In the deep heart’s core

Mary (Baroness) Warnock has been issuing reports and pronouncing on overweight domestic issues throughout my professional life. In addition to this, she is a philosopher (I read her book on existentialism) and one of the current stony outcrop of the Great and the Good. I was on a Newsnight programme with her some years ago, when in the hospitality room Jeremy Paxman interrupted us obsequiously to solicit her opinion about his book, The English. She obliged, as I recall. Anyway, I happened to hear her in interview on the radio, enthusing about Robert Bridges’ The Spirit Of Man (1916), which was the main poetry anthology around in her girlhood and which influenced her throughout her life.

Robert Bridges, poet laureate

This aroused my curiosity and I obtained a copy which I read from cover to cover. Bridges was acknowledged in 1932 by FR Leavis in his New Bearings as a brave early patron of Gerard Manley Hopkins, though as I recall he chided him also for not exposing Hopkins more and interfering editorially with him less. It is true that a great many of the items in The Spirit Of Man have been fussed and fiddled with by Bridges, sometimes profitably, sometimes unnecessarily, including translations from the Latin and Greek which Bridges wanted to do all over again.

I don’t think anybody reads the poems of Robert Bridges today. His grandson (or great grandson) is a friend of mine and he certainly doesn’t read his ancestor. The Collected Poems is the sort of thing one could find quite easily in the little second-hand bookshops of yesteryear, like those of John Masefield and John Greenleaf Whittier. TS Eliot was still reprinting him in 1941, according to the cover of Harold Monro’s The Silent Pool. But De la Mare and the Georgians were rubbing shoulders with Ezra Pound, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender, WH Auden and Louis MacNeice, Edith Sitwell and Roy Campbell at this point. It is interesting that Eliot kept Bridges, Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas in play. How time has sorted this list out, to be sure.

John Masefield

Nevertheless, the following short poem by Bridges seems to me both deft and intriguing:

The Evening Darkens Over

The evening darkens over

After a day so bright,

The windcapt waves discover

That wild will be the night.

There’s sound of distant thunder.

~-~

The latest sea-birds hover

Along the cliff’s sheer height;

As in the memory wander

Last flutterings of delight,

White wings lost on the white.

~-~

There’s not a ship in sight;

And as the sun goes under,

Thick clouds conspire to cover

The moon that should rise yonder.

Thou art alone, fond lover.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Bridges keeps all his 449 anthology entries anonymous, though he provides both a key and some scholarly notes at the back of the book. Many of the items are in French, some medieval French, though presumably this would not have troubled young Mary, at school in Winchester. The method of anonymity enables the reader to approach each offering with a modern but unglazed eye. Many chestnuts, to be sure, are easily recognisable but the playing field is surprisingly level.

I thus came to notice, as I read, that one figure loomed head and shoulders above the contemporary and now forgotten fustian of the likes of Dixon, namely that of the young WB Yeats. This seemed to me an essentially novel way of coming at the irruption of the talented and confident young poet in the years just before the First World War. I mentioned this to a friend who is a Yeats and Celtic Twilight scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, and to my amazement she obtained a copy of The Spirit Of Man and hunted up precisely the poems I meant.

Perhaps this is another example of Bridges spotting a significant winner. He was not entirely up-to-date with Yeats, since another two books had been published before he came to compile The Spirit Of Man, but he drew from the first four (1889-1904). The poems in question are as follows:

1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
2. The Man Who Dreamed Of Faeryland
3. The Sad Shepherd
4. He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven
5. The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart (Bridges breaks up the long lines into two)
6. The Ragged Wood (Bridges seems to have been working here from an early variant subsequently revised)
7. Into The Twilight (Bridges extracts the first quatrain only)
8. The Pity Of Love.

Bridges does not allow Yeats any of his titles, perhaps to enhance the anonymity. But the impact of these early poems, among the patinas of the museum and the featureless modern sawdust alike, is remarkable. They afford us a sidelong glance at an over-familiar eminence. Most of these poems are a century old, though Yeats seems distinguished enough now to be considered the foremost poet of the first quarter of the last century. If he is old, why so is Beethoven, whose youthful piano concertos also remind me of a young colt frisking in an empty Swiss meadow, running up and down, with mountains all around, tossing his mane.

The frisky young Beethoven

Perhaps it is Yeats’s confidence. If ‘Innisfree’ is already familiar, and I want to come back to that poem, then we first meet an unfamiliar Yeats, like the Unknown Knight coming forward under a inscrutable gage at a tourney, in the following lines:

He stood among the crowd at Dromahair;

His heart hung all upon a silken dress,

And he had known at last some tenderness [...]

Immediately, as sometimes with Browning, one comes across a level of unafraid emotional maturity. This poem consists of four 12-line stanzas, all purposefully but easily handled, and ends:

The man has found no comfort in the grave.

Yeats does a standard fin-de-siècle poem as well as anybody, as in the Dowson-like ‘The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart’ (he dedicated his second book to Lionel Johnson of ‘The Dark Angel’), but one feels he is already beyond this. He works within an assumption of ─ not form: that has never gone away ─ but metre and rhyme, bit and bridle. But he handles classical models with an assurance bordering on sangfroid. Once again, the young stallion is tossing its head in the meadow. For instance, ‘He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven ‘ opens:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with gold and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of the night and light and the half-light [...]

WB Yeats by Augustus John 1907

(the monosyllables and spondees here arousing the reader to un-classical fervour) and ends:

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Notice how the rhetorical overpowers the metrical. It is hard to see AE Housman, a near contemporary, allowing himself such liberties and prospectively inspiring Malcolm Muggeridge.

AE Housman

This poem seems to have been conceived as a whole before ever pen was set to paper, like the remarkable ‘The Pity Of Love’:

A pity beyond all telling

Is hid in the heart of love:

The folk who are buying and selling,

The clouds on their journey above,

The cold wet winds ever blowing,

And the shadowy hazel grove

Where mouse-grey waters are flowing,

Threaten the head that I love.

Here, the full force of rhetorical drive piles up in the initial dactyl of the final line. Similarly, the first stanza of ‘Into the Twilight’ ─ the only one admitted by Bridges ─ exemplifies a moody, pensive exploratoriness that is hard to match among his contemporaries in 1899:

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

One can see that this might lodge in the auditory imagination of Robert Bridges.

WB Yeats, the romantic idealist, by John Singer Sargent

Which brings me to that dreadfully familiar poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree.’ Here one has to forget the remarkable crackly recording of Yeats’s own reading and forget, too, the anaesthetic effect of meeting it in innumerable anthologies, and read it afresh, so that one can notice that this is a wholly unsentimental poem. Indeed it is primarily an acoustic poem, one that alludes to the effect of sound while not especially contriving such effects. Although the linnet’s wings are a visual exception, we are invited to consider the sound of bees and cricket and water lapping. The poet returns to the city, to tread the roads and pavements, but he still carries the echoes within him:

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

This is a daring and irresistible plunge to the heart of poetic sensibility. Experimental psychologists have not, as yet, had anything illuminating to say about this most central aspect of human linguistic capacity, what Eliot called ‘the auditory imagination’ and what many poets, Pasternak and Bunting among them, have isolated as the matrix of poetic creativity.

WB Yeats 1923 after winning the Nobel Prize

It may, too, be relevant to evaluate Yeats’s writing ability (not his attitudes and beliefs, which are another story altogether), his artistic and rhetorical power, in relation to these gusts of prophetic current issuing from what he himself called “the deep heart’s core”.

Our reverence on the birth centenary of Stephen Spender, Bishnu Dey and Aashapurna Devi

This edition includes critical essays on Stephen Spender, Bishnu Dey and Aashapurna Devi along side with an interview of Zapatista leder Subcomandante Marcos with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

An amazing series of juxtapositions from Locust St:

Round 12:

Picasso is a gunslinger

I had thought earlier in the night that you can’t run when you are sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle and cartridges; I learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or one hundred armed men after you.

George Orwell, “Homage to Catalonia.”

The guns spell money’s ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the Spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.

Stephen Spender, “Ultima Ratio Regum.”

If you find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed,
Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist.
Ask the Dalai Lama in the hills of Tibet
How many monks did the Chinese get?

Joe Strummer, “Washington Bullets.”

He carried a shotgun–a weapon I thought was outlawed in international war–and the shotgun itself was a measure of his professionalism, for to use it effectively requires an exact blend of courage and skill and self-confidence. The weapon is neither accurate nor lethal at much over seventy yards. So it shows the skill of the carrier, a man who must work his way close enough to the prey to make a shot, close enough to see the enemy’s retina and the tone of his skin. The shotgun is not an automatic weapon. You must hit once, on the first shot, and the hit must kill.

Tim O’Brien, “If I Die in a Combat Zone.”

Other things:

Bataille Socialiste, with some wonderful 1936 photos from Paris en images. And, in French, a piece on the late, lovely Mary Low. (In English, see here, here.)

Eamonn McDonagh on the Livingstone formulation in Madrid.

Entdichlung with more from the archive (including Ernie Haberkern: The Left and Max Shachtman Part 1 AWL 1995).

(कविता – स्तेफ़ान स्पेंडर)

बंदूकें धन के अंतिम कारण के हिज्जे बताती हैं
बसंत में पहाड़ों पर सीसे के अक्षरों में
लेकिन जैतून के पेड़ों के नीचे मरा पड़ा वो लड़का
अभी बच्चा ही था और बहुत अनाड़ी भी
उनकी महती आँखों के ध्यान में आने के लिए।
वो तो चुंबन के लिए बेहतर निशाना था।

जब वो ज़िंदा था, मिलों की ऊँची चिमनियों ने उसे कभी नहीं बुलाया।
ना ही रेस्तराँ के शीशों के दरवाज़े घूमे उसे अंदर ले लेने के लिए।
उसका नाम कभी अखबारों में नहीं आया।
दुनिया ने अपनी पारंपरिक दीवार बनाए रक्खी
मृतकों के चारों तरफ़ और अपने सोने को भी गहरे दबाए रक्खा,
जबकि उसकी ज़िंदगी, शेयर बाज़ार की अगोचर अफ़वाह की तरह, बाहर भटकती रही।

अरे, उसने अपनी टोपी खेल-खेल में ही फेंक दी
एक दिन जब हवा ने पेड़ों से पंखुड़ियाँ फेंकीं।
फूलहीन दीवार से बंदूकें फूट पड़ीं,
मशीन गन के गुस्से ने सारी घास काट डाली;
झंडे और पत्तियाँ गिरने लगे हाथों और शाखों से;
ऊनी टोपी बबूल में सड़ती रही।

उसकी ज़िंदगी पर गौर करो जिसकी कोई कीमत नहीं थी
रोज़गार में, होटलों के रजिस्टर में, खबरों के दस्तावेज़ों में
गौर करो। दस हज़ार में एक गोली एक आदमी को मारती है।
पूछो। क्या इतना खर्चा जायज़ था
इतनी बचकानी और अनाड़ी ज़िंदगी पर
जो जैतून के पेड़ों के नीचे पड़ी है, ओ दुनिया, ओ मौत?

अनुवादक : अनिल एकलव्य

(कविता – स्तेफ़ान स्पेंडर)

मैं हमेशा उनके बारे में सोचता हूँ जो सच में महान थे

मैं हमेशा उनके बारे में सोचता हूँ जो सच में महान थे।
जिन्होंने, गर्भ से, आत्मा के इतिहास को याद किया
रोशनी के गलियारों से होते हुए जहाँ समय के सूरज होते हैं
अंतहीन और गाते हुए, जिनकी खूबसूरत महत्वाकांक्षा
थी कि उनके होंठ, अब भी आग की तपन से लैस,
सिर से पैर तक गीत पहने उस जीवट की बात कहें
और जिन्होंने बसंत की शाखों से जमा कर लीं
चाहतें जो उसके शरीर पर फैली थीं मंजरियों जैसे

बेशकीमती है कभी न भूलना
अमर बसंत के रक्त से लिया गया आह्लाद का सार
हमारी पृथ्वी के पहले की दुनियाओं से चट्टानें तोड़ कर आते हुए,
कभी ना नकारना सुबह के सहज प्रकाश में इसके आनंद को
ना ही इसकी शाम की प्रेम की गंभीर मांग को।
यातायात को कभी आहिस्ता से ना घोंटने देना
शोर से और धुंध से इस जीवट का पनपना।

बर्फ़ के पास, सूरज के पास, सबसे ऊंचे मैदानों में
देखो कैसे इन नामों का सम्मान हो रहा है लहराती घास द्वारा
और सफ़ेद बादलों की नावों के द्वारा
और ध्यान से सुन रहे आकाश में हवा की फुसफुसाहट द्वारा
जिन्होंने अपने दिल मे रखा आग के मरकज़ को,
सूरज से जन्मे वे कुछ समय सूरज की तरफ ही चल पड़े,
और चंचल हवा पर अपने मान के हस्ताक्षर छोड़ गए।

अनुवादक : अनिल एकलव्य

STEPHEN SPENDER
a centenary conference

Friday 27 February 2009

organised by the Institute of English Studies and the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust

Speakers: John Sutherland, Barbara Hardy, Val Cunningham, Peter McDonald, Mark Rawlinson, Alan Jenkins, Stephen Romer, Mike Scammell

Sir Stephen Spender (1909–1995), poet, translator, literary critic and editor, was born in London and educated at Oxford, where he first became associated with such other outstanding British literary figures as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice. His book The Thirties and After (1979) recalls these figures and others prominent in the arts and politics and his Journals 1939–1983 , published in 1986, are a detailed account of his times and contemporaries. Knighted in 1983 for services to literature, Stephen Spender is the only Briton ever to have held the post of Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, as the American equivalent of Poet Laureate was then called.

His passionate and lyrical verse, filled with images of the modern industrial world yet intensely personal, is collected in volumes such as Twenty Poems (1930), The Still Centre (1939), Poems of Dedication (1946), Collected Poems, 1928–1985 (1986) and New Collected Poems (2004). World Within World , Stephen Spender’s autobiography, World Within World, is recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to come out of the 1930s and 1940s.

Stephen Spender’s other works include literary and social criticism, short stories, novels and the heavily autobiographical The Temple (set in Germany on the 1930s) as well as translations of the poetry of Lorca, Altolaguerra, Rilke, Hölderlin, Stefan George and Schiller. From 1939 to 1941 he co-edited Horizon magazine with Cyril Connolly and was editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1967.

Stephen Spender’s teaching at American universities during the 1960s was followed by a six-year stint from 1970 in the English department of UCL, when he and Grey Gowrie were appointed to chairs by Frank Kermode, who wanted (in the words of John Sutherland) ‘to reconnect the department with the living world of London letters’. During this time Spender’s passionate concern for the rights of banned and silenced writers to free expression led to his founding Index on Censorship. John Sutherland has written the authorised biography of Stephen Spender, published by Penguin in 2004. The New Collected Journals are scheduled for publication by Faber in late 2009.

Conference papers will explore Stephen Spender’s poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his relationship to the political and historical developments of his time, and will reassess his achievement in the light of recent archival research and new critical perspectives.
Full programme to be confirmed and registration to open in the New Year.

Enquiries: Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email jon.millington@sas.ac.uk

time to recommend some further reading, related to what i posted and what i will post. and also to give some feeling to how it was before, before the big cut of the second world war. also with the intention to maybe follow some of these lines from way back to today… and yes, i have to smile, they are all, eer, gay-themed. the last one amazingly frank, actually…

the obvious choice is christoph isherwoods goodbye berlin. and yes, it has been an inspiration for the musical and film cabaret. well well – the book is better. sorry, liza… and isherwood is always recommended, anyway… and yes, goodbye berlin might be a good starting point to get into the history of the weimarer republik, its culture, but also to get into the work of mister isherwood.

second i do recommend a book written in the twenties but published much later. a book which draws a fascinating picture of germany between the wars. and it is about the body: the temple, which gave stephen spender’s book the title… i remember having it read with a lot of enjoyment. the stuck up brit and the golden, young germans withouth worries…and it’s funny, it will always remind me of a golden summer in amsterdam…

but then one that really amazed me – i have to admit i did read it only lately, is the first novel by klaus mann: der fromme tanz. written at the tender age of 19 it is quite shocking, actually. most people describe the crowd in the book as bohème – i’d rather use demi-monde… it explores the topics of art in a big sense – the art of / for a generation, the search, or rather the recognizing of love – be it in its most abstract, be it in its most carnal. it is really a quite amazing little book. at the same time it is also interesting to read about the cabarets, the shady bars, the coked up hustlers…

i also recommend to research all three author’s lifes a little bit – and yes, this time wikipedia isn’t a bad place to start.

allright, for the ones less into reading i do have some music. well, not me exactly, but zakkorama does. presenting a “little” series of german popular music especially from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. some artist already have shown up here on this blog, some will still show up… start here with part 1 and 2 – and then you’ll find under june the other parts – including a bonus at the end. and don’t forget to say thank you!

“Qué sonido vibra alto en el aire

Rumor de maternal lamento

Qué hordas encapuchadas hormiguean

Por llanuras sin fin, tropezando en las grietas de la tierra

Cercados por el liso horizonte

Qué ciudad es esa sobre las montañas

Que se resquebraja y ajusta y estalla en el aire violeta

Torres que se derrumban

Jerusalem Atenas Alejandría

Viena Londres

Fantasmal”.

T.S. Eliot: “The Waste Land”

Eliot ronda una vez más las sacudidas de la actualidad. El 29 de septiembre lo cité a propósito de la Crisis en Wall Street ( y por su parte también lo hizo Una temporada en el infierno). Hoy la crisis no está sólo en Wall Street sino que está extendida. La Revista Renacimiento, en su número 59-60, acaba de dedicar un monográfico a Eliot. Stephen Spender, en la intervención que sobre Eliot tuvo en Barcelona en 1988 y algunos de cuyos fragmentos se publican en este monográfico, habla de que “The Waste Land” “hacía referencia, como yo creo – dice -, a la idea del fin de la Civilización (…) Al final de los años veinte y principio de los treinta, parecía realmente pertenecer a esa serie de libros escritos en el caos de la época y que pertenecían a este fin de la Civilización Occidental”.

Estos días Time se pregunta -acompañando a esta fotografía de las colas del paro en el Chicago de 1931 – si esto es el fin de la prosperidad.

El fin. Todo el mundo habla del fin de algo.

Y todo el mundo dice que no estamos en el fin sino en el principio.

(Imágenes: Fráncfort-foto: Ralp Orlowski/Getty.-Time/ Chicago, 1931.-foto: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty.-Time)

*Bossy, Deucey apologies to Bruce Almighty – and Manfred Mann …

At the webzine of Greek paytoplayboyleocon Tacky Thermidorapocalypse (note to self: spellcheck nom de Révélation Française), Austin “Do I Tickle Your Apostate, Baby?” Bramwell asks, Is the conservative movement worth conserving? [tip: Dan "The Pipes are Calling" McCarthy]

Good question. I know if I had a syphilitic uncle, 65 or so, who had lurched in life, in a perpetual vibrato triggering an equally unsleeping optic-cranial rollback, from complacent adolescence to advanced senile dementia without ever having enjoyed the bracing charms of responsible adulthood, and one prone to channeling the voices in his head while masturbating before paying crowds, I’d probably humor him as much as time allowed, while arranging behind the scenes for his medication and his life support to be discreetly cut, after a decent interval: I kill because I love…

Best-bit Bramwell’d bullets:

Everything human dies, soon or late, as Irving “My Son, the Dauphin ” Kristol once said to me, regarding the lamented death of Encounter magazine , whose founding editor he was, along with Stephen Spender . For which, thanks be to a Providence as becoming in mercy as it is so abundantly in mirth.

DET ÄR INTE var dag som en ny tidskrift lanseras som vill “fira vår civilisation, dess konst och dess värderingar – speciellt demokrati, debatt och yttrandefrihet – i en tid när dessa är under hot”.

Den nya brittiska tidskriften Standpoint har satt ribban högt. Dess redaktör, Daniel Johnson, vill se tidskriften som arvtagare till Encounter som startades 1953 av Irving Kristol (vars fru sitter i Standpoints “advisory board”) och Stephen Spender.

Encouner var ett forum där den fria världens intellektuella kunde debattera och ta upp kampen mot de kommunistiska idéerna som svepte över världen och hotade att även underminera de västerländska demokratierna.

Enligt Johnson var det först med efterdyningarna av den 11 september 2001 som det fanns förutsättningar och en moralisk grogrund för en efterföljare till den numera insomnade tidskriften.

The aftermath revealed such moral cowardice and intellectual confusion on both sides of the Atlantic that the battle of ideas has sometimes seemed in danger of being lost by default. To defend and celebrate Western civilisation is not merely desirable; it is imperative.

Om man utgår ifrån premiärnumret så kan Standpoint (med devisen “Think again”) liknas vid en elegantare månadsversion av nyhetsmagasinet The Spectator (“Champagne for the brain”). Och lyckas man med det är det bara att gratulera.

Man gör inte någon hemlighet av att man vill skapa en sofistikerad tidskrift; “unashamedly highbrow in an era of relentless ‘dumbing down,’ it responds to the unfulfilled needs of the educated public”.

Tidskriften har lyckats få med en imponerande antal kända namn. Här bidrar exempelvis krönikörerna Craig Brown (The Daily Telegraph), Nick Cohen (The Observer) och Charles Moore (The Spectator); författarna Julie Burchill, Antonia Fraser och Alain de Botton; historikerna Robert Conquest (som bidrar med sex dikter!), Andrew Roberts och Michael Burleigh; USA:s f.d. ambassadör i London Raymond Seitz; konstnären David Hockney samt många, många fler.

I tidskriftens rådgivande organ sitter en imponernade samling personer. Mest kända är kanske Michael Burleigh, David Hockney CH, Noel Malcolm, Sir V.S. Naipaul KB, Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, Michael Gove MP, Baron Lawson of Blaby, PC.

Standpoint ges ut av idéinstitutet Social Affairs Unit i London. Denna “think tank” citerar med stolthet på sin hemsida ett omnämnande från The Times;

The Social Affairs Unit is famous for driving its coach and horses through the liberal consensus scattering intellectual picket lines as it goes [and] for raising questions which strike most people most of the time as too dangerous or too difficult to think about.

Det är helt uppenbart att det är i denna anda som Standpoint kommer att verka. 

Daniel Johnson konstaterar att det är farligt att anta att de värderingar och framgångar som har präglat den västerländska civilisationens utveckling skulle vara universellt accepterade, eller att det öppna samhällets -i huvudsak positiva – framgångar inte skulle kunna vändas emot oss.

Våra lagar, friheter och tekniska framgångar kommer alltid att exploateras av demokratins fiender. “Standpoint, however, intends to be a beacon of hope”.

Ett sådant “mission statement” är imponerande och det är bara att hoppas att tidningen kommer lyckas nå sina läsare.

“You dream”, he said, “because of the child
Asleep in the nest of your body, who dreams”

(The Dream, Stephen Spender, Collected Poems 1928-1985, Faber and Faber, 1985, p. 131)

“Tu sogni”, egli disse, “grazie al bimbo
addormentato nel nido del tuo corpo, che sogna!”

Giusto due versi (che ho provato a tradurre velocemente) e la foto della margheritina che mia figlia ha raccolto per me questa mattina ( e per me è stato il più bel regalo del mondo!)…per augurare a tutte le mamme:

Buona festa della mamma!!

“I think continually of those who were truly great–
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.”

-Stephen Spender

I don’t have heroes any more. Not really. When I was growing up there were certain sports stars I revered and as a six year old I looked on in wonder as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin gamboled about on the pitted, ancient surface of the moon.

Now I’m a man in my mid-forties and my views on the subject of heroes have been jaundiced by decades of lies and evasions from leaders of all political persuasions. Athletes these days are remote, rich and juiced on any performance enhancing drug they can get their hands on. And it turns out that Neil Armstrong is a rather cold, undemonstrative man and Buzz Aldrin spent the entire Apollo mission sulking because he wasn’t going to be the first one out the hatch once they set down in the Sea of Tranquility.

Heroes nowadays are at a disadvantage—Caesar and Alexander and Boadicea never had to put up with celebrity biographers (just malicious gossip), the Andrew Mortons and Kitty Kelleys of the world peeping in keyholes and tracking down anyone with a bit of tittle to tattle. It’s hard to rally the citizenry and inspire high minded ideals while trying to cover up or defend some transgression or moral lapse. The optics are really awful.

When I’m looking for a bit of inspiration, a true tale to remind me of the strength and resilience of the human spirit, I look to the past, often the very distant past. Seeking those individuals who seized control of their own fates, who were determined, regardless of the cost “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (Tennyson). These men and women didn’t employ spin doctors or commission polls before determining policies and tactics.

We don’t find leaders of the quality of Leonidas, Xenophon or Marcus Aurelius in the halls of power these days. No figures of unimpeachable authority and strength to admire and emulate.

Take a look at the head of state of your country. Would you follow that person to the ends of the earth, serve them without question, suffer extreme deprivation, enter the very depths of Hell itself at their behest?

I rest my case.

Do the soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq feel heroic, like latter-day versions of Achilles and Agamemnon, laying siege to the fortresses of terrorism? Or are they just guys and gals who have a job to do, a family to support, hoping and praying each and every night before they bed down that they’ll survive their tours of duty?

We’ve become a smaller people, soft and pliant; hedonistic narcissists, indifferent to the world around us. We don’t dare dream and rarely does our gaze stray to the horizon line (for the most part we keep our heads down and try not to meet anyone’s eyes).

Historical narratives presented by the likes of Stephen Pressfield, Conn Iggulden, Robert Graves and Michael Curtis Ford evoke past ages with thrilling vigor and elan. These authors devote incredible time and energy researching the great and near great, presenting us with gorgeous, vibrant, utterly convincing portrayals that are documentary-like in their realism, provoking a constant sense of you are there. In the process, we are reminded of what frail and timid things we are in comparison, how addicted to creature comforts, how far removed from suffering and strife. We were a much sturdier, hardier breed in days of yore.

In America, it was the pioneers who came closest to the kind of heroic courage that is the making of myths and legends. Unfortunately, they soon gave way to the lawyers and bankers, mercantilism replacing true grit. From Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, Lewis & Clark and Davey Crockett to being a “nation of shopkeepers”.

I grieve for what has been lost—the price of “progress”, which seems to instill a desire for stability, comfort…and mediocrity. I crave heroes, the visions and dreams they inspire. We’re poorer as a species without such men and women. They show us what might be possible if we exert ourselves for a higher purpose and deny or withhold from us the bright attractions of commonplace things.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.
 

 I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great

Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Stephen Spender

Listen

Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.
These have their leave; while new battalions wait
On time at last to bring them violent peace.

All have become so nervous and so cold
That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.
Once a boy hummed a popular marching song,
Once a novice hand flapped the salute;
The voice was choked the lifted hand fell,
Shot through the wrist by those of his own side.

From their numb harvest all would flee, except
For discipline drilled once in an iron school
Which holds them at the point of a revolver.
Yet when they sleep, the images of home
Ride wishing horses of escape
Which herd the plain in a mass unspoken poem.

Finally, they cease to hate: for although hate
Bursts from the air and whips the earth like hail
Or pours it up in fountains to marvel at,
And although hundreds fell, who can connect
The inexhaustible anger of the guns
With the dumb patience of these tormented animals?

Clean silence drops at night when a little walk
Divides the sleeping armies, each
Huddled in linen woven by remote hands.
When the machines are stilled, a common suffering
Whitens the air with breath and makes both one
As though these enemies slept in each other’s arms.

Only the lucid friend to aerial raiders,
The brilliant pilot moon, stares down
Upon the plain she makes a shining bone
Cut by the shadow of many thousand bones.
Where amber clouds scatter on no-man’s-land
She regards death and time throw up
The furious words and minerals which kill life

Reading Spender, I almost always have the sense of something metallic and assembled, a feat of engineering, a poetry of girders and rivets. Spender’s poems do not fly, they remain firmly bolted to the page, their phrases gleaming like true steel, their voice at once greased and rusty. They are exquisite machines, these poems, and they hum with the energy of the earth. And for all their complex gadgetry, there is nothing contrived about them – ugly at first glance, they are models of efficiency, turning out the truth with ruthless precision, every cog necessary, every word tightened to its exact torque. They are poems for a metal landscape, roaring and unadorned.

Today’s poem is a good example [1]. It is a poem crammed with death and despair, conveying perfectly the sense of being trapped and crushed in the giant machine that is war, and yet, just as the apparatus of the poem is beginning to suffocate you, Spender throws in “the images of home / ride wishing horses of escape / that herd the plain in a mass unspoken poem”. It is also, of course, a poem with a message. Spender titles the poem ‘Two Armies’, but his descriptions are ubiquitious and apply equally to both. Facing each other across the plain (a frame that Spender creates in the very first lines with superb skill), the two armies thus become mirror images of each other, indistinguishable but for the trapping of flags and anthems, and we are reminded once again that “When the machines are stilled, a common suffering / whitens the air with breath and makes both one / As though these enemies slept in each other’s arms”. It’s an image that always reminds me of Dali’s Autumn Cannibalism:

[falstaff]

[1] On a personal note, my own memories of this poem go back a little over ten years to my first year in college, where the Economics Honours syllabus included a mandatory English course, in which Two Armies was pretty much the only thing remotely worth reading.

Stephen Spender

Listen

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fŠted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Stephen Spender is, IMHO, one of the most underrated poets of the last century. Which is not to say that I think he’s an incredibly great poet or anything – just that he deserves to be far more widely read than he is today.

Today’s poem is one I have a love-hate relationship with. On the one hand, I’m not too fond of the overall sentiment, and all this over the top hero-worship definitely puts me off. On the other hand, I can’t get away from the fact that there are some brilliant lines in this poem (I particularly love the “desires falling across their bodies like blossoms” line).

The way I rationalise it to myself, then, is this – if this poem had been written even slightly less skilfully, it would have deteriorated into something trite and unaffecting. That Spender manages to say something so hackneyed and still make it beautiful, is a serious compliment to his skill as a poet.