Prelude
One night as I lay in my bed and thought
And failed to find the theme for which I sought
A bird began to sing (or I to hear)
Above me in the blackness, loud and clear,
Threading the dark with easy lines of song
That seemed – as I lay wakeful for so long
I saw the sky was lightening – to say:
“Here’s one who, focussed, hasn’t lost his way.”
Then, softening to neighbours who I’d heard
cursing the selfsame or another bird,
fretting that I would never be content
Unless I wrote, fearing contentment meant
The end of art (a self-defeating choice),
I heard this in the bird’s melodic voice:
“A man stood in the shadow of a King
who told the man he’d give him anything
His heart desired – land, women, gold or boys:
He only had to ask. ‘But these are toys,’
Knowing himself tested, the man replied;
‘But this you can do for me: step aside
and let the sunlight fall on me.’ And smiled,
as if he saw posterity beguiled….”
As I lay there I felt compelled to choose,
Yet knew that either choice meant I would loose:
That moment total happiness appeared
Impossible. “It’s no more than you feared.”
I told myself and, putting from my mind
Such dismal thoughts, I fell asleep, resigned,
And dreamt Beethoven and Mozart were struck
By how each saw the other’s state as luck –
The lonely bachelor’s dreams of a wife
Idealised in song; the married life
embroidered by its opposite; yet each,
Sublime beyond most other artists’ reach,
Must craft from need to be (not show or tell),
to earn a brief reprieve through art from hell,
or let imagination fall from grace
and send another to it in one’s place.
“Revealing weakness, we illuminate”
they told each other, “Humankind’s estate,
depicting not what is, but rather what
the artists suffers for not having got.
For those who understand our states (the rest
will hear the catalogue and be impressed)
We lay our night times bare, as others days,
and cast in silver their more glittering rays.”
I sat beside my lover as she slept
In Tuscany; the bright flames licked and leapt
Along the slowly charring logs, and turned
The stubborn wood to ashes as they burned,
And saw the sight she pointed out to me:
Laid upright on the grass, felled lengths of tree
At first sight dead, were shooting vivd green
As full of life as they had even been,
Demanding (as half dazed with sleep, appalled,
The dream still clutching him, Pharaoh had called
For someone to say what the dream was for,
Shouting for explanation) metaphor.
If wood, then, is experience (its rings
The fingerprint of all important things),
Conscious volition is the axe that chops
Clean through the chambers threading it, and stops
The capillary, nourishing sap-tide
rising unseen from root to leaf inside;
And as from the unfathomable dark
between the dying heart-wood and the bark
new life shoulders its way out of the wood
till green shoots in a living circle stood
keen-fingering the changing Tuscan sky,
so in between the bone and skin there lie
the secret regions of the human heart
whose rank and sweet fecundity breeds art.
The hail that bounced amongst the grass has gone,
And mauve wisteria petals lie upon
The table, path and lawn: the Tuscan sun
Is hot upon us. More than half is done;
Few days remain in which to apprehend
Some clear expression of the time we spend
Together here. The unfamiliar tongue
That we have paid to spend these days among
Arranges, soothes and praises, while the wind
Is just below the surface of our mind,
And Beatric¾ bawls her infant rage
At teething-pain somewhere indoors. Offstage,
There wait the hilltop towns whose narrow lanes
Are silent, high above the patchworked plains,
As we explore their steepnesses, and dine
On menu tipico and local wine,
Happily missing artifacts and sites
Through easy days that lead to ease-filled nights.
The cypresses, bearing their store of cones
As if bedecked with pale gray snails or stones,
stand tall against the flawless sky; between,
Olives spread trembling leaves of silver-green.
Here are no pines: instead a fruit tree bears
Clear pink (for apples, possibly, or pears)
Beside a spout that pours, after the rain,
Out of the bank. Beside the house the lane
Becomes a shallow stream that I watch run
Transparent in the hot afternoon sun;
Asphodel, hyacinth and orchid burn
Star-white and purple, till the clouds return,
Amongst the bank-grass; iris share their hues
And skied are echoed in the bugloss’ blues,
While buttercups and daisies point a green
More emerald than I have ever seen….
The slender branch of banksiae arranged
Curving across my kitchen window changed
The way I think of beauty. Adding grace
And lightness to the flat, right-angled space,
Its fine, long, elegant recursive strength
Inclines to gravity; along its length
At unworked periods, small single stems
Bear others like them, leaves, and diadems
Of tiny reflexed flowers, primrose-pale,
And all of them, according to some scale,
More miniature and frequent, as I cast
My eye along its wonders, than the last.
The beauty of the individual parts,
Or all, is where appreciation starts,
But where it leads – I catch a glimmer now,
Studying it – is understanding how,
Interrelating, deeper beauty’s made
That puts the former beauty in the shade.
Then, put unwillingly to bed, I find
A beauty waiting of a different kind:
The beauty that a vase of random blooms,
Arranged perhaps haphazardly, assumes,
That shown no pattern and no symmetry,
Except in each component, to the eye;
And yet the beauty of each leaf and flower
Can neither sum to, nor explain, its power –
That the effectively infinite scope
Of all its angles offers us the hope
That Nature’s inexhaustible domain,
The outer edge of chaos, will remain
Our nursery forever, and Dame Kind
A store of wonders for the restless mind.
This insight takes a week; then, as with verve
Assertion, skill, and not a little nerve,
You drive us, Friday, north, and I expound
My thesis using what I see around –
A cone-shaped roof whose symmetry of style
Is balanced by its random-coloured tile;
A field, unweeded, balanced green and white,
Its flower heads all at a single height –
I meet (but not, thank god! beneath a bus!)
The gods Apollo and Dionysus
Measured and mocking as they welcome me,
And after working all that week I see,
And though I know I’m seeing nothing new
I’m satisfied to have my point of view;
Yet now the skirmish, not the war, is won,
And wit this time, sat in the evening sun
The workshop finished and the poets gone,
When I must find my breath and battle on,
To keep the poem’s promise, and rehearse
The application of these rules to verse.
Firstly, the poem must provide delight
(as much to read as first it was to write)
if not in every liner, yet in enough
to make the reader persevere for stuff
worth excavating: first-sight love, while fine,
depends upon the working of its mine
for permanence: prognostication’s poor
for love that fails to find a seam of ore,
and poems where one reading yields up all,
with few supreme exceptions, quickly pall.
And what delights? Fine poetry will storm
The heart and head with feeling, sense and form:
A striking or a haunting metaphor,
an image that one hasn’t met before,
a way of seeing different to one’s own,
adding to one’s perceptions, or the known
affirmed in recognition, a sublime,
a witty or an unexpected rhyme
in which some new relationship is caught
by juxtaposing what one hadn’t thought;
and, though one can’t be certain of it, yet
reading the greatest verse one seems to get
a sense of truth, a glimpse into the soul.
Second, the shape and contour of the whole
Works its effect upon the reader, though
S/he may not realise that this is so,
The tension built in every word and line
Discharged according to the form’s design:
Ottava rima’s punchline couplets – yes,
We all see those: less easy to assess
A subtle sonnet’s turnings; harder still
To see the isomorph of Jack and Jill
(the basic shape of feeling) not in line
or verse or stanza, but the whole design
which if effective, mimics all the drives,
in shape, at least, that underlay our lives,
the appetite (and whether its for bread,
fame, self-discovery or three-in-bed,
the shape’s the same) that once it’s started, grows,
unless it fails, until the creature knows –
conscious, unconscious, keen or loath – it must
do something where it irritates, adjust
its habits or its hormone-levels (which
depends upon the nature of the itch);
and what the organism does to find
release, gratification, peace of mind,
full stomach or fulfillment – all’s the same:
the only variations are the name
and which way skewed the line whose length and height
(how long and how intense the appetite,
where does it reach the stasis of its start?)
maps onto works of all but plastic art.
Third, though conventions change from age to age
The seen aesthetics of the printed page –
The perfect typescript, margin straight as die
Or quaintly patterned – gives the reader’s eye,
Especially the poet’s, pleasures clear
As spoken or imagined verse the ear.
Last is the mystery, that which we owe
Whatever Muse inspired the words to flow,
Obedient alphabetics trail or chase
Our cursor or our pen from space to space,
That solves he riddle posed by verse: the way
We say things modifies the things we say.
For while the same thing might be said in prose
In different ways, and so we may propose
That three plus for equates to four plus three,
The same does not apply to poetry.
And as one might define the highest part
Of gardener’s or flower-arranger’s art
As playing profusion as one might a lyre,
Charming or forcing pan-pipes to a choir,
Accepting the materials to hand –
The sort of flowers and the stretch of land –
Conducting the contingent in a dance,
So poetry embraces circumstance
And from the unique moment spins a thread
Of meaning that can’t otherwise be said,
Whose manifold determinants – the view,
The things the poet couldn’t quite construe,
Her intimations of the far divine,
The cheese she had for dinner, or the wine,
The bee alighting briefly on the page,
The import of her or her epoch’s age,
The words that came to mind, and those required
To fit the scheme by which she was inspired,
The state of her digestion and her soul –
Fall either side the margins of control.
So if a poem finally gives voice
All that’s required a poet is: rejoice!
But all’s not Eden. Soon the world is wrecked
If entropy is left to reign unchecked.
Massed greenfly take the tender Rose to dine,
And caterpillars ravage Columbine;
Unbarred, mosquitos find their way within
And penetrate the Poet’s fragile skin;
Dust mounts, the pile of dirty dishes swells,
The garbage underneath the work-top smells,
The bills unpaid, the services are stopped;
His friends come less and less until he’s dropped;
His much relieved employers ‘let him go’;
Unkempt, unwashed, he wanders to and fro;
His most determined lover disappears;
His home, neglected, falls around his ears;
As, finally, he sits and stares beyond
Some institution for the frail or fond,
Exasperated family refuse
To visit him, and leave him to his Muse.
No. This wont do. The Poet can’t evade
The choices that must constantly be made;
Good sense or toilet-training make him loth
To take extremes: he’ll follow none, or both.
He hedges bets, believes in “middle way”,
And muddle through the options of the day;
Has always kept a foot in either camp
And, neither wet nor dry, is deeply damp;
Attempts a life of reason (though it’s true
He used to feel nostalgie de la boue
As he matures he feels it less and less –
If ‘maturation’’s apt for such a mess).
And so he works and plays and finds the time
Amongst it all to write a little rhyme
With what he thinks of as a gowing skill
At balancing or juggling – but still
Feels sometimes vaguely discontent, as when
A week’s gone by with nothing from his pen;
Sometimes, uncertain, wonders if he’s right
To shade in gray what might be black or white:
And might not all be worth it for one fine
Enduring sonnet, or one deathless line?
But then he thinks: “Eternity is vast,
And if, a million million light-years past
The centre of a slowly spinning core,
Upon some minor constellation’s shore
Expires a smallish sun, that has a moon
On which a creature, rhyming June with spoon,
Feels sometimes troubled…” Here he stops, and grins;
A poem ends: another one begins.