The Nativity

 

 

     

The Nativity

 
Unfold thy face, unmaske thy ray,
Shine forth, bright Sunne, double the day.
Let no malignant misty fume,
Nor foggy vapour, once presume
To interpose thy perfect sight
This day, which makes us love thy light
For ever better, that we could
That blessèd object once behold,
Which is both the circumference,
And center of all excellence:
Or rather neither, but a treasure
Unconfinèd without measure,
Whose center and circumference,
Including all preheminence,
Excluding nothing but defect,
And infinite in each respect,
Is equally both here and there,
And now and then and every where,
And alwaies, one, himselfe, the same,
A beeing farre above a name.
Draw neer then, and freely poure
Forth all thy light into that houre,
Which was crownèd with his birth,
And made heaven envy earth.
Let not his birth-day clouded be,
By whom thou shinest, and we see.

 

Christopher Harvey 

Reading this poem is like opening a treasure chest in a forgotten room and finding the light of the 16th century shining out of it.

Time melts, barriers dissolve, Christopher Harvey speaks.

The brightness of his words! 

I love the lines - "that object at once the center and the circumference of all excellence, Or rather neither, but a treasure unconfined without measure..."  Attempting to describe the superlative nature of God, he then has to retract, realizing his scope is too small.

(And isn't that still the problem? The marvel being too big, and our imaginations not widewild enough, even five centuries later.)

And this - "By whom thou shinest, and we see." A reminder of the mysterious quality of light itself - we see light, and by it we see. Psalm 36:9 says, For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light." Jesus Christ, the sun and subject of this poem, calls himself "the Light of the world". Light as a metaphor for knowledge, for clarity, for joy, for the  manifestation of beauty, for guidance, for the means of growth, for warmth, for comfort. Jesus is the living, breathing, walking embodiment of all these.

As the poet-prophet Isaiah wrote, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great Light."

Centuries later, Christopher Harvey's words still echo that hope.

"Shine forth, bright Sunne, double the day!"

Laurentian Shield

            

A. J. Casson

      

Laurentian Shield

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.

This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity. A language of flesh and of roses.

Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.

The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.

But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

F.R. Scott 

And land is a language.

I want to argue with this poem. Is the land really "not written upon by history"?  What is writing? What is language? What is history?

Is the land really empty as paper?

"Now there is pre-words/cabin syllables"

I like that image, of an alphabet and then a language forming, that's appealing, clever.

But the land is forming "a long sentence of it's exploitation"?

What is exploitation?

Is a tree exploiting the ground? Is a bird exploiting a flower seedhead?

Is a moose exploiting waterweeds?

Or are only humans capable of exploitation?

What is "the full culture of occupation"?

Isn't the world without an abundance of all life, dead?

Everything about nature is good and about humans, bad?

But who fills the paper with the poem if not the human?

I love this poem, at the same time I want to argue with it.

 

House On a Cliff

House On a Cliff

Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors
The winking signal on the waste of sea.
Indoors the sound of the wind, outdoors the wind.
Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.

Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors
The strong man pained to find his red blood cools,
While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors
The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules.

Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors
The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep.
Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross
Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep.

Louis MacNeice

 

What is this drama?

"Indoors the locked heart and the lost key."

 

I seem to have lost the ability to comment.

I'm at sea. Thinking, wondering, and no words come. 

Memory Green

Simon Garden

Memory Green 

Yes and when the warm unseasonable weather

Comes at the year’s end of the next late year

And the southwest wind that smells of rain and summer

Strips the huge branches of their dying leaves,

And you at dusk along the Friedrichstrasse

Or you in Paris on the windy quay

Shuffle the shallow fallen leaves before you

Thinking the thoughts that like the grey clouds change,

You will not understand why suddenly sweetness

Fills in your heart nor the tears come to your eyes:

You will stand in the June-warm wind and the leaves falling:

When was it so before, you will say, With whom?

You will not remember this at all: you will stand there

Feeling the wind on your throat, the wind in your sleeves,

You will smell the dead leaves in the grass of a garden:

You will close your eyes: With whom, you will say,

Ah where?

Archibald MacLeish

"You will not understand why..."

"You will not remember this at all."

 

 

I don't even know how to talk about this poem. It's about sensations and as-if's, about inexplicable emotions, states of mind and memory for which there are no words.

 

 I see that this is the poet's territory. The poet's work. Travel to the unmapped parts of the human experience and examine what is there. Not what is imagined, hoped for, dreamed - only what is true.

 

 

 "I Carried With Me Poems", by Gail Dusenbery  talks about becoming "the poet's accomplice".

I want to be that too. I want to go to the places there are no words for, and learn with the poets what is true.

 

 

 

The Way Through the Woods

 

The Way Through the Woods

 

They shut the way through the woods

Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again,

And now you would never know

There was once a way through the woods

Before they planted the trees. 

It is underneath the coppice and the heath,

And the thin anemones.

Only the keeper sees 

That, where the ring-dove broods,

And the badgers roll at ease,

There was once a road through the woods. 

 

Yet, if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late,

When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools,

Where the otter whistles his mate,

(They fear not men in the woods, 

Because they see so few.)

You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,

And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

Steadily cantering through 

The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

The old lost road through the woods.

But there is no road through the woods.

 

Rudyard Kipling

 

This poem happened to me a couple weeks ago. 

 

I was driving down some back roads in the countryside where I'd lived years ago. Everything was so familiar. Each curve of the road brought back memories. Trees even, were familiar. The farms, the riverbank, the train tracks and the way the cattails swayed in the ditch alongside the road were like the past come to life. 

But then I came to a dead-end.

The road up the hill was blocked off. It was so strange, beyond the barrier was only forest. 

There was no road at all.

Completely overgrown! No sign even of a path. Trees, underbrush, ferns, nothing else.  It was almost as if I had been wrong, as if I had never traveled there, as if I had imagined or dreamed all the times we had driven around the sharp corners, hit the potholes, splashed through the puddles.

 

I couldn't shake off the feeling afterward. I calculated in my head - it had been two years since I'd last driven up that road. Only two years!

 

So when I read this poem, I thought - it's the ghost of a road he's writing about. 

An unearthly, eerie feeling. It's still with me.

 

How quickly, how completely things can be erased! 

  

 

from Mossbawn

  

  

For Mary Heaney

 

 Sunlight 

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose's wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

Seamus Heaney

 
From "North"

Notice the objects named in this poem:

Pump, bucket, water, griddle, wall, bakeboard, stove, apron, window, goose-wing, nails, shins, two clocks, scoop, meal-bin.

And the two phrases:

"Here is a space", and "here is love."

The way Heaney shows that each object is worked upon by something else. The sun heats the iron of the pump, the water honeys in the bucket, the sun heats the wall.

And she is like this. She works upon the things she touches. She changes things. Warms them, moves them, works them, touches them.

And Time works and moves as well. 

This "sunlit absence", this woman, this remembered warmth of love -

so beautiful.

Marine Surface, Low Overcast

 

 

Marine Surface, Low Overcast 

 

Out of churned aureoles

this buttermilk, this

herringbone of albatross,

floss of mercury,

deshabille of spun

aluminum, furred with a veloute

of looking-glass,

 

a stuff so single

it might almost be lifted,

folded over, crawled underneath

or slid between, as nakedness-

caressing sheets, or donned

and worn, the train-borne

trapping of an unrepeatable

occasion,

 

this wind-silver

rumpling as of oatfields,

a suede of meadow,

a nub, a nap, a mane of lustre

lithe as the slide

of muscle in its

sheath of skin,

 

laminae of living tissue,

mysteries of flex,

affinities of texture,

subtleties of touch, of pressure

and release, the suppleness

of long and intimate

association,

 

new synchronies of fingertip,

of breath, of sequence,

entities that still can rouse,

can stir or solder,

whip to a froth, or force

to march in strictly

hierarchical formation

 

down galleries of sheen, of flux,

cathedral domes that seem to hover

overturned and shaken like a basin

to the noise of voices,

from a rustle to the jostle

of such rush-hour

conglomerations

 

no loom, no spinneret, no forge, no factor,

no process whatsoever, patent

applied or not applied for,

no five-year formula, no fabric

for which pure imagining,

except thus prompted,

can invent the equal.

 

Amy Clampitt 

 

When it comes to description - if there were a Hall of Fame - Amy Clampitt 

would deserve a place there. 

 

"floss of mercury" 

"deshabille of spun aluminum" 

"down galleries of sheen"...

 

  

Can these descriptions ever be equaled?