Still from 'Night Mail'

The classic film made by the GPO film unit.

Words by WH Auden. Music by Benjamin Britten.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmq6mFAEqNQ

K- You embody the ideal that to give is better than to receive.

Auden agrees,

The More Loving One- 1957

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

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”.

I rewatched Four Weddings and a Funeral last night which is one of my favourite movies.  This time the part that struck me most was the reading of this beautiful poem by WH Auden.  I had to share it with you.

Funeral Blues 

by WH Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and, with muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin. Let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message: “He is dead!”
Put crepe bows around the white necks of the public doves.
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my north, my south, my east and west,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can come to any good.

L. Timmel Duchamp posts extracts from Brian Attebery’s Pilgrim Award acceptance speech:

My third discovery about writing is that it only works when I force myself to ask the hard questions. That’s especially true when writing about something I care deeply about– passion has to be tempered and tested by critical thought. Otherwise it does become a mere exercise in political or aesthetic orthodoxy (and I think aesthetic correctness is more harmful than the political variety). When I look back at my early papers…the problem is not that they’re badly written or that they misread the material. It is that they don’t probe deeply enough into their own–which is to say, my own–assumptions and reading practices. I didn’t ask hard enough questions.

But what exactly is a hard question?

Well, that one is.

I believe that when we study literature, we are never studying just the literary work itself. Instead, we’re examining our own interaction with the text. That is difficult because it means bringing to consciousness the very structure of consciousness, which is the business of theory. Psychological theory, political theory, feminist theory, semiotic theory: these all have to do with making the invisible patterns of thought and culture more visible, so that they can be challenged.

And (unrelatedly) Andrew Wheeler quotes WH Auden:

“One cannot review a bad book without showing off.”

It’s now exactly 70 years since the start of World War Two, as it was on this date in 1939 that Germany invaded Poland. On hearing the news, WH Auden composed this poem. Although the poet himself grew to dislike it, it became one of his most famous poems and has many resonances still in today’s world.

September 1st, 1939

A.N. Wilson's biography of John Betjeman

John Betjeman was a much loved modern poet whose unashamed ‘Englishness’ and chummy loyalty to the Church of England won him a place in many English hearts. His light and amusing poetry made him a popular hit giving him access (and sales) where other more serious poets stayed on the fringes of popular culture. He was tutored briefly by CS Lewis, was a keen lover of church architecture (including Edward Irving’s London church buildings) and a muddle of emotions and guilt when it came to relationships.

Read the full review here

If I could tell you

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I cuold tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

- W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

–W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Why this poem matters after the jump.

[EDIT: Shit!  Andrew Sullivan beats me to it!]

W.H. Auden hated this poem.  His frustration was centered around one line:

We must love one another or die.

The problem?  It’s a lie.  Auden knew better than most that love offers no protection from death.  Later collections of his work have the entire offending stanza cut out; only in 1955 did Auden consent to put it back in, with the line changed to:

We must love one another and die.

Emphasis mine.  Apparently unsatisfied with the more honest yet considerably more dour revision, Auden allowed the poem to be reprinted only once more in his lifetime, alongside a handful of other poems to which he attached the postscript “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”

The poem has remained popular, however, even amongst those who don’t consider themselves fans of Auden.  Since 2001, much of the renewed interest in the work can be traced to its circulation, largely over e-mail, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The poem’s few superficial similarities – the New York City setting, the month of the events – are enough to snare in those who might otherwise reject poetry that doesn’t even rhyme.  And to be sure, there’s a lot in the poem for the post-9/11 reader to sympathize with – the overwhelming uncertainty, the lack of individual agency in matters of life and death, even the end note of solidarity in the face of tragedy. 

But the poem just didn’t fit the nationalistic, increasingly-jingoistic tempo of the weeks that followed.  You can’t rally a nation for war with lines decrying “The windiest militant trash / Important Persons shout”, and sardonic remarks about “blind skyscrapers” being the hollow victories of the “The strength of Collective Man” did little for a people who had lost their two most iconic skyscrapers and were already making plans to rebuild.

And then came Iran.

As an American watching the revolution in Iran unfold, I feel a strong sense of camraderie with Auden’s persona (there’s something to be said for letting a poem exist in its own historical moment; but then again, poetry that is barred from making emotional connections across generational/national/etc. lines is impotent).  I am no closer, in terms of geography or kinship, to Iran than Auden was to Poland.  But coming of age as I did in the twilight years of the 21st century, I know something of existential dread on a national level, and the narcotic effect our culture can have, insulated as it (usually) is from destabilizing crises.  And as I hourly catch up on Andrew Sullivan’s updates, I’m forced to ponder my own helplessness each time.  This is history.  This is revolution.  This is as close as our generation will likely get to a black/white, good guys vs. bad guys showdown for freedom.

And the closest I get to helping is changing my Twitter icon.

In one particularly frustrated exhortation, Auden declared his poem to be “self-flattering”.  This, I feel, is too convenient an excuse.  The act of writing is, almost by necesseity, an act of self-flattery (Hey, Society.  I got some ideas of such import I have to make them tangible objects. And you are going to take time out of your life, time you could spend reproducing or securing more of the food supply, to take in my ideas through this tangible medium and let them evoke an emotional response in you.  Why?  Because I’m a badass).  And Auden was smart enough to know that.

But I understand Auden’s frustration, even if I don’t agree with his stated reasons for it.  And I think he was right to center his criticism on the “love and/or die” line.  Can love protect a sleepy Polish hamlet from a Luftwaffe firestorm?  And if it can’t, then what’s the point?  Moreover, what can poetry offer?  There’s no verse I know of that will take the bullets out the Basij’s guns.  At moments like those, the wisest words from the most accomplished poet seem no more useful than an epitaph on a mass grave.

There’s no easy answers here.  Auden, a man much smarter than I, never found a satisfactory one either.  In one of literature’s uncomfortably-tidy little ironies, perhaps the best response I’ve found to Auden’s dilemma is Auden’s troublesome stanza itself: 

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

When poetry seems useless, poetry becomes its own justification.

Yet, dotted everywhere, 
Ironic points of light 
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

I’ve been drooling over Faber’s gorgeous 80th anniversary poetry covers ever since spotting them on designsponge last week.  Illustrators and printmakers were commissioned for the covers of six new editions of twentieth-century poetry (by W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, John Betjemen, T.S. Eliot, and Ted Hughes) and the woodcut and linocut results on the covers and matching endpapers are just beautiful. I recently started dabbling in linocuts and found these to be fantastic inspiration. Visit FaceOut Books for a great description of project designer Miriam Rosenbloom’s process, including how themes, artists, and unifying elements were chosen. I’d think they’d make beautiful gifts. Poetry of WH Auden, poems selected by John Fuller, cover by Paul CatherallPoetry of Sylvia Plath, poems selected by Ted Hughes, cover by Peter LawrencePoetry of John Betjeman, poems selected by Hugo Williams, cover by Joe McLarenPoetry of T.S. Eliot, poems selected by T.S. Eliot, cover by Clare CurtisW.B. Yeats, poems selected by Seamus Heaney, cover by Heaney Nick MorleyPoetry of Ted Hughes, poems selected by Simon Armitage, cover by Mark Hearld

The BBC, in their infinite wisdom, are trying to germinate the nation’s poetic seed.

John Dryden, first Poet Laureate

We’ve recently had Ian Hislop expounding the bizarre tradition of appointing a national Poet Laureate, in Changing of the Bard on BBC4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kk49c;

Roger McGough revealing the not-so-clandestine secrets of Radio 4’s Poetry Please

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qp7q) in Thirty Years of the People’s Poetry, also on BBC4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kk499;

& Owen Sheers, (yes, BBC4), presenting a series of programmes on 6 works of poetry intrinsically linked to the British landscape, exploring place & identity whilst illuminating the lives of the poets themselves

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00k99tf.

(The 6, for those interested, thus far include that most repressed of Romantics, Wordsworth; Sylvia Plath; George Mackay Brown; Matthew Arnold & Lynette Roberts).

A veritable collection indeed,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/whats_on.shtml

& at a time when the Beeb’s coverage of Carol Ann Duffy’s elevation to Laureate at times rivalled, somewhat embarrassingly, even the most important world news in its hyperbole & devotion. Now, far be it for me to criticise the BBC for setting themselves up as the nation’s cultural purveyor, or encouraging our leaden imaginations to re-engage with the wisdom of bards old & new, it just slightly smacks of that favoured middle-class pursuit – culture for the masses, accessibility for the great unwashed, reclaiming the nation’s literature. And as such, I’m inclined to say bleughh.

Bleughh.

Bleughh

Bleuggg-hhhh!

It’s just all so fucking contrived, this BBC Poetry Season. Let Poetry into Your Life (oh, my, so very kind…the smiling graduates who finally nailed that copy don’t need a kicking, do they?) even includes a vote (what doesn’t these days) to discover Who…is…the…Nation’s…Favourite…Poet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/

Ok, so it doesn’t appeal to me, so it’s the sort of meaningless exercise which makes those who exist at the bureaucratic periphery of the Arts Council feel good about themselves, a pat on the back for those schedulers who argue that television should have some semblance of educational core (aaagh!), a hip-hip-hooray for all those newly employed Drama & Media graduates, fresh from the University for the Province of Enlightenment, whose lives have been so enriched by that one book they happened to accidentally study in a subsidiary module in the 1st semester of their 2nd year.

BBC ideas room...

Hip-hip-hooray – how they must shine their BBC security passes with pride, knowing their grand ideas have made such a worthy contribution to our poor, mundane, prosaic little lives.

Ok, so like I said, it doesn’t appeal, I regard it with the same opprobrium as The Big Read (BBC) http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/

& The Play’s the Thing (Channel 4) http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/T/the_play/show.html.

If I remember rightly Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings was The-Big-Read (& A-Big-Bore) whilst the top 10 included such delights as Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter & the Something or Other, & His Dark Materials…you get the idea…(Catcher in the Rye only 15? Tess of the D’Urbervilles 26? Crime & Punishment 60?!).  But I’m not so dumb as to fail to comprehend such programmes’ appeal &, though I loathe myself for saying it, well-meaning intentions.

However – then I had a quick gander at the shortlist which those talking heads with their tweed jackets & hessian hair, those seers & sages who collectively prop up the Arts Council & The Poetry Society (itself, like something from Monty Python), deemed necessary to provide, lest us poor unread minions were incapable of nominating our favoured poets ourselves.

The Poetry Society?

And it reads thus…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/apps/ifl/poetryseason/captcha

Now, I’m all for Blake, Yeats, Larkin & Sylvia Plath. & I’m forever laying myself prostrate before the genius of Coleridge, the only true revolutionary of the Romantics.

Coleridge

& I apprehensively accept – whilst stabbing my eyes out – that somebody of a certain age & somewhat whimsical disposition might be in the thrall of fusty old John Betjeman. But where in this list is Percy Bysshe Shelley? Where the inimitable simplicity of John Clare (a poet so effortless that all the Romantics, with the exception of Byron, who couldn’t possibly imagine that anybody might be his better, cited Clare as the greatest & most neglected poet of their age)? Where Emily Dickinson, a particular favourite for women but also a trail-blazer in her own right & not simply the author of the funereal eulogies we nowadays associate with her? Where Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, along with Dickinson another stalwart of the Victorian struggle for literary parity? Where Siegfried Sassoon? Where Walt Whitman? Where Federico Garcia Lorca, the man who brought surrealism into poetry & the hitherto impenetrable idea of duende to international consciousness? Where Pablo Neruda? Where Thom Gunn? AND WHERE THE FUCK IS SHAKESPEARE??!

where the f**k is Shakey?

Even if you are clinically dead you would still include Shakespeare. Even if you have no head you would include Shakespeare. Even the pigeon pecking shit off the pavement would include Shakespeare. He is, indisputably, the poet par excellence, a sonneteer whose words not only already exist in your unconscious (such is his stature within our national psyche) but infiltrate your everyday language. He embodies your own protestations of innocence, your proclamations of love, the suppression of your jealousy, every articulated human emotion he long ago copyrighted. Of all his 154 sonnets, most people will recognise at least 10, 15, 20…find me another poet anywhere in the world who can boast a 10% or greater hit-list. He is to poetry what JS Bach is to the progression of Western Music – you simply can’t imagine what art & culture would be like without his presence. He bestrides not only the past but the present & future. His is the clarity of thought & unerring accuracy of feeling to which we still collectively turn in those moments of extreme national or individual crisis. He is also the only person, along with Bach, whom I can confidently say I consider to be genius, a man beyond mere talent, skill, passion, endeavour, something genuinely super-human in his empathetic ability to squirrel into the core of humanity & emerge holding aloft the still beating, bursting heart within. &, banal though it may seem, he was truly the most exquisite of technicians whilst always pushing boundaries & seeking to subvert.

So, go ahead, Let Poetry into Your Life, please those cultural dullards ensconced in the Beeb’s innovation hub with your embrace of Carol Ann Duffy & Ted Hughes & Auden. Vote for John Donne or Keats or the god-awful Burns. Keep those craggy-cheeked crones at The Poetry Society up all night with anticipation of who they might crown the nation’s bard. Just don’t for one second think that it signifies anything pertinent, for it’s clear from the offset that those who set themselves up as knowing best know really very little at all.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

William Shakespeare

So there we have it. Daily moan done. I think the nurses are ready with my injection.

© crushedegg

For those interested, there are now 9 short stories up on the assorted shorts page, the 5 most recent being: arresting the gene/every tender memory/the company of strangers/the dying & the going/the underside of your life. There is also material uploaded on the cinephilia pages, what’s good? & sneak preview.

Much more to follow shortly.

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‘All marriages – all everythings – tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don’t. In all things good and giddy, there’s always one measly eventuality no one’s thought about, or hasn’t thought about in so long it almost doesn’t exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, to the unconditional this ‘n that, to the sacred vows, the pledging of truths, to the forever anythings. And that is: There’s a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter.’


- Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land




‘A wise lord cannot and ought not keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that led him to pledge faith no longer exist…But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic and to be a great pretender and dissembler.’


- Niccolo Machiavelli




‘Words are for those with promises to keep.’


- W.H. Auden

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction” [John F. Kennedy].

Mission statements intrigue me. I’m sure you have seen the carefully worded phrases that organizations write to concisely declare their self-imposed duty [dictionary.com] and to help employees or members feel anchored and unified toward a common vision.

“Self-imposed duty” is an interesting concept. I guess it could be defined as voluntarily assuming a moral obligation, or coming to the realization that it’s not all about ME! It also serves as a reminder that “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” [Kelly Ann Rothaus].

In The Mission Statement Book, author Jeffrey Abrahams writes, “a mission also provides a sense of purposefulness, that there is a reason for working (or living) — aside from compensation.

I’ve gathered mission statements from several well-known corporations I found interesting.

• Google: . . . to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• Southwest Airlines: . . . dedication to the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and company spirit.
• Microsoft: . . . our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.
• Starbucks: . . . to inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time.
• The Ohio State University: To advance the well-being of the people of Ohio and the global community through the creation and dissemination of knowledge. (Are you surprised it doesn’t mention the football team?)

Notice that not one statement speaks of profits, or private planes, or plush corner offices. Surprisingly, the focus is on potential, people, inspiration, and empowerment.

I had always assumed that mission statements were for the big guys (see list above), and had not given much thought to their usefulness in an individual or family situation until I read an article by Stephen R. Covey entitled, “The Unifying Power of a Family Mission Statement.”

In the article, Covey states that the creation of a family mission statement was the most transforming event in his family’s history. “Through the years, these mission statements have created the common sense of destination and manner of travel that has represented the social will, the culture, in our family. And directly, or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, almost everything else in our family has grown out of it. We had to create a vision of what we wanted our family to be like, what we would live by, what we would stand for — even die for.”

What about you? What’s your main thing? Where are you headed? Do you have a personal or family mission statement that keeps you focused on your purpose? Something that answers the age old question, “Why am I here?” (I think W. H. Auden answered that question when he said, “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for I do not know.”)

Why not take a few minutes and clarify your personal mission statement and organize your purpose. It’s time to declare an answer for the question of your life!

According to George Bernard Shaw, “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

Whatever you are, be a good one!

Deanna

My personal mission statement is “To add value to people and help them reach their potential.” What’s yours?

This is probably my favorite poem of all time. When someone says “poem”, it’s the one I always think of first. And judging by the rest of the world in websites and blogs, I’m not the only one. So, I know that it has been placed around here countless times, but I’m going to add it in just once more.

I have two other poems on the Icarus theme that I will be posting this week. Those might not be AS popular so it will give a fresh take on an old subject. I even did a critical literary analysis comparing the three for a college paper. Exciting stuff. Maybe if someone asks nice or begs originally, I’ll just post it on up. And if nobody says anything, I might just post it anyway.

Here it is. The one, the only:

Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

You need not see what someone is doing

to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:

a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,

a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,

forgetting themselves in a function.

“Sext” (1954) by W.H. Auden.

Tailored by England murals on Great Eastern St, London.

I think the gentlemen and gentlewomen at Umbro have hit on something. Their new England shirt has certainly garnered attention.

This little island was once a hub of craft and industry. By delivering “The right shirt at the right time”, Umbro have collared an inconvenient truth:

We stopped crafting – and started outsourcing.

That “rapt expression” of which Auden speaks disappeared from the face of the nation. And I couldn’t agree more with Umbro’s strapline – this is the right time to look back, and move forward.

New England Shirt – The Making of by umbro on YouTube.

A few weeks ago two Brits clashed in a game of Layer Tennis (massive props to Coudal Partners, the broadcasters and creators of the event).

What emerged from this riveting rally? For one thing, both Rex Crowle and Simon Cook were obsessed with… things.

We see “things” that are British every day. We use those things too. We may even keep them in our codpiece.

Layer 6 by Rex Crowle on Layer Tennis.

Somewhere in the twilight of late capitalism, we lost sight of those items on our kitchen table. The necessaries in our chest of drawers.

Cookie does a wonderful job of reviving that joy of craft and “things” at his blog, Made in England by Gentlemen – go check it out.

It was there, to bring this little ramble to an end, that I discovered his apt fondness for the work of Hwa Young Jung.

In her words:

“…if you’re English these are things you might have grown up with & therefore you feel is insignificant. They are new and fascinating to me.”

Fingers crossed, as they say, that fascination can return for English folks too.

Tetley by hwayoungjung on Flickr.

Walking into her room, turning on the lamp on the nightstand, he breathed in the pleasant smell of fresh laundry that sat at the foot of her bed. He noticed that she left her iPod on, and instead of turning it off he let the honky-tonk piano of Bobby Zimmerman tamper on with much silenced gusto. Archaic looking library books lay on the bed, hard covered with torn corners and the faint smell of “old” dusted all over. 

The Collected Poetry Of W.H. Auden, History Of English Literature, The Early Writings Of Ezra Pound, and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. He whistled at the reading material he now began thumbing through, its yellowing pages felt dry and powdery between his fingers. 

“Your reading material is s-o-o-o very eclectic, Kay.,” he told her one-day, laying themselves out on the grass of their back yard. She laughed at this as if it were apparent to her but not particularly know-it-all about it He did not mind this, he thought that in a “writers point of view” she had every right to think in that mindset. As modest and humble as she was about her writing and knowledgeable about  “anything and everything”(like her teacher once mentioned), she did have a snobbish way of putting someone on if she sensed them to be a waste of her time; and he liked this about her. Being able to defend something or someone with the right facts to prove it.

“Look, its not like I say things to fill the air, otherwise I’d be doing a lot of bad. There’d be no point to talking. It’s like polluting our very planet! The scary thing about that is, people do it all the time.”

She pointed to the sky and they both looked up. Spring was headed their way, and the sun shone bright, but the cold breeze raised the hairs on their arms, stinging their cheeks and slowly drying their lips. 

“Environmentalists think its exhaust and chemical waste that’s causing this global warming?”  Popping a mandarin slice into her mouth, and in between chewing, continued.

“No, its people and their gad-damn wasted words, filling the sea and drifting into the Arctic Ocean, breaking down icebergs, and melting the ozone!” She raised her hands and boosted her voice in a theatrical gesture, and pursed her lips together.

He laughed at her humor and threw his face into her neck, inserting warm kisses, then placing his left hand on the slope of her neck as if to keep them there. She fell onto his shoulder, breathing in deeply, setting aside the notion that peoples wasted words have been putting others lives at jeopardy.

She began again. “No, its true Michael. You told me yourself you hated wasted words, now look, it’s killing you this very second.”

They both laughed and sighed into silence, laying his head on her lap. She looked down at him and smiled.

“There’s that smirk of yours, what are you thinking?” She stroked his hair back.

“Nothin’, just wonderin’ how much damage William Faulkner did with ‘The Sound and The Fury’.

By ALEXANDER LAWRIE

A FORMER sex education teacher at one of Scotland’s top private schools has been struck off after being convicted of downloading thousands of child porn images.

Shamed sir Peter Orr, 31, taught biology and sex education to kids at Lomond School, Helensburgh, but resigned from the school after he was caught with the horrific pictures.

The disturbed teacher, who is now thought to be working as a shop cleaner in England, was charged with downloading 4000 images but only admitted to half that number.

The court heard the ex-biology teacher first found the images after searching for information on puberty.

Orr, formerly of Clydebank, was initially interviewed by the school’s head before police were called in March 2007.

Former pupil

It is believed his laptop was seized during the investigation.

The shamed teacher himself was a former pupil of the £5000-a-year school, and returned as a member of the staff in 2006.

His duties also included working in the school’s boarding section.

He was given a two year probation order and placed on the sex offender’s register after appearing at Dumbarton Sheriff Court in March 2008.

Yesterday, he failed to appear before the General Teaching Council (Scotland) in Edinburgh and his name was permanently removed from the teaching register.

The GTC panel stated: “The sub-committee found the offences to have material relevance to the respondent’s fitness to be a teacher in that he failed to have upheld the standards of personal conduct and integrity so that the public have confidence in him as a teacher and teaching as a profession.

“Furthermore, the respondent has failed to maintain his position as a role model to young people.

“In addition, he placed himself in a situation which breached the criminal law and hence called into question his suitability to be a teacher.”

Famous ex-pupils

Lomond School is in the suburbs of Helensburgh on the edge of the Lomond National Park.

Parents from all over Scotland and beyond have been tempted by its tranquil settings and excellent exam results, as it consistently appears near the top of school performance league tables in Scotland.

Poet WH Auden taught there and former pupils include television inventor John Logie Baird and international entertainer Jack Buchanan.

The exclusive school is a favourite choice of Rangers footballers, with the children of Walter Smith, Mo Johnstone and Mark Hateley have all been educated there.

On Saturday I finished the book - What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt -  I was reading. Of late my reading has been jilted and sporadic. I immerse myself in a few chapters, get distracted by something else I think I most definitely should be reading and so on and so forth. It makes me lazy and has left a sizeable bookshelf of half-read books languishing in my apartment. Completing What I Loved (a birthday gift from Miss Murphy) reminded me how much I enjoy fiction, how much I’ve been missing its input in my life and has reignited a passion for more. If you’re looking for some fiction with heart and soul, breathing with life and love, I recommend it. 

There was something in the book, in the relationships and lives within it that reminded of one of my favourite poems, well, ever. (You mock now but you know a collection entitled ‘NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL POETRY VOL. 44′ will someday be a runaway success) It’s ‘The More Loving One’ by WH Auden. There is something in the persistent tone of the poem, the unyielding hope within that reminds me of the book’s narrator. 

Anyway, posting this on a rainy Sunday evening with little else of a positive nature to offer felt right.