Still Falls the Rain -- Edith Sitwell

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul:

(Poem #1595) Still Falls the Rain The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn. Still falls the Rain--- Dark as the world of man, black as our loss--- Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross. Still falls the Rain With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet On the Tomb: Still falls the Rain In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain. Still falls the Rain At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us--- On Dives and on Lazarus: Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one. Still falls the Rain--- Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side: He bears in His Heart all wounds,---those of the light that died, The last faint spark In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark, The wounds of the baited bear--- The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat On his helpless flesh... the tears of the hunted hare. Still falls the Rain--- Then--- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune--- See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament: It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart That holds the fires of the world,---dark-smirched with pain As Caesar's laurel crown. Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man Was once a child who among beasts has lain--- "Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee." -- Edith Sitwell

Continuing the trend of poets I don't care for.

This was the first Sitwell poem I ever read, and it impressed the hell out
of me. Some of the lines in it are (IMHO) truly spectacular. The first
stanza is pure genius, for instance, and I love the image of the baited
bear. And I love how spectacularly visual the poem is - how vividly the
image of dark night turning to crimson dawn comes across. And I love the
sound of it - the repetition of the single line, the restless, switching
rhyme patterns, the ebb and flow of the stanzas that makes this a poem that
cries to be read aloud. But most of all, I love the sheer relentlessness of
it, the way that one repeated line is like a  great hammer striking deep
into the poem again and again, the sense of stopping in utter defeat and
then starting up again, despairing but not defeated. There's a tone to this
poem that both reminds me of Hopkins and seems, sometimes, to anticipate
Sexton and Plath.

Unfortunately nothing else that Sitwell ever wrote comes, in my opinion,
even close to this (after I read this poem I went out and bought the
selected works - I was bitterly disappointed). See for example the other
Sitwell entry on Minstrels (Poem # 849, Sir Beelzebub) - it's not that it's
a bad poem, exactly, but it's a poem that it's easy to be indifferent to -
one that is interesting to read (at least the first time) but packs no real
emotional punch. And Sir Beelzebub is one of her BETTER poems!

Aseem.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire -- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Guest poem submitted by Sarah Kunjummen:

(Poem #1594) As Kingfishers Catch Fire As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves -- goes itself; _myself_ it speaks and spells, Crying _What I do is me: for that I came_. I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -- Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces. -- Gerard Manley Hopkins

           (1844-1889).
           Published in 1918.

This site has a pretty good representation of Hopkins' poetry already, but
one of my favorites was missing, so I couldn't resist sending it in.  This
poem is based on his personal philosophy of inscape, which, if I understand
rightly, is the inner essence or meaning which every created thing has;
somewhat like a platonic ideal, except that each object's inscape is an
intrinsic part of itself. It celebrates a nature which, though perhaps
fallen, is still marvelous in being what it is so exuberantly and
gracefully.

In the second part of the sonnet, Hopkins extends this idea to mankind.  The
just show in their every action an inner character and grace that reflects
the character of God, and in doing so are beautiful to God himself.  The
last four lines hold echoes of Christian doctrines of justification and
sanctification. I love Hopkins's vision of even the most insignificant
things (stones, dragonflies, humans, etc.) having a meaning and beauty
uniquely their own.

The poem is a sonnet, with an abbaabba cdcdcd rhyme scheme, but instead of
the traditional sonnet meter, employs sprung rhythm, a more Germanic type of
poetry in which only emphasized syllables are counted.  In view of this
difference, the strong meter of this poem never fails to surprise me.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, coming into the Catholic church
in the Oxford movement and received by Cardinal Newman.  His poetry was not
published in his lifetime; in fact, he was very far out of the mainstream of
Victorian poetry.  While no information is really necessary to enjoy his
poetry, I think there's a much more extensive bio attached to Poem #606,
"God's Grandeur."

Sarah.

Tao Te Ching: Verse 57 -- Lao-Tzu

Guest poem sent in by Arun Sripati

(Poem #1593) Tao Te Ching: Verse 57 If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the Tao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself. The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. The more weapons you have, the less secure people will be. The more subsidies you have, the less self-reliant people will be. Therefore the Master says: I let go of the law, and people become honest. I let go of economics, and people become prosperous. I let go of religion, and people become serene. I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes common as grass. -- Lao-Tzu

 (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

I have discovered - and rediscovered - wonderful poetry on minstrels.  But I
am truly delighted to be able to share a verse from the Tao Te Ching, which
is not represented on this list. As the saying goes, "you don't find a good
book, a good book finds you" - I have known for sometime about the Tao Te
Ching, but when I actually read it recently - the timing was perfect. :-)

Suffice it to say that Tao means "the way", and as verse 1 tells us: "The
tao that can be told/ is not the eternal Tao". The meaning is known in
context; through experience - as we understood things as children.  Life is
replete with opposing elements in balance, and the text seems to express
profound (seemingly contradictory) truths in a really concise manner.

Many verses in the Tao Te Ching are concerned with leadership, like this
one. How difficult it is to "achieve something", especially when it involves
people! We try to impose rules, constitutions, laws, prohibitions - and we
think that we can keep things under control. Yet, is nature like that? Does
nature have fixed rules and categories? We find that the laws that govern
nature readily give rise to a rich and bewildering variety - perhaps we
"impose" order at a level far more superficial than nature does? Maybe the
"letting go" that the Tao Te Ching advises us to do is really a call to
discover that deeper order.

Arun

Links:
 Full text:
   http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html

 Wikipedia on the Tao Te Ching:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%E0o_D%E9_Jing

from The Estranging Sea -- Derek Walcott

Aseem

(Poem #1592) from The Estranging Sea 1 Why? You want to know why? Go down to the shacks then, like shattered staves bound in old wire at the hour when the sun's wrist bleeds in the basin of the sea, and you will sense it, or follow the path of the caked piglet through the sea-village's midden, past the repeated detonations of spray, where the death rattle gargles in the shale, and the crab, like a letter, slides into its crevice, and you may understand this, smell the late, ineradicable reek of stale rags like rivers at daybreak, or the dark corner of the salt-caked shop where the cod barrel smells of old women and you can start then, to know how the vise of horizon tightens the throat, when the first sulphur star catches the hum of insects round the gas lantern like flies round a sore. No more? Then hang round the lobby of the one cinema too early in the hour between two illusions where you startle at the chuckle of water under the shallop of the old schooner basin, or else it is still under all the frighteningly formal marches of banana groves, the smell from the armpits of cocoa from the dead, open mouths of husked nuts on the long beach at twilight, old mouths filled with water, or else with no more to say. 2 So you have ceased to ask yourself, nor do these things ask you, for the bush too is an answer without a question, as the sea is a question, chafing, impatient for answers, and we are the same. They do not ask us, master, do you accept this? A nature reduced to the service of praising or humbling men, there is a yes without a question, there is assent founded on ignorance, in the mangroves plunged to the wrist, repeating the mangroves plunging to the wrist, there are spaces wider than conscience. Yet, when I continue to see the young deaths of others, even of lean old men, perpetually young, when the alphabet I learnt as a child will not keep its order, see the young wife, self-slain like scentful clove in the earth, a skin the colour of cinnamon, there is something which balances, I see him bent under the weight of the morning, against its shafts, devout, angelical, the easel rifling his shoulder, the master of Gregorias and myself, I see him standing over the bleached roofs of the salt-streaked villages, each steeple pricked by its own wooden star. I who dressed too early for the funeral of this life, who saw them all, as pilgrims of the night. -- Derek Walcott

(From Another Life; part IV, The Estranging Sea)

Nobody writes about the sea as well as Walcott. As we struggle to come to
terms with the horror of the tsunami, as we come face to face with these
"spaces wider than conscience" and find the basic order of things that we
depend on suddenly, horifically overturned ("when the alphabet I learnt as a
child will not keep its order"), his is the voice I find myself turning to
for comfort.

One reason I love this poem is because the landscape Walcott so skillfully
paints here is at once vividly familiar and strangely hostile- the poem both
captures the sights and smells of a small coastal fishing village and turns
it into something darker, more sinister. It is, I feel, the right landscape
for the hour.

More importantly, however, I think the poem echoes the sense of confused
loss that we have all felt over the last few weeks. The poem starts
aggressively, but the question raised there is never quite answered, and
Walcott is barely able to maintain this balance between a view of the world
as haphazard and contrary and the glimpse he has of a tired yet still
dominant figure behind all this sorrow. It would be easy (and somewhat
trite) to offer words of understanding here, but Walcott gives us something
deeper: the struggle to understand.

Aseem

P.S. Another poem that is sadly apt is Marianne Moore's the Grave [Poem #986]

One Cigarette -- Edwin Morgan

Guest poem sent in by Deepak Srinivasan

(Poem #1591) One Cigarette No smoke without you, my fire. After you left, your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal of so much love. One cigarette in the non-smoker's tray. As the last spire trembles up, a sudden draught blows it winding into my face. Is it smell, is it taste? You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips. Out with the light. Let the smoke lie back in the dark. Till I hear the very ash sigh down among the flowers of brass I'll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss. -- Edwin Morgan

After reading your selection of Edwin Morgan's poetry (yet again) I continue to
be amazed by the simplicity of the work and yet the intense sense of feelings
that his poems seem to generate. This poem (I respectfully submit) stands among
them for its fineness in depiction of a different kind of nonsmoke without a
fire (in Faulkner speak).  It is good. Very good. From the first to the last.

Deepak