The Republic of Yeah (Revised)

In April/May 2013 I wrote three poems on ‘the way things are’ – ‘A Biedermeir Age,’ ‘The Anthropological Turn’ and ‘The Republic of Yeah’ and posted them August-October 2014. I have come to think that the rhythms in all three were too rugged, even jagged, and have revised them for easier reading. The revised ‘A Biedermeir Age’ can be read here ; the revised ‘The Anthropological Turn’ can be read here
   The third poem, 'The Republic of Yeah' was posted on 11 October 2014 and like the others I have quietly amended it in situ. This cost me more hair-pulling than the others put together. The poem uses a complex stanza and rhyme scheme adapted from models in W.B. Yeats and that most-interesting Cornish poet, Jack Clemo. Hence, hemmed in by line and rhyme restraints, trying to rewrite was mind-boggling work. I suspect that rather than finishing the poem I've abandoned it as the best I can do. The revised 'The Republic of Yeah' can be read here

A Blackbird After Rain

The bird books tell you blackbirds stop singing after July until the following spring; although many may continue singing quietly to themselves in a sub-song or under-song, as if practising. However, where I was living at the time, one or two blackbirds would often launch into full song right up until November, usually in the late afternoon or after heavy rain.
   The poem is in blank verse.

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Suddenly, after filthy rain a blackbird,
Lodged in a drooping-fingered cherry tree,
Launched into song, rebrightening the dank
And mud-besmirched November afternoon.
For weeks from the same perch this bird at dusk
Had fretted at the cherry leaves’ decay
And the chill unfriendliness of thinning air
With his persistent “jag-jag-jag” hurled at 
The fading lemon-green sky of evening. 
But now in thanks that the roaring welter had  
Declined it threw out loudly thrills of sound,
Sharp-toned and fluted, clear and perfectly
In pitch, with which on summer afternoons
It had made light liquid and stirred up heat
Into a wide-beaked incandescence of
Plangent beauty and frank incontinence.
In silhouette against the indigo
And slatey cloud-sheet, moving off to leave
Cold skies and a muddle-misted quarter moon, 
The blackbird sang its alto-treble descants,
Whooping ebulliently – his trademark since  
Claiming his ground in spring. But something cracked,
And clattering into a warning yell
He arrowed to a distant tree from which,
Reperched, he gruffly spat his “jag-jag-jag”
Again. Soon, spotting rain and thickened dusk,
Impenetrable as treacle, smothered him 
And shut him up for the night’s tense endurance. 
Unheard the last few days, it proved at least
He still subsisted now that food and warmth
Were scanting: may he still subsist come winter’s  
Open-vista’d blasts, rattling his feathers, 
So that mist-enshrouded on Christmas Day,
He’ll chorus in the snow-piled cherry tree 
Commending birth and the holly’s rich red berries, 
And then endure the famished ice-lands of
January’s neutered stillness, baleful through
February, March, until spring’s boiling blood
Urges him a’back his hen, begetting there 
New life, and harshly-proud he reascends 
His cherry bough, there to sing on, sing on. 

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© November 2013

The Anthropological Turn (Revised)

In April/May 2013 I wrote three poems on ‘the way things are’ – ‘A Biedermeir Age,’ ‘The Anthropological Turn’ and ‘The Republic of Yeah’ and posted them August-October 2014. I have come to think that the rhythms in all three were too rugged, even jagged, and have revised them for easier reading. The revised ‘A Biedermeir Age’ can be read here
   ‘The Anthropological Turn’ was posted on 14 September 2014. I have revised it in situ; the result can be read here
   The phrase “anthropological turn” was used by Catholic thinkers, in particular, to describe the revolution in thinking in the 1960s (at least in the West) which put man rather than God at the centre of all things.

A Fallen Bough

This is my first poem in syllabics for thirty years or more. The syllable count is 5 6 3 7 with no elisions; for good measure I introduced rhyme in the first and fourth lines of each stanza. I wrote quite a number of poems in syllabics when I was much younger; they are posted in the earlier pages of this blog. A couple of examples are 'Outside, a Blunt Wind Shatters...' here, a sonnet following the example of Elizabeth Daryush, a most interesting poet though largely forgotten now; and 'Hearing Thunder' here, using a model adapted from W.H. Auden who in turn used Alcaic and Asclepiadean models found in Hölderlin and in turn borrowed from their Greek originals. Poetic craft almost completely forgotten by today's younger poets! 

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      In the dawning hours 
   A pounding weight of wind 
         Wrenched the house 
As if clambering powers 

      Burst Hades’ black walls.

   A morning’s drenching walk
         Through wrecked fields,
Wading ditches and leaf falls, 

      Found the wind-torn oak –

   A bough an arm’s-reach thick
         Ripped from its
Trunk by the brute gale, its cloak   

      Of leaves palling its

   Twisted corpse collapsed in  
         The mud-grass.
The October sun span glits  

      Of watery light

   On the brood of branches 
         Borne by the 
Thrown bough like Medusa’s fright

      Of hair. A wide third

   Of the oak’s crown had been 
         Dismembered –  
The bight broiled with the sky’s curd 

      Like the sea squirming

   Across a bay. A stark 
         Suede adit
On the trunk’s flank was firming

      Already into

   A lumpish thick-lipped scar,  
         Tannin-brown –  
A dank haven to accrue 

      Tree mould and birds’ bones.

   The bough stump, shattered to
         Fangs, gleamed white,
Sprinkled by the rain-wet groans 

      Of wind. Inspected,

   Its switchback limbs, dense with 
         Chisel-chased
Elephant-bark, infected  

      By lichen pastes, grey

   And bilious, and caked 
         With soaked moss,  
Smelt mutedly of dunged hay –

      The raw exchanges 

   Of air and fatal life  
         Curtained from
Livers in heated granges.

      In seconds that bough,

   Gnarled grower of decades,
         Had staggered –
Felled by the wresting wind’s sough. 

      What hope for the finch,

   Then, bundled from a hedge
         By the blast,
Worn brittle by autumn’s pinch?

      Or us, tramping back 

   In cloud-smoke and rain-shot,
         One day to
Be sundered by our bones’ crack?

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© November 2013

 

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.

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© 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.
                                             *