The Soul's Desert

 

Coventry, after the Blitz

 

The Soul's Desert
August 30, 1939

 

They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.

Beware of taking sides; only watch.

These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but the governments

Of great nations; men favorably

Representative of massed humanity. Observe them.

              Wrath and laughter

Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time

To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert

And look for God - having seen man.

Robinson Jeffers 

fr. Be Angry at the Sun and Other Poems

 

Not knowing much about Jeffers other than that he seemed to see humanity in a rather negative light and preferred nature, or that his politics were controversial in their time, I take his poem for its words rather than its author. Is that correct or not? I don't know. All I can say is that he gives me his poem, not his person, and I trust he was deliberate in his choice of words.

The poem, then! Gosh, it's so clear to me that poetry is what we need these days, words that cut through the murk - that line, "They are warming up the old horrors" -  I see that happening right in front of my eyes. I just read a book about the early days of WW2, in which a Jewish child relates how the change in Germany began, "We were no longer allowed to go to cinemas and theatres and be members of clubs...we could no longer go to universities..." Interesting. They are warming up that "old horror" here in Canada right now. The "unvaccinated" as of the end of September (in British Columbia) will not be allowed in theatres or any ticketed events, restaurants, or fitness centres, and already the Universities Gelph, Toronto, Waterloo, and Carleton have prohibited attendance by any "unvaccinated" student or staff member. Then there's the U of P.E.I, Uof M, and Mount St. Vincent - all falling in line. 

 

The world has been divided in two, the clean and the unclean. 

 

 "Clearly it is time 

to become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert

And look for God - having seen man."

 

It can't be said better. 

 

You, Andrew Marvell

 

 

                                                                           Wilhelm Amberg

You, Andrew Marvell



And here face down beneath the sun

And here upon earth’s noonward height

To feel the always coming on

The always rising of the night:



To feel creep up the curving east

The earthy chill of dusk and slow

Upon those under lands the vast

And ever climbing shadow grow



And strange at Ecbatan the trees

Take leaf by leaf the evening strange

The flooding dark about their knees

The mountains over Persia change



And now at Kermanshah the gate

Dark empty and the withered grass

And through the twilight now the late

Few travelers in the westward pass



And Baghdad darken and the bridge

Across the silent river gone

And through Arabia the edge

Of evening widen and steal on



And deepen on Palmyra’s street

The wheel rut in the ruined stone

And Lebanon fade out and Crete

High through the clouds and overblown



And over Sicily the air

Still flashing with the landward gulls

And loom and slowly disappear

The sails above the shadowy hulls



And Spain go under and the shore

Of Africa the gilded sand

And evening vanish and no more

The low pale light across that land



Nor now the long light on the sea:



And here face downward in the sun

To feel how swift how secretly

The shadow of the night comes on ...



Louis MacNiece

Night poems come in so many forms - symbolic, descriptive, meditations on death or parting (really, I should put together a collection for comparison and contrast). In this one, darkness creeps inexorably over the globe, swallowing cities, whole nations and countries. Deserts and mountains go dark, the clouds fade out, bridges go under, trees disappear leaf by leaf - night becomes almost like a mythological creature, a magical being that transforms the world as we know it into something strange and unfamiliar. A poem that never fails to remind me of the turning earth and the mysterious rhythms we all live within.

 

 *The title refers to the Andrew Marvell poem "To His Coy Mistress" which famously admonishes the reader to make the most of time, and seize opportunity before it's gone.

 

 

 

The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews

 

Unknown

The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews

 

An ingenuity too astonishing

to be quite fortuitous is

this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-

lined and shaped like a teacup.

                                             A step

down and you're into it; a

wilderness swallows you up:

ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-

to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted

understory, an overhead

spruce-tamarack horizon hinting

you'll never get out of here.

                                           But the sun

among the sundews, down there,

is so bright, an underfoot

webwork of carnivorous rubies,

a star-swarm thick as the gnats

they're set to catch, delectable

double-faced cockleburs, each

hair-tip a sticky mirror

afire with sunlight, a million

of them and again a million,

each mirror a trap set to 

unhand unbelieving,

                                   that either

a First Cause said once, "Let there

be sundews," and there were, or they've

made their way here unaided

other than by that backhand, round-

about refusal to assume responsibility

known as Natural Selection.

                                        But the sun

underfoot is so dazzling

down there among the sundews,

there is so much light

in the cup that, looking,

you start to fall upward.

 

Amy Clampitt 

 

I know the exact spot. The back 40 of my childhood home, standing in the cutline that made a slash through our property, up to my knees in the muskeg. It's not really land that you stand on there, it's plant material who knows how deep. Is it "ground" you reach when you finally stop sinking, or has your weight simply compacted the sphagnum enough to give you somewhere to push off from? Hard to tell. There isn't really anything to call "solid ground", or dry. You're neither on water nor on land, you're in both.

"Wetfooted understory"  Clampitt has perfectly balanced accuracy and artistry in that description - sinking down that far brings the strange flora right up to your eyes, after all. And she is telling the truth - you wonder how the heck you're going to get out of there. And it's urgent, because the mosquito hordes have already found you and in a strange micro/macrocosm way you are like a bug caught by a carnivorous host and the humour of it only comes to you long afterward when you are back safe on your heavily screened porch, be-smeared with the contents of an entire bottle of calamine lotion. 

 A week later it is even better. Then you are able to read poetry and recall that indeed, the light in that place was beautiful, and the plants extraordinary. (Whether it was God or Satan who created it all is a question that lingers whinily way back in the dark corners of your mind.)

 

 

The Kittiwake

                              

Unknown

The Kittiwake

With blistered heels and bones that ache,
Marching through pitchy ways and blind,
The miry track is hard to make;
Yet, ever hovering in my mind,
Above red crags a kittiwake
Hangs motionless against the wind—
Grey-winged, white-breasted and black-eyed,
Against red crags of porphyry
That pillar from a sapphire tide
A sapphire sky. . . . Indifferently
The raw lad limping at my side
Blasphemes his boots, the world, and me. . . .
Still keen, unwavering and alert,
Within my aching empty mind
The bright bird hovers—and the dirt
Of bottomless black ways and blind,
And all the hundred things that hurt
Past healing, seem to drop behind.

 

 

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

 "Yet ever hovering in my mind" - what do you call that? An image within an image? The bird in the sky and the bird in the mind? I love the inner/outer exploration Gibson show us. Is this what everyone does? Do we all see something in nature and within ourselves simultaneously? Is there an almost unconscious relating ourselves to another form of life? Is there something about us that is tree-like, for instance? 

There must be hundreds of poems in which a person, at a low moment, looks at the landscape, the trees, or the creatures around them and says something like, "That leaf with the blotches and dried edges, that is how I am inside", or "If only I could be like that grass-blade I just stepped on - it springs up again after I'm gone." 

We seem to be in a conversation with our world. "Kittiwake" is a particularly beautiful expression of that. The image of the bird is like the action of the mind, rising up, leaving the trouble behind, letting it go. There's comfort in that thought, even when the trouble must be gone through.

 

First Fight. Then Fiddle.

 

Dmitri Belyukin

First Fight. Then Fiddle.

 First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string
With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note
With hurting love; the music that they wrote
Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing
Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing
For the dear instrument to bear. Devote
The bow to silks and honey. Be remote
A while from malice and from murdering,
But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate
In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late
For having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin with grace.

 

Gwendolyn  Brooks 

 

I like how she says "fight first", and sets off about music as if she just can't resist. All things sweet and lovely - work at them with all possible skill and subtlety. She gets caught up in the thought and has to tear herself away -  

 "But first to arms." 

 There's something about this poem at this moment in time. I've carried it with me since I was a teen, and felt that dichotomy of  - needing to do what's necessary before doing what's pleasurable and preferred, but it's now that it really hits home.

Something in these circumstances tells me, 'Deal with the important things now, be alert, gather your strength, put up your guard.'

I have lived in a peaceful country til now, I've been able to experience the unbelievable blessing of expecting to be safe. I think those days are gone. The weather has changed, there's a feeling in the air - something's on the wind, there's a sound of voices from far-off places.

 What does it mean?   

 

 

June Wind

Unknown

 June Wind

I watched wind ripple the field's supple grasses.

For once earth is alive while restless ocean

Lies still beyond it like a flat blue screen.

I watch the wind burnishing as it passes,

Lifting soft waves, an ecstasy of motion,

A long glissando through the static green.

These waves crash on no rock; rooted, they stay,

As restless love, that ocean, changes over

And comes to land, alive, a shining field

Caught in wind's captivating gentle play

As though a harp played by a subtle lover --

And the tormented ocean has been stilled.

May Sarton

 

This one is sheer self-indulgence. There is something so gorgeous about a field of grasses swaying in the wind - it's one of my favourite things, and any poem about it gets my attention. Like Barley Bending by Sara Teasdale, is an excellent example, it's theme that of the grass's ability to bend without breaking. And Patrick Kavanagh's  Consider the Grass Growing - which makes special note of the time of year and the joy in seasonal repetition, especially of the sensation of spring grass brushing one's ankles.

 

 But May Sarton's poem is all about the motion. That line, "a long glissando through the static green." that's incredible - how does that work? Can one see a glissando? I saw it when I read it, even though a glissando is something you hear. A poet can do these kind of shifts, jump from one sense to the next in a seamless unfolding of pure expression - and what? Well, we see, we feel, we understand - with all the senses.

 

 "For once earth is alive."  And that's what gets to me, what I love about a field of grasses moving in the wind - it's as if the earth is breathing. Sarton compares it to an instrument being played  - that's interesting, we can imagine fingers of the wind running octaves of motion over the field. Does that mean the ocean and land are part of an organic orchestra, each taking turns in a cosmic composition for the senses? 

 

Looking through the lens of the poem, it would sure seem so.

 

 

 

 

In a Dark Time

 

Yaroslav Gerzhedovich

 

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,   

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   

And in broad day the midnight come again!   

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke

This poem has been on my mind a long time. Most of us are put off by poems we don't understand. It feels like failure to not grasp what's being said. And yet, I wonder if good poems (it doesn't do to respect a poem too much, like anything, there are differences in quality) aren't purposely intended to be wrestled with. Aren't they a questioning, a puzzling-out-loud? It seems to me that I can enter a poem and walk around, look through its rooms, pick up an object here, wonder why it's there, try sitting in a chair - no, it doesn't quite suit, look out the window at the view from here. The poem seems to be a living contender, an arrangement of ideas I talk to, and who talk back. A construction that either stands when shaken, or falls flat.

 

So I wrestle with the poem. That first line "In a dark time, the eye begins to see" gets me immediately. Isn't that just how our eyes adjust to darkness? It takes time, but slowly, we begin to make out the edges of things, the shapes of familiar objects - that's the garage, there's the fence-line, oh, the pine tree and the gate-latch. At this moment in life, that line alone (never mind the rest of the poem) captures my experience. I am trying to make out familiar shapes in the darkness. I'm fumbling around, not sure what I bumped into, but, oh yes, I see now - that was here before, but I didn't recognize it. 

 

"What's madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstance?" I'm chewing on that one. 

 

"I know the purity of pure despair/ My shadow pinned against a sweating wall." Isn't it remarkable how an image can perfectly embody a feeling? It's as if there is another language out there, or an incarnation for each thought and state of mind. Maybe that's what poets are doing - fumbling through a dark alphabet- forest, searching for a familiar shape to bring back with them into the light? 

 

What does "the mind enters itself" mean?

 

And isn't it so true, "A man goes far to find out what he is."?

 

And then, even though I can't explain why, "the edge is what I have" is dead-on accurate. Maybe it's that I am finally making out the lines of certain objects in the darkness - not the entirety, certainly not the whole.No, the edge is what I have.

Well, it's a beginning.