I Hear a River Thro' the Valley Wander -- Trumbull Stickney

(Poem #396) I Hear a River Thro' the Valley Wander I hear a river thro' the valley wander Whose water runs, the song alone remaining. A rainbow stands and summer passes under. -- Trumbull Stickney

An exquisite little poem that needs no explanation. The juxtaposition of
images is especially nice - the river and the summer reinforcing both on the
metaphor and the image level - as is the pleasing regularity of the verse
(something imagists[1], for instance, often neglect).

[1] not to imply that imagist verse is 'free', just that metre is rarely
used as a device. Kreymborg's 'Whitman'[2] is a beautiful counterexample.

[2] poem #245

Biography:

  Notes on Life and Works

  Joseph Trumbull Stickney was born in Geneva on June 20, 1874, and grew up
  (to a height of six feet four inches) as his parents travelled widely ...
  Wiesbaden, Florence, Nice, London, and New York. After being educated by
  his father Austin at home in Latin and Greek, Trumbull entered Harvard
  University in 1891. He graduated magna cum laude in June 1895.

  The following eight years were spent studying for the degree of Doctorat
  ès Lettres at the Sorbonne in Paris. For this he wrote two theses, one on
  the letters of Ermolao Barbaro, a 15th-century ambassador to Rome, and the
  other on aphorisms in Greek verse. His Dramatic Verses was published in
  Boston in 1902, dedicated from Paris to his friend "Bay" (George) Lodge,
  who would co-edit Stickney's collected poems in 1905.

  In 1903 his second thesis was published as Les Sentences dans la Poésie
  Grècque: this won him the first Sorbonne Doctorat awarded to an American.
  Stickney then took on a position as instructor in Greek at Harvard in 1903
  and travelled abroad in Greece from April to June that year. A brain tumor
  caused headaches and partial blindness from early in 1904 and led to his
  death in Boston on Oct. 11. He is buried in Hartford, Connecticut. For his
  biography, see Homage to Trumbull Stickney: Poems, edited by James Reeves
  and Seán Haldane (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 1-16 (New York Public
  Library shelfmark D-18-2147).

        -- Representative Poetry Online
        http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/stickney.html

Links:

Variations on a Fragment by Trumbull Stickney (John Hollander): Not a parody
(for those of you who remember the Williams variations[3]), but a nice set of
variations on the theme.
  [broken link] http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/95_96/hollande.html

Random association: The last line reminds me of AE's stars 'dancing over the
mountains' - see poem #350

[3] getting further and further off topic, but... poem #278

- martin

Naming of Parts -- Henry Reed

(Poem #395) Naming of Parts "Vixi duellis nuper idoneus Et militavi non sine glori" Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens, And today we have naming of parts. This is the lower sling swivel. And this Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel, Which in your case you have not got. The branches Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures, Which in our case we have not got. This is the safety-catch, which is always released With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easily If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see Any of them using their finger. And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring. They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt, And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance, Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards, For today we have naming of parts. -- Henry Reed

 From 'Lessons of the War'
 Dedicated to Alan Mitchell.

I remember reading a not terribly distinguished parody of this poem when I was
in school; many years later, when I discovered the original, I was surprised to
see how very good it was. Indeed, it's one of the more celebrated poems of the
last half-century (though the years have not been particularly kind to Henry
Reed: these days we see him more as a failed Modernist than as a revolutionary
Romantic), and it's not hard to see why: the tone of voice, the choice of phrase
and the repetitive patterning are all instantly recognizable.

That said, though, it _is_ a poem that simply cries out for a parody, isn't it?

thomas.

[Links]

Here's a link to an essay on 'The Imagery of Genesis in Henry Reed's 'The Naming
of Parts'': [broken link] http://barney.gonzaga.edu/~mquieto/papers/naming.html . It's an
interesting enough piece, though it suffers somewhat from an overly pretentious
and (imho) juvenile style. An extract should suffice to show what I mean:

"Guns and gardens, soldiers and bees: the poem relates the unrelated in order to
draw a clear dichotomy between the forces of life and the forces of death.
However, the poem goes further than merely contrasting opposites. The  structure
and language of the poem combine to demonstrate how one should become the other.
The eschatological hope expressed by the harmonious image of this Eden begs and
demands a transformation or conversion into communion with the natural order.
The poem demonstrates that war is contrary to nature."

Poem -- Ernest Dowson

Guest poem submitted by Ravi S Mundoli:

(Poem #394) Poem "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae" Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; And I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, When I awoke and found the dawn was grey: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine; And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. -- Ernest Dowson

(Translation of the subtitle: 'I am not as I was under the reign of the good
Cynara')

Not being someone who knows too much about such things as structure, composition
etc. (unlike other worthies here)  I will gallantly refrain from spouting forth.
This poem affects me. The imagery (mad music, strong wine, riotous roses, pale
lilies, grey dawn, bought red mouth) generates a heady chaos in my head. And the
last three lines in every stanza serve very well to reinforce the general
feeling of heartbrokenness and despair. An explanation of the poet's life
(below) will be useful in understanding it.

I keep seeing Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings in my head when I read this
poem. His life, at one point, was at a stage when he could have written
something like this. If you ever lay your hands on it, read "Moulin Rouge". Its
a novel based on the life of Toulouse-Lautrec. Come to think of it, even Philip
Carey from Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" would have probably empathized
with the thing.

[Trivia]

All said and done, with Martin and Thomas acting as censors, I thought if one
thing could clinch the weblication of this poem, it would be trivia.

1. "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae" is a quote from Horace. I have
not been able to (i.e. not bothered to) find any reference to Cynarae
elsewhere.  If someone knows more, please post.

2. Margaret Mitchell lifted stuff from the first line of the third stanza.

[About the poem]

Living for a while in the East End of London where his father owned a dry dock,
Ernest Dowson fell in love with the daughter of a restaurant keeper. It was a
platonic love, and the girl could not understand either Dowson's reticent
idealism nor the poem he wrote to her. Its title was a line which Dowson had
taken from Horace. This classic of sentimental decadence was wasted on his
"Cynarae"; she ran off and married one of her father's waiters.

- (Men and Women: The Poetry of Love: American Heritage Press 1970)

[Biography]

Ernest Dowson was born at Belmont Hill in Kent in 1867. His great-uncle was
Alfred Domett (Browning's "Waring"), who was at one time Prime Minister of New
Zealand. Dowson, practically an invalid all his life, was reckless with himself
and, as disease weakened him more and more, hid himself in miserable
surroundings; for almost two years he lived in sordid supper-houses known as
"cabmen's shelters." He literally drank himself to death.

Dowson was a prominent member of the aesthetic movement, a group of English
poets and painters of the 1890s formed as a reaction against Victorianism. His
delicate and fantastic poetry was an attempt to escape from a reality too big
and brutal for him. His passionate lyric, 'I have been faithful to thee, Cynara!
in my fashion', a triumph of despair and disillusion, is an outburst in which
Dowson epitomized himself. "One of the greatest lyrical poem of our time",
writes Arthur Symons, "in it he has for once said everything, and he has said it
to an intoxicating and perhaps immortal music".

Dowson died obscure in 1900, one of the finest of modern minor poets. His life
was the tragedy of a weak nature buffeted by a strong and merciless environment.

[Links]

http://www.bartleby.com/verse/103/2000.html
[broken link] http://www.access.victoria.bc.ca/~joannee/poetry/dowson.htm

Villanelle (minimalist): One Drunken Night -- Peter Schaeffer

(Poem #393) Villanelle (minimalist): One Drunken Night I think she'll pour my drink. I wink at more, I think, than minx who pours my drink. I sink to floor, and think she stinks! I roar, "My drink, you fink!" I snore, and think I drink. -- Peter Schaeffer

What is a villanelle? "Seven-syllable lines using two rhymes, distributed in
(normally) five tercets and a final quatrain with line repetitions", saith
the Britannica, which also calls it a "rigorous and somewhat monotonous
form". Rigorous it may be, but half the beauty of a villanelle lies in the
poet's efforts to conform without lapsing into monotony. Indeed, by its very
nature the villanelle seems to cry out for some sort of wordplay or other -
it is hard to write an entirely 'serious' poem under the constraints[1].

The most usual form of wordplay is simply the setting up of the repeated
lines so that the word meanings shift and change. Schaeffer takes a slightly
different approach here - rather than trying to write so 'naturally' as to
distract attention from the rigid form, he embraces it for humorous effect.
For instance, in 'The Art of the Villanelle' (see links) he explicitly
comments on the repetition - "Attend this line, which you'll have heard.../
until you're sick of every word."[2]

Today's poem, on the other hand, uses a different technique - it strips the
villanelle of its usual trappings, simultaneously poking fun at both the
villanelle and at minimalist verse. (See also the last verse for an example
of villanelle-induced wordplay).

[1] making it all the more impressive when managed - as in Dylan Thomas's
classic poem (see links)

[2] see my comment on self-referential humorous verse, poem #194

Links:

Just over half a minstrels ago, we ran Schaeffer's mindbogglingly good
'Juggler, Magician, Fool - A Pantoum': poem #195

The canonical example of the English villanelle is surely Dylan Thomas's 'Do
Not Go Gentle into That Good Night': poem #38

which includes, as a bonus, another of Schaeffer's villanelles, 'The Art of
the Villanelle'

And for some lovely pieces of minimalist verse, see Pound's 'In a station of
the Metro': poem #319

and Corman's untitled poem: poem #348

- martin

Good -- R S Thomas

(Poem #392) Good The old man comes out on the hill and looks down to recall earlier days in the valley. He sees the stream shine, the church stand, hears the litter of children's voices. A chill in the flesh tells him that death is not far off now: it is the shadow under the great boughs of life. His garden has herbs growing. The kestrel goes by with fresh prey in its claws. The wind scatters the scent of wild beans. The tractor operates on the earth's body. His grandson is there ploughing; his young wife fetches him cakes and tea and a dark smile. It is well. -- R S Thomas

'Granitic' is not a word I use very often while describing poetry (it sounds far
too pretentious, if you ask me), but if ever a poet deserved to be called a
hewer of stony verse, R. S. Thomas does. Indeed, rarely do you hear a poet speak
with a voice as strong and self-assured as that of this humble Welsh clergyman.
This is in  large part due to the simplicity of his themes and the directness of
his language - there's no room for ornamentation in either. But it also betokens
the care with which Thomas selects and arranges his words - witness today's
wonderfully constructed poem, in which not a single image or phrase seems out of
place. It takes craftsmanship of the highest order to be able to create a whole
as unified and perfect as this, and it's all the better for being well nigh
unnoticeable.

The poem itself is quiet and restrained (though no less moving for all that); in
its air of dignified acceptance, it achieves a slow grandeur denied to most
evocations of death and the passing of time. And although at first glance its
message may seem unduly harsh, I find the poem as a whole profoundly calm and
serene - at peace with the world and all that is in it.

thomas.

[Moreover]

George Macbeth has this to say about R. S. Thomas:

"... R[onald] S[tuart] Thomas was born in Wales in 1913, a year before his more
famous namesake Dylan Thomas. He lived his life as a clergyman, often in the
remote country parishes whose landscape and people he has celebrated in his
poems. Thomas' poetry seems at first sight a grim and forbidding body of work to
appreach. His tone of voice is invariably severe, his rhythm slow and heavy and
his subject matter Man scratching a pitiful livelihood from a bare and
inhospitable land. Thomas' poetry is narrow in range, but it seems sure to last
for its depth and its honesty."

and this about today's poem:

"A quiet poem about old age. There is a note of acceptance in some of Thomas'
[later] work which is a refreshing change from the harshness of his earlier
pieces. The image of death as 'the shadow under the great boughs of life' is
particularly resonant, with its hint of a real (if limited) immortality."

        -- George Macbeth, Poetry 1900-1975

[Minstrels Links]

'Poetry for Supper' offers two diametrically opposite views of the poetic
process - the one, that it is somehow 'inspired' and innately unfathomable; the
other, that it requires careful labour and skilled workmanship. As you've no
doubt guessed by now, I tend towards the latter (as, I think, does R. S. T.);
you can decide for yourself at poem #187

'The Ancients of the World' shows Thomas in the guise of storyteller and
mythmaker; it's a wonderfully evocative three stanzas' worth of bardic breath,
at poem #152

[Biography and Assessment]

  b. March 29, 1913, Cardiff, Glamorgan [now South Glamorgan], Wales

Welsh clergyman and poet whose lucid, austere verse expresses an undeviating
affirmation of the values of the common man. Thomas was educated in Wales and
ordained in the Church of Wales (1936), in which he held several appointments,
including vicar of St. Hywyn (Aberdaron) with St. Mary (Bodferi) from 1967, as
well as rector of Rhiw with Llanfaelrhys from 1973.

He published his first volume of poetry in 1946 and gradually developed his
unadorned style with each new collection. His early poems, most notably those
found in Stones of the Field (1946) and Song at the Year's Turning Point: Poems, contained a harshly critical but increasingly compassionate
view of the Welsh people and their stark homeland. In Thomas' later volumes,
starting with Poetry for Supper (1958), the subjects of his poetry remained the
same, yet his questions became more specific, his irony more bitter, and his
compassion deeper. In such later works as The Way of It (1977), Frequencies
(1978), Between Here and Now (1981), and Later Poems, Thomas
was not without hope when he described with mournful derision the cultural decay
affecting his parishioners, his country, and the modern world.

        -- EB