Postscript to 'The Spirit Level'

'The Spirit Level' - a 1996 collection by Seamus Heaney.

Postscript

And some time take the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(Suggested by Recumbentman)

It seems to me that Heaney is one for poetry concerned with the nature of poetry and the poetic process. Take his Digging - unearthing a poem with a pen, unearthing spuds with a spade. The same here? Note that it's the postcript to a collection. Have his poems captured what he meant to say? And I'm wondering if there's anything in the techniques he displays in the poem - his ambiguous use of words? - which highlights the general nature of poetry?

Heaney gace my favourite definition of poetry. As a preamble, he talked about 'The Och Line'. Linguists draw dialect maps of the British Isles. A line can be drawn running roughly North-Eastto South-West. To the North and West of the line, people so 'Och'. To the South and East, they say something like 'Oh dearie me'.

"Poetry expresses the essential Och-ness of life".

Somersault

Hugh McDiarmid. The pen name of CM Grieve, a communist and founder of The National Party of Scotland - he was expelled at various times from one for being a nationalist, and from the other for being a communist.

McDiarmid wrote both in English and in Lallans ('Lowland' Scots). He described Lallans as 'a synthetic Scots' - not real-life dialect, but a constructed language borrowing from various contemporary dialects and from archaic Scots. It is readable by English speakers - with effort - but you need a glossary. The difficulty is deliberate. The idea is that you can read for the rhythm, or slow down to catch the meaning.

Somersault

I lo'e the stishie
O' earth in space
Breengin' by
At a haliket pace.

A wech o' hills
Gangs wallopin' owre,
Syne a whummlin' sea
Wi' a gallus glower.

The West whuds doon
Like the pigs at Gadara,
But the East's aye there
Like a sow at farrow.

Glossary (these translations are only approximate):
stishie = stir
breengin = hurtling
haliket = giddy
syne = then, and then
whummlin' = tumbling
wech = weight
gallus = reckless
aye = always

I think it's glorious, myself. The giddy (or haliket) meter. The originality of the description of the earth's rotation as a matter of speed, mass, violence.

It's the final quatrain that made me sit up. There's so much going on there. The mixture of vernacular and literary registers - the 'whud' of the Gadarene swine. And that 'whud' is so appropriate - the sound of a pig dropping off a cliff and of the mass of the earth disappearing over the horizon. But the death of the pig is contrasted with the horizon coming into view - a newborn piglet coming at the teat with the ferocity and urgency of a homing missile.

Norman McCaig (and I must post one of his poems) said this about McDiarmid's originality of thought: McDiarmid shoots at a bird/ And brings down the landscape (probably a misquote. I'll look it up.)

Songs of Innocence and Experience

A request from Dan.

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are two poem or collections by William Blake, the 38th greatest Briton. For now, let's try comparing and contrasting the Introductions.

Songs of Innocence: Introduction

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:

‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’
So I piped with merry cheer.
‘Piper, pipe that song again.’
So I piped: he wept to hear.‘

Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

‘Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.’
So he vanish'd from my sight;
And I pluck'd a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.


Songs of Experience: Introduction

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word,
That walk'd among the ancient trees.

Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might controll.
The starry pole;
And fallen fallen light renew!

O Earth O Earth return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumbrous mass.

Turn away no more:
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor
The watery shore
Is given thee till the break of day.

What do we think of the rhyme and metrical schemes? What types of sound are prevalent in each poem? Is the imagery different? Note the personal agent in each case: In 'Innocence', the poet is responding to the insistence of a child. In 'Experience' he's declaiming to others.

Prayer Before Birth

I don't know much about Louis MacNeice. I'm going on a recommendation. Presumably the title is a reference to "A Prayer Before Birth". I'm not sure where that phrase comes from. The Anglican liturgy, possibly?


Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.



My initial thought is, "Whoah! Talk about existential howl!"

I liked:

...forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit,....

The long lines with their repetitive clumps of alliteration and internal rhyme - the relentlessness of life?

Comeclose and Sleepnow

Roger McGough, along with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, is one of the 'Liverpool Poets' anthologised in the hugely successful The Mersey Sound paperback.

If one were to list the three in ascending order of serious, at first sight one might be tempted to put McGough, Henri and Patten. While, all three are capable of light humour and also profundity, possibly McGough who has the reputation as a lightweight. A former member of The Scaffold (Lily the Pink), he is these days most known for his children's poetry, and his radio and TV rent-a-poet appearances.

However, whenever I recall The Mersey Sound, I realise that it is McGough's contributions that have the most lasting impression.

Anyway...

Comeclose and Sleepnow

it is afterwards
and you
talk on tiptoe
happy to be part
of the darkness
lips becoming limp
a prelude to tiredness
Comeclose and Sleepnow
for in the morning
when a
policeman
disguised as the sun
creeps into the room
and your mother
disguised as birds
calls from the trees
you will put on a dress of guilt
and shoes with broken high ideals
and refusing coffee
run
alltheway
home.

What is this poetry stuff anyway?

Time for a confession: I know next to nothing about poetry. However, I am that rare person who actually buys poetry books. Occasionally. And sometimes I even read them. There's definitely something in poetry, and I wish I had time to read and study it more.

As it happens, one or two people have recently told me that poetry is "not their kind of thing". This seems a shame. Some people seem to get something - a lot - out of it. Why is that? What does poetry do that other art forms don't? And why have others been put off poetry? Was it a bad experience at school? Or have they simply not been exposed to enough of it?

Let's see. This blog is an attempt to set up a sort of reader's circle. I don't really have any firm ideas about how poetry appreciation might be taught. The best I can think of is to post a few poems I like and start discussing them.

I'll use this posting as the main blog portal. Use the Comments to make general points or to suggest poems. I'll also update to link to postings for specific poems.

Let's start with:

Comeclose and Sleepnow by Roger McGough
Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake
Somersault by Hugh McDiarmid
Postscript to 'The Spirit Level' by Seamus Heaney

(Note: The copyright situation concerning poetry is a litle confusing. Copying a whole poem may not count as 'fair use' - hence my using this blog instead of another possible forum. If any publishers/poets want to object, I shall happily remove any infringements).