Within You Without You -- George Harrison

Guest poem submitted by Arun Simha:

(Poem #954) Within You Without You We were talking - about the space between us all And the people - who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion Never glimpse the truth - then it's far too late - when they pass away. We were talking - about the love we all could share - when we find it To try our best to hold it there - with our love With our love - we could save the world - if they only knew. Try to realise it's all within yourself no-one else can make you change And to see you're really only very small, and life flows on within you and without you. We were talking - about the love that's gone so cold and the people, Who gain the world and lose their soul - they don't know - they can't see - are you one of them? When you've seen beyond yourself - then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there - And the time will come when you see we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you. -- George Harrison

[Details]

Rec.: 15th/22nd March, 3rd/4th April 1967
Rel. UK: 1st June 1967 (LP Sergent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)
Rel. US: 2nd June 1967 (LP Sergent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)
Track No.: 8
Composer: Harrison
Vocals: George Harrison
Year: 1967

Instruments & additional info.:
Recording commenced in studio two at Abbey Road on March 22 1967.
Album version mixed from take two. Writer: George. Lead vocal:
George. Producer: George Martin. Recording engineer: Geoff Emerick.
Second engineer: Richard Lush.

Harrison: vocal, sitar, acoustic guitar, tambura
Uncredited Indian musicians: dilrubas, svarmandal, tabla, tambura
Erich Gruenberg, Alan Loveday, Julien Gaillard, Paul Scherman,
Ralph Elman, David Wolfsthal, Jack Rothstein, Jack Greene: violins
Reginald Kilbey, Allen Ford, Peter Beavan: cellos
Neil Aspinall: tambura

[Commentary]

George Harrison  R.I.P

Tragic, isn't it?

I'm sure most people remember his music and its associated Indian influence
fondly.

Those were the days when musicians looked eastwards for spiritual
inspiration. John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu) and Carlos Santana (Devadip)
became followers of Sri Chinmoy, Jimmy Page & Robert Plant spent a few
months in India and collected a great deal from Indian music for their
incredible Led Zeppelin  albums, and George...

 ...  who can forget 'Norwegian Wood', 'Something', 'Here Comes the Sun',
'Within You Without You' and many other immortal songs that will remain
forever etched in our minds and hearts?

He was the originator of the movement to connect music with humanitarian
aid. In 1971, Ravi Shankar informed him about the great poverty in
Bangladesh, which moved him to hold a concert which raised quite a lot of
money.

Arun.

[Minstrels Links]

Poem #631, Mean Mr Mustard / Polythene Pam -- John Lennon
Poem #112, Mr.Tambourine Man  -- Bob Dylan
Poem #227, Desolation Row  -- Bob Dylan
Poem #832, Love Minus Zero / No Limit -- Bob Dylan
Poem #890, All Along the Watchtower -- Bob Dylan
Poem #933, Mother's Little Helper -- Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Parable of the Madman -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Guest poem submitted by David Wright:

(Poem #953) Parable of the Madman Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred gamesshall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us - For the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves. It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter
Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]

     Not long ago, a poetry group I participate in was looking at Yeats's
The Second Coming (Minstrels Poem #289) - an exploration that was deeply
tinted with recent tragedies and ongoing world events.  I was thinking of
that poem as a reflection on man without God, man after God.  This led to
thoughts of Nietzsche's most notorious statement: God is Dead, which
everybody knows, although few people know the full parable that it is taken
from.

     Nietzsche has been much maligned in the popular mind as an atheist, a
nihilist, and a proto-fascist.  I think the passage is appropriate for the
Minstrels because Nietzsche was a true oet philosopher (Plato being the only
other example I can call to mind.)  I don't read German, but I understand
that he is one of the greatest of German stylists, and his background in
philology gave him a poet's feel for language.  And writing in the form of a
parable, he demands interpretation in the same way a lot of poets do.

     I find it a moving, frightening, telling mythos for our time - it just
about defines what is meant by 'postmodernism.'  Perhaps it is for all time,
or for certain times throughout history when mankind has felt the darkness
closing in, the meaning evaporating.  But even Ragnarok, the Norse doom of
the Gods in which the world was to be plunged into darkness and ice and
humankind was to be destroyed while the Gods killed each other, even that
dark vision was to be followed by a new Golden Age in which the triumphant
Gods returned.  For Nietzsche, the death of God is attended merely by decay
and worms.  And freedom, that dreaded freedom that Sartre addresses in his
work.

David.

[Minstrels Links]

The aforementioned Yeats poem:
Poem #289, The Second Coming  -- William Butler Yeats

For something completely different, see:
Poem #615, The Philosopher's Drinking Song -- Monty Python

Verity -- Drummond Allison

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul.
Who'd have thought the world would have so many cricket poems in it?

(Poem #952) Verity (In memory of Captain Hedley Verity, injured in Sicily, Taken POW, buried at Caserta. Pre-war, Yorkshire and England slow left-arm bowler.) The ruth and truth you taught have come full-circle On that fell island all whose history lies, Far now from Bramhall Lane and far from Scarborough You recollect how foolish are the wise. On this great ground more marvellous than Lord's - Time takes more spin than nineteen thirty four - You face at last that vast that Bradman-shaming Batsman whose cuts obey no natural law. Run up again, as gravely smile as ever, Veer without fear your left unlucky arm In His so dark direction, but no length However lovely can disturb the harm That is His style, defer the winning drive Or shake the crowd from their uproarious calm. -- Drummond Allison

 What I find wonderful about this poem is that it's perhaps the only poem
I've ever read which treats cricket as a sombre subject (witness the poems
run so far in this theme - all of which have an element of humour). The
starting, of course, is a bit weak, and the use of the sonnet form somewhat
unnecessary, but I truly love the last six lines, with their sense of heroic
determination - the sort of courage that makes a man give all he has against
an implacable foe and an unconcerned crowd. I know nothing of Verity (and am
not particularly fond of cricket) but reading this poem, I have no choice
but to admire him - as a cricketer and a human being.

Aseem.

[Verity Bio]

A wonderfully gifted left-arm spin bowler, Hedley Verity was born in the
shadow of Headingley in 1905 and died from his wounds in a prisoner-of-war
hospital camp in Caserta, Italy, during the Second World War at the age of
38. It was a tragic end to a life that had given so much to the world of
cricket.

It seems strange to think that Verity was originally turned down by
Yorkshire at trials in 1926, but he was eventually given a chance by the
county in 1930 and, of course, became a fixture until the start of the war.
He was the natural successor to that other great Yorkshire left-arm spinner,
Wilfred Rhodes, whose career drew to a close in 1930 after an amazing 883
games for the county. Verity was never going to get close - Hitler saw to
that - but he did turn out for Yorkshire 278 times and in that time he
produced some remarkable bowling analyses.

In 1931 he took ten for 36 off 18.4 overs against Warwickshire at Leeds, but
incredibly he bettered these figures the following season by taking ten for
ten in 19.4 overs against Nottinghamshire, also at Headingley. They remain
the county's best bowling figures for an innings while Verity's 17 for 91
against Essex at Leyton in 1933 remain Yorkshire's best bowling in a match.
Verity claimed nine wickets in an innings seven times for Yorkshire. He took
100 wickets in a season nine times and took 200 wickets in three consecutive
seasons between 1935-37. He ended with 1,956 first-class wickets at an
average of 14.9, took five wickets in an innings 164 times and ten wickets
in a match 54 times. On 1 September, 1939, in the last first-class match
before war was declared, he took seven for nine at Hove against Sussex.

The year after he first appeared for Yorkshire, Verity made his England
debut against New Zealand at The Oval, finishing the game with four wickets.
After that summer he was ignored until 1932/33, the Bodyline Series, in
which he took 11 wickets, including Bradman twice. By the time his career
was over, Verity had dismissed Bradman ten times, a figure matched only by
Grimmett. As with his domestic career, Verity's international performances
threw up some astonishing bowling figures. He took eight for 43 and finished
with match figures of 15 for 104 against Australia at Lord's in 1934. His
stamina was demonstrated during the 1938-39 tour of South Africa when he
bowled 95.6 eight-ball overs in an innings at Durban, taking four for 184.
By the time war arrived, Verity had taken 144 wickets at 24.37.

During the war he was a captain in the Green Howards. He sustained his
wounds in the battle of Catania in Sicily and died on 31 July, 1943. His
grave is at Caserta Military Cemetery, some 16 miles from Naples. (Copyright
CricInfo 2001)

        -- www.cricinfo.com

Ironically, Drummond Allison was also killed in action during WW2...

Wife Poem -- Hayden Carruth

Guest poem submitted by Adam Gitner:

(Poem #951) Wife Poem And it's clear at last, she dropped down from the moon, not like some sylphy Cynthia at Delphi, after all she's not seventeen, but with the sexual grace and personal implacability of a goddess of our time; so he says to himself at night seeing the glow of her sleep in her half (two-thirds really) of their bed, the claire de lune of her shoulder and forehead behind the deep clouds of her hair. He drinks his wine and swallows more pills. The birds make their first aubade, little chirps and chitterings, and outside the first light mists their window. The day will be awful, nervy and dull and sullen. His last cigarette, his final gulp of chardonnay, and he presses against her warm glow, thinking of how he swam as a boy of twelve in the warm pond beyond the elms and hickories at the meadow's edge. He turned like a sleepy carp among the water lilies, under the dragonflies and hot clouds of the old days of summer. -- Hayden Carruth

You've run Carruth before and here as usual is his particular New England
maturity. He's such a technician with the lines; one hand continually
pulling you forward, the other deftly assembling the landscape. In another
poem "Ray" he compares the poetic mind to a bucket of minnows. If they are
minnows he's slapping together on this poem, it's some shellac that holds
them together. Though there's no consistent meter I can tell, there's an
abiding if intangible sense of poetic rhythm. Lines tend to lapse into iambs
but slip out of hand too quickly to hold. Other lines have an elusive rhyme,
as in how the words "sylphy Cynthia at Delphi" echo back to each other
softly reduced. Reduction is a key to this poem, as is the weakness of an
echo. The narrator seems to live in a world with the lights set permanently
on dim. His only display of strength is in a few lines that end in strong
iambs, like "she dropped", "His last", "a boy", "beyond", and "among" that
carry you over the enjambment and onto the next line. Yet even this give the
impression of the narrator's ultimate weakness in the way it mimics the
sound of a lame foot dragging only intermittently, or the rasp of a labored
breath heaving in the lungs then falling silent on the next line. It begs
comparison with the resolution of the meter in Tennyson's "Ulysses".

The moon, Diana, Cynthia, or Selene as Keats called her, hangs in the
backdrop of this poem and is frequently contrasted with the day: in imagery,
surely Carruth was aware of the juxtaposition of Delphi the center of
worship of Apollo with Cynthia; in form, the way the first and last half of
the poem are consumed with dreaming while the middle displays a shift in
diction to the concrete (cigarette, gulp of chardonnay, chirps, birds, and
first light). His wife is consistently identified with the moon from the
initial simile, to the "claire de lune" of her shoulder, and the "clouds" of
her hair. I can only assume that the poet is familiar with Keats' previous
treatment of the Moon falling in love with the shepherd Endymion in his epic
of the same name. A quote from Bulfinch's _Mythology_ is relevant:

   "The story of Endymion has a peculiar charm from the human meaning which
it so thinly veils. We see in Endymion the young poet, his fancy and his
heart seeking in vain for that which can satisfy them, finding his favourite
hour in the quiet moonlight, and nursing there beneath the beams of the
bright and silent witness the melancholy and the ardour which consume him.
The story suggests aspiring and poetic love, a life spent more in dreams
than in reality, and an early and welcome death."
        -- ([broken link] http://www.bulfinch.org/fables/bull26.html).

To the narrator the night is the soft echo of day just as the dream is the
embrace opposite "nervy" reality. Our narrator lives in this wistful cocoon
which is not a cocoon as should precede maturity but one that slips on long
after. It verges on inexpressible for me to describe how Carruth brings out
the similarities between dreamy adolescence and dreamy old age, moving
between night and day with the effort of a brushstroke or how the end comes
not with the ringing tone of a rhyming couplet or the beating finality of
consistent meter but with a simple, falling trochee.

 - Adam Gitner

[Minstrels Links]

Hayden Carruth:
Poem #684, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey
Poem #774, Ray

John Keats:
Poem #12, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
Poem #182, La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Poem #316, Ode to a Nightingale
Poem #433, Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell
Poem #575, To Mrs Reynolds' Cat
Poem #696, Last Sonnet
Poem #770, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy for Ever
Poem #910, On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
Poem #15, The Eagle (a fragment)
Poem #31, Break, break, break
Poem #80, The Brook (excerpt)
Poem #121, Ulysses
Poem #355, Charge of the Light Brigade
Poem #653, Ring Out, Wild Bells
Poem #825, Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White
Poem #852, Mariana in the Moated Grange
Poem #896, The Kraken

The cricket sang -- Emily Dickinson

Not cricket? You decide...

(Poem #950) The cricket sang The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. -- Emily Dickinson

One of Dickinson's many impressive poetic talents is the ability to write in
a wonderfully and deliberately quirky style, and yet not have that
quirkiness become the focus of the poem, or overshadow its more 'poetic'
aspects. Today's poem doesn't *quite* succeed in that particular regard -
the convoluted syntax is obtrusive, and forces several readings of the poem,
but that is not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed, the poem itself is
quite beautiful, packing several layers of imagery into a few
precisely-chosen words.

The images themselves are original and evocative (and sometimes even both
<g>) - the cricket singing the sun into setting (compare Thomas's "wild men
who caught and sang the sun in flight"), the workmen seaming[1] up the day,
the startlingly apt comparison in the second verse, and the unoriginal but
very well executed last verse.

Note, too, the deceptively regular-seeming verse, both in terms of metrical
structure and rhyme. Particularly impressive is how well the short first
verse blends into the longer (by a whole line[2]) second and third verses,
though the varying rhyme scheme is handled perfectly too.

[1] though I am unable to decide quite what Dickinson intended here - there
is the obvious sense of stitching, but the OED also gives "Agric. A furrow,
(seed) drill.", and the more I think about it, the more appropriate a usage
it seems in context.
[2] if you count lines one and two as a single, broken line

Links:

  Set to music by Ernst Bacon:
    [broken link] http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/d/dickinson/cricket.html

  Biography:
    Poem #92

  Dickinson poems on Minstrels:
    Poem #92, "There's a certain Slant of light"
    Poem #174, "A Route of Evanescence"
    Poem #341, "The Grass so little has to do -"
    Poem #458, "The Chariot"
    Poem #529, "If you were coming in the fall"
    Poem #580, "Split the Lark"
    Poem #687, "Success is counted sweetest"
    Poem #711, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"
    Poem #829, "It dropped so low in my regard"
    Poem #871, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"
    Poem #891, "A Doubt If It Be Us"

  And the cricket theme:
    Poem #946, Sir Henry Newbolt, "Vitai Lampada"
    Poem #947, John Kendal, "Ballad of a Homeless Bat"
    Poem #948, Julia A. Moore, "Grand Rapids Cricket Club"
    Poem #949, Andrew Lang, "Brahma"

-martin