Dowson

 Born on this day in 1867 was Ernest Dowson, a minor poet, Decadent and doomed – but he left the English language three fine, musical phrases that have long survived him. I told the story in this post from fifteen(!) years ago...

Last?

 Every time I post about having seen my last swift of the year, I do so with an unspoken hope of tempting benign fate into granting me a further sighting, or maybe more. Sure enough, as I was sitting in the garden just now, I looked up and saw a pair of swifts flying over – a joyful sight. They've made it into August, hurrah! And already I'm wondering if those two really will be the last...

Note

 Blog posts might be a little sparser over the next few weeks, as my daughter and family are visiting from Canada (via Rome). 

Marianne Moore: No Feet

In the chapter devoted to Marianne Moore in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, Donald Hall examines the structure of Moore's verse, which basically comes in two forms: syllabic verse and free verse. Her syllabic lines have no meter, no feet, only particular syllable counts. Indeed, it seems that she was effectively tone deaf when it came to meter, simply not hearing it – an extraordinary thing in a poet of her accomplishment. In her memoir of Moore, 'Efforts of Affection', which Hall quotes, Elizabeth Bishop 'recalls with astonishment that Moore was baffled by conventional English prosody.' 'Why not believe,' Bishop concludes,' that the old English meters that still seem natural to most of us ... were not natural to her at all?' 
  There is plenty of evidence, and Hall cites an essay by Moore, 'Feeling and Precision', in which 'she spoke of "Dr Johnson's objection to rigmarole, in his takeoff on the ballad:
       'I put my hat upon my head,
          And went into the Strand,
       And there I saw another man,
          With his hat in his hand.'"
Johnson was parodying bad poets' attempts at achieving the simplicity of a ballad, and the lines depend on a thumpingly regular meter – which Marianne Moore mucks up in the last line: it simply doesn't scan. It should read 'Whose hat was in his hand' – three iambs, di-dum, di-dum, di-dum, as in the second line. Johnson first recited these lines to his friend Garrick, who passed them on to Boswell – making exactly the same mistake as Moore in the last line.  When Boswell repeated Garrick's version to Johnson, the Doctor growled, 'Then he has no ear.' As for Marianne Moore's ear – Hall concludes that 'she had a remarkable and innovative ear, but not an ear for English meter. She had an ear that Johnson would have recognised as belonging to prose, not to poetry.' But, emphatically, she was a poet – a quite unique one, and a classic. 'Removed from the distractions of time,' Hall concludes his essay, 'her work grows firmer, the character more luminous, brave, exemplary, virtuous, and strange.'  For another take on Moore's extraordinary poetry, here is Kay Ryan, plain-speaking as ever. 

Review

 My review of Lea Korsgaard's The Butterfly Season is on Engelsberg Ideas, embellished with a rather lovely butterfly print by Rasmus Christiansen (a Dane). The link in the review should take you to a podcast reading of my earlier piece on the Aurelians – the reader is not me (I wish I sounded like that, but I don't). 
https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/in-pursuit-of-denmarks-butterflies/

'The swift's black bow'

It looks very much as if the swifts have flown, from Lichfield at least – a notably early departure. It's been a strange, but ultimately successful, season, beginning with the newly arrived birds absenting themselves for long periods from the cool, wet weather of late spring and early summer (and who could blame them?). Then, once the weather had properly warmed up, back they came in force, as numerous as I have ever seen them in Lichfield. If they have truly gone now, it has been a short season indeed – down south I often saw my last swifts in mid-August. I must have seen my last of this year a couple of evenings ago – a pair in fact, lazily circling high up over the garden.
  Unlike Edward Thomas in this lovely short poem, I never know when I have seen the last of the season...

'How at once should I know,
When stretched in the harvest blue
I saw the swift's black bow,
That I would not have that view
Another day
Until next May
Again it is due?

The same year after year –
But with the swift alone.
With other things I but fear
That they will be over and done
Suddenly
And I only see
Them to know them gone.'

An Olympic Anniversary

 On this evening 14 years ago, I was watching, aghast, the television coverage of the London Olympics opening ceremony. My memories of it are mercifully vague, though I do of course remember the James Bond stunt with the Queen, all those nurses prancing about in celebration of that envy of the world, our NHS (which the Man in the T-shirt now assures is about to collapse, unless Social Care is sorted out – good luck with that, Andy). And naturally there was much celebration of the arrival of the Empire Windrush – the greatest moment in our postwar history – and somewhere along the way Kenneth Branagh in a stovepipe hat as Isambard Kingdom Brunel – and was Mr Bean there somewhere? Enough – I'd rather forget. Writing the morning after, I think I was actually quite generous...   

'It was the poor old Queen I felt sorry for – obliged to participate in that puerile James Bond stunt, then sit through yet another dreary pop concert and an endless parade of grinning athletes. You could see she wasn't really enjoying it, not the way she enjoyed the Jubilee flotilla – or Epsom, come to that. She must have been thinking wistfully back to the 1948 Olympics, and wondering where it all went wrong...
  As for the content, such as it was, of Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony spectacular, this came across (to me at least) as little more than a sentimental, politically correct primary school History lesson - appropriately enough for a Games whose logo was clearly the product of a primary school design project. Yes, the Boyle extravaganza was bold, brash, bizarre, bonkers, and a truly astonishing technical achievement. But to me it all had a weirdly post-apocalyptic feel, as if the survivors of some great collapse had come across a machine whose levers they could press to make it work – but they no longer knew what it was for, what it meant. It seemed the expression of an absence, a loss – but executed in the most extravagantly triumphant and positive terms. Very very strange...'

The dear old Queen was also probably reliving the horror of the equally extravagant, bizarre and empty spectacle of Millennium Night at the Dome, on which occasion she was surely wondering what had gone wrong since the Festival of Britain back in 1951, when her country still had a proper, historically informed sense of itself. Ah well, those days are gone – and so is our Dear Old Queen, alas...