[Jeff Holt]

Rhina, I think I speak for everyone in saying that we are just happy to have you aboard, so no need to apologize for anything! Your commentary is wonderful and much appreciated.

[Jeff Holt]

Originally Posted by Tim Murphy

I suspect that the first time I heard Fern Hill I was seated beside my father, by a pond, waiting for sunset ducks. I was too young to carry a gun but big enough to put on waders and set forth decoys. There wasn’t a duck in sight, and my father said:

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

I must have been about ten years old, and I was a small town boy. My father was the real deal, a farm boy, a superb reciter of poetry. The poem simply blew me apart, with its change of direction from recollection of happy youth to its grim reflection on the exigencies of age, which I was very far from! It is a poem to which I have returned for some decades.

I am now twenty years older than Thomas was the night he died of too many martinis, an undiagnosed diabetic, whom a heroic dose of insulin might have saved. What a loss. When I embarked on the path to poet at seventeen I was horribly derivative of Thomas. I’m over that, but I still recite that great singer with pleasure.

As I look back on my life at 59, I suspect that Thomas has it all wrong. Childhood for me was perplexity and unhappiness. Relatively late in life, at age 54, my life was taken over by the Holy Spirit, and I no longer “sing in my chains like the sea.” I have an image of Dylan Thomas, drunkenly sobbing on my living master’s couch shortly before he died: “I am washed up, still going on the inspiration I had at seventeen.”

Mr. Thomas, your poetry woke me from my sleep to a vast intoxication in our art. However derivative of you I might have been at seventeen, I never, ever drink martinis.

Tim,

I've left only the last stanza of "Fern Hill" here for brevity in quoting, and because it's the stanza that interests me the most for this forum.

Thanks for reminding me of this--I've always enjoyed Thomas's work, and somehow I had forgotten these wonderful concluding lines:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea

I can appreciate why you were bowled over. And I appreciate what you say about not being able to relate to Dylan Thomas regarding his idyllic recollections of childhood, as I was depressed through most of my childhood (don't worry, folks, I have no desire to go into a confessional mode here and start piling on details--we've all had our struggles, I know). But, as you appear to be able to do as well, I can still revel in Thomas's vision, just as I can revel in the finely wrought Christian poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins without being a Christian.

Regarding whether or not Thomas "had it all wrong," I think, in some ways, he did have it wrong, in that he was an alcoholic, and like most alcoholics he lived in the past. Probably the reason that he believed that he was "washed up" was because the alcohol, while it may have freed up his inhibitions and thus appeared to give him inspiration to write for a time, had, as it inevitably will, turned on him, and made him ill. And, as you pointed out, he had undiagnosed diabetes. I wasn't aware of that--that makes me feel even more compassion for him.

Thank you for sharing all of this, Tim. While I don't personally feel it's necessary to think that Thomas had it "all" wrong, or that it's necessary to accept the Christian faith, I respect your point of view on the matter.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

One thing that's always struck me about poems of despair is how much more effective they are if they temper their bitterness with humor, however dark the humor. Here's one from a book titled "To Tell the Story," by a friend of mine in NYC who survived the Holocaust in a slave labor camp, and subsequently wrote poems to keep alive the memory of those who didn't make it. Her name is Yala Korwin:

Jozek's Fedora

That morning they sent us
to sort out headgear
in that hut, you know,
near the crematoria.
All sizes, shapes, colors.
Caps, hats, bonnets,
hoods, berets, biggins.

Near one edge I spotted
my brown fedora
bought in Krakow
four years before
on Grodska Street.
I stared, thinking:
is it possible?
Am I still alive?
It stared back at me
as if in disbelief
that I was still alive.

I said to Mietek:
pinch me, pinch me.
I need to know
if I am still alive.

[Jeff Holt]

Originally Posted by Rhina P. Espaillat

Yes, I think Roger has it right: "Almost no poetry is thoroughly happy." That reminds me of the joke about the man who complained bitterly about the food at his boarding house, because "it's so bad, and there's so little of it." That contradiction is at the heart of a dissatisfaction with life that is unreasoning and pretty much universal: we agree that it's full of trouble, and wish there were more of it.

The longing for childhood--or youth, or lost loves, or you name it--is the "so little of it" part of the complaint, the eternal desire for what's still missing or already gone, like Paradise or mornings on "Fern Hill," not because of its perfection (which we don't really know anything about) but because of its goneness, which allows us to gild it in retrospect.

Thomas's trick to writing a good poem about this is not to believe all of what he's saying, even while the gilding is going on, so that the apparent nostalgia falls apart eventually and becomes the truth almost against its own wishes: "I sang (because I didn't know any better!) in my chains (which I've always worn) like the sea (which isn't free either)."

Rhina, this is very wise. I don't know if you're aware of this, but the joke that you begin this post quoting is how Woody Allen starts out "Annie Hall"--he then goes on to say "Well, folks, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of pain, suffering, and misery.... And it's all over much too quickly." A related quote from his character, in the movie, is when he is telling Annie his philosophy that you can divide people into two groups, "the horrible and the miserable." "The horrible" are people suffering from terrible handicaps and diseases--he doesn't know how they make it at all. That leaves the rest of us, the miserable. Therefore, whenever you are feeling miserable, you should be grateful that you're one of the miserable.

Anyway, I think your argument is dead on, and I love your modification of the last line:
"I sang (because I didn't know any better!) in my chains (which I've always worn) like the sea (which isn't free either)."[/quote]
It's actually a little Woody Allen-ish/Monty-Python-ish.... I can imagine someone playing Dylan Thomas, intoning the line while someone else yells the parenthetical part, and the Thomas character keeps glaring at the curtains...

[David Anthony]

Millay wrote some crackers. This is one of my favourites:

TIME does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

It makes an interesting contrast with this one by Lisle Bowles, which seems to be saying the opposite but in fact is saying the same:


O TIME! who know'st a lenient hand to lay
Softest on sorrow's wound, and slowly thence
(Lulling to sad repose the weary sense)
The faint pang stealest unperceived away;
On thee I rest my only hope at last,
And think, when thou hast dried the bitter tear
That flows in vain o'er all my soul held dear,
I may look back on every sorrow past,
And meet life's peaceful evening with a smile:
As some lone bird, at day's departing hour,
Sings in the sunbeam, of the transient shower
Forgetful, though its wings are wet the while:--
Yet ah! how much must this poor heart endure,
Which hopes from thee, and thee alone, a cure!

[FOsen]

This is a great discussion. Since Charlotte Mew has been mentioned, let me put in a plug for Ruth Pitter, who's also been unjustly neglected, but may now get some of her due with a new biography out. Her stuff may still be under copyright, so I'll just link to one that's a little quietly despairing, here.

Frank

[Tim Murphy]

Frank, thanks so much for posting that link to Nell's thoughts on Pitter. Rhina and Jeff, thanks for your kind remarks on The Blind. I still think Fern Hill and The Force that through the Green Fuse are great poems. Just don't feel that way about Do Not Go Gentle or much else of Thomas' work, though forty years ago I thought he walked on water.

[Ed Shacklee]

Here's one by Amiri Baraka that I think fits here:



Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands.

[Suzanne Doyle]

Clearly you don't need any help from me to have a lively discussion on this topic, but I'll toss in a couple of my favorite acts of quiet despair.

When Alicia mentioned Thomas Hardy, "Wind and Rain" immediately leaped to mind:

Wind and Rain

They sing their dearest songs --
He, she, all of them -- yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss --
Elders and juniors -- aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!

They are blithely breakfasting all --
Men and maidens -- yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them -- aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

Somewhere I once read that despair is the feeling that greets us when we can see no way out, whether the situation is physical or psychological. Death is an obvious subject. In Hardy's poem the concrete detail is so unique, and so lovingly chosen that we can see that family as if it was our own, so the irreconcilable loss ploughed by the rain-drop in the last line knocks the wind out us. The first time I read this poem I literally gasped.

Ed Shaklee also mentioned Cunningham's poem "To My Wife." Now there's a quiet despair that doesn't welcome us in but does illuminate love and loss all the same. I think it bears repeating here:

To My Wife

And does the heart grow old? You know
In the indiscriminate green
Of summer or in earliest snow
A landscape is another scene,

Inchoate and anonymous,
And every rock and bush and drift
As our affections alter us
Will alter with the season's shift.

So love by love we come at last,
As through the exclusions of a rhyme,
Or the exactions of a past,
To the simplicity of time,

The antiquity of grace, where yet
We live in terror and delight
With love as quiet as regret
And love like anger in the night.

I have a problem with light at the end of the tunnel in general. In most poems it seems as contrived to me in verse as it does in life. I hope someone will take this opportunity to prove me wrong. Most of Richard Wilbur's poems try, but this is the weak spot for me with his work. Rhina, bring it!

[David Anthony]

Wind and Rain: fine poem; I hadn't come across it before.
It seems ekphrastic to me: I think Hardy was looking at a series of family photographs.