Butterflies

A weekend of warm autumn sunshine in the Derbyshire demiparadise (where I was on an all too brief visit), and the Great Butterfly Summer goes on. Tortoiseshells and Red Admirals were flying everywhere in glorious profusion, with Peacocks and Commas, the odd Brimstone and Speckled Wood, and even another late but bright Small Copper.
  It took a while to get going, but what a summer this has been - not another like it in years. The sheer abundance of individuals flying has seemed prodigious after such slim pickings in recent summers - like turning the clock back 20 years or so - and many species must surely have had a bumper year: Commas and Peacocks for sure, though oddly the Red Admiral didn't come into its own till high summer (for the first summer in decades I had at one point, early on, seen more Tortoiseshells than Red Admirals).
Despite the ongoing butterfly bonanza, though, I actually failed to see quite a few species that are normally on my list. Work, plus a combination of family and social commitments and the vagaries of the railway network (and the odd dull day) kept me from the most butterfly-rich haunts at the most propitious times. I saw White Admirals but not one Silver-Washed Fritillary, and several Blues I would normally have seen I missed this year - though I did have the pleasure of finding that colony of Small Blues in Dieppe. One other thing made my butterfly year truly memorable - a bizarre encounter with, of all things, a Monarch.
  If the sunny weather lasts, there should be more butterflies to be seen before the year is over - and later this week I'm off to Normandy for a few days, so who knows what I might find there? Apart from fruits de mer, Ricard, Calvados...

Anthology 12

Talking of feminine line-endings, here is a charming little lyric (titled as a Song) by the Rev. R.W. Dixon, Victorian churchman and poet.Charming, and seasonal too - the first lines came into my head the other day while looking at just such a half-yellowed willow.
  Richard Watson Dixon,  an early associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, was ordained in 1858 and spent the rest of his life in the bosom of the C of E and his fitful muse. It was not until 1883 that he attracted serious literary attention, when his epic Mano: A Poetical History of the Time of the Close of the Tenth Century: Concerning the Adventures of a Norman Knight: Which Fell Part in Normandy Part in Italy: In Four Books attracted high praise from Swinburne. It was written entirely in terza rima - a tribute to Dixon's industry and technical skill if nothing else. His magnum opus was his (prose) History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction - eight hefty volumes covering the years 1529 to 1570.
  When Tennyson died in 1892, Dixon was briefly considered as the next Poet Laureate. However, Lord Salisbury - intending a joke on the literary establishment - manoeuvred his man, Alfred Austin, into the post. Widely regarded as the worst Poet Laureate ever (yes - worse than Andrew Motion!), Austin is remembered for the notorious lines on a health crisis in the life of the Prince of Wales: 'Across the wires the electric message came: He is no better, he is much the same' - though, oddly, there's no documentary evidence that Austin wrote them.
  Here is Dixon's Song -

The feathers of the willow
Are half of them grown yellow
Above the swelling stream;
And ragged are the bushes,
And rusty now the rushes,
And wild the clouded gleam.
The thistle now is older,
His stalk begins to moulder,
His head is white as snow;
The branches all are barer,
The linnet’s song is rarer,
The robin pipeth now.

Over on The Dabbler today...

... a chance to revisit my revisit to Desiderata.

Anthology 11

Here is one by Kay Ryan. As ever with her poems, there is really nothing to add. Except perhaps to point to her exquisite craftsmanship, her subtle use of half-rhyme, assonance, enjambment, feminine line-endings... But that is hardly the point. This is a poem simple and true.

AGE

As some people age
they kinden.
The apertures
of their eyes widen.
I do not think they weaken;
I think something weak strengthens
until they are more and more it,
like letting in heaven.
But other people are
mussels or clams, frightened.
Steam or knife blades mean open.
They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Very like a masterpiece?

I've been rereading Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (published 1941, the first novel he wrote in English). My copy is a Penguin reprint dating from 1971 - that handsome set with the Nabokov signature aslant the cover - and it would be around that date that I first read it. If I've read it again since, it would have been at least 20 years ago, so I was glad to find how much of The Real Life I remembered - scenes, phrases, images, the overall shape...
 It's a quite extraordinary book, this one, and seems all the more so on rereading. Ostensibly an unnamed narrator's (or rather named only as V) account of the life and works of his adored half-brother, the distinguished Russian-born novelist Sebastian Knight, The Real Life soon has the alert reader questioning what exactly is going on here. Are V and SK 'really' separate entities, or is one the creation of the other - and if so, which way round? Of course both are the creations of VN and have their being in the novel The Real Life, which itself contains the novels of SK, an abysmally bad biography of SK by one Goodman, and (by way of SK's autobiographical Lost Property) the ghostly presence of VN's yet to be written Speak Memory - not to mention the later novels The Real Life prefigures, notably Pale Fire and Transparent Things.
 All of which makes The Real Life sound like some tiresome postmodernist exercise in metametafiction - but it is no such thing. Nabokov's grace, wit and style, working through the medium of the somewhat plodding V and the brilliant SK, keep the narrative shimmering with life. As the story proceeds - in a series of Knight's moves, naturally (the novel is full of chess allusions) - it becomes a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner, albeit a page-turner of exceptional literary quality. I had a lurking doubt that this reread might prove a disappointment - but in the event I was impressed anew by what now seems to me very like a masterpiece.

Meanwhile...

The NigeCorp workstorm should be dying down soon, and I'm wondering whether to continue anthologising a while longer - I have found it unexpectedly enjoyable - or return to business as usual. Or perhaps a mixture of both?
Meanwhile, I was intrigued by a news story about Ancient Egyptians in Barnsley - it rang a bell... Yes of course - Nerdley's vibrant Aztec community, part of the densely populated dream world of Peter Simple. According to their self-appointed spokesman, Royston Vibes, an 18th-year sociology student at Nerdley University, the Aztecs had occupied Nerdley in the Dark Ages, having crossed the Atlantic in stone boats. Vibes, tirelessly exacting concessions and benefits from the council on the Aztecs' behalf, asserted the community's inalienable right to commit human sacrifice on state-subsidised step pyramids. Peter Simple certainly saw multiculturalism coming...

Anthology 10

In this strange, haunting poem, the inland pastoralist Robert Frost takes to the sea shore. The beach scene is real enough, fixed by the passing ship and the standing gull, and people do on a beach all look one way,  at the sea. But that sea clearly stands for something bigger - the infinite, mysterious Out There, into which was can see neither far nor deep. It might be construed as a bleak vision of stasis and limitation, but the poem's poise and tact give it an almost tender note. We are what we are, things are as they are.

NEITHER OUT FAR NOR IN DEEP

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be---
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?


Frost's poem has been much analysed and interpreted. In his thoughtful commentary on it, Randall Jarrell likens it to these lines by Housman: 

Stars, I have seen them fall,

But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea

And still the sea is salt.