Looking Babies

Patricia Thomson (ed. “Elizabethan Lyrical Poets,” Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967) says of “The Extasie,” “This poem has been subject to more comment and analysis than any other of Donne’s.” As regards “looking babies”(line 4) she says, “The phenomenon by which a person sees his image reflected in the pupil of another was called 'looking babies.'"
   The (very) basic argument of "The Extasie" is: the lovers' two souls leave the body in love's ecstasy, uniting into one soul somewhere beyond. But this soul misses the body which is the proper home of souls in this world. Hence, the one becomes two again, descending into the lovers' bodies, and able to be a lesson to others. It's best to read "The Extasie" yourselves.

   This poem alternates trochaic tetrameter stanzas with alexandrine stanzas. In the alexandrines the fourth syllable of the first line rhymes with the third to last and last syllables of the second line.

   For another view of love, this time from those who haven't found it yet, read my "The Vigil of Venus," written in March 1981 and posted on this blog on 9 April 2012. It is linked here.

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(An Extrapolation from John Donne’s “The Extasie”)

      Eye to eye and breast to breast,
      You look east and I’ll look west;
      Clasped, there’s no more “yours” and “my”s,
      Looking babies in our eyes.

Pillowed or banked, and helpless as a violet,
We lay, hands twined, each lost in loving, flanked and shanked.

      Well, the fleshed and feeling end
      Love’s arched delvings all intend,
      Nine months in the womb will hold,
      Then squeeze out to stretch and scold!

Our bodies two'd, our single active soul create
Which, greater, homes our unfull selves, now newed and trued.

      Strollered, then on foot, that one
      Seizes life and’s never done;
      Growing, mind work twins with world,
      Conscious bodyhood’s unfurled.

Absent, soul turns, knows body is its daily place,
Descends, now our two souls, mixed in what yearns or spurns.

      Hormones urge, when body’s ripe,
      Mind agrees and looks for type;
      Found, soul-swooned and eye to eye,
      Love’s conceiving’s by and by.

Affects and sense, re-grammared in the body’s book,
Tell truths to seekers, tempered by love’s “whence” and “hence.”

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© November 2023

A Love Memory

This lyric uses phrases taken from Ephesians 6, 5 - 8 (King James Bible). The phrases appear in the order in which they appear in the verses. I do not recall why I chose to use the holy text in a (very) secular poem. I will not do it again. There is also an echo in the second stanza of St John's Gospel, 5: 8.
   The shrike is also known as the butcher bird from its habit of impaling its victims on thorns or spikes.

   As a rueful conspectus of some past loves and time's scourge, I wrote "Down to Death" in May 2015 and posted it on 11 December 2019. There's a link here.

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      According to the flesh, I loved
         And lost a she unlike;
      Petite and warm, my thoughts she doved,
         Though inward she was tough:
      Those love-gripped gaspings, leg-wrapped haspings,
      Intimacies of bed and board,
         Were thorn-stuck like the shrike
         Who pikes its helpless prey,
When, losing faith, declaring that she’d had enough –
   Such fear and trembling at those sudden waspings! –
            She plunged and gored
   In singleness of heart, and went her way.

      Now what’s of spirit that can staunch
         Eyeservice of the kind,
      Menpleasers with a shaken haunch,
         Gulfing the lusting male?
      Might mind’s belayings wring betrayings,
      Gentling passion to rise and take
         Its bed, now love has pined
         (For, truth, life waits for none)?
All must, with good will doing service, find avail
   In years’ drudge, and forbearance of behavings,
            That, then, love’s quake
   Again, might, with the bond or free, be won.

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© October 2023

Months: The Sea: March

In 2012-13 I wrote a series of shorter poems on the months of the year using a similar form for each poem. I posted the complete set of "Months" on 6 February 2015 and it is linked here.  In 2014-15 I wrote a series of lyrics on the year's months, called "Months: Lyrics" and that series was posted on 11 March 2016. It is linked here. Between 2019 and 2024 I wrote a third "Months" series, this time concentrating on the sea and littoral and using a wide range of forms. The poems were also much longer and much more discursive. I am now beginning to post them as I revise them. I will put some notes about each poem's form and references at the end of each post. But I note here that each of the Months sequences begins with March - the month of the Annunciation and for centuries the beginning of the civil year.

   There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence (the Biblical quotes are from the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation):

By the word of the Lord the heavens were established; and all the power of them by the spirit of His mouth: gathering together the waters of the sea, as in a vessel; laying up the depths in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord, and let all the inhabitants of the world be in awe of Him. (Psalm 32, v 6-8)

How great are Thy works, O Lord; Thou hast made all things in wisdom: the earth is filled with Thy riches. So is this great sea, which stretcheth wide its arms: there are creeping things without number: creatures little and great. There the ships shall go. (Psalm 103, v 24-26)

Then the Lord answered Job out of a whirlwind, and said: Who is this that wrappeth up sentences in unskilful words? (Job 38, v 1-2)

"Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence; tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. (George Santayana)

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(Month of St Joseph the Worker)

Early morning, tide out: the beach shingle rattles
Beneath foot; the sand flats, hide-brown and low leaning,
Stretch to the far sea, sigh-falling in misty mauve.
   Here, there, are herring gulls preening.

A cold wind and low cloud in this gull-calling sphere
Make a grey stifling day, though restless with promise
For trigger-Equinox is near; the black-head gulls
   Are black-headed again; Momus

Was wittily apt, crafting their red-beaked, hooded
Circus capers, petite and touchy. Warily
Winging, they snub my crackling lurch through the shingle –
   A penance to walk on, slyly

Turning ankles or sinking a foot dead. At sea,
Distant around the offshore reefs, dried toothily
By the spring tides, the crabbers heel, wrestling with traps;
   Their launching tractor, forlornly

Dismissed, rust-patched with eczema, squats on the pooled
Sands, its tracks grooved from the beach top like a ploughman’s
Furrows. Curses and battering as pots are decked
   Sift on the wind through the no-man’s

Waves. How harsh, how harsh! this daily wrenching, salt-scoured,
Wind-drilled, desperate for feedstuffs, captured bloodied
And flesh-torn – in the marshy fields, from the soused rocks
   Or far at sea. Mere scraps, muddied

And stinking, a crab claw perhaps, are spitefully
Fought for by gulls, wings inter-grappled, beaks clashing,
Screeching like harpies; deep sea, a trawler hand screams,
   His arm sucked in a winch, hashing

To blood-pudding in pain-crushed seconds; or a net
Being shot whips a man’s legs, flinging him flailing
Into Alp-like seas, lugging him to the depth-ooze
   Where net-wrapped he totters, mouthing

Water like Phlebas, these two weeks dead. In lash up
Workshops on harbour walls, greased lumps of gear, rusted
And work-bleached, are clattered and drilled by wind-burnt men;
   Then, fingers crossed, to be hoisted

Back to the bowels of some crank, stained tramp, afloat
(If its pumps work) by luck and patching. For, ever,
They that trouble the sea in ships have high-rolled fate,
   Sound seams and glowering weather.

At the Airport

A "rite of passage" poem with all the rites included or at least alluded to. Hence in stanza seven the three "atches" are the famed three staples of The Times' personal columns - hatches, matches and dispatches. In the sixth stanza "Bartlemy's Fair" is London's once famous, indeed notorious, St Bartholomew's Fair.

   This is possibly the most complex stanza form I've ever used - I am not in a hurry to repeat it! The poem is syllabic and the line syllable counts can be analysed easily. In each stanza lines 3, 6, 7, 10 have feminine endings, all other lines have single syllable masculine endings. Further, lines 2 and 4 rhyme, lines 6 and 7 rhyme, and lines 9 and 11 rhyme.
   Way back in August 1981 I wrote, some time after the event, "A Tardy Epithalamium" to celebrate a friend's wedding. Unfortunately the marriage eventually foundered so I have removed the names from the poem. It is written in syllabics using a simple alcaic form. I posted it on 27 May 2013; it is linked here.

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Turned seventy, how life’s late-realized truths flock
Like airport-domiciled birds –
Wagtails, perhaps, or starlings – crotchetly ganging
At dusk, their static like words,
Mistrustingly, snappishly, clumping close, though sharp
To protect space, each one hunched to endure night’s draining
Of warmth and contexture, that relational faining
Sans which right judgement or instinct fail
And all meaning’s nil.
Man, though, can ideate both abstracts and concepts,
And truth’s in that skill.

Truth it is that an airport’s noised swirl is a type
Of man’s life: birthed, he’s at once
Found dazed at the terminal – that much-ways meaninged
Word for all sorts and the nonce:
A quo – as in law’s terminer or pedants’ glee
In terminology; or a spry termor clinching
Land for a term, even life. And eyes up, see inching
The terminator, parting what’s light
From night on the moon’s
Disc, tugged by Terminus, boundaries’ glared godling
Harsh-mouthing his runes

From his bust on its terminal. Then there’s ad quem
(For all things end): think of words,
Their back-end parts inflected in termination;
Then diseases, fever’s curds,
And policies, periods, all railways and roads,
Sooner, later, must terminate. What’s terrifying,
Though, is terminism – that fiat nullifying
Our headstrong dither at Heaven’s gates,
For contrition’s time
Is curt: missed, the Lord no longer wills our suasion;
We drown in screamed mime.

So, seize the hour! Teach straplings clear-eyed trust of self,
Sinewed by the Canon’s bans,
That, shipshape, the flight desk’s check-in’s voyaged trimly,
The boarding pass’s “you cans/
You can’ts” – life’s bounds already tautened by that slip! –
Stowed safely for pettifogs’ later sharp-nosed query.
Obliged to sunder hold luggage – the rattling weary
Belt claptraps it away – what’s left is
Predicate: tuned thought,
Heed for facts, context’d by the felt Unseen’s rescript,
“Do always the ought.”

Next loom the prim probings of the hand luggage check:
The rebelled mulishness of
Slapping one’s trousered metals into a barren
Customs tray, the all’s-lost cough
That, to parents’ wryness, the hand-swept scanner pings
A first (secret!) crush’s bangle, pocketed slyly
From the polluting world. Thus, teened hot faces scryly
Learn that “ought’s” frankful ownings have cost,
Though righteous to pay:
Thank Something when customs malarkey’s concluded
And you go your way!

Audenic Apophthegms

These little pieces all use the tanka form. To be clear, these are my thoughts, not Auden's, deriving from rereading Humphrey Carpenter's biography and picking up on certain themes. Sometimes I use some of Auden's or Carpenter's words (I think). In the first stanza of "In a Nutshell," "NYT" is the New York Times: replace with the Guardian if you wish!

   On 7 June 2017 I posted a short series called "Epigrams." I was hoping to write more but decided I wasn't very good at them. You can read the series here.

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(After rereading “W. H. Auden, A Biography” by Humphrey Carpenter)

Faith without dogma
Is soda water sans gas;
Vague uplift, stale buns.
All should be pleasant, but who,
Come shove, will die for the Lord?

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“Intensity of
Attention:” hushed at his desk,
Daily the poet
Or statesman strive: but what if
The tyrant likewise? Watch out!

----------

“Spain” was prescriptive
Nonsense: poetry does not
Insist what to do;
Though by quizzing good and bad
It lauds virtue, which then prompts.

----------

Inner order, not
Outward look, was key; therefore
Scruff clothes, hair – so what?
But late life, his inner self
Froze: now parody, he died.

----------

John Pudney made note:
The Thirties Auden, Britten,
Lived in a world which
“Closed certain doors to strangers:”
Oh, would that were still the case!

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Men kill, cheat, rape, fight:
That’s accident not essence
Claim some. No, man fell,
Evil’s the fruit: he’ll fester
Till he say, “Maranatha.”

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In a Nutshell

There are three stages
(Thus Kierkegaard): aesthetic –
Swoon, my precious words!
Ethical – NYT types
Rainbow dress their only child;

Religious – those two
Having failed. Hopeless, helpless,
Man must leap: if not,
Despair will kill; guilt-engulfed,
Reason falls: faith must suffice.

Surrendered thus, man
Chooses himself (indeed yes!)
Oned with the Fontal
Of self – true autonomy
That’s fulfilled in dependence.

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That sneaked slice of cake,
That thug flitching his crime-mate,
The jobsworth quibbling:
All by their nay-deeds illume
The Way, the strait gate they’ll miss.

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The Going

The first part is written in syllabics, the syllable count is obvious. After writing the previous post, "On the Shelf," I reread Daniel Farson's enjoyable but salutary "Soho in the Fifties" - so much booze, so much human wreckage! Muriel Belcher's Colony Room plays a large part and Francis Bacon and the photographer John Deakin were practically fixtures. Both died lamentable deaths - Bacon with his millions, Deakin penniless. There is a sly nod to the fearsome Muriel in the third stanza of the first part.

   Long ago in the 1970s I was a frequent visitor to the low drinking pub the Fifth Hants Volunteer Arms (now a more up market affair, looking at the web) in Portsmouth. Folk would gather to watch "Kojak" on the television shelved above the bar. The poem is a portrait of one particular drinker who probably drank himself to death many years ago. I wrote it sometime in 1973-6 and posted it here on 6 December 2013.

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i.
Hid behind booze-stink, screaming
Chatter, smoke as dense
As a Thames night-mist;
Sunk in the outraged back stabs,
Tears that the betrayed
Had betrayed even
Whilst being betrayed; blanked by
Stuporous drunks, glazed
On the bar stools, lies
The goal which lights the going.

Bacon, soused and gay-boy thumped,
Extruding human
Faces, sought the facts
Of sorrow, flesh’s trapment
In world’s vehemence:
But contortion’s not
Meaning, not art; proportion’s
Truth and an awed gaze
At what is, must find
The goal which lights the going.

Such shrivelled ends: Deakin’s death
On a hired bed, art
Pimped for drinks and smokes –
The world belched and forgot him.
What’s prior remains:
The glass before drink,
The cigarette pack unfilled –
The glass fresh, card clean:
Somehow implete, is
The goal which lights the going.

ii.
The goal which lights the going
Throws a shadow on the ground,
And who would go straightforwardly
Instead goes round and round.

The finding’s in the losing,
Sing the harlots and the clowns,
You pays your whack for something back,
There’s ups and then there’s downs.

But how then to see clearly,
Seeking peace, if peace there be,
Humming – does it? – among the leaves,
Or drifting on the sea?

The sage who rises early,
Crooning mantras to the sun,
Convinced he pleases all the gods,
Might find he’s pleasing none.

Those whores and jobbing jokesters,
Cluttered in their two-time lives,
Know best to question then to hush,
Paying the All its tithes.

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© June 2023

On the Shelf

Having met Maria who could forget her? It still seems extraordinary to me that she left this mortal coil so soon and so long ago. Mind you, it also seems astonishing that the Gay Hussar restaurant and the Colony Room drinking den (often known as Muriel's - she owned it) are no more. What is there left of Soho? I worked with Maria at the Poetry Society's old headquarters in Earls Court Square in the 1980s. We stayed friends when she moved to "Time Out" magazine; she put much reviewing work my way: most welcome! She was a Welsh beauty from Cardiff (I think) and a lapsed (very) Catholic; this occasioned  the reference to Our Lady of Lourdes in the fifth stanza.

   I wrote separately the little lyric, "Fine is the bloom..." and thought it might work interleaved between the stanzas of "On the Shelf."  The two tankas are self-explanatory.

   A much earlier poem about a more commonplace parting of ways, written circa 1973-6, is "Parting Ways," posted on 23 July 2013 and linked here.

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In Remembrance Maria Lexton, d. 2004

   “I’m on the shelf,” she said:
How so? A “nature’s beauty,” bold and sleek,
With looks and shape to turn men’s gaze unforced:
Welsh-lilted, forty, with a canny head,
   Her world the London arts bazaar
Of high-strung narcissists, half-noused, half-freak –
Writers and ad-men, journos, paunched and sauced
By well-wined lunches at the Gay Hussar –
   Surely she was at her peak?

   Fine is the bloom and sweet the scent,
   But still the flower falls,

   Able to hold her drink,
Her cigarettes to hand, that fatal flaw,
But shunned by wives distrustful of their men,
(For one had delved, his name masked by a blink,
   Who now paid lushly for his child’s
Ménage); ill-lucked, drawn fatefully to raw
Abusive couplings, louche, her woman’s yen
To settle was upturned by door-slammed wilds,
   Love left trashed like trampled straw.

   For hidden in its flare and curl
   There’s a worm which crawls:

   And so I played my part.
A paddler in that 1980s pool
Of “Time Out” parties, Chelsea Arts Club ball
And Muriel’s (that hell!); tricked-up, chic-smart,
   I’d sire her through an evening’s routs
Then later in her flat we’d play by rule
Of drinks and talk before a taxi call
To take me to my digs: I had no doubts
   Wish and blood should keep their cool.

   Who would not ache to brush that bloom
   Against his longing cheek?

   For both knew that she lived
In torsions like to wreck the Prufrock-type:
Cheek kisses, hugs, were limits; twilight lands
Lay hid beyond where chancers, brags, were sieved
   And wounds and heart-grief shrank the soul.
At last, revulsed by London’s bonhomme hype,
I upsticked west to Cornwall’s winds and sands:
Years passed, then news came like an evil dole,
   Death had seized her with a finalled swipe.

   Though soon, so soon, its petalled flesh
   Is mottled with a streak:

   It seemed absurdity
Her warm if hazard beauty should be gone:
But twenty years have hightailed: we now left
Quail in the chill of death’s immensity:
   In evening thoughts I sometimes grasp
Some glimpse of purpose in the path we’re on;
Will it one day, like a Madonna in a cleft,
Reveal that smile, that lilt, her friendly clasp,
   Crowned with hay-scent hair which shone?

   Now mulched in earth that flower lies,
   The wind blowing round,

   And what was tough though fragrant-soft
   Sleeps without sound.

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Tanka for Maria

Known for her shoe hoard
She’d helplessly groan, “I need
New shoes.” “No mother,”
Came her daughter’s tart rebuke,
“You don’t need, you want new shoes!”

Double Tanka for Maria

Came a night she wore
A tight open-sided dress
Which glimpsed her breast curves,
Her flanks honey-coloured, firm.
Entering the Groucho’s bar,

Men’s eyes homed like bees
To nectar (and women’s too
More circumspectly).
I was by her side all night:
My, my, those envious looks!

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Everything © June 2023