Wanderer's Nightsong (#poem)

 

Wanderer's Night-song

O'er all the hilltops

Is quiet now,

In all the tree-tops

Hearest thou

Hardly a breath;

The birds are asleep in the trees:

Wait, soon like these,

Thou too shall rest.

 

-Goethe (tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

 

 

I just finished A. N. Wilson's recent biography of Goethe (pretty good!) and came across this poem. Goethe wrote the poem on the wall of a gamekeeper's hut in the mountains of Thuringia, Germany in 1776. He mentioned it in a letter, and friends copied it out and later published it without his approval. He never thought to include it in one of his own books, but now it's sometimes considered the most perfect lyric in German and was set to music by Schubert.

 

Six months before his death with his health failing, Goethe insisted he could still climb the mountain to where the hut was, and did, and read the poem he'd written there fifty years before.

 

Another version, by John Whaley, an English translator who died in 2005:

 

Over all of the hills

Peace comes anew,

The woodland stills

All through;

The birds make no sound on the bough,

Wait a while,

Soon now,

Peace comes to you.

 

-Goethe (tr. John Whaley)

 

And warum nicht? The German:

 

Wandrers Nachtlied

 

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur! Balde

Ruhest du auch.

 

-Goethe

Heinrich Heine's The Lotus Flower

The Lotus Flower

The lotus flower is frightened

By the sun's majestic light;

With downcast eyes and dreaming

She longs for the quiet of night.

 

The moon, he is her lover,

He wakes her with silver rays;

To him she unveils her friendly

Devoted flower face.

 

She blooms and sparkles, gazing

Silently up to his glow;

In fragrance she weeps and trembles

From rapture of love and woe.

 

-Heinrich Heine (tr. Ernst Feise)

 

Heine was a German poet, born in 1797 in Düsseldorf, when the revolutionary French forces occupied the town. His parents were Jewish. In 1831, he moved as a political exile to Paris, where he lived the rest of his life. In 1848, he suffered a paralytic stroke and was confined to bed (his 'mattress-grave' he called it) from then until his death in 1856, but still writing all the time.

 

The German:

 

Die Lotosblume

 

Die Lotosblume ängstigt

Sich vor der Sonne Pracht,

Und mit gesenktem Haupte

Erwartet sie träumend die Nacht.

 

Der Mond, der ist ihr Buhle,

Er weckt sie mit seinem Licht,

Und ihm entschleiert sie freundlich

Ihr frommes Blumengesicht.

 

Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet

Und starret stumm in die Höh;

Sie duftet und weinet und zittert

Vor Liebe und Liebesweh.

 

-Heinrich Heine

Pangloss' Song by Richard Wilbur (#poem)

 

Pangloss' Song:

A comic-opera lyric

 

I

 

Dear boy, you will not hear me speak

  With sorrow or with rancor

Of what has paled my rosy cheek

  And blasted it with canker;

'Twas Love, great Love, that did the deed

  Through Nature's gentle laws,

And how should ill effects proceed

  From so divine a cause?

 

Sweet honey comes from bees that sting,

  As you are well aware

To one adept in reasoning

Whatever pains disease may bring

Are but the tangy seasoning

  To Love's delicious fare.

 

II

 

Columbus and his men, they say,

  Conveyed the virus hither

Whereby my features rot away

  And vital powers wither;

Yet had they not traversed the seas

  And come infected back,

Why, think of all the luxuries

  That modern life would lack!

 

All bitter things conduce to sweet,

  As this example shows;

Without the little spirochete

We'd have no chocolate to eat,

Nor would tobacco's fragrance greet

  The European nose.

 

III

 

Each nation guards its native land

  With cannons and with sentry,

Inspectors look for contraband

  At every port of entry,

Yet nothing can prevent the spread

  Of love's divine disease:

It rounds the world from bed to bed

  As pretty as you please.

 

Men worship Venus everywhere,

  As plainly may be seen;

The decorations which I bear

Are nobler than the Croix de Guerre,

And gained in service of our fair

  And universal Queen.

 

-Richard Wilbur

 

Somehow it seemed time for a little light verse, even if it's verse in celebration (?) of syphilis. 

 

Richard Wilbur wrote this for Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide, the first version of which was performed in 1956. This song for Dr. Pangloss (he was the young Candide's tutor) didn't make it into the operetta--I suspect Bernstein thought it would be too hard to sing and so didn't write music for it--but did make it into subsequent volumes of Richard Wilbur's poetry. But the majority of the lyrics in the operetta were by Richard Wilbur, including its most famous song, 'Glitter and Be Gay', sung by Cunegonde.

 

Frank O'Hara's A City Winter (#1952Club, #Poem)

Poem

Let's take a walk, you 

and I in spite of the

weather if it rains hard

      on our toes

 

we'll stroll like poodles

and be washed down a

gigantic scenic gutter

     that will be

 

exciting! voyages are not

all like this you just put

your toes together then

     maybe blood

 

will get meaning and a trick

become slight in our keeping

before we sail the open sea it's

     possible--

 

And the landscape will do

us some strange favor when

we look back at each other

     anxiously

 

-Frank O'Hara

 

A City Winter: 1

 

I understand the boredom of the clerks

fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes

a frightful nausea gumming up the works

that once was thought aggression in disguise.

Do you remember? then how lightly dead

seemed the moon when over factories

it languid slid like a barrage of lead

above the heart, the fierce inventories

of desire. Now women wander our dreams

carrying money to our sleep's shame

our hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes

nor languorous white horses nor ill fame,

  but clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky

  where tow'rs are sinking in their common eye.

 

-Frank O'Hara

 

Frank O'Hara was an American poet (1926-1966). He was born in Baltimore, grew up in Massachusetts, was in the Navy in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific during World War II, used his GI Bill benefits to get a Harvard education and then moved to New York City where he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and an art critic. He was gay. He died when he was hit by a (presumably drunk) driver in a dune buggy on Fire Island.

 

His first published book of poems, A City Winter and Other Poems, came out in 1952. (There was an earlier privately printed volume.)  O'Hara is usually viewed as a spontaneous chronicler of his life in a sort of primitive poetry. John Ashbery says, in the introduction to the Collected Poems, "Dashing the poems off at odd moments--in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people--he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them." Hmm. Maybe. But I would note that 'A City Winter: 1' is a perfectly fine sonnet, and is one of five sonnets in a sequence that is the title poem, and that the first poem quoted while, not in a nameable form, has form, something close to Sapphics. Maybe he did think about them a little bit...

 

He's also capable of fun: 

 

Poem

 

At night Chinamen jump

on Asia with a thump

 

while in our willful way

we, in secret, play

 

affectionate games and bruise

our knees like China's shoes.

 

The birds push apples through

grass the moon turns blue, 

those apples roll beneath

our buttocks like a heath

 

full of Chinese thrushes

flushed from China's bushes.

 

As we love at night

birds sing out of sight,

 

Chinese rhythms beat

through us in our heat,

 

the apples and the birds

move us like soft words,

 

we couple in the grace

of that mysterious race.

 

-Frank O'Hara

 

One of my favourites from O'Hara, also from A City Winter and Other Poems.

 

A great discussion of what's probably O'Hara's most famous poem (but from his later book Lunch Poems) 'Having a Coke With You' by A. O. Scott can be found here, though you'll need access to the New York Times to read it.

 

Sadly, while I put a photo of the first edition of A City Winter and Other Poems up at the top, that's not what I have. I poached that picture from AbeBooks where an autographed copy was listed for £27000. Instead what I have is 😉 this:

 

 

which is where that Ashbery quote comes from.

It's the week of Simon and Kaggsy's 1952 Club! It's also National Poetry Month in Canada and the US.

 

 

 

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (#1952Club)

"He knew with all his heart the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch, that he couldn't see how history could have possibly led anywhere else."

Doctor Paul Proteus is the manager of the Ilium Works, "the most important, brilliant person in Ilium." He's only thirty-five, and he's expected to only move up from that triumph. After all his father was Doctor George Proteus, a man second in importance only to the president of the United States.

The time is after the third world war; industrial planning and robotics were so important and successful in enabling the U.S. to win those wars, that now everything is given over to managers and engineers--and the machines that replace most people's jobs. 

It's a meritocratic society--examinations determine each individual's capabilities--and your punch card determines the sort of job you can have. If you're not qualified for any of the jobs, you're not tossed aside--exactly. You're offered a position in the Army--though there are no more wars after that last one--or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, the 'Reeks and Wrecks'. It'll keep you from starving. But everybody knows both are just make-work.

The quote above is Proteus thinking about the current state of the U.S. Something's not right.

There's a rebel organization, the Ghost Shirt Society, that aims to do something about it. From their manifesto:

"Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore, be returned to participation is such enterprises."

Proteus is drawn to the ideas of the Ghost Shirt Society, but he's also an engineer and finds it hard to approve inefficiency for its own sake. But then his superiors want him to infiltrate the Society, and publicly fire him to ease his infiltration. What does he decide to do?

Player Piano is Vonnegut's first novel and it's definitely 1952. Processes that improve to such a degree there won't be enough work for all the workers is probably more a risk now than in 1952, but in the novel it happens with punch cards and tape, and the majority of the jobs replaced are assembly line-style work. (No LLMs or general AI.) There are a few women that work, but mostly their opportunities are limited to marriage. (Vonnegut is sympathetic to women not having anything to do, but he doesn't really see around the problem in this; their usefulness is ruined by automatic washers.) But the novel does examine real issues with a human setting, and is unpredictable in its outcome.

Still, while it's not the equal of Vonnegut's later greater novels--the prose is flatter, the construction isn't as tight, it doesn't have those flights of inspired absurdism--it is pretty solid, and better than I expected it to be. (It's usually dismissed.) It does have the Shah of Bratpuhr, the 'spiritual leader of 6,000,000 members of the Kolhouri sect,'  an amusingly ridiculous character who could show up in Cat's Cradle. There's humor:

"I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I earned that degree. My thesis was the third longest in any field in the country that year."

A different character has all his academic degrees revoked because it's discovered he never passed gym. (Noooooo!)

A contribution to the 1952 Club. Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting!

 WordPress has been sending my comments to the spam folder again, it seems.

Angus WIlson's Hemlock and After (#1952Club)

"Dear Sands, I am pleased to be able to tell you that official agreement has been given to the grant for Vardon Hall."

Bernard Sands is a 'Grand Old Man of Letters', perhaps even a 'Grand Enfant Terrible'.  He's in his late 50s and has written a number of successful novels. The old manor house in his English village of Vardon was on the market; it wasn't good enough for the National Trust, and Sands has decided it should become a retreat for young writers. As the novel starts he's just gotten word of his success.

Sands is married with two children he's somewhat estranged from. His son James aspires to a Conservative political career; Sands is a bit closer to his daughter Elizabeth, a journalist.

The reason for the estrangement is that Sands has decided he's homosexual. His wife Ella has had a nervous breakdown, though she's gradually recovering. His son James is worried about the scandal; his daughter feels her mother's injury.

His first affair was with a graphic artist Terence Lambert who aspires to do stage design. That affair is over though they remain on good terms, and Sands is now interested in Eric Craddock who works in a bookshop. Is this grants scheme for young writers just a procurement mechanism? It's not, but the rumours do fly. (And somebody else is running a procurement scheme.) Mr. Greenlees, the first young writer for Vardon Hall, would definitely appear not to be a sex object.

The first high point of the novel, Sands is waiting in Leicester Square for Terence Lambert, when he's approached by a young man who asks him for a light. The young man has clearly got something more on his mind, but Sands isn't interested in cruising. But moments later, the still nameless young man is arrested 'for importuning', and the detective asks Sands if he would like to offer evidence. Sands says, "Certainly not," but he's torn between helping, as if there was anything he could do, and throwing the young man to the dogs to save himself. The stress of it all leads to a heart attack, just as Terence Lambert is arriving.

The second high point of the novel is the speech Sands gives at the opening of Vardon Hall. James and his wife have been inviting Conservative grandees, hoping to make connections, various London homosexuals show up, and, from the neighbourhood, the odious Mrs. Curry--Sands' original rival for Vardon Hall--and her circle appear. The hall is jammed; the weather is an uncharacteristic broiling, and a mad imbroglio breaks out.

The novel is funny and sad both. Those with good intentions act, but mostly don't succeed, though the worst do fall.

Sands may have been a grand old man of letters, but this is Angus Wilson's first novel. It was a success from the start; its open discussion of homosexuality, though not unknown in the English novel--Brideshead Revisited came out in 1945, for instance--was still pretty shocking. I do think from what I've read, his later novels are better. His Anglo-Saxon Attitudes made it to the blog here.

It's the week of Simon and Kaggsy's 1952 Club! My organizing post is here. There's one other 1952 book on the blog, Edmund Wilson's The Shores of Light.

Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting! I hope to get one or two more books this week.

#1952Club Candidates

Once again it's time for Kaggsy & Simon's year club and this spring its 1952:

 

I've heaped up a pile of books, not all of which I'll read:

Left, then top to bottom:

A. J. Liebling/Chicago

Liebling wrote several articles about Chicago for The New Yorker in early 1952; the book came out later that year. I've read this one before, but something I read recently about the Mob in Chicago referenced it and I've been thinking about rereading it. When I first read it, my thought at the time was, enh, a New Yorker writing about Chicago--what did he know? But we can see if that's true! (Liebling at his best is amazing.)

Angus Wilson/Hemlock & After

Bernard Sands is a 50-something novelist who wants to start an arts centre. Wilson's first novel.

Kurt Vonnegut/Player Piano

Also Vonnegut's first novel. I've never read it but I think it's harder sci-fi than a lot of his later novels.

Henry Green/Doting

Henry Green's last novel. Witty and dialog-heavy? I suspect. I've read a couple of Greens, but not this one.

Yasunari Kawabata/Thousand Cranes

Hopeless love and the Japanese tea ceremony says the cover. I've also read a couple of Kawabata's and not this one--the Other Reader is a fan and we have a stack, which I haven't made my way through.

Vassily Grossman/Stalingrad

Well, this one is here, but I'd have to have started it already to actually read it in time for this week. But I've been thinking about it since I recently read Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction and one of his chapters is devoted to this and the amazing Life and Fate. So I could be reading it soon.

Van Wyck Brooks/The Confident Years

Brooks' history of the American literary scene in the years 1885-1915. Late Henry James, Edith Wharton, Lafcadio Hearn, early Theodore Dreiser. Brooks' whole Makers and Finders series on the history of American literature is pretty great.

I've already read one and a half of the books on that pile (in addition to the Liebling which I read some years ago). First post on Monday!

But of course I won't read all of them this week, alas...

There's one book I've read from 1952 since I've started the blog:

Edmund Wilson's The Shores of Light. It's a pretty great collection of Wilson's criticism, bookended by two essays he wrote in 1952, on Christian Gauss, the literary critic and his (and F. Scott Fitzgerald's) professor at Princeton, and on Edna St. Vincent Millay, with whom Wilson had been in love at one point.

Some other '52 books I've read and enjoyed in the past: Invisible Man, Martha Quest, East of Eden, The Old Man and the Sea, Wise Blood, The Cloven Viscount, Men at Arms (from Evelyn Waugh's Swords of Honour trilogy).

And if I want to sneak in a mystery toward the end of the week, some possible rereads:

I remember the Queen pretty well--well, it is one of his most striking solutions--so I probably won't reread that. The Lew Archer and the Perry Mason I scarcely remember and so they'd practically be like new mysteries. One of those is likeliest.

I'm pretty sure I've also read the two Christies from that year, but I don't have them and would have to hunt them up. Though the Poirot from that year seems vague to me and it's possible I've never read it.

Are you joining in? Which look good to you? Which should I be sure not to miss?

Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

 

Catullus 75 (#poem)

My beat up undergraduate text

Catullus 75

Huc est mens deducta tua mea, Lesbia, culpa

  Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo

Ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias,

  Nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.

 

-Catullus

 

Yikes, Latin! Fortunately my translation of the poem appeared in a web-based magazine here just last week. 

Catullus 75

Lesbia, I've been brought so low by your wayward ways--

  I'm also by my own nice-guy-ness cursed--

that I cannot like you when you try to be your best,

  or stop loving you, when you do your worst.

 

-Catullus (tr. Reese Warner--hey, that's me!)

 

The original is written in elegiacs--alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter. I've been translating these into a syllable-counting measure with rhymes (a style Marianne Moore often used, though not for elegiacs). 

A couple of other translations I happened to have lying around:

 

Catullus 75

 

My mind has been brought so low by your conduct, Lesbia,

  and so undone itself through its own goodwill

that now if you were perfect it couldn't like you,

  nor cease to love you now, whatever you did.

 

-Catullus (tr. Peter Green)

 

Catullus 75

 

Lesbia, you are the author of my destruction.

My heart is weary and defeated at the thought of life.

I will wish terrible things for you if you become great,

But I will always love you just the same.

 

-Catullus (tr. Ewan Whyte)

 

 

Peter Green was a British professor of Classics who mostly taught in the U.S. He died last year at the good age of 99. (!) His complete translation of Catullus came out in 2005. Ewan Whyte is a Toronto-based poet and essayist. His volume of Catullus translations came out in 2004.

 

 

Ostend 1936

"Letting barbarism assume rule bore fruit. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns."

-Letter from Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig

In 1936 several exiled writers and artists decided to summer in Ostend in Belgium. Not just Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth pictured on the cover, but also Irmgard Keun, Ernst Toller, and for a while Arthur Koestler (until he leaves for Spain to report on the Civil War).

Zweig and Roth are old friends and like to write in each other's company in order to bounce around ideas. Both are Jews born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but unable to live in Austria any more. Zweig, the more financially successful of the two, is already in Ostend and he encourages his friend Roth to come. Ostend is a beach resort.

Roth is already suffering from the alcoholism that will kill him in 1939 at the age of 44 and Zweig also hopes to wean him off alcohol (or at least eat regular meals). Schnapps, Roth's preferred tipple, is illegal in Belgium, and then, as now, Belgian beers are an acquired taste, one which Roth has failed to acquire. It takes Roth longer to sort the necessary visa for Belgium, but he does get there.

The writing is working for both of them. Zweig helps Roth edit his new novel Confessions of a Murderer, though neither can publish in Germany or Austria by then--their books will come out with German exile presses. Romance is also in the air: Zweig has separated from his first wife, and is travelling with his secretary, then his mistress, but later his second wife. Roth and Irmgard Keun become a couple; she's banned from Germany for her communist politics; the books of all three were burned by Nazi authorities. Unfortunately for Zweig's efforts at reform, it's mostly drinking that Keun and Roth have bonded over, and they've discovered an illegal source of schnapps.

This short book featuring a moment in the precarious lives of German-language writers in 1936 is both touching and alarming. The book came out in 2014--Weidermann is a German cultural journalist--and was translated into English in 2016 by Carol Brown Janeway.

Zweig (on left) and Roth in Ostend in 1936

 

Anabel Loyd's The Dervish Bowl

"The wandering Jew is a very real character in the great drama of history."

-Sir Edward Denison Ross, Jewish Travellers, 1930

"Arminius Vambéry's father had been a Talmudic scholar and failed businessman in the small town of St Georghen near Pressburg in Austria-Hungary." Pressburg is now Bratislava in modern Slovakia, but Vambéry thought of himself as Hungarian. He was born Hermann Wamburger in 1832--probably. He was never certain. His father died when he was less than a year old and his mother remarried so he had a number of half-siblings, but his stepfather was no more financially successful than his birth father and Vambéry grew up in poverty. He was deeply affected by Lajos Kossuth and the revolt of the Hungarians in 1848 and as a consequence he Magyarized his name to Armin Vambéry. Because of the Russian assistance in putting down the Hungarians at that time, Vambéry became a lifelong Russophobe.

Because of his poverty, his education was spotty. His family was so poor, he said, he was cast adrift at age twelve. But he was very good at languages. At age sixteen he knew Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, French and German. There was great interest in the relation between Hungarian and Turkic languages at that time and he was able to convince the Academy of Sciences in Budapest he should travel to the East to study that relationship and was awarded a stipend. So, in his twenties, he was in Constantinople, learning Turkish--and teaching Danish to the Danish consul. (Who was actually a Turkish native of German ancestry named von Hübsch.) He also tutored the sister of the future Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He writes a German-Turkish dictionary that becomes popular.

Nor did his Russophobia stop him from learning Russian along the way.

He's made good contacts in Constantinople and could have made a successful career there, but he's young and still imagines greater successes, greater adventures. His stipend was meant to take him further east. He's given the Sultan's tugra, an ornate calligraphic emblem that serves as a sort of diplomatic passport and with that in hand, he travels to Persia. He learns Persian. But where he really wants to go are the Khanates of Khiva and Bokhara, the capital cities of which are both now in Uzbekistan, but were independent countries until they fell to Russian imperialism.

He stays in Tehran for a while because a war in the Central Asian plains makes travel further east unsafe, but eventually he disguises himself as a dervish, a Muslim pilgrim and holy man, purportedly returning from a Hajj to Mecca, and sets off in the company of real dervishes. The year is 1863. 

Crossing the Caspian sea he reaches both Khiva and Bokhara. Muzaffar, the emir of Bokhara, is slightly more moderate than his father Nasrullah, who was famed for simply killing anyone from other countries who might look at him cross-eyed. Vambéry is the rare Westerner who visits and lives to tell the tale.

On his return to Europe he hopes to become a professor of Turkic and Iranian languages, but at first anti-Semitism and his lack of formal academic credentials prevent this. It's suggested he write a book about his travels and get it published in England, which he does; both the book (Travels in Central Asia, available at Project Gutenberg) and Vambéry himself become great successes in England. He's a famous man. 

With this under his belt, he returns to Austria-Hungary and petitions the Emperor Franz Josef to make him a professor, which Franz Josef does, while telling him he won't have any students. Vambéry settles down to life as a professor in Budapest with a few--but at least not no--students. He's on visiting terms with the Sultan Abdul Hamid II and with future Edward VII of England. He meets Queen Victoria several times and travels back and forth between England, his home in Budapest, and Constantinople. He wrote a bunch of books, mostly in German, but also others in English and in Hungarian as well.

He's also a spy, at least so-called, though I'd instead label him a paid intelligence analyst. He writes reports for the English government on the state of affairs in the East, and does what he can to promote friendship between the Ottomans and England. This is popular enough until it isn't, when English policy begins to shift from support of Turkey to accommodation with Russia in the years before World War I. By then the English foreign office is beginning to see him as a bit of a pest (despite his friendship with Edward VII) and amusingly enough Anabel Loyd the biographer kind of does, too.

He dies in 1913.

All in all, a pretty fascinating life, with the one (albeit only the one) great adventure. The book came out last year from Haus Publishing in the U.K.

 

European Reading Challenge 2025

 

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts a challenge to read books from 50 different European countries. I'm signing up again for the Deluxe Entourage level, which is five countries--I've usually done a bit better than that.

I never know what I'm going to read (which is part of the beauty of this challenge!) but I do know that the first book will be Slovakia, because I've already written the post.

Thanks again to Gilion for hosting!

O What Is That Sound

O What Is That Sound

O what is that sound that so thrills the ear

  Down in the valley drumming, drumming?

Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

  The soldiers coming.

 

O what is that light I see flashing so clear

  Over the distance brightly, brightly?

Only the sun on their weapons, dear,

  As they step lightly.

 

O what are they doing with all that gear,

  What are they doing this morning, this morning?

Only their usual manoeuvres, dear,

  Or perhaps a warning.

 

O why have they left the road down there,

  Why are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?

Perhaps a change in their orders, dear,

  Why are you kneeling?

 

O haven't they stopped for the doctor's care,

  Haven't they reined their horses, their horses?

Why, none of them are wounded, dear,

  None of these forces.

 

O is it the parson they want, with white hair,

  Is it the parson, is it, is it?

No, they are passing his gateway, dear,

  Without a visit.

 

O it must be the farmer who lives so near.

  It must the farmer, so cunning, so cunning.

They have passed the farmyard already, dear,

  And now they are running.

 

O where are you going? Stay with me here!

  Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?

No, I promised to love you, dear,

  But I must be leaving.

 

O it's broken the lock and it's splintered the door,

  O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;

Their boots are heavy on the floor,

  And their eyes are burning.

 

-W. H. Auden

 

Why has this poem been running through my head lately? I'm sure I can't explain it. Though it's true I did almost lead with a picture of a 'Notorious El Salvadoran Prison'. 

Does this mean I'm going to be more active on the blog again? Hmm...maybe. But I have been lately thinking that that three-month blogging vacation I just took was what I needed, and that it's been long enough. We'll see.

Thomas Hardy's Afterwards

Afterwards

When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,

  And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

  "He was a man who used to notice such things."?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,

  The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,

  "To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,

  When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures would come to no harm,

  But he could do little for them, and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,

  Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,

  "He was one who had an eye for such mysteries."?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

  And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,

  "He hears it not now, but used to notice such things."?

-Thomas Hardy

'Afterwards' comes from Thomas Hardy's volume of poetry Moments of Vision of 1917, when he was 77. The poem was later read at a memorial service after his death ten years later.

It's possible I've read it before, but I don't really remember. It shows up here now because I recently finished Nicholas Jenkins' biography of W. H. Auden's early years in England, The Island. 'Afterwards' was a favorite poem of the teen-aged Auden; he apparently liked it because it emphasized observation of the natural world, hedgehogs travelling furtively over the lawn, dew-fall hawks landing on wind-warped thorns. Though I suspect the general melancholy of the poem appealed to Auden, teenage boy poet, just as much.

(In fact, according to Jenkins, Auden was also reading Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts at the time, Hardy's unperformably long verse drama about the Napoleonic wars. Soldiers and mopery. Maybe Auden was a perfectly normal teenage boy after all?)

Jenkins' book came out in 2024 and definitely got some buzz, (Edward Mendelson: "a Copernican revolution in Auden studies.") I thought it was good, but not necessarily as amazing as that. His father was as important in Auden's life as his mother; given the usual clichés about gay men, this may be a necessary corrective, but since I wasn't all that up on Auden studies anyway... Still if you're interested in Auden, you might very well like it. I learned things.

Hardy's poem is my current memorization project, and, as I'm finding it difficult, I was hoping that typing it in would help. It hasn't seemed to yet. It's got rhyme, it's got meter--those usually help in memorizing. And it's clever about seasons and times of day--that feels like it should help, too. Why is it so difficult? Is it the recondite vocabulary? 'Dewfall', 'outrollings'? Or is it too much holiday season distraction?

European Reading Challenge Wrapup 2024

 

 

Another ERC wrapped. I signed up for the Jet Setter level of five books, and once again surpassed that. Here's the final list:

1.) Stephen Budiansky/Journey to the Edge of Reason  (Austria)

2.) Goethe/Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Germany)

3.) Konstantin Stanislavski/My Life in Art (Russia)

4.) Virginia Woolf/The Waves (U.K.)

5.) Carlo Levi/Christ Stopped at Eboli (Italy)

6.) Serhiy Zhadan/The Orphanage (Ukraine)

7.) Ana Blandiana/The Architecture of Waves (Romania)

8.) Josef Skvoreçky/The End of Lieutenant Boruvka (Czech Republic)

9.) James Baldwin/Giovanni's Room (France)

10.) Kurban Said/Ali and Nino (Azerbaijan)

11.) Sholem Aleichem/Wandering Stars (Moldova)

12.) J. G. Farrell/Troubles (Ireland)

13.) Kurban Said/The Girl from the Golden Horn (Bosnia)

14.) Tom Reiss/The Orientalist (Turkey)

15.) Henrik Ibsen/Rosmerholm (Norway)

The best countries this year for me were Azerbaijan and Ireland, with Ali and Nino in particular being a real surprise and delight. Troubles was a reread, so I knew the fun I was letting myself in for with that one. This is the first year since I've been doing this challenge (that's since 2018) that there's not a new country on the list, which is a little disappointing, especially since I've got a book set in Slovenia on my reading stack. 

Thanks again to Gilion for hosting! The signup for the new year is here.