Poetry Session – August 4, 2017

Pamela, Ankush

The poetry session began with a surprise phone call from Kumkum in Boston, wishing the group a great session. She was sad she could not participate and her health issues did not permit her to submit poems in the Dropbox via a voice file, as Joe managed.

Onion Bhajjis for refreshment

Priya took the notes for this post and administered the session, and Hemjit contributed many of the live pictures of the readers during the sessions. Ankush showed up having missed the previous one on Pnin for family reasons. Onion fritters, tea and coffee were served.

Saras

Thommo informed the members that the tea and onion bhajis would be his treat for his belated birthday, which he shares with George Bernard Shaw! Saras suggested that KRG should have a birthday list of its members and we could celebrate birthdays at the reading sessions. Pamela made a note of the birthdays of members present – many of whom share theirs with literary personalities: Shoba with Shakespeare, Thommo with GBS, Hemjit with Muhammad Ali, but Priya would like to hide hers for it’s an infamous date in modern times.

Thommo, Priya, Zakia, Pamela, Saras, Ankush, &  Hemjit (seated)

 Full Account of KRG Poetry Session – August 4, 2017 at CYC

Present: Joe (virtual), Thommo, Ankush, Pamela, Saras, Shobha, Zakia, Hemjit and Priya

Absent: Sunil, Preeti, KumKum, Kavita

The dates for the next readings are as follows:

Julian Barnes – Sense Of An Ending, Sep 22, 2017 (novel chosen by Thommo and Priya) 

Poetry Session – Oct 13, 2017

Joe — Alexander Pushkin (1799 - 1837)

Cover of Eugene Onegin Opera DVD

Joe read via voice file from Alexander Pushkin’s long poem Eugene Onegin. He first gave an introduction to the poet as follows, much of which is taken from the Poetry Foundation website.

Alexander Pushkin is considered Russia’s most famous poet, and as everyone quotes Shakespeare in England, or Dante in Italy, all Russians can be expected to know some poetry of Pushkin. He was born into a noble family. There’s an African connection. His mother was the granddaughter of an Abyssinian prince, Hannibal, and many of Pushkin’s forebears played important roles in Russian history. He began writing poetry as a student in school. As a young man, Pushkin was immersed in French poetry and Russian Neoclassicism. His early output included elegies and songs.

Pushkin threw himself into St. Petersburg society, pursuing pleasure as well as politics. In his poems he railed against autocracy, and criticised the regime; these poems were circulated widely but never published and eventually came back to haunt Pushkin after their discovery when a military faction that rose up to challenge Czar Nicholas I. Pushkin’s first major verse narrative, the mock epic Ruslan i Liudmila (1820), dates from his St. Petersburg period. It was Pushkin’s first major success, the poem also generated controversy for its break with prevailing verse traditions. Pushkin was sent into exile in southern Russia for his outspoken political views. Pushkin traveled to the Caucasus and Crimea, writing lyrics and narrative poems that exhibited what he owed to his reading in French translation, of the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron.

At the end 1823, Pushkin began work on his masterpiece, Evgeny Onegin (Eugene Onegin). Written over seven years, the poem was published in full in 1833. In it, Pushkin invented a new stanza: iambic tetrameter with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes. The poem is also notable for its inventive and exuberant language and social critique. Eugene Onegin is written in 8 chapters consisting of 60, 40, 41, 51, 45, 47, 55, & 51 stanzas for a total of 390 stanzas each a sonnets of 14 lines.

Like Pushkin himself later on in real life, the fictional hero Onegin dies in a duel. In general, Pushkin’s life was marked by political and romantic scandal and he died in a duel in 1831 soon after marrying a beautiful lady Natalia Goncharova, whom a Frenchman coveted. The resulting challenge led to the duel and death. He was quietly buried next to his mother at Svyatye Gory Monastery.

Pushkin’s works have inspired song cycles, ballets, and other artistic interpretations.

Eugene Onegin has been called “A timeless story of love, yearning, and the tragic consequences of youthful pride.” It was the novel in verse which Vikram Seth took as his model in writing The Golden Gate. 

The form of this celebrated work of Russian literature was novel, written entirely in sonnets but in iambic tetrameter, not pentameter, and rhymed AbAbCCddEffEgg, with alternating feminine rhymes and masculine rhymes. The wit of Pushkin’s verse, as of Seth’s, finds a sleek wrapping in this Onegin stanza. But the rhyming does not detract from the novel’s inquiry into the nature of young love and unfulfilled longing.

The summary of the novel is well stated in this Introduction to the Opera of the same name composed by Tchaikowsky. Here are the program notes by the Metropolitan Opera:

“Eugene Onegin, a worldly but arrogant young man, visits the home of two young sisters in the Russian countryside. The older sister, Tatyana, immediately falls in love with him and, in a fit of passion, writes him a letter confessing her feelings. Onegin humiliates Tatyana by refusing her and suggesting that she should learn to control her emotions. A few months later, Onegin angers his best friend, the poet Lensky, by idly flirting with Olga, Tatiana’s sister, who is the object of Lensky’s affection. Onegin and Lensky fight a duel and Lensky is killed.

Several years later, Onegin returns to St. Petersburg after traveling abroad. While at a party, he is introduced to the young wife of Prince Gremin and is shocked to realise that the stylish, beautiful woman is the same Tatyana whose love he once spurned. Onegin suddenly realises that he is indeed in love with Tatyana and later, at the Prince’s palace, asks her to run away with him. Tatyana tells Onegin that while she still loves him, she has made her choice and will not abandon her husband. Onegin is left alone and devastated.”

Everyone waits to listen to Joe’s rendition and so also this time, his reading of the dramatic story of Tatyana and Eugene was heard attentively. Eugene’s reasons to reject Tatyana’s disclosure of love and proposal was enjoyed. However some lines –“Could I be happy circumscribing my life in a domestic plot?” – paint a rather bleak picture of married life.




Ankush — Stephen Dunn







Thommo — W.H. Auden

Homer begins his account of the forging of Achilles’ shield, which is covered with Arcadian images of earth, sky, stars, a wedding, wild beasts, dancing boys and girls.

“And first Hephaestos makes a great and massive shield, blazoning well-wrought emblems all across its surface, raising a rim around it, glittering, triple-ply with a silver shield-strap run from edge to edge and five layers of metal to build the shield itself.” The Iliad, book XVIII

The Shield of Achilles - Supplied to George IV by Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, 1821

Auden replaces the images with ones about the horrors of modern war: rape, barbed wire, etc. in the poem titled The Shield of Achilles which Thommo chose. You can listen to Auden reading his great anti-war poem here.

Auden uses the goddess, Thetis, Achilles’ mother, as the observer of the work of the armourer, Hephaestos, who made the shield depicting Achilles as a hero going into battle. Only the agreeable details of the real world are depicted on the shield. But Thetis sees through it:

She looked over his shoulder

For ritual pieties,

White flower-garlanded heifers,

Libation and sacrifice,

But there on the shining metal

Where the altar should have been,

She saw by his flickering forge-light

Quite another scene.

Auden extracts these scenes from the battlefields of WWII.




Priya — Eunice de Souza (1940 - 2017)

Priya selected a poet of Mumbai who had long taught at St. Xavier’s College and met and exchanged poems with the Bombay group of poets, Adil Jussawala, Arun Kolatkar, Nissim Ezekiel, Gieve Patel, Dilip Chitre, Salim Peeradina and Arvind Mehrotra. People remember the short-lived poetry imprints they brought out like the Clearing House publishing collective.

Perhaps, Priya chose Eunice de Souza on account of her recent death. She had a large following among the students of literature at St. Xavier’s and inspired two generations of them. She was closely involved in the arts and theater in Mumbai, with the festival Ithaka as the annual vehicle. You can read a brief bio of Eunice de Souza in The Hindu. A rather more closely observed poetic biography of her influences, as well as an account of her poetry is in the Hindustan Times obituary by the poet, Ranjit Hoskote.

In the poem Advice To Women, Eunice de Souza seems to be telling women to be like her, living alone, which

will teach you

to die alone.

– which she did. The wish For Rita’s Daughter is a more joyous poem; the poet hopes the fate of the new-born girl will be influenced by objects that augur well for humans – the smell of earth after rain, gods in niches, the luminous new leaf, but never the shrill cry of kites. The poem Bequest is deliberately in-your-face, scorning an object of Catholic piety (she was brought up a Catholic) as only fit to be given away like “a spare kidney.” She is expressing her need to get far from pietistic religion.

She has anger in her requiring to be expressed, I mean squeezed out. The last poem De Souza Prabhu has two sore points from the past: a supposed broken identity between Brahmin (Mangalorean Catholics claim to be of Saraswat Brahmin extraction, but Eunice de Souza is Goan) and Catholic; and another peeve is that her parents expected a boy when she came along, forcing her to hide her menstrual blood. Poets have to break free of very much to win their liberation and claim an independent voice! Susan Abraham in The Wire calls her the Cult Guru Who Rocked “a fierce critic of all things hypocritical, including the church establishment, patriarchy and social mores.”




Saras — Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

Saras brought the magic of Tennyson alive with two poems – All things will die, and The Brook. When Joe heard that Saras would be reciting it he wrote to her:

“You’ve chosen Tennyson, an all-time great. He modestly claimed he knew the quantity of sound of every word in the English language, except for ‘scissors’. And when you read The Brook you’ll be convinced he not only knew that, but could recall at once all other words in the language with similar sounds and employ them profusely with alliteration and assonance. When you come to the stanza
I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.

put extra liveliness in the first line for it brings to mind Saroma Raychaudhuri, a woman of eighty, who recited it for me once – the entire poem from memory.”

Priya reports that The Brook was enjoyed immensely by the other readers.

Tennyson was the predominant poet of the Victorian era in Britain. His great gift for sound and the flow of rhythmic language was unique. He was always immersed in that world and whatever poem of his you read you cannot fail to ‘hear’ the poetry, cannot fail to recognise the underlying pulse and ebb of the lines, and discover how the music flowed from the words, so apposite, so right, so harmonious in their place. The Lotos Eaters conveys through choice of words and leisurely pace the mood of languor that weighs on the sailors when a storm drives Odysseus’ men to an island where they eat the intoxicating lotus flowers that bloom there:

There is sweet music here that softer falls

Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

Or night-dews on still waters between walls

Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;

…

Here are cool mosses deep,

And thro' the moss the ivies creep,

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

Tennyson wrote poetry long before he was sent to school. He would compose phrases in his head and wait for an event to trigger an outpouring, and once started he could write long poems in sustained metre without losing his way. His first poems were published at age eighteen in 1827, and though his poetic verve was on display, the sales were low, for he was unknown.

He left for Trinity College, Cambridge, and his life was happy there. He won the chancellor's prize for poetry in the summer of 1829. He became friends with Arthur Henry Hallam, a friendship that lasted a lifetime and occasioned a great poem, In Memoriam, by Tennyson, because his friend died at the early age of twenty-two from a stroke. The long poem of deep longing contains striking metaphors and almost aphoristic sayings, such a this,

Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

It was written as fragments over a period of seventeen years and published only in 1850. In 1832 he published his third volume, Poems, containing the well-remembered lines from The Lady of Shalott that reverberate in the memory:

Willows whiten, aspens shiver.

The sunbeam showers break and quiver

In the stream that runneth ever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.

The volume also had The Lotos-Eaters. How such verse could attract wide adverse criticism says something about the judgement of professional critics. He had other reverses too that put him in despair and for ten years he did not publish, but continued to write. Great poems were never remote from Tennyson. Soon he was writing Ulysses and Morte d'Arthur and the unforgettable Break, break, break. Tennyson had some romantic involvements with women, but lack of a livelihood forced him to turn these off. It was Edward Fitzgerald of Rubaiyat fame who continued to befriend Tennyson and admired his poems, asking him to publish them. And so he did, after a ten-year break in 1842. This came as two volumes Poems (1942) the first of which was a revision of Poems (1832) and the second had his new poems. This time the reviews were enthusiastic. At last he had made a name.

However financial misfortune never lost him as victim with a scheme he had invested in going terribly wrong. He lapsed into a life of heavy smoking and drinking. The government mitigated his ill-fortune by granting him a pension. Tennyson was a sufferer from melancholia, or depression as it might be called today, and the remedies of that time were not successful. However, his improving fortunes encouraged him to marry, and the woman (one of his old loves) was good for him, relieving him of things he was not very good at, like the practical management of affairs.

Upon returning from his honeymoon he found the long poem In Memoriam had made him famous (everyone knew the authorship though it was signed Anonymous). It is over 19,000 words long, about 3,000 lines in 131 sections. If anyone wants to learn about how poets select words that are poetic, In Memoriam is an object lesson. Many read it like a scriptural work of consolation in sorrow and that accounted for its great sale. Soon after he was made poet laureate on Wordsworth's death.

Tennyson published much more, Idlylls of the King and Maud. The modern ring of the beginning of Maud

Come into the garden, Maud,

For the black bat, night, has flown,

Come into the garden, Maud,

I am here at the gate alone;

makes one wish there were more like that to signal that Tennyson was turning over a new leaf in his poetic evolution. The words were no less jewelled and precise, but the mood had changed.

The initial print-run of Idylls of the King in 1859 was 40,000 copies! Has poetry taken a back seat in modern times when 2,000 copies would signify great boldness on the part of a publisher? Were Victorian times more partial to the inspiration of poetry?

The rest of his life was spent in the glow of public admiration as he continued to develop, writing more poetry, and even plays. He was offered a lordship by Prime Minister Gladstone in 1883 which he accepted. He died in 1892 and was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Browning and Chaucer.




Zakia — Don Paterson

Zakia, Hemjit, Saras, Pamela, Ankush

Paterson, a Scottish poet, who has the distinction among modern poets of using rhyme and metre, was recited once before by Joe in Nov 2011. His early foray was into music with a folk-band. His interest in poetry was piqued by meeting Tony Harrison. He won the Forward Prize for his first collection Nil Nil in 1993. In 1997 his collection God’s Gift to Women won the T.S. Eliot Prize and one other prize. He has been winning prizes ever since, and has been named among the New generation Poets by the Poetry Society.

In 1991 he brought out an edited volume of 101 Sonnets, and worked on a critical volume called Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Then he himself wrote a volume called 40 Sonnets, which is reviewed here. Here is the last sonnet from the volume:

The Roundabout

for Jamie and Russ

It's moving still, that wooden roundabout

we found at the field's end, sunk in the grass

like an ancient buckler from the giants' war.

The first day of good weather, our first out

after me and your mother. Its thrawn mass

was like trying to push a tree over, or row

a galley sealed in ice. I was all for

giving up when we felt it give, and go.

What had saved the axle all those years?

It let out one great drawn-out yawn and swung

away like a hundred gates. Our hands still burning

we lay and looked up at a sky so clear

there was nothing in the world to prove our turning

but our light heads, and the wind's lung.

It’s about going out with his sons to a playing field where they discover an old creaking roundabout which begins to rotate finally.

Paterson won an OBE for services in Literature and he is poetry editor at Picador publishers. He is on the faculty of St Andrews University for Creative Writing and continues to perform as a jazz guitarist.

Zakia chose to recite the poem Rain by Paterson because we are in the monsoon season now. It is a simple poem and richly aural. The poem imagines that all films beginning with rain create a narrative thread that commence and end with the connotations of rain – fertility, washing out, elemental force, draining, and so on. It ends in the lines

all was washed clean with the flood

we rose up from the falling waters

the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.




Pamela — Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Pamela

Kahlil Gibran is an American poet of Lebanese extraction and carried his roots with him to America. He was born on in 1883 in Bsharri, in the region of the famous cedar trees of Lebanon.

He was educated broadly. Gibran wrote The Prophet originally in Arabic when he was just fifteen! He took five years to translate the series of sketches and aphorisms into English. He was the energy behind an intellectual movement to renew Arabic poetry. The collection Broken Wings (1911) was written in Arabic and then translated into English. He also worked the other way – sometimes writing in English, and then translating it into Arabic.

Gibran died at the age of forty-eight in New York, a victim of serious alcoholism. He is buried in a monastery purchased by one of his women admirers, Mary Haskell, in Lebanon. Their exchange of intimate letters over a span of two decades was willed to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Read more at Gibran’s wiki site.

Gibran has been recited four times before at KRG. Pamela read a section called Peace XVII by Khalil Gibran. Thommo said that The Prophet by the poet was his most popular volume, translated into forty languages, sold all over the world, and still in print though published in 1923. By 2012 it had sold over 9m copies. Pamela added that Gibran’s wife was a good editor and many believe the co-author of his works; she brought out, The Beloved Prophet, stitched together from his edited manuscripts.

Salma Hayek speaking about Kahlil Gibran

Salma Hayek, the actor, has made a film (she too is of Lebanese parentage) on The Prophet as a series of adventures. You can hear her talk about it here. The film merges animation, music and poetry to create a visual celebration of life’s key moments as it follows three animation characters Almitra, Kamila and Mustafa and the philosophical questions they face. It has eight short poems of Gibran beautifully picturised. For example:

“On Children”:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You might want to watch the video, if nothing else because Ms. Hayek’s charm will relieve any eye strain that might have been caused by reading this blog. 

Thommo said that The Prophet fascinated Elvis Presley, so much so, that he distributed copies of the book freely, marking his favourite lines and signing the copies, virtually making them a collector’s item.

Zakia complimented Pamela on her graceful reading of the poem.

Parts of the poem reminded Shoba of the words Jesus said after his resurrection. During his life he and his writings were great favourites of women, not so much of men. The poet is buried in Lebanon.




Shoba — Walt Whitman (1818 - 1892)

Shoba

Shoba chose to read Walt Whitman’s poem, Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry as she had just returned from New York city, having used the Brooklyn Bridge often during her stay. She said that the bridge built in 1888 connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn over the East River, completely changed the lives of the people. It is a historic landmark and was built by a German immigrant John Roebling who was himself paralysed during the construction and had to be assisted by his wife for higher mathematical calculations of catenary curves of the suspension cables and strength of the foundations. A documentary film was made about its construction, which took fourteen years.

As a sideline Shoba mentioned her grandmother in Kerala had to take seven ferries to reach her married home. Thommo said that in olden days one had to take three ferries from Kottayam to Kochi. Joe remembers only one ferry (chengadam) on his childhood journeys between Cochin and Alleppey.

The Brooklyn Bridge now has six-lane traffic and is one of the busiest bridges in the world. Priya said that on her visit to NYC she met a research scholar who specializes on Walt Whitman and conducts foot tours to places and monuments related to the poet. The scholar had selected a few lines written by the poet to be inscribed on a monument built in his honour, only to find a word misspelt. Whitman remains thus on a monument built for him, quoted wrongly!

Walt Whitman is a poet who sang praises of the body and nature. He is almost prophetic in stature with his work Leaves of Grass (LG), self-published in 1855. He had many professions in his life: printer, schoolteacher, reporter, and editor. LG was inspired by his travels in America.

Whitman’s poetry takes on the form of poetic prose and often consists of an apostrophe to nature:

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!

Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!

Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!

Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!

Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!

Whitman had no religion, but embraced all religions equally and tended to a kind of deism, nature as transcendent, and God being everywhere. Sections of his poem, LG, have been interpreted as paeans to homosexual love and that community of people has embraced him, but it is not clear. He himself disavowed it, but he did have close friendships with men and boys throughout his life. Nobody has verified his claim that he fathered six illegitimate children. You can read more at Whitman’s wiki site. The critic Harold Bloom considers the first edition fo LG as a kind of secular scripture of America.




Hemjit — Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)

Thommo, Shoba, Zakia, Hemjit, Saras

Emily Dickinson is one of the most written about poets in KRG’s archive. She has been recited five times before this. The first time was by KumKum in Dec 2008. A fairly good biography is presented in the session when Priya chose a couple of Dickinson poems in July 2013. An extensive visit by Joe & KumKum to her Amherst home in Western Massachusetts, now kept as a museum, and to her grave site nearby, in Aug 2014 resulted in an interesting post.

There is nothing much to add to the knowledge of Emily Dickinson except to note a new biographical film A Quiet Passion (2016). Here is the New Yorker’s critic on the film. It is a Dickinson rather more rough on the edges that is portrayed, not true to the original in my estimation. She is said to have suffered from Bright’s disease, a form of chronic kidney disease which gave her the shakes. Scenes from her life are voiced over with snatches of her poems. A lively video review of the film on BBC Radio 5 by Mark Kermode is here. He commends Terence Davis who made the film, “so engaging so magical.” The actor Cynthia Nixon speaks on portraying Emily Dickinson in this video, and throws light on the poet and her struggles.

The first poem selected by Hemjit, The Soul Selects Her Own Society, was written it appears in the same year, 1862, in which she decided to retire from the wider world. She is perhaps asserting her right to choose her close associates and at the same time, exclude those she does not want to enter into her circle. Though the idea may be simple she uses metaphors like emperors kneeling on mats, and the soul shutting the door, and choosing one from an ‘ample nation’. Expressions like ‘divine majority’ are surprising.

The second poem, Hope is the thing with feathers, starts off with a metaphor likening Hope to a bird, and carries on the bird metaphor throughout the poem. The diction is antique:

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

but the words are well-chosen, ‘abash.’ The metre is mostly iambic trimeter rhyming ABCB.

The Poems

Joe — Alexander Pushkin (1799 - 1837)

Excerpts from Eugene Onegin

A few stanzas concerned with The Letter.

Chapter Three

XXXI

This was Tatyana's Letter to Onegin, addressed in the ‘careless language of surrender.’

“I write to you – no more confession

is needed, nothing's left to tell.

I know it's now in your discretion

with scorn to make my world a hell.

“But, if you've kept some faint impression

of pity for my wretched state,

you'll never leave me to my fate.

At first I thought it out of season

to speak; believe me: of my shame

you'd not so much as know the name,

if I'd possessed the slightest reason

to hope that even once a week

I might have seen you, heard you speak

on visits to us, and in greeting

I might have said a word, and then

thought, day and night, and thought again

about one thing, till our next meeting.

But you're not sociable, they say:

you find the country godforsaken;

though we ... don't shine in any way,

our joy in you is warmly taken.

“Why did you visit us, but why?

Lost in our backwoods habitation

I'd not have known you, therefore I

would have been spared this laceration.

In time, who knows, the agitation

of inexperience would have passed,

I would have found a friend, another,

and in the role of virtuous mother

and faithful wife I'd have been cast.

{100}

“Another!... No, another never

in all the world could take my heart!

Decreed in highest court for ever...

heaven's will — for you I'm set apart;

and my whole life has been directed

and pledged to you, and firmly planned:

I know, Godsent one, I'm protected

until the grave by your strong hand:

you'd made appearance in my dreaming;

unseen, already you were dear,

my soul had heard your voice ring clear,

stirred at your gaze, so strange, so gleaming,

long, long ago ... no, that could be

no dream. You'd scarce arrived, I reckoned

to know you, swooned, and in a second

all in a blaze, I said: it's he!

….But who are you:

the guardian angel of tradition,

or some vile agent of perdition

sent to seduce? Resolve my doubt.

Oh, this could all be false and vain,

a sham that trustful souls work out;

fate could be something else again..,

“So let it be! for you to keep

I trust my fate to your direction,

henceforth in front of you I weep,

I weep, and pray for your protection..,

Imagine it: quite on my own

I've no one here who comprehends me,

and now a swooning mind attends me,

dumb I must perish, and alone.

My heart awaits you: you can turn it

to life and hope with just a glance --

or else disturb my mournful trance

with censure – I've done all to earn it!

“I close. I dread to read this page...

for shame and fear my wits are sliding...

and yet your honour is my gage

and in it boldly I'm confiding''...

Chapter 4

XI

Yet Tanya's note made its impression

on Eugene, he was deeply stirred:

that virgin dream and its confession

filled him with thoughts that swarmed and whirred;

the flower-like pallor of the maiden,

her look, so sweetly sorrow-laden,

all plunged his soul deep in the stream

of a delicious, guiltless dream...

and though perhaps old fires were thrusting

and held him briefly in their sway,

Eugene had no wish to betray

a soul so innocent, so trusting.

But to the garden, to the scene

where Tanya now confronts Eugene.

...

XIII

“Could I be happy circumscribing

my life in a domestic plot;

had fortune blest me by prescribing

husband and father as my lot;

could I accept for just a minute

the homely scene, take pleasure in it --

then I'd have looked for you alone

to be the bride I'd call my own.

Without romance, or false insistence,

I'll say: with past ideals in view

I would have chosen none but you

as helpmeet in my sad existence,

as gage of all things that were good,

and been as happy... as I could!

XIV

“But I was simply not intended

for happiness – that alien role.

Should your perfections be expended

in vain on my unworthy soul?

Believe (as conscience is my warrant),

wedlock for us would be abhorrent.

I'd love you, but inside a day,

with custom, love would fade away;

your tears would flow – but your emotion,

your grief would fail to touch my heart,

they'd just enrage it with their dart.

What sort of roses, in your notion,

would Hymen bring us – blooms that might

last many a day, and many a night!

Ankush — Stephen Dunn

I will be reading

Thommo — W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

The Shield of Achilles

She looked over his shoulder

For vines and olive trees,

Marble well-governed cities

And ships upon untamed seas,

But there on the shining metal

His hands had put instead

An artificial wilderness

And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,

Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,

Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood

An unintelligible multitude,

A million eyes, a million boots in line,

Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face

Proved by statistics that some cause was just

In tones as dry and level as the place:

No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

Column by column in a cloud of dust

They marched away enduring a belief

Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder

For ritual pieties,

White flower-garlanded heifers,

Libation and sacrifice,

But there on the shining metal

Where the altar should have been,

She saw by his flickering forge-light

Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

And sentries sweated for the day was hot:

A crowd of ordinary decent folk

Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

As three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

And could not hope for help and no help came:

What their foes like to do was done, their shame

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder

For athletes at their games,

Men and women in a dance

Moving their sweet limbs

Quick, quick, to music,

But there on the shining shield

His hands had set no dancing-floor

But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy; a bird

Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:

That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

Were axioms to him, who’d never heard

Of any world where promises were kept,

Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,

Hephaestos, hobbled away,

Thetis of the shining breasts

Cried out in dismay

At what the god had wrought

To please her son, the strong

Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles

Who would not live long.

Priya — Eunice de Souza (1889-1973)

Advice To Women

Keep cats

if you want to learn to cope with

the otherness of lovers.

Otherness is not always neglect –

Cats return to their litter trays

when they need to.

Don’t cuss out of the window

at their enemies.

That stare of perpetual surprise

in those great green eyes

will teach you

to die alone.

Don’t Look For My Life In These Poems

Poems have order, sanity

aesthetic distance from debris.

All I’ve learnt from pain

I always knew,

but could not do.

For Rita’s Daughter, Just Born

Luminous new leaf

May the sun rise gently

on your unfurling

in the courtyard always linger

the smell of earth after rain

the stone of these steps

stay cool and old

gods in the niches

old brass on the wall

never the shrill cry of kites

Bequest

In every Catholic home there’s a picture

of Christ holding his bleeding heart

in his hand.

I used to think, ugh.

the only person with whom

I have not exchanged confidences

is my hairdresser.

Some recommend stern standards,

others say float along.

He says, take it as it comes,

meaning, of course, as he hands it out.

I wish I could be a

Wise Woman

smiling endlessly, vacuously

like a plastic flower,

saying Child, learn from me.

It’s time to perform an act of charity

to myself,

bequeath the heart, like a

spare kidney –

preferably to an enemy.

Miss Louise

She dreamt of descending

curving staircases

ivory fan aflutter

of children in sailor suits

and organza dresses

till the dream rotted her innards

but no one knew:

innards weren’t permitted

in her time.

Shaking her graying ringlets:

“My girl, I can’t even

go to Church you know

I unsettle the priests

so completely. Only yesterday

that handsome Fr Hans was saying,

‘Miss Louise, I feel an arrow

through my heart.’

But no one will believe me

if I tell them. It’s always

Been the same. They’ll say,

‘Yes Louisa, we know, professors

loved you in your youth,

judges in your prime.’”

De Souza Prabhu

No, I'm not going to

delve deep down and discover

I'm really de Souza Prabhu

even if Prabhu was no fool

and got the best of both worlds.

(Catholic Brahmin!

I can hear his fat chuckle still.)

No matter that

my name is Greek

my surname Portuguese

my language alien.

There are ways

of belonging.

I belong with the lame ducks.

I heard it said

my parents wanted a boy.

I've done my best to qualify.

I hid the bloodstains

on my clothes

and let my breasts sag.

Words the weapon

to crucify.

Saras — Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

Painting by Millais

All things will die

CLEARLY the blue river chimes in its flowing

Under my eye;

Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing

Over the sky.

One after another the white clouds are fleeting; 

Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating

Full merrily;

Yet all things must die.

The stream will cease to flow;

The wind will cease to blow;

The clouds will cease to fleet;

The heart will cease to beat;

For all things must die.

All things must die.

Spring will come never more.

Oh! vanity!

Death waits at the door.

See! our friends are all forsaking

The wine and the merrymaking.

We are called—we must go.

Laid low, very low,

In the dark we must lie.

The merry glees are still;

The voice of the bird

Shall no more be heard,

Nor the wind on the hill.

Oh! misery!

Hark! death is calling

While I speak to ye,

The jaw is falling,

The red cheek paling,

The strong limbs failing;

Ice with the warm blood mixing;

The eyeballs fixing.

Nine times goes the passing bell:

Ye merry souls, farewell.

The old earth

Had a birth,

As all men know,

Long ago.

And the old earth must die.

So let the warm winds range,

And the blue wave beat the shore;

For even and morn

Ye will never see

Through eternity.

All things were born.

Ye will come never more,

For all things must die.

The Brook

I COME from haunts of coot and hern:

I make a sudden sally

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,

Or slip between the ridges,

By twenty thorps, a little town,

And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip’s farm I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.

I chatter over stony ways,

In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,

I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret

By many a field and fallow,

And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river;

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.

I wind about, and in and out,

With here a blossom sailing,

And here and there a lusty trout,

And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake

Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak

Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow

To join the brimming river;

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots:

I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots

That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,

Among my skimming swallows;

I make the netted sunbeam dance

Against my sandy shallows;

I murmur under moon and stars

In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars;

I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river;

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.

Zakia — Don Paterson

RAIN

I love all films that start with rain:

rain, braiding a windowpane

or darkening a hung-out dress

or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour

right through the empty script and score

before the act, before the blame,

before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone

beside a silent telephone

or the dress lies ruined on the grass

or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source

along their fatal watercourse.

However bad or overlong

such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through

or when the boom dips into view

or when her speech starts to betray

its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold

on a rain-dark gutter, running gold

with the neon of a drugstore sign,

and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—

all was washed clean with the flood

we rose up from the falling waters

the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

Pamela — Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Peace XVIII

The tempest calmed after bending the branches of the trees and leaning heavily upon the grain in the field. The stars appeared as broken remnants of lightning, but now silence prevailed over all, as if Nature's war had never been fought.

At that hour a young woman entered her chamber and knelt by her bed sobbing bitterly. Her heart flamed with agony but she could finally open her lips and say, "Oh Lord, bring him home safely to me. I have exhausted my tears and can offer no more, oh Lord, full of love and mercy. My patience is drained and calamity is seeking possession of my heart. Save him, oh Lord, from the iron paws of War; deliver him from such unmerciful Death, for he is weak, governed by the strong. Oh Lord, save my beloved, who is Thine own son, from the foe, who is Thy foe. Keep him from the forced pathway to Death's door; let him see me, or come and take me to him."

Quietly a young man entered. His head was wrapped in bandage soaked with escaping life.

He approached he with a greeting of tears and laughter, then took her hand and placed against it his flaming lips. And with a voice with bespoke past sorrow, and joy of union, and uncertainty of her reaction, he said, "Fear me not, for I am the object of your plea. Be glad, for Peace has carried me back safely to you, and humanity has restored what greed essayed to take from us. Be not sad, but smile, my beloved. Do not express bewilderment, for Love has power that dispels Death; charm that conquers the enemy. I am your one. Think me not a specter emerging from the House of Death to visit your Home of Beauty.

"Do not be frightened, for I am now Truth, spared from swords and fire to reveal to the people the triumph of Love over War. I am Word uttering introduction to the play of happiness and peace."

Then the young man became speechless and his tears spoke the language of the heart; and the angels of Joy hovered about that dwelling, and the two hearts restored the singleness which had been taken from them.

At dawn the two stood in the middle of the field contemplating the beauty of Nature injured by the tempest. After a deep and comforting silence, the soldier said to his sweetheart, "Look at the Darkness, giving birth to the Sun."

Shoba — Walt Whitman (1818 - 1892)

Walt Whitman, age 35, from the frontispiece to Leaves of Grass - steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

1

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

2

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,

The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,

The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

3

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,

Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,

Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow,

Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,

Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,

Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,

Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water,

Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,

Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,

Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,

Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,

Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,

The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,

The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,

The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,

The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,

The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,

The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening,

The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,

On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,

On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,

Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

4

These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,

I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,

The men and women I saw were all near to me,

Others the same—others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them,

(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

5

What is it then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,

I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,

In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,

In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,

I too had receiv’d identity by my body,

That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.

6

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

The dark threw its patches down upon me also,

The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,

My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,

Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,

Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,

Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,

Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,

The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,

Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

7

Closer yet I approach you,

What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,

I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?

Who knows but I am enjoying this?

Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

8

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?

River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?

The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?

What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach?

What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?

Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

We understand then do we not?

What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?

What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?

9

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!

Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!

Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!

Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!

Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!

Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!

Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!

Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!

Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!

Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!

Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!

Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;

Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;

Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;

Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you!

Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!

Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!

Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset!

Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses!

Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,

You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,

About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung out divinest aromas,

Thrive, cities—bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers,

Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,

Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,

We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,

Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,

We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,

You furnish your parts toward eternity,

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Hemjit — Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)

XIII The Soul Selects Her Own Society

THE SOUL selects her own society,

Then shuts the door;

On her divine majority

Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing

At her low gate;

Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling

Upon her mat.

I ’ve known her from an ample nation

Choose one;

Then close the valves of her attention

Like stone.

XXXII Hope is the thing with feathers

HOPE is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I ’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.