There were nine of us at
the reading of poems by an assortment of authors. Vikram Seth was the
token Indian; the other poets were from England, America, Ireland,
and France. Almost four centuries of poetry were covered.
KumKum, Saras, Sunil, Thommo, Priya enjoying sandwiches, cupcakes and coffee
We had no singing this
time, but had Joe learnt to rap, his poet could have been rendered in
her original voice. Pamela could not attend for some obligation she
had to fulfil on behalf of her husband.
Sunil, Thommo, Priya, Hemjit, Shoba
It is unusual in modern
times for poetry to be crafted to adhere to a form and structure.
Unusually, we had a triolet, a sonnet, and an Alexandrine mixed with
hymn meter, iambic tetrameters, and modern rap.
Sunil, Thommo, Priya, Hemjit
This was the last session
of the year and a new set of novel selections has been made for 2017.
We start off with Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
on Jan 13, and the following month Kavita has invited the crew with
their dearly beloveds to her estate in Thodupuzha, about 2 hours
journey by road. It will be poetry in a pastoral setting.
KumKum & Saras
Here we are at the end of
the session, after enjoying cucumber and cheese sandwiches
(KumKum) and cupcakes (Shoba).
Hemjit, Thommo, Priya, Saras, Shoba, KumKum, Sunil, Kavita, Joe
Full Account and Record
of the Poetry Session on Dec 2, 2016
The dates for the next
events are confirmed as follows:
Fri
Jan 13, 2017 — Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy
Chevalier
Sun
Jan 15, 2017 — Lunch at KumKum & Joe’s place
Present: Hemjit, Thommo, Priya, Saras, Shoba, KumKum, Sunil, Kavita, Joe
Absent: Zakia, Preeti, Pamela
1.
Saras
Vikram Seth Bio
Vikram Seth was born to
Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta (now Kolkata). His father Prem Seth
was an executive in Bata Shoe company and his mother, Leila Seth,
served as a judge, rising to be the first Chief Justice of a State
High Court (Himachal Pradesh).
KumKum with Leila Seth at India International Centre, New Delhi, in 2009 with the IIC Librarian, Zutshi
Vikram studied at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, Stanford University and Nanjing University.
His younger brother,
Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours. His younger sister,
Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, and has
worked on Deepa Mehta’s movies Earth and Fire. Many of his
fictional characters are drawn from life, he acknowledges, but the
portraits are composites.
Seth was educated at the Doon School in India, but finished with a scholarship to
Tonbridge School in England. Seth studied Modern Greats at Oxford
(Philosophy, Politics, and Economics or PPE) at Corpus Christi
College where he developed an interest in poetry and learned Chinese.
After leaving Oxford, Seth moved to California to work on a PhD in
economics at Stanford University.
Having lived in London for
many years, Seth now maintains residences near Salisbury, England,
where he bought and renovated the house of the poet George Herbert in
1996; and another one in NOIDA, a Delhi suburb, where he lives with his parents
and keeps his extensive library and papers.
A suitable guest - Vikram Seth in poet George Herbert's old house which he bought in Bemerton
Seth self-identifies as
bisexual. In 2006, he became a leader of the campaign against the Indian
Penal Code Section 377, a holdover of the colonial law against
homosexuality.
His mother has written
about Seth’s sexuality and her coming to terms with it in her
memoir On Balance (2003).
Work Themes
Seth has studied several
languages, including Welsh, German and, later, French in addition to
Mandarin, English (which he describes as “my instrument” in
answer to Indians who carp about his not writing in his native
Hindi), Urdu (which he reads and writes in Nasta’liq script), and
Hindi, which he reads and writes in the Devanagari script. He plays
the Indian flute and the cello and sings German lieder, especially
those of Schubert.
Vikram Seth signs in Malayalam too
Writing
His travel book From
Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) was his
first popular success and won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. It
offers insights into Seth as a person, who is candid about the reality
and effect of living abroad — though not about being part of the diaspora — a theme which arises in his poetry but
nowhere in his fiction:
“Increasingly of late,
and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past
rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in
California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where
I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I
wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to
wander around the world merely accumulating material for future
nostalgias.”
On A Suitable Boy
“I have little doubt
that. … Vikram Seth is already the best writer of his generation,”
Eugene Robinson and Jonathan Yardley said in reference to A
Suitable Boy. Both are literary critics for The Washington Post.
Poetry
Seth has published five
volumes of poetry. His first published work, a collection of poetry
called Mappings (1980), was originally published by
Purushottama Lal, the legendary Calcutta professor (at St Xavier's
College) who founded the publishing venture called The Writers
Workshop, now carried on by his son, Ananda Lal and his wife,
Shuktara. For a short obituary of P. Lal you can read this note in
the London Economist:
Prof. P. Lal in his Kolkata home
Mappings attracted
little attention and indeed Philip Larkin, to whom he sent it for
comment, referred to it scornfully among his intimates, though he
offered Seth encouragement. Thommo, also a graduate of St Xavier's
College, commented that Professors Vishwanathan and Lal of the Dept
of English married two sisters, Paramita and Shyamasree, daughters of
the famous linguistics professor of Calcutta University, Prof Sukumar
Sen. KumKum said she studied under Prof Sen at Cal Univ.
Novels in Prose
The first of his novels,
The Golden Gate (1986), is a novel in verse about the lives of
a number of young professionals in the Bay Area around San Francisco.
The novel is written entirely in Onegin stanzas after the style
Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Onegin stanzas are in
iambic tetrameter rather than pentameter, and the 14 lines are rhymed
aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where the lowercase letters represent feminine
endings (i.e., with an additional unstressed syllable) and the
uppercase representing masculine endings. The 590 sonnets making up The
Golden Gate are a tour-de-force, and he turned it out in just a
year or so, working at the rate of about 600 lines a month, he says.
Seth had encountered Charles Johnston’s 1977 translation of Eugene
Onegin in a Stanford second-hand bookstore and it changed the
direction of his career, shifting his focus from a Ph.D in Economics
to literary work. The likelihood of commercial success seemed remote — and the scepticism of friends as to the novel’s
viability is facetiously quoted within the novel; but it received
wide acclaim, with Gore Vidal dubbing it “The Great California
Novel”; it achieved healthy sales and remains in print.
Timothy Steele, Veracity and Vim
Timothy Steele, his
poet-mentor at Stanford to whom The Golden Gate is dedicated,
says, "I've always found him warm and funny. The first thing
that impresses you about Vikram is his immense and lively
intelligence. It was always clear he was going to do something
remarkable, but it wasn't clear, when I first knew him, what
direction his talent would take”. Here is the dedicatory sonnet which stands at the beginning of The Golden Gate:
So here they are, the chapters ready,
And, half against my will, I’m free
Of this warm enterprise, this heady
Labor that has exhausted me
Through thirteen months, swift and delightful,
Incited by my friends’ insightful
Paring and prodding and appeal.
I pray the gentle hands of Steele
Will once again sift through its pages.
If anything in this should grate,
Ascribe it to its natal state;
If anything in this engages
By verse, veracity, or vim,
You know whom I must credit, Tim.
A Suitable Girl
There’s no word yet as to
whether the novel in progress will stretch to the wrist-breaking length of A Suitable
Boy, but Vikram Seth has announced that he is writing a sequel to
his most popular novel, which should be released in 2017 after a
delay.
A Suitable Girl will
skip a generation and see Lata, the 19-year-old heroine of A
Suitable Boy, now a grandmother, searching for the right match
for her grandson.
The biographical details above are excerpted from the review at http://www.sangatreview.org/vikram-seth/ with several additions.
References:
Lunch with the FT: A
reluctant genius Vikram Seth
2.
KumKum
John Keats is one of
KumKum's favourite English poets. She has read him once before at
KRG. This time, she chose one of the Odes, since Keats is praised for
the perfection of his Odes.
Some critics thought To
Autumn was his best, and some say, it ranks second. For a Keats
enthusiast, it will be very difficult to select ‘the best’. To
Autumn was composed on Sept 19, 1819, after an evening walk in
the countryside. What the poet heard and saw is exquisitely limned in
this Ode. Keats died only a year after he composed it.
Keats’ grave in Rome - 'Here lies One Whose name was writ in Water'
KumKum thought the
selection of words in this Ode was marvellous. He chose them for
rhyme, meaning, sound, imagery, and, of course, for their power to
convey his myriad moods, even his philosophy. Be it mere description,
an allusion to light, or sound, or fragrance, taste, texture, life,
death, posturing, and the silence; all are faithfully represented.
There is no doubt that Keats is the poet who elevated the
sensuousness of words to new heights. Take this from Ode to a
Nightingale:
My heart aches, and a
drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as
though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull
opiate to the drains
One minute
past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
...
Darkling I listen; and,
for many a time
I have been
half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in
many a mused rhyme,
To take into
the air my quiet breath;
And read these erotic lines
from the The Eve of St. Agnes when young Porphyro comes ‘with
heart on fire for Madeline’ and hidden in her closet, espies her
undress:
Anon his heart
revives: her vespers done,
Of all its
wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her
warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her
fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire
creeps rustling to her knees:
KumKum clarified several
terms Keats used in the Ode to Autumn:
hilly bourn — small
stream that flows down a hill
garden croft — an
enclosed garden
river sallows — willow
trees growing by the river
thatch-eaves — the edges
of the roofs of thatched cottages
cyder press — the apple
gets squeezed by the mechanical press into a juice which can be fermented
3.
Joe
Kate
Tempest (birth name Kate Esther Calvert, born Dec 22, 1985) is a poet
from south-east London. At the age of sixteen she made her entrance
on the stage of spoken word artists at poetry slam events. She says
she had a ‘wayward youth’, living in squats, ‘hanging around on
picket lines rapping at riot cops’. She is a rapper and a
playwright, and has recorded several albums. In 2014 she was selected
as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets.
Kate Tempest is an English poet, spoken word artist and playwright
Her
first collection of poems, Everything
Speaks in its Own Way,
was published under her own imprint. She won the Ted Hughes Award for
New Work in Poetry in 2012 for her hour-long performance piece, Brand
New Ancients. That was
her entry into mainstream poetry, with a passionate depiction of
ordinary people with all their faults in the role of ancient gods.
Joe
took up the entrance gambit of this poem for the first piece which
begins:
There
have always been heroes,
And
there have always been villains,
And
yes the stakes may have changed
but
really there’s no difference.
Kate
Tempest writes with a fine ear for the modern rough-tough words used
in street rap. She is always writing about contemporary life, but
through the lens of myth and a feeling for the ancient struggles of
humankind.
For
the second piece Joe picked another mythical story, that of Icarus
and Daedalus, retold in a colloquial style by Ms Tempest as though
the performer were a friend of Icarus. You will remember the story of
Icarus, the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, who fashions wings
made of feathers and wax for both of them to escape by flying away
from Crete. The father warns the son not to fly close to the sun. But
all Icarus
wants
to do was soar above his station and become
the
Sun's equal
...
Gifts
are dangerous when they are given and not earned
A
lesson merely heard is never a lesson learned
And so Icarus flies close
to the sun, the wax melts, the feathers fall off, and he plunges into
the sea!
You can find Kate Tempest
on the Web at her own site:
and a good introduction to
her body of work is at:
The Financial Times has a
frank but informal interview over breakfast at Terry’s Café
(costing £15.95) in her native haunt of south-east London:
Asked how she caters to the
distinct audiences for her poetry, her music, her rap, her plays,
etc. She replies:
“I don’t separate the
forms in the way I receive them or create them. Today, I’m going to
be blown away by a rapper and tomorrow by a poet — it doesn’t
work like that. I receive lyricism and literature with an open soul.
The commonality is the lyricism. It’s just the words. That’s
all.”
4.
Kavita
The poems which Kavita chose
contrast the eagerness with which poor children entertain themselves
receiving a single trifling present, with rich children who get bored with
the showers of gifts they receive. Kavita said her son wanted to play
football, and nothing else; he couldn't be bothered to even open the
many gifts he got at Christmas. The moral of which is to give a poor
child just one gift, nicely wrapped, and if you give gifts to a rich
child make sure to use no wrapping; just lay it all out on the bed.
Ellis Parker Butler was
born in Muscatine, Iowa. He was the author of more than 30 books and
2,000 stories and essays, and is most famous for his short story
"Pigs is Pigs", in which a bureaucratic stationmaster
insists on levying the livestock rate for a shipment of two pet
guinea pigs, which soon start proliferating in geometric progression.
Working
from his home in Flushing (Queens) New York, Butler was —
by
every measure and by many times — the most published author of the
pulp fiction era. He wrote twenty-five stories for Woman's
Home Companion
between 1906 and 1935. The stories were illustrated by well-known
illustrators. Between 1931 and 1936, at least seventeen of Butler's
stories were published in newspapers.
His career spanned more
than forty years and his stories, poems and articles were published
in more than 225 magazines. His work appeared alongside that of his
contemporaries including Mark Twain, Sax Rohmer, James B. Hendryx,
Berton Braley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Don Marquis, Will Rogers and
Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Despite the enormous volume
of his work, Butler was, for most of his life, only a part-time
author, working full-time as a banker and was very active in his
local community. KumKum alluded to T.S. Eliot also being a full-time
banker at Lloyds Bank in London, working on foreign accounts, and
being a part-time poet, until he resigned and joined Faber and Faber,
the publishing house. Butler was a founding member of both the Dutch
Treat Club and the Author's League of America, a permanent fixture in
the New York City literary scene.
He died in Williamsville,
Massachusetts and was interred in Flushing Cemetery.
(taken from
http://www.poemhunter.com/ellis-parker-butler/biography/
)
5.
Shoba
Shoba chose two poems of
Walter de La Mare, a modern English poet whose father was a French
Huguenot (Protestant). In those days France was not very kind to
Protestants and he emigrated to England. Walter de la Mare is
considered one of modern literature's chief exemplars of the romantic
imagination. His life was outwardly uneventful. His formal education
did not extend beyond high school. De la Mare began writing short
stories and poetry while working as a bookkeeper in Standard Oil
Company's London office during the 1890s. His first published short
story, "Kismet," appeared in the journal Sketch in
1895. In 1902 he published his first major work, the poetry
collection Songs of Childhood. Critics often assert that a
childlike richness of imagination influenced everything de la Mare
wrote, emphasising his frequent depiction of childhood as a time of
intuition, deep emotion, and closeness to spiritual truth. In 1908,
following the publication of his novel Henry Brocken and the
poetry collection titled Poems, de la Mare was granted a Civil
List pension, enabling him to terminate his corporate employment and
focus exclusively on writing. He died in 1956.
As a poet de la Mare is
often compared with Thomas Hardy and William Blake for their
respective themes of mortality and visionary illumination. His
greatest concern was the creation of a dreamlike tone implying a
tangible but nonspecific transcendent reality. It is generally agreed
that de la Mare was a skilful manipulator of poetic structure, a
skill which is particularly evident in the earlier collections.
Closely linked with his
poetry in theme and mood are de la Mare's short stories. Collections
like The Riddle are imbued with the same indefiniteness and
aura of fantasy as his poetry. As a short story writer, de la Mare is
frequently compared to Henry James, particularly for his elaborate
prose style and his ambiguous, often obscure treatment of
supernatural themes.
The novels of de la Mare
rival his poetry in importance. His early novels, such as Henry
Brocken, are works of fantasy written in a genre traditionally
reserved for realistic subjects. In his tale of supernatural
possession, The Return, de la Mare deals with a primarily
naturalistic world while maintaining a fantastic element as the
thematic core.
de la Mare is sometimes
labelled an escapist who retreats from accepted definitions of
reality and the relationships of conventional existence. His approach
to reality, however, is not escapist; rather, it profoundly explores
the world he considered most significant—that of the imagination.
Shoba read the second poem,
The Listeners, which many readers recognised from having read
it in school, or more probably in college. It has a strange air of
mystery. Who came on the horse? Who is listening? Saras said it is a
bhut story. These two lines indicate some secret affair is
going on:
‘Tell them I came, and
no one answered,
That I kept my word,’
Joe read this poem in a
slim textbook called Modern Poetry when he entered college;
that gave him a taste for poetry which has remained. The textbook included poets such
as these and their well-remembered lines:
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson,
The Little Red Calf
O little red brother,
Keep close to your
mother
Whatever betide,
And snuggle as long as
you may to her side!
W.B. Yeats, The Lake
Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now,
and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build
there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I
have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the
bee-loud glade.
Alice Meynell, The
Shepherdess
She walks-the lady of my
delight-
A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts.
She keeps them white;
She keeps them from the
steep;
She feeds them on the
fragrant height,
And folds them in for
sleep.
Siegfried Sassoon,
Everyone Sang
Everyone suddenly burst
out singing;
And I was filled with
such delight
As prisoned birds must
find in freedom,
Winging wildly across
the white
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for
dappled things –
For skies of
couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all
in stipple upon trout that swim;
6.
Hemjit
Hemjit chose the very first
recognised and published poet of America, Anne Bradstreet, a Puritan
(i.e., the sect that wished to rid or purify the Church of England of
all rituals that smacked of the Popish creed). She was born in
England in 1612 (Shakespeare was still alive). She was well-educated
and married a Cambridge man, Simon Bradstreet, at the age of 16. Her
family emigrated to America in 1630 aboard the ship Arabella.
Her husband and her father later served as Governors of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony.
She
had ten children in spite of her poor health. She was deeply
religious and the second poem testifies to her personal devotion. In
1650 her poems were published in England under the title The
Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, by a Gentlewoman of those
Parts, the manuscript
being taken there by her brother-in-law on a visit. She didn't fit
into the accepted mould of housewife, being a poet also. Hemjit
claimed she was a feminist in her time for enlarging the frame within
which women could toil.
She
lost 800 books in her collection when her house burned down; later
two of her children died. Yet she was serene, writing
And
when I could no longer look,
I
blest his grace that gave and took,
That
laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea,
so it was, and so 'twas just.
It
was his own; it was not mine.
Far
be it that I should repine.
The first poem written in
couplets is testament to the unalloyed union of two persons in
marriage. It is an aseptic union she speaks of, quite other-worldly
for being free of strife, with the wife so utterly devoted to her
husband that she exclaims, unabashed
If ever wife was happy
in a man,
Compare with me ye women
if you can.
About the second poem, Joe
said it would be impossible to write something like this today, and
if someone did, readers would roll their eyes in disbelief. For a
close reading of this poem consult:
The word loue in the
last line (And Loue him to Eternity) is probably from French
louer, to praise, said Hemjit and Shoba seconded that opinion.
Could it equally be seen as an obsolete spelling of ‘love’?
Her grave stone in North
Andover, Massachusetts, has these words incised:
Mirror of Her Age, Glory
of her Sex,
whose Heaven born Soul
leaving its earthly
Shrine,
chose its native home,
and
was taken to its Rest,
upon 16th Sept 1672
Anne Bradstreet gravestone in North Andover, MA
(erected by the Historical Society of the town)
For more about the poet
consult the Poetry Foundation at
7.
Priya
Thomas Hardy (1840 –
1928), Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886), Louis Macneice (1907 –
1963)
Priya chose several poets
according to the theme of winter, the present season. In Kerala there
is no winter really except a chill in the Nilgiris, but the poets
here are writing in temperate latitudes where the progression of
seasons becomes especially severe in winter. Thomas Hardy writes of
birds that find it hard to survive the winter because the ground is
hard, encrusted with frost that will not yield to their pecking as
they forage. Priya sent Joe a video that illustrates this poem
graphically:
Hardy - Durnover Field
Video
Hardy is writing in triolet
form, which is 8 lines, rhymed ab aa abab, with lines 4 and 7
repeating 1, and 8 repeating 2. To see that you have to recast the
poem, removing the bird names and joining some lines to get
Throughout the field I
find no grain;
The cruel frost
encrusts the cornland!
Aye: patient pecking now
is vain
Throughout the
field, I find...No grain!
Nor will be, comrade,
till it rain,
Or genial thawings
loose the lorn land
Throughout the field. I
find no grain:
The cruel frost
encrusts the cornland!
A characteristic of Hardy
is that he is familiar with an entire archaic vocabulary of dialect
words that serves him well in his poetry. The manifestation of his
art is the word lorn (meaning ‘lost’ or ‘forsaken’)
in the phrase lorn land which he rhymes with cornland.
Joe mentioned that Thomas Hardy is probably the oldest poet in age
to have been published in the English language. In 1898, two years
shy of sixty, Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex
Poems, a collection of poems written over the previous 30 years.
If you read Joe's appreciation of Hardy
at
http://kochiread.blogspot.in/2010_04_01_archive.html
http://kochiread.blogspot.in/2010_04_01_archive.html
you will realise what
damage critics can do. They had succeeded in bottling up Hardy's
poetry for 30 years, disfiguring it, killing it, and causing the
verse to remain unappreciated until decades after his death! And yet
his poetic oeuvre is large, 947 poems:
It was much than same story
with Emily Dickinson when a pseudo-critic called Thomas Higginson
ordained a still-birth of her desire to publish. See:
Dickinson in her poem on
Snow writes about the magic ‘crystal veil’ that snow casts on the
landscape and describes objects like fences, grain fields, and roads
transformed by the powder. She uses her favourite 4-line stanza in
hymn meter, varying the rhyme. But the images stand out.
For a modern editor of
Country Life at The Guardian newspaper the appeal of winter lies in a
host of things. Winter, says Clive Aslet, is a time of true wonder —
the crunch of frost, starlings at dusk, a solitary robin, keeping
warm with roasted chestnuts, icicles hanging from the eaves, and
mulled wine simmering on the stove. For a wonderful evocation read
his illustrated piece at
Sonnet 97 has been recited
at least twice before at KRG, once by Prof Tom Duddy at the
Shakespeare 450th birthday celebration and once by KumKum later at
his 400th death anniversary:
‘How like a winter hath my absence been’
Sonnet 97 is not really
about winter at all except in a single metaphor. The sonneteer is
writing this in summer and comparing his absence from his
beloved as though it were a winter. And if it is about seasons then
all four are described, each with its characteristics: spring,
summer, autumn and winter. Only WS could pack the atmospherics of the
entire year in describing aspects of how it feels to be absent from
one's beloved! Please refer to the link above. There you will also
note Helen Vendler, the venerable Harvard professor and critic, suggesting
that Sonnet 97 was very much on Keats‘ mind when he wrote the Ode
to Autumn.
MacNeice, the fourth poet
Priya read is an Irish poet who was a contemporary of Auden and
member of his gang, consisting of C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender.
The Auden Gang with T. S. Eliot - L to R, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis
MacNeice was born the son
of a clergyman. He lost his mother when young. His father taught him
Latin at home, but he felt isolated as a child, and divided between
the upper class and the lower classes both of whom were hostile. He went to a
posh school, Marlborough, but faced a lot of unpleasantness there.
Later he went to Oxford and there met Auden and Spender. He mentions
somewhere that in Oxford, homosexuality and intelligence were paired,
as was heterosexuality and brawn. What MacNeice absorbed from Oxford
was a great deal of snobbery.
After taking a first at
Oxford in Classics he married and moved to the University of
Birmingham as an Assistant Lecturer. He wrote a novel, and then
turned to poetry again. He sent several poems to T.S. Eliot who as
editor at Faber and Faber would not publish him at first, although he
granted space in a journal he edited, called the Criterion.
Two years later in 1935 his collection, Poems, was brought out
by Faber and Faber. At about this time his wife left him, with a
daughter to be looked after. MacNeice traveled, leaving the girl with
his sister and a nurse. By 1936 he made it to a prominent collection
called Faber Book of Modern Verse. He had a very adventurous
life thereafter, courting many women, writing radio plays for BBC,
and penning more poetry, and battling alcohol. He died of pneumonia
caught when he was spelunking and did not change from wet clothes. He
is being reclaimed now as an Irish poet, rather than the English poet he
was in life, circling the orbit of Auden.
For more, read his bio at
the wiki site:
In Snow MacNeice
shows a positive relish as he speaks of the ‘incorrigibly plural’
and of the ‘drunkenness of things being various ... On the tongue
on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands ’ (from
Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class, and Ideology in the 1930s by
Adrian Caesar). Unlike the triolet by Hardy this poem celebrates the
‘suddener, crazier’ world that Winter reveals. Priya said you
feel the physicality of life when you read the poem.
8.
Thommo
P.G.
Wodehouse (1881 – 1975)
Thommo,
an aficionado of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, drew upon the humorous
master's poems to engage and entertain us at the reading. A selection
can be found at
In
the first poem a chivalrous man desires to respond to the War
Office's recruitment poster for men to join up, and having been
trained at Sandhurst, the military academy for officers in England,
he goes to the War Office to learn when he will be ‘gazetted’, a
peculiar word all colonials are aware of, meaning to have their
appointment notified in the official Gazette of the Government. He's
given the runaround and sent from one Military Section to another
until he is finally directed back to the first one where he started,
and then he knows he'll probably have to wait and goes home; he's
still waiting!
The
second poem is more interesting because the tetrameter rhymes with
great facility, and serves up a bit of nonsense (much like Bertie
Wooster, said Shoba). The poet confesses to his lover that he's glad
they never married, for having tarried he's since published verses of
genius, and since genius is incompatible with a happy married life, he's
glad he spared his beloved:
Reluctantly
I set you free,
Though
ne'er, I vow, will I forget you.
Some
other man your hand may win;
I'll
strive to bear it with composure;
Your
letters you will find within;
Yours
truly,
EDWIN
JONES. (Enclosure)
Delightful!
For
more about P.G. Wodehouse click on ‘About P. G. Wodehouse’ at
9.
Sunil
Charles
Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)
Baudelaire
is the indispensable French poet of the nineteenth century, for
having influenced not only other important French poets like Paul
Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but also English poets through the
Symbolist and Modernist movements he participated in. That in turn
influenced modern English poetry, as witness the statement by Frank
Kermode that the most important moment of T.S. Eliot's undergraduate
career at Harvard was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons‘ The
Symbolist Movement in Literature. This book is credited
with bringing French Symbolism to the notice of English and American
poets.
Some
of Baudelaire's poems were subject to censorship upon publication
because they dealt frankly with topics which are commonplace today:
lesbians, prostitutes, fetishism, etc. His signal poetic work is
Fleurs du Mal or The Flowers of Evil published in 1857,
from which the first poem is taken, L'âme du Vin, or The
Soul of Wine. The poems use a meter unfamiliar in English,
called the Alexandrine, 12 syllables with an emphatic stress on the
6th. See
There
is a website for his poems from the first edition
onwards, built as a labour-of-love. It has several translations into English of each poem:
Apropos
of this poem, Joe declares:
L'âme
du vin vit non seulement dans des bouteilles, mais dans le sein de
toutes les personnes ivres
The
soul of wine lives not only in bottles, but in the breasts of all
sozzled folk
The
second poem has an intriguing element: it features a girl from
Malabar. At the reading there was some debate whether the girl was in
France, which would be remarkable; or was she in Malabar, pining for
France – if so why? The mystery gets resolved by consulting
Baudelaire - To A Woman Of Malabar
(photo taken from Castes and Tribes of Southern India by Edgar Thurston)
Baudelaire
was shipped off by his stepfather in 1841 to Calcutta to outgrow his
rebellious spirit. But en route the ship was wrecked in Mauritius and
there he met Dorothée at a sugarcane plantation. She had been
expatriated from Malabar with her mother to work as a slave on the
plantation. In her sweet company Baudelaire was cured of his
rebellion and his melancholy. Not only that, but she became his
Muse, and he regained the inspiration to write; which culminated
in Les Fleurs du Mal when he returned to France.
Oh, what wonders this girl in the tropics did to revive the flagging
spirit of a forlorn poet! Shouldn't Dorothée be awarded the Légion
d'Honneur posthumously for outstanding services to French poesy?
Readings
1.
Saras
Vikram Seth (born 1952)
Poems
1. Round and
Round
After a long and wretched flight
That stretched from
daylight into night,
Where babies wept and tempers shattered
And the
plane lurched and whiskey splattered
Over my plastic food, I came
To
claim my bags from Baggage Claim
Around, the carousel went
around
The anxious travelers sought and found
Their bags, intact or
gently battered,
But to my foolish eyes what mattered
Was a brave
suitcase, red and small,
That circled round, not mine at all.
I knew that bag. It must be hers.
We hadn't met in seven years!
And as
the metal plates squealed and clattered
My happy memories chimed and
chattered.
An old man pulled it off the Claim.
My bags appeared: I
did the same.
2.
From
California
Sunday night in the house.
The blinds drawn, the phone
dead.
The sound of the kettle, the rain.
Supper: cheese, celery,
bread.
For company, old
letters
In the same disjointed script.
Old love wells up again,
All that I thought had slipped
Old love wells up again,
All that I thought had slipped
Through the sieve of long
absence
Is here with me again:
The long stone walls, the
green
Hillsides renewed with rain.
Hillsides renewed with rain.
The way you would lick your finger
And touch your forehead, the way
You hummed a phrase from
the flute
Sonatas, or turned to say,
Sonatas, or turned to say,
"Larches--the only conifers
That honestly blend with Wales."
I walk with you
again
Along these settled trails.
Along these settled trails.
It seems I started this poem
So many years ago
I cannot follow its ending
And must begin
anew.
Blame, some bitterness,
I recall there were these.
Yet what
survives is Bach
And a few blackberries
And a few blackberries
Something of the "falling starlight",
In the phrase of Wang Wei,
Falls on my
shadowed self.
I thank you that today
I thank you that today
His words are open to me.
How much you have inspired
You cannot know. The end
Left much to be desired.
Left much to be desired.
"There is a comfort in
The strength of love." I quote
Another favourite
You vouchsafed me. Please note
The lack of hope or faith:
Neither is justified.
I have closed out the
night.
The random rain outside
The random rain outside
Rejuvenates the parched
Foothills along the Bay.
Anaesthetised by years
I think of you today
I think of you today
Not with impassionedness
So much as half a smile
To see the weathered past
Still worth my present while.
To see the weathered past
Still worth my present while.
2.
KumKum
John Keats (1795–1821)
Ode to Autumn
Season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of
the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to
load and bless
With fruit the vines
that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the
moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with
ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd,
and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to
set budding more,
And still more, later
flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days
will never cease,
For summer has
o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft
amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks
abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a
granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by
the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow
sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of
poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath
and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a
gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head
across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press,
with patient look,
Thou watchest the
last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of
spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou
hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom
the soft-dying day,
And touch the
stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the
small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows,
borne aloft
Or sinking as the
light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud
bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and
now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles
from a garden-croft;
And gathering
swallows twitter in the skies.
3.
Joe
Kate Tempest (born 1985)
1. Excerpt from the
beginning of Brand New Ancients.
There have always been
heroes,
And there have always been
villains,
And yes the stakes may have
changed
but really there’s no
difference.
There’s always been greed
and heartbreak and ambition
and bravery and love and
trespass and contrition
– we’re the same beings
that began, we’re still living,
in all of our fury and
foulness and friction,
These are everyday
odysseys, we have dreams we make decisions…
The stories are there if
you listen.
The stories are here,
the stories are you,
and your fear
and your hope
are as old
as the language of smoke,
as old as the language of
blood,
as old as the language of
languishing love.
the Gods are all here.
Because the Gods are in us.
And the gods are in the
betting shops
the gods are in the caff
the gods are smoking fags
out the back
the gods are in the office
blocks
the gods are at their desks
the gods are sick of always
giving more and getting less
the gods are at the rave –
and they’re two pills
deep into dancing –
the gods are in the
alleyways laughing
the gods are at the
doctor’s
they just need a little
something for the stress
the gods are in the toilets
having unprotected sex
the gods are in the
supermarket
the gods are walking home,
the gods can’t stop
checking Facebook on their phones
the gods are in a traffic
jam
the gods are on a train
the gods are watching
adverts
the gods are not to blame –
the gods are working for
the council
the gods are on the dole
the gods are getting drunk
pissing their wages down a hole
the gods are in their
gardens
and they’re staring at
their plants
the gods are in the
classrooms
those poor things don’t
stand a chance
the gods are trying to tell
the truth
but the truth is hard to
say
the gods are born, they
live a while
and then they pass away.
(You can hear the
poet-performer doing this act on Youtube:
2.
Come down from the sky your
flying to high
Soaring the sky's that had
always been beyond his reach
He felt like a champion his
feet kicked the clouds
Arms bound in the feathers
of his father's labour
Which a little while later
would be ashes and vapour
Cumbersome limbs furnished
with powerful things
He heard the wind speak
every time he heard his wings beat
His Father flew before him
and so his course was set
He's like don't fly by the
waves or your wings will get wet
And don't fly so high that
the sun melts the wax
Just stay on my path son
and follow my tracks
But Icarus enamoured by the
feeling of flight
He just had to fly higher
and get closer to that light
The sun was hot against him
as he carried on ascending
He felt strength in him
increasing like the heat that was so tempting
Beneath was the world he
left behind in search of better things
To achieve his freedom he
sacrificed everything
Icarus
Come down from the sky your
flying to high
Icarus
Heed your Father's words
this ain't your territory
No one even noticed as he
splashed and hit the sea bed
I wonder what he saw before
he fell
If he needed my help
Would he have asked for it?
Probably he wouldn't no
Probably he thought he was
invincible
He weren't
In principle he burnt
He smouldered in them myths
So that we who never flew
before could learn from what he did
Given the gift of flight
It was too easy to ignore
The warnings of his Father
How could he be truly
responsible
When really all he wants to
do was soar above his station and become the Sun's equal
But the Sun can have no
equal
For Icarus that flicker in
his eye
Distant picture in the sky
About to catch the light
that he sought
Oh foolish young pride
Silly man cub
How can you learn to fly if
you ain't even learnt to stand up
If he had listened to his
father
He would never would've
drowned
But the happiness he felt
is one he never would have found
Gifts are dangerous when
they are given and not earned
A lesson merely heard is
never a lesson learned
By the time his father
turned, the wax had completely burned
Feathers scattered on the
waves
They rolled on unconcerned
But in the small moment
before he fell into the sea
Icarus the head strong had
been completely free
Icarus
Come down from the sky your
flying too high
Icarus
Heed your Father's words
this ain't your territory
No one even noticed as he
splashed and hit the sea bed
I wonder what he saw before
he fell
If he needed my help
Would he have asked for it?
Probably he wouldn't no
Probably he thought he was
invincible
He weren't
In principle he burnt
He smouldered in them myths
So that we who never flew
before could learn from what he did
(Listen to Kate Tempest
perform this on Youtube at:
4.
Kavita
Ellis Parker Butler
(1869 – 1937)
1. The Poor Boy’s
Christmas
Observe, my child, this
pretty scene,
And note the air of
pleasure keen
With which the widow’s
orphan boy
Toots his tin horn, his
only toy.
What need of costly gifts
has he?
The widow has nowhere to
flee.
And ample noise his horn
emits
To drive the widow into
fits.
MORAL:
The philosophic mind can
see
The uses of adversity.
2. The Rich Boy's
Christmas
And now behold this sulking
boy,
His costly presents bring
no joy;
Harsh tears of anger fill
his eye
Tho’ he has all that
wealth can buy.
What profits it that he
employs
His many gifts to make a
noise?
His playroom is so placed
that he
Can cause his folks no
agony.
MORAL:
Mere worldly wealth does
not possess
The power of giving
happiness.
5.
Shoba
Walter de la Mare (1873
– 1956).
1. The Scarecrow
All winter through I bow my
head
beneath the driving rain;
the North Wind powders me
with snow
and blows me black again;
at midnight 'neath a maze
of stars
I flame with glittering
rime,
and stand above the
stubble, stiff
as mail at morning-prime.
But when that child called
Spring, and all
his host of children come,
scattering their buds and
dew upon
these acres of my home,
some rapture in my rags
awakes;
I lift void eyes and scan
the sky for crows, those
ravening foes,
of my strange master, Man.
I watch him striding lank
behind
his clashing team, and know
soon will the wheat swish
body high
where once lay a sterile
snow;
soon I shall gaze across a
sea
of sun-begotten grain,
which my unflinching watch
hath sealed
for harvest once again.
2. The Listeners
‘Is there anybody there?’
said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit
door;
And his horse in the
silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny
floor:
And a bird flew up out of
the turret,
Above the Traveller’s
head:
And he smote upon the door
again a second time;
‘Is there anybody
there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the
Traveller;
No head from the
leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into
his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed
and still.
But only a host of phantom
listeners
That dwelt in the lone
house then
Stood listening in the
quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the
world of men:
Stood thronging the faint
moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the
empty hall,
Hearkening in an air
stirred and shaken
By the lonely
Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart
their strangeness,
Their stillness
answering his cry,
While his horse moved,
cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and
leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on
the door, even
Louder, and lifted his
head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no
one answered,
That I kept my word,’
he said.
Never the least stir made
the listeners,
Though every word he
spake
Fell echoing through the
shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left
awake:
Ay, they heard his foot
upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on
stone,
And how the silence surged
softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs
were gone.
6.
Hemjit
Anne Bradstreet (1612 —
1672)
To My Dear and Loving
Husband
If ever two were one, then
surely we.
If ever man were loved by
wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a
man,
Compare with me ye women if
you can.
I prize thy love more than
whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the
East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers
cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from
thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no
way repay;
The heavens reward thee
manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love
let’s so persever,
That when we live no more
we may live ever.
By Night when Others
Soundly Slept
By night when others
soundly slept
And hath at once both ease
and Rest,
My waking eyes were open
kept
And so to lie I found it
best.
I sought him whom my Soul
did Love,
With tears I sought him
earnestly.
He bow’d his ear down
from Above.
In vain I did not seek or
cry.
My hungry Soul he fill’d
with Good;
He in his Bottle put my
tears,
My smarting wounds washt in
his blood,
And banisht thence my
Doubts and fears.
What to my Saviour shall I
give
Who freely hath done this
for me?
I’ll serve him here
whilst I shall live
And Loue him to Eternity.
7.
Priya
Thomas Hardy (1840 –
1928), Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886), Louis Macneice (1907 –
1963), William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
Winter in Durnover Field
by Thomas Hardy (1901)
Scene.—A wide stretch of
fallow ground recently sown with wheat,
and frozen to iron
hardness. Three large birds walking about thereon,
and wistfully eyeing the
surface. Wind keen from north-east: sky a dull grey.
(Triolet)
Rook.—Throughout the
field I find no grain;
The cruel frost
encrusts the cornland!
Starling.—Aye: patient
pecking now is vain
Throughout the field, I
find...
Rook.—No grain!
Pigeon.—Nor will be,
comrade, till it rain,
Or genial thawings
loose the lorn land
Throughout the field.
Rook.—I find no grain:
The cruel frost
encrusts the cornland!
Sonnet 97 by William
Shakespeare (1609)
How like a winter hath my
absence been
From thee, the pleasure of
the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt,
what dark days seen!
What old December’s
bareness every where!
And yet this time removed
was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big
with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden
of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after
their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue
seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and
unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his
pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very
birds are mute;
Or, if they sing, ’tis
with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale,
dreading the winter’s near.
Snow by Louis
Macneice
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
The Snow by Emily
Dickinson
Illustration by Tina Berning
It sifts from leaden
sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster
wool
The wrinkles of the road.
It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, —
Unbroken forehead from the
east
Unto the east again.
It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil
On stump and stack and
stem, —
The summer's empty room,
Acres of seams where
harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.
It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen, —
Then stills its artisans
like ghosts,
Denying they have been.
8.
Thommo
P.G.
Wodehouse (1881 – 1975)
1.
A War Office Enquiry
SIR,
Mr Punch, the following is true.
Peruse
my story written in blank verse,
For
such a tragic metre seems to me
Peculiarly
adapted to the subject.
From
earliest years had I been singled out
As
one whose talents leaned to feats of arms,
In
view of which to Sandhurst I repaired,
Whence,
in the second year from my arrival,
Steeped
to the eyes in military lore,
I
passed with honours.
Straightway
did I speed
To
the War Office, all agog to learn
The
date when I might look to be gazetted.
Quickly
arriving, I produced my card,
And
to the nearest minion thus: "Good Sir,
In me
a budding KITCHENER you see,
Who,
at your leisure, would be glad to learn
The
date when he may look to be gazetted."
“They’ll
tell you,” quoth the knave, “at M.S. One.”
To
M.S. One, whatever that might mean,
I
turned my steps. And, on arriving, “Sir,
To be
succinct, I pant to ascertain
The
date when I may look to be gazetted.”
"Ah,"
said the minion blandly, "I should think
Colonel
O'MAUSER is the man you want.
He'll
give you information on the topic.
Call,
therefore, on this noted son of Mars
At
Number Thirty-seven, Bayonet Buildings.
Pall
Mall."
I
thanked him kindly, and departed.
Colonel
O'MAUSER, I regret to say,
Was
out.
His
servant, having heard my errand,
Genially
bade me "Ask at M.S. Two."
Bracing
myself together (for by now
Faint
did I feel with hunger and fatigue),
I
called at M.S. Two, to be directed
With
some asperity to Cox's Bank,
Where,
I was told, I might expect to find
Major
DE FORPOINT-SEVENING's address.
He,
they surmised, could tell me in a trice
The
date when I might look to be gazetted-
Shrewd
man, the Major.
Cox's
Bank was shut.
I
tried to find him at the Foreign Office
Without
success. And when a person there
Gave
me instructions, which, I saw, would lead
Once
more by devious routes to M.S. One,
I
hailed a passing hansom, and returned,
Full
of strange oaths, to my ancestral home –
And
to this day, for all I've toiled and fretted,
I've
no idea when I'm to be gazetted.
[First
published in Punch, April 15, 1903]
2.
Shattered Dreams
[The
British Medical Journal says that men of genius are never
happy in their married lives.]
I
THOUGHT, dear DORIS, we should be
Extremely
happy if we married;
I
deemed that you were made for me,
But
oh! I'm thankful now we tarried.
Had
we been wedded last July
(I
caught the measles so we waited)
We'd
now be wretched, you and I;
A
genius always is ill-fated.
We
might have lived without a hitch
Till
one or both of us were “taken”,
And
even won the Dunmow flitch
Of
appetising breakfast bacon;
We
might have passed our married life
In
quite the Joan and Darby fashion,
Free
from the slightest taint of strife, –
Had
I not written “Songs of Passion”.
Ah
me, that book! The truth will out;
Genius
is rampant in each sonnet;
Consult,
if you're inclined to doubt,
The
verdict of the Press upon it.
The
Pigbury Patriot calls them “staves
Which
we feel justified in praising”;
The
Mudford Daily Argus raves;
The
Sloshly Clarion says “Amazing!”
So,
DORIS, it can never be:
I
trust the tidings won't upset you;
Reluctantly
I set you free,
Though
ne'er, I vow, will I forget you.
Some
other man your hand may win;
I'll
strive to bear it with composure;
Your
letters you will find within;
Yours
truly,
EDWIN
JONES. (Enclosure)
[First
published in Punch, July 29, 1903]
Notes:
Dunmow
Flitch: The town of Great Dunmow, Essex, is famous for its
four-yearly ritual of the Flitch Trials, in which couples must
convince a jury of six local bachelors and six local maidens that
they have never wished themselves un-wed for a year and a day. If
successful the couple are paraded through the High Street and receive
a flitch of bacon.
Darby
and Joan: The term 'Darby and Joan' is defined as "a happily
married couple who lead a placid, uneventful life". The term is
also used disparagingly to describe younger people who are perceived
to favour spending their evenings in, or following pursuits seen as
"middle-aged". In England, clubs for senior citizens are
appropriately called Darby and Joan Clubs. It seems most likely that
John Darby and his wife Joan were first mentioned in a poem published
in The Gentleman's Magazine by Henry Woodfall in 1735.
9.
Sunil
Charles
Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)
1. The Soul Of Wine
One eve in the bottle sang the soul of wine:
'Man, unto thee, dear disinherited,
I sing a song of love and light divine-
Prisoned in glass beneath my seals of red.
'I know thou labourest on the hill of fire,
In sweat and pain beneath a flaming sun,
To give the life and soul my vines desire,
And I am grateful for thy labours done.
'For I find joys unnumbered when I lave
The throat of man by travail long outworn,
And his hot bosom is a sweeter grave
Of sounder sleep than my cold caves forlorn.
'Hearest thou not the echoing Sabbath sound?
The hope that whispers in my trembling breast?
Thy elbows on the table! gaze around;
Glorify me with joy and be at rest.
'To thy wife's eyes I'll bring their long-lost gleam,
I'll bring back to thy child his strength and light,
To him, life's fragile athlete I will seem
Rare oil that firms his muscles for the fight.
'I flow in man's heart as ambrosia flows;
The grain the eternal Sower casts in the sod-
From our first loves the first fair verse arose,
Flower-like aspiring to the heavens and God!'
(translated by Frank Pearce
Sturm)
2. To A Woman Of Malabar
Your feet are as slender as
hands, your hips, to me,
wide enough for the
sweetest white girl’s envy:
to the wise artist your
body is sweet and dear,
and your great velvet eyes
black without peer.
In the hot blue lands where
God gave you your nature
your task is to light a
pipe for your master,
to fill up the vessels with
cool fragrance
and chase the mosquitoes
away when they dance,
and when dawn sings in the
plane-trees, afar,
fetch bananas and
pineapples from the bazaar.
All day your bare feet go
where they wish
as you hum old lost
melodies under your breath,
and when evening’s red
cloak descends overhead
you lie down sweetly on a
straw bed,
where humming birds fill
your floating dreams,
as graceful and flowery as
you it seems.
Happy child, why do you
long to see France
our suffering, and
over-crowded land,
and trusting your life to
the sailors, your friends,
say a fond goodbye to your
dear tamarinds?
Scantily dressed, in
muslins, frail,
shivering under the snow
and hail,
how you’d pine for your
leisure, sweet and free,
body pinned in a corset’s
brutality,
if you’d to glean supper
amongst our vile harms,
selling the scent of exotic
charms,
sad pensive eyes searching
our fog-bound sleaze,
for the lost ghosts of your
coconut-trees!
(translated by A.S. Kline,
probably)
Thanks, Joe, for the wealth of information.
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