I wish to leave the world -- José Martí

Guest poem submitted by Movin Miranda:

(Poem #452) I wish to leave the world I wish to leave the world By its natural door; In my tomb of green leaves They are to carry me to die. Do not put me in the dark To die like a a traitor; I am good, and like a good thing I will die with my face to the sun -- José Martí

I have chosen the poem not so much for its merit (can't say how much of it is
lost in translation) but because the poet's life fascinates me. It is very
unusual for a poet to be actually a guerrilla fighter and then be a hero to both
the extreme-right and to the leftists.

In Jose Marti's case both the Castro regime and its right-wing opponents based
in Miami have claimed José Martí as their own. Quizzards and music lovers will
recognise José Martí as the one who wrote the popular song "Guantanamera".
Actually the song is based on one of his poems. More trivia: the anti-Castro
stations Radio Marti and TV Marti, Havana's main airport and El Salvador's
leftist guerrilla outfit (the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front) are all named
for this Cuban patriot. Wonder why there is no Hollywood movie based on his
life, as yet.

Movin.

[Bio]

José Martí (1853-1895)

Cuban poet, essayist and journalist, who became symbol of Cuba's struggle for
independence from Spain and who promoted better understanding among American
nations.

Martí was born in Havanna. He studied at the Instituto de Havana (1866-69), and
worked on the underground periodicals El Diablo Cojuelo and La Patria Libre. In
1869 Martí was arrested for subversion and sentenced to six years' hard labour.
He went into exile to Spain, where he studied at the University of Madrid (1873)
and University of Saragosa, receiving degree in law in 1873, and a year later
degree in philosophy and letters.  In 1875 Martí moved to Mexico and wrote for
Revista Universal. He taught then literature and philosphy at the University of
Guatemala and returned to Cuba where he worked in a law office. In 1879 he was
again deported to Spain.

Because of his political activities, Martí was unwelcome to many countries. In
1881 he moved to New York City, where he worked as an editor, journalist or
foreign correspondent for several magazines, including the New York Sun, El
Partido Liberal, La Opinión Nacional, La Nación, La República, El Economista
Americano, and La Opinión Pública. Martí also served as consul for Uruguay,
Paraguay, and Argentina, and was a Spanish teacher at Central High School.

Except for travels, Martí remained in the U.S. until the year of his death. He
published the periodical La patria, which followed events in Cuba, and launched
a crusade for independence of his birth country from Spain. In 1894 he founded
the Cuban revolutionary Party and tried to lead a company of revolutionaries
from the U.S. to Cuba. The plan failed but next year he succeeded in reaching
Cuba, and died in a skirmish at Dos Rios on May 19, 1895. Popular song
Guantanamera is based on Marti's poem. His style is still considered a model of
Spanish prose. Martí's collected writings in 73 volumes appeared in 1936-53.
Main body of Martí's prose was journalistic in nature, targeted for quick
publication in newspapers and magazines. In his essays he always reaffirmed his
anticolonialist and antiracists beliefs. During the last fifteen years of his
life, Martí sent regular contributions to important Spanish American newspapers
and displayed his his essays a new style, which had deep influence on the
literary prose of every Spanish-speaking nation.

        -- http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/josemart.htm

Leda and the Swan -- William Butler Yeats

(Poem #451) Leda and the Swan A sudden blow: The great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in the bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? -- William Butler Yeats

In the course of my researches (read: web-surfing), I found this extract which
sums up my feelings for this poem:

"The poem is artful, canonical, and compelling; yet ultimately it is also a poem
about rape, a poem that uses the image of rape as a central figure for
inspiration, for poetry, and for history. As a poet, I find the poem to be
beautifully crafted; as a modernist scholar, I think it is a historically
important part of the modernist canon; yet as a feminist critic, I find it
troublesome and potentially repugnant to some readers.

        -- Ed Madden, [broken link] http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~cwrl/v1n2/article3/madden.html

It's true: although I would be the first to admit the power of this great and
complex sonnet, I can't read 'Leda and the Swan' without being profoundly
disturbed by it...

thomas.

[Historical note]

The swan is an incarnation of Zeus; the offspring of his union with Leda were
the twins Castor and Pollux, and the beautiful Helen of Troy. Notice how there's
only one proper noun used in the entire poem, yet the sonnet as a whole evokes
the grand sweep of history and myth quite brilliantly - 'the fury and the mire
of human veins'.

[Links]

The web has no shortage of commentaries on Yeats in general and this poem in
particular. Two which I liked are at [broken link] http://www.well.com/user/sch/yeats.html and
[broken link] http://metalab.unc.edu/sally/Leda.html; the former is a contextual (I hope I'm
using the word correctly) reading, the latter a feminist one.

Auntie's Skirts -- Robert Louis Stevenson

(Poem #450) Auntie's Skirts Whenever Auntie moves around, Her dresses make a curious sound, They trail behind her up the floor, And trundle after through the door. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

        (From 'A Child's Garden of Verses')

What childrens' poet has at some time or the other not succumbed to the
temptation to rhyme 'floor' and 'door'? :) Not that there's anything wrong
with that, of course - indeed, I consider this one of the 'successful' poems
in Stevenson's wildly diverse 'A Child's Garden of Verses'. True, it
presents no deep insight, no stunning revelation. However, it possesses that
rare and welcome quality of working on two entirely separate levels.

Firstly, it is clearly a childrens' poem. Is it a good childrens' poem? Yes
- the meter and rhyme fall very naturally into the sort of singsong chant
that the Very Young delight in repeating ad nauseum. Also the central image
*is* insightful from a child's perspective - I can imagine one reading the
poem and then keeping an eye out the next time he saw an aunt of his,
wondering if her dresses did indeed make a curious sound, or trail behind
her on the floor.

However, there is also a certain underscored pointlessness that appeals to
me on a far more 'sophisticated' level. The very lack of humour, imagery,
comparison, elaboration, surprise, and all the other techniques we expect in
a short poem - the sheer "take it or leave it" presentation of a single
fact, dissociated even from event-specificity by the enclosing 'whenever',
is a stylistic technique verging on imagism, and one that it not easy to get
right. Whatever one might say about Stevenson, there is no denying that he
had a wonderful feel for style and language.

Links:

Here are the other three Stevenson poems we've run in the past:
poem #20, poem #84, and poem #290.

-martin

Helen -- H D

This week's theme: the Trojan War.

(Poem #449) Helen All Greece hates the still eyes in the white face, the lustre as of olives where she stands, and the white hands. All Greece reviles the wan face when she smiles, hating it deeper still when it grows wan and white, remembering past enchantments and past ills. Greece sees unmoved, God's daughter, born of love, the beauty of cool feet and slenderest knees, could love indeed the maid, only if she were laid, white ash amid funereal cypresses. -- H D

Sometimes I think the true tragedy of the Iliad is not that of Hector,
an honourable man ensnared (by his own loyalty) on the wrong
side, but that of Helen - caught up in a conflict not of her own
making, both sides treating her as a pawn or a prize to be won, all
because of her (unasked-for) beauty...

Any number of poems have been written about the aforementioned
beauty (see the links section below, and, indeed, the remaining
poems for this week); HD, though, presents another perspective on
the matter. And like a good Imagist poem should, this poem
suggests far more than it says - it provokes pity as much as it
does awe, and it does both in a beautifully understated manner.
Nice.

thomas.

[Note on Construction]

This is not a completely irregular poem; there are rhymes, half-
rhymes and assonances, internal resonances, the glimmerings of a
stress pattern... through these, HD maintains a 'poetic' (no other
word fits) lightness and ease of expression, while steering clear of
the strict prosody which constrained most of her contemporaries.
And this lightness is (despite the seriousness of the poem)
perfectly suited to describing the greatest beauty of antiquity...
form and content meet once again.

Notice also the harshness of the first line of each stanza - 'All
Greece hates', 'All Greece reviles', 'Greece sees unmoved' - these
set the tone for the entire poem, and ensure that the descriptions
of Helen's beauty in the ensuing lines evoke pity rather than desire
or admiration. Again, skilfully done.

[Links]

The definitive poetic description of Helen of Troy is surely Marlowe's
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships" speech from Dr
Faustus; you can read it at poem #75

Keats' sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is another
famous evocation of time, distance and beauty (and a host of other
things beside; no amount of prose can do justice to the sheer
perfection of this poem); you can read it at poem #12

Yet another utterly wonderful poem on the same subject is
Tennyson's "Ulysses", which is archived at poem #121.
Tennyson's stock has gone down considerably since the 19th
century, but there's no question that for the sheer music of his
verse he has few rivals. And "Ulysses" is one of my favourite
poems, think what I may of Tennyson.

[Note on the Trojan War]

At first blush this would seem a remarkably abstruse theme - one
unlikely to supply even a single title, let alone three or four. But
such is Homer's place at the wellspring of Western culture that
there's no shortage of poems celebrating (or otherwise) this
seminal event. Enjoy!

To The Immortal Memory of the Halibut, On Which I Dined This Day, Monday, April 26, 1784 -- William Cowper

(Poem #448) To The Immortal Memory of the Halibut, On Which I Dined This Day, Monday, April 26, 1784 Where hast thou floated, in what seas pursu'd Thy pastime? When wast thou an egg new spawn'd, Lost in the immensity of ocean's waste? Roar as they might, the overbearing winds That rock'd the deep, thy cradle, thou wast safe-- And in thy minikin and embryo state, Attach'd to the firm leaf of some salt weed, Didst outlive tempests, such as wrung and rack'd The joints of many a stout and gallant bark, And whelm'd them in the unexplor'd abyss. Indebted to no magnet and no chart, Nor under guidance of the polar fire, Thou wast a voyager on many coasts, Grazing at large in meadows submarine, Where flat Batavia just emerging peeps Above the brine,--where Caledonia's rocks Beat back the surge,--and where Hibernia shoots Her wondrous causeway far into the main. --Wherever thou hast fed, thou little thought'st, And I not more, that I should feed on thee. Peace, therefore, and good health, and much good fish, To him who sent thee! and success, as oft As it descends into the billowy gulf, To the same drag that caught thee!--Fare thee well! Thy lot thy brethern of the slimy fin Would envy, could they know that thou wast doom'd To feed a bard, and to be prais'd in verse. -- William Cowper

A wonderfully tongue-in-cheek poem, from the title[1] all the way down to
the final two lines. Cowper does a wonderful job of poking fun at some of
the cliches of nature/sea poetry, while simultaneously managing to produce a
pretty good set of verses (by no means a contradiction - images don't get to
be cliches for no reason).

And don't miss the play on 'doom'[2] in the penultimate line.

[1] curiously enough, not even the longest-titled poem we've had so far -
see the titled-in-all-earnest rival to Shelley's 'Ozymandias', poem #284

[2] not quite a pun, but a definite sense of the word being used in both its
neutral (i.e. simply 'fated') and adverse senses.

Links:

Who could forget Norman Gale's immortal "MOST ANGLERS ARE VERY HUMANE" -
Daily Paper'? poem #284

And for a rather different piece of interplay between cliches and food, see
'Caliban at Sunset', poem #408

Biography:

  Cowper, William
   b. Nov. 26, 1731, Great Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, Eng.
   d. April 25, 1800, East Dereham, Norfolk one of the most widely read
   English poets of his day, whose most characteristic work, as in The Task
   or the melodious short lyric "The Poplar Trees," brought a new directness
   to 18th-century nature poetry.

   Cowper wrote of the joys and sorrows of everyday life and was content to
   describe hedgerows, ditches, rivers, haystacks, and hares. In his
   sympathy with such phenomena, his concern for the poor and downtrodden,
   and his comparative simplicity of language, he may be seen as one in
   revolt against much 18th-century verse and as a forerunner of Robert
   Burns, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. While he is often
   gently humorous in his verse, the tragedy that was never far below the
   surface of his mind is revealed in "The Castaway."

   After the death of his mother when he was six, Cowper (pronounced
   "Cooper"), the son of an Anglican clergyman, was sent to a local boarding
   school. He then moved to Westminster School, in London, and in 1750 began
   to study law. He was called to the bar in 1754 and took chambers in
   London's Middle Temple in 1757. During his student days he fell in love
   with his cousin, Theodora Cowper, and for a while the two were engaged.
   But Cowper was beginning to show signs of the mental instability that
   plagued him throughout his life. His father had died in 1756, leaving
   little wealth, and Cowper's family used its influence to obtain two
   administrative posts for him in the House of Lords, which entailed a
   formal examination. This prospect so disturbed him that he attempted
   suicide and was confined for 18 months in an asylum, troubled by
   religious doubts and fears and persistently dreaming of his predestined
   damnation.

   Religion, however, also provided the comfort of Cowper's convalescence,
   which he spent at Huntingdon, lodging with the Reverend Morley Unwin, his
   wife Mary, and their small family. Pious Calvinists, the Unwins supported
   the evangelical revival, then a powerful force in English society. In
   1767 Morley Unwin was killed in a riding accident, and his family, with
   Cowper, took up residence at Olney, in Buckinghamshire. The curate there,
   John Newton, a leader of the revival, encouraged Cowper in a life of
   practical evangelism; however, the poet proved too frail, and his doubt
   and melancholy returned. Cowper collaborated with Newton on a book of
   religious verse, eventually published as Olney Hymns (1779).

   In 1773 thoughts of marriage with Mary Unwin were ended by Cowper's
   relapse into near madness. When he recovered the following year, his
   religious fervour was gone. Newton departed for London in 1780, and
   Cowper again turned to writing poetry; Mrs. Unwin suggested the theme for
   "The Progress of Error," six moral satires. Other works, such as
   "Conversation" and "Retirement," reflected his comparative cheerfulness
   at this time.

   Cowper was friendly with Lady Austen, a widow living nearby, who told him
   a story that he made into a ballad, "The Journey of John Gilpin," which
   was sung all over London after it was printed in 1783. She also playfully
   suggested that he write about a sofa--an idea that grew into The Task.
   This long discursive poem, written "to recommend rural ease and leisure,"
   was an immediate success on its publication in 1785. Cowper then moved to
   Weston, a neighbouring village, and began translating Homer. His health
   suffered under the strain, however, and there were occasional periods of
   mental illness. His health continued to deteriorate, and in 1795 he moved
   with Mary Unwin to live near a cousin in Norfolk, finally settling at
   East Dereham. Mrs. Unwin, a permanent invalid since 1792, died in
   December 1796, and Cowper sank into despair from which he never emerged.

   Robert Southey edited his writings in 15 volumes between 1835 and 1837.
   Cowper is also considered one of the best letter writers in English, and
   some of his hymns, such as "God Moves in a Mysterious Way" and "Oh! For a
   Closer Walk with God," have become part of the folk heritage of
   Protestant England. The Letters and Prose Writings, in two volumes,
   edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp, was published in 1979-80.

        -- EB

- martin