Just a Prod at Auden

Back in the 1930s William Empson wrote his famous - and still well worth reading - poem, "Just a Smack at Auden." I thought I'd have my own say, using the Tanka stanza. As I wrote, two quiet references to Auden's elegy for W.B. Yeats crept in. In the fifth stanza there is a quote from St Paul, 1 Cor. 11.22 (Douay-Rheims translation). Blenheim is Blenheim Palace, surely pretty massive on anyone's scale, (my spelling "massifed" is deliberate).

   I expanded on some of my own feelings about writing in "Meaning," written in April 2016 and posted here on 22 June 2021.

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Your subjects were large,
Your languaged proclivities,
Your scoped poetics,
Immense. And engrossing were
Your rococo’d, modulate

Speech-things, busied with
Ethics in this double-cross,
Back-slap-and-grin world:
A gemmist, you rehabbed words,
Bran-tubbing the O.E.D.

But you were silly,
Unserioused by queerdom,
A wrist-dropped “get her!”
Veining even your starkest
Moralled works. Those epicene

Love songs, unfocussed
By the twink impulse, hidden;
The doctrined poems
Later, Christ typifiying,
Wormed by the harlot, Kallman;

And, in age, your broad
Divagated hold-forths, wealed,
But cricked by your eye
For “trade” and young men blooming:
Well, in this I praise you not!

Oh, for that finalled
“Whoomp!” of braced argumentum –
Arnold’s tense hair-pull,
Say, worrying to terse ends
(A dosing of his father’s

Masculine credo
Would have helped, too). Despite that,
Your gift survived all,
Uneasing, now, “woke” wordcarls,
Popping-eyed for “inclusion,”

Castrated syntax –
All such man-dreamt Ponzi trash!
Massifed as Blenheim
Your work shrugs: what’s consequent
Is virtue; praise; and pity.

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© February 2023

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

West Penwith

West Penwith is the far south-western toe of the UK mainland; only the nail clippings of the Scilly Isles lie beyond.  Up on the moors behind Penzance is Carn Euny, a preserved Iron Age settlement of the Cornovii tribe. Fogous (rather crudely "caves") probably had a religious/ceremonial significance - there are several in West Penwith. The coastal village of Pendeen until 2014 had a massive working foghorn replete with signs to stay well away during poor visibility because the horn was so powerful it could damage your ears. (The disused foghorn is still there beside the Pendeen lighthouse.) 

   The poem, with just a little bit of grammatical stretch, is written in a single sentence. It is one of three written in the same rather jogging metre in 2021/22. The others are "Cornish Gorse" posted here on 24 October 2023, and "If You Want to Know What Sea Is" posted here on 25 November 2023.

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The cliffs are shook, the thyme is shaken,
The roar is such to waken the Kraken;
Dank mist like suds is flung from the sea,
Greyly streaming over stack and scree;
Sharp rain is piercing the grass and sedge
Clinging blackly to slab and ledge,
And the wind, the wind! like a searing flail
Scourges the cliffs and moors with hail:
Carn Euny, stark on its rising breast,
Has a view all ways, north-east, south-west,
But compass-open there’s no reprieve
From the air’s freeze, the wind’s heave;
Here the Cornovii built their huts,
Granite and thatch, their paths all ruts,
And wind-swept, damp-rotted, scratched their fields
For oats’ and barley’s skinny yields;
Some bony cattle, some goats and sheep
Graze the moorland with its constant creep
Of heather, bracken and yellow-eyed gorse
Grabbing ground with bullying force:
Arthritic, coughing, weather-scarred men
Hack the furze from the field walls again;
Their women, bent-backed, carry and cook,
The children learning by help and look:
And has much changed through centuries’ reach
(Some offer nostrums, others preach)?
But look, Penzance – harsh-granite-grey –
Hunkers as a rain squall swamps the bay,
Glinting grimly through the solid pour
Battering gutters with its ear-split roar;
The sea, the rain-drenched wind, the salt
Govern life and health from birth to vault;
And soon or late, folk to the grave
Crumple and fall like a stumbling wave,

Down at the Water's Edge

All the references will be well known to Penzance aficionados; Pen Sans is the "Holy Headland" around which Penzance is built. For my attempt to convey what it's like to be caught in bad weather at sea see my "Gale at Sea" posted here on 25 October 2023. And for my memorial of a genuine Penzance/Newlyn "character" see "Roger Nowell, A Cornish Skipper" posted here on 19 December 2017 and easily my most visited poem: it's astonishing how his memory lives on!

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When the wind blows and the scud is low,
Swamping St Clement’s Isle,
When the sea surges as black as pitch
And the cloud’s as brown as bile;
Then’s the time to gasp your last
And groan for cart or sledge:
“O, haul me out and let me die
Down at the water’s edge.”

Rattle me down through Chapel Street
Sinking below Pen Sans,
Hear! the rain is flung in swathes
Roaring like falling cans;
Drag me on to Battery Rocks
For I’m to fulfil a pledge –
Soaked, battered, it’s there I’ll die
Down at the water’s edge.

So many! In youth we were forced from the west,
Urgent for work and a wage,
In London town I sweated and jobbed
As the years became an age;
Now old, returned, in Gwavas Street
I sit in my window’s ledge,
Waiting the end when I wish to die
Down at the water’s edge.

St Peter in boots, with his oilskins tight,
Staggered along Heaven's pier,
The seas were high, the entrance rough,
Boats off wallow and veer:
“Ahoy,” he bawled, “there’s few will enter
Struggling with sheet and kedge,
But are you from the west and did you die
Down at the water’s edge?”

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© October-November 2022

Eyelids

The stanzas are written as haikus with the usual syllable count of 5, 7, 5. I've introduced rhyme in the third line of each stanza to bind the poem together.

   A sort of hunched-up winter contra-version of this poem is "Impromptu," written in February 1980 and posted here on 26 January 2012.

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But by God you’ve lived!
Late June, the afternoon sun’s
Intense, the wind strong,

The sea’s a’broil with
Plasma of leaping flash-flakes,
Flinging heat that shone

Glarely on suede sand
And hot-stoned shingle. The gulls
Crouched, panting, weighed by

The sky’s vaulted tons,
Lapis-blue, peremptory.
Lips and tongue are spry

With ozone-souse, flung
By the in-roaring waves, thumped
By wind’s fisted blast.

An hour’s prom walk is
Enough, threading the basted
Bodies, thin or vast,

Crisping in sun, all
Angst-work annulled in heat-trance.
Wake up! There’s self’s thrill

In this mêle of air’s
Primary dazzle, frank to
Enthuse the poised will.

Later, returned home,
An iced drink misting its glass,
Eyelids sting, cheeks throb,

Livened by sun’s, wind’s
Afterburn. Back! Go back, where
The sea shouts, gulls mob!

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© August 2022

The Spider

This is my only poem about spiders as far as I recall. I have, however, written a lot of poems about birds. So for comparison I give a link to my eleven year old poem, "Two Sparrows" here.

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A tiny spider but a mil or two,
Vaulted in terror as my finger swept
Above him like a comet razing earth:
   The domicile he kept

Disastered, gamely bristling legs like clubs,
He fled for safety to the cupboard’s bounds.
Ten days he’d commoned on that smooth white door,
   Sorting his granuled founds;

I him ignored, he me, but then my hand,
Forgetful, upside-downed with whistling winds
His lunar plain’s calm atmosphere, shaking
   His web-tied goods to flinds.

With caution, later, he sidled back and set
Himself again to hoard his winnowed shreds;
For him, at scale, that door’s unfeatured stretch
   Was place, with meats and breads,

A neighbourhood, terrained and closely-known,
Though heavened with a void, now light, now not,
Tornadoed by destroyings beyond all grasp
   Of his brain’s challenged dot.

What gulfs between that minim thing and I –
Both size and concept-handling depth of mind!
Looming, to him I’m but a whimful god,
   Destructive, lenient, blind;

But then, what depths, what deeps! draw endlessly
Between the Fleshless Ones and my garbed self;
To them, had Yahweh not touched flesh I’d be
   A bug upon a shelf.

Again, though Angels crowd the One’s just Hand,
Unbridgeable’s the tract that clefts His thoughts
From theirs: we none have being in ourselves
   Except He stoops and wroughts.

Many’s the thinker, centuries-long, who’s twist
His mind to know what’s known-not but it show
Itself! We come, we go – truth’s behind-veiled,
   And death’s its pilgrim’s glow.

So smile upon that spider’s life’s endeavours,
His treasured husks and flakes; soon he’ll fall prey
To some toothed gatherer, so let his dwelling
   Prosper him his day.

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© July 2022