Midsummer poetry: what do Bunting, Empson, Betjeman and Graves have in common? And The Miracle Club …

Roger Fry, The Barns Pond at Charleston

You don’t come to Lourdes for a miracle … You come for the strength to go on when there is no miracle.” — “The best journeys take you home” … Father Macdermot (Mark O’Halloran) in The Miracle Club

Dear friends and readers,

I know we are beyond mid-summer as the days begin to shorten (the sky used to be light at 5 am, now it’s still dusky at 6 am; it was light until 9:15 or so and now it’s darkened by 8:20; the arc of the sun across the sky is lower), but it feels like mid-summer because I know we have another two and one-half months to go of heat. It is very sad to me that I cannot go out at night as I cannot drive at night any more. It’s also been another summer of dream frustration (for the desire is a product of dreams) without any trip to the beach.

I have been missing Jim very badly this 11th summer without him for himself as my one friend who understood and for other reasons too.

For me there’s been less going out, not more; I love my online life but there is increasingly less of that too. It’s hard for me to keep this blog up as I work on projects for papers or reviews, and follow my own bents too. I also discover that I don’t remember details as well; my mind is more diffusely alive to the social world around me and not so filled with books as it once was; I’m more outward without being able to cope with social life any more than I once did. I would do so much better with and for Jim if we had a second time round — but, as Father Macdermot hints (see The Miracle Club below, especially click on the reviews), there are no miracles of the traditional type for us to discern.

But over this week or today I’ve been cheered by feeling reminded a couple of times of poetry by men (and it does seem to have been all by men) whom Jim would read and reread, and whose work it may be said constituted his favorite: I have much in house on and by Basil Bunting, William Empson, John Betjeman, Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, e.e. cummings, C. P Cavafy.

Today I also attended the National Book Festival located here in DC, — from home (so I could also read 8 essays on Trollope and shop with Izzy in five different places for groceries & and the like): I listened to and watched three full and several parts of various sessions. Now one type of book missing it seemed to me (very strange but perhaps showing the commercialization of this fair) was poetry, so here finally a subject for a blog that might interest people:   a few of Jim’s favorite poems, from four of these people, those I know he read over and over. I’ve linked the poetry into discussions of these poets and these poems (one by me)

Basil Bunting:

A thrush in the syringa sings.

Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things

Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk’s beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.

Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things
fear, hunger, lust.

O gay thrush!

William Empson:

Missing Dates A villanelle

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month’s desires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

For a very different mood, from Summoned By Bells (one of Jim’s favored volumes). One aspect is the book supplies psychological and spiritual experiences attached to local places, to your memory of your past — and Jim came from, grew up in southeastern England.

John Betjeman:

DEAR lanes of Cornwall! With a one-inch map,
A bicycle and well-worn “Little Guide”,
Those were the years I used to ride for miles
To far-off churches. One of them that year
So worked on me that, if my life was changed,
I owe it to St. Ervan and his priest
In their small hollow deep in sycamores.
The time was tea-time, calm free-wheeling time,
When from slashed tree-tops in the combe below
I heard a bell-note floating to the sun;
It gave significance to lichened stone
And large red admirals with outspread wings
Basking on buddleia. So, casting down
In the cool shade of interlacing boughs,
I found St. Ervan’s partly ruined church.
Its bearded Rector, holding in one hand
A gong-stick, in the other hand a book,
Struck, while he read, a heavy-sounding bell,
Hung from an elm bough by the churchyard gate.
“Better come in. It’s time for Evensong.”

There wasn’t much to see, there wasn’t much
The “Little Guide” could say about the church.
Holy and small and heavily restored,
It held me for the length of Evensong,
Said rapidly among discoloured walls,
Impatient of my diffident response.
“Better come in and have a cup of tea.”
The Rectory was large, uncarpeted;
Books and oil-lamps and papers were about;
The study’s pale green walls were mapped with damp;
The pitch-pine doors and window-frames were cracked;
Loose noisy tiles along the passages
Led to a waste of barely furnished rooms:
Clearly the Rector lived here all alone.

He talked of poetry and Cornish saints;
He kept an apiary and a cow;
He asked me which church service I liked best —
I told him Evensong… “And I suppose
You think religion’s mostly singing hymns
And feeling warm and comfortable inside?”
And he was right: most certainly I did.
“Borrow this book and come to tea again.”
With Arthur Machen’s “Secret Glory” stuffed
Into my blazer pocket, up the hill
On to St. Merryn, down to Padstow Quay
In time for the last ferry back to Rock,
I bicycled — and found Trebetherick
A worldly contrast with my afternoon.

I would not care to read that book again.
It so exactly mingled with the mood
Of those impressionable years, that now
I might be disillusioned. There were laughs
At public schools, at chapel services,
At masters who were still ‘big boys at heart’—
While all the time the author’s hero knew
A Secret Glory in the hills of Wales:
Caverns of light revealed the Holy Grail
Exhaling gold upon the mountain-tops;
At “Holy! Holy! Holy!” in the Mass
King Brychan’s sainted children crowded round,
And past and present were enwrapped in one.

In quest of mystical experience
I knelt in darkness at St. Enodoc;
I visited our local Holy Well,
Whereto the native Cornish still resort
For cures for whooping-cough, and drop bent pins
Into its peaty water . . . Not a sign:
No mystical experience was vouchsafed:
The maidenhair just trembled in the wind
And everything looked as it always looked . . .
But somewhere, somewhere underneath the dunes,
Somewhere among the cairns or in the caves
The Celtic saints would come to me, the ledge
Of time we walk on, like a thin cliff-path
High in the mist, would show the precipice.

Robert Graves:

When I first met Jim he couldn’t stop talking about Robert Graves’s White Goddess (he was very young, not 21), and over our first couple of years we acquired his extraordinary Greek Myths (now a foundational resource for me), the I, Claudius books, Goodbye to All That, his travel regional writing and of course Collected Poems. This remains my favorite, read aloud to me by Jim so many years ago:

She tells her love while half asleep

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And put out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow

***********************

Maggie Smith as Lily

I am not going to resist adding (non sequitor) that I went to a very different kind of movie than those two millions of US people have been to see in the last three weeks: The Miracle Club by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, filmed in Ireland (where I shall go next year with Road Scholar at last). This modest summer movie is better and more successful than people make out: a relief against the over-produced overloud overaggressive Barbie and Oppenheimer, and done tastefully so that what moves is not meretricious. To me and a woman friend I went with (a new British friend, just my age, with husband and autistic son), it brought back memories of analogous real or meaningful experiences both of us had had: how it took a professional teacher for disabled children to get Isobel to start talking finally at age 2 and 1/2. The script is much better than the groans over lines manifesting emotion the reviewers would prefer to see repressed.

So recommended — as ever Maggie Smith steals the show except when suddenly Laura Linney is so stilly there. Reviewed by Dalya Alberge in The Guardian and by Sheila O’Malley for RogerEbert.com; and Peter Debruge for Variety.

It occurs to me I’ve provided enough matter for one night; I’ll come back later in the week with some favorites of Jim by Larkin, cummings, Auden, and Cavafy. And perhaps another summer film too.

Ellen