[Rhina P. Espaillat]

What a wonderful thread! I'm grateful to all of you who have posted on it, as you've taught me a lot more than I knew about a poet I loved years ago and haven't read again in far too long. Yes, it's the music in his work that lasts and moves you after you've put it down.

Janet, what you say about trying to pin down the meaning of words as spoken by different people, the need to be sure that you're "seeing the same thing," is something I recognize with both pain and excitement from the experience of learning a second language. Like you with your brother, I was amazed--and isolated, and a little frightened--to think that the sounds I made wouldn't create the same pictures for the strangers now around me, who were making other sounds. There's a sense of being trapped in something unyielding and opaque that may be what deafness feels like, Robert; and what a relief it is to discover that it's possible to break through that, to get out to the others, if only imperfectly and to some degree!

[Robt_Ward]

For those who are aware of my putative "channeling" of the other "great-but-underappreciated" poet of this time frame, Theodore Roethke, it's worth noting that both he and Aiken partake of the "I'm so happy it makes me sad" dichotomy Janet has pointed out. It's extraordinarily rare, in either poet, to see an example of joy-without-dread or sorrow-without-hope.

I'm still looking for a clean copy of At a Concert of Music by Aiken, a (relatively) short poem that is poth stunningly evocative of what music does and plangently despairing of finding temporal joy even within the forest of beauty. I have the poem in memory, but want to be sure I have it right.

(robt)

[Robt_Ward]

It's not on the web, that I can see. Here it is, typed from memory. Anyone with an Aiken "Collected" to hand, feel free to correct me and I'll revise.

(robt)

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

At a Concert of Music

Be still, while the music rises about us: the deep enchantment
Towers, like a forest of singing leaves and birds,
Built, for an instant, by the heart’s troubled beating,
Beyond all power of words.

And while you are listening, silent, I escape you;
And I go by a secret path in that dark wood
To another time, long past, and another woman,
And another mood.

Then, too, the music’s cold algebra of enchantment
Wrought all about us a bird-voice haunted grove;
Then too, as now, I returned to an earlier moment,
And an earlier love.

Alas! Can I never find peace in the shining instant,
The hard, bright crystal of being, in time and space?
Must I always seek, in the moment, an earlier moment,
And an earlier face?

Absolve me! I would adore you, had I the secret,
In all the music’s power, for your face alone;
I would try to answer, in the world’s chaotic symphony,
Your one clear tone.

But alas, alas; being everything, you are nothing.
The history of all my life is in your face,
And all I can remember is an earlier, more haunted moment,
and a brighter place.



[This message has been edited by Robt_Ward (edited April 15, 2004).]

[Henry Quince]

Thanks, Robt. That’s a haunting one that I don’t remember seeing before. I don’t have a “collected” of him either.

The theme (Must I always seek, in the moment, an earlier moment,..) was a preoccupation. Here are some lines from Time in the Rock:

The picture world that falls apart
and leaves a snowflake on the hand,
a star of ice, a hillside, a dead leaf --
the picture world, the lost and broken
child's book, whence we treasure one picture
torn and soiled, the faded colors precious
because dimmed, clear because faded --
The picture world which is ourselves
speaking of yesterday and yesterday and yesterday
the huge world promised in the bud of May
the leaf, the stone, the rain, the cloud,
the face most loved, the hand most clung to.

Must we go back to this and have this always?
Remember what was lost or what was torn?
Replace the missing with a better dream
built from the broken fabric of our wills,
thus to admit our present is our past
and in one picture find unaltered heaven?

Henry

[Robt_Ward]

Precisely so, Henry. For me Aiken is the absolute personification of the persistence of memory. He's almost obsessive about it, and it strikes a deep chord in me.

P.S. — am I being passionate enough for you yet? jejeje™

(robt)

[Janet Kenny]

Rhina,
I have seen the birthday photographs of the little girl you were and then I realised how far you had to travel. I can't imagine what it must have been like at that age to have to learn a new language. I'm sure you have an extra level of understanding because of the struggle. It shows in your English poems and probably equally in your Spanish poems. Painfully acquired riches.
Janet

[Kate Benedict]

Fellow Aiken enthusiasts!--perhaps you'll be interested in my new Lectio on this extraordinary poet. I've tried to include some poems that may be new to most.

http://katebenedict.com/Lectio.htm

[Henry Quince]

Thank you, Kate. Interesting indeed. Some of those are certainly new to me.

I would have posted Aiken’s The One-Eyed Calendar on this thread, but it’s rather long to type in. Though it appears in some anthologies, I can’t find it online.

Henry

[Janet Kenny]

Thank you Kate and Henry for this great thread.
Janet