A Biedermeir Age (Revised)

On 16 August 2014 I posted 'A Biedermeir Age,' a poem on 'the current state of things.' It was written in rugged ottava rima which I have come to think of as too rugged. Hence I have revised the poem for greater smoothness. I quietly amended the original posting which can be read here

Tree Bark

The rhyme in line 5 of each stanza binds them together.

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   I’m too old to be smooth
   With a deep olive sheen
Like the bark of the neat laburnum;
   Or to glitter dark green
   When brusque April rain
Polishes each wart and groove;
And as for a corn-yellow head,
   Soon set, soon shed,
Long gone are my days of quorum.

   I’m too old to have beauty,

   Cream-full and white,
Like the bark of the silver birch;
   Catching the light
   Like a gleam on a pane,
In September dusks it does duty
Guiding labourers home
   Though shadows loom 
And an owl glides from its perch.

   I am old and rough,

   Ragged-grained and grey,
Like the bark of the leaning willow;
   With thin leaves all day
   It dabbles a stain
In the stream, black and buff,
Groaning sore in its boughs
   At the wind’s souse,
Longing for the earth’s pillow.

====================

© October 2013

 

The Woods at Night

In September and October 2013 I made a number of night walks through deep woods close to where I lived. I made the walks in the dark of night with no torch or mobile. I avoided the forest paths and cut straight through the untouched woods, although I had previously reconnoitred my route by daylight. If I had become incapacitated in any way it would have been extremely awkward. I did it because I wanted to find out what it was like. It was hard work and not to be recommended to anyone who worries about ghosts or ghouls; or indeed wandering madmen (which is probably what I was). I made detailed notes immediately after the walks and this poem records my impressions, although it then moves on to meditate on the frailty of physical existence and the experience of the Absolute gained in extreme situations. 
   The poem is 296 lines long and has 6 sections, each of which begins and ends with alexandrines which rhyme. Otherwise, the poem is written in rugged iambic pentameter,  perhaps best thought of as syllabic, although as it moves into the meditative later part the metre becomes more regular. Briefly, the argument is: section 1 - sets the scene as dusk falls; section 2 - the walk starts as night deepens; section 3 - making the walk in deep dark; section 4 - gaining a forest path and making my way over heathland back to a village; section 5 - ponders what would have happened if I or someone had fallen and broken a leg; section 6 - extends the meditation to the contingency of animal life, and to man suffering and dying in "civilized" settings, before returning to the forest to consider the experience of the Absolute and the provisional nature of existence.
   Such themes have always interested me; as far back as 1979 I wrote a couple of extended poems in free verse as meditations on time and existence prompted by natural settings. "Ashford Stream" (in Edward Thomas country) can be seen here and "The Ridgeway Above Wroughton" here

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Sunk in the autumn woods dusk deepens to bruise-brown.
Standing in brittle leaf mulch, suede and grey,
I watch the oak trunks, grossly-waisted, darken
And the ragged chestnuts blanch in the gloom;
Above, through clawing hands of dead-leaved branches
A washed sky of linen dirties to ash.
A thick silence in the browning light stiffens
Like dregs, and shadows, bulky as sludge, seep
Beneath yew trees grown grimly dark as caves.
A sharp slope strewn with rotting boles and swart
Coverts of nettles fades impetuously 
As if a great fist closed. There’s a weak groan
Of traffic mewing from a motorway
At distance, though stymied by the wood’s stillness
And the cold air’s aloof indifference.
Tersely, an acorn clatters through an oak’s
Twisted crown or a twig toboggans through
A maple’s rusty foliage. They slap
The ground and cease. Uneased, I shuffle, snapping
Dry branches underfoot and scattering
The crackling leaf trash. Near but hid a blackbird
Scolds this dangerous noise; higher, a crow
Croaks angrily, daunted by the uncharted
Passage of night. Silence silences all.
The wood becomes a sombre, introverted frown. 

Night falls; the forest petrifies in sullen dark.

The air is muddy-thick, bile-brown; above,
The shreds of sky are charcoal metal-grey.
Vistas coagulate in shadow masses,
Swathing the copper-boled beeches and dank
Crouching holly. The silence now is tough 
And leathern chestnuts plummet with a rip
Like tearing cloth. Moving by the foot’s touch
I blunder into arching bramble shoots,
Painfully snagging flesh, or lurch shakily
On tree or gorse roots. Worse are the unseen
Spiders’ webs, graspingly-meshing on face
And neck, loaded with dust and papery
Rubbish of leaf fall. Crunching at every step
Twigs and branches grossly implode like fungus
Trodden upon. All’s indistinct; ripe smells                                             
Assail: sour leafage, boggy earth, tart dust,
Fruiting fungus and insect-rotten wood.
The darkness deepens and a shaking night wind 
Sweeps through the wood, disturbing the tree crowns,
Rattling the holly bushes and shivering
The draped ivy so that its captive litter 
Trickles like rain. A magpie gratingly cries  
Then settles, as does the rough wind which leaves no mark.
                                             *



Elegy: Washington Square Revisited

The reference, of course, is to Henry James's novella, Washington Square, although the poem actually ends up with Oedipus in the groves at Colonus and, indeed, at the fateful crossroads themselves. Such is the logic of poems. This 132 line poem is written in my approximation to the classical elegiac metre, i.e. alternating alexandrines and pentameters, although for good measure I have added rhyme in the pentameters. The subject is a personal one, concerning a most significant "other", but perhaps not unusual in these disordered times.

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(n m-s)
 
This is the saddest poem I shall ever write.
   There’s Morris Townsend stalking from the house
Of blameless Catherine, his hat upon his head,
   Smarting disappointment that the meek mouse 
Pursued by him has crushed with vexing dignity 
   His plea that friendship be allowed to grow
Once more, despite the silence of his absent years 
   Spent travelling and getting, and the blow 
Landed brutely a decade since, rejecting her
   Because control of all he wished would not
Be his. What made him think it might be otherwise?
   In agony the years pour back with what
I’d hoped forgotten: broiling storms of obstinate 
   Despair which swamped all sense; unruly surges
Of love and hate which crashed like blackened waves on sands
   Made sumps by spray and rain, and the wind’s dirges
Screaming over the seaweed, soggy as ropes, heaped 
   At the storm-line, crawled across by sand crabs 
Like confessors digging motives. And who’s to blame?
   Where’s forgiveness? My tale, a hand which grabs
Your arm as the stairs turn, may only be resolved 
   In death. Was it a case of opposites?
You used to amplitude, the freedom of fine rooms,
   Where ornament and grace-notes as befits
A dwelling held aloof by the exemplary
   Milch of trust funds, embodied boundaries,
Implicit expectations, always difficult
   For one who kept small rooms, a life of sundries 
And unheated winter mornings to intrude upon. 
   Likewise, love for you was contextual,
Requiring the warm weft of family and friends 
   As setting for commitments functional 
As well as heartfelt; whereas I preferred the cold 
   Mist of sunrise, a soul-denuding calm 
Which offered isolation and intensity
   Of thought on self – that puzzle-in-a-psalm
Wrong-footing every sage and scribbler who has tugged
   A loved one into its transfixing coils. 
O, but memories of grace and giving oversweep: 
   Those moments which up-end the toils and moils
Of passing hours, epiphanising what’s most real 
   In any true commitment – that entrusting
Of each to each, an unconditional bestowing 
   In self-abandonment that knows no musting
Nor peevish motive. I recall a time of play,
   Of guileless teasing, you confronting me
Helpless in laughter, falling in my arms and resting
   In and on them, bodily, psychically – 
Your skin was blushed, your voice as musical as water;
   A boundless moment superseding time
In which the weaker, trusting, was caressed to growth,
   The stronger one, sustaining, sought the prime
Of both, fulfilled that strength might be transposed to being
   And thereby draw the hidden inwardness 
Of persons to a crux of pure communion. 

Months: Lyrics

In March 2012 I decided to write a sequence of twelve poems about the months - all the poems to be in the same form and each written in the month, each based on a close observation of the natural phenomena around me. That original set of 'Months' was posted on 6 February 2015 and is linked here
   I then decided to write another set, this time of shorter lyrics in various sizes, shapes and metres. I started in March 2014 and finished in February 2015. That's the order the poems are meant to be read in, March - February. I now post the complete set.
   For the record, the individual poems were posted on 14 March, 13 April, 9 May, 15 June, 11 July, 8 August, 11 September, 9 October, 14 November, 12 December 2015, 10 January and 15 February 2016. Some of the postings contained a few notes to explain anything unusual in the poems. 
   Also, one or two of the early poems had references to the Christian year which I planned to continue throughout the sequence; unfortunately this fell by the wayside.

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MARCH

March murk done, the chilly dew
Drips from the shock-head churchyard yew,
   Quicksilvers grass,
   Glistens like glass,
Speckling the dusty graves anew.    

Freshly, the tight-fist orange sun

A cloud-tall morning blush has flung;

Daffodils prattle in the breeze,
Blue-skinned crocuses flop and sneeze;   
   The dip-gathered frost
   Like a glint-toothed ghost
Hugs close its winter miseries.    

Drumming its creaking bone-break thud,

The woodpecker, splashed with Jesu’s blood,

   The year’s agonies
   Shrilly cries:
Lady Day primrose lights the wood. 

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APRIL

 

A winter-absent heron
Returns on the April wind,
Long-legging the lake’s sedges;
Enthralled it spears at a find –           
A tench dies in its passion
Mourned by a mist of midges.        

Shroud-grey and dusty that heron
Corpse-like on parachute wings
Hangs on the lake’s black waters;       
Willow flock froths up and sings,        
The aspen is a white-leaved clarion,
But the heron broods on slaughters.    

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MAY

The trees are leaved; even the ash
Its many-fingered crown has dressed;    
      Noah’s splash
Must bide a year. With tipsy cheer  
The lopside stare at the bank’s crest     
      Whistles a leer.      

Crazyhead oak with fat-leaf veils
Enswathes itself, aglim with sun;    
      In shadows, snails
Aboard the nettles’ spiteful bristles, 
Thrush-grabbed are cracked to death among 
      The throstle jostled thistles.  

The splay-pined larch drops seed from cones
To fruit in the earth’s spicy pall;    
      With tortured bones,
Christ ascended in His blood’s banner,
Hovers; will He in judgement fall      
      Like the wind-fanner?

--------------

A Rowan Tree

In the grey mist of a September dawn,
   Chill with drizzle, a rowan tree,
Huddled like a watchman beneath its lamp
Of clustered berries, issued from the bourn  
Of night. Those berries, richly red and damp,
      Shone flatly as though black 
   Were cindered with their hot-coals glimmer; 
For not dull autumn with its rust and lack
But the rowan with leaves like Charon’s oars
Lights travellers to Lake Avernus’ shores,
   Its waters’ man-destroying simmer.

All that has meaning is earmarked by death; 

   Distracted men ignore this tree,
Its muted berry-brands aglow in dusk,
But comes a day a hand will snatch their breath, 
Then dusty-mouthed like a discarded husk,
      Possessions and endearments
   Become like leaf-fall, friable,
Charon will ferry them stripped of cerements
Across the lake to judgement, then to wander
In asphodels or Tartarus asunder, 
   Discarnate and unknowable.

====================

© September 2013

 

Months: Lyrics: February

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December and January in this series were posted on 14 March, 13 April, 9 May, 15 June, 11 July, 8 August, 11 September, 9 October, 14 November, 12 December 2015 and 10 January 2016.
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Ah the foggy, foggy dawns
And misty eves which pierce the bones; 
   Such rat-grey gloomings
   And dead-man loomings,
Fox spoor on the dew-black lawns
And wind-wisps making sudden moans:
 
Dusk despite all lingers later,
The ditchman, digging, stretches straighter;
   Candlemas coughings quenched,
   Though freezing rains bedamp,
Cherry buds like fingers clenched  
Swell and fidget to untamp. 

The sun like a sucked mint pales the sky,

Linnets and sparrows shout hue and cry,
   Blackbirds forage straws,
   Bright berries tempt the ’daws,
But should a brown-dense cloud throw cover, 
All stills lest winter be not over.

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© February 2015