Sunday, March 15, 2009

Two 'lost' poems

Years ago, when still at school, I owned a poetry anthology that contained a short piece about children's experience of the world. I have a feeling that it might have been by Edwin Muir, but I'm not confident of that. After all this time, I can no longer remember the title or even a single line of it. But it did make a very deep impression on me; I recall it as a very beautiful snapshot of the tranquility of suburbia, and of home, and of the comforting attachment to one's mother - but it ended with the rather sinister thought that this idyll is broken by the reappearance of "the masters", the husbands/fathers returning from work at the end of the afternoon. The only phrase I think I remember (perhaps misremember) relates to overhearing a piano being played in another house; it's something like "liberates the light keys of Chopin". And no, it wasn't D. H. Lawrence's Piano (although that would be a good selection for a future 'Poetry Sunday').

Can anyone help me identify this piece? JES??



The other poem I have long yearned to recover, but can find nowhere on the Internet, is one that was introduced to me 20 years ago, when I was doing my teacher training at the University of Durham. My supervisor on that course was a Classicist, and liked to collect modern poems with Classical allusions. He once gave his class one of the obscurer pieces in his files, a poem called Andromeda (I believe the author was called Graham Hough and was a professor of English literature somewhere), which I immediately fell in love with, and used a number of times subsequently in poetry classes of my own.

Andromeda, of course, was a figure in Greek mythology, a beautiful virgin princess who had to be sacrificed to the sea-monster Cetus in order to appease some angry god or goddess, I forget who. Luckily for her, while she was chained naked to a rock on the seashore waiting for the monster to appear, the Greek hero Perseus happened by (fresh from slaying the Gorgon, Medusa); being a hero, of course, he killed the monster and married the girl.

Hough's take on this, though, created an alternative account where Perseus failed to show up until some time later, and the sea-monster had married Andromeda. It was a witty and elegantly punning picture of daily drudgery in a loveless marriage. Cetus became the archetypally insensitive male: self-absorbed, uncommunicative, preferring to spend most of his time out fishing. Andromeda was a wistful but uncomplaining housewife, busying herself with the domestic chores. They lived together in a cave beside the ocean, whose opening was only just above the tideline. This made keeping the place clean a task of Sisyphean repetitiveness (another gratuitous Classical allusion!), because twice a day, at high tide, waves would slop over the rim of the cave entrance depositing seaweed and so on all over the floor.

When Perseus finally arrives, he feels incongruous, embarrassed in such a situation, and doesn't know what to do. So he coughs and shuffles his feet and leaves again.

The poem closes with the most memorably bleak couplet I know, a really devastating image of hopelessness:


The tide was rising, and she turned once more
To sweep away the dark sea from the door.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the Muir poem is "Suburban Dream" (line breaks okay, indents not):

=================

Walking the suburbs in the afternoon
In summer when the idle doors stand open
And the air flows through the rooms
Fanning the curtain hems,

You wander through a cool elysium
Of women, schoolgirls, children, garden talks,
With a schoolboy here and there
Conning his history book.

The men are all away in offices,
Committee-rooms, laboratories, banks,
Or pushing cotton goods
In Wick or Ilfracombe.

The massed unanimous absence liberates
The light keys of the piano and sets free
Chopin and everlasting youth,
Now, with the masters gone.

And all things turn to images of peace,
The boy curled over his book, the young girl poised
On the path as if beguiled
By the silence of a wood.


It is a child's dream of a grown-up world.
But soon the brazen evening clocks will bring
The tramp of feet and brisk.
Fanfare of motor horns
And the masters come.

=================

No wonder it made a deep impression!

And yes, we may thank the gods of Google (which after many slayings of fatted calves, etc., led me here) and not the imps of recollection for this one.

Froog said...

JES, thank you, thank you, thank you.

It was a wild improbable hope (more well-read than me, more tech-savvy than me, more manic-obsessive than me....) that led me to ask. I had NO expectations of success.

And, oh god, that is one of the ones that makes me swoon.

Thank you so much.


Now, if you can dig up the "Graham Hough".... I may have to buy you a case of malt Scotch, or something else that would your heart and oesophagus as cheerily.

And I do in fact have tears in my eyes now. I love this poem.

Froog said...

I omitted the word 'warm' there?

Well, it is late, and I have been getting far too little sleep for a week,and I am teary...

John Hodgson said...

Here's the Hough:

Andromeda Graham Hough

One can get used to anything; the cave
Was dark, smelt bad, and twice a day the wave
Slopped on the floor; however much she swept
Sand, bladder-wrack and dead sea-urchins crept
Over the stones. The monster did not care,
But crouched preoccupied before the door,
Fretted at unsuccessful business deals,
Went out to fish and came back late for meals.

And when at last the heaven-sprung hero came,
Wing-heeled and gorgon-shielded, thirsty for fame,
Red-hot with bravery, he found her sitting
Upon a damp stone, busy with her knitting.
The monster lay asleep, and dinner stood
To simmer by a fire of smouldering wood.
The sword seemed pointless, something was amiss.
She stirred the pot. He had not come for this.

He was too late. The voyage had been too long.
The gorgon shield turned no ill thing to stone.
The gold helm hardly dazzled her at all.
She hung the iron ladle on the wall,
Stood up and faced him. Was the moment come?
But when the monster shivered in the gloom
She bent and spread a cloth over its coiled
Green limbs. The hero’s attitude was spoiled.

Had he looked close enough he might have seen
A thin dry shudder where her heart had been,
But saw no thundering wrong to fight about,
Clattered his golden armour and went out;
Finding her patient unrebellious shape
No pretext for a plain heroic rape.
The tide was rising, and she turned once more
To sweep the dark sea from the door.

[found at http://www.sd47.bc.ca/documents/Sliammon%20Mythology.pdf page 20]

I remembered the Muir from a school anthology, and only recently found it again. It conjours my childhood perfectly.

Froog said...

Thanks very much, John.

I had been able to find and post Hough's Andromeda six months or so on from this.

It's interesting to encounter someone else who felt such a strong affinity with both of these poems.