Collage of Readers on Zoom
We had ten poets represented, five American, three British, and one each from Russia and Argentina. The only translated poems were those of Pasternak from Russian, and Borges from Spanish.
The poem chosen by Thomo, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is from the 1939 book of poems by T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Its presentation in modern times occurred when the book was turned into the 1981 musical Cats composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The most famous song in the musical was Memory, adapted from the Eliot poem with lyrics by the musical's director Trevor Nunn. Memory is sung primarily by the character Grizabella as a melancholic remembrance of her glamorous past, and as a plea for acceptance.
Elaine Page as Grizabella in the musical Cats
The enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina is best known for his short stories in Ficciones and his essays on various subjects. Every reader will be transported by reading his short story The Library of Babel which begins:
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly.
But at this poetry session we tasted a poem of Borges in which he successively refines the concept of a tiger, having never seen one,
conjuring in my poem
is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows
– and thus
creates a fiction, not a living creature,
not one of those who wander on the earth.
The Other Tiger
The venerable Robert Frost who doesn’t like walls was about this very task of mending one. Each spring they find gaps from fallen boulders in the low stone walls between their houses and attempt to repair the gaps:
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
Robert Frost and a wall
Apparently the adage ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ urges them on to complete a task, which is actually redundant to the aim of trespassing for there are no cows to wander across. Frost philosophically reminds the reader
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
Boris Pasternak, whose poems we’ve read before, reappeared when KumKum read a poem out of his famous novel, Doctor Zhivago. The poem is titled Parting and we are reminded of the line from our recent Shakespeare session when Juliet confides to her lover Romeo that
… Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say “Good night” till it be morrow.
But the occasion of Pasternak’s poem is the final parting, out of many in the novel, between Lara and Yury, the doctor, who also writes poems; he is left alone in the deserted house and muses –
In years of strife, in times which were
Unthinkable to live in,
Upon a wave of destiny
To him she had been driven,
…
And now, so suddenly, she'd left.
What power overrode them?
The last parting of Yuri and Lara in Doctor Zhivago
Arundhaty
Arundhaty first came across the poet Clint Smith on a site called ‘poetry is not a luxury ‘ on Instagram. She chose two poems to read. He is a contemporary new generation writer (born 1988) who writes about things that concern us in our everyday lives. In one of his talks on Youtube he speaks about how poetry doesn’t necessarily have to be about nature’s beauty or sorrow or longing or anything profound. It can be anything that stimulates contemplation and about seeing. Poetry is the act of paying attention.
Clinton Smith III is an African American writer, poet and scholar. He is the author of New York Times Best Seller, How the Word Is Passed, which won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the top ten books of 2021 by the New York Times.
Clint Smith, poet of collection ‘Above Ground’
Smith grew up in New Orleans, where he went to Benjamin Franklin High School for his first three years and attended the Awty International School in Houston, Texas, for his final senior year when his family had to get away from New Orleans when it was battered by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. It was an extremely powerful hurricane that caused enormous destruction and significant loss of life. He attended Davidson College in North Carolina, graduating in 2010 with a B.A. in English. Subsequently he obtained a Ph.D. in 2020 from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
He was part of the winning team at the 2014 National Poetry Slam and was a 2017 recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from The American Poetry Review. Smith published his first book of poetry, Counting Descent, in 2016. It won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Awards.
Smith has also been a contributor to The New Yorker magazine. His work is included in the anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (2016). He won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction for it. Smith is currently working to present the untold stories of World War II to be published by Random House in a nonfiction book, Just Beneath the Soil.
At present he is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where his article, Monuments to the Unthinkable was featured as the cover story in December 2022. He hosted Crash Course's Black American History series, which ran from 2021 until late in 2022.
Clint Smith Cover for The Atlantic Dec 2022 – How Germany Remembers the Holocaust
In the poem Above Ground, Clint Smith writes about the everyday joy, anxiety and the exhaustion of parenthood. He also writes about the legacy of slavery and racism and how that history shaped the lives of his ancestors and continues to influence the lives of his children. In many of his poems Clint speaks to his two children.
Discussion
The poet mentions his children's ages and refers to the cycle of cicadas emerging from the earth:
Cicadas are on 13 and 17 year cycles which occur in different years in different geographical areas. Geetha loved this phrase from the second poem –
The poet mentions his children's ages and refers to the cycle of cicadas emerging from the earth:
One of you is four years old. One of you is two.
The next time the cicadas rise out of the earth
you will be twenty-one and nineteen.
Praise
the seduction of slumber that tiptoes across your eyelids,
...
the cicada's
song wrapping itself around the three of us like a quilt
Thomo says Geetha and her brother can sleep any amount. Devika on the other hand knows a mother with a 4-year-old child who gives her great trouble to fall asleep.
Devika
Devika chose a poem by by Marie Ravenel de LaCoste. Marie Ravenel de La Coste (1835? - 1946) who wrote one of the best-loved Confederate songs. Her French parents had emigrated to Savannah, Georgia. Marie was a French teacher but she was inspired to try her hand at poetry when her fiancé, a Captain in the Confederate Army, was killed in combat. Devika tried to dig up information on the poet but was unsuccessful beyond the bare minimum presented here. Even Joe who usually unearths things from the Web, was stymied in the case of Marie Ravenel. Perhaps we have to invent her biography with the help of ChatGPT.
After his death, Marie made a practice of visiting wounded soldiers in Savannah's hospitals, bringing them flowers and fruit, and keeping them company. She composed these moving verses about the loss of a loved one in battle after seeing an unidentified young soldier with a fatal wound brought into the ward she was visiting.
Her poem, which is sung at historical events today, is a distinctive memorial to those soldiers.
Devika found this poem from the book, The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes, gifted to her by Joe and KumKum’s children. According to Francis Mayes, this poem, manages to top melodrama with sentimentality. She says that melodrama is a tempest in a teapot – a dangerous quality for a poem as one doesn’t like to be over-convinced.
Closely related to melodrama is sentimentality. Poems that deal with emotions constantly risk becoming sentimental. The sure sign of sentimentality is oversimplification. This results in watery-eyed nostalgia or pure corniness.
Somebody’s Darling, popular during the civil war reinforces its single message over and over.
Marie Ravenel’s Fictitious Biography supplied by ChatGPT
Marie Ravenel de LaCoste, the enigmatic poet behind the moving verses of Somebody's Darling, captivated readers with her profound insights into love, loss, and the human experience. While historical information about her is limited, let us delve into a narrative that imagines some significant events in her life.
Marie Ravenel was born in a quaint countryside village in southern France in the year 1830. From a young age, she possessed an innate passion for literature and an extraordinary talent for weaving words together. Encouraged by her progressive-minded parents, Marie received a well-rounded education, studying not only the classics but also embracing the emerging Romantic movement.
As she blossomed into a young woman, Marie's wanderlust ignited, prompting her to embark on a grand adventure through Europe. She traveled across enchanting landscapes, soaking up inspiration from the vibrant cultures she encountered. It was during her journeys that Marie experienced her first taste of unrequited love, which would serve as a recurring theme in her poetic works.
Returning to her ancestral home, Marie found solace in the serenity of her family's estate, perched atop a verdant hillside. In the sanctuary of her personal haven, she devoted countless hours to honing her craft and refining her poetic voice. The majestic gardens and picturesque surroundings became a muse that guided her pen.
Her parents emigrated from France to Savannah, Georgia, in the south of the US when she was still an impressionable young woman. There she met a dashing young captain in the Confederate Army, Joseph Louis de LaCoste. It was love at first sight, tenderly nurtured and soon they got married.
But tragedy struck when Marie's beloved succumbed to a wound in the war. Overwhelmed by grief, Marie made a practice of visiting wounded soldiers in Savannah's hospitals, bringing them flowers and fruit, and keeping them company. She composed these moving verses about the loss of a loved one in battle after seeing an unidentified young soldier with a fatal wound brought into the ward she was visiting. She found solace in her writing, pouring her heartache into verses but unfortunately only this one poem has survived and she did not publish.
Somebody's Darling became a celebrated poem, The heartfelt elegy resonated deeply with readers, who were moved by its poignant depiction of loss and longing.
Emboldened by the success of her first published poem, Marie ventured to the bustling literary salons of Paris, where she sought recognition among the esteemed writers and thinkers of the time. There, she found a circle of like-minded souls who embraced her unique voice and celebrated her evocative imagery.
As the years passed, Marie continued to explore the complexities of the human condition through her poetry, delving into themes of unrequited love, the fleeting nature of happiness, and the fragility of life. Her works spoke to the hearts of those who sought solace and understanding in the written word.
Marie Ravenel de LaCoste's image reflects an elegant woman with deep, contemplative eyes that hold a glimmer of both joy and sorrow. Her chestnut hair, often arranged in an intricate braid, cascades softly over her shoulders. Clad in flowing dresses adorned with delicate lace, she exudes an air of timeless grace and ethereal beauty. Her countenance bears the marks of a life lived passionately, etching wisdom and compassion into her delicate features.
Marie Ravenel de LaCoste imagined
While the details of Marie's life may remain shrouded in mystery, her words continue to resonate across generations, offering solace, inspiration, and a glimpse into the enigmatic soul of the poet who penned Somebody's Darling. The poem has pathos. Geetha likened it to the Minstrel Boy.
Geetha
Geetha was in a quandary as to which poem to select when she came across a book of poems on her daughter Miriam’s shelf. She selected a small poem by a poet she had never heard of before, Clark Ashton Smith. It's not a well-known poem by a poet who was prolific. The narratives in his poems tend to be macabre. Geetha selected a poem which she thought was short and simple, but soon realised it's melancholic tenor.
Miriam, daughter of Geetha and Thomo
The poet Clark Ashton Smith is known for poems and writings which are anything but simple. His inspiration besides other famous poets was Edgar Allan Poe who as we know is renowned for his dark, macabre poems, rich in imagery and absolutely transfixing to a reader of poetry!
Clark Ashton Smith, 1912
Clark Ashton Smith(CAS) (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an American writer and artist. Smith was born in Long Valley, Placer County, California, into a family with legacy English and New England heritage. He spent most of his life in the small town of Auburn, California, living in a cabin built by his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith.
He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and is remembered as ‘The Last of the Great Romantics’ and ‘The Bard of Auburn.’ Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that “in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled,” and Ray Bradbury said that Smith “filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures.”
His work is marked by an extraordinarily rich and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humour.
Of his writing style, Smith stated: “My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.”
An insatiable reader with an extraordinary eidetic memory, Smith seemed to retain most or all of he read. After his formal education, he embarked upon a self-directed course of literature, including Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Madame d'Aulnoy, the Arabian Nights and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. He read every word of an unabridged dictionary, studying not only the definitions of the words but also their etymology.
The other main content of Smith's self-education was to read the complete 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica at least twice.
Geetha remembers that in our poetry reading circle, it was Reggie (late husband of Arundhaty), who used to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from cover to cover in his childhood days!!
CAS's poems and writings have a niche readership and is very popular among them. Hundreds of stories were published in his lifetime, in magazines like Weird Tales.
Smith's most celebrated poems are The Star Treader written at age 19, The Hashish Eater, 1922, and Sandalwood 1925.
Discussion
KumKum said it was a lovely poem. It has certain words like dolent (‘A dolent, drear, complaining note’) and reiterant (‘With a sad, reiterant sound’) that are now not used much, said Joe. The first is listed as archaic in the OED.
Geetha liked the cadence of the verse, noting that she did not much take to prose-like poetry. Joe said one of the poets we are going to read, Robert Frost, said writing that kind of poetry is like playing tennis with the net down. Thomo replied that playing tennis without a net is like squash; but they are playing against the rapidly rebounding walls that can send the ball back in weird angles. Poetry should employ all its particular devices like metaphors, and similes, and personification, and so on. A neat little example of metaphors, and about poetry in general is given in this short clip of the poet Pablo Neruda chatting with the poet-manqué postman, Mario, in the film Il Postino.
Joe
We all know Lawrence from having read a novel of his, Women in Love, in May 2021. That novel takes up the story of Ursula doubtful of her role as teacher and her sister Gudrun, who is also a teacher but an artist and a free spirit as well. They are modern women, educated, free from stereotyped assumptions about their role.
D.H. Lawrence – © University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections
David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was the fourth child of a coal miner, and very much of working class origins. His mother was educated and religious. Lawrence won a scholarship to high school and left at 16 to earn a living as clerk in a factory. He began a intense friendship (1902–10) with his sweetheart Jessie Chambers. Encouraged by her, he began to write in 1905; his first story was published in a local newspaper in 1907. He studied further at the University College in Nottingham and earned a teacher’s certificate in 1908. He never stopped writing poems and stories, and began his first novel, The White Peacock.
In 1908 Lawrence went to teach in Croydon, a London suburb. Jessie Chambers was instrumental in getting The White Peacock published through Madox Ford in 1911. His second novel, The Trespasser (1912) piqued the interest of the editor Edward Garnett, who secured the third novel, Sons and Lovers, for his own firm, Duckworth.
Lawrence married Frieda Weekley, neè von Richthofen, after a tempestuous affair
In 1911–12 Lawrence fell in love and eloped with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), who had already had 3 children by the linguistics professor Weekley at Nottingham University. The couple went first to Germany and then to Italy, where Lawrence completed Sons and Lovers.
During World War I Lawrence’s pacifism and Frieda’s German origins evoked suspicion among their rural neighbours. The couple often had quarrels because Frieda wanted to take on lovers, as she had been accustomed to. Lawrence extended the scope of Sons and Lovers by following the Brangwen family (who lived near Eastwood) over three generations, in a new novel The Rainbow.
After World War I Lawrence and his wife went to Italy (1919), and he never again lived in England. He soon embarked on a group of novels consisting of The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922).
Lawrence wrote Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and Movements in European History (1921) and two psychological treatises.
Reaching Taos, New Mexico, he found a suitable place but his health declined with a bronchial haemorrhage and tuberculosis.
Lawrence returned to Italy in 1925, and in 1926 he embarked on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and wrote travel pieces. Lady Chatterley’s Lover led an underground life until legal decisions in New York (1959) and London (1960) lifted censorship and made it freely available. Judge Bryan in New York wrote that “The dominant theme, purpose and effect of the book as a whole is not an appeal to prurience or the prurient minded.”
D.H. Lawrence bust by Diana Thomson at Newstead Abbey
The dying Lawrence moved to the south of France and wrote Apocalypse (published 1931), a commentary on the biblical Book of Revelation. He was buried in Vence, and his ashes were removed to Taos in 1935.
Lawrence’s work includes 7 volumes of letters. A sample from his letter to Jessie Chambers: “When I look at you, what I see is not the kissable and embraceable part of you, although it is so fine to look at, with the silken toss of hair curling over your ears. What I see is the deep spirit within. That I love and can go on loving all my life.”
Here's another example, an application letter in a traditional nineteenth century form (probably still used in India) at age 16:
To J.H. Haywood Ltd., September ? 1901
Gentlemen,
In reply to your ad. in today's Guardian) for a junior clerk, I beg to place my services at your disposal. I am sixteen years of age, and have just completed three years' course at the Nottingham High School. Although | have not had any business experience in accounts yet, I studied book-keeping and obtained two prizes for Mathematics, as well as one for French and German.
If desired, I shall be pleased to furnish you with the highest references as to character and ability, both from my late masters and the Minister in this town.
Should you favour me with the appointment I would always endeavour to merit the confidence you place in me.
Trusting to receive your favourable reply, I beg to remain, Gentlemen,
Yours obediently, D. H. Lawrence
Lawrence wrote over 800 poems during his lifetime. The publisher’s commendation of his Collected Poetry states:
“At the beginning of his career, his poems were infused with pathetic fallacy and continual personification of flora and fauna. Like many of the Georgian poets, Lawrence's style was overly verbose and archaic, meant as a tribute to the previous Georgian period. However, the tragedy of World War I changed Lawrence's style dramatically. He wanted to break free from the overused stereotypes of the time and instead focus on finding new and more eloquent ways of expressing poetry. The author began experimenting with free verse and often revised past works in order to strip away the dated tropes he used as a less experienced writer. While Lawrence wrote during the Modernist period, his poems do not exhibit the same style as the famous Modern poets. He celebrated impulses and felt that each poem had to be deeply personal to its author.”
(This biography relies on Brittanica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/D-H-Lawrence)
Nottingham University hosts an extended biography of Lawrence at
A documentary biography of DHL is available on youtube emphasising the role of the Nottinghamshire countryside in his development:
Joe read the poem The Ship of Death, one of DHL’s famous poems. It is a reflection on death while the person is still living. It would be easy to fall into a dispirited depression thinking on death. After all it ends the most beautiful thing we have – our life.
The poem takes a different tack, recognising that life is a
… journey, over the hidden sea
To the last wonder of oblivion.
And the person has to make provision for that ‘longest journey’ by building ‘a ship of death’ and
Putting its timbers together in the dusk
The word ‘ship’ occurs 7 times and it is embedded in the phrase ‘ship of death’ 4 times. In Viking lore the body of dead hero is placed on a pyre in a wooden ship and floated off and set fire too by shooting a flaming arrow at it. Perhaps that is where DHL got the image from. Or is it from the Greek myth of the boatman on the river Styx, Charon, whose duty was to ferry souls of the deceased over the Rivers Styx and Acheron. In payment he received the coin that was placed in the mouth of the corpse. Such journeys were also envisioned by Pharaohs buried in their sarcophagi. Their mummies were buried with bread, meat, fruits and vegetables, and all manner of things the person could enjoy in the after-life. And a book of the dead was included that had instructions on how to pass safely from this world into the next.
How the image of the ship occurred to DHL is moot, but one thing is clear: he believed in
kindness of the cosmos, that will waft
The little ship with its soul to the wonder-goal.
Nothing is specified about the ‘wonder-goal.’ But we can speculate with some guidance from mystics who meditate on such things. The Jesuit geologist and thinker Teilhard de Chardin in his seminal book, The Divine Milieu, envisaged a future building up from the material world, toward an irreversible ascent, through men's efforts, to what he called the Omega Point. He believed that in every being and every event there was a progressive expansion of a mysterious inner clarity which transfigured them.
St. Thomas Aquinas in his prayer at the Eucharist desired an intimate union with the Mystical Body of Christ and prayed, “grant that I may behold for all eternity face to face Your beloved Son, whom now, on my pilgrimage, I am about to receive under the sacramental veil.”
Adi Shankaracharya’s Advaita Vedanta teaches that the Atman in a person will be united with the Brahman at death. On this side we don’t quite know what goes on when Atman meets Brahman, but there is the reputed cry of Steve Jobs as he was dying of pancreatic cancer, surrounded by people who loved him, his sister and his wife. After looking at them and then over their shoulders and past them his last words were: ‘Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.’
DHL is quietly telling us our own ‘Oh Wow’ moment will come. How will we react and how well are we prepared?
Geetha thought the way Joe gave his own thoughts on the poem and recited it was really insightful.
Priya reminded people she shares her birthday with D.H. Lawrence. Thomo's is with Bernard Shaw. When readers were aligning their birthdays with such illustrious authors, Devika burst out that she shares her birthday with Joe Cleetus – at which the group broke out in spontaneous laughter!
Thomo, continuing, said Priya would be upset she shares her birthday with Indira Gandhi; but also with Zeenat Aman and Sushmita Sen, chimed in Geetha. With 9-11 too, said KumKum.
Kavita
Caroline Anne Bowles, an English poet and artist, was born on 6 December 1786 at Buckland Manor, near Lymington. She was the only child of Captain Charles Bowles (1737–1801) of the East India Company, and Anne Burrard (1753–1817), hailing from a prominent local family.
Her private education was mainly entrusted to the writer and artist William Gilpin (1724–1804), vicar of nearby Boldre. She herself showed early artistic talent. Some surviving paintings of hers are owned by the Keswick School and held by the Wordsworth Trust.
Caroline Anne Bowles self-portrait with dog
Mismanagement of her legacy by a guardian left Bowles in financial straits after her mother's death in 1817. Much of her work was published initially in Blackwood's Magazine, after she had struck up a lively correspondence with the founder, William Blackwood. Bowles was married to Poet Robert Southey.
Bowles's first meeting with Southey in 1820 led to a proposal that they jointly write an epic poem about Robin Hood, although this only yielded Robin Hood: A Fragment after Southey's death. The greater part of what was eventually published in 1847 was the work of Caroline Southey, including some fine sonnets on their marriage, which took place only on June 4, 1839, after the death of Robert Southey’s first wife. There was a second edition of her mixed volume of verse and prose, Solitary Hours (1826), in that year. The marriage was not well-received by Southey's grown-up children.
Within three months of the marriage, Southey began to succumb to senile dementia. He died in March 1843. Caroline Southey had to leave Southey's home, Greta Hall, immediately after his death, and move back to Buckland Cottage, where she ceased to write. She died there on 20 July 1854.
Kavita chose to read The River, a simple poem; it talks about the journey of a river from its initial stages to its union with the ocean in the end. Kavita had done this poem in her early schooling. The poem compares and contrasts this concept to a more serious theme of a person’s journey from childhood to death.
KumKum said she likes this kind of poem where the meaning is transparent. Kavita said most of Caroline Bowles’ poems are light and easy to understand. Priya drew attention to Tennyson's tripping poem The Brook. Joe immediately latched onto its last line
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
And its beginning is so promising –
I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.
It's equally simple but strikes the ear with its flowing purls of alliteration and consonance that run through the poem and embrace the reader with the feeling of a rippling brook. That's the magic of poetry, for as T.S. Eliot declared, “Tennyson had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton, ...”
KumKum
KumKum said that like Joe she would read a poem by an author who is better known as a novelist, namely Boris Pasternak. But in Pasternak's case the novel he is known for outside Russia, Doctor Zhivago, was secondary to his long-established reputation as a poet in the former Soviet Union, decades before the novel was written toward the end of his life.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960)
Boris Pasternak - TIME Magazine Cover - Dec. 15, 1958
Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, critic and essayist. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1958 was awarded to him and the citation read, “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.” He first accepted the award, but was later pressured by the authorities in the Soviet Union to decline the prize.
Boris Pasternak with his first wife Evgeniya Lurye and son Yevgenii in 1920s
Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890. His parents were Russian Jews and were both intellectuals, very successful in their careers. His father was a professor and a painter, his mother was an accomplished concert pianist, friends of Leo Tolstoy. Their home was a meeting place for artists, writers and intellectuals. The young Pasternak grew up in this unique ambience of Arts and Culture. He initially wanted to study music, but ended up studying Philosophy.
His first published book was an anthology, which contains mainly love poems, on the theme of unrequited love. His second book of poems titled My Sister, Life was published in 1921, and became very popular, establishing Pasternak as a poet.
The poet Osip Mandelstam was a close friend and when Mandelstam was arrested it upset Pasternak greatly. Soon other friends and artists whom Pasternak knew fell victim to Stalin's oppressive treatment known as The Great Purge of 1937. They were arrested and made to disappear.
Pasternak often had to submit his writings to Stalin’s bureaucracy to get permission to publish them. Pasternak continued writing during World Wars I and II during the regimes of Stalin, and later of Khrushchev. His writings achieved great literary height in spite of the lack of freedom. He translated Shakespeare into Russian. When Russians quote Shakespeare they are quoting Pasternak’s verses. His ideas on translation are very broad:
we can conceive of translations, because ideally they must be literary works in their own right and, through textual equivalence, stand shoulder to shoulder with their source texts, in their own originality. We can conceive of translations because for centuries entire literatures have translated each other, and translations are not a method for becoming acquainted with individual works – they are a means of perpetual communication between cultures and peoples.
KumKum said Doctor Zhivago was a difficult book to read for her, having to track the many characters who flitted in and out of the pages.
Doctor Zhivago – First Edition in which Joe read the novel
In Joe's opinion the book was beautifully translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari.
Doctor Zhivago – Character Map
Diligent readers of his novel would not have missed the last chapter containing the 25 poems written by the protagonist, doctor Yury Zhivago, during his spare time. Their themes are the same as that of the novel – nature, love, and the meaning and purpose of life. Union and separation occur continually as Zhivago and Lara are brought together, and parted, by circumstances outside their control, on many occasions. The most intense phase of their love in Varykino is immediately followed by their final separation. Moviegoers will recall the snowbound scene where Julie Christie as Lara drives off into the snow on a sleigh leaving behind Omar Sharif as Doctor Zhivago at the wooden cabin where they lived. The 16th poem Parting in the last chapter describes the feelings and behaviour of a man, left alone after the departure of the woman he loves, as he returns to the house where they had lived together. The poem is actually describing the scene where Zhivago re-enters the house at Varykino after Lara has left him forever.
Olga Ivinskaya was friend and lover of Boris Pasternak during the last 13 years of his life, and the inspiration for the character of Lara in his novel Doctor Zhivago
Parting has 12 stanzas, each stanza contains four lines, each second and fourth lines rhyming. It is a poem of simple ideas with an overarching picture of a tragic separation. The time captured in the poem is very short, just a glimpse. Coming home a man realises that his companion has left the home they shared, leaving an emptiness spreading all over. The poem has a story-like appeal with a climax.
In the end he...
The parting will destroy them both,
The grief bone-deep corrode them.
...
And pricks his finger on a pin
In her unfinished sewing,
And sees the whole of her again,
And silent tears come flowing.
[Ref: The Poems of Doctor Zhivago by Dimitri Obolensky, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 40, No. 94 (Dec., 1961), pp. 123-135]
KumKum wanted everyone to see the film again (probably streaming on Amazon Prime). The snow and ice in the bleak Russian winter across the Urals form a backdrop to the film. Thomo remembered Lara's Theme composed by Maurice Jarre which recurs in the film; in this clip the parting scene of the poem is shown at minute 1:14. Kavita recalls the vast stretches of snow in the film and the train journey of several days from Moscow across the Urals. It's a 3-hour long film requiring an intermission. Omar Sharif acts as Yury Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara, Geraldine Chaplin as Tonya, Zhivago's wife. The poignancy of the story as described by the poem Parting is that Lara is carrying his child when she goes away, forever, and becomes ‘a nameless number in a list that was mislaid,’ in the words of Yevgraf Zhivago, the half-brother of Yury, played by Alec Guinness. Yevgraf searches for the lost daughter of Yury and interviews a young worker named Tanya who he suspects is Yury's daughter, but she can't remember her childhood.
Priya
Priya said like Lawrence, and Hardy, Borges was more known for his fiction than poetry. Borges, the Argentinian writer, is known for the vein of magical realism that runs through his fiction works, but Priya did not know he was a poet also, just as people do not know Pasternak as a poet in the English-speaking world. Joe said there is no excuse for English readers of Doctor Zhivago to have remained ignorant of his poetry because right there in the last chapter stand 28 poems, and they are all illustrative of the novel itself.
Priya, addressing Joe, said she did not know Hardy was such a good poet. Joe replied, “You know how he became a poet? His novel Jude the Obscure (1895) was badly panned when it appeared, as was Tess of the D‘Urbervilles (1891). That was when he said goodbye to fiction and went back to his first love, poetry.” Hardy was born in 1840 but his published poems date from 1898 when he was 58 years old. From 1898 until his death in 1928 Hardy published eight volumes of poetry – about one thousand poems, studded with gems.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986)
Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and went on to win an international reputation for both his writing and his work as a translator. His work has embraced both the fantastical and the surreal, exploring wide ranging topics such as philosophy, religion, and what was later called ‘magical realism.’
Jorge Luis Borges
Although better known for his short story writing, Borges also published several works of poetry. His career as a translator started when he was just 9 years old – he produced a Spanish version of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, which was published in a local newspaper. One of the main joys of his early life was his father’s large library which boasted many literary volumes including Shakespeare, Schopenhauer; and Meyrink, author of The Golem, about a Jewish community in Lithuania, where the plague decimates the population, and then a woman creates a creature known as ‘Golem’ to protect her people. This story would have a great influence on his own work.
After World War I ended, the Borges family spent three years variously in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. In Spain, Borges became a member of the avant-garde Ultraist literary movement. His first poem, Hymn to the Sea, written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia. In Madrid he frequently met notable Spanish writers.
Borges began producing surrealist essays and poems at the age of 22 . He published his first poetry collection in 1923, Fervor de Buenos Aires, (Passion for Buenos Aires) which explored the essence of Argentinian nationality, and by the 1930s he was writing about existentialism and producing essays for the literary magazine Sur.
He worked as an editor on Critica from 1933 and also advised a publishing house, besides writing for El Hogar.
In 1937, friends of Borges found him work at the Miguel Cané branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library as a first assistant. The other employees forbade Borges from cataloging more than 100 books each day, a task which would take him about one hour. The rest of the time he would spend in the basement of the library, writing articles and short stories. When Juan Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was effectively fired; and ‘promoted’ to the position of poultry inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market. He resigned. His offences against the Peronistas up to that time had apparently consisted of little more than adding his signature to pro-democratic petitions, but shortly after his resignation he addressed the Argentine Society of Letters saying, in his characteristic style, “Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.”
Following the death of his father in 1938 and a near fatal head injury, Borges began experimenting with his writing style producing works that could be read in a number of ways. By the time he was 30, Borges began going blind. Not being able to support himself as a writer, he worked as a lecturer. He became nationally renowned and received many doctorates and delivered lectures at notable venues, including Harvard.
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, thanks to whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. He also continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967), co-written with Margarita Guerrero. He wrote El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena ( The Book of Sand, 1975). He also lectured extensively. Many of these lectures were anthologised in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays).
He wrote more poetry because, with his failing sight, he could easily keep the whole poem in his head as a work in progress. By now completely blind, Borges had to rely on his mother to assist him – which she did well into her 90s. Borges did not marry until he was in his 60s and some have suggested that his ageing mother wanted to find someone to look after him before she passed away. The marriage didn’t last long and he returned to stay with his mother. There have been questions about Borges sexuality over the years – except for a few stories, women are noticeably absent in his work.
Though blind, Borges continued to travel widely and write poetry into his 70s and 80s. Throughout his life Borges held strong anti-fascist and anti-communist views and he was a firm critic of Peron – which won him few friends in the political arena. He was also perpetually upset that he never won the Nobel Prize in Literature like so many of his compatriots. But then his short stories in total comprise only about 150,000 words, less than one good novel’s worth.
In 1986, Borges died from liver cancer and was buried in Geneva at the Cemetery of Kings.
Poetry by Borges
Although better known for his prose, Borges began his writing career as a poet and was known primarily for his poetry in Latin America particularly. In addition to writing original poetry, he translated important foreign poets for an Argentinian audience. He also authored numerous essays and gave a whole series of lectures on poetry and various poets from Dante to Whitman. Observing that Borges “is one of the major Latin American poets of the twentieth century,” Daniel Balderston in the Dictionary of Literary Biography added that in Latin America, Borges’ poetry “has had a wide impact: many verses have been used as titles for novels and other works, many poems have been set to music, and his variety of poetic voices have been important to many younger poets.”
“Our destiny," wrote Borges in the essay, "is not horrible because of its unreality; it is horrible because it is irreversible and iron bound. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges.”
The poem Priya read The Other Tiger was written in 1961. He is talking about three tigers, all in his mind. KumKum’s reaction was she did not get too much out of the poem, she may have to read it again. Borges is not ‘easy’ said Priya. It’s quite ‘heavy, heavy, heavy’, said Kavita. Joe said this is clearly a poem written after he went blind. It is written by a man whose eyes are closed. And it is entirely in his imagination that he is creating tigers. He has never seen a tiger, like that other poet, Blake, who wrote –
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
this poet had never seen a tiger either. He is far away on the shores of some river, perhaps on the banks of the Río de la Plata between Uruguay and Argentina,
from this one house in a remote lost seaport
in South America, I dream you, follow you,
oh tiger on the fringes of the Ganges.
He has three different visions of the tiger, and one is the creature in its native surroundings, the other is the tiger made of flesh and blood and bones; and the third is so silent it is creeping around – it is like a shadow in his mind, like a ghost. And then the narrator says there is yet another tiger he hasn't told about yet –
the other tiger which is not in this poem.
the other tiger which is not in this poem.
It’s a man who is blind and entirely living in his imagination, and that is what is wonderful about Jorge Luis Borges, said Joe. He had the fortunate event as an author (not as human) that he went blind. His short stories are composed of shadows, receding shadows and reflections of shadows, mysterious things that you can see in the distance, a universe that you can only imagine, which is not real. That's his wonderful quality, it's distinctive. Joe wouldn’t call it magical realism; he would call it the unbounded, unearthly, experiences of a man living entirely in the mind. One need not pity people like Borges in their blindness, because they see more than you and I wandering around and seeing flowers, roses and fields, and trees. He is an author, and for an author nothing has reality until it's said in words. By this time KumKum was fretting about Joe’s going on – but he maintained this is what we come to do, not merely to hear each other read, but to discuss, share, and enlighten each other.
Shoba
Shoba chose two poems by Marie Howe, a contemporary American poet. Marie Howe was born in 1950 in an Irish catholic family at Rochester, New York in 1950. She was the second among nine children. She graduated from the University of Windsor in Ontario and worked as a newspaper reporter and English teacher before taking up poetry at the age of 30.
The Good Thief is her first published book of poems. In the words of her teacher, the poet Stanley Kunitz, “Marie Howe's poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life. Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”
In Howe’s work, inconsequential incidents and memories help to shed light on the nature of soul and self, and become a guide to living on the brink of the mystical and the mundane.
Marie Howe, Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014
Here are some quotes by Marie Howe:
Poetry holds mystery. It has a trance-like quality, a spell.
It is more akin to music and song, than to prose.
It is making magic with words. It is a sacred art.
Incantatory. Its roots can never be fully pulled out from sacred ground.
In 1989, her brother John died of an AIDS-related illness. What the Living Do, a collection of poems published in 1997, is an elegy to John. Stripping her poems of metaphor, Howe composed the collection as a transparent, accessible documentary of loss.
Howe currently lives in West Village, NY. She is a single mother to her daughter Grace whom she adopted from China. For more about the poet consult her website mariehowe.com You may listen to an extended interview with the poet at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qaFPX6upy8
The poems are simple and a woman especially can relate to them. It’s about a mother when she is giving birth and later when she is much older:
Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,
grew louder. From inside her body I heard almost every word she said
Thomo
Thomo read TS Eliot's Rhapsody on a Windy Night from his 1939 book of poems Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
The lyrics of the bitter ballad Memory in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats were adapted from T.S. Eliot's Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Memory was the most famous and arguably the best song in the hugely successful musical which grossed $3 billion in worldwide ticket sales.
That was among the reasons Thomo cited for selecting this poem, besides the fact he and the poet bear the same first name!
T.S. Eliot and his wife Valerie Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born an American on 26th September 1888 in Boston USA. He died a British citizen in London, UK on 4th January 1965).
Eliot was a poet, essayist, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. Through his experiments in language, writing style, and verse structure, he reinvigorated English poetry. He also dismantled outdated beliefs and established new ones through a collection of critical essays.
Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock which, at the time of its publication, was considered unconventional and strange. It was followed by The Waste Land, his most famous poem, and The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets.
He was also known for seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (about the assassination of Thomas à Becket which in 1951 was made into a film starring Eliot as the 4th tempter).The Cocktail Party is another well-known play by Eliot.
Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.”
Divided into 6 stanzas, Rhapsody on a Windy Night is a lyric poem in free verse without a distinct persona or consistent rhyme scheme. The poem is considered to be Eliot's emotional and psychological response to modernisation as he evokes disturbing realities that distort time, memory, and human connection. Written in Paris circa 1911, this poem is known as one of TS Eliot's most difficult poems to deconstruct. It can be understood as a visualisation of an individual’s attempts to regain a sense of stability amid the uncertainty of the modern world.
The central motif of memory guides the poem as it follows the speaker's increasing isolation. One line in the poem is in French. It reads
La lune ne garde aucune rancune
which means ‘The moon holds no grudge.’ The readers thought the lyrics of the song Memory made more sense than Eliot’s original poem on which it is based.
Joe said the poem he likes best from Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Cats is Macavity the Mystery Cat :
Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw—
For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!
Joe recalled Eliot reciting Macavity in 1963 in the Kresge Auditorium at MIT two years before his death. Zakia read this once at KRG. Joe said Osama bin Laden, however vile a person, in his mind reflected Macavity exactly because when the troops showed up he wasn’t there! Inspired by the close resemblance between Macavity and Osama bin Laden Joe once wrote a verse, a sample of which is here:
Osama's a mujahid, he's very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;
His ’47 is ready, and his beard is uncombed.
He points his finger at the world, that he proceeds to shake;
And though you think he's half asleep, he's always wide awake.
Deriving from this poem Trevor Nunn, the director of the musical, wrote the lyrics for the song Memory, which Thomo also recited at the end. The song by Elaine Page who sang Memory in the musical is on Youtube here. The lyrics she sings are a bit different than what is given below by Thomo.
Elaine Page singing Memory in the musical Cats
Memory
Midnight not a sound from the pavement
Has the moon lost her memory?
She is smiling alone
In the lamplight
The withered leaves collect at my feet
And the wind begins to moan
Memory all alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember
The time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again
Every street lamp
Seems to beat a fatalistic warning
Someone mutters at the street lamp gutters
And soon it will be morning
Daylight I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life
And I mustn't give in
When the dawn comes
Tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin
Burnt out ends of smoky days
The stale cold smell of morning
The street lamp dies, another night is over
Another day is dawning
Touch me it's so easy to leave me
All alone with my memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me
You'll understand what happiness is
Look a new day has begun
Zakia
Zakia chose the well-known poem by Robert Frost Mending Wall. A previous biography of Frost is here from the time when Devika read his poem Stopping by The Woods on a Snowy Evening in Feb 2020.
Robert Frost – Photo by Dmitri Kessel, The LIFE Picture Collection
Robert Frost was an American poet born on 26th March 1874 in San Francisco. In 1912 he sailed with his family to Great Britain. There he made an acquaintance with some poets including Edward Thomas who inspired him to write The Road Not Taken. He also met T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound.
Frost's first book was published around the age of 40, but he would go on to win a record four Pulitzer Prizes and become the most famous American poet of his time, before his death at the age of 88. He wrote about settings from rural life in New England. He was awarded the Congressional Gold medal in 1960 for his poetic work; it was formally bestowed on him by President Kennedy in March 1962.
When Zakia was travelling in New Jersey in May and saw the beautiful homes, it struck her there were no walls between them. They all had beautiful gardens and nice trees. Zakia liked the idea of living without walls. Mending Wall captured her interest. The narrative is simple. The speaker and a neighbour meet to mend their wall in spring, to repair the damages caused by winter, animal crossings, and so on.
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10¢ stamp honouring Frost issued on his birth centennial, March 26, 1974. The pencil drawing of Frost was by Paul Calle
Mending Wall, one of Frost’s most famous poems, is about the human race’s primitive urge to ‘mark its territory’ and our fondness for setting clear boundaries for our houses and gardens. It first appeared in the collection of seventeen poems North of Boston in 1914.
The speaker senses the irrelevance of the wall dividing their properties, for the trees are not going to stretch and trespass across the boundary. But the neighbour has the traditional notion that good fences make good neighbours. Are humans mistrustful, or are they willing to connect and cooperate? Reviewing the damage caused by the weather and the hunters, the speaker reflects whether walls are necessary and should they be built at all. Their differing attitudes toward “boundaries” has a symbolic significance.
The hunters had displaced some stone boulders which needed replacing.
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
The mending is mindless therefore, a blind following of tradition. Frost then makes the conclusive argument:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
...
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’
But the neighbour goes by received wisdom and continues to put forward the adage of good fences making good neighbours. The narrator-poet nurses a healthy suspicion of barriers that serve no clear purpose; he is open to communication and new ideas, wary of anything that arbitrarily divides people.
By contrast, the neighbour is a creature ruled by habit and clichéd sayings. It is Frost’s neighbour, rather than the poet-narrator who insists: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’
The poem has been hard to separate from politics. Frost published it in England during the first year of World War I, at a time of fierce European border disputes. Though we can’t reduce it to a political allegory, the poem’s ambivalence about boundaries does make a particular kind of sense in that context too.
This poem from 1914 now holds a mirror to international relations since 1960. It seems destined to have perpetual relevance. One of the reasons for selecting this poem was Zakia’s own view of life, and whether setting artificial boundaries is unnecessary, if we have mutual understanding and respect for other human beings.
The readers felt the relevance of this poem even in the present day, where migrants are denied refuge in neighbouring countries and many innocent lives are lost.
KumKum liked the poem but said we need fences to pay our taxes (?). Devika's need for a wall was to exclude drunk men wandering in to stretch out in her garden. In Kerala trespassing is common, and one needs walls to keep out those who want to poach your land.
The Poems
Arundhaty – 2 poems by by Clint Smith
1. Above Ground
For weeks, we can't go outside without the cicada's
song wrapping itself around the three of us like a quilt.
The tree in our front yard has become their sanctuary,
a place where they all seem to congregate
and sing their first and final songs.
We get closer, and see the way their exoskeletons
ornament the bark like golden ghosts,
shadows abandoned by their bodies
searching for new life.
One of you is four years old. One of you is two.
The next time the cicadas rise out of the earth
you will be twenty-one and nineteen.
I think of how much might change between these cycles.
How much of our planet will still be intact?
What sort of societies will the cicadas return to
when they next make their way up from the earth?
When they first arrive, you are both frightened
of this new noise that hangs in the air,
of these small orange-and-black-winged bodies
that fall from the sky like new rain.
They don't bite, I say.
But neither of you believe me.
So I reach out to one of the branches
and allow one of the orange-eyed creatures to climb
onto my finger. You both watch it roam around my hand
as it becomes familiar with the flesh of my palm,
your eyes widening at the revelation that this infrequent
visitor has no interest in piercing my skin.
And maybe that is enough, because now
you both try to pick up cicadas from the ground
and collect them in buckets as if they are treasure.
And maybe they are.
Maybe treasure is in what dies almost
as quickly as it rises from the earth.
Maybe treasure is anything that reminds you
what a miracle it is to be alive.
2. Ode To Those First 15 Minutes After The Kids Are Finally Asleep
Praise the couch that welcomes you back into its embrace, as it does every night around this time. Praise the loose cereal that crunches beneath your weight - the whole-grain golden dust that now shimmers on the backside of your pants. Praise the cushion, the one in the middle that sinks like a lifeboat leaking air, and the ottoman covered in crayon stains that you now have accepted as aesthetic. Praise your knees and the evening respite they receive from a day of choo-choo training along the carpet with two eager passengers in tow. Praise the silence - oh, the silence - how it washes over you like a warm bedsheet.
Praise the walls for the way they stand there and don't ask for anything. Praise the seduction of slumber that tiptoes across your eyelids, the way it tempts you to curl up right there and drift away even though it's only 7:30 p.m. Praise the phone you scroll through without even realizing that you're scrolling. Praise the video you scroll past of the man teaching his dog how to dance merengue. Praise the way it makes you laugh the way someone laughs when they are so tired they don't even know if they will stand up again. Praise the toys scattered across the floor and the way you wonder if it might be OK to just leave them there for now, since you know tomorrow, they will end up there again.
Devika – poem by by Marie Ravenel de LaCoste
Somebody's Darling
INTO A WARD of the whitewashed walls
Where the dead and the dying lay—
Wounded by bayonets, shells, and balls—
Somebody's darling was borne one day.
Somebody's darling! so young and so brave,
Wearing still on his pale, sweet face—
Soon to be hid by the dust of the grave—
The lingering light of his boyhood's grace.
Matted and damp are the curls of gold,
Kissing the snow of that fair young brow;
Pale are the lips of delicate mould—
Somebody's darling is dying now.
Back from the beautiful blue-veined face
Brush every wandering, silken thread;
Cross his hands as a sign of grace—
Somebody's darling is still and dead!
Kiss him once for Somebody's sake;
Murmur a prayer, soft and low;
One bright curl from the cluster take—
They were Somebody's pride, you know.
Somebody's hand hath rested there;
Was it a mother's, soft and white?
And have the lips of a sister fair
Been baptized in those waves of light?
God knows best. He was Somebody's love!
Somebody's heart enshrined him here;
Somebody wafted his name above,
Night and morn, on the wings of prayer.
Somebody wept when he marched away,
Looking so handsome, brave, and grand;
Somebody's kiss on his forehead lay;
Somebody clung to his parting hand.
Somebody's watching and waiting for him,
Yearning to hold him again to her heart;
There he lies—with the blue eyes dim,
And smiling, childlike lips apart.
Tenderly bury the fair young dead,
Pausing to drop on his grave a tear;
Carve on the wooden slab at his head,
“Somebody's darling lies buried here!”
Set to music here:
Geetha – poem by Clark Ashton Smith
The Old Water-Wheel
Often, on homeward ways, I come
To a deserted orchard, old and lone,
Unplowed, untrod, with wilding grasses grown
Through rows of pear and plum.
There, in a never-ceasing round,
In the slow stream, by noon, by night, by dawn,
An ancient, hidden water-wheel turns on
With a sad, reiterant sound.
Most eerily it comes and dies,
And comes again, when on the horizon's breast
The ruby of Antares seems to rest,
Fallen from star-fraught skies:
A dolent, drear, complaining note
Whose all-monotonous cadence haunts the air
Like the recurrent moan of a despair
Some heart has learned by rote.
Heavy, and ill to hear for one
Within whose breast, today, tonight, tomorrow,
Like the slow wheel, an ancient, darkling sorrow
Turns, and is never done.
Joe – poem by D.H. Lawrence
The Ship of Death
Have you built your ship of death, or have you?
Oh build your ship of death, for you will need it.
Now in the twilight, sit by the invisible sea
Of peace, and build your little ship
Of death, that will carry the soul
On its last journey, on and on, so still
So beautiful, over the last of seas.
When the day comes, that will come.
Oh think of it in the twilight peacefully!
The last day, and the setting forth
On the longest journey, over the hidden sea
To the last wonder of oblivion.
Oblivion, the last wonder!
When we have trusted ourselves entirely
To the unknown, and are taken up
Out of our little ships of death
Into pure oblivion.
Oh build your ship of death, be building it now
With dim, calm thoughts and quiet hands
Putting its timbers together in the dusk,
Rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail
That will spread in death to the breeze
Of the kindness of the cosmos, that will waft
The little ship with its soul to the wonder-goal.
Ah, if you want to live in peace on the face of the earth
Then build your ship of death, in readiness
For the longest journey, over the last of seas.
Kavita – poem by Caroline Ann Bowles
The River
River, river, little river!
Bright you sparkle on your way;
O’er the yellow pebbles dancing,
Through the flowers and foliage glancing,
Like a child at play.
River, river! swelling river!
On you rush through rough and smooth;
Louder, faster, brawling, leaping,
Over rocks, by rose-banks, sweeping
Like impetuous youth.
River, river! brimming river!
Broad and deep, and still as time;
Seeming still, yet still in motion,
Tending onward to the ocean,
Just like mortal prime.
River, river! headlong river!
Down you dash into the sea, _
Sea that line hath never sounded,
Sea that sail hath never rounded,
Like eternity.
KumKum – poem by Boris Pasternak
Parting
A man is standing in the hall
His house not recognizing.
Her sudden leaving was a flight,
Herself, maybe, surprising.
The chaos reigning in the room
He does not try to master.
His tears and headache hide in gloom
The extent of his disaster.
His ears are ringing all day long
As though he has been drinking.
And why is it that all the time
Of waves he keeps on thinking?
When frosty window-panes blank out
The world of light and motion,
Despair and grief are doubly like
The desert of the ocean.
She was as dear to him, as close
In all her ways and features,
As is the seashore to the wave,
The ocean to the beaches.
As over rushes, after storm
The swell of water surges,
Into the deepness of his soul
Her memory submerges.
In years of strife, in times which were
Unthinkable to live in,
Upon a wave of destiny
To him she had been driven,
Through countless obstacles, and past
All dangers never-ended,
The wave had carried, carried her,
Till close to him she'd landed.
And now, so suddenly, she'd left.
What power overrode them?
The parting will destroy them both,
The grief bone-deep corrode them.
He looks around him. On the floor
In frantic haste she'd scattered
The contents of the cupboard, scraps
Of stuff, her sewing patterns.
He wanders through deserted rooms
And tidies up for hours;
Till darkness falls he folds away
Her things into the drawers;
And pricks his finger on a pin
In her unfinished sewing,
And sees the whole of her again,
And silent tears come flowing.
(Translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater, sister of Boris Pasternak)
Priya – poem by Jorge Luis Borges
THE OTHER TIGER
(1961)
And the craft createth a semblance.
– Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876).
I think of a tiger. The half-light enhances
the vast and painstaking library
and seems to set the bookshelves at a distance;
strong, innocent, new-made, bloodstained,
it will move through its jungle and its morning,
and leave its track across the muddy
edge of a river, unknown, nameless
(in its world, there are no names, nor past, nor future
only the sureness of the passing moment)
and it will cross the wilderness of distance
and sniff out in the woven labyrinth
of smells the smell peculiar to morning
and the scent of deer, delectable.
Among the slivers of bamboo, I notice
its stripes, and I have an inkling of the skeleton
under the magnificence of the skin, which quivers.
In vain, the convex oceans and the deserts
spread themselves across the earth between us;
from this one house in a remote lost seaport
in South America, I dream you, follow you,
oh tiger on the fringes of the Ganges.
Afternoon creeps in my spirit and I keep thinking
that the tiger I am conjuring in my poem
is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows,
a sequence of prosodic measures,
scraps remembered from encyclopedias,
and not the deadly tiger, the luckless jewel
which in the sun or the deceptive moonlight
follows its paths, in Bengal or Sumatra,
of love, of indolence, of dying.
Against the symbolic tiger, I have planted
the real one, it whose blood runs hotly,
and today, 1959, the third of August,
a slow shadow spreads across the prairie,
but still, the act of naming it, of guessing
what is its nature and its circumstances
creates a fiction, not & living creature,
not one of those who wander on the earth.
Let us look for a third tiger. This one
will be a form in my dream like all the others,
a system and arrangement of human language,
and not the tiger of the vertebrae
which, out of reach of all mythology,
paces the earth. I know all this, but something
drives me to this ancient and vague adventure,
unreasonable, and still I keep on looking
throughout the afternoon for the other tiger,
the other tiger which is not in this poem.
– Translated by ALASTAIR REED
Shoba – 2 poems by Marie Howe
1. Prayer
Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage
I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here
among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.
The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?
My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.
Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.
2. My Mother’s Body
Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,
grew louder. From inside her body I heard almost every word she said.
Within that girl I drove to the store and back, her feet pressing
the pedals of the blue car, her voice, first gate to the cold sunny mornings,
rain, moonlight, snow fall, dogs . . .
Her kidneys failed, the womb where I once lived is gone.
Her young astonished body pushed me down that long corridor,
and my body hurt her, I know that—24 years old. I’m old enough
to be that girl’s mother, to smooth her hair, to look into her exultant frightened eyes,
her bedsheets stained with chocolate, her heart in constant failure.
It’s a girl, someone must have said. She must have kissed me
with her mouth, first grief, first air,
and soon I was drinking her, first food, I was eating my mother,
slumped in her wheelchair, one of my brothers pushing it,
across the snowy lawn, her eyes fixed, her face averted.
Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers,
our voice in my throat speaking to you now.
Thomo – poem by T.S Eliot
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, 'Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.'
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
'Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.'
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
'Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.'
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.
The lamp said,
'Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.'
The last twist of the knife.
Zakia – poem by Robert Frost
Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
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