Birthday Boy

 Well, I can't really let Tennyson's birthday go unmarked (he was born on this day in 1809, at the vicarage of Somersby in the beautiful Lincolnshire Wolds). With all the talk of this Ulysses film (which I have no intention of seeing), surely it's got to be this:

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Missing Liddle already

 I see that my old university has given a professorship to a fantasist and plagiarist (both 'alleged', m'lud), for reasons that are all too painfully obvious. The story is still unfolding, in jaw-dropping detail, and will surely do real harm to Cambridge's reputation.
   One of Arday's outlandish Munchausenesque tales is that he once ran 600 miles in six days – and that reminded me of something I wrote about a while back: the six-day walk (and one George Hazel did indeed walk 600 miles in six days, back in 1882). 
   Among the many reasons to mourn the death of Rod Liddle, the nearest thing we had to a Swiftian journalist, is that we'll never read what he had to say on the Jason Arday story. It would surely have been choice. 

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/