[A. E. Stallings]

I have been a little at a loss what sort of thing I ought to post here, after the recent nightmarish events--not wanting to be too morbid, or too glib. How is poetry to respond to such atrocity? Aren't words inadequate? And yet poets do try to respond, sometimes successfully, often not, to events they read in newspapers, or see on t.v. What else is there to do?

I'll give three examples, I think, that are successful to some degree, usually by maintaining some sort of distance, avoiding the sentimental, the cheap response. The first states this outright, in the title (which nonetheless has its irony).

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Dylan Thomas


Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

[A. E. Stallings]

The second, by Thomas Hardy, keeps its distance by the splendour of its language (often solemnly Latinate) and imagery, its other-world-iness, and its grand abstraction--universalizing the particular. The rimed tercets, which start as trimeters, and end as a drawn-out hexameter, have something of the feel of destiny and the inevitable. (The first two lines of each stanza should be indented):

The Convergence of the Twain

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

I.

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II.

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III.

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V.

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"

VI.

Well: while fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII.

Prepared a sinister mate
For her--so gaily great--
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII.

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX.

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

X

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event.

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

[Solan]

Isn't poetry simply prose's stylish cousin? If it can be expressed in prose, why not also in poetry? True enough, good poetry takes longer to write and should embody more reflection; immediate poetic responses will probably be of poor quality or even "therapeutic poetry".

But I think poetry has a role here - if poetry ever has a role - as the refiner of human emotion.


------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

[A. E. Stallings]

The third succeeds by very different methods. Seamus Heaney has not, I believe, been mentioned on this board. And it is my impression that he is not particularly popular here--but he remains among my favorite living poets. I like that he is equally at home in form and a muscular free verse, and I like his employment of slant rimes.

He is certainly a poet that has been criticised both for attending to, and for not attending to, the political environment. Here is one poem that merges the personal and the public. While sestinas are probably my least favorite form, this one strikes me as relatively successful. The distance here is achieved by the almost casual and random association of a fond childhood memory with a terrorist bombing (and perhaps the poet is aided by the discipline necessary to the form). The two events have nothing to do with each other besides the lorry and its load, and a place name--and the juxtaposition is what makes this so sinister. The form is well exploited, too, as it weaves the two disparate events together. This is in a rough-hewn pentameter, and he plays a bit with the end-words, making it more end-sounds (lorry/flurry; mother/meet her, etc.):

Two Lorries

It's raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.
There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew's old lorry
Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman
With his Belfast accent's sweet-talking my mother.
Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?
But it's raining and he still has half the load

To deliver farther on. This time the lode
Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes
Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt
(Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry
With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother:
The tasty ways of a leather-aproned coalman!

And films no less! The conceit of a coalman . . .
She goes back in and gets out the black lead
And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother,
All business round her stove, half-wiping ashes
With a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry
Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt

And the last delivery. Oh, Magherafelt!
Oh, dreams of red plush and a city coalman
As time fastforwards and a different lorry
Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload
That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes . . .
After that happened, I'd a vision of my mother,

A revenant on the bench where I would meet her
In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt,
Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes.
Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman
Refolding body-bags, plying his load
Empty upon empty, in a flurry

Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry
Was it now? Young Agnew's or that other,
Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode
In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt . . .
So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman.
Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,
Then reappear from your lorry as my mother's
Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.

[RCL]

Alicia, thanks for this thread. This is one of my favorites.

Easter 1916
W. B. Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terribly beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights is argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute to minute they live;
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

[robert mezey]

Three quick & brief responses. Solan, I don't
think of poetry as prose's stylish cousin---just
a fancier kind of prose. If that were true, why
not write plain, honest prose?
Alicia, it's true that Heaney handles the meter
with great freedom in his sestina, but I don't
think he falls into free verse anywhere. The
closest he gets to it is using a variation made
new by Frost, substituting two anapests for three
iambs---he does that twice. But all the other
lines are roughly five beats---sometimes pretty
roughly. Anyway, thanks for posting it.
And finally, Bob, I would agree, certainly, that
Yeats' elegy is beautifully written, but in a way
too much so. It has always seemed a little false
to me, more self-delighting that grief-stricken.
And others have pointed out that he managed a poem
that did the trick for the Irish without offending
the English.

[A. E. Stallings]

Ralph, Thanks for posting. Yes, another good one.

Robert--sorry. I guess I was unclear. I meant that Heaney moves between free verse and form in his work as a whole. I'll amend my original post to avoid the confusion.

The sestina is metrical, of course--in the intro, I had called it a "rough-hewn" pentameter--though, as you point out, it really is not even all that rough. Thanks for commenting.

[Tom]

.

[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Tom,

Please feel free to post an example of the kind of public poetry you would like to see.

Heaney is not, perhaps, a humorous poet, but I'd disagree that he has no sense of humour. I think there is a wit in his writing, and even the occasional spot of whimsy. The wit is usually in a striking image, however, rather than in word play. I shall perhaps start a separate Heaney thread to discuss him.

Thanks for commenting.

[Golias]

Alicia, Tom

I just posted what I think is a fairly good one on the "In Memoriam" thread. Probably I should have put it here.

G.