with this message, our lives are
the expression of the vividness, indeed
stardust, of, to a sublime degree, our dreams
 
aspiration, in other words, is destiny     
 
who’d a thunk it
 
 
Richard 
 
 
 
 
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September 19, 2012

XXlll. Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XXlll. Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead

Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead,
Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine?
And would the sun for thee more coldly shine
Because of grave-damps falling round my head?
I marvelled, my Belovèd, when I read
Thy thought so in the letter. I am thine–
But . . . so much to thee? Can I pour thy wine
While my hands tremble? Then my soul, instead
Of dreams of death, resumes life’s lower range.
Then, love me, Love! Look on me–breathe on me!
As brighter ladies do not count it strange,
For love, to give up acres and degree,
I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange
My near sweet view of Heaven, for earth with thee!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

_____________________

it is nearly a commonplace that to be profoundly
loved keeps one in fact alive, it is also so in my
own experience, though the expression of it may
often seem, paradoxically, subservient and
fawning

and a great spiritual burden, I would think,
for the anchor, who would be told, in reversed
circumstances, that to be abandoned would be
to have been left, ignominiously, to die

but Elizabeth chooses not to survive, but to
not die, there is a difference, enough to make
a jewel of this poem

Richard

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September 15, 2012

XXll. When our two souls stand up erect and strong – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XXll. When our two souls stand up erect and strong

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvèd point,–what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Belovèd,–where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

__________________________

in this XXllnd of her Portuguese sonnets, perhaps a little
too unbridled for my taste, I nearly even blushed,
Elizabeth seems to have been eating all her Wheaties

“erect and strong” indeed, “wings break[ing] into fire”,
the yet unfulfilled idea of “mounting higher”, goodness,
I’ve been even tripling in my excitement all my o’s here
instead of only doubling them, in my unsettling
distraction trippingly misspelling gooodness, and,
however improbably, even tooo

I think I’ll draw the curtain on this one, or at least a veil

this kind of thing, this sort of personal revelation, doesn’t
occur much until, in Paris before the Second World War,
Henry Miller, who is way too uninhibited, not to mention
creatively unedited, generally, for my perhaps too proper
sensitivity, though you could read to the greatest
advantage his magisterial “The Colossus of Maroussi“,
an exhilarating evocation of the Greeks, their invaluable
life lessons, grounded in the still unrivalled wisdom of
their verily Promethean legacy

Richard

psst: “Every moment is a golden one for him who has
the vision to recognize it as such”

Henry Miller

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September 13, 2012

the ensuing Ages – Ovid‏

    The Silver Age - Lucas Cranach the Elder

                            “The Siver Age“  (c.1516)

                              Lucas Cranach the Elder

                                                     ________
 
 
 
it is interesting to note how profoundly Ovid‘s mythological
setting marked Christian notions of the Creation, which at
least in the West have held sway now for some nearly two
thousand years
 
it is a tale then twice told, the last time however with not
half even the first one’s contagious exuberance, I think  
 
I believe more in Ovid then, also in Cranach and da Cortona,
worthy indeed proponents of that earlier oracular deity 
 
 
Richard
 
                       ____________________
 
 
 
 
But when good Saturn, banish’d from above,
Was driv’n to Hell, the world was under Jove.
Succeeding times a silver age behold,
Excelling brass, but more excell’d by gold.
Then summer, autumn, winter did appear:
And spring was but a season of the year.
The sun his annual course obliquely made,
Good days contracted, and enlarg’d the bad.
Then air with sultry heats began to glow;
The wings of winds were clogg’d with ice and snow;
And shivering mortals, into houses driv’n,
Sought shelter from th’ inclemency of Heav’n.
Those houses, then, were caves, or homely sheds;
With twining oziers fenc’d; and moss their beds.
Then ploughs, for seed, the fruitful furrows broke,
And oxen labour’d first beneath the yoke.
 
 
To this came next in course, the brazen age:
A warlike offspring, prompt to bloody rage,
Not impious yet…
 
 
 
   The Age of Iron - Pietro da Cortona
 
                             “The Age of Iron”  (1637)
 
                                      Pietro da Cortona
 
                                            __________
                                     
 
  
Hard steel succeeded then:
And stubborn as the metal, were the men.
Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook:
Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took.
Then sails were spread, to every wind that blew.
Raw were the sailors, and the depths were new:
Trees, rudely hollow’d, did the waves sustain;
E’re ships in triumph plough’d the watry plain.

Then land-marks limited to each his right:
For all before was common as the light.
Nor was the ground alone requir’d to bear
Her annual income to the crooked share,
But greedy mortals, rummaging her store,
Digg’d from her entrails first the precious oar;
Which next to Hell, the prudent Gods had laid;
And that alluring ill, to sight display’d.
Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold,
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold:
And double death did wretched Man invade,
By steel assaulted, and by gold betray’d,
Now (brandish’d weapons glittering in their hands)
Mankind is broken loose from moral bands;
No rights of hospitality remain:
The guest, by him who harbour’d him, is slain,
The son-in-law pursues the father’s life;
The wife her husband murders, he the wife.
The step-dame poyson for the son prepares;
The son inquires into his father’s years.
Faith flies, and piety in exile mourns;
And justice, here opprest, to Heav’n returns.

 
                                               Ovid 
                                                                    
                                   (from “Metamorphoses“, Book I, in a translation by
                                   Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, Alexander Pope,
                                   Joseph Addison, William Congreve and other
                                   eminent hands)
   
 
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September 12, 2012

XXl. Say Over Again, And Yet Once Over Again – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XXl. Say Over Again, And Yet Once Over Again

Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated
Should seem “a cuckoo-song,” as thou dost treat it,
Remember, never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.
Belovèd, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain
Cry, “Speak once more–thou lovest!” Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll,
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me–toll
The silver iterance!–only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence with thy soul.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

_________________________

though we might no longer be Romantics, it isn’t
easy to forego its ideals, to succumb to the pure
illusion of unfettered, even selfless, affection,
romance still burns, though like only maybe
embers, no less searing for being undisclosed,
in our more eclectic 21st-Century consciousness

repeat again and again that “thou dost love me”
she says, though it might seem silly to him like
a “cuckoo-song”, but these bursts of apparently
mere serendipity, she defends, are to the
contrary integral to spring, and not at all
unnecessary

and in her “darkness” these trivialities would
reassure her

as art itself incidentally, a triviality neither,
also does and is meant to do

and indeed even the innumerable stars in the
heavens, she continues, flowers in the fields,
are none of them irrelevant, superfluous,
“[t]oo many”

nor then would to say that “thou dost love me”,
“silver iterance” indeed, never forgetting
nonetheless to fit the feeling to the words

I always say “I love you” now, taking care to
ever include the feeling, upon taking leave of
those I love

maybe that’s an atavism

Richard

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September 9, 2012

Edward Hopper’s “11 A.M.,” 1926 – Joyce Carol Oates‏

Eleven A.M. - Edward Hopper

“Eleven A.M.” (1926)

Edward Hopper

___________

we’ve come a long way from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
in this contemporary poem – from the New Yorker, August
27, 2012 – we are no longer Romantics

Richard

_______________________

Edward Hopper’s “11 A.M.,” 1926

She’s naked yet wearing shoes.
Wants to think nude. And happy in her body.

Though it’s a fleshy aging body. And her posture
in the chair—leaning forward, arms on knees,
staring out the window—makes her belly bulge,
but what the hell.

What the hell, he isn’t here.

Lived in this damn drab apartment at Third Avenue,
Twenty-third Street, Manhattan, how many
damn years, has to be at least fifteen. Moved to the city
from Hackensack, needing to breathe.

She’d never looked back. Sure they called her selfish,
cruel. What the hell, the use they’d have made of her,
she’d be sucked dry like bone marrow.

First job was file clerk at Trinity Trust. Wasted
three years of her young life waiting
for R.B. to leave his wife and wouldn’t you think
a smart girl like her would know better?

Second job also file clerk but then she’d been promoted
to Mr. Castle’s secretarial staff at Lyman Typewriters. The
least the old bastard could do for her and she’d
have done a lot better except for fat-face Stella Czechi.

Third job, Tvek Realtors & Insurance and she’s
Mr. Tvek’s private secretary: What would I do
without you, my dear one?

As long as Tvek pays her decent. And he doesn’t
let her down like last Christmas, she’d wanted to die.

This damn room she hates. Dim-lit like a region of the soul
into which light doesn’t penetrate. Soft-shabby old furniture
and sagging mattress like those bodies in dreams we feel
but don’t see. But she keeps her bed made
every God-damned day, visitors or not.

He doesn’t like disorder. He’d told her how he’d learned
to make a proper bed in the U.S. Army in 1917.

The trick is, he says, you make the bed as soon as you get up.

Detaches himself from her as soon as it’s over. Sticky skin,
hairy legs, patches of scratchy hair on his shoulders, chest,
belly. She’d like him to hold her and they could drift into
sleep together but rarely this happens. Crazy wanting her, then
abruptly it’s over—he’s inside his head,
and she’s inside hers.

Now this morning she’s thinking God-damned bastard, this has
got to be the last time. Waiting for him to call to explain
Why he hadn’t come last night. And there’s the chance
he might come here before calling, which he has done more than once.
Couldn’t keep away. God, I’m crazy for you.

She’s thinking she will give the bastard ten more minutes.

She’s Jo Hopper with her plain redhead’s face stretched
on this fleshy female’s face and he’s the artist but also
the lover and last week he came to take her
out to Delmonico’s but in this dim-lit room they’d made love
in her bed and never got out until too late and she’d overheard
him on the phone explaining—there’s the sound of a man’s voice
explaining to a wife that is so callow, so craven, she’s sick
with contempt recalling. Yet he says he has left his family, he
loves her.

Runs his hands over her body like a blind man trying to see. And
the radiance in his face that’s pitted and scarred, he needs her in
the way a starving man needs food. Die without you. Don’t
leave me.

He’d told her it wasn’t what she thought. Wasn’t his family
that kept him from loving her all he could but his life
he’d never told anyone about in the war, in the infantry,
in France. What crept like paralysis through him.
Things that had happened to him, and things
that he’d witnessed, and things that he’d perpetrated himself
with his own hands. And she’d taken his hands and kissed them,
and brought them against her breasts that were aching like the
breasts of a young mother ravenous to give suck,
and sustenance. And she said No. That is your old life.
I am your new life.

She will give her new life five more minutes.

Joyce Carol Oates

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September 8, 2012

“The Golden Age” – Ovid‏

      The Golden Age - Pietro da Cortona

                                  “The Golden Age“ (1637)

 
                                                   Pietro da Cortona 
 
                                                       ____________
 
 
Eden revisited 
 
 
Richard
 
         __________________
 
 

The Golden Age

The golden age was first; when Man yet new,
No rule but uncorrupted reason knew:
And, with a native bent, did good pursue.
Unforc’d by punishment, un-aw’d by fear,
His words were simple, and his soul sincere;
Needless was written law, where none opprest:
The law of Man was written in his breast:
No suppliant crowds before the judge appear’d,
No court erected yet, nor cause was heard:
But all was safe, for conscience was their guard.
The mountain-trees in distant prospect please,
E’re yet the pine descended to the seas:
E’re sails were spread, new oceans to explore:
And happy mortals, unconcern’d for more,
Confin’d their wishes to their native shore.
No walls were yet; nor fence, nor mote, nor mound,
Nor drum was heard, nor trumpet’s angry sound:
Nor swords were forg’d; but void of care and crime,
The soft creation slept away their time.
The teeming Earth, yet guiltless of the plough,
And unprovok’d, did fruitful stores allow:
Content with food, which Nature freely bred,
On wildings and on strawberries they fed;
Cornels and bramble-berries gave the rest,
And falling acorns furnish’d out a feast.
The flow’rs unsown, in fields and meadows reign’d:
And Western winds immortal spring maintain’d.
In following years, the bearded corn ensu’d
From Earth unask’d, nor was that Earth renew’d.
From veins of vallies, milk and nectar broke;
And honey sweating through the pores of oak.

                                                 Ovid                                                                     

                                   (from “Metamorphoses“, Book I, in a translation by
                                   Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, Alexander Pope,
                                   Joseph Addison, William Congreve and other
                                   eminent hands)
 
 
 
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September 6, 2012

“The Creation of the World” – Ovid‏

                                                                                                                                                   way more fun than the Bible 
 
 
Richard  
 
            ___________

  
 
Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth, to Caesar’s times.
Before the seas, and this terrestrial ball,
And Heav’n’s high canopy, that covers all,
One was the face of Nature; if a face:
Rather a rude and indigested mass:
A lifeless lump, unfashion’d, and unfram’d,
Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam’d.
No sun was lighted up, the world to view;
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew:
Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky,
Nor pois’d, did on her own foundations lye:
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water’s dark abyss unnavigable.
No certain form on any was imprest;
All were confus’d, and each disturb’d the rest.
For hot and cold were in one body fixt;
And soft with hard, and light with heavy mixt.
 
But God, or Nature, while they thus contend,
To these intestine discords put an end:
Then earth from air, and seas from earth were driv’n,
And grosser air sunk from aetherial Heav’n.
Thus disembroil’d, they take their proper place;
The next of kin, contiguously embrace;
And foes are sunder’d, by a larger space.
The force of fire ascended first on high,
And took its dwelling in the vaulted sky:
Then air succeeds, in lightness next to fire;
Whose atoms from unactive earth retire.
Earth sinks beneath, and draws a num’rous throng
Of pondrous, thick, unwieldy seeds along.
About her coasts, unruly waters roar;
And rising, on a ridge, insult the shore.
Thus when the God, whatever God was he,
Had form’d the whole, and made the parts agree,
That no unequal portions might be found,
He moulded Earth into a spacious round:
Then with a breath, he gave the winds to blow;
And bad the congregated waters flow.
He adds the running springs, and standing lakes;
And bounding banks for winding rivers makes.
Some part, in Earth are swallow’d up, the most
In ample oceans, disembogu’d, are lost.
He shades the woods, the vallies he restrains
With rocky mountains, and extends the plains.
 
And as five zones th’ aetherial regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign’d:
The sun with rays, directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:
The two beneath the distant poles, complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt th’ extreams, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.
The fields of liquid air, inclosing all,
Surround the compass of this earthly ball:
The lighter parts lye next the fires above;
The grosser near the watry surface move:
Thick clouds are spread, and storms engender there,
And thunder’s voice, which wretched mortals fear,
And winds that on their wings cold winter bear.
Nor were those blustring brethren left at large,
On seas, and shores, their fury to discharge:
Bound as they are, and circumscrib’d in place,
They rend the world, resistless, where they pass;
And mighty marks of mischief leave behind;
Such is the rage of their tempestuous kind.
First Eurus to the rising morn is sent
(The regions of the balmy continent);
And Eastern realms, where early Persians run,
To greet the blest appearance of the sun.
Westward, the wanton Zephyr wings his flight;
Pleas’d with the remnants of departing light:
Fierce Boreas, with his off-spring, issues forth
T’ invade the frozen waggon of the North.
While frowning Auster seeks the Southern sphere;
And rots, with endless rain, th’ unwholsom year.  

High o’er the clouds, and empty realms of wind,
The God a clearer space for Heav’n design’d;
Where fields of light, and liquid aether flow;
Purg’d from the pondrous dregs of Earth below.

Scarce had the Pow’r distinguish’d these, when streight
The stars, no longer overlaid with weight,
Exert their heads, from underneath the mass;
And upward shoot, and kindle as they pass,
And with diffusive light adorn their heav’nly place.
Then, every void of Nature to supply,
With forms of Gods he fills the vacant sky:
New herds of beasts he sends, the plains to share:
New colonies of birds, to people air:
And to their oozy beds, the finny fish repair.

A creature of a more exalted kind
Was wanting yet, and then was Man design’d:
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire form’d, and fit to rule the rest:
Whether with particles of heav’nly fire
The God of Nature did his soul inspire,
Or Earth, but new divided from the sky,
And, pliant, still retain’d th’ aetherial energy:
Which wise Prometheus temper’d into paste,
And, mixt with living streams, the godlike image cast.

Thus, while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft; and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.
From such rude principles our form began;
And earth was metamorphos’d into Man. 

 
                                         Ovid    
 
                                   (from “Metamorphoses“, Book I , in a translation by
                                   Sir Samuel Garth,John Dryden, Alexander Pope,
                                   Joseph Addison, William Congreve and other
                                   eminent hands)
 
 
 
 
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August 18, 2012

“King Lear” – William Shakespeare

 

forget about any other version, this is the only “King Lear” 

 
Richard
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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