The final 'Poetry Sunday'

This is one of the first poems that I committed to memory, and one of the longest. The very first - when I was about ten years old - and the longest was Thomas Gray's Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard, but I've forgotten all but a handful of lines and phrases from that now. Tennyson's Ulysses, on the other hand, I can still run through from start to finish with barely a stumble.

As a great enthusiast for Classical mythology since my earliest days at school, I was naturally drawn to such subjects in poetry, and these are the poems that have proven to be amongst my most enduring favourites. Tennyson has some particularly fine ones - Tithonus, The Lotus-Eaters - but this was the one that especially got under my skin, an imagining of the great adventurer Ulysses/Odysseus in old age, bored with the settled life, urging his old comrades to join him again for one last voyage (a futile, probably suicidal exercise - yet inspiring nonetheless).

Why does this speak so strongly to me? I don't know - but it does. It has done now for nearly forty years. "I cannot rest from travel..."

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

                This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and through soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

                There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought

                with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Staring into the abyss

A week from now I shall be one year older than I am today. Because we only count the passing of the anniversary, like the laboured ticking over of a mileometer, a whole year's aging smites us on this one day.

And, though I have long sought to deny the passing of the years, and have flattered myself that I can usually pass for 5 or 10 years younger than I really am, even this is becoming a feebler consolation. I long ago passed the half-way point on my advance to the traditional span of 'three score years and ten'; now, even at the most wildly optimistic estimate of enhanced life expectancy our generation might get to experience, I am well beyond half-way to my end. In all probability, I'm more like two-thirds done. And it is a depressing fact to reflect upon.

Can the eternally effervescent Billy Collins cheer me up? No, apparently not. But perhaps he can at least cheer me down in a useful way. I find it useful sometimes to accelerate my slump into a morbid depression because the momentum will usually carry me out the other side faster as well.

If I get this out of my system now, I might be able to enjoy my birthday next weekend. Maybe.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue

or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted   

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins (1941- )

What are days for?

Music Mike, a fellow Beijing blogger with whom I have entered into frequent online correspondence over this past year, was kind enough to nominate me for a blog award last week (not for the vaguely artsy Froogville here, but for my more down-and-dirty 'drinking blog', Round-The-World Barstool Blues - which, coincidentally, turns six today). I felt I had to decline the honour, because, as I've noted before, I'm a bit down on the whole 'blog meme' thing; and, moreover, I really don't think there's anyone I could pass the award on to (the 'rules' demand that you extend the chain to ten new recipients!). Mike himself included nearly all the essential China blogs in his own nominations (and the few he missed are admirably covered in this fuller rundown from Danwei). Nearly all the other bloggers I used to read have hung up their spurs now (unplugged their keyboards?). It's Götterdämmerung time for blogging, I fear.

I also struggled with the award's demand to answer a batch of "What's your favourite...?" questions: favourite animal, colour, number, food, drink, flower, and... day of the week! (Only two of these inquiries would I have been able to come up with a straightforward answer to. Do I prefer Facebook or Twitter? Neither! [Although I concede that Twitter may have some utility, whereas Facebook is a pure social evil.] And do I prefer giving or receiving presents? Giving, naturally. Doesn't everyone?) I don't have one favourite anything. If I did nominate just one thing, it would only be a partial, misleading answer, a momentary, inconstant impulse; ask me again tomorrow and I'd say something completely different.

Whenever I try to do a 'favourite things' post, I always end up with a list - sometimes quite a long list; and that's only an illustrative sample rather than a comprehensive account of my tastes in the area. Over on my other blog, I started a series of 'Top Fives' a few years ago; even that format I find very difficult, much too limiting - I quite often find myself having to 'cheat' a little bit, throwing in one or two supplementary nominations... or I return to the topic after a little while with another list of five... and perhaps another, and another. 

What's my favourite food?? Where would I begin?! With a narrower frame of reference, like 'Favourite childhood comfort food' (baked beans on toast) or 'Favourite Beijing street food' (rou jia mo), I might have a chance of coming up with a single answer - but favourite food??!! No, the idea of having a single favourite something utterly baffles me.

And particularly for 'Favourite day of the week'. I might from time to time have enjoyed a particular day because of a regular activity associated with that day. For a long time in Beijing, Thursday was the best night of the week for me, because musician friends of mine in a couple of bands had long residencies at nearby music bars - Jianghu and Jiangjinjiu - on that night, and I'd go to hear them play almost every week. But all good things come to an end; Thursdays are nothing special to me any more. And there was never anything intrinsic to Thursday that made me like that day, only events that happened to take place on a Thursday.

More often, I think, people acquire negative associations with particular days; and preferred days may only seem better by contrast with these worse ones. Most people, I suspect would nominate a weekend day as their favourite, because of the freedom from work. That doesn't apply for me, though, because I am entirely freelance these days, and so quite often work just as much - or as little! - on the weekends as I do on any other day of the week.

In general, I find the mere idea of days oppressive, emphasising as it does the repetitive cycles not just of work but of our lives overall. My favourite days are those on which I have managed to lose awareness of what day of the week it is. That doesn't happen often enough.

All of which preamble was merely an excuse to post some more Larkin....

Days 

What are days for? 

Days are where we live. 

They come, they wake us 

Time and time over. 

They are to be happy in: 

Where can we live but days? 

Ah, solving that question 

Brings the priest and the doctor 

In their long coats 

Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

The return of 'Poetry Sunday'

We haven't had one in a while, and I happened upon this in an anthology at a friend's house a few days ago. 'Fate' once again giving a little prod.

Larkin always seems to strike deep chords within me. And I hold him significantly  - if indirectly - responsible for the curiously meandering path my life has taken. Particularly avid readers may also recall the last time I mentioned him on here...

I believe a leading literary critic once described Larkin as "a gloomy bugger" - and I suppose that summation fits me rather too aptly as well.

Love Songs In Old Age

She kept her songs, they took so little space,

  The covers pleased her: 

One bleached from lying in a sunny place, 

One marked in circles by a vase of water, 

One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, 

  And coloured, by her daughter - 

So they had waited, till, in widowhood,

She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord 

  Had ushered in 

Word after sprawling hyphenated word, 

And the unfailing sense of being young  

Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein 

That hidden freshness sung, 

That certainty of time laid up in store 

As when she played them first. But, even more, 

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love, 

  Broke out, to show 

Its bright incipience sailing above, 

Still promising to solve, and satisfy, 

And set unchangeably in order. So 

  To pile them back, to cry, 

Was hard, without lamely admitting how 

It had not done so then, and could not now.

Philip Larkin  (1922-1985)

Farewell, dear friend

Four or five years ago, an old Oxford associate of mine, Keith Tolstoy (not his real name), was running an amusing blog called Webside Gleanings, on which he collected links to all sorts of oddball delights he had somehow discovered on the Internet. He it was who first led me to Other Men's Flowers (although I am strangely unable to relocate the first post I visited there, or Tolstoy's post which directed me to it), a formidably literate, dazzlingly diverse, and exquisitely written blog created by Tony Brooks, a retired gentleman in the south of England. It immediately became my favourite online reading.

Before long, we were quite often commenting on each other's blogs, and that in turn evolved into an occasional e-mail correspondence; I came to regard Tony as one of my most valued online friends, and someone I would very much like to have met in person. In fact, I have admitted to a certain envy of the man: he was so erudite, so witty, such an elegant writer; he maintained a consistent excellence in his blog writing that was quite daunting, a standard that I have aspired to myself but fear I shall never achieve.

Tony had been experiencing some health problems over the last year or so, and had therefore cut back his frequency of posting. In April he took a turn for the worse, and he passed away on May 25th.

His funeral will take place this afternoon. You can make a donation in his memory to the St Michael's Hospice.

His family have decided to leave Other Men's Flowers online. I look forward to being able to continue to revisit his rich archives, although the pleasure will be undercut by the sadness of no longer being able to interact directly with this wonderful personality.

As I commented on that final post on OMF:

I'm glad that the blog will remain online. It is a fine tribute to a remarkable man, and I'm sure it will in future bring pleasure to countless new readers who were not lucky enough to discover it while its author was still with us. All of us who were thus fortunate, whether casual or regular readers here, are very grateful to Tony for sharing so much wit and whimsy and beautiful writing with us. I shall miss him very much. It is surely a sign of a life well lived to have inspired so much love and admiration in people he never met.

Positive thinking from the icy North

We haven't had a 'Poetry Sunday' for a while, and I was reminded of this by mention yesterday (indirect, in a link) of The Residents' album Eskimo, a great musical oddity that some friends and I used to use in our college days for hi-fi speaker tests (it has some fun stereo effects in it).

When I was living in Canada in the late '90s, I got to know an Inuit soapstone carver I'd bumped into at a gallery opening, and he shared with me some of his people's traditional songs/poems, along with his own translations of them. Unfortunately, I didn't have any written copies, and they endured only dimly in my memory. However, a few years ago, I happened to recognise one of them when I came upon it online. I'm afraid I have completely forgotten where, and haven't been able to find it again; I don't think a translator was credited anyway, and I've tweaked it a bit myself, in line with what I think I recall of what my Inuit acquaintance told me all those years ago.

I'd like to be able to add the original language, but I don't know what it is called, and I very much doubt if it's posted anywhere online. It's an uplifting little piece. [No, I couldn't find this song/poem. But there's an interesting free download of a study of Inuit art here.]

I thought over again

My little adventures -

As when  once on a shore-wind 

I drifted far out in my kayak

And thought I was in danger -

My fears,

Those small ones

That I thought so big,

For all the vital things

I had to get and to reach.

And yet there is only

One great thing,

The only thing:

To live to see, in huts or on journeys,

The great day as it dawns,

And the light that fills the world.

Inupiat Traditional

An especially topical 'Sunday Poem'

Well the wind has relented today; but for most of this week it has been howling down out of the north-west at 15, 20, 25 mph. And every one of those miles represents a degree or so of windchill.

Feverish with a cold, and struggling to sleep anyway through the ominous resonating of my building, fragments of this piece by Ted Hughes kept popping into my mind.

I think I'd first come upon it as a teenager. I then chose to use it a few times in poetry classes I taught myself when I became a schoolteacher for a while a few years later. Wonderful how obstinately poetry resides in the memory, when so much else is lost! I hadn't read this poem - or even given it a thought - in at least a dozen years; but I found I could recall it almost word for word.

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up -

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guy-rope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Ted Hughes  (1930-1998)

A staring-at-oblivion 'Poetry Sunday'

The dismal tick-tock of the mortality clock, bringing too near the end of another year (Agh - this preamble is almost becoming a poem itself! Must... stop... rhyming! I would hate for my mid-life crisis to manifest itself in an attempt to become a rapper.)... Now, where was I? Oh yes, my imminent birthday is - as usual - filling me with gloom. So, I thought I'd better try to lighten my spirits with this piece of zestful silliness. I'm not sure when this was written, but I rather think I remember it from my own schooldays back in the 1970s, and certainly from my spell of schoolteaching at the end of the 1980s.

Let Me Die A Youngman's Death

Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death

Roger McGough  (1937-  )

The caged bird sings

I've long had a bit of a weakness for the works of Charles Bukowski, and have quoted him before a few times, both here and on The Barstool (which I suppose might seem to be the more natural home for them). But I can't now recall how I happened to stumble upon this nice little animation a few weeks back, for his poem Bluebird. [Oh, no, I can - but that perhaps is a post for another time. I was looking for something by Tom Waits, and discovered a YouTube video of Waits reading another Bukowski poem. That woke me up to the possibility of there being some Bukowski-related stuff on YouTube and I did a bit more searching...]

Bluebird

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too tough for him,

I say, stay in there, I'm not going

to let anybody see

you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I pour whiskey on him and inhale

cigarette smoke

and the whores and the bartenders

and the grocery clerks

never know that

he's

in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too tough for him,

I say,

stay down, do you want to mess

me up?

you want to screw up the

works?

you want to blow my book sales in

Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too clever, I only let him out

at night sometimes

when everybody's asleep.

I say, I know that you're there,

so don't be

sad.

then I put him back,

but he's singing a little

in there, I haven't quite let him

die

and we sleep together like

that

with our

secret pact

and it's nice enough to

make a man

weep, but I don't

weep, do

you?

Charles Bukowski  (1920-1994)

A close call?

Just like the buses! You wait for months between sightings of a 'poem' of mine, sometimes, and then two come along in as many weeks!

I believe I knocked out this little frippery the last time I was so miserably ill I could scarcely leave my bed for a week and was assailed by fever dreams (it just happened again the other week), round about 18 months ago. I had completely forgotten about it, but stumbled upon it by chance a few days ago when rummaging around in my files.

Death sits in the corner

Idly reading a magazine

And drinking tea,

Looking at the crossword.

No ‘Reaper’ accoutrements;

Just a humourless, businesslike young man

In a grey suit.

He says it’s just a courtesy call,

Not THE END.

But I don’t believe him;

I think he’s lying

To soothe my anxieties.

It’s hard not to be anxious

With Death sitting in your bedroom.

I think to myself, As soon as he’s finished that crossword

That’s going to be IT.

Death dozes off in the chair.

I check on the crossword:

He’s not very good.

I fill a few clues in wrongly,

Hoping he won’t notice.

Death stays with me all week,

Fretting over the crossword.

Then, one morning I wake up

And find him gone.

His bony butt has etched its outline

In my chair.

He’s taken the magazine with him.

An important lesson

A couple of weeks ago, while trying to find some amusing pictures for a Cinco de Mayo post, I happened upon a selection of funny Mexican gravestones (it seems to be a well-established national genre).

I couldn't help but be reminded of this classic bit of Belloc. [And I am glad to have just now found a free edition of his poems to download in PDF.]

Lord Finchley

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the duty of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.


Hilaire Belloc  (1870-1953)

Springtime

Sunday afternoon poetry browsing today led me to this... a piece of Lawrence I hadn't read before. It chimes rather too well with my own mood.



The Enkindled Spring

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.


D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

A Sunday poem

My passion for Larkin is well-known by now to regular visitors.  This is a particularly poignant one - evoking what is lost when a life is cut short.

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead.
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.


Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

A Sunday poem

I haven't made an entry in my What is poetry? series for ages (three and a half years!!), but coming across this bit of Eliot the other day has prompted me to return to it.  So many great phrases in this - "undisciplined squads of emotion"; yes indeed, I know that feeling.

So, here I am.... trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our
business.

T.S. Eliot (from Four Quartets)

A little bit of Zen

A few months ago, the tireless trufflehound of the interwebs, JES, led me to this.... a delightful piece of prose poetry by Karel Čapek (a writer I read a lot of as a kid, and absolutely loved: a marvellous fabulist and wit - begetter of the term 'robot'* for a humanoid mechanical servant, amongst much else) and an equally delightful piece of visual poetry inspired by it, the creation of a young Polish art student, Alicja Cioch (you can read about the process of making the film on her blog here, and also see some of her charming original storyboards for the project).  Just the thing for a mellow, self-reflective Sunday.

How to grow clouds

It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds. Probatum est.

Karel Čapek (1890-1938), translated by Andrew Malcovsky

* Čapek generously acknowledged that he got the idea to use this word from his elder brother Josef, a painter.

Dying in harness

I was reflecting the other day on my first career as a schoolmaster (nearly twenty years ago now: it seems another life, someone else's, not my own).  Much as I loved the job (or certain aspects of it, anyway), I was mightily relieved to have escaped it, when a spell of serious illness forced me to retire in my mid-twenties.

There's something insidiously comfortable about that lifestyle: the steady routines, the short working hours and long holidays, the sense of separateness - of being insulated - from the outside world; and the sense of mastery too, of having absolute dominion over your classes, absolute (well, nearly) freedom to do whatever you will with them - unsupervised and unchecked by anyone.

But there's a deadening inertia about it, too.  There's not much in the way of a career path - unless you want to take on major administrative duties (at the cost of reduced contact time with pupils) or pastoral responsibilities as a live-in housemaster in a boarding school.  It can be quite difficult to change schools.  And, after a while, you become so attuned to the characteristic eccentricities of the school and the staff you're currently working with that change begins to seem too effortful, too irksome a dislocation.

It's not uncommon to find schoolteachers (particularly in the private sector) who have spent their entire working lives in the same school.  In fact, the deputy headmaster at the school where I taught had himself been educated there, and thus - apart from the brief interlude of university, which I gather he hadn't much enjoyed - he had spent his entire life in the same place.  I found that baffling and horrifying.  But I could see that - without a bold and decisive step, and perhaps a willingness to embrace a period of unemployment - this was a path that I myself was heading along.

For me, it was ultimately the routines - the very orderliness and predictability that some people find so reassuring - that started to make the job seem irksome to me.  The repetitive cycle of the timetable oppresses the soul, I found, makes you feel like a hamster on a wheel.  Each week is the same as the one before, and each term, and each year.

There's not even that much variety available to you in what you can teach (in English literature).  Shakespeare is, of course, compulsory for all; but the number of his plays which are at all accessible for children of 14 years old or so is really pretty small.  The longer, more complex works like Lear and Hamlet have to be reserved for advanced studies at 16+.  With the juniors you're stuck with Romeo & Juliet or Julius Caesar, and perhaps Macbeth or Othello; and maybe Henry V or Richard III for a history play, and As You Like It or The Taming Of The Shrew for a comedy.  And that's assuming that your school has sufficient copies of all of these, and that all available copies have not already been appropriated by your more senior colleagues; in practice, you may only have three or four to choose from - and you have to do two with each year group.  When 'The Scottish Play' came around for the third time in four years, I found myself thinking, "Not again!"  And I didn't want to be feeling like that about Shakespeare, going 'stale' on such great writing through enforced over-exposure.  And so I resolved to get out, after at most one more year.  (But, as Fate would have it, a near-death experience got me out of it rather sooner than that.)

Philip Larkin has a fine short poem, Schoolmaster, on the theme of spending a whole lifetime in such a narrow sphere, and how such an environment erodes your sense of identity, your independent will.  It closes with the chilling line:  He had dissolved.  (Like sugar in a cup of tea.)

Unfortunately, I can't find that one online.  But here's another good one.  Some online sources appear to attribute this to Larkin, but I'm pretty sure it's actually by Vernon Scannell.  The style and sensibility are very alike, though; I'm not completely confident in the identification.

Ageing Schoolmaster

And now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.

Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,

And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell

From which I gaze upon the April faces
That gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves;
And yet I feel no pinch or prick of envy
Nor would I have them know their sentenced selves.

With careful effort I can separate the faces,
The dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes;
But in the autumn shades I find I only
Brood upon death, who carries off all the prizes.

Vernon Scannell  (1922-2007)

Time's arrow reversed

I had meant to post this a few weeks back, but wasn't able to find it online.  I am indebted to occasional Froogville reader Nick (or perhaps a regular reader but infrequent commenter?) for passing it on to me.  It is one of my very favourite Larkin poems.

As Bad As A Mile

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier: the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

Philip Larkin  (1922-1985)

And - finally, after years of occasional fruitless searching - I've found this, Renaissance, an early film by Walerian Borowczyk (who would later become famous/notorious for quirky and macabre erotica like The Beast), dimly remembered from a festival of short animations I saw at the Phoenix cinema in Oxford while an undergraduate two dozen or more years ago. It is, I think, the best piece I've ever seen using the 'time goes backwards' device.

[It's posted by a user called The Motion Brigades, "dedicated to showcasing stop motion animation from the masters of the genre, with focus on rare and hard to find titles". I can see I'm going to be spending a lot of time noodling around their collection. I might have to have another 'Short Animation Festival' on here soon!]

And, well, I am hesitant to recommend this, since I absolutely loathe Coldplay, but ... it is another stunningly well executed example of this idea: the video for their song The Scientist, directed by Jamie Thraves.

[And do you remember this poem of my own on a similar theme - not following time backwards, but bringing it to a standstill, in the way that only a really good kiss can?]

In search of....?

I just turned up this piece of Shel Silverstein's, and it chimed with the restless sense I've had this last week or so of hankering for a change of scene, needing to break out of a rut, dreaming of trekking out into the great wilderness.... or perhaps just escaping from Beijing for a few days.

Where The Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

Shel Silverstein (1930-1999)

A China-inspired Sunday poem

I was thinking when I did this post at the end of last year that I'd read a Billy Collins piece inspired by Chinese poetry, but I couldn't place it then. The thought only just resurfaced in my mind, and this time I wrested the formerly elusive poem from the knotted thickets of the Internet with comparative ease. So, here you go.

Reading An Anthology Of Chinese Poems Of The Song Dynasty, I Pause To Admire The Length And Clarity Of Their Titles

It seems these poets have nothing up their ample sleeves,
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry, night or day,
the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

"Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's.
"Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea"
is another one, or just "On a Boat, Awake at Night."

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
"In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel - Moved, I Wrote This Poem."

There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with headings like "Vortex on a String,"
"The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever.
No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall"
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors"
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends.

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner,
cross my legs like his, and listen.

Billy Collins (1941- )

Bon mot for the week (century... millennium)

First they came for the Communists,
but I was not a Communist, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists,
but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews,
but I was not a Jew, so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me,
there was no-one left to speak out for me.


Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)


These lines have always seemed particularly important to me, ever since I first heard them as a schoolboy of about ten - but particularly so at this time, living in this country now.

I stand corrected on the matter of the author here. I had always been led to believe that these words were spoken by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), and this is an attribution which seems to have gained primacy on the - not always so reliable - Internet. However, it would seem that they are more properly ascribed to Niemöller; although the exact text and provenance are shrouded in obscurity, it would seem that the famous 'poem' is derived from or inspired by one or more speeches that he made shortly after the War. Like Bonhoeffer, he had been one of the leaders of the Confessing Church, a dissident Protestant group that opposed Hitler; but unlike Bonhoeffer, he survived his wartime internment in the concentration camps. And his initial support of Hitler when he first came to power makes him a more ambivalent, somewhat tarnished figure - which is perhaps the reason why so many have preferred to associate these inspiring words with the martyred Bonhoeffer.