What Do Teeth Say?

 This morning I was obliged to visit my dentist (the best dentist I've ever had, as it happens) to have a troublesome and half-wrecked wisdom tooth removed. This was my third wisdom extraction, so I knew what to expect, but my dentist was impressively quick and thorough, and I felt almost no pain this time. I'm still getting over the anaesthetic, but all seems well.
  While I was sitting in the waiting room, I was entertained by various videos about dental health and the wonders that can be worked on your teeth by cosmetic dentistry. 'Your teeth,' one video declared, 'say a lot about you.' Indeed, the video continued, they say more about you than your car, your clothes or your hairstyle. Naturally, I wondered what my teeth might be saying about me (apart from expressing the wish that they'd been better looked after in my early years). I think they would clearly say just two things: that I am English – they are very English teeth, i.e. overcrowded and uneven; and that I grew up in a time before straightening and whitening became the norm. My car would have nothing to say, for the very good reason that I don't drive one. My clothes would confirm that I am English, that I grew up when men dressed properly, and in my mature years I reverted to type. And my hairstyle (if such a word applies)? That would say simply that I am blessed with luxuriant hair, and in my old age am making the most of it. 
  I wish this anaesthetic would wear off...

'Even the small violet...'

 This post comes with a big tip of the hat to Anonymous, a frequent commenter (along with Unknown), who in a comment under 'Daffodil Time' directs me to a poem by John Clare that I did not know. I find it quite beautiful and, for all its questioning tone, cheering. So here it is for all readers, however anonymous and unknown, to enjoy...

The Instinct of Hope

Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Something about me daily speaks there must,
And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?
'Tis nature's prophesy that such will be,
And everything seems struggling to explain
The close sealed volume of its mystery.
Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace
As seeming anxious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E'en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?

Daffodil Time

 It's daffodil time, and this morning Radio 3's Poem of the Day was the inevitable 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' (a meaningless opening line unless you follow it past the enjambment into the next: there's nothing intrinsically lonely about a cloud. And Wordsworth wasn't 'lonely' either: he was walking with his sister Dorothy, whose journal entry inspired the poem.) It's a piece that is perfect in its way – as a (mercifully) succinct expression of Wordsworth's poetical philosophy, and as an effective, easily learned recitation piece.
For myself, when it comes to daffodil poetry, I would plump for Robert Herrick's equally perfect 'To Daffodils', a poem from which the word 'I' is refreshingly absent. Herrick does not present himself as a lone sensitive soul vibrating in sympathy with divine Nature – in fact he doesn't present himself at all: his poem is about what 'we' might feel, an inclusive and inviting 'we', not the exclusive, attention-seeking 'I'. It is simple (effortlessly concealing its art) and direct, and beautifully expresses the transience of all things, daffodils and 'we' humans alike...

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

Has not attain'd his noon.

Stay, stay,

Until the hasting day

Has run

But to the even-song;

And, having pray'd together, we

Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,

We have as short a spring;

As quick a growth to meet decay,

As you, or anything.

We die

As your hours do, and dry

Away,

Like to the summer's rain;

Or as the pearls of morning's dew,

Ne'er to be found again.

Rereading

 Back in 2021, I read The Maias, Eça de Queiros's mighty masterpiece, all 600-plus pages of it. Now I find myself rereading it, having been asked to write something about it for a literary magazine. I hadn't expected this – indeed I seem to have been so confident I wouldn't be returning to The Maias any time soon that I must have donated it to one of the charity shops: such fat volumes clear a lot of shelf space. It might be lurking somewhere on my chaotically disorganised shelves, but I was unable to find it, so I bought another copy of the same (Carcanet) edition. 
And here I am, immersed again in Eça's sprawling, richly detailed portrait of the life of an aristocratic family in Lisbon during the late 19th-century decline of the Portuguese monarchy and nation. And here's the thing – I'm enjoying it even more this time round than last. It seems to be yielding yet more riches on second reading, and my admiration for Eça's brilliant management of such a huge narrative only grows. Although I know roughly what will happen, I'm every bit as excited as I was first time round, and enjoying Eça's distinctive qualities even more: he is clear-sighted and ironic but forgiving and essentially comic, sometimes satirical but never didactic, and always treading lightly. For all its length, The Maias is immensely readable; you could call it a literary page-turner – and there are a lot of pages to turn. I'm delighted to be reading it again. Nabokov said that 'all reading [meaning real reading] is rereading', and he had a point. 

Jessie Matthews

 Born on this day in 1907, in a flat above a butcher's shop on Berwick Street, Soho, was Jessie Matthews, who was to become a hugely successful singer, dancer and actress in the interwar years. She was the seventh of 16 children (11 of whom survived infancy), and her father was a fruit-and-veg trader. Jessie was soon leaving all that behind her, making her stage debut at the age of 12 and her West End debut at 16, the age at which she also landed her first film role. From there she had soon ascended to the big time, becoming a star of stage musicals by the late 1920s, and a film star through the 1930s. Here she is in the film Evergreen, singing a Rodgers and Hart number, 'Dancing on the Ceiling'. From Matthews' wide-eyed, chubby-cheeked face, warbling voice and cut-glass accent to the slightly desperate choreography, this is absolutely of its time and place. Jessie gives it her all, but it is easy to see why, in the postwar years, this kind of thing went completely out of fashion, causing her career to take a major dip. 



I only became aware of the existence of Jessie Matthews when, in 1963, she took on the role of doctor's wife Mrs Mary Dale in The Dales (formerly Mrs Dale's Diary), a long-running radio soap that lasted until 1969, when it was replaced by the slightly more hip and happenin' Waggoners' Walk, which ran until 1980. I've written before about the close study of my mother's women's magazines that was one of my boyhood occupations; another was listening at every opportunity to the radio soaps, including of course The Archers, which took me a little longer to get properly into.  By the time I arrived at Cambridge, I was listening daily, whenever possible, to both Waggoners' Walk and The Archers. Hey ho – I really should have been born gay. 

Another Day

 World Book Day on Friday, International Women's Day yesterday, and now a Day of Reflection to mark the fifth anniversary of the Covid pandemic. Perhaps The Science will take the opportunity to publish the Statement I helpfully drafted for them/it back in 2020 (since when the consequences of lockdown have turned out even more disastrous than I expected)? I'm not holding my breath...

Priscilla Pointon

On International Women's Day, let's celebrate a literary daughter of Lichfield – not Anna Seward, the faintly absurd 'Swan of Lichfield', but another ornament of the Mercian Elightenment, Priscilla Pointon.  She was born in Lichfield around 1740, and in late childhood lost her sight, following a violent headache, and never regained it. Hoping to earn a living by her poetry, she published a first collection, Poems on Several Occasions, in 1770, attracting some 1,300 subscribers, including several from the ranks of the aristocracy.
In this more than competent poem, she writes about her blindness: 

I never tasted the Pierian spring,
Of which great Pope does with such rapture sing*.
For, since deprived from infancy of sight,
How should my muse in lofty numbers write?
Milton and Homer both, you say, were blind,
And where on earth can we their equals find?
But were they blind like me in infant state?
Or did they taste like me tenebrous fate?
No — long they lived great nature to explore,
Their minds enriching with poetic store.
Then in compassion say, ye critics, say
You'll cheer my soul with one reviving ray;
Nor frown indignant on my night-struck strain,
But for amusement bid me write again;
Yet friendly tell me, though I'm not sublimed,
My thoughts are rude, my numbers unrefined;
Since liberal pity all the wise commend,
Be then for once an helpless woman's friend!

* 'A little learning is a dangerous thing: Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring' – An Essay on Criticism.

Here is a very different kind of poem, in which Miss Pointon addresses a subject rarely mentioned in literature (though I seem to remember an instance in Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels) – the plight of a woman in urgent need of emptying her bladder:

Address to a Bachelor, on a Delicate Occasion

You bid me write, Sir, I comply,
Since I my grave airs can’t deny.
But say, how can my Muse declare
The situation of the Fair,
That full six hours had sat, or more,                                       5
And never once been out of door?
Tea, wine, and punch, Sir, to be free,
Excellent diuretics be:
I made it so appear, it’s true,
When at your House, last night, with you:                            10
Blushing, I own, to you I said,
“I should be glad you’d call a maid.”
“The girls,” you answer’d “are from home,
Nor can I guess when they’ll return.”
Then in contempt you came to me,                                        15
And sneering cry’d, “Dear Miss, make free;
“Let me conduct you—don’t be nice—
Or if a bason is your choice,
To fetch you one I’ll instant fly.”
I blush’d, but could not make reply;                                       20
Confus’d, to find myself the joke,
I silent sat till TRUEWORTH spoke:
“To go with me, Miss, don’t refuse,
Your loss this freedom will excuse.”
To him my hand reluctant gave,                                              25
And out he led me very grave;
Whilst you and CHATFREE laugh’d aloud,
As if to dash a Maid seem’d proud.
But I the silly jest despise,
Since well I know each man that’s wise                                30
All affectation does disdain,
Since it in Prudes and Coxcombs reign:
So I repent not what I’ve done;
Adieu—enjoy your empty fun.

Trueworth and Chatfree, whose names are self-explanatory, are characters in Eliza Haywood's novel The History of Miss Betty Thoughtless. It is said that Miss Pointon's rescuer ('Trueworth') on this delicate occasion was James Pickering, a saddler from Chester, whom she subsequently married. After his death, she published a second volume of verse, Poems by Mrs Pickering (1794). 
Her verse may be forgotten now, but Priscilla Pointon surely deserves a heritage plaque in Lichfield. One did appear, on railings near Minster Pool, but apparently it was taken down because it was unauthorised. A shame. 

'No one can say why hearts will break...'

 A balmy spring day, and I'm in a state of excitement – not because it's World Book Day, well intentioned though that initiative is – but because I've seen my first butterflies of the season: a lively Peacock, in good condition, taking an aerial tour of the front gardens on a busy road, and, a little later, I think a Red Admiral, glimpsed as it flew away from me, over a high wall and into the sun. The butterfly year has started! And I devoutly hope it is a much better one than the last. 
  Anyway, I reckon it's time for a poem, and maybe time to resume my one-man* campaign to keep the name of Peter Porter alive. Here is one of his finest, taken from the collection The Cost of Seriousness (1978), which he wrote after the death of his wife. This one is 'An Exequy', a beautifully controlled poem of grief... 

In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper deep – Though you are five months dead, I see You in guilt’s iconography, Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child, The stranded monster with the mild Appearance, whom small waves tease, (Andromeda upon her knees In orthodox deliverance) And you alone of pure substance, The unformed form of life, the earth Which Piero’s brushes brought to birth For all to greet as myth, a thing Out of the box of imagining. This introduction serves to sing Your mortal death as Bishop King Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme His young wife, lost before her time; Though he lived on for many years His poem each day fed new tears To that unreaching spot, her grave, His lines a baroque architrave The Sunday poor with bottled flowers Would by-pass in their morning hours, Esteeming ragged natural life (‘Most dear loved, most gentle wife’), Yet, looking back when at the gate And seeing grief in formal state Upon a sculpted angel group, Were glad that men of god could stoop To give the dead a public stance And freeze them in their mortal dance. The words and faces proper to My misery are private – you Would never share our heart with those Whose only talent’s to suppose, Nor from your final childish bed Raise a remote confessing head – The channels of our lives are blocked, The hand is stopped upon the clock, No one can say why hearts will break And marriages are all opaque: A map of loss, some posted cards, The living house reduced to shards, The abstract hell of memory, The pointlessness of poetry – These are the instances which tell Of something which I know full well, I owe a death to you – one day The time will come for me to pay When your slim shape from photographs Stands at my door and gently asks If I have any work to do Or will I come to bed with you. O scala enigmata, I’ll climb up to that attic where The curtain of your life was drawn Some time between despair and dawn – I’ll never know with what halt steps You mounted to this plain eclipse But each stair now will station me A black responsibility And point me to that shut-down room, ‘This be your due appointed tomb.’ I think of us in Italy: Gin-and-chianti-fuelled, we Move in a trance through Paradise, Feeding at last our starving eyes, Two people of the English blindness Doing each masterpiece the kindness Of discovering it – from Baldovinetti To Venice’s most obscure jetty. A true unfortunate traveller, I Depend upon your nurse’s eye To pick the altars where no Grinner Puts us off our tourists’ dinner And in hotels to bandy words With Genevan girls and talking birds, To wear your feet out following me To night’s end and true amity, And call my rational fear of flying A paradigm of Holy Dying – And, oh my love, I wish you were Once more with me, at night somewhere In narrow streets applauding wines, The moon above the Apennines As large as logic and the stars, Most middle-aged of avatars, As bright as when they shone for truth Upon untried and avid youth. The rooms and days we wandered through Shrink in my mind to one – there you Lie quite absorbed by peace – the calm Which life could not provide is balm In death. Unseen by me, you look Past bed and stairs and half-read book Eternally upon your home, The end of pain, the left alone. I have no friend, no intercessor, No psychopomp or true confessor But only you who know my heart In every cramped and devious part – Then take my hand and lead me out, The sky is overcast by doubt, The time has come, I listen for Your words of comfort at the door, O guide me through the shoals of fear – ‘Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir.’

[The 'enigmatic scale' is a scale used by Verdi in his
'Ave Maria'. It has 4 whole steps followed by 3 half steps.
The last line means 'Be not afraid, I am with you.']

 Porter's poem explicitly echoes the Exequy written by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, in memory of his wife, who died in 1624 at the age of just twenty-four. By adopting its regular rhymed couplets and tetrameter, Porter gives his poem extraordinary potency and an almost monumental quality.
Here is Bishop King's original... 

Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint,

Instead of dirges this complaint;
And for sweet flowers to crown thy hearse,
Receive a strew of weeping verse
From thy grieved friend, whom thou mightst see
Quite melted into tears for thee. 

Dear loss! Since thy untimely fate
My task hath been to meditate
On thee, on thee! Thou art the book,
The library, whereon I look
Though almost blind. For thee, loved clay,
I languish out, not live, the day,
Using no other exercise
But what I practise with mine eyes.
By which wet glasses I find out
How lazily time creeps about
To one that mourns. This, only this,
My exercise and business is:
So I compute the weary hours
With sighs dissolved into showers. 

Nor wonder if my time go thus
Backward and most preposterous:
Thou hast benighted me. Thy set
This eve of blackness did beget,
Who wast my day (though overcast
Before thou hadst thy noon-tide past)
And I remember must in tears
Thou scarce hadst seen so many years
As day tells hours. By thy clear sun
My love and fortune first did run;
But thou wilt never appear 
Folded within my hemisphere,
Since both thy light and motion,
Like a fled star, is fallen and gone, 
And 'twixt me and my soul's dear wish
The earth now interposed is,
Which such a strange eclipse doth make
As ne'er was read in almanac. 

I could allow thee for a time 
To darken me and my sad clime;
Were it a month, a year, or ten,
I would thy exile live till then;
And all that space my mirth adjourn,
So thou wouldst promise to return
And, putting off thy ashy shroud,
At length disperse this sorrow's cloud. 

But woe is me! The longest date
Too narrow is to calculate
These empty hopes. Never shall I
Be so much blest as to descry
A glimpse of thee, till that day come
Which shall the earth to cinders doom,
And a fierce fever must calcine
The body of this world, like mine, 
My little world! That fit of fire
Once off, our bodies shall aspire
To our souls' bliss: then we shall rise,
And view ourselves with clearer eyes
In that calm region where no night
Can hide us from each other's sight. 

Meantime thou hast her, Earth: much good
May my harm do thee. Since it stood 
With Heaven's will I might not call 
Her longer mine, I give thee all
My short-lived right and interest 
In her, whom living I loved best:
With a most free and bounteous grief,
I give thee what I could not keep.
Be kind to her, and prithee look 
Thou write into thy Doomsday book
Each parcel of this rarity,
Which in thy casket shrined doth lie.
See that thou make thy reckoning straight,
And yield her back again by weight;
For thou must audit on thy trust
Each grain and atom of this dust,
As thou wilt answer him that lent,
Not gave thee, my dear monument.


* Not quite one-man – Bryan Appleyard posted 'An Angel in Blythburgh Church' on Facebook the other day. 

A Curiosity

I came across this little gem on a website dedicated to R.S. Thomas. It's Jan Morris's (unpublished) obituary of the great Welshman.

 'He stood there like an old idol,
       Raised from a stony bed.
Strangers sneered, and would be no wiser
                If they read 
               What he said,
But the birds in the wood understood him,
            And shat reverently
                On his head.'

It's that 'reverently' that does it...

Going Off Wordsworth

 Confession time: I believe I've finally, and all but totally, gone off Wordsworth. This would have seemed inconceivable in my youth, when I all but worshipped him, but with the passing years I've found his 'intense intellectual egotism' more and more oppressive, to the point where now I rarely feel an urge to read him, and then only in small doses. His poems – certainly the longer, more 'philosophical' ones – seem strained and airless, with no space in them for anything but their self-absorbed author, his fine feelings and his philosophy. Such self-absorption sits well with youth, I suppose, but as we get older it tends to pall, and might drive us to look for other satisfactions in reading poetry, preferring poets who look out and around them, beyond the dreary citadel of the Self.  
  The phrase 'intense intellectual egotism' comes from William Hazlitt's Observations on Mr Wordsworth's poem, The Excursion (a poem which, even in my Wordsworthian days, I found hard to enjoy). It is, Hazlitt rightly observes, 'less a poem on the country, than on the love of the country. It is not so much a description of natural objects, as of the feelings associated with them; not an account of the manners of rural life, but the result of the poet's reflections on it. He does not present the reader with a lively succession of images or incidents, but paints the outgoings of his own heart, the shapings of his own fancy. He may be said to create his own materials; his thoughts are his real subject ... He sees all things in himself.'  And here's the phrase again – 'An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing ... The power of the mind preys upon itself. It is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe.' (Yes, and the best poetry surely inhabits the zone between Self and Universe; that is where the real interest of life resides.) Hazlitt writes of the 'philosophical poet' as 'making every object about him a whole length mirror to reflect his favourite thoughts'. And that kind of thing, as Hazlitt doesn't say, can become decidedly wearisome. 
  Oscar Wilde – or rather the character Vivian in 'The Decay of Lying' – takes an interesting line on Wordsworth, who, he declares, 'went to the lakes but was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetry gave him 'Laodamia', and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is. Nature gave him 'Martha Ray' and 'Peter Bell', and the address to Mr Wilkinson's spade.' 
  To which Vivian's interlocutor, Cyril, mildly replies: 'I think that view might be questioned.'

A Curious Case

 The first day of 'Meteorological Spring' at last – and it's St David's Day, and the birthday of Frederic Chopin (born on this day in 1810). Wouldn't it be good it Chopin had, like Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Schubert and many another, written a piece of Spring-themed music? Alas, he didn't – but there is still the curious case of 'Chopin's Spring Waltz', a piece which, despite not being by Chopin, not sounding like Chopin, and not even being (for the most part) in waltz time, has had a huge internet success, and can still be found under that false flag. It first attracted attention – and 34 million views – when it turned up as an erroneously titled YouTube video. After that was taken down, it kept turning up again and again, in one iteration attracting over 160 million views. The piece known as 'Chopin's Spring Waltz' is actually 'Mariage d'Amour', written by Paul de Senneville in 1978, and popularised by Richard Clayderman, whose repertoire it fits perfectly. Here is the piece (arranged by George Davidson), on which I shall pass no further comment...

I remember buying my first Chopin record, in the local W.H. Smith's, when they still sold such things. The girl behind the counter had some difficulty with the word 'Chopin', which I had to write down on paper for her, but eventually I came out clutching a Music for Pleasure EP of the great Fantaisie-Impromptu, played, I think, by Benno Moiseiwitsch. Here he is (in another recording) showing how it's done...