Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Walt Whitman: 200 Years On


For the 200th anniversary of the birth of our national poet (May 31, 2019), here are lines from Walt Whitman's 'Song of the Universal', which composer Ola Gjielo has selected and set for chorus, piano, and orchestra. (You can hear a performance of the work from Spain at the first link below.) Whitman was one of the first writers who made me take poetry seriously, and I'm sure there are more echoes of his verses in my own work than I will ever find.

Come, said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the Universal.

In this broad Earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed Perfection.

By every life a share, or more or less,
None born but it is born—concealed or unconcealed, the seed is waiting.

Give me, O God, to sing that thought!
Give me—give him or her I love, this quenchless faith
In Thy ensemble. Whatever else withheld, withhold not from us
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space;
Health, peace, salvation universal.

All, all for Immortality!
Love, like the light, silently wrapping all!
Nature’s amelioration blessing all!
The blossoms, fruits of ages—orchards divine and certain;
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening.

 Written in 1871, this poem--considerably longer than the lines Gjielo selected--appears at the head of the 'Birds of Passage' section of Leaves of Grass. Is this Whitman's most succinct expression of his artistic credo? I think it might be.


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What kind of performer was Rilke?


We have audio recordings of Tolstoy and Tennyson--even one of Robert Browning. But no recordings of Rainer Maria Rilke are known to exist, although he lived until 1926. In a letter written in April of that year to Dieter Bassermann, Rilke noted that the phonograph could contribute "to a new, orderly sense of responsibility toward the reading aloud of a poem (by which alone its whole existence appears)."

 We do, however, have a vivid description of Rilke as a performer. Here is Marie von Thurn and Taxis' account of a reading he gave at her home, Lautschin Castle, in Bohemia in July 1911:

 Rilke read in a very characteristic manner, always standing up, in a voice capable of infinite modulations, which sometimes rose to an amazingly sonorous volume, in a strange, singing tone that strongly stressed the rhythm.

 It was entirely different from anything one had ever heard -- startling at first, then wonderfully moving. I have never heard verse spoken more solemnly and, at the same time, with greater simplicity; one could have listened to him forever.

 It was remarkable what long pauses he made. Then he would slowly bow his head, almost closing his heavy eyelids, and one could hear the silence, as one hears the pauses of a Beethoven sonata.

 This letter is quoted in the 1949 book, Rilke: Man and Poet, by Nora Wydenbruck, which is well worth hunting down. Wydenbruck (1885-1962) was an Austrian-British author and painter, now best known for her German translations of Four Quartets and several of Eliot's plays. In 1948, she published one of the first English translations of the Duino Elegies.

Today recordings of Rilke's poetry and prose are available in many languages. Some of my favorites are those by the German actor Sven Gortz. He may not emphasize the meters as much as Rilke himself apparently did, but he has a fine sense of the human drama in poems like 'An Archaic Torso of Apollo'.  


Lautschin, now in the Czech Republic, as it is today (Photo: Radio Prague)

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What have we learned from Dylan Thomas?

Dylan Thomas in Swansea at the age of 23












When I started reading Dylan Thomas, the only real poetry I knew was Shakespeare's. I was a teenager who loved the lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner and the Beatles, and my girl friend had just introduced me to the songs of Bob Dylan. I thought maybe a look at the Welsh poet's work would help me understand some of the more opaque images in Dylan's songbook. So I found Thomas's Collected Poems at the public library and went straight to the beginning:

 I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen love they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

 I had never seen language like his before. Thomas's elliptical statements made his lines sound contemporary, but his reliance on words with Germanic roots ("cargoed" the sole exception here) made his work ancient-sounding, bardic, elemental. I flipped through the book, searching for more lines with the same resonance--that feeling of inevitability-- and quickly found them:

The force that drives the green fuse through the flower . . .

If I were tickled by the rub of love . . .

 The hand that signed the paper felled a city . . .

 I couldn't know it then, but I had already encountered Thomas's poetic DNA in those first half-dozen lines: sex, the sea, the seasons, the abundance of life and the nearness of death. But aren't these the topics of most poets? Yes, but here they seemed more immediate, and their music was irresistible.

 Like many young Americans of my generation, I hadn't thought poetry could speak to us anymore--certainly not with the force of fiction and film. Thomas showed me that it could, and I was driven by a curiosity to find out where his poetry sprang from. I read his prose, his plays, his letters and the many biographies and memoirs.

 At the same time, Thomas's extraordinary recordings introduced me to the poets he most admired: Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats and others. They were all writers who used compelling rhythms, but they had something more unusual in common: they savored the finest nuances of the spoken word, and they reached for rhymes with all the inventiveness of a dreamer. So Thomas was more than an inspiration; he was an education.

 When I began writing poetry myself, my work was too much like his. That was to be expected. Eventually I found a voice of my own, but I never forgot the central lesson Thomas's poems had taught me: the ear and the subconscious can light the way to imagery that the conscious mind cannot conceive on its own. 

 Looking at Thomas's work again this weekend, I'm as certain as ever that any anthology of English poetry a century from now will include some poems of his. I'd expect to see "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "Fern Hill." But, if they only make room for a single poem, I hope it will be this one.

 It may not have the delicately orchestrated music of "Poem on his birthday" or the heart-shaking pathos of "A Refusal to Mourn," but its quiet beauty may move those future readers so strongly that it will lead them on to all the rest. 

 In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

 Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
The shed in Laugharne where Thomas wrote some of his best-known poems


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The White Goddess: An Encounter

Robert Graves
 
How many literary memoirs are compulsive page-turners? Not many, I can tell you, having read more than my share of them. But, in less than a week, I devoured Simon Gough's hefty recollection of his encounter with Margot Callas, Robert Graves' 'muse' of the early 1960s. (Callas later married the director Mike Nichols.) The book runs to more than 600 pages, but they fly by.

At the start, I wasn't sure where the story (The White Goddess: An Encounter, Galley Beggar Press) was going, and I urge you not to give up after the first 50 pages. Gough wants to give you all the background you need to understand his experiences on Mallorca as an 18-year-old, so he has to dig deep. He begins by recounting his idyllic boyhood experiences in and around the house that belonged to Graves and his wife Beryl. Gough is their great-nephew. (That's Graves, in later life, in the photo above.)
 
As one of Gough's reviews has observed, he uses Thomas Mann's technique of drastically slowing down the action to draw the reader in. When that happens - and when you understand that Gough had so blocked his memories that he himself didn't know where the story was going when he began to write - you're hooked. You quickly see that there's disaster ahead, because Gough falls head-over-heels in love with Margot, whom he's supposed to be keeping an eye on in Madrid, on behalf of his great-uncle.
 
But there are many things that the young Gough - and the reader - don't know, and they set off a fearful set of events. Whether she is accurately remembered or largely invented, Margot may be one of the most charismatic characters you'll meet between the pages of a book. Yet the real star of the story is Beryl Graves. If Margot is the White Goddess, Beryl is a female Merlin who sees deep into the turmoil-driven hearts all around her. 
 
In the coda to the book's harrowing climax, Beryl tells Simon that Robert had predicted it all in his book, 'The White Goddess.' Graves believed that the female deity who rules the heavens once governed earth as well. Now only true poets worship her, and to guide them, she sometimes takes on the form of a mortal woman. But that unstable relationship always results in betrayal and loss. Graves mapped out the process almost two decades earlier in 'To Juan at Winter Solstice': 
 
Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfailingly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall ...

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-grey eyes were wild
But nothing promise that is not performed. 
 
Gough promises a second volume, supposedly telling how he and his great-uncle were eventually reconciled. For Graves eventually forgave both Margot and Simon. That may be the impetus behind this later poem: 
 
We are less than friends.
What woman ever
So ill-used her man?
That I played false
Not even she pretends:
May God forgive her,
For, alas, I can.


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