Language

This poem, using the Tanka stanza, cost me much blood and sweat to write, lacking Auden's wonderful facility with conceptual argument. The statistics about Shakespeare's and others' word scope are from Anthony Holden's biography of the Bard; Kraus is Karl Kraus, the 1920s/30s Austrian satirist; the peasant in the final stanza was recorded by the saintly Curé d’Ars as sitting for hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament Exposed: when asked his purpose he gave his famous reply. (And you can scorn anyone who tells you the Host is merely a piece of bread.)
   Auden, of course, was much concerned with language. Here's a link to my humble "Homage to W.H. Auden," written in 1981 and posted on this blog on 21 February 2012.

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Milton eight thou. words:
Shakespeare twenty-one thousand!
The grammar school oik
(And Papist-tainted) quite swamped
The orotund Puritan!

Luculent wordists,
Laptop-lorn, drudged by candle
Computing the Bard’s
Wort-fest – wide-eyed at the scoped
Terrains his weirdings revealed;

Yet in Stratford’s rents
The lumpen trammelled their lives
With a few hundred
Words at most: how, we puzzle,
Did the Swan’s epi-massive

Fructions of language
Emerge: some sprite chromosome
Knacked as Ariel?
It matters? It does: the tribe’s
Width of being – its far fetch,

Its fulled purposes –
Grows from, expands, its self-heft
Torso’d in language,
Mutter not diener of thought
(Kraus noted); and thought parents

The anguishing will,
Its conundrums and turn-’bouts,
Whose nose-taut searchings
At last might inhere the veld,
Tiptoeingly adequate

To all that’s the case.
World-historical Virgil,
Then, mything the brute
Growings of tough-shouldered Rome,
Abundanced its can-do speech

To fount that telos
Which, historied, now insists
As Rome’s foredained “Thus.”
And Rilke, tranced in a rose,
His teetered syntax torqued to

Grasp Dasein, aweing
Youth to saltimbanque featings
That body’s autumned
Sadness might, thought-forced, bud-burst
To soul’s glad terror, light-laved

By a dread Angel –
Oh, his words lived what they knew!
Well, by mind’s reachings
Language has birthed from clod things
An Ideosphere, where what’s

Mental blooms a world
Broader, deeper, than physics’
Navelling. It’s here
That the throned Word, contexting
All words, is gaspingly known,

Silencing tattle
Which false-steps the unwary,
Chorusing with mates
At table in bombast rounds:
At end the fullest words are

Wordless. A peasant
Hours-long sat before the Host:
When asked what he did
He replied, “Just this: I looks
At ’Im, ’an ’E looks at me.”

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© August/September 2022 & January/February 2023

The Garden Crock

For comparison here's a link to another garden poem - "A View of My Garden," which was the first poem I completed after returning to poetry in 2012 (after a near thirty year break). I posted it on this blog on 18 January 2014.

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   A disused kitchen crock was dumped
      Upon a scrubby path
   At garden’s rear, collecting there
         The rain which flumped
      From autumn’s clouds: hence, birds
   Would to and fro for drink or bath:
   Gruff gulls, meek pigeons, poised to scare,
Made weal or woe, like roughly-butted words,
   Churning that crock with cries and merds.

   Pre-Christmas, freezing air flowed in –
      The prom and shingle banks
   Were iced, the sea a sluggish lead.
         A metalled skin
      Of ice panelled the bowl
   Which after fraught days burst its flanks,
   Peeling the iced plug’s solid head:
The shards and shattered hulkings, winter’s toll,
   Lay round like shipwrecks on a shoal.

   Long days it took that plug to melt
      Till January’s nought
   Had come. I thought of the prom’s tribe
         Of old – unsvelte,
      Wheelchaired or zimmered, slow
   To die, and like that ice-pig wrought
   To dribs. Ah, Time’s unfriendly jibe:
Both ice and old thin to a slivered floe,
    Then wind’s puff shakes them. And they go.

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© December 2022