The Rolling English Road -- G K Chesterton

And who better to follow Belloc than Chesterton... (thanks to Vikram Doctor
for the suggestion)

(Poem #228) The Rolling English Road Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire, And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire; A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head. I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire, And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire; But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made, Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands, The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands. His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun? The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which, But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch. God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier. My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage, Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age, But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth, And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death; For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green. -- G K Chesterton

Another poet who has been conspicuous by his absence. Chesterton is slightly
better known for his prose, including many highly acclaimed works of
criticism, and the magnificent Father Brown stories, which rank among the
all time classics of detective fiction. However, his poetry is well worthy
of notice, being almost uniformly excellent (no easy feat, even for the
better poets), and almost always enjoyable. Like most of my favourite poets,
Chesterton displays a rare mastery of versification - the rhythms of speech
blending smoothly and easily into the rhythms of the poem, with not a
syllable out of place.

As for today's poem, it's probably the best known of his poems, and my
favourite for several reasons. Firstly, as I have mentioned before, I'm
predisposed to like poems about roads, and this is an excellent example,
with the easy flowing rhythm and the alliteration reinforce the image of the
rolling, rambling road. The language is an intriguing blend of the informal
- almost colloquial - and the high poetic. The mood likewise ranges from
humorous[1] to thoughtful, and in the end, serious. But it is not necessary
to analyse the poem in order to enjoy it - simply read it, not quite aloud,
but shaping your lips over the syllables, and let the verses wash over you
as you follow, with Chesterton, the rolling English road.

[1] see http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/0529.htm

Notes:

 baggonet: obs. or vulgar form of bayonet

 Kensal Green: A famous English cemetery - see
 <http://www.xs4all.nl/~androom/dead/kensal.htm>

 Interestingly, there's a pub called Paradise, or in full Paradise, by way
 of Kensal Green (that being the nearest Tube stop). Almost certainly
 post-facto, but it made me laugh.

Biography:

  Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)

   b. May 29, 1874, London
   d. June 14, 1936, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, Eng. English critic
   and author of verse, essays, novels, and short stories, known also for
   his exuberant personality and rotund figure.

   Chesterton was educated at St. Paul's School and later studied art at
   the Slade School and literature at University College, London. His
   writings to 1910 were of three kinds. First, his social criticism,
   largely in his voluminous journalism, was gathered in The Defendant
   (1901), Twelve Types (1902), and Heretics (1905). In it he expressed
   strongly pro-Boer views in the South African War. Politically, he began
   as a Liberal but after a brief radical period became, with his Christian
   and medievalist friend Hilaire Belloc, a Distributist, favouring the
   distribution of land. This phase of his thinking is exemplified by What's
   Wrong with the World (1910).

   His second preoccupation was literary criticism. Robert Browning
   (1903) was followed by Charles Dickens (1906) and Appreciations and
   Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), prefaces to the
   individual novels, which are among his finest contributions to
   criticism. His George Bernard Shaw (1909) and The Victorian Age in
   Literature (1913) together with William Blake (1910) and the later
   monographs William Cobbett (1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)
   have a spontaneity that places them above the works of many academic
   critics.

   Chesterton's third major concern was theology and religious argument.
   He was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1922.
   Although he had written on Christianity earlier, as in his book
   Orthodoxy (1909), his conversion added edge to his controversial
   writing, notably The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), his
   writings in G.K.'s Weekly, and Avowals and Denials (1934). Other works
   arising from his conversion were St. Francis of Assisi (1923), the essay
   in historical theology The Everlasting Man (1925), and St. Thomas Aquinas
   (1933).

   In his verse Chesterton was a master of ballad forms, as shown in the
   stirring "Lepanto" (1911). When it was not uproariously comic, his
   verse was frankly partisan and didactic. His essays developed his
   shrewd, paradoxical irreverence to its ultimate point of real
   seriousness. He is seen at his happiest in such essays as "On Running
   After One's Hat" (1908) and "A Defence of Nonsense" (1901), in which
   he says that nonsense and faith are "the two supreme symbolic
   assertions of truth" and "to draw out the soul of things with a
   syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook."

   Many readers value Chesterton's fiction most highly. The Napoleon of
   Notting Hill (1904), a romance of civil war in suburban London, was
   followed by the loosely knit collection of short stories, The Club of
   Queer Trades (1905), and the popular allegorical novel The Man Who Was
   Thursday (1908). But the most successful association of fiction with
   social judgment is in Chesterton's series on the priest-sleuth Father
   Brown: The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), followed by The Wisdom .
   . . (1914), The Incredulity . . . (1926), The Secret . . . (1927), and
   The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). Chesterton's friendships were with
   men as diverse as H.G. Wells, Shaw, Belloc, and Max Beerbohm. His
   Autobiography was published in 1936.

                -- EB

Desolation Row -- Bob Dylan

 Another species of Dylan...

(Poem #227) Desolation Row They're selling postcards of the hanging They're painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town Here comes the blind commissioner They've got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker The other is in his pants And the riot squad they're restless They need somewhere to go As the Lady and I look out tonight From Desolation Row Cinderella, she seems so easy "It takes one to know one," she smiles And puts her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis style And in comes Romeo, he's moaning "You Belong To Me I Believe" And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend You better leave." And the only sound that's left After the ambulances go Is Cinderella sweeping up On Desolation Row Now the moon is almost hidden The stars are beginning to hide The fortunetelling lady Has even taken all her things inside All except for Cain and Abel And the hunchback of Notre Dame Everybody is making love Or else expecting rain And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing He's getting ready for the show He's going to the carnival tonight On Desolation Row Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window For her I feel so afraid On her twenty-second birthday She already is an old maid To her, death is quite romantic She wears an iron vest Her profession's her religion Her sin is her lifelessness And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow She spends her time peeking Into Desolation Row Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood With his memories in a trunk Passed this way an hour ago With his friend, a jealous monk He looked so immaculately frightful As he bummed a cigarette Then he went off sniffing drainpipes And reciting the alphabet Now you would not think to look at him But he was famous long ago For playing the electric violin On Desolation Row Dr. Filth, he keeps his world Inside of a leather cup But all his sexless patients They're trying to blow it up Now his nurse, some local loser She's in charge of the cyanide hole And she also keeps the cards that read "Have Mercy On His Soul" They all play on penny whistles You can hear them blow If you lean your head out far enough From Desolation Row Across the street they've nailed the curtains They're getting ready for the feast The Phantom of the Opera A perfect image of a priest They're spoonfeeding Casanova To get him to feel more assured Then they'll kill him with self-confidence After poisoning him with words And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls "Get Outta Here If You Don't Know Casanova is just being punished for going To Desolation Row" Now at midnight all the agents And the superhuman crew Come out and round up everyone That knows more than they do Then they bring them to the factory Where the heart-attack machine Is strapped across their shoulders And then the kerosene Is brought down from the castles By insurance men who go Check to see that nobody is escaping To Desolation Row Praise be to Nero's Neptune The Titanic sails at dawn And everybody's shouting "Which Side Are You On?" And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers Between the windows of the sea Where lovely mermaids flow And nobody has to think too much About Desolation Row Yes, I received your letter yesterday (About the time the door knob broke) When you asked how I was doing Was that some kind of joke? All these people that you mention Yes, I know them, they're quite lame I had to rearrange their faces And give them all another name Right now I can't read too good Don't send me no more letters no Not unless you mail them From Desolation Row -- Bob Dylan

Dylan captures the full sweep and flow of late 20th-century society in a way
that few other poets have even attempted, let alone accomplished. From start to
finish, Desolation Row is a brilliant tapestry of glory and decadence, cliches
and novelties, high art and pop culture. It's cynical and satirical and biting
and bitter, true, but it's also magical in the richness of its pageantry.
Dylan's montage is reminiscent of Eliot's "heap of broken images", but his
images are far from broken; rather, their whirling confusion reflects the
disorienting nature of the age we live in.

thomas.

[Links]

I've run only one Dylan song before, the hypnotically beautiful
'Mr. Tambourine Man', which you can read at poem #112.
In addition to the poem itself, my commentary includes a few thoughts on
Dylan's standing as a poet and social critic, and the feelings that run
through his work.

The Web, of course, has hundreds of sites devoted to the man himself; these
range from brilliantly informative and insightful to criminally incompetent.
I'll leave it to you to explore them on your own.

October -- Hilaire Belloc

'tis indeed October, and a cold, rainy October at that.

(Poem #226) October Look, how those steep woods on the mountain's face Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold Invades our very noon: the year's grown old, Mornings are dark, and evenings come apace. The vines below have lost their purple grace, And in Forreze the white wrack backward rolled, Hangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold, And moaning gusts make desolate all the place. Mine host the month, at thy good hostelry, Tired limbs I'll stretch and steaming beast I'll tether; Pile on great logs with Gascon hand and free, And pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather; Swell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we, Singing old songs and drinking wine together. -- Hilaire Belloc

The most striking thing about today's poem is the wonderful vividness of its
imagery. The wild, rough beauty of the French Pyrenees is brought to life
with images of wooded slopes burning against the sunset, rolling fog and
'sons of the soil', all imbued with that slightly larger-than-life, romantic
atmosphere that a more sheltered, civilized perspective lends to 'untamed
nature'.

m.

Biography et al. at poem #124

For another poem along the same lines, see poem #117

Poem In October -- Dylan Thomas

October finally rolls around...

(Poem #225) Poem In October It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning. -- Dylan Thomas

One of those wonderful poems which make you feel glad just to be alive.

I've mentioned Thomas' skill in using the compressed metaphor before [1]. Poem
In October has many beautiful examples of his art: phrases like 'the
heron-priested shore', 'a springful of larks', 'the parables of sun light' and
'the legends of the green chapels' fairly shimmer with joy and wonder and
mystical beauty.

Simply glorious.

thomas.

[1] In the commentary to Fern Hill, poem #138

As a matter of fact, Fern Hill is very similar to today's poem in theme,
especially in the sense of almost religious awe in the face of the beauty and
majesty of Nature... read it!

[More Analysis]

George MacBeth has quite a bit to say about today's poem...

"This has great interest as one of the earliest poems written in England in
syllabics, a metre later to be exploited by Thom Gunn and other poets. The
mathematical principle underlying the syllabic form was not always appreciated
by critics of Thomas, to whom the rhythms of this poem seemed flaccid and its
metrical pattern purely visual and arbitrary. A syllabic metre depends on the
presence of a given number of syllables in each line, but no given number of
feet or stresses as in iambic or accentual verse, In this case the number of
syllables per line in each stanza is as follows: 9,12,9,3,5,12,12,5,3,9. This
number sequence is repeated throughout the poem. The effect is great ease and
rapidity of movement combined with a delicate precision of form. Thomas
contrives to retain the forcefulness of his earlier poetry by ending each line
with a strong word, often a noun. This keeps the metre from becoming too loose.

The poem itself is an exquisitely gay and cheerful one. It describes how a man
gets up early in the morning on his birthday and goes out for a walk through the
country to a place where he can look down on the town where he lives. The man is
almost certainly Thomas himself, and the town Swansea, where he was born.

The rhyme scheme of the poem is highly original. It seems to depend on normally
using the same vowel sound but different consonants, so that the word 'water'
can rhyme with the word 'horse'. Thomas is not completely consistent about this,
but he is consistent enough for the principle to be observable."

    -- George MacBeth, Poetry 1900-1975.

[Minstrels Links]

There's a brief biography of Dylan Thomas accompanying one of the very first
poems to be run on the Wondering Minstrels, Thomas' Prologue to his Collected
Poems, at poem #14

Prologue is a denser work (both in sound and meaning) than Poem In October.
Closer to today's poem in form and spirit is the beautiful Fern Hill,
poem #138

The commentary accompanying Fern Hill has more material on compressed metaphors
and syllabic verse; it also talks about Thomas' poetic philosophy. You can learn
more about the latter by reading everybody's favourite Dylan Thomas poem, the
utterly magnificent Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, poem #38

Under One Small Star -- Wislawa Szymborska

Guest poem sent in by Vikram Doctor

(Poem #224) Under One Small Star My apologies to chance for calling it necessity My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all. Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due. May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade. My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. I apologise for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths. I apologise to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m. Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time. Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water. And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage, you gaze always fixed on the same point in space, forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed. My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs. My apologies to great questions for small answers. Truth, please don't pay me much attention. Dignity please be magnanimous. Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train. Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then. My apologies to everyone that I can't be everywhere at once. My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man. I know that I won't be justified as long as I live, since I myself stand in my own way. Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, then labor heavily so that they may seem light. -- Wislawa Szymborska

        (translated by Stanislaw Branczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Notes:

There used to be a time when I was very young and full of intellectual
pretentions when I prided myself on having read as many of the winners of
the Nobel Prize for Literature as I could. And quite a weird bunch they were
too. I did make some nice discoveries - Kawabata and Singer, for example.
But some of the others still leave me baffled or bored - has anyone on this
list ever got great delight from Ivo Andric, Selma Lagerlof, Ivan Bunin and
others like them?

This is not fair, of course, some of these were of their time, and a lot
probably was lost when they were translated, and I'm sure they all deserved
their prizes, which are anyway always going to be a bit of a lottery. Its
just that as a guide to someone in their reading it did lead to quite a few
yawn-offs (I am going to risk being lynched by every Bengali on this list
and add Rabindranath Tagore to this category). So after a point I stopped
even trying to keep up.

Nonetheless, I did think of reconsidering when quite by chance I picked up a
book of Wislawa Szymborska's poems which came out after she won the Nobel
some years back. Because I guess I wouldn't have if she hadn't been
publicised by that, and I would have been the loser. As soon as I started
reading I was hooked. But I have to say this is partly because she hardly
seems like the stereotypical Nobel winner. The stereotype has many qualities
- noble, profound, impressive, intense, intellectual, opaque... but rarely
charming. And absolutely charming is what Szymborska is.

Its not twee charm, but something more. Its intelligence, and humour, and a
strong feminine sensibility and wisdom and humanity and all that, all of it
wrapped up and packaged with the lightest of hands, and in the most charming
of ways. Under One Small Star is a good example, but there is much more, and
well worth trying, Nobel or no Nobel.

General info:

In a poem titled "Big Numbers," Wislawa Szymborska writes that her
imagination doesn't cope well with big numbers./ It's still moved by
singularity." Indeed, throughout her career, she has kept her eye on
particulars: small creatures, overlooked objects, marginal characters,
everyday habits, neglected feelings. To each as well she brings an angled
perspective. It is the point of view of both a lonely skeptic and a canny
ironist; as it keeps a cloying sentimentality at bay, it encourages an
extraordinary detached sympathy with her subjects. "Take it not amiss, O
speech," she writes, "that I borrow weighty words/ and later try hard to
make them seem light." The light she makes is a sort of moral illumination,
shining back from details onto the inner lives of her readers. She has
published sparingly and writes with a careful precision. Her conceits are
elaborated with a  witty originality and spontaneity, and her work has been
immensely popular in Poland. Sine the age of eight, Wislawa Szymborska has
lived in Krakow. She graduated from the Jagellonian University, and she
began publishing in 1945. Although she has tried out political themes in her
poems, sometimes with a biting satirical force, her defense of the
individual - of "singularity" - draws on her unique powers of observation
rather than on any ideology. As an "unsurpassable model of the writer's
craft and a constant encouragement to transcend the obvious with thought,"
she has cited Montaigne's adage "See how many ends this stick has!"

        -- from The Vintage Book Of Contemporary World Poetry