Bravo, Janet!

Yes, I enjoyed your Aunt sestina. Well done!

You now more than most of us can truly appreciate the degree of difficulty in bringing the full double, full rhymed sestina to a satisfactory completion.

I salute, you! - I who have yet to attempt any type of sestina.

Algy's double-banger is a mortifying challenge.



------------------

I've got a double rhymed sestina up in Metrical at the moment (Visions of Granada). My first post was the same. 'The Complaint of Lisa', naturally, is one of my favourite poems in the English language, but unfortunately Mark got there first. Here instead is the wonderful 'Itylus'. If only Eliot had such an ear for verbal music, he wouldn't have felt obliged to tarnish Algy's reputation in one of his many awful essays, which were somehow fashionable in his time.


ITYLUS

Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,
How can thine heart be full of the spring?
A thousand summers are over and dead.
What hast thou found in the spring to follow?
What hast thou found in thine heart to sing?
What wilt thou do when the summer is shed?

O swallow, sister, O fair swift swallow,
Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south,
The soft south whither thine heart is set?
Shall not the grief of the old time follow?
Shall not the song thereof cleave to thy mouth?
Hast thou forgotten ere I forget?

Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow,
Thy way is long to the sun and the south;
But I, fulfill'd of my heart's desire,
Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow,
From tawny body and sweet small mouth
Feed the heart of the night with fire.

I the nightingale all spring through,
O swallow, sister, O changing swallow,
All spring through till the spring be done,
Clothed with the light of the night on the dew,
Sing, while the hours and the wild birds follow,
Take fight and follow and find the sun.

Sister, my sister, O soft light swallow,
Though all things feast in the spring's guest-chamber,
How hast thou heart to be glad thereof yet?
For where thou fliest I shall not follow,
Till life forget and death remember,
Till thou remember and I forget.

Swallow, my sister, O singing swallow,
I know not how thou hast heart to sing.
Hast thou the heart? is it all past over?
Thy lord the summer is good to follow,
And fair the feet of thy lover the spring:
But what wilt thou say to the spring thy lover?

O swallow, sister, O fleeting swallow,
My heart in me is a molten ember
And over my head the waves have met.
But thou wouldst tarry or I would follow
Could I forget or thou remember,
Couldst thou remember and I forget.

O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow,
The heart's division divideth us.
Thy heart is light as a leaf of a tree;
But mine goes forth among sea-gulfs hollow
To the place of the slaying of Itylus,
The feast of Daulis, the Thracian sea.

O swallow, sister, O rapid swallow,
I pray thee sing not a little space.
Are not the roofs and the lintels wet?
The woven web that was plain to follow,
The small slain body, the flower-like face,
Can I remember if thou forget?

O sister, sister, thy first-begotten!
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood crying yet,
Who hath remember'd me? who hath forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.


Swinburne is perhaps my favourite poet in the language, so I'll respond further to Rose's excellent thread as soon as I have more time.

Iain

Iain,
I just had a peek at your double sestina. I'll definitely comment as soon as I find a moment. I'm very impressed.
Janet

Thank you, Janet. Bear in mind that the second draft doesn't function in the form. Anyway, since someone at some point would post this, here is my second and last post of a Swinburne poem here, which is the first thing I actually read of his, and which is still a mainstay of anthologies despite the apparent neglect of the poet:-


A FORSAKEN GARDEN

In a coign of a cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain;
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither,
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song.
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.

The sun burns sear, and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath,
Only the wind here hovers and revels,
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers one never will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, 'Look thither,'
Did he whisper? 'Look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die-- but we?'
And the same wind sang, and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end-- but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.

All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Nor known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.

Here death may not deal again for ever;
Here change may not come till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind's breath, upon all these blowing,
Roll the sea.

Till the slow sea rise, and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.


Newcomers to Swinburne unaware of the propagandist tactics used by twentieth century modernists (excluding Pound) to cast slurs on late Romanticism will tend to enquire just why a great poet such as this has slipped beyond criticular favour. Of course, the reverence paid towards modernist poets who served their own ends with their written opinions, by modernist editors and the critics who have always been lackeys, in this century, to their editorial tastes, speaks volumes enough.

The frankly inflated reputation of Yeats is actually an aspect of their revisionist opinion. Had anyone, in Yeats' early years, made serious claim that he rivalled Tennyson and Swinburne, much less exceeded them, the person voicing such an opinion would have been dismissed as a madman. Yeats' early poems, pretty though some of them are, are not far beyond the poetry of Wilde as an exercise in Victorian pastiche. His modernist era work produced no lasting monuments of the sort produced (and I grudgingly say this) by Eliot or by the twentieth century's greatest poet, Pound. Yeats' corpus, so far as I can see it, produced perhaps a handful of great poems, including one of my favourite lyrics ever, 'Sailing to Byzantium', yet it does not go much beyond. Yeats is over-rated now because critics lazily see him as a turning point between what they see as the decadence of the Victorian age and the purity of the modern. Actually, between the styles of one age and those of the next, that reputation ought to go to Hardy or, on a more progressive level, Pound. Yeats is more accessible than the still widely misunderstood latter so the trophy goes to Yeats. Yet his verse is still largely filled with mediocre music, pretentiously earnest themes, and a tendency to briefly wax lyrical with stilted metaphors on absolutely nothing. A full reading of 'Poems and Ballads' confirms Swinburne as being a far, far better poet.

There are a number of flaws in Swinburne's work, granted, which need to be recognised first purely in order to be set out of the way. He over-uses certain words for the effect of alliteration, assonance and rhyming. There are many 'rods' and 'flowers', and much use of 'wine'and 'foam'. His range of themes can be narrow, but his expression within these themes is wide ranging and his themes extend further than Hopkins', or Christina Rosetti's (and C. Rosetti is only set higher than her brother because her work falls more easily on the modern ear). The general mellifluous pablum modern critics are wont to accuse him of is only prevalent in his poetry since the point where he burned out at the Pines: and those who seek to point out that taking his worst poetry as an indication of the whole is a worthwhile excercise should apply that same standard to Wordsworth, whose standards were more erratic, and whose worst material extends further out after the dissipation of his genius and, if anything, is worse.

Hopefully, his reputation will be assured again by the close of the current century. His material is, after all, spread out widely on the Internet, and he is still accepted as a figure whose influence has not even fully been felt by various current poets. Blake dwelled in obscurity for some fifty years until his reputation was rescued via the criticism of Swinburne. Someday someone else's might well do the same for him.

Iain

Wow. Didn't know that.

Yeah, for someone who's routinely written off as a lightweight, he certainly had a brain. In his pamphlet, he defends Anactoria by pointing out that every schoolboy is expected to recite Sappho in the original Greek. Can you imagine kids doing that nowadays? I hope someday, perhaps in my nineties, to be as well read as Swinburne was at age ten.

Speaking of Sappho, in the notes to Anactoria (I'm reading this , by the way, which has tons of notes, thank goodness) he's quoted as saying:

Ahhhh...that's so un-wishywashy!

Iain,

Eliot's essays "mostly awful"? I happen to really like "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Yeah, he gave Swinburne a hard time, but he was invaluable in bringing forward previously neglected writers from the seventeenth century.

Quincy

Iain,
You've followed Rose with a tremendously interesting essay. Thank you so much.
What a magnificent poem that poem is. Does anyone mention its colour and chiaroscuro?

When I was a child Christina Rosetti reached me immediately. That must be good. Nobody read her to me. I found her.

I have resisted Pound, not for political reasons but because a particularly autocratic Italian poet who didn't speak English, introduced his work to me as the "greatest". Since his English was very marginal I developed a habit of resisting Pound. I'll try again.
Janet




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 24, 2006).]

Iain,

I can accept that Swinburne could be your "favorite poet in the language". Perhaps you mean this the way I can say on certain days, "Richard Strauss is my favorite composer" while knowing, feeling, that Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Ligeti, not to mention Monteverdi, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner and many others are greater. If you mean anything more than this I worry for you and your poetry. I mean all this affectionately, half-jokingly, and please read my fond post above. But Swinburne does seem a dangerous influence. You say some other provocative things. It can be useful to consider Yeats, great poet that he is, overrated. Yvor Winters is brilliant, and brilliantly funny, on him and his charges must be answered. But I think Christina Rossetti is far and away the stronger poet in her family. And while you can read a handful of Yeats, that's about the amount of Pound, maybe a quarter-pound, I can read. And I'm not disturbed by his bigotries, as I'm certain he started going frankly mad quite early. Just some thoughts.

Best,
Michael Slipp

Rose - Cheers. I'm glad to be a part of your thread.

Quincy - Eliot did do well in writing of Donne, and I like his essay on his favourite poet Dante. He was, however, a negligible presence re: his personal views on Whitman, Tennyson, Swinburne, Poe and Blake. I think he moulded his criticism too much to suit his views of where his own work should fall in terms of a progression from the Romantic. In short, it suited his own agenda. He was not the first poet/critic to work in this way and perhaps I generalised against him, but I really do feel that his reliability extends mainly to Dante and the metaphysical poets.

Janet - For some reason, though 'Poems and Ballads' has already been published by Penguin, though you'll have to track a copy out of print, no-one has released a copy of its third series, which is where 'A Forsaken Garden' comes from, along with 'The Complaint of Lisa' and the beautiful 'At a Month's End', which can still be found online in its first draft under the title 'At the End of a Month.' Publishers probably sell less copies of other poets but delete Swinburne reissues faster. This may not be the case eternally, since other poets now part of our lasting canon have went missing for longer than he.

Mike - My favourite composer is Beethoven. I can well understand those who'd lay claim to Mozart, R. Strauss, Bach or Wagner. In fact, I'd personally say that the finest opera ever written was 'Tristan und Isolde', though obviously some would disagree.

I think that personal preference, in a way, can be subjective, since our own sensiblities have to come into play beyond our mere objectivity in how we are met by an artistic presence. I personally can only handle, having read it straight through, around a third of Pound's 'Cantos.' If extremely well edited down, I think it would far outdo 'The Wasteland', but Pound was too mentally unstable then to think of it. It's his poetry in 'Personae' that will prove his lasting monument to twentieth century verse.

Apologies to Rose if it seems I've temporarily hijacked or deviated from the theme of the thread. I'll go and correct my own poems now.

Iain

[This message has been edited by Iain James Robb (edited June 25, 2006).]

It's a pleasure to see all the secret Swinburne lovers coming out of the closet. My own confession is that when I was in college and suffering from a major case of unrequited love, I memorized large swaths of "The Triumph of Time" and still recite with pleasure the verse beginning

There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless, dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman and none but she.

I'd like to see someone offer a prize for the best poem beginning with those 4 lines.