The reading of the novel The Children Act by Ian McEwan will take place on Fri Mar 26, 2021. We were happy to have Talitha join us for this session. Counting her we had 15 readers attending, a full house. This blog is No. 200, recounting KRG sessions and other literary events recorded here from time to time.
Arundhaty
Jibanananda Das (1899 – 1954) has been read before by KumKum in 2018. He has been called ‘The Loneliest Poet of the Twentieth Century.’
Jibanananda Das was knocked unconscious on south Kolkata’s Rashbehari Avenue, near his home, on October 17, 1954, and died a few days later. Some in Kolkata were convinced that it was death by suicide. The poet who looked lonely to many of his countrymen seemed scarcely less of an enigma in death.
The poet himself invoked a serious yearning for death once in his poems. In One Day Eight Years Ago he had written:
Last night, the fifth night of the moon, when sudden he felt
A rush of desire for death.
The desire so possessed the man that, spurning his bed
in which lay his sweetheart and his child, he grasped at a piece of rope to hang himself
…
Never, never to awake again.
Death is a motif that runs right through his oeuvre: from his 1934 selection of poems, Dhusar Pandulipi (‘The Greying Manuscript’) to the last anthology published in his lifetime, Sat-Ti Tarar Timir (‘The Dark Night of the Seven Stars’), 1948. The reason Jibanananda Das appeared so remote to many contemporary Bengalis was that his style was so unlike what they had become accustomed to. He seemed to stand outside the formidable tradition of Rabindranath Tagore.
Jibanananda was like an island in the broad stream of Bengali poetry. He was shy and private as a person, possessing few of the social graces that make one popular. As a professor of English he lost his job more than once, and scraping by was an ordeal.
Most notable in his poetry is his sensuous diction. He kept the spiritual and the philosophical at arms’s length and became one of the most visually descriptive of poets. Sensations, shapes, forms, smells and colour thrill in his poems. Rabindranath who died before Jibanananda had reached his prime, once spoke of the younger poet’s work as ‘soaked through with vividness.’ He was referring to such sparkling word-pictures as these:
We’ve seen the green leaf turn yellow in the autumnal dark,
Sunlight and the sparrow play in the lattice of the Hisal’s branches,
The mouse’s silk-like fur caked in husk on winter night,
The musty smell of rice wafting all day long on rippling waves
On to the eyes of the solitary fish in ever newer forms.
Across the pond the duck, in the gathering darkness of the evening,
Scents delicious sleep – borne on soft womanly hands.
Parallels can only be sought in the early Keats. Jibanananda’s poetry is graceful and light-footed. It rarely has a message, but it does connect with pain and heartbreak, joy and exhilaration.
Satyajit Ray-designed cover of the 1942 anthology ‘Banalata Sen’
The bar for the translator is also high because Jibanannda’s poetry is firmly rooted in the earth of Bengal’s countryside – more particularly in the geography now identified with Bangladesh. A related difficulty is that his poetry makes extensive use of such rhetorical devices as alliteration and irony, along with wonderful similes and conceits, which are nigh impossible to translate. If some of the flavour of the original is still captured in the more competent translations of his work, this is a tribute to the translator’s intimate familiarity with the cadences of two languages.
The poem Banalata Sen read by Arundhaty is from the 1942 anthology of that name, and she used the version by the translator, Chidananda Dasgupta. In Joe’s opinion. Clinton Seely has done a better job, if you look here:
https://www.parabaas.com/jd/articles/seely_scent_banalata.shtml
In its English translation, Banalata Sen remains a strikingly beautiful poem. The images of the concluding stanza are among the most memorable evocations:
At day's end, like hush of dew
Comes evening. A hawk wipes the scent of sunlight from its wings.
When earth's colors fade and a pale design is sketched,
Glimmering fireflies paint in the story.
All birds come home, all rivers, all of life's tasks done.
Only darkness remains, as I sit there face to face with Banalata Sen.
Some of the above is taken from an article by Anjan Basu in thewire.in
Devika
Devika selected a poem, The Ballad of True Regret by Sebastian Barker, from the book Poems that Make Grown Women Cry, a volume she got as a prize for her makeup and fashion outfit at the Dec 2020 humorous poems; the award was donated by the children of K2 and Joe.
Sebastian Smart Barker (1945 – 2014)
Sebastian Barker was the son of poets George Barker and Elizabeth Smart. He was educated at The King’s School in Canterbury and did his MA from Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
While a boy in rural Essex, he was often cared for by ‘The Two Roberts’, painters Colquhoun and MacBryde, whilst his mother was at work; his father was absent but he was okay with that. Sebastian wrote a first-person biography of the poet Eddie Linden, also born out of wedlock.
Sebastian Barker, the poet, made Greece his second home after rebuilding a village house
Barker’s list of achievements is extraordinary. He was the author of many books on poetry and Editor of the London Magazine, ex-Chairman of the Poetry Society and Director of several literary festivals.
Barker used to write poems for family and friends such as ‘For Eddie Linden on His 70th Birthday.’ His relationships range from fraternal to filial, and extend to romantic and erotic love as well. Barker was firmly committed to the virtues of rhyme. He liked to write two types of poetry – one was rhyming traditional verse and the other free flowing with long lines.
In 1983 Barker bought bought a ruined house in 1983 for £780 and lovingly restored it in a small village in the mountains of South West Peloponnese island in southern Greece. Little by little he re-built it in the traditional style with help of locals. It became his home away from home for over 30 years.
Sebastian Barker was married three times, the last to the poet Hilary Davies who survived him. His relationship with Davies, led him to enter into the Catholic faith at the age of 52.
He lived to see his last and best collection, The Land of Gold, reach publication. The Land of Gold was a masterly achievement, and it was matched by the radiant equanimity of Sebastian himself, now in a wheelchair, at the book’s launch and at the Cambridge reading he gave, two days before his death on 31 January at the age of sixty-eight.
It contains his farewell to life, to love, his family, to the landscapes he loved in France and Greece. It contains his last and most profound statement about hope and faith. What makes them unusual is their open-hearted Christian faith and the affirmation of the sense of drawing closer to God. There is nothing stuffily reverential here. In the last poem, The Sea Seen From Sitochori, he refers, with charming, comic off-handedness, to the probability that his late mother may be haunting the place: “She'll be around somewhere, in a prospect rich as this.” At times, says the reviewer Kate Kellaway, his rhymes are too conspicuous – neatly chiming or dragging their heels. But this scarcely matters because, in his case, content renders form inconsequential.
Heather Glen, Professor of English at Cambrige University heard Sebastian Barker read this poem at his last poetry reading, delivered from his wheelchair in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, at dusk on a winter day in January 2014. Nobody who was there will ever forget that reading, she says. The poet was obviously dying (he was to die two days later), but radiant with enjoyment of poetry, of the occasion, and of the family and friends assembled there. The chapel was beautiful, lit with candles; the mood was one of celebration. But all were aware of the darkness descending outside.
Heather Glen says that what moves her in this poem is its unashamed expression of the rawness of primitive feeling: the desolation and the loneliness of saying goodbye for ever to the world the living share. Its poignancy lies in its lack of polish, its Blake-like ballad form. It offers no euphemisms, no consolation. In a succession of vivid cameos it simply evokes and celebrates a life intensely loved. This, with naked directness, is the passion of true regret.
So exhilarating was his exit, with a superb reading from this last and best of all his books, that its glow tempted one to forget that his life had had its more difficult aspects.
The Ballad of True Regret is an excerpt from the collection The Land of Gold. It confronts mortality without flinching:
Never to tread on the forest floor
Mottled with pools of light.
Never to open the kitchen door
To walk in the starry night…
He knows is dying, but he is happy, even radiant. Everyone was moved among our readers by this poem and Devika asked to send her regards to our daughters who had given this book of poems. Sebastian’s book-jacket lists a bewildering range of occupations: antique-dealer, fireman, carpenter, rare book valuer. Partly these were attempts to find his feet after giving up the scientific career his mother had planned for him, before devoting himself to poetry. And there was a breakdown, or more than one: in an interview, Sebastian spoke of a ‘serious and terrible crisis’ preceding his conversion to Catholicism; of how he ‘kind of went mad’ himself after writing about the madness of Nietzsche.
Barker died of cardiac arrest at the age of 68. He was suffering from cancer. The obituaries noted that his father was the poet George Barker and his mother, the novelist Elizabeth Smart; none mentioned that his father had fifteen children by numerous women and did no longer live with his once-wife Elizabeth Smart.
Sebastian Barker probably never met some of his half-siblings.
References:-
https://poetryarchive.org/poet/sebastian-barker/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Barker
https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/article/sebastian-barker-a-glass-thats-rubbed-enough-to-sing-2/
Priya
Priya chose the The Garden by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). Marvell has been read before by Tom Duddy who gave a rendition from memory of the famous poem To His Coy Mistress. Priya has been spending a lot of time in the garden, hence her choice of the poem. He is a 17th century poet; he belonged to group known the Metaphysical Poets. The appellation was given by Samuel Johnson to poets such as John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughn, Robert Herrick, and Abraham Cowley. This was said in a somewhat jocular vein by Johnson concerning Donne:
He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts ...
Metaphysical Poets were the first to use imagery from science, medicine and law, said. Priya. T.S. Eliot elevated the status of Marvell – Eliot himself uses a lot of metaphysical conceits in his poetry, as we know. Marvell was a satirist also and a politician, an MP. He was a friend of John Milton and took his degree from Trinity College in Cambridge.
The words of Marvell create a garden full of joys:
What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
Nature gives respite to everyone. Priya noted allusions to Greek myths, like Apollo and Daphne. Apollo pursued Daphne, begging her to stay for him, but she rejected him. When Apollo was about to overcome her she prayed to her father, the river god Peneus, and
a heavy numbness seized her limbs; her soft breasts are surrounded by a thin bark, her hair changes into foliage, her arms change into branches; her foot, just now swift, now clings to sluggish roots.
Apollo vowed to honour her plea to be left alone forever:
Always my hair will have you, my lyres will have you, my quivers will have you, laurel tree. You will be present for the Latin leaders when a happy voice will sing a triumph and the Capitoline Hill will see long processions.
Apollo and Dapne in marble by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (ca 1622-25) in the Galleria Borghese in Rome
Apollo also used his powers of eternal youth and immortality to render Daphne evergreen ("you also, wear always the perpetual honours of your foliage!"). For this reason, it is said, the leaves of the Bay Laurel tree (referred to in the poem) do not decay.
Each stanza has a thought and the theme of the poem is how gardens yield relief [from the busy company of men], how they provide delicious solitude and a retreat from passion’s heat, and the beauties they reveal in flowers and trees. In the garden everything turns
To a green thought in a green shade
The poet marvels that in the environs of the garden
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Priya liked the lines:
Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
KumKum said she liked the poem and will read it again later. Geeta chimed in and said she has missed some essential parts and will re-read it. Priya noted these poets were all intellectual men, from Oxford and Cambridge, and their poems are rich and layered.
Joe relished the quality of the words Marvell uses and quoted two lines from To His Coy Mistress which are famous:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Geeta
Geeta remembered this poem Hiawatha from her school days. KumKum said she has been to Longfellow’s housesat 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now maintained as a museum in his memory. Both the Vassall-Longfellow house and Elmwood (the Harvard President's house, also off Brattle Street) were built by members of the extended Vassall-Oliver-Royall family, who enslaved many, many people on their sugar plantations in Jamaica and Antigua. You can read more about the house here, and see interior pictures. The house was donated by Longfellow’s heirs to the American people via a trust.
Longfellow House, Brattle Street, Cambridge, Masschusetts – the house was originally built by the Vassall-Royall family with profits from the slave trade in Jamaica
Hiawatha a long poem and Geeta didn’t know which part to choose – she likes all these ‘Red Indian’ things, she said. She chose the section Blessing the Cornfields. All the sections are sweet said Geeta, so she just chose this section at random, and had to excerpt it. Hiawatha was a Mohawk Indian chief, or the leader of the Onondaga tribe, depending on the source you believe. He is attributed with having joined together five tribes to form the Iroquois Confederacy. He was born circa 1525, but not much is known about him prior to his becoming chief.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) – The People’s Poet
Early Years
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine on February 27, 1807. His father, Stephen, was a well-known lawyer who served in the Massachusetts State Legislature and United States Congress.
Henry was known for his lively imagination and a thirst for learning from an early age. As befitting a member of the upper class he was enrolled in the Portland Academy, a private school. He excelled as a pupil there.
Longfellow joined Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and pursued his literary interests. There he began to give serious thought to a career in literature.
Choosing a Career
Longfellow's father encouraged him to adopt a profession which would afford a living as well as a reputation – like law. But on graduation Henry was asked by Bowdoin College to become their first professor in Modern Languages. He accepted the position, but Bowdoin required Henry to travel and study in Europe before assuming the position.
Accordingly in May of 1826, Longfellow sailed for Europe to become a scholar and a linguist. Between meetings with important people and courses in the universities, Longfellow undertook walks through the countryside in Spain, Italy, France, Germany and England – talking to peasants, farmers, and traders, in addition to meeting people of note. He returned to Bowdoin in 1829 to begin his career as a college professor. At 22, he was the youngest professor, and since Modern Languages was a new area of study, he prepared his own texts.
Professor of Modern Languages
Longfellow was a colourful figure on campus. He wore bright clothes, and he regaled students with the languages and literature of Spain, France, and Italy. Longfellow found time to translate European literature, and write poetry, and write travel articles.
In 1831, he married Mary Storer Potter, and the two lived in Maine for several years until in 1834, Longfellow received an offer to head the Modern Language Department at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To prepare for the prestigious position, Longfellow journeyed once again to Europe, this time with his wife. While in the Netherlands, Mary suffered a miscarriage and died from its complications in November 1835.
Devastated by his loss, Longfellow plunged into study and spent the following winter and spring in Heidelberg perfecting his German. The young professor left soon after for America to take up his duties at Harvard after meeting interesting people, including a possible American love interest called Fanny Appleton.
Cambridge Life
In Cambridge, Longfellow persuaded widow Elizabeth Craigie to accept him as a lodger at her comfortable home on Brattle Street. Craigie House suited Longfellow, providing a short walk to Harvard, views of the Charles River, and lush grounds to walk while pondering poetry and verse. His first literary writings were published within three years of moving to Cambridge: Hyperion, A Romance (1839) and Voices of the Night (1839).
Courtship and Marriage
When the Appleton family returned to Boston, Henry and Fanny struck up a courtship, and on July 13, 1843, they married. Fanny’s father purchased Craigie House later that year and presented the house and surrounding grounds to the Longfellows as a wedding gift. Within eleven months of their wedding, Fanny Longfellow gave birth to the first of their six children: Charles Appleton Longfellow. Charley’s birth marked the start of a new kind of life at “Craigie Castle,” a life filled with the sounds of children, staff, family pets, extended family, friends, guests, and strangers eager to catch a glimpse of the famed poet and his family. In this setting, Longfellow raised a family; entertained reformers, politicians, and literary figures; and wrote some of his most popular poems.
Fanny died tragically when her clothing caught fire. Longfellow was always thankful for the happy life they shared. Eighteen years later he wrote the Cross of Snow that deals directly with his grief. He translated Dante’s Divine Comedy and a Provençal poem on the spiritual power of love to overcome death, published in 1867. He was seventy-two when he died.
Longfellow’s Legacy
Longfellow lived the rest of his life at the old house on Brattle Street. From his study he drafted, revised, and ultimately penned hundreds of poems that captured people’s imagination, and shaped the nation’s understanding of itself. They gave rise to a distinctly American literary tradition. Poems like Paul Revere’s Ride, The Psalm of Life, The Children’s Hour, The Village Blacksmith, and Hiawatha – written more than a century ago – remain among the country’s most popular poems.
In 1972, the Longfellow House Trust donated the house and property to the National Park Service to preserve it for the benefit and inspiration of the citizens of the United States. You can read a more detailed account of Longfellow House and Longfellow Park across the street from his house where a memorial to him has been built in the serene surroundings of a spacious public park.
The section Geeta read of of Hiawatha, the epic poem, speaks of the peace that prevailed and the economic activities undergirding their life:
There was peace among the nations;
Unmolested roved the hunters,
Built the birch canoe for sailing,
Caught the fish in lake and river,
Shot the deer and trapped the beaver;
Unmolested worked the women,
Made their sugar from the maple,
Gathered wild rice in the meadows,
Dressed the skins of deer and beaver.
Mondamin appears as the god of maize personified. In traditional Native American legend, Mondamin is believed to have given humans the maize plant by turning into a maize field.
Joe mentioned that in the Wikipedia you can learn that Longfellow was paid $3,000 for a single poem in 1870 – that’s about $90,000 in today’s money. If you publish a poem in the NewYorker magazine today, you get perhaps $2,000, a minuscule sum compared to what Longfellow was paid. No poet today can survive by selling poems or poetry books ( some few exceptions aside). They have to teach in a college or become a professor of poetry or engage in some such activity to make ends meet. Longfellow’s annual income, says Wikipedia was $48,000 – which means he was earning millions every year! His famous poem is about the rain, said Priya:
The Rain in Summer
How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!
How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoofs
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout!
Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and wide,
With a muddy tide,
Like a river down the gutter roars
The rain, the welcome rain!
…
Geetha
Geetha’s selection was Psalm 139, which she read in the King James Version (KJV). It is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611 under the sponsorship of James I and VI. This version of the Bible became the most widely printed book in history. Its style, slightly archaic in its use of words even at the time of writing (employing verily, and it came to pass), had a marked influence on English literary style; Biblical quotations are most often remembered in their KJV wording. Now we have simpler versions, easier to read in contemporary diction, with archaisms absent.
You can hear Psalm 139 sung in the original Hebrew with a rolling English translation here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cyBQytZwOs
The. Psalms are highly treasured among the books in the Old Testament, the Jewish Torah. They are a collection of poems, hymns and prayers that express the religious feelings of Jews throughout the various periods of their national history over a period of five centuries. Of the hundred and fifty Psalms, seventy-three are thought to have been written by David.
King David Playing the Harp – painting by Gerard van Honthorst, 1622
The poet, David, was anointed the second King of the Israelites at around age of thirty towards the second half of 1000 BCE. He was the eighth and the youngest son of Jesse, an Israelite farmer and shepherd, from the tribe of Judah, one of the twelve tribes. (Jesus is descended from that tribe – one recalls that many who were healed by Jesus cried out ‘O, Son of David’) David was selected by the Prophet Samuel, under the direction of God, and anointed as the would-be king of the Israelites at the age of 15, to replace Saul who had fallen out of grace. Geetha recalled seeing the sculpture of David by Michelangelo in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence; a perfection of form of the nude male body that will fill the viewer with delight.
David is described as a handsome ruddy child glowing in health. He was a multi-talented youth – a shepherd, a skilled musician with the harp; having the heart of a lion and an abiding love of God.
Yet, he was a sinner too, and the Bible bears witness to his sending his general, Uriah the Hittite, into the heat of battle so he would die and David could continue to covet the general’s wife, Bathsheba. The prophet Nathan calls King David on his sexual abuse. David acknowledges to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan replies, “Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die.” (2 Sam. 12:13-14).
The subsequent stories of his son Ammon (who also commits rape) and Absalom, his other son, who kills Ammon and ignites civil war are narrated in the Bible. David did not die a happy man. Witnessing the death of his favourite son, Absalom, he cries out in a famous passage of the Bible:
O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!
To return to Psalm 139 after this brief excursus through the history of the Jews, we see one of the great passages in literature about the miracle of human conception and birth. David declares that God is present at conception and birth, because we are made in the image of God, and He has a special plan and purpose for each person born.
David speaks as a member of the covenant, one who trusts in the God of his salvation. David knew that he was addressing the true God and not a figment of his own imagination. The subject of the Psalm is the Lord.
The Psalm presents a genuine doctrine of the omnipresence of God. This appears as early as verse 5, and finds strong expression in verse 8. The contemplation of this omniscience and omnipresence leads the Psalmist to rejoice that such is his God.
How did the Psalmist derive so elevated an idea of God? What David speaks was divinely revealed to him. Without this revelation men may create only imitations of the truth. The Psalm ends with this cry to be cleansed and to be led toward God:
And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Pamela said this Psalm also appeals to her. Priya wondered if we could select the KJV at some future KRG reading.
After searching for dates we finally settled on Friday Mar 26 for the reading of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act. Priya left to take her father for a drive in Patna – she is returning next week to Kochi.
Gopa
Gopa was going to read the poem Happy Insensibility by John Keats, recalling that this week we celebrate the bi-centenary the poet’ death (on Feb 23, 2021). He was one of our best-loved poets and is being remembered by commemorative events all over the world:
Rome, were he died, is remembering his death
https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/rome-remembers-keats-on-the-bicentenary-of-his-death.html
In Keats House in London where he lived and wrote some of his great Odes they are holding events:
https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/things-to-do/200-bicentenary-of-keats-death-marked-with-poems-7325846
Celebrating Keats: The Bicentenary, 2021 is a wonderful way of spending 40 minutes with a cast of performers, scholars, poets and a sculptor listening to Keats.
There’s an Immersive Video Tour of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, narrated by Bob Geldof. 200 years after his death, Keats’s poetry has never been more alive or more loved, says Giuseppe Albano, the Curator of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. “It never ceases to amaze me just much love he inspires in readers all across the world, as attested by the truly global following the Keats-Shelley House museum has on social media, and Keats is particularly loved across South Asia and the Far East,” Albano told Euronews.
Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is bringing poet John Keats back to life 200 years after his death in a speaking-reciting avatar of him. A team of scientists from the Institute for Digital Archeology (IDA) in Oxford has been joined by a team of linguists, curators and physicists to accomplish this project.
A Keats-Shelley Campaign has been launched for a rich programme of initiatives, exhibitions, scholarships, and events in the UK and Italy, to celebrate the two poets' extraordinary legacies.
Gopa gave a brief bio of Keats as follows.
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is one most verbally sensual poets of the genre. He wrote about bodily pain and pleasure, and also about sexual desire.
Keats Medical Notebook which he kept as a student at Guy's Hospital – click to enlarge
Keats trained as an apothecary and a surgeon before deciding to dedicate himself to poetry. In his poem Lamia (the word stands for a bloodsucking serpent-witch in Greek mythology) Keats claims that scientific knowledge ruins our sense of beauty. The more we understand a thing in nature, the less we appreciate it.
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things. (Part 2, II. 231-33)
In other words, now that we know what a rainbow actually is, it is no longer a thing of mystery and wonder. For the contrary view expressed elegantly by Richard Feynman one of the great physicists of the last century you can check this quote.
His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude, appeared in The Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems was published in July 1820 just before his last journey to Rome.
Although prolific during his short career, and now one of the most studied and admired British poets, he was known more for his work, centred on the Odes. When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years, from 1814 until the summer of 1820. His works had been published for just about four years. In his lifetime the sales of Keats' three volumes of poetry was not impressive. Keats, keen for fame, was convinced he had made no mark in his lifetime.
Aware that he was dying of tuberculosis because his medical training told him what course the disease would take, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820,
I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.
Keats’s life mask by Benjamin Robert Haydon, done in Dec 1817
Happy Insensibility (In a drear-nighted December) - The Poem
The rhyme scheme is ababcccd aeacfffd ghghiiid. In this poem Keats describes how the beauty of the physical world of nature is steadfast, continuing with the same equilibrium he has observed through the passing years.
He compares this congruity of natural phenomena with that of human ‘emotional state or reaction’ which he feels is resistant to change. His musing takes place one dreary December night. He philosophises that happiness and sorrow are cyclic as are all things in nature. In the first two stanzas he says that the tree and the brook in frozen sleety winter and cold do not recall days gone past when they may have been happier. Which is how nature deemed it and that is why they are happy always.
In the third stanza he compares how humans deal with the cyclic nature of happiness and sorrow. He asks,
Was there ever a girl or a boy who did not writhe at passed joy?
He surmises that the tree and the brook are happy because they have never known the pain and suffering that memories of happier days brings to human beings. And then he states that how to handle the sorrow of lost happiness, and how to heal and steel oneself from sorrow, has not yet been ‘put in rhyme.’ Did he look for the answers to this in poetry?
Joe
Joe recited an Urdu poem by Hussain Haidry. Hussain Haidry is a young poet who shot to fame after this poem of his, Hindustani Mussalman, went viral when he recited it at a mushaira at age 31. He hails from Indore, Madhya Pradesh. The poem outlines the many-faceted nature of the Indian Muslim. He has written about 150 other nazms and ghazals.
Haidry did his management from the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, and worked in a healthcare company in Kolkata. He rose to head its Finance Department, before resigning in 2015 for a poet’s unsettled life. Bollywood was his aim and he wanted to be a lyricist and writer of screenplays in the grand tradition of Bollywood that is almost totally made up of talents attracted from all over India.
Hussain Haidry, poet who wrote the poem Hindustani Mussalman
He moved there in March 2016. He started off reciting at spoken word forums. It was this poem Hindustani Mussalman, recited at Kommune, a performing arts forum in Mumbai, that took off and was praised and gave him his foot in the door of the film industry, writing the lyrics for song Tanha Begum in the film of that name which became a hit. Later he wrote lyrics for many songs in the film Mukkabazz. He has also written for series broadcast on the Web, like Chacha Vidhaayak Hai Humaare. You can view his credits the IMDB database.
Haidry says he harbours many identities that can be confusing at times. He speaks several languages of India, having lived in Gujarat, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh. All those places have left their imprint on him. Here’s what he says:
“ ‘Main kaisa Musalman hoon?’ or ‘What kind of Muslim am I?’ is a question I’ve often put to myself. Why do I feel my identity is so fragmented? Perhaps because I’m a Hindustani? Hindustan is so diverse. It gives you so much in terms of experience and you soak all that in.”
Joe has had similar feelings about his identity, and found a succinct solution in St. Paul’s maxim: Be all things to all men. Paul said it in the cause of Salvation, but Joe says it in the cause of Liberation. For though we all start from a certain identity we receive, if we remain for all time trapped in that one identity, we can never experience the fullness of our humanity.
Haidry experienced most of the things the poem mentions. He has had a dip in the Ganga in Rishikesh, where he had gone rafting. He has visited temples, gurdwaras, churches and mosques with friends. School friends and classmates from his youth also wonder about their identity. He notes: “I have Brahmin friends who are conscious of being privileged, yet their caste is very much part of their personality. But that has never come between us.’’
Babri Masjid is mentioned in his poem. So too ‘sheher ke beech mein sarhad’ or, the border in the middle of the city. He has lived in Masjid Bunder in Mumbai, also on Bazaar Road, a kind of Muslim-Christian ghetto, which runs parallel to Bandra’s Hill Road. “When I mention Khooni Darwaza in Delhi and Bhool Bhulaiya, in Lucknow, both of which I have visited, I am referring to their histories, not to them as tourist places,” Haidry says. The poem also refers to riots and “kurtey par khoon ka dhabba”, or a bloodstained kurta. He therefore does not leave out the strained contemporary events that affect Muslims adversely.
It was while waiting to set off on a trip from Kolkata to Bhutan that Haidry heard the sound of the azaan one morning, and the first lines of the poem came to him. “But it was a completely different poem back then, and I even lost the diary I wrote it in. So I rewrote it a few months back.”
Hindustani Mussalman – audio recited by Joe
Joe recited the Urdu from its transcription in Devnagiri, providing a side-by-side English translation that he modified from the. one available on the web by Dipika Mukherjee and Udit Mehrotra. Some clarifications were made before reading the poem. Khooni Darwaza (the bloody gate) is an old gate of Delhi on BSZ Marg, opposite Feroz Shah Kotla cricket ground. It is so named because the three sons of the last Moghul Emperor,Bahadur Shah Zafar, were shot there by an English soldier. Bhool Bhulaiya is the name of a maze in Lucknow next the Imambara, a much visited place. The numbers 14 and 100 that occur in the poem constitute the percentage of Muslims in the Indian population.
Joe could feel the weight of the poem and the underlying anguish as well as exhilaration of a person who belongs to such a marvellously diverse country. He too has visited every kind of shrine of all faiths and traditions, and dipped in the Ganga – not in Rishikesh like Haidry, but in nearby Haridwar. The essence of the poem may be felt in these two lines:
मैं पूरे सौ में बसता हूं
पूरे सौ मुझमें बसते हैं
The unity is not in exterior diversity as commonly understood; Haidry says the unification takes place within each person. Or to put it in Whitman’s words:
I am large, I contain multitudes.
The poem was appreciated by the KRG readers. Zakia wanted to say ‘Wah! Wah!‘ As it represents exactly what Muslims think in India. She said India is so much richer for the influence of other sects and religions and the multiplicity of identities we see. KumKum also thought highly of the poet, never having come across him before. She said she got goosebumps listening to the. recitation and Joe seemed to have got the intonation right. She called the poet ‘ a lovely young man.’ Geeta said she understands not a word of Hindi or Urdu but she read the the translation provided alongside the Devnagiri text beforehand, and was prepared. Joe stands corrected on a point KumKum made: the percentage of Christians in India is just 2.3%.
Kavita
Kavita gave the news of her daughter’s decision to get married; it will take place in Sep or Oct. Everyone applauded the happy event to come. The boy is related to Rema aunty. He is her sister’s grandson. ‘Welcome to the club’ said Talitha. Her daughter is 25 years old, and Kavita had her by age twenty-five.
She read two poems of an Australian Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, also known as Kath Walker. The first poem titled A Song Of Hope, appropriately holds out the promise of a future in which the past oppression and racial hatred visited on the Aboriginals will be blown away by a new dawn:
The world is waking
To a new bright day,
When none defame us,
No restriction tame us,
The hope is strong and sweet as she hails her fellow people:
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over,
And though long the climb,
New rights will greet us,
We can all hope with her that the promise of a brighter future will be borne out. The second poem, United We Win, is like the first in hailing a brighter tomorrow:
Brood no more on the bloody past
that is gone without regret,
But look to the light of happier days
that will shine for your children yet.
She assures her people about
the good white hand
stretched out to grip the black.
Is it wishful thinking? We know that in America prejudices and the white supremacist sentiments of ante-bellum days still flourish 200 years after Emancipation. In truth political acts assure nothing, without the attempt to provide equal economic status and opportunities for long-oppressed and suppressed people.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920 - 1993) was an Aboriginal rights activist, poet, veteran, environmentalist and educator
Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) (1920–1993), was black rights activist, poet, environmentalist, and educator. She was born to Edward (Ted) Ruska, a labourer, and his wife Lucy, who was a Noonuccal descendant, the daughter of an inland Aboriginal woman and a Scottish migrant. Lucy, her mother, was removed and placed in an institution in Brisbane, and at fourteen years of age, without the skills to read or write, she was consigned to work as a housemaid in rural Queensland.
The settlement on North Stradbroke Island or Minjerribah on the outskirts of Dunwich, was the setting for Kath’s earliest memories of hunting wild parrots, fishing, boating, and sharing in the community dugong catch. In 1934, at thirteen, she completed her formal education at Dunwich State School. She left home for Brisbane to work as a domestic for board and lodging but had a talent for writing.
In World War II Ruska enlisted in the Australian Women’s Army Service after her brothers were captured by the Japanese. In June she transferred to the district accounts office where she remained until being discharged from the Army on 19 January 1944. She enjoyed team competition in sports. In 1943 she married Bruce Walker, a childhood friend and a descendant of Aboriginal clans from Queensland’s Logan and Albert rivers region; he was an electric welder. Their union did not last and as a single parent she struggled to provide and care for her son, Denis. A course in stenography led to an office job but because she was needed at home by her son she returned to flexible hours, taking in ironing and cleaning for professional households. She worked for a medical couple Raphael and Phyllis Cilento, whose house full of books encouraged her own artistic sensibilities. In 1953 she had a second son, Vivian by the son of her employer.
In the 1940s she joined the Communist Party of Australia – the only political party without a White Australia policy. It opposed racial discrimination. Through the party she gained skills in writing speeches and political strategy, which ‘stood me in good stead through life,’ but she left because ‘they wanted to write my speeches.’ She joined the Brisbane Realist Writers Group. James Devaney encouraged and sent a selection of her poems to Dame Mary Gilmore. Ninety-four at the time of their meeting, Gilmore said, as Walker later recalled: ‘These belong to the world. Never forget you’re the tool that merely wrote them down.’
In 1964 We Are Going became the first poetry publication by an Aboriginal Australian. Despite the success of that book and The Dawn Is At Hand, which followed two years later, her work was dismissed by many critics as protest poetry. She won the Jessie Litchfield award for literature (1967), a Fellowship of Australian Writers award, and the Dame Mary Gilmore medal. Sales of her poetry were claimed to rank second to Australia’s best-selling poet, C. J. Dennis.
Two years before her first book, in 1962, Walker became secretary of the Federal Council for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement. She travelled around Australia with delegates of the Council. Campaigning for equal citizenship rights, she met with cabinet ministers, and led a delegation to Prime Minister Robert Menzies, and wrote and delivered speeches. The struggle culminated in the landmark 1967 referendum to empower the Federal government to legislate on Aboriginal affairs.
Walker stood for the Labor Party in the 1969 State election, but lost. Her hard-fought campaign for Aboriginal land rights was slow to gain political support. London’s 1969 World Council of Churches consultation on racism was the first of many international invitations, which over the years would take her to Fiji, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America. My People (1970), a collection combining her two previous books, would be her last poetry for a decade and a half.
Aged fifty, in 1971, suffering ill health and facing challenges for power from younger Aboriginal leaders, Walker returned to Minjerribah. She assembled a gunyah – a traditional shelter – on negotiated leasehold land, the beginnings of a learning facility, and named it Moongalba (the sitting-down place). Her teaching of Aboriginal culture inspired thousands of school children, whom she saw as the bright future. She published two children’s books, Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972) and Father Sky and Mother Earth (1981). In 1983 she stood in the State election, without success.
During a tour of China in 1984 Walker’s enthusiasm to write poetry revived, resulting in the simultaneous publication in Australia and China of Kath Walker in China (1988). She received prestigious awards, including honorary doctorates from Macquarie University (1988), Griffith University (1989), Monash University (1991), and Queensland University of Technology (1992). In 1977 she appeared in a film biography, Shadow Sister; her performance won the 1977 Black Film Makers’ award in San Francisco. She also advised on and acted in Bruce Beresford’s 1986 film The Fringe Dwellers. A veteran environmental campaigner, she spoke against uranium mining and opposed sand mining on Minjerribah. In 1987, in protest at the bicentennial celebration of Australia Day, she returned the MBE to which she had been appointed in 1970.
With her son Vivian she wrote under their newly chosen Noonuccal names Oodgeroo (paperbark tree) and Kabul (carpet snake). These last few years together ended in 1991 with Kabul’s AIDS-related death at thirty-eight. Heartsick but resolute, Oodgeroo served as a judge of the David Unaipon award for Indigenous writers, as adviser on a national Aboriginal studies curriculum for teachers, and as patron of Queensland’s first Writers Centre. She died of cancer on 16 September 1993 at the Repatriation General Hospital, Greenslopes, Brisbane. At her funeral on Minjerribah hundreds came to say farewell to the nation’s much loved poet and activist, who was buried at Moongalba beside Kabul.
In 2006 Queensland University of Technology renamed its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Support Unit the Oodgeroo Unit. Oodgeroo taught the spirituality of her ancestors, responsibility for the earth, and the connection of all people. Her poetry and stories continue to inspire. She chose ‘a long road and a lonely road, but oh, the goal is sure’ (Walker 1970, 54).
(The above biography is largely taken from a 2017 article by Sue Abbey on the Australian National University website).
KumKum
Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is not new to our readers at KRG. We heard her poems, once when we celebrated women poets of the world in October 2020, and again in another poetry session in August 2016, when KumKum read a couple of her poems. KRG also read her Booker prize (2000) winning novel The Blind Assassin in December 2012.
For our February 2021 Poetry session, once again KumKum chose to read Atwood, this time the poem Dearly. This poem is included in her latest volume titled, Dearly, published on November 10, 2020. She was almost 81 years old then, and had just lost her longtime partner Graeme Gibson, a distinguished Canadian author and naturalist, on September 18, 2019 in London, when the Poetry collection Dearly was published.
Gibson was 85 when he died. They were in London at the time of his death because Ms. Atwood was promoting a book of hers. Graeme Gibson was suffering from vascular dementia during the last five years of his life. Both were expecting the end for some time. Margaret Atwood accepted it philosophically, remarking that he did not suffer much degradation from the ailment. Together Margaret Atwood and Gibson lived a very happy and fulfilling life for decades. They had a daughter Eleanor Atwood Gibson. Gibson had two other children from his previous marriage, while Margaret didn't have any issue from her first marriage to Jim Polk, an American.
Margaret Atwood was being heralded as ‘the high priestess of Canadian literature’ as far back as 1981 when this picture was taken
Dearly is a long poem, a recollection of simple random thoughts, and reflections. Atwood describes her love and the feeling of loss for her deceased partner, and transforms the loss into rhyme. She also randomly talks about some words which are falling out of circulation or whose meanings have completely changed in the modern context – words like dearly, polaroid, string, and sorrow. Then she talks about the word stamen, ‘nothing to do with men’ as if trying to introduce a bit of jocularity. Words occupy her mind as they should being a poet.
So hard to describe the smallest details of flowers.
This is a stamen, nothing to do with men.
This is a pistil, nothing to do with guns.
It's the smallest details that foil translators
and myself too, trying to describe.
See what I mean.
You can wander away. You can get lost.
Words can do that.
And the line
I give less of a shit
seems daring, coming out of an octogenarian's pen, yet it’s quite colloquial today.
She ends with three lines:
Sorrow: that's another word
you don't hear much any more.
I sorrow dearly
Pamela
James Merrill was recognised as one of the leading poets of his generation. He has been praised for his stylish elegance, moral sensibilities and how he has transformed autobiographical moments into deep and complex meditations. Merrill's work includes prose and plays too but his artistic expression is found in poetry. He has won nearly every major literary award in America.
Merrill was born in 1926 in New York City and died of a heart attack in Feb.1995. He was the son of the investment banker, Charles.E.Merrill, co-founder of the Merrill Lynch investment firm. He was brought up in fabulous wealth. His father printed his first book when he was in high school. In 1946, while in College, he published his first collection of poetry – The Black Swan. Merrill's subject proves to be the subject of the great Romantics: the constant revisions of the self that come through writing verse.
He settled in Connecticut with his long term partner, the writer David Jackson. His master work was The Changing Light at Sandover. Embracing mysticism and the occult, Merrill believed, like Yeats, that he received inspiration from the world beyond. Critics have also found parallels between his writings and the work of Dante.
James Merrill, the poet, photo by Oscar White
In the 1960's Merrill began to incorporate more autobiographical and personal elements into his work. Merrill wanted (according to Helen Vendler, Harvard professor and critic) more than the usual proportion of dailiness and detail in his lyrics, while preserving a language remote from the usual journalistic poetry. His language, she said, was full of ‘arabesques, fancifulness, the play of wit and oblique metaphor.’ Merrill rivals Yeats in the Book of Ephraim, for occult description. Vendler observed in the New York Times Book Review that the best of Merrill's poems were autobiographical without being confessional.
Merrill's last years were haunted by a truth he once spoke to Helen Vendler in an interview in 1979 :
“In life there are no perfect affections. Estrangements among the living reek of unfinished business. Poems get written to the person no longer reachable.”
Joe added that soon after he came into his inheritance, James. Merrill and his siblings renounced it (worth billions) and established a charitable trust with their legacy. It has gone to aid artists who have not made it big in their professions, but are worthy of support. His heart attack was the final stage of AIDS he contracted; at that time there was no treatment.
He was never a tenant in real life. We are all tenants in this world metaphorically, and when we leave we pave the way for others to take over. When he talks of three friends, the third is himself. The first two had wine and flowers in their hand, the third one has an empty hand – he is an open person with thoughts and philosophies. He thinks beyond the physical world with a kind of mysticism, said Pamela.
Saras
Saras can’t get enough of Langston Hughes, the black poet who was part of the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theatre and politics centred in Harlem in New York City. Langston Hughes, a major poet of the time also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He declared he wanted to express his individuality as a ark-skinned person “without fear or shame.”
Many black intellectuals criticised his books, calling them “a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public.” Even people like James Baldwin, a fellow writer, were down on him. Langston Hughes showed an accurate picture of black life and its frustrations. The reality of job insecurity constantly interfered with ambitions to get ahead in life, among ordinary workers and singers. Although the elite critics dispraised him he gained a following among the public to whom he demonstrated the great resilience and spiritual strength of the African American people.
He visited many countries and worked in several cities in a variety of jobs. His experience of those times is reflected in his poetry, and he spoke for the people whom he saw and befriended. One of his characters is Semple who tells stories of his troubles with work, women, money and life to a friend. Hughes wrote these stories as newspaper columns. Occasionally critics have tended to question his commitment to the black cause because he saw good in every race.
Langston Hughes
The reason many believe Hughes’ poetic voice will outlive his times is that it draws on the sounds of “of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music” and lives within its own ironic sense. Hughes’ poetry in various places has the thrill of jazz and his sense of rhyme creates an image of blues music in verse. His distinguishing quality was that he addressed his verse to black people. At a time when poets were turning inward and writing obscure poetry for a select audience, Hughes was turning outward, “using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read.” He went around the country reading his poetry to audiences and got the ears of more people than any other poet of the time.
Hughes died of prostate cancer in May 1967.
[The above is taken from the poetry foundation.org page on Langston Hughes]
In the first poem Saras chose, Life is Fine, the poet is describing a crisis with a girl as a result of which the guy is forced to throw himself in the water from desperation, but the cold of the water saves him:
I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.
And later he defiantly announces to his ‘sweet baby’
So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love—
But for livin' I was born
He triumphs: Life is Fine!
You can hear the inflections of the common black voice in words like set down, holler, and sweet baby; they immediately transport you to the scene.
Harlem, the second poem is a wry musing on what happens to the dreams that people do not work to bring to fruition. After comparing it to several natural things like grapes and meat that go bad if neglected and left to dry up, the poet thinks it may just turn into a heavy load to carry: weight of unfulfilled hopes.
Or does it explode?
– he asks.
Commentators have noted that the famous 'I Have A Dream' speech of Martin Luther King, may have had its origin in this minor poem. MLK said in 1963:
There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.
And so it remains today, as America continues to default on its promise of the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, now not only to people of colour, but to all working class people, in an increasingly unequal society.
Shoba
Shoba read a poem of mysterious communion between two lovers. It’s best to start at the end:
And all the room a glow because
Time was away and she was here.
Throughout the poem time remains in suspension:
Time was away and somewhere else,
…
The bell was silent in the air
…
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them
…
God or whatever means the Good
Be praised that time can stop like this,
…
Time was away and she was here.
The camels, the brazen calyx of no noise, the cigarette the ash that bloomed again in tropic trees –– all these are surreal patches of imagination superposed on the central image of two people in a coffee shop, two glasses, two chairs and time utterly banished.
The narrator is agnostic and rather uncertain about using the familiar ‘God be praised’ so he says God or whatever means the Good –
Be praised that time can stop like this,
That what the heart has understood
Can verify in the body’s peace
You can derive what you want from this; perhaps it is the ability to experience within the body in sexual union the bliss of the frozen time as it descends on the lovers. Carol Rumens, the poet who writes a weekly column called Poem of the Week in The Guardian offered this poem to readers on 21 Nov 2016.
Louis MacNeice short bio
The British poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1964) claimed himself to be not a theorist but a poetic empiricist. His unfinished autobiography was posthumously published as The Strings Are False.
Louis MacNeice – photo by Kurt Hutton
Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast, Ireland. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford, and taught Greek for a short time in London, and elsewhere from 1936 to 1939. In 1939 he lectured at Cornell University in the United States.
In 1941 he joined the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) as a staff script writer and producer to illustrate Britain's war effort. During a brief hiatus 1950-1951 he served as director of the British Institute in Athens.
MacNeice’s first wife was Giovanna Marie Therese Ezra. This marriage began in 1930 and ended in divorce in 1946. He had a son by his first marriage. In 1954, with his second wife, vocalist Hedli Anderson, he had a daughter. He travelled extensively abroad in France, Norway, Italy, and India.
MacNeice rarely read novels. His favourite was Tolstoy's War and Peace. MacNeice considered the three novels he wrote in his youth poor attempts. He published his first poetic collection, Blind Fireworks, in 1929.
MacNeice predicted the inevitable fall of capitalism. On a visit to Barcelona in 1939, he pronounced that the Republican government, and not the reactionary forces Franco, would serve Spain well.
As poet, MacNeice's early work derives from the forms and traditions of classic poetry. He ttempted to achieve what Wordsworth called “The Real Language of Men,” an objective he sought not only in diction but in rhythm as well. MacNeice had a facility for imagery in which one descriptive passage leads to another.
MacNeice began to experiment with traditional lyrics, in which he sought to express a single, strong personal feeling. He employed symmetrical but intricate verse patterns and rhymes to this purpose.
In his later works he strove for economy. Especially in imagery he pursued the multum in parvo (much in little) ethos of poetic compression. MacNeice for example described a prostitute sitting at the end of a long bar as “mascara scrawls a gloss on a torn leaf.” Does that make sense?
MacNeice was identified in the 1930s with a group of young poets of social protest. The group included his friends Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. In later years he returned from political to moral themes.
Collaborating with a scholar of German in 1951, MacNeice translated Goethe's Faust for a radio presentation. Robert Lowell later observed that poetic translation requires not only translation but the composition of a new poem based upon an original in another language.
Some critics regard MacNeice as an undeveloped poet.
MacNeice was connected with the English Group Theatre in London, which produced his translation of the Agamemnon by Aeschylus in 1936 and his experimental play, Out of the Picture (1937), which he, himself, judged a bad play. At this time he began a trilogy of one-act plays with the intention of having them produced by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, because he considered the London West End Stage moribund.
His later works included The Roman Smile, a book of literary criticism; a verse translation of the Hippolytus by Euripedes; and a quasi-autobiographical book. In addition to his own publications, MacNeice contributed articles to several anthologies of literary criticism. Most of his work was published in the United States.
MacNeice was made C.B.E. (Commander of the British Empire) in 1957. He died on September 3, 1964, from viral pneumonia.
(The above is condensed from Biography at yourdictionary.com. For a far more detailed biography consult the poetryfoundation.org)
Thommo
Once long ago in Jan 2009 Thommo chose the title song Heavy Horses from the album of that name sung by Ian Anderson of the band Jethro Tull. That was an ode to horses.
The song Moths is probably about love and speaks of the first moths of summer entering by a window:
The leaded window opened
to move the dancing candle flame
And the first Moths of summer
suicidal came.
Love may be short in its duration (as the lemming said) and it’s irresistibly drawn to the flame, the object of love, and there perishes. But it is in love that people blossom and live their happiest selves (soared on powdered wings). They are subject to the vagaries of love,
Dipping and weaving --- flutter
through the golden needle's eye
and there’s a consummation before the end:
… we'll all burn together as the wick grows higher ---
before the candle's dead.
So the moths know they’ll die but they
join in the worship
of the light that never dies
Thommo sang the song to the reading group, but for lack of Internet bandwidth there was a stutter and we asked him to record the song again so that a recording could be included in this blog. Moths was conceived as a love song, inspired by a possibly fictitious game described in a book by John le Carré.
[Thommo audio file]
Ian Anderson, frontman for the rock band Jethro Tull is Scottish. Anderson and was born on the 10th of August 1947. As principal songwriter he has composed both the lyrics and music for most of Jethro Tull’s songs. Musician, singer and songwriter, he is best known for his work as lead vocalist, flautist and acoustic guitarist of the band. He is a multi-instrumentalist who, in addition to the flute, plays keyboards, acoustic and bass guitar, bouzouki, balalaika, saxophone, harmonica and a variety of whistles. His solo work began with the 1983 album Walk into Light; since then he has released another five works, including the 2012 sequel to the 1972 Jethro Tull album Thick as a Brick entitled Thick as a Brick 2. The other albums are their first. This Was their best selling Aqualung and Songs from the Woods, Heavy Horses, Minstrel in the Gallery, Living in the Past and A Passion Play. The band to date has sold over 60 million records.
Ian Anderson of the Jethro Tull bandd may never be too old to rock
‘Moths’ is a song from Jethro Tull’s hugely successful album Heavy Horses. Judging from the title Moths, one would imagine that the song would be about that nocturnal insect, the moth. Actually it refers to a fictitious game described in a book!
Ian Anderson of the Jethro Tull band may never be too old to rock
Anderson was impressed by the story of John Le Carré’s novel The Naive and Sentimental Lover. Incidentally it is Le Carre’s only non-espionage novel. Ian Anderson says
“It’s a weird and tricky love story between three people, Shamus, Cassidy and Helen. Shamus the bad guy, is the seductive, crazy man, he’s the dangerous sex, drugs and rock’n’roll guy. And Moths is a game invented by Le Carré, which Shamus plays with Cassidy and Helen, in which a candle is placed in the middle of a billiard table, and you score a point for each time you bounce the white ball off each side of the table around the candle.”
Ian Anderson has combined the game and the love triangle intrigue with real moths.
Zakia
This being the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats, Zakia read from a letter of Joseph Severn, the painter who cared for Keats during his final illness until his death in Rome. Severn is writing to William Haslam, a great friend of Keats in London, to give him the news of how Keats is doing. It is a letter full of pathos in which you hear the voice of Keats speaking to Severn:
You are enduring for me more than I’d have you. O! that my last hour has come.
.. and then the voice of Severn tells Haslam the fatal news:
Keats is sinking daily. He is dying of a consumption, of a confirmed consumption. Perhaps another three weeks may lose me him forever. This alone would break down the most gallant spirit. … Should our unfortunate friend die, all the furniture will be burnt; beds, sheets, curtains, and even the walls must be scraped.
Severn continues:
O! My dear Haslam, this is my greatest care, a care that I pray to God may soon end, for he says in words that tear my very heartstrings: “Miserable wretch I am. This last cheap comfort which every rogue and fool have is denied me in my last moments. Why is this? O! I have serv’d everyone with my utmost good, yet why is this? I cannot understand this.” And then his chattering teeth.
Joseph Severn's sketch of Keats on his deathbed
Keats Short Bio
John Keats (1795–1821) is synonymous with English Romantic poetry. Vivid imagery and the resort to greek myths and legends animate his poetry, just as much as the simple consideration of nature.
His mother died the he ws young of tuberculosis and he himself came upon its symptoms in 1818 after the exertions of a walking tour in the Lake District.
Early Years
He was the oldest of four children. Keats lost his parents at an early age.
Keats' father's death greatly dealt a blow to financial security. His mother, Frances, remarried lost her money, and left left the family in the care of her mother.
Keats found solace and comfort in art and literature. At Enfield Academy, he was taken in hand by the school's headmaster, John Clarke, who encouraged Keats' interest in literature.
In 1810, Keats left the school for studies to become a surgeon. He eventually studied medicine at a London’s Guy’s hospital and became a licensed apothecary in 1816.
Early Poetry
But Keats’ devotion to literature and the arts never ceased. Through his friend, Cowden Clarke, Keats met publisher, Leigh Hunt of The Examiner. Through Hunt, a liberal commentator and critic, and man of letters, Keats was introduced to the world of other writers, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Williams Wordsworth.
In 1817 Keats published his first volume of poetry, Poems. The following year, Keats' published Endymion, a four-thousand line poem based on the Greek myth of the same name which took about 10 months of labour.
Unfortunately for him two of England's leading journals, Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review, criticised him severely. The Blackwood's piece labelled him as belonging to the ‘Cockney School of Poetry.’ This criticism took a toll on Keats, as Byron later noticed.
Endymion further earned scorn for Keats.
Recovering Poet
In 1817 Keats wrote about poetry’s role in society in lengthy letters to friends. He outlined his vision of a kind of poetry that drew its beauty from real world human experience rather than some mythical grandeur.
There is a famous doctrine called Negative Capability associated with his name: though one may not understand it precisely, Keats seems to be saying that by foregoing logical incisive thought processes and yielding instead to sensations, we can enter into a kind of knowledge that is unavailable to the fact-follower.
The Mature Poet
In the summer of 1818 Keats returned home to care for his brother, Tom, who'd fallen deeply ill with tuberculosis. Around this time Keats fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. His work included his first Shakespearean sonnet, When I have fears that I may cease to be, which was published in January 1818.
Two months later, Keats published Isabella, and then the beautiful ode To Autumn, a sensuous work published in 1820
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
The poem, and others, was Keats coming into his own style filled with sensuality beyond any contemporary Romantic poetry.
Keats' writing also compassed Hyperion, an ambitious Romantic piece inspired by Greek myth.
Tom’s death halted his writing and he finally returned to the work in late 1819, rewriting his unfinished poem with a new title, The Fall of Hyperion, which went unpublished until thirty years after Keats' death.
The audience for Keats' poetry during his lifetime was small. He published three volumes of poetry but managed to sell just 200 copies of all his work in his lifetime. Truly he would have perished without generous friends. His third and final volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in July 1820.
Final Years and Death
In 1819 Keats’ tuberculosis that he must have contracted while caring for his brother, grew worse. Soon after his last volume of poetry was published, he ventured off to Italy with his close friend, the painter Joseph Severn, on the advice of his doctor, who had told him he needed to be in a warmer climate for the winter.
The trip and health issues ended his romance with Fanny Brawne. He despaired of his own dreams of becoming a successful writer.
Keats briefly felt better in Rome. But within a month, he was back in bed, suffering from a high temperature. The last few months of his life proved particularly painful for the poet and Severn’s letter to Haslam, which Zakia read, portrays the sense of doom closing in.
Keats' agony was so severe he pressed his doctor and asked him, "How long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?" Death came on February 23, 1821 whiles clutching the hand of the blessed Severn. He wrote for his epitaph:
Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water.
Talitha
Bio of Louise Bogan (1897 – 1970)
Louise Bogan is one of the most accomplished American poet-critics of the mid-20th century. Her subtle, restrained style was influenced by writers such as Rilke and Henry James, and the English metaphysical poets such as George Herbert, John Donne, and Henry Vaughan.
Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets. Bogan chose to use traditional techniques, though her poetry is modern and her language is immediate and contemporary. Her poems are economical with words; they are masterpieces of crossed rhythms (in which the meter opposes word groupings). Marianne Moore described her poems as “compactness compacted.”
Louise Bogan (1897–1970) her poetry is modern and emotive without being sentimental
Louise Bogan was born in Maine, the daughter of a mill worker. Her parents’ marriage was not a happy one, because her mother was unstable mentally. As the Bogans moved from one mill town to the next, her mother had many extramarital affairs and mystified her family with frequent and lengthy disappearances. The reviewer Brett C. Millier proposed that “the difficulties and instabilities of her childhood produced in Bogan a preoccupation with betrayal and a distrust of others …”
Louise did her schooling in Boston, and after marrying lived in New York. She moved to Vienna after her husband's death in 1920, where she lived a writer’s life of solitude for three years. When she returned to live in New York in 1923, she worked in a bookstore and with cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Among her friends were the literary figures and poets, William Carlos Williams and Conrad Aiken.
Bogan died in 1970, at her home in Manhattan. She was 72.
These are her collections of poetry:
Body of This Death (1923)
Dark Summer (1929)
Sleeping Fury (1937),
Poems and New Poems (1941)
Collected Poems, 1923-1953
The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968 was the final collection of her poems
A book review said Bogan “works not as a landscape painter nor yet as a musician — although in many of her poems, the auditory imagery is superior to the visual: the ear listens, even as the eye sees. Her art is that of a sculpture.”
Saturday Review commented, “Louise Bogan is mistress of precise images ... she is also a musician, whose notes are as as crystalline as those of Chopin’s Preludes... at the core of her poetry is mind-stuff which it is fashionable to call metaphysical."... they deal intelligently with the themes of sexual love and bodily decay.
With William Jay Smith, Bogan compiled an anthology of poems for children, The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People which was widely acclaimed.
Brett C. Millier named Bogan “one of the finest lyric poets America has produced."
She also reviewed poetry for the New Yorker for 38 years, becoming one of America’s most astute critics. Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 was a brief account of American poetry during the first half of the 20th century. The Chicago Tribune described the book as “a delight... acute, spirited, and authoritative.”
"Louise Bogan is a great lyric poet,” concluded Paul Ramsey in Iowa Review. “To have written ‘Song for the Last Act,’ ‘Old Countryside,’ ‘Men Loved Wholly Wisdom,’ … and ...similar poems is to have wrought one of the high achievements of the human spirit."
Here are some poems by Bogan which Talitha recommends:
After the Persian, The Alchemist, Betrothed, Cassandra, Didactic Piece, Elders, Epitaph for a Romantic Woman, Fifteenth Farewell, Hypocrite Swift, Juan’s Song, The Mark.
Particular recommendation: The Mark.
The poem Song for the Last Act is a mysterious poem that Talitha read. It spells out the various aspects of a person whom the poet is getting to know in several ways – by face, voice and heart.
Now that I have your face by heart, I look.
…
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.
…
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.
These are all stages in coming to know. The face yields the frame by which to look. The voice serves
chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music’s cage,
The heart brings interior visions of
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
How does a person’s heart render such images. We don’t know but
… the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Is the poet satisfied. Yes, for she says in conclusion:
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.
The Poems
Consolidated Poems for Feb 26, 2021 KRG Poetry Session
It was a very enjoyable Session. Poetry sessions are always like that. Very enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteThank you Joe for your wonderful Blog. This one is your 200th blog entry, Congratulations. Amazing!
February 23 was Keats 200th Death Anniversary. We remembered him in this session.
This year on February 23rd, we remembered our member Hemjith affectionately. It was his first death anniversary. He was one of our devoted readers, and very fine gentleman. We do miss him.
KRG sent a bouquet of flowers to his wife Sugandhi that day.
This Peotry session was also very special, as all 14 members of KRG attended the session. And we had Ms. Talitha, an old member, attending the session from Kollam.
Thanks to Zoom, our monthly Sessions are going on without break.
Thank you for your encouragement. I am not very sure the blog posts are useful, but they give me an outlet for writing; and allow me to go over the entire material of a session again and expand it. I get to know some of the poets better ... read more subsidiary material, find suitable. illustrations, etc.
Deletelove
joe
I also support Un peace
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