A Tough Poem From Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon was among the so-called "trench poets" of World War I, and he not only survived the war but lived until 1967, having been born in 1886. One wonders what he thought of the Viet Nam war.

One of his toughest war-poems, in my opinion, is the one below. It isn't remotely as famous as Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," and it isn't tough in the same way; the poem by Owen, in addition to skewering easy notions of patriotism and of dying for one's country, presents a graphic "battle" scene--which is mainly a scene of soldiers being hit by poison gas. Sassoon's poem is tough because it is directed at--and gives hard advice--to one who grieves. It is one of the most emotionally unflinching poems I know. If one didn't have the sense that Sassoon had earned the right to compose such a poem and the sense that what he writes is true, one might be tempted to think of the poem as cruel. It is a hard poem, a tough poem, certainly a sobering poem about war--but not a cruel one. It is from his book Picture Show (1920).

Reconciliation

By Siegfried Sassoon

WHEN you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.

Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred, harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.

Gazelle Ghazal Gets Monday Going

As Ron Padgett notes in his splendid book, The Handbook of Poetic Forms (Teachers & Writers Press, New York), the ghazal is a venerable form of Persian poetry with which the poets Hafiz and Rumi are associated, among others. I'm always reticent to use forms that have such a long history in other cultures because I assume that when the form is transferred to English, it will lose much if not most of what makes it distinctive in its own setting. The ghazal, for example, had its own patterns of rhythm and rhyme in Persian, whereas in English those features tended to fall away. In fact, Padgett's view (p. 88 of his book) is that the contemporary ghazal in English really need only be in the form of (unrhymed) couplets and approach its subject-matter with something of a mystical or philosophical perspective. Adhering to one custom of the Persian ghazal, the ghazal in English may also end with the poet's name. I've brought exactly one ghazal in for what I consider to be a successful landing. It first appeared in Wendy Bishop's textbook, 13 Ways of Looking for a Poem (Longman). Unfortunately, the narrow margins of the blog make what should be long couplet-lines run over, so one will have to make allowances for that.

This Is The Gazelle Ghazal

This is the piano which holds its white hat in its black hands. This is the shovel
that says Excuse me and enters an important person’s office and will not leave.

This is the pebble that politely intrudes and, like a hard seed, sprouts
discomfort. This is the important person, leveled by regret, desperate for hope.

This is the outside, which is rain, and this is the inside, which is dry.
This is the student, who wants to be older. This is the teacher, who wants to be younger.

This is the love affair, so raging it convinced itself it would last forever but ended.
This is the friendship, which began before it knew it began and will not end.

This is the gazelle that springs onto suede savannas of mind as you read.
This is the name that writes the last of the gazelle ghazal: Hans Ostrom.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Walt Whitman Sees

Known for his volubility, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) can be a pithy poet, too, as in the poem below. Written in an age of supreme anxiety about what Darwin's ideas meant for those with mystical or religious beliefs, the poem seems to sidestep a "science" vs. "religion" duality and simply regards evolution as one more element to admire, mystically, about the universe. Not surprisingly (in the case of Whitman), the poem ends with a surprise, as the "real" subject of the piece is the unseen "soul"--human consciousness, another mystery of evolution. Thus the poem finally settles into an old philosophical question about whether reality exists independently of perception, whether perception is reality, and whether these are the correct philosophical questions to ask. Happily, for him and for us, Whitman chose his genre wisely--lyric poem, not treatise; so he's not obligated to sort out the philosophical question fully. Instead he ends with an exclamation, an homage to the soul his intuition grasps but does not see. It's a grand little poem, the way I see it.

Grand is the Seen

Walt Whitman

GRAND is the seen, the light, to me—grand are the sky and stars.
Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space,
And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary;
But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those,
Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea,
(What were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?)
More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul!
More multiform far—more lasting thou than they.

The Fly Is Welcome to Share

I enjoy this poem from William Oldys, whose life and writing-career took place chiefly in the 18th century, although he was born in 1687.

On a Fly Drinking Out of His Cup

By William Oldys (1687-1761)

BUSY, curious, thirsty fly!
Drink with me and drink as I:
Freely welcome to my cup,
Couldst thou sip and sip it up:

Make the most of life you may,
Life is short and wears away.
Both alike are mine and thine
Hastening quick to their decline:

Thine 's a summer, mine 's no more,
Though repeated to threescore.
Threescore summers, when they're gone,
Will appear as short as one!

I find much to like in just three stanzas, including the assonance in line one (curious/thirsty); the phrase "sip and sip it up"; and the assertion that once a segment of time is gone, it looks about the same as any other segment of time. It's a poem with modern sensibilities; or rather, our sensibilities do not seem to have changed all that radically compared to those of Oldys's era.

Apparently, however, the conventional wisdom back then was that flies lived a whole summer, whereas, if I'm not mistaken, their life-span is a matter of hours. (This just in from one of my colleagues in science who studies fruit flies: the life-span of most flies is more properly measured in weeks, not hours; my apologies to flies, those who study them, and those who drink with them.) Also, we associate flies with the spread of bacteria and other sources of disease, whereas Oldys seems fine with having the fly drink from his cup. Maybe the sensibility here is not so much modern as it is Zen-like, to the extent that Zen Buddhism takes a radically democratic view of all creatures.

Finally, I take pleasure in comparing this poem to Karl Shapiro's poem, "The Fly," which begins, "O hideous little bat, the size of snot," and proceeds to get more miffed with the fly from there. In class once, Shapiro claimed that he wrote the poem while serving in the military in the South Pacific during World War. He said he had a lot of pent-up rage toward the military, and he channeled it all into an irrational rage against a fly. What a great strategy for writing a poem: take the emotion one feels for one situation and rewire it to a completely different subject. Shapiro was an iconoclast by nature and by nature not a joiner of any kind, so the conformity of military life must indeed have induced some rage.

Was the beverage in Oldys's cup alcoholic, and if so, what does alcohol do to a fly? I guess it turns the creature (the insect, I mean) into a barfly.

Roy Helton Passes By

Here's a well wrought poem by Roy Helton (born 1886), published in the early decades of the 20th century:

In Passing

by Roy Helton

THROUGH the dim window, I could see
The little room—a sordid square
Of helter-skelter penury:
Piano, whatnot, splintered chair.

It is so small a room that I
Seemed almost at the woman's side:
Galled jade—too fat for vanity,
And far too frankly old for pride.

Her greasy apron 'round her waist;
The dish cloth by her on the chair;
As if in some wild headlong haste,
She has come in and settled there.

Grimly she bends her back and tries
To stab the keys, with heavy hand;
A child's first finger exercise
Before her on the music stand.

"In Passing" reminds me of William Carlos Williams' poem about his driving through a suburban neighborhood and noticing a "housewife." I like Helton's poem even better because it transfers the point of view from viewer to viewed. At the end of the poem, we concentrate completely on the woman; the scene's poignant but not sentimental. Amid all the work and in the midst of a hard life, the woman pauses to take a try at playing the piano. Helton's poem amounts to a highly compressed short story.

Max Eastman on Diogenes

In an on-line version of Louis Untermeyer's anthology, Modern Poetry (1919), I found the following small poem by Max Eastman, known more as an editor than a poet. Eastman knew several Harlem Renaissance writers well, including George Schuyler; his politics in the 1920s were leftward leaning. In this poem, he praises the Cynic philosopher, Diogenes, a contemporary of Aristotle's. Diogenes preferred to live like a beggar, although I believe that he worked for a long time as a tutor to a rich person's children. "Worked" makes it sound as if he was employed, but I think he was actually a slave at that point. He disparaged customs, including comfort, money, and funeral rites. For himself, he allegedly wished no funeral rites or even burial but requested that his body simply be flung outside the city's gates, to be devoured by dogs. Instead, somebody built a monument to him--with the figure of a dog on top; at least that's the lore.

Here's Eastman's crisp little homage to Diogenes:

Diogenes

by Max Eastman

A HUT, and a tree,
And a hill for me,
And a piece of weedy meadow.
I’ll ask no thing,
Of God or king,
But to clear away his shadow.

I do appreciate that half-rhyme, meadow and shadow--almost as if, on behalf of Diogenes, Eastman were purposely "bending" the custom of rhyming. Fans of Sherlock Holmes will remember that Holmes's brother, Mycroft, belonged (or I should say belongs) to the Diogenes Club in London.

Searchlights Find Poem

I ran across an on-line version of Louis Untermeyer's anthology, Modern Poetry (1919). (Untermeyer and Oscar Williams were equally prolific anthologists of poetry in the 20th century.) I enjoy perusing old anthologies to see which poems from them have persisted in subsequent anthologies and which haven't, and to re-discover poems that have gone out of sight. This time I found a poem by Alter Brody, who was born in 1895:

Searchlights

by Alter Brody

TINGLING shafts of light,
Like gigantic staffs
Brandished by blind, invisible hands,
Cross and recross each other in the sky,
Frantically—
Groping among the stars—stubbing themselves against the bloated clouds—
Tapping desperately for a sure foothold
In the fluctuating mists.

Calm-eyed and inaccessible
The stars peer through the blue fissures of the sky,
Unperturbed among the panic of scurrying beams;
Twinkling with a cold, acrid merriment.

The basic contrast--searchlights v. stars--is appealing. The image of "gigantic shafts" is just right. I associate these with film-clips of Hollywood's opening of movies in the hold days and with car-dealerships, which occasionally used to deploy searchlights during special night-sales, at least in California. The image of their "stubbing themselves against . . . clouds" seems correct, too. The word "frantically" doesn't seem quite right, partly because searchlights are so hard to maneuver that the shafts of light never seem rushed. The personification of the stars may be excessive in the second stanza. I'd be inclined to trust the image of the stars to convey the meaning that most of the adjectives no convey, and "acrid merriment" seems over-the-top. Nonetheless, what a great idea for a poem: searchlights and stars in a "stare-down" that is a mismatch.

I've seen a searchlight up close because my father had somehow acquired what he called "an old Navy light." It was an upright searchlight that swiveled ponderously. I have no idea what the wattage was aside from "more than a lot."

Poets Today

Although I read and teach a lot of Old School poetry, I also try to continue to read contemporary poets, although it's hard to keep up with the all the poetry that's out there. That's not cause for despair; it's actually cause for celebration. Professor and writer Judith Johnson, I believe, applied the term "a false economy of scarcity" to the impulse some people have to create narrow canons of literature--an impulse that may be guided in part by a fear of abundance. An abundance of literature may make some people feel as if literature is "out of control." It may be out of their control, but it's not out of control. Some people may feel as if, with new literature pouring out all the time, "the standards" may disappear. Canons shift all the time; just look at any poetry anthology from the 19th or early 20th centuries. Standards vary according to criteria, in spite of a yearning to establish the indisputable list of great works.

Among the contemporary poets I've enjoyed reading are, in no particular order, Natasha Trethewey, Marilyn Chin, Mark Halliday, Jim Daniels, Virgil Suarez, Rita Dove, and Kevin Clark--to name only a handful. I like some of Sherman Alexie's poetry, and I've enjoyed poems by Gary Soto, too. I'm partial to my late friend Wendy Bishop's posthumous collection, My Last Door, but I think even if I hadn't known Wendy, I'd be impressed with it.

I also just like reading poetry in the magazines in which I publish, or in magazines I just pick up. Often I don't remember the name of the poet whose work I like. But there's good poetry appearing all the time. In recent years, I've placed a few poems in British magazines, and it's nice to see what sorts or things are going on poetically over there. I've read a smattering of contemporary Swedish poetry in Swedish, and I even translated one. It's by Marie Silkeberg, from her collection, Black Mercury. It appears in a book I wrote with Wendy Bishop and Kate Haake, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively. Here's the untitled poem (in English):

Mother! my son called in the night.
Mother! I can't see you.

You can, my precious.
You can see my voice.

Listen to the sky now, so wildly blue,
And to black birds when they fly.


Thanks again to Marie Silkeberg.

Copryight Marie Silkeberg; translation copyright Hans Ostrom 2007.

Anne Finch Likes Herself

You get the feeling from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself that Walt loved himself. Good for him; and he got some fine poetry out of that self-regard.

A more difficult, or at least an as difficult, kind of poem to write is one in which the poet describes satisfaction with herself, or at least self-acceptance.

Anne Finch (1661-1720) seems to have written such a poem, logically titled "On Myself."

On Myself

by Anne Finch

Good Heav'n, I thank thee, since it was designed
I should be framed, but of the weaker kind,
That yet, my Soul, is rescued from the love
Of all those trifles which their passions move.
Pleasure and praise and plenty have with me
But their just value. If allowed they be,
Freely, and thankfully as much I taste,
As will not reason or religion waste.
If they're denied, I on my self can live,
And slight those aids unequal chance does give.
When in the sun, my wings can be displayed.
And, in retirement, I can bless the shade.

This is an intricately original poem. As can often be the case with sonnets from the period, the syntax isn't always easy. To what, for example, does "their" refer to in line four? My guess is that it refers to "other people," not to trifles, for it wouldn't make sense for the trifles to move their own passions.

To some degree, the poem seems to concern a self-restraint that comes easily to the person. She doesn't deny herself things by means of excruciating self-discipline, but if she doesn't experience certain pleasant things, she is content nonetheless. Both reason and religion seem to serve as guides, but she seems to work easily within the guidelines, which do not seem oppressive. She describes herself as "weaker"--meaning what? That she is "of the 'weaker' sex"--a woman? Or that she doesn't have appetites as powerful as those of other people?

The concluding couplet sets itself apart from the rest of the poem; the couplet seems to leap to the image of a winged creature--butterfly? bird?--in sun and shade. But the leap seems to work, reinforcing the sense in which the person is both balanced and content with the balance.

Appreciating Cedar Trees

According to my blog-hit-counter, "I" just passed the 1500-hit-mark, although when I log on to my own blog, I think I'm counted as a hit, so we must take that dizzying number with a grain of smelling salts. I realize some blogs get that many hits in less than a minute. Even so, I'm mightily impressed with my 1500. If someone had spoken the phrase "blog-hit-counter" to me in 1971, or even in 1999, I may not have guessed they were speaking English.

Today's poem concerns cedar trees, which many people appreciate. They are aromatic. They are gracefully attired. Their bark is intricate. Their wood is easy to work with and, because of the resin, stands up to rot better than pine. Then there are the famous cedar-chests and those Cedars of Lebanon.

Where I grew up in the Sierra Nevada, cedars composed a good percentage of the forest's population, but they were not in the same abundance as pine trees or fir trees. Some of the old-growth cedars were massive, their bark as thick as a fist.

Here, then, is a kind of homage to cedar trees:

Cedars in Space

If there is what
we call life
elsewhere in the All,
I hope it includes
cedar trees, which are
excellent forms of what
we call life, really aromatic,
interesting nodes of
the All. I look outward
to a time when
an intergalactic
Cedar-Appreciation Festival
is held on what we call
an annual basis.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Alfred Austin Can't Sleep

Below is a poem about insomnia I hadn't read until today; it's by Alfred Austin, who was Poet Laureate of England in the Victorian period.

A Sleepless Night

by Alfred Austin

Within the hollow silence of the night

I lay awake and listened. I could hear

Planet with punctual planet chiming clear,

And unto star star cadencing aright.

Nor these alone: cloistered from deafening sight,

All things that are made music to my ear:

Hushed woods, dumb caves, and many a soundless mere,

With Arctic mains in rigid sleep locked tight.

But ever with this chant from shore and sea,

From singing constellation, humming thought,

And Life through Time's stops blowing variously,

A melancholy undertone was wrought;

And from its boundless prison-house I caught

The awful wail of lone Eternity.

The beginning of the poem may be a bit confusing unless we recall that Aristotle believed that the sun, the moon, and the stars were all attached to spheres, and that these spheres operated in harmony. So although almost no one believed that theory in Austin's time, Austin is probably using Aristotle's idea figuratively, so that the planets chime like a clock. I don't think we're supposed to believe that the planets are literally audible.

The synesthesia--or deliberate mixing of senses--of "cloistered from deafening sight" works well. (Apparently, synesthesia may also refer to an actual condition, in which, for example, a person might associate numbers with colors.) It works well, I think, because "cloistered" from sight, lying in bed, we do tend to turn things over to the ears, whereas when we're up and about, our focus on things we see may make us less aware of what we hear.

The person in Austin's poem seems to welcome this "cloistered" situation and enjoys listening to what he might not have heard were he awake and looking out a window, but probably most insomniacs get annoyed by hearing every little noise. Almost everything seems too loud when you can't sleep. "Life through Time's stops" refers, I believe, to an organ, which has stops that an organist manipulates. The sonnet ends more gloomily than we might have expected: ya think?! It takes a morose Victorian turn, just when we thought the guy was fairly sanguine about being awake at night.

One More By Alice Meynell

Here is another poem by Alice Meynell (1847-1922), whom I mentioned in the previous post:

The Poet and his Book by Alice Meynell

Here are my thoughts, alive within this fold, My simple sheep. Their shepherd, I grow wise As dearly, gravely, deeply I behold Their different eyes.

O distant pastures in their blood! O streams From watersheds that fed them for this prison! Lights from aloft, midsummer suns in dreams, Set and arisen.

They wander out, but all return anew, The small ones, to this heart to which they clung; “And those that are with young,” the fruitful few That are with young.

When I began to read the poem for the first time, I almost cringed because I didn't think the extended comparison between sheep and poems was going to work, partly because of the age-old Judeo-Christian comparison between humans/souls and sheep. Ah, but Meynell uses the comparison surprisingly and smartly, in my view anyway. The sheep (poems) were fed by a variety of streams, watersheds, and pastures--ideas for poems, in other words. The implication that the poet likes "the small ones" best rings true; for quirky, private reasons, poets will often like the poems others don't necessarily like. And the final extension of the comparison is to suggest, or at least to hope, that some of the poems will inspire others' poems, will bear literary "young." Through the post-feminist critical lens, we marvel that Meynell felt obligated to write about the poet and "his" book, when rather obviously she was meditating on her own work and her attitude toward it later in life. Surely, the sheep/poem comparison will still seem too cloying to some, but what Meynell actually does with the comparison is pleasant and instructive to observe. I enjoyed watching her work in this poem, a small one.

Poem By Alice Meynell

Below appears a poem by Alice Meynell, who is known as a Victorian poet but lived well into the 20th century. She was born in 1847 and died in the year my mother was born, 1922.

November Blue by Alice Meynell

The golden tint of the electric lights seems to give a complementary colour to the air in the early evening.—Essay on London

O heavenly colour, London town Has blurred it from her skies; And, hooded in an earthly brown, Unheaven’d the city lies. No longer, standard-like, this hue Above the broad road flies; Nor does the narrow street the blue Wear, slender pennon-wise.

But when the gold and silver lamps Colour the London dew, And, misted by the winter damps, The shops shine bright anew— Blue comes to earth, it walks the street, It dyes the wide air through; A mimic sky about their feet, The throng go crowned with blue.