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...

'It is not like this at all'

 On this day 60 years ago, the New York Poet Frank O'Hara died, following a bizarre night-time accident in which he was run over by a jeep on a Fire Island beach. The literary world was shocked, and his friends thrown into convulsions of grief. At his funeral John Ashbery, fighting back his tears, read 'To the Harbormaster', perhaps O'Hara's finest poem: 

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught   

in some moorings. I am always tying up   

and then deciding to depart. In storms and   

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide   

around my fathomless arms, I am unable   

to understand the forms of my vanity   

or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder   

in my hand and the sun sinking. To   

you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage   

of my will. The terrible channels where   

the wind drives me against the brown lips   

of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet   

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and   

if it sinks, it may well be in answer   

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Some while after the death, his friend James Schuyler wrote an elegy for O'Hara, 'Buried at Springs'. It's an oblique, considered, surprisingly pastoral work, written at the painter Fairfield Porter's home on Great Spruce Island (which O'Hara had visited some years before)...

There is a hornet in the room   

and one of us will have to go   

out the window into the late   

August midafternoon sun. I

won. There is a certain challenge   

in being humane to hornets   

but not much. A launch draws   

two lines of wake behind it   

on the bay like a delta

with a melted base. Sandy   

billows, or so they look,

of feathery ripe heads of grass,   

an acid-yellow kind of

goldenrod glowing or glowering   

in shade. Rocks with rags   

of shadow, washed dust clouts   

that will never bleach.

It is not like this at all.   

The rapid running of the   

lapping water a hollow knock

of someone shipping oars:   

it’s eleven years since   

Frank sat at this desk and   

saw and heard it all   

the incessant water the   

immutable crickets only   

not the same: new needles   

on the spruce, new seaweed   

on the low-tide rocks   

other grass and other water   

even the great gold lichen   

on a granite boulder   

even the boulder quite   

literally is not the same

      II

A day subtle and suppressed   

in mounds of juniper enfolding   

scratchy pockets of shadow

while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump—

stands shadowless in an overcast   

of ripe grass. There is nothing   

but shade, like the boggy depths   

of a stand of spruce, its resonance   

just the thin scream

of mosquitoes ascending.

Boats are light lumps on the bay   

stretching past erased islands   

to ocean and the terrible tumble   

and London (“rain persisting”)   

and Paris (“changing to rain”).   

Delicate day, setting the bright

of a young spruce against the cold

of an old one hung with unripe cones   

each exuding at its tip

gum, pungent, clear as a tear,   

a day tarnished and fractured   

as the quartz in the rocks

of a dulled and distant point,   

a day like a gull passing

with a slow flapping of wings   

in a kind of lope, without

breeze enough to shake loose   

the last of the fireweed flowers,

a faintly clammy day, like wet silk   

stained by one dead branch

the harsh russet of dried blood.  

Christina the Astonishing

Today is the feast day of St Christina the Astonishing, a 12th-century saint from Sint-Truiden, in what is now Belgium. Having suffered a massive seizure of some kind, she was taken for dead, but in the midst of her funeral service 'she arose full of vigour, stupefying with amazement the whole city of Sint-Truiden'. She had, she said, visited Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and now, on her return, she could not bear the smell of the sinful people gathered in the church. She duly levitated up to the rafters to escape the stench, and hovered there for some while. 
  On returning to terra firma, Christina embraced a life of extreme destitution and privation, shunning human contact and seeking out anything that would cause her to suffer. According to accounts of her life, she would throw herself into burning furnaces, suffering agonies but emerging quite unhurt. In the depths of winter she would fling herself into the river Meuse, spending hours or even days in the icy waters, praying and begging for mercy. Sometimes she would allow herself to be carried down to a mill, where the mill wheel 'whirled her round in a manner frightful to behold', but of course she emerged unscathed. This – and absolutely nothing else – Christina had in common with the far from saintly Laurence Sterne, who, as a boy in Ireland, had once fallen into a mill-race and been carried right round the wheel (had 'been through the mill'), but emerged, like the saint, quite unharmed. 
  In later life Christina the Astonishing quietened down, living, surprisingly, to the age of 74. Fans of Nick Cave might recall that he tells something of her story in his song 'Christina the Astonishing', from the 1992 album Henry's Dream...