Peace -- Rupert Brooke

(Poem #1762) Peace Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love! Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there, Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending, Naught broken save this body, lost but breath; Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there But only agony, and that has ending; And the worst friend and enemy is but Death. -- Rupert Brooke

        (1914)

Note: The first sonnet in Brooke's 1914 sequence

Today's poem - challengingly titled "Peace" - marks the first of Brooke's
sequence of five World War I sonnets, commonly called the "1914 sequence".
("The Soldier", perhaps his best known poem, is Sonnet V in that sequence.)
Back when I ran "The Soldier", I noted that the patriotic tone, filtered
through the sensibilities of a post-World-Wars mind, makes these sonnets
seem old-fashioned at best, badly dated at worst. "The Soldier" tended
towards the former end of the spectrum; "Peace", despite is poetic merits,
tends definitely to the latter.

Which is not to say that I dislike the poem - indeed, I found the images of
renewal and cleansing, the almost palpable feeling of a skin being shed,
both finely crafted and powerful. But it would be naive to pretend that a
sentiment like "leave the sick hearts that honour could not move" sounds
anything but misguided today.

An excellent summary from http://www.sonnets.org/wwi.htm captures both sides
of the matter perfectly:

  Although Rupert Brooke's 1914 sonnets received an enthusiastic reception
  at the time of their publication and the author's death (of blood
  poisoning), disenchantment with the ever-lengthening war meant a backlash
  against Brooke's work. These sonnets have been lauded as being "among the
  supreme expressions of English patriotism and among the few notable poems
  produced by the Great War" (Houston Peterson), while according to Patrick
  Cruttwell, "I suspect that these unfortunate poems, through their great
  vogue at first and the bitter reaction against them later, did more than
  anything else to put the traditional sonnet virtually out of action for a
  generation or more of vital poetry in English." But, as you can see here,
  some writers of the period adapted the sonnet to their war experience, and
  it is interesting to speculate on whether Brooke's writing would have
  become as bitter and disillusioned as that of his contemporaries had he
  lived a few years more. See Harry Rusche's Rupert Brooke page, part of his
  Lost Poets of the Great War.

Also, I feel an essential step towards fully appreciating today's poem is to
note its significant personal component - several of the attitudes expressed
are thrown into clearer focus when viewed against Brooke's biography.

martin

[Links]

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/brooke3.html has a few footnotes

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/brooke2.html has more on the Brooke of the 1914
sonnets

Poem #280, "The Soldier", has some more discussion of Brooke's war poetry.

Further in Summer than the Birds -- Emily Dickinson

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1761) Further in Summer than the Birds Further in Summer than the Birds Pathetic from the Grass A minor Nation celebrates Its unobtrusive Mass. No Ordinance be seen So gradual the Grace A pensive Custom it becomes Enlarging Loneliness. Antiquest felt at Noon When August burning low Arise this spectral Canticle Repose to typify Remit as yet no Grace No Furrow on the Glow Yet a Druidic Difference Enhances Nature now -- Emily Dickinson

It is a compliment to the Wondering Minstrels when a standard of the canon
has not yet appeared, but so it is and I here remedy the default, provoked
by the recent other Dickinson offerings.

It is easy to patronise "Emily," as her academic critics invariably rather
astonishingly call her - not "Dickinson"; not even "Miss Dickinson" or
"Emily Dickinson" - does one ever hear of "Twain" or "Whitman"? Nope: they
are always "Mark Twain" and "Walt Whitman"; fair enough, but why is Emily
Dickinson always "Emily"? Well, she had a rather sheltered sequestered small
town Old Maid Yankee existence. And her poems are all in 86 86 Common Metre,
like the 19th century hymns that would have been familiar to her at Sunday
Congregational church meetings. One wonders just how wide her reading could
have been, not to speak of her acquaintance: she might, after all, be simply
an astonishingly sensitive and acute original. Certainly her real life
experience was extremely straitened; she took her reclusiveness very
seriously - her poetry was mostly found after her death sewn up in
"fascicles," as she called them; in 20th century terms she would doubtless
be regarded as a pathological case and have been locked up like Robert
Lowell; and in, say, 4th century terms she would undoubtedly be in the canon
of saints.

But in her poetry - it is most certainly not mere "verse" - she pushes CM to
its outermost limits: she makes me think of William Cowper and John Newton
with their very fine CM hymns a hundred years earlier ("God moves in a
mysterious way/his wonders to perform"; "Glorious things of thee are
spoken/Zion, city of our God"; "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/that
saved a wretch like me"), and Wordsworth's reverie on the disciplining
confines of the sonnet form in "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow
room."

The thing that's so amazing about her poetry is, continuingly, "How did she
know?! How COULD she know?!" A queer old maid Yankee just couldn't have
known about Catholic liturgical and exegetical niceties but yet,
astonishingly, she did. (T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins, with
backgrounds not wholly dissimilar to hers, went whole hog into small- and
large-C catholicism, respectively, but Emily Dickinson seems to have grasped
everything they did and found that route unnecessary.)

And so the hum of grasshoppers on a hot, dry August afternoon is the
celebration both of insubstantial quiddity and a sacramental rite. The
"Grace" that is imparted to faithful (well, say, to Boston Irish Catholics
in Emily Dickinson's world) in the Mass, some time after the "gradual" (ie
not just slowly-slowly, but also the scriptural tract recited or sung
between the epistle and the gospel) - in the case of the August insect
liturgies isolates and excludes rather than gathering and including. But HOW
did she know all this? An "antiquest"? It's perhaps an antiphon - the
responsory chanted by a monastic choir, but it's also a vain endeavour to
find involvement in nature and obviate loneliness and isolation. A
"canticle"? It's the liturgical term for the biblical hymns chanted in the
monastic office - magnificat, nunc dimitis, benedictus, benedicite and so
on; but again, how did she know? And they typify repose: they represent
rest; but "typology" is the hermeneutical term for supposed Old Testament
anticipations of New Testament fulfilments, such as the rod carried aloft
before the Israelites in the wilderness and the cross of Jesus. And yet
again, how DID she know? But clearly she did, for her closing reference to a
"Druidic difference" means, certainly, that she has considered all these
liturgical resonances before rejecting them as the appropriate metaphor;
nature is certainly sacramental, but the appropriate sacerdotalism is pagan.
And exclusionary.

"Further in summer than the birds," it seems to me, is a companion to, an
amplification of, that splendid other nature poem of hers, "A narrow fellow
in the grass," and its arresting concluding image of feeling "zero at the
bone" comes to mind here - as Wordsworth (to return to the opening of this
little discussion) with his sentimentality about nature most certainly does
not.

Mac Robb.
Brisbane, Australia.

Leaves of Grass, Section 14, Poem 6 -- Walt Whitman

Guest poem submitted by Flavia:

(Poem #1760) Leaves of Grass, Section 14, Poem 6 A child said, *What is the grass?* fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, *Whose?* Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic; And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white; Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you, curling grass; It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men; It may be if I had known them I would have loved them; It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps; And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers; Darker than the colorless beards of old men; Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues! And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward-nothing collapses; And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. -- Walt Whitman

Every now and then new symbols and achetypes get added to the strange tangle
we call the Western Culture. Everybody, wave to the guy who managed to add
that green stuff under your feet. This poem is far from the only time Walt
Whitman mentions grass, but it is the most memorable.

And the truth is, grass *is* fascinating. The only plant that grows on every
continent, including Antarctica, that can grow twenty meters high, or just
be microscopic green fuzz, that grows in sweet water as well as in salt
deserts. *Every* culture on earth that has left the hunter-gatherer stage is
based on grass, whether it's wheat, corn, oats, rice, spelt, rye, etc.
(Sorry, my Alter hanging over my shoulder points out that there are herding
cultures that subsists on meat-and-milk. I should have said every *settled*
culture. Mea culpa.)

In the symbolic flower language, grass means humility, and in the bible it
symbolises decay and the briefness of life. In this poem Walt Whitman turns
this around.

And he called his collected works "Leaves of Grass".

Cool, huh?

Flavia.

An Apology -- F J Bergmann

Guest poem submitted by Paramjit Oberoi:

(Poem #1759) An Apology Forgive me for backing over and smashing your red wheelbarrow. It was raining and the rear wiper does not work on my new plum-colored SUV. I am also sorry about the white chickens. -- F J Bergmann

I was leafing through one of Billy Collins's anthologies of contemporary
American poetry ("180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day") when I ran
into this.  I love the haiku-like simplicity of the lines, and the random
irreverent touches ("plum-colored SUV", "white chickens").  So spare, not a
word out of place, and one gets such a clear and vivid picture of the event
when reading it.

"An Apology" was a finalist for the 2003 James Hearst Poetry Prize and
appeared in The North American Review Vol. 288, No. 2.

Frances Jean Bergmann is a web designer and artist.  She reads at spoken
word venues, and has been published in Margie-The American Journal of
Poetry, Wind, Pavement Saw, Realpoetik,in the anthology Connected: Poetry
Online In The Age Of Computers, in her own chapbooks, and has a poem
included in 180 More (Random House 2005).  In 2003 she received the Mary
Roberts Rinehart National Poetry Award; in 2004 she won the Pauline Ellis
Prose Poetry Prize with "Wall."  She lives in Madison, Wisconsin (USA), and
maintains several local poetry websites.

Biographical information from:
  http://www.madpoetry.org/madpoets/bergmann.html
  http://www.wfop.org/poets/bergmann.html
  http://www.fibitz.com/biostate.html

-param

PS. Here's the original:
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/83.html

Eyes -- Czeslaw Milosz

Guest poem submitted by Sarah Korah :

(Poem #1758) Eyes My most honorable eyes, you are not in the best of shape. I receive from you an image less than sharp, And if a color, then it's dimmed. And you were a pack of royal greyhounds once, With whom I would set out in the early mornings. My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, Lands and cities, islands and oceans. Together we greeted immense sunrises When the fresh air set us running on the trails Where the dew had just begun to dry. Now what you have seen is hidden inside me And changed into memories or dreams. I am slowly moving away from the fairgrounds of the world And I notice in myself a distaste For the monkeyish dress, the screams and drumbeats. What a relief. To be alone with my meditation On the basic similarity in humans And their tiny grain of dissimilarity. Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, That grows large and takes me in. -- Czeslaw Milosz

I was reminded of this poem when my hardy 93 year old grandfather complained
of a slight loss of hearing. He was also rather upset about the fact that he
can *only* walk a couple of kilometers these days.

I confess we grandchildren shared smiles while thinking 'Hey, we'd be lucky
to be half as fit as you when we're in our 70's.'... But then it occurred to
me that sights, sounds and memories, mobility and independence - these are
important at any age.

Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or as energetically as
Milosz [1911-2003]. A self proclaimed "one day's master", Milosz had a great
capacity to both confront the world's suffering and embrace its joys.

Wistfulness, acceptance, even a little humour - this short poem has it all.

Sarah Korah.

Minstrels has write-ups on Milosz, so I'm spared the trouble. And yes, my
grandfather seems quite happy with his new hearing aid :-)