Horner's Corner

‘TIS the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
            The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
            For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
    I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
    Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
            Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know ; I should prefer,
            If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat is run
    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
            Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

John Donne: A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being The Shortest Day..

 

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

 

WH Auden

‘And these words shall then become

Like Oppression’s thundered doom

Ringing through each heart and brain,

Heard again – again – again -

‘Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number -

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you -

Ye are many – they are few.’

Complete poem:  Shelley – The Mask of Anarchy.

Good article by Daniel Trilling on the meaning of the Millbank protest here.

-Homecoming

Snowfall, denser and denser,
dove-coloured as yesterday,
snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.

White, stacked into distance.
Above it, endless,
the sleigh track of the lost.

Below, hidden,
presses up
what so hurts the eyes,
hill upon hill,
invisible.

On each,
fetched home into its today,
an I slipped away into dumbness:
wooden, a post.

There: a feeling,
blown across by the ice wind
attaching its dove- its snow-
coloured cloth as a flag.

Paul Celan

tr. Michael Hamburger

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels Seferis — ‘Mythistorema’

For J.G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow —

Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned

To a slow clock of condensation,

An echo trapped forever, and a flutter

Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,

Indian compounds where the wind dances

And a door bangs with diminished confidence,

Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,

Dog corners for bone burials;

And a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,

Among the bathtubs and the washbasins

A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

This is the one star in their firmament

Or frames a star within a star.

What should they do there but desire?

So many days beyond the rhododendrons

With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,

They have learnt patience and silence

Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor

Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,

Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure

of the expropriated mycologist.

He never came back, and light since then

Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.

Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew

And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —

A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue

Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking

Into the earth that nourished it;

And nightmares, born of these and the grim

Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.

Those nearest the door growing strong —

‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’

The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling

Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning

For their deliverance, have been so long

Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark —

Poor preparation for the cracking lock

And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,

Powdery prisoners of the old regime,

Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought

And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream

At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with

Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.

Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,

They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,

To do something, to speak on their behalf

Or at least not to close the door again.

Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,

‘Let the god not abandon us

Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

We too had our lives to live.

You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,

Let not our naive labours have been in vain!

Derek Mahon

 

 

 

 

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

I cried to dream again.

The Tempest 3.2.148-156

These are the years which furnish no repentance

Though seamed with sore regret:

So much would selflessly be done and yet

Print no true sentence.

That grief sits down in books but is no writer

Must be the just rebuke,

And every lightless evening proves a fluke

The one grown brighter.

A careless management of things, they call it

Who pose for God or Fate

The purpose of the Infinite and Great

And here install it.

These decades, all the decimals of feeling,

Are pressing on our schemes.

On childhood walls, on corridors of dreams,

The paint is peeling.

 

 

 

– William Blake : The Four Zoas.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

b.April 27, 1889

Photographed by Ben Richards in Swansea

_______________________

Wittgenstein’s Dream

Peter Porter

I had taken my boat out on the fiord,

I get so dreadfully morose at five,

I went in and put Nature on my hatstand

And considering the Sinking of the Eveninglands

And laughed at what translation may contrive

And worked at mathematics and was bored.

(….)

After dinner I read myself to sleep,

After which I dreamt the Eastern Front

After an exchange of howitzers,

The Angel of Death was taking what was hers,

The finger missed me but the guns still grunt

The syntax of the real, the rules they keep.

And then I woke in my own corner bed

And turned away and cried into the wall

And cursed the world which Mozart had to leave.

I heard a voice which told me not to grieve,

I heard myself. ‘Tell them’, I said to all,

‘I’ve had a wonderful life. I’m dead.’

…(more)

_______________________

Wittgenstein

rowing from Skjolden to his house

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Biographical Sketch

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

At the City University of New Yorks Graduate Center, a friend of mine named Lydia Hazen is testing subjects to see whether they have greater perception of certain colors or shapes after reading poems by Wallace Stevens. Shes engaged in what the New York Times recently dubbed “neuroscience lit crit,” in an article wondering whether its “the next big thing” in literary studies. ? Exciting – but hardly the “new thing”; it should more accurately be called an experimental trope on the oldest traditions of modern literary criticism and philosophy in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834. The infamous English Romantic – opium addict, plagiarist, long-winded talker and poet of fragments – was also a metacognitive theorist far ahead of his time, who now appears to me a startlingly contemporary figure. Today, we have blogs, text-messages, FaceBook updates, Twitter. Coleridge had his notebooks

Read more here: via 3quarksdaily.

Basil Bunting

(1900 – 1985)

“Compose aloud; poetry is sound.” – Advice to young poets, Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) is best known for his long poem ‘Briggflatts’ which has come to be recognised as one of the key texts of British modernism.

more via Basil Bunting – Poetry Archive.

Photograph © Jonathan Williams

Nothing

substance utters or time

stills and restrains

joins design and

supple measure deftly

as thought’s intricate polyphonic

score dovetails with the tread

sensuous things

keep in our consciousness.

Celebrate man’s craft

and the word spoken in shapeless night, the

sharp tool paring away

waste and the forms

cut out of mystery!

When taut string’s note

passes ears’ reach or red rays or violet

fade, strong over unseen

forces the word

ranks and enumerates…

mimes clouds condensed

and hewn hills and bristling forests,

steadfast corn in its season

and the seasons

in their due array,

life of man’s own body

and death…

The sound thins into melody,

discourse narrowing, craft

failing, design

petering out.

Ears heavy to breeze of speech and

thud of the ictus.

Basil Bunting, from Odes

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

The sea is calm tonight,

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Agean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

1867

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, — John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going

1954