Autumn On the Land

 

Grigoriy Myasoyedov

 Autumn On the Land

 

A man, a field, silence—what is there to say?
He lives, he moves, and the October day
Burns slowly down.
                                 History is made
Elsewhere; the hours forfeit to time's blade
Don't matter here. The leaves large and small,
Shed by the branches, unlamented fall
About his shoulders. You may look in vain
Through the eyes' window; on his meagre hearth
The thin, shy soul has not begun its reign
Over the darkness. Beauty, love and mirth
And joy are strangers there.
                                             You must revise
Your bland philosophy of nature, earth
Has of itself no power to make men wise. 

 

R. S. Thomas 

I go over it - reading it again, hoping I will find a different conclusion. 

Something more hopeful.

The man, the field, and the silence.

That silence gapes. 

Meaningless! It's all empty. Even the beauty of Nature has no influence, no redeeming power.

But what is this - a sliver of hope? "The thin, shy soul has not begun its reign/Over the darkness."

How does one begin, then? Where?

 

 

Autumn

 

 

 

Heinrich Vogeler

Autumn

 

There is wind where the rose was;

Cold rain where the sweet grass was;

And clouds like sheep

 Stream o'er the steep

Grey skies where the lark was. 

 

Nought gold where your hair was;

Nought warm where your hand was;

But phantom, forlorn,

Beneath the thorn,

Your ghost where your face was.

 

Sad winds where your voice was;

Tears, tears where my heart was;

And ever with me,

Child, ever with me,

Silence where hope was.

 

Walter de la Mare 

 

 

 A painful anniversary. 

 

 

Prologue

Chris Neale

Prologue

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage red, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms


To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
in the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooing the woods' praise,
who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite
(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tongued puffball)
But animals thick as thieves
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogsback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms in a throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells
Of sheep and churches noise
Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone, and then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multitudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now. 

Dylan Thomas 

Convoluted, roping, twisting words - 

Dylan, you draw us in.

Seashaken house, starfish sands, men tackled with clouds, cities of nine day's night. 

 You live in a myth-world, a deeper-than-surface, marrow-life.

You dip in and out of this place, showing us what is there, bringing as much of it back to us

as words will carry. 

Your net of words has caught for us flashes of otherwise unimagined beauty.

Is this true? Is this place really where we live?

Is the poem an Ark to carry us there?

Is it enough to envision it?

I want to walk in the holy fields.

End of Summer

 

Steven Outram

 

 End of Summer

An agitation of the air, 

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

 

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows.

 

Stanley Kunitz

That moment when, doing something usual and ordinary, you feel it - something is happening. Something is changing.

Is it a leaving, or an arriving?

The phrase " turn on its hinge", and later, " the iron door" - you can almost hear the creak of it, feel it's coldness, it's finality - like a prison door.

Is Summer a room in Time's house? Or is it outside, and now we move inside, into the dark confines of an inhospitable cell?

"I stood in the disenchanted field". All the lovely sea-like grasses, gone. All the movement and sway shorn down to bristles. And then the realization "that part of my life was over".

Is this the season of disenchantment? And what happens when only the bones are left?

 Is it possible that there is a deeper magic? A magic beyond seasons, a meaning running through all times and places, an unswervable undefeatable unchangeable and glorious victorious beauty that transforms us?

That would melt an iron door.

Nobbut God

Elena Yushina

 

 

"First on, there was nobbut God." Genesis 1:1

 Yorkshire Dialect Translation

Nobbut God

            

First on

There was silence.

And God said:

'Let there be clatter.'

The wind, unclenching,

Runs its thumbs

Along dry bristles of Yorkshire Fog.

The mountain ousel

Oboes its one note.

After rain

Water lobelia

Drips like a tap

On the tarn's tight surface-tension.

But louder,

And every second nearer,

Like chain explosions

From furthest nebulae

Light-yearing across space:

The thudding of my own blood.

'It's nobbut me,'

Says God.

Norman Nicholson

 

 

The way he joins the sound of rain dripping off the petals of a flower and "chain explosions from furthest nebulae" with the sound of his beating heart!

 

It's a shock, the differences in scope. 

A raindrop, a heartbeat, an explosion -

and then the presence and voice of God.

Is it a terror or a comfort 

that He is both so close and so distant?

His voice right in my ear,

and also reaching further than I can imagine?

Oysters

Hans Iten

Oysters     Our shells clacked on the plates. My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water. Alive and violated, They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ocean. Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered. We had driven to that coast Through flowers and limestone And there we were, toasting friendship, Laying down a perfect memory In the cool of thatch and crockery. Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow, The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome: I saw damp panniers disgorge The frond-lipped, brine-stung Glut of privilege. And was angry that my trust could not repose In the clear light, like poetry or freedom Leaning in from sea. I ate the day Deliberately, that its tang Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.     Seamus Heaney      Reading this poem I find myself trying to add up the words as if their total will be equal to the meaning.     But it doesn't work.   I start again. This time I envision the images. The sound of the shells hitting the plate, the water reflecting the stars, the constellations - and the poet feeling as if he is tasting all those. Then the image of millions of oyster shells opened up and discarded on a beach. A sense of futility, of desolation. Seamus driving through the countryside, and spending time with friends in a stone cottage, thinking as he does this about the distant past, the Romans transporting their loads of oysters across the mountains to wealthy buyers in Rome. (Is this a comment about how beauty has been sold like a product?) And then the last stanza - "I was angry that my trust could not repose in the clear light..." - what does that mean? Is it that he wants to be fully honest and open, but cannot trust how that would be received or used?  And - "I ate the day." Wonderful! First he eats the oyster, and it opens a crack in history and friendship and the desire to be fully open to others - and now, 'eating the day', he overrides his anger at not being able to trust truth to words, by turning himself from words into verbs - that is, action.    Words alive in gesture and motion.  Words speaking through his entire body, his life.   I don't know if that's what the poem is about, but I might be closer to it.

Two Campers in Cloud Country

 

Terry Watkinson

 

 

Two Campers in Cloud Country

(Rock Lake, Canada)

 

In this country there is neither measure nor balance
To redress the dominance of rocks and woods,
The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds.

No gesture of yours or mine could catch their attention,
No word make them carry water or fire the kindling
Like local trolls in the spell of a superior being.

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens:  one wants a vacation
Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;
Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses.

It took three days driving north to find a cloud
The polite skies over Boston couldn't possibly accommodate.
Here on the last frontier of the big, brash spirit

The horizons are too far off to be chummy as uncles;
The colors assert themselves with a sort of vengeance.
Each day concludes in a huge splurge of vermilions

And night arrives in one gigantic step.
It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little.
These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people:

They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.
In a month we'll wonder what plates and forks are for.
I lean to you, numb as a fossil.  Tell me I'm here.

The Pilgrims and Indians might never have happened.
Planets pulse in the lake like bright amoebas;
The pines blot our voices up in their lightest sighs.

Around our tent the old simplicities sough
Sleepily as Lethe, trying to get in.
We'll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn.

 

Sylvia Plath

 

 "It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little."

It's interesting - that sometimes we humans long to be lost in the bigness of something else. That we want to feel small. Its a dangerous smallness, though, when you are lost in Nature, seeing that Nature likes to eat us.  I like how Plath describes the lack of measure and balance, their lostness in the rocks and clouds begins to effect them, even to erasing their sense of selfhood. Nature is soaking them up, absorbing them.

Campers beware!