Silent Noon (Sonnet XIX) -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Guest poem sent in by

(Poem #1388) Silent Noon (Sonnet XIX) Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,- The finger-points look through, like rosy blooms: Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms 'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass. All round our nest far, as the eye can pass Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge 'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass. Deep in the sun searched groves, a dragon-fly Hangs, like a blue thread loosened from the sky:- So this winged hour is dropt to us from above. Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was the song of love. -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

          (from 'The House of Life')

[Comments]

A previous posting (Poem #715) has many links to various biogs of D G
Rossetti, so I won't go into much detail, save to say that whatever you
think of his poetry, the deep passion and commitment of the man always is
apparent.  Whilst undoubtedly a deeply troubled person, his poetic spirit
seems largely romantic and hopeful. His voice reaches far beyond the
romanticism of his pre-Raphaelite age on which modernism so rapidly turned
its back: acknowledgements of his influence from Frost, Pound and Yeats
cement his place in posterity, already secured by the quality of the very
best of his work.

Whether this particular sonnet - from his tour-de-force of 101 Sonnets: The
House of Life - is indeed his best work is hard for me to be objective
about.  I first heard this in the musical setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams
and it had a profound effect on me both lyrically and musically. Its
evocation of an English summer day with clouds and sunshine is perfect and
within its span, of two people whose very silence encapsulates their love is
so accurate.

Technically, its sonnet form is unusual (abbaacca ddeffe) and perhaps looser
than some classical forms.  One might also quibble with some of the metrical
precision.  Neither of these facts detract, for me, from the overall effect
and the last two lines in particular which never fail to summon memories of
my own experiences of silence and love.

The Explosion -- Philip Larkin

Proceeding with the mining disaster theme, here's a guest poem submitted
independently by Mike Christie and
Ameya Nagarajan

(Poem #1387) The Explosion On the day of the explosion Shadows pointed towards the pithead: In the sun the slagheap slept. Down the lane came men in pitboots Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke, Shouldering off the freshened silence. One chased after rabbits; lost them; Came back with a nest of lark's eggs; Showed them; lodged them in the grasses. So they passed in beards and moleskins, Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter, Through the tall gates standing open. At noon, there came a tremor; cows Stopped chewing for a second; sun, Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed. The dead go on before us, they Are sitting in God's house in comfort, We shall see them face to face - Plain as lettering in the chapels It was said, and for a second Wives saw men of the explosion Larger than in life they managed - Gold as on a coin, or walking Somehow from the sun towards them, One showing the eggs unbroken. -- Philip Larkin

Note: the sixth verse ("The dead go on . . . ") should be in italics.

[Mike's commentary]

I've liked the two poems people sent in about mining disasters: I wanted to
add this one to the list.  It's long been one of my favourite Larkin poems.
It manages to be powerfully moving without being sentimental; the last image,
of the men somehow expanding and disappearing away from this mortal world, as
the wives understand they are dead, is one of my favourite images in all of
poetry.

Mike Christie

[Ameya's commentary]

All these mining poems reminded me of larkin, what I like about this poem is
that it focuses on the life of the miners and thus highlights even more the
tragedy of their death.

The saddest image is the one conjured by "Gold as on a coin" because it
implies the miners are worth more to their families after death because of
compensation, an amount of money that their labour could never provide.

Ameya

Ballad of Spring Hill (Spring Hill Disaster) -- Peggy Seeger

Guest poem sent in by Dale Rosenberg

(Poem #1386) Ballad of Spring Hill (Spring Hill Disaster) In the town of Spring Hill, Nova Scotia, Down in the heart of the Cumberland Mine, There's blood on the coal and miners lie In the roads that never saw sun or sky Roads that never saw sun or sky. Down at the coal face the miner's workin' Rattle of the belt and the cutter's blade Crumble of rock and the walls close round Living and the dead men two miles down Living and the dead men two miles down Twelve men lay two miles from the pitshaft Listen for the drillin' of a rescue team Six hundred feet of coal and slag Hope imprisoned in a three-foot seam Hope imprisoned in a three-foot seam Eight days passed and some were rescued Leaving the dead to lie alone All their lives they dug their graves Two miles of earth for a markin' stone Two miles of earth for a markin' stone In the town of Spring Hill you don't sleep easy Often the Earth will tremble and groan When the Earth is restless, miners die Bone and blood is the price of coal Bone and blood is the price of coal -- Peggy Seeger

Yesterday's poem about a mining disaster made me think of Peggy Seeger's
"Ballad of Spring Hill."  Based on a real mining accident, where a number of
the trapped miners survived until rescued 8 days later, it has a haunting
melody and even more haunting lyrics.  I heard it as a child, listening to
Peter, Paul and Mary's recording.  I doubt I've heard or read it for 30 years,
but the line "all their lives they dug their graves" still gives me shivers.

Dale Rosenberg

Biography:
  [broken link] http://www.pegseeger.com/html/peggylongbio.html

[p.s. thanks to everyone who identified Stephen Mitchell as the translator of
the Rilke poem. - martin]

Miners -- Wilfred Owen

Guest poem sent in by Dave Fortin

(Poem #1385) Miners There was a whispering in my hearth, A sigh of the coal, Grown wistful of a former earth It might recall. I listened for a tale of leaves And smothered ferns, Frond-frosts, and the low sly lives Before the fauns. My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer From Time's old cauldron, Before the birds made nests in summer, Or men had children. But the coals were murmuring of their mine, And moans down there Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men Writhing for air. And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard, Bones without number. Many the muscled bodies charred, And few remember. I thought of all that worked dark pits Of war, and died Digging the rock where Death reputes Peace lies indeed. Comforted years will sit soft-chaired, In rooms of amber; The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered By our life's ember; The centuries will burn rich loads With which we groaned, Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids, While songs are crooned; But they will not dream of us poor lads, Left in the ground. -- Wilfred Owen

Tuesday, November 4th, marked the 85th anniversary of Wilfred Owen's death.
He was killed in action on the Oise-Sambre Canal near Ors one week before
the Armistice was signed.

The above poem is one of my favorites by Owen.  He originally meant to write
about a mining accident at Podmore Hill Colliery, Halmerend that killed 140
men and boys.  In a letter to a friend, he writes "Wrote a poem on the
Colliery Disaster: but I get mixed up with the War at the end."

The list has a number of poems by Owen and other poets from WWI.  In
thinking about the congruence of poetry and war, I came across a passage in
one of Erich Maria Remarque's novels, The Black Obelisk (1957):

  "I push the poems aside.  They suddenly seem to me flat and childish,
  typical of the attempts almost every young man makes at one time or
  another.  I began to write during the war, but then it made some
  sense--for minutes at a time it took me away from what I was seeing.  It
  was like a little hut of protest and of belief that something else existed
  beyond destruction and death."

Dave Fortin

Autumn -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1384) Autumn Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by. Now overlap the sundials with your shadows, and on the meadows let the wind go free. Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine; grant them a few more warm transparent days, urge them on to fulfillment then, and press the final sweetness into the heavy wine. Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander along the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Notes:

The first fall day is here, at this latitude [Sep 29 - ed]. The long
sleeves come out of the closet as do dawns after 7.00 am. Light and darkness
slice the day almost evenly, two halves of a pumpkin. And as I wander along
the boulevards, up and down, only Rilke sings in the wind.

Sashi