West Wind

 The mid-May weather here has been unseasonally cold, with sudden violent showers of rain and hail. The swifts have withdrawn to await better things; only the doughtiest butterflies – holly blues (amazingly abundant this year) and speckled woods – are showing themselves, in the rare moments of relative warmth; and me, I'm back in my herringbone tweed jacket. The worst of it is the relentless, hard-blowing West wind. I'm no fan of strong winds, from whatever quarter, but the West is undoubtedly the worst, scrambling my brain in a way no other wind does. If I were to write an Ode to the West Wind, it would consist of three words: Cease And Desist. Or I might adapt the ancient lyric, with apologies to Anon: 
Westron wind, when wilt tha cease?
Thy blowing drives me mad.
All I ask is a little peace
And the quiet I once had.

In the Mediterranean world, away from the rude Atlantic blast, the West wind is regarded as a welcome visitor, a soft, warm breeze,  personified as Zephyr. (Even Chaucer talks of Zephyrus with his sweet breath – really? In England?). Here is a glorious madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi (baptised on this day in 1567, fact fans) in which 'Zephyr returns, and with gentle words warms the air and sets the waters free, and whispering among the verdant boughs, makes the field flowers dance to his glad sound'. If only. 

 

Wartime in Wool

 Yesterday my old friend Bryan (Appleyard) paid a visit to Lichfield. We met, as usual, in the cathedral, which, on his last visit, was hosting an exhibition of Peter Marlow's wonderful photographs of English cathedrals. This time, by way of contrast, much of the cathedral was given over to a vast exhibition, The Longest Yarn 2, which tells the story of wartime Britain in a series of eighty 'wool art' tableaux composed entirely of, er, knitting wool. Above, for example, is VE Day at Buckingham Palace. 
   What can I say? This was clearly a labour of love, created by an army of volunteers over who knows how many man/woman-hours. It covers the whole duration of the war, from Chamberlain's broadcast to VJ Day, taking in the Blitz, rationing, the Battle of Britain, evacuees, bomber raids, D-Day, street parties, the lot. The trouble is that knitting wool has, shall we say, limited expressive possibilities, and knitted figures inevitably look like something from vintage children's television, with their round faces, button noses and vacuous expressions. Despite this, I understand that many people are finding the exhibition moving and impressive – and it is certainly attracting large numbers of visitors: the cathedral was heaving. It is, in its very English way, sweet, charming, and quite bonkers. Perhaps, if I hadn't watched the seriously moving BBC documentary Children of the Blitz the night before, The Longest Yarn 2 might have done more for me...
   Then we walked round Stowe Pool, dropped into St Chad's church, enjoyed an excessively liquid lunch, and had a look around the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, where, in the bookshop, I bought a copy of Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, and a facsimile of a letter from Boswell to Johnson. 

Donovan and Fred

 Today, the singer-songwriter Donovan, a man not given to understating his contribution to popular music, celebrates his 80th birthday. A while back, on the occasion of another Donovan birthday, I wrote this: 
'Today is the 67th birthday of that titan of troubadours, Donovan. Singer-songwriter, poet, mystic, visionary, man of letters, musical and psychedelic pioneer, Donovan was the most influential figure of his time, entirely changing the course of music history. Without him, the Beatles would have been just another beat combo, California's Summer of Love would never have happened, jazz, psychedelia and world music would probably not exist, and no one would ever have heard of Jeff Beck or Bob Dylan.

You might recall the 1965 meeting between Dylan and Donovan captured in D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back. The director later recalled that
'Of course, when Donovan met him he was very excited and decided to play something for him. Dylan said he liked 'Catch The Wind', but Donovan said, I've written a new song I wanna play for you. So he played a song called 'My Darling Tangerine Eyes'. And it was to the tune of 'Mr Tambourine Man'! And Dylan was sitting there with this funny look on his face, listening to 'Mr Tambourine Man' with these really weird words, trying to keep a straight face. Then Dylan says, Well, you know, that tune ... I have to admit that I haven't written all the tunes I'm credited with, but that happens to be one that I did write! I'm sure Donovan never played the song again.'
   Back in the Sixties, music fandom was intensely tribal, especially in the school playground, but often in the music press as well - Cliff v Elvis, Beatles v Stones (even, briefly, Beatles v Dave Clark Five), and of course Dylan v Donovan, which now looks rather like Beatles v Dave Clark Five. But let's be fair, Donovan - at least in the years when he was managed by Mickie Most - did produce a string of agreeable, even classic, singles. These, and indeed his early albums, were part of the soundtrack of my misspent youth, though A Gift from a Flower to a Garden finished it for me (Dear Flower - Thanks but No Thanks). But then there was the strangely wonderful 'children's album' HMS Donovan, which I remember (with a blush) being played worryingly often in my rooms at university...'

Nothing to add, really – except Happy Birthday, old chap!

As it happens,  Fred Astaire (né Austerlitz) was also born on this day, in 1899. No one could dance like him (especially when he was dancing with Ginger Rogers), and no one could put across a song as effectively as him – no wonder he was the songwriters' favourite. Here is a clip of classic Fred and Ginger – Irving Berlin's 'Cheek to Cheek', from Top Hat (1935). Enjoy...

The Great Centenarian

 Well, there's no escaping the Attenborough centenary – it's everywhere, and will be all day, with a special concert from the Royal Albert Hall on TV this evening. It was 100 years ago today that the Great Man, our most assured National Treasure, was born – in Isleworth, by the Thames in Middlesex (though he did not grow up there). I remember Isleworth from my childhood: it was there that, despite the state of the heavily polluted river, I saw my first (and for a long while last) Kingfisher. A flash of electric blue, unmistakable, unforgettable...
    So, Attenborough. In his prime a great broadcaster and communicator, and even a great Controller of BBC2, responsible for Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. As regular readers of this blog will know, I found Attenborough in his later years hard to take, such was his insistent focus on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change. Having bought in to Paul Ehrlich's Malthusian predictions of planetary catastrophe caused by human overpopulation (which hasn't happened), Attenborough then bought in to CACC and its similarly dire predictions, continuing to push the notorious Michael Mann 's Hockey Stick model long after it had been shown up be mathematical nonsense. Though he was a genial fellow, a mensch and an all-round good egg, there was a disturbingly anti-human strand in Attenborough's thought. But never mind: he was, overall, a great good thing, his early achievements, I hope, outweighing later developments – and the quality of his brilliant earlier documentaries outweighing the gee-whiz visuals and lame commentary of much of his later work. Enough: de centenariis nil nisi bonum. Even I salute you, Sir David. 

   And here I'll append my own Nature Note: yesterday I saw my first swifts of the year – a pair flying high and passing from sight, and then, later, a single bird swooping down almost to within touching distance. Always a red letter day (and a little late this year), always a joyful, heart-lifting experience.

  And here, for good measure, what I think is one of the great nature poems (set in a garden, like Attenborough's latest series, The Secret Garden). It's by Emily Dickinson –

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, —
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.

History

 I've been watching the reruns of Simon Schama's A History of Britain, a sweeping 15-part series that dates back to a time long before Schama became an annoying metroliberal pantomime dame – and to a time when the BBC would put good money into producing a straight, intelligent narrative history, presented without gimmicks and authored by an actual historian. Imagine that happening now, quarter of a century on, when narrative history is barely taught in schools, and profound historical ignorance is the norm. How did this sad state of affairs come about? It's hard not to blame the constitutional vandal Blair, perhaps the first British Prime Minister to entirely lack a sense of history, except as something to be 'on the right side of' – a notion barely less fatuous than 'things can only get better'.  (The right side of history of course meant the left side of politics.) A proper sense of history, i.e. the past, is, it seems to me, essential for any society, any nation to thrive, and ignorance of it can only lead to decline, and indeed fall. But when, like Blair, you are a globalist 'anywhere man', with no firm belief in national identity or cultural roots, the past barely exists; you live in an eternal present. This seems to be what far too many people are now content to do, aided and abetted by institutions that have no interest in transmitting the story of the past, unless through the lens of our present preoccupations. Perhaps it will be down to the novelists and poets to keep alive some genuine sense of the past? 
   Here is Philip Larkin taking a deep dive into history – seventeenth-century Holland, to be precise – in a sonnet written on this day in 1970 and drawing inspiration from the genre paintings of Jan Steen –

The Card Players

Jan van Hogspuew staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.
Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace! 

Birthdays

 Today is Mrs N's birthday – and that of the inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori (born 1655). One of his pianos, built in Florence in 1720, survives in playable condition, and this is what it sounds like (the pianist is Dongsok Shin, and the piece is a Scarlatti sonata, K9). Having a wooden rather than a metal frame, a Cristofori piano is a delicate instrument, compared to what came later, but the action (a fiendishly complex affair) is essentially that of a modern piano...

Couples

 An interesting piece in The Times yesterday, about literary couples, i.e. cohabiting couples composed of two writers, each pursuing their own projects or, sometimes, collaborating. American examples include Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt,  Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. From this side of the pond, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath of course, Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn – and our old friend Kingsley Amis and his wife of 18 years, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Their honeymoon in Spain seems to have been positively idyllic, at least according to Howard: 'In the mornings we wrote sitting opposite each other at the table, our typewriters almost touching in the small space. Then we went to the beach...' 
 As we know, that happy time did not last, as Howard was soon struggling with the domestic demands of looking after the needy and demanding Amis – plus a house full of friends and family – and coping with his drinking. I've written about the Amises' life in their 'bloody great mansion' before, and the wonder is that Howard put up with it for as long as she did (and somehow managed to carry on writing). In happier times, I was interested to learn from the Times piece, she and Amis once 'decided to write a few pages of each other's novels'. The novels were Howard's After Julius and Amis's One Fat Englishman. They duly swapped manuscripts, briefed each other on where the plot was going, and set to work. According to Howard, the chapters that resulted from this work-swap experiment went unnoticed and unsuspected. I guess there's an opening there for a literary sleuth, armed with the latest tools of textual analysis – though perhaps there is more important work to be done...

'One of the most unmeddlesome of women'

 Having recently read Richard Holmes's excellent account of Tennyson's early years, The Boundless Deep, I was amused to come across this picture, in J.G. Riewald's Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures (a great book for browsing in). It shows Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, sculpting his portrait bust of the still beardless Tennyson in 1857 – the bust that is now in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The caption reads: 

Mrs Tennyson: 'You know, Mr Woolner, I'm one of the most unmeddlesome of women; but – when (I'm only asking), when do you begin modelling his halo?'

'A single Hound'

 Consciousness. I know I have it, but have no idea what it is or where it comes from (nor does anyone else, whatever they may say). I am equally sure that I have a soul, but again have no idea what it is or where it comes from. Are consciousness and soul the same thing, or aspects of the same thing? Is soul perhaps a deeper form of consciousness, one that somehow connects with a reality beyond time and space? Both consciousness and soul seem identical with our ultimate selves. We inhabit consciousness, and infer everything else. 
  These are deep waters. Over to you, Emily Dickinson –

This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone

Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men—

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be—
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.

This poem was sent to me by my friend, the Emily Dickinson maven, who regards it as one of her most profound. I agree – it's a gem. 

Borges, Scott, Naipaul

This morning I took delivery of a new Panama hat, the old one having become an offence to the eye, and summer being in the offing. The new hat, I was delighted to note, was made by the firm of Borges & Scott – a nice literary double-act. Sadly, Jorge Luis had no connection with the hat-making dynasty, which is based in Ecuador, where they still make their hats by hand, weaving the narrow fibres of toquilla straw into cooling headgear. 
Then, this afternoon, I went with Mrs N to a hospital where she had an appointment with an eye specialist. He turned out to be called Mr Biswas. She didn't ask him if he'd got his own house yet.  

Changed

 Here, for no particular reason, is a poem by Charles Stuart Calverley which perfectly demonstrates what Pope called the art of sinking in poetry – also the perils of ending a stanza with a two-syllable line. 

Changed

    I know not why my soul is rack'd:
        Why I ne'er smile as was my wont:
    I only know that, as a fact,
            I don't.

    I used to roam o'er glen and glade
        Buoyant and blithe as other folk:
    And not unfrequently I made
            A joke.

    A minstrel's fire within me burn'd.
       I'd sing, as one whose heart must break,
   Lay upon lay: I nearly learn'd
           To shake.

   All day I sang; of love, of fame,
       Of fights our fathers fought of yore,
   Until the thing almost became
           A bore.

   I cannot sing the old songs now!
       It is not that I deem then low;
  'Tis that I can't remember how
           They go.

   I could not range the hills till high
       Above me stood the summer moon:
   And as to dancing, I could fly
           As soon.

   The sports, to which with boyish glee
       I sprang erewhile, attract no more;
   Although I am but sixty-three
           Or four.

   Nay, worse than that, I've seem'd of late
       To shrink from happy boyhood — boys
   Have grown so noisy, and I hate
           A noise.

   They fright me, when the beech is green,
       By swarming up its stem for eggs:
   They drive their horrid hoops between
           My legs: —

   It's idle to repine, I know;
       I'll tell you what I'll do instead:
   I'll drink my arrowroot, and go
           To bed.

Calverley was a noted university wit and a brilliant classicist who, uniquely, managed to win the Chancellor's Prize for Latin verse at Oxford (whence he was sent down for misbehaviour – he was an extremely high-spirited undergraduate) and Cambridge. He was a keen smoker, and wrote a heartfelt 'Ode to Tobacco'.

Caine

 It's not only the poets who are getting older (spoiler alert: we all are). Last night, for some reason, I was looking up Michael Caine, and discovered that he is all of 93. I've always liked Caine, who seems to be that rare thing among actors, a proper mensch, a regular guy. I wondered if he'd made an appearance on this blog – and sure enough he had, on this very day in 2009 (yes, the blog is that old, and older). Here's the post:

Quote of the Day

'We've got three and a half million layabouts laying about on benefits, and I'm 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them.' Sir Michael Caine, telling it like it is.
The British 'welfare state' has turned into a national disaster, perpetuating poverty, idleness and dependence - at huge and ever-growing expense. It's a model that could only work in a nation with a strong, homogeneous identity and sense of common cause, and a strong work ethic. None of which apply to modern Britain.
See also De Tocqueville's Memoir on Pauperism, and Corelli Barnett's The Audit of War.

I rather hope Sir Michael is not taking too keen an interest in the state of the nation these days, when there are around ten million people of working age (not all layabouts, of course) on benefits – a situation that is in large part a legacy of the insane policy of 'lockdown'.
Don't tell Caine – it might finish him off. 

A Birthday

 The poets are getting older: Kay Ryan is 80, Dana Gioia is 75, Dick Davis is 81, Billy Collins is 85 – and today Ted Kooser turns 87. He's a poet who tends to get dismissed as a Midwesterner dispensing homely wisdom, but I think this is unfair (and reminiscent of the way some have dismissed Willa Cather as a Midwestern chronicler of life on the Prairie, and nothing more). I've posted a few Kooser poems – here and here (and I hope he's having a happier birthday than that hinted at in the poem 'Birthday').
Like Wallace Stevens, Kooser was for many years an executive in an insurance company – and, also like Stevens, he wrote a poem called 'Sunday Morning', but it is no homage and bears little or no resemblance to Stevens's masterpiece. It is more in the nature of a suburban idyll, and very nicely done, I reckon...

Sunday Morning

Now it is June again, one of those
leafy Sundays drifting through galaxies
of maple seeds. Somewhere, a mourning dove
touches her keyboard twice, a lonely F,
and then falls silent. Here in the house
the Sunday papers lie in whitecaps
over the living-room floor. Among them floats
the bridal page, that window of many panes,
reflecting, black and white, patches of sky
and puffs of starlit cloud becoming
faces. On each bright brow the same light falls,
the nuptial moon held up just out of sight
to the left. The brides all lift their eyes
and smile to see the heavens stopped for them.
And love is everywhere. Cars that have all week
lurched and honked with sour commuters are now
like smooth canoes packed soft with families. 
A church bell strides through the green perfume
of locust trees and tolls its thankfulness.
The mourning dove, to her astonishment,
blunders upon a distant call in answer. 

Miss Bart and Mrs Lloyd

 I'm just back from yet another visit to Worthing (see Nigeness passim). This time my reading on the train was Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, which I resolved to read after enjoying The Age of Innocence so much. I'm about halfway through, and finding it even more impressive than The Age of Innocence, and every bit as enjoyable, with the satirical humour closer to the surface, though the tragic undercurrents are unmissable. Miss Lily Bart – beautiful, witty, sophisticated, and in need of a seriously rich husband – is a wholly convincing and attractive creation, painted in the round, with full awareness of her weaknesses. 
   I have just read the crucial chapter that revolves around an evening of tableaux vivants  – a now defunct form of entertainment in which people posed as famous works of art, with suitable costume, lighting and props. This show is being lavishly staged by luminaries of New York society, under the direction of a fashionable artist, and is designed to impress. Lily Bart does indeed make an impression, eliciting a unanimous, spontaneous 'Oh!' from the spectators as soon as she appears, in the likeness of Joshua Reynolds's 'Mrs Lloyd'. Mrs Lloyd? This was not a painting I know, so I sought it out...

The portrait is of Mrs Richard Bennett Lloyd, wife of a British army captain who served in America, and it shows her as an ultra-elegant lady, carving her marital surname in the trunk of a tree. Lily Bart chose well when she decided to pose as Mrs Lloyd, and Wharton describes the effect: 'Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden [who is in love with her, but not 'suitable'] always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of the eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.' Oh dear...
   The edition I'm reading (Virago Modern Classics) has as its cover image a portrait of Lady Colin Campbell by Giovanni Boldini, the 'Master of Swish' – a good choice.

As for Reynolds's Mrs Lloyd, that painting now hangs on the walls of Waddesdon Manor, the grand Rothschild mansion in Buckinghamshire. 

'His ripening talent broke suddenly into song'

 In the course of writing my butterfly book, I spent some time seeking out butterfly-themed poems (the best of them are Emily Dickinson's butterfly poems, and Janet Lewis's 'The Insect', which you can find here, after the snails). A name that did not come my way was Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839), author of a collection titled Loves of the Butterflies and of a lyric, popular in its time, 'I'd Be a Butterfly'. This piece, with a few others from Bayly's hand, finds its way into that wonderfully entertaining anthology of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl. The editors introduce it thus:

'He married (1826) Miss Hayes of Marble Hill, Co. Cork, and during a stay with his young bride at Lord Ashdown's villa on Southampton Water his ripening talent broke suddenly into song with the composition of I'd Be A Butterfly, in which a strong desire to flutter to and fro like that beautiful and colourful insect was very graphically expressed. The poem was written, says a biographer, "in romantic circumstances" – and one may be almost certain that the poet was gratified by the approval of Lord Ashdown himself, who added to singular munificence a true nobleman's patronage of letters, in so far as they are designed to improve public taste.'

Bayly wrote prolifically, mostly songs, ballads and dramatic pieces, and 'among his admirers [the editors of The Stuffed Owl inform us] was Mr Richard Swiveller'. That will be Dick Swiveller, from The Old Curiosity Shop, an amiable fellow who speaks much of the time in quotations. 
   But to 'I'd Be a Butterfly'. Here it is – 

I'd be a Butterfly born in a bower,
Where roses and lilies and violets meet;
Roving for ever from flower to flower,
And kissing all buds that are pretty and sweet.
I'd never languish for wealth or for power;
I'd never sigh to see slaves at my feet:
I'd be a butterfly born in a bower,
Kissing all buds that are pretty and sweet...

What, though you tell me each gay little rover
Shrinks from the breath of the first autumn day!
Surely 'tis better, when summer is over,
To die when all fair things are fading away.
Some in life's winter may toil to discover
Means of procuring a weary delay –
I'd be a butterfly; living, a rover,
Dying when fair things are fading away. 

It's rather sweet, isn't it? I certainly prefer it to Wordsworth's 'To a Butterfly' – 

'Stay near me – do not take thy flight!
A little longer stay in sight!
Much converse to I find in thee,
Historian of my infancy!' 
                                         etc, etc.

Shorts

Oddly – deplorably? somethingly? – my recently acquired anthology of 101 very short poems, Short and Sweet, doesn't include anything by Walter de la Mare. This is a pity, as some of his shortest poems are among his best. I posted a couple a while back: this extraordinary portrait of grandiose paranoia – 

Napoleon

'What is the world, O soldiers?
       It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
   This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
   Through which we go
       Is I.'

– and this (characteristically) eerie little number –

'Ann, Ann!
        Come! Quick as you can!
    There's a fish that talks
        In the frying-pan.
    Out of the fat,
        As clear as glass,
    He put up his mouth
        And moaned 'Alas!'
    Oh, most mournful,
        'Alas, alack!'
    Then turned to his sizzling,
        And sank him back.'

Here is something even shorter, but packing a quiet little punch (what made that grass so 'paradisal green'?) –

The Field

Yes, there was once a battle here: 
There, where the grass takes on a shade
Of paradisal green, sun-clear –
     There the last stand was made.

And there's this little beauty –

The Dead Jay

A witless, pert, bedizened fop,
Man scoffs, resembles you:
Fate levels all – voice harsh or sweet –
Ringing the woodlands through: 
But O, poor hapless bird, that broken death-stilled wing,
            That miracle of blue!

And finally this one – short but by no means sweet –

'Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes—
Under this stone one loved too wildly lies;
How false she was, no granite could declare;
Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.'

Art

It has come to my attention that today is World Art Day – an occasion that seems to be little marked here: no going to school dressed as your favourite painting, or at least clutching a reproduction thereof (perhaps just as well – it would probably be wall-to-wall Van Goghs, with the odd Monet). Anyway, I thought I'd mark the day by naming what I believe to be the greatest paintings of, as they say, 'all time' – limiting the list to those I've actually seen with my own eyes. The list I came up with shows, if nothing else, that my (visual) aesthetic sense is rooted firmly in one quite narrow period of time (though there's one outlier, from the 15th century) – or does it show that that was when painting reached its peak? 
  So, in no particular order...

Any and all of Titian's four 'Poesie'
Rembrandt's Night Watch
Vermeer's View of Delft
Tintoretto's Crucifixion
Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece
Velazquez's Las Meninas
Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas
Bellini's San Zaccaria Altarpiece
Giorgione's Tempest
Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson

Any thoughts? 

'These touching lines...'

 I have never seriously kept a commonplace book, but I have long had a habit of jotting down, usually in scrappy little notebooks, short quotations from things I'm reading or have come across. I lost several such notebooks some years ago when my bag mysteriously disappeared in the course of a Tube journey (presumably nicked), but I did start another one – and yesterday, while looking for something else altogether, I came across it in a pocket of my current bag, and spent a while browsing in its dog-eared pages.
  The first entry is this, written by an early reader of the anonymously published In Memoriam: 'These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.' The last is a quotation from Michael Oakeshott (one of several): 'All great works of art have a touch of lightness, happiness, almost inconsequence, and this saves us from being oppressed, and having to turn away from them.' There's even a quotation from Nietzsche along similar lines: 'What is good is light. Everything divine runs on delicate feet.' Near these are a couple of God quotations: 'Believe in God, and don't put anything past Him' (Peter de Vries, The Blood of the Lamb) and 'The bastard! He doesn't exist!' (Samuel Beckett: Endgame). Beckett turns up several times: I particularly like 'Ah yes, I was always subject to the deep thought, especially in the spring of the year' (Malone Dies), and – this in response to the question 'What's the matter with you?' – 'I tried to look like one with whom that only is the matter which is native to him' (The Calmative). Don't we all? 
   Here is Oscar Wilde on Max Beerbohm: 'God has conferred on him the priceless gift of perpetual middle age.' And James Russell Lowell on Keats: 'The moral seems to have so perfectly interfused the physical man, that you might almost say he could feel sorrow with his hands.' And Ivy Compton-Burnett on Trollope: 'Yes, he is good. He is so good one wonders why he isn't better.' And Guy Davenport on Kafka: 'Like Kierkegaard, he saw the absurdity of life as the most meaningful clue to its elusive vitality. His humour authenticates his seriousness: "Only Maimonides may say there is no God; he's entitled"' – there's God again. I think that's enough for now.

Lassie Come Home

 Yesterday, with the Lichfield grandchildren (who, like the Canadian grandchildren, have pleasingly retro tastes), we watched Lassie Come Home – the 1943 feature film that spawned a succession of inferior sequels and corny TV series. The original is surprisingly impressive and hard-edged, and set not in America but Yorkshire and Scotland (filmed in Washington State and California) in the Depression years of the 1930s. It tells a gripping, emotionally involving story, and tells it well. The source was a novel, Lassie Come-Home, by Eric Knight, a Yorkshire-born writer who spent some of his boyhood in St Petersburg*, where his mother was a governess in the imperial family. He served in the Canadian infantry in WWI and died in WWII, serving in the US Army Special Services.
  In the film, Roddy McDowall gives a fine performance as Joe, the Yorkshire lad whose beloved collie dog, Lassie, has to be sold by his impoverished parents, and is eventually taken all the way to Scotland – from where (spoiler alert) he makes his arduous way back, after many perilous adventures and near-death experiences, all quite starkly portrayed. Elsa Lanchester plays Joe's mother, and his father is played by the character actor Donald Crisp, born a cockney but claiming all his life to be Scottish – and maintaining his assumed Scottish accent even while playing this doughty Yorkshireman. Nigel Bruce, fondly remembered for his numerous portrayals of Holmes's Dr Watson, plays the local landowner, the Duke of Rudling, and an 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, looking weirdly like a miniaturised woman rather than a little girl, plays his granddaughter. As for Pal, the dog who plays Lassie, he (playing a she) is clearly star material. The storyline might be predictable, but, by golly, it draws you in and makes you care; resistance is futile. I probably enjoyed this as much as the grandchildren. Even the critic James Agate was won over, writing that 'Those who made it seem to have had a pretty fair sense of the square naïveté which most good stories for children have, or affect; they also manipulate some surprisingly acute emotions out of the head dog. Whether from private remembrance or from the show, I got several reverberations of that strangely pure, half-magical tone which certain books ... have for many children.' If you haven't seen it, and think of Lassie purely in terms of those feeble TV series, seek it out – you should be pleasantly surprised.   

* He would have been there at the same time as the young Nabokov and George Sanders.

A Garner Poem

 I happened upon this on Facebook today. It's an uncollected poem by Alan Garner, and it amused me – it reads like something Thomas Hardy might have written, if he hadn't been Thomas Hardy...

R.I.P.

A girl in our village makes love in the churchyard.
She doesn't care who, but it must be the churchyard.
They say she prefers the old part to the new –
Green granite chippings maybe rankle, warm slabs welcome.
And after, in her bedroom, she sees the mirror's view
Of her shoulder, embossed "In Loving Memory".
Anne, why did you do it? You've eight O-Levels.
Why not Anne? If bones remember, you'll give them joy.
It's as good a place as any, close by Nave,
Rood Screen, Chapel of Ease, Peal of the Bells,
Bob Singles and Grand Sire Doubles.
And, when you half-close your eyes,
The horned gargoyles choose.
But it had to happen.
Oh Anne, tonight you were levelled.
William James, late of this parish, was cold beneath you
And his great-grandson warm above, and you rose,
Although your shoulder didn't know it,
In glorious expectation of the Life to Come.

Ben

Above is Ben Nicholson's Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise, one of my favourites among his paintings, many of which leave me fairly cool. Ben, born on this day in 1894, took off in a wholly different direction from his father, the great (and still underrated) William Nicholson, pursuing abstraction rather than naturalism, and thereby becoming a fashionable and widely celebrated artist, even being enrolled in the Order of Merit, which his father never was. 
  When young Ben was studying at the Slade – along with Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, etc. – he spent much of his time playing billiards. He claimed that the abstract formality of the green baize and the ever changing relationships between the coloured balls stimulated his aesthetic sense. Well, maybe they did...
   The picture above, which is in the Tate collection, mixes abstraction with naturalism, showing the reflections in the window of a Dieppe restaurant – including the face of his then wife, Barbara Hepworth (who bore him triplets as well as a son). The restaurant is long gone, alas, and is now an estate agent's office. 

AI?

 The Making of a Poem, the excellent Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, prints its authors' names in UPPER CASE, above the name of the poem (and why not?). Thus it was that, browsing in its pages last night, I came across a poem written by AI. AI? What? I know everyone's doing it now, but surely not in 2000, and surely not in a Norton anthology...
Indeed not: the poem was the work of a poet who styled herself 'Ai' (the Japanese for 'love', apparently). The poem, in the 'Open Forms' section of the anthology, is titled 'The German Army, Russia, 1943' –
 
For twelve days,
I drilled through Moscow ice
to reach paradise,
that while tablecloth, set with a plate
that's cracking bit by bit
like the glassy air, like me.
I know I'll fly apart soon,
the pieces of me so light they float. 
The Russians burned their crops,
rather than feed our army.
Now they strike us against each other like dry rocks
and set us on fire with a hunger
nothing can feed.
Someone calls me and I look up.
It's Hitler.
I imagine eating his terrible, luminous eyes.
Brother, he says.
I stand up, tie the rags tighter around my feet.
I hear  my footsteps running after me,
but I am already gone. 

As a stark portrait of absolute desperation, I think that is rather good... 
  Ai was born Florence Anthony (in Texas in 1947), and described herself as half Japanese, one eighth Choktaw-Chickasaw, a quarter black, a sixteenth (!) Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. Well, at least her chosen two-letter moniker simplified things. Her early years were tough and complicated, and it was an assignment at her Catholic school – write a letter from the perspective of a martyr – that first got her interested in the possibilities of writing poetry. Joining the University of California's MFA programme, she worked under, among others, the great Donald Justice. Rising through academe, publishing at intervals, winning awards and finally securing tenure as a professor at the Oklahoma State University, she had the kind of career characteristic of 20th-century American poets. As for her work, what little I've seen of it seems rather too loud and overtly political for my taste – but that poem in the Norton anthology is rather good, if grim.

The Elusive Chase

 Cannock Chase is big – something over 20 square miles of heathland, woods and plantations – and not very far from Lichfield. So you would have thought that by now I would have become a frequent visitor – or at the very least have managed to find it. You would be wrong on both counts: on my first attempt (last year, I think) I found what I took to be Cannock Chase and had a very pleasant walk, but on checking the OS map afterwords I discovered that it was not Cannock Chase I'd been walking on, after all. 
   Yesterday – a wonderfully warm and sunny day – I set out to try again, armed with rather more accurate information than I had had the last time. In mitigation, I should say at this point that I do not drive, so I usually (rashly) attempt these expeditions by bus – and no bus or any other form of public transport delivers you on to Cannock Chase itself. However, it was entirely my own fault that I started off by misreading my map and setting off on a wholly unnecessary detour – fairly brief, but made that annoying bit longer by some humorist having turned a footpath sign through 180 degrees. After a while, I arrived at a location I took to be the veritable gateway to Cannock Chase, but all I found was a spinney with a brook running through it, an uninviting view of fir trees, and no indication of which way was likely to take me on to the wide open spaces of the Chase. After a little (too little, as usual) thought, I changed my plan, having identified what looked like a good walk to another destination altogether – which, for a wonder, I reached without once going astray. Unfortunately, the walk was through a kind of landscape all too common in Staffordshire – sheep pasture and arable, with narrowly circumscribed footpaths and rather little in the way of (wild) flora and fauna. All rather dull, especially for one spoiled by having wandered too long on the Surrey hills and downs. Cannock Chase, I'm sure, has much more to offer – if I ever manage to penetrate its mysterious force field. Having re-examined the map, I now feel pretty sure that next time I'll make it... I'm probably wrong.
   Anyway, as I said, it was a warm and sunny day, and I was rewarded with my first orange-tips of the year, and my first blackcap, singing away lustily – a song 'full, sweet, deep, loud and wild,' as Gilbert White described it. And the blackthorn was in full bloom, and here and there larks were singing as they rose into the sky.
   The weather is even warmer and sunnier today, and, after visiting the dentist, I took a stroll around the wilder parts of St Michael's churchyard, where holly blues, orange-tips, speckled woods and the ubiquitous peacocks were flying (as they are in my garden). Yet again I failed to find the grave of Philip Larkin's parents: I know I found it once, and photographed it, but since then I have drawn a blank on every visit. After this, I had to shop at Tesco – a grim place, but with a superb view of the cathedral – and on the way out I glanced, as I always do, at the discarded books that satiated readers leave for others to pick up. Today I was startled to see the selected poems of the 15th-century Scottish 'makar' Robert Henryson (Carcanet paperback). I was not tempted: reading the English Chaucer at university was painful enough, the Scottish one still more so. Dostoevsky's The Devils was also on the shelf, but I passed on that one too. There is enough suffering in the world. 

Easter

'Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.
Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.
Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.'

Easter greetings to all who browse here.
The painting above is 'Noli Me Tangere' by the Bolognese mannerist Lavinia Fontana. She has gone even farther than Rembrandt in identifying the risen Christ as a gardener; here, he is fully kitted out with a rustic straw hat, a coarse, belted smock, and a serious-looking spade. The spiritual meaning of this identification of Jesus is that Christ is the gardener of the human soul, eradicating what Bob Dylan calls 'the weeds of yesteryear' and planting 'the flourishing seeds of virtue' (as St Gregory the Great put it). It's a teaching that passed out of fashion long ago, but the image can still turn up in unlikely places – none more so that this passage from Ronald Firbank's Valmouth:

With angelic humour Mrs Hurstpierpoint swept skyward her heavy-lidded eyes.
'I thought last night, in my sleep,' she murmured, 'that Christ was my new gardener. I thought I saw Him in the Long Walk there, by the bed of Nelly Roche, tending a fallen flower with a wisp of bast.... "Oh, Seth," I said to Him... "remember the fresh lilies for the altar-vases... Cut all the myosotis there is," I said, "and grub plenty of fine, feathery moss..." And then, as He turned, I saw of course it was not Seth at all.'
'Tending a fallen flower with a wisp of bast...' – a phrase that often returns to me when I'm working in the garden...

But here, for Easter Sunday, is R.S. Thomas –

Resurrection

Easter. The grave clothes of winter
are still here, but the sepulchre
is empty. A messenger
from the tomb tells us
how a stone has been rolled
from the mind, and a tree lightens
the darkness with its blossom.
There are travellers upon the road
who have heard music blown
from a bare bough, and a child
tells us how the accident
of last year, a machine stranded
beside the way for lack
of petrol, is crowned with flowers.

'After a while your mind's a macédoine...'

 When John Ruskin first visited the Alps, at the age of fourteen, his father took care to entrust him to a reliable and expert guide, Joseph Marie Couttet, with whom the young Ruskin soon formed a close bond, which lasted throughout Couttet's life. The Alpine guide even accompanied Ruskin to Italy, to attend to practical matters and generally take care of him. 
  Ruskin recalled their first Alpine venture, an ascent of Mont Buet, with Couttet on foot, leading his young master on a mule. Despite suffering from migraine, sunburn and painful eyes, Ruskin found the experience magical, and was instantly captivated by the Alpine scenery – a taste he never lost; he visited the region around thirty times in his life. When he heard that his old guide was dying, Ruskin made a detour to visit him, and afterwards wrote: 'I am tired, full of anguish and sadness. The death of my old Couttet weighs on me like all the snows of Chamonix. How lonely I am at his passing. My dear old guide of Chamonix. He who said he would give me just nine sous a day to herd cows, because, according to him, that was all I was good for...' A few years later, Ruskin wrote about Couttet again, recalling how 'after the meal, once he'd had his half-bottle of Savoy wine, it wasn't unusual for him to give me a philosophical lecture as we drove up a peaceful valley in the afternoon light. And after I'd tired him out and provoked him with my views on the world, my joys and his own, he would slide down to my valet beside me and murmur, shrugging his shoulders: 'Le pauvre enfant, il ne sait pas vivre.' The poor child doesn't know how to live. He was right: life for Ruskin seems to have been a relentless struggle, driving him constantly to the edge of nervous collapse, as his ferocious work ethic, and who knows what demons, drove him to a level of overwork and over-commitment staggering even by Victorian standards. 
  Couttet's perceptive remark appears as the epigraph to this poem by Dick Davis (from Belonging), in which the poet considers once again the possibility, or impossibility, of living happily –


'Live Happily'

'Le pauvre enfant, il ne sait pas vivre' 

After a while your minds a macédoine 
Of muddled poems, stories, paintings, music,
And pointed admonitions by the dead
Who seemed to know what they were saying meant. 

In all this incommodious welter one
Phrase comically recurs to me, the flourish
With which Domenico Scarlatti ended
The dedication of his published work –

'Vivi felice' ... 'Vivi felice',
Which I've not done yet, or seen clearly how
I'd manage to. Time's running out, his bright 
Arpeggios remind me ... running out ...


Which surely calls for a little Scarlatti – here's the ludicrously talented Yuja Wang playing the Sonata K455. Enjoy.

Moore Music

 Last night on the vintage music quiz Face the Music – an awful smugfest, really, but strangely compelling – the guest was Gerald Moore, who had recently celebrated his 80th birthday. As well as being probably the finest accompanist who ever lived, Moore was blessed with a genial personality, a sense of humour and a talent for anecdote. He soon had Joseph Cooper and the panellists – Robin Ray, Joyce Grenfell and the humorist Paul Jennings – reduced to helpless laughter with his memories of the early days of studio recording and much else. After the show was over, my mind turned to his wonderful Schubert recordings – and to this, his own arrangement for solo piano (no voice) of 'An Die Musik'. Enjoy...

Graphite and Rubber

 I've always liked pencils – the look, the feel and the smell of them – and the best pencils are surely those with a nice sharp graphite point at one end and a little eraser conveniently placed at the other. Who first came up with that bright idea? Well, as it happens, it was on this day in 1858 that one Hymen L. Lipman registered the first patent for such a pencil. He was the leading stationer in Philadelphia, where he also launched the first envelope company in America. In 1862 he sold the pencil-eraser patent to Joseph Reckendorker, who rashly sued the German company Faber for infringement. Alas, after due deliberation, the Supreme Court ruled against him and declared that the patent was invalid because it was simply a combination of two already known things with no additional use. Oh dear. 

   Vladimir Nabokov loved pencils, and they turn up more than once in his writings. In his autobiography Speak, Memory, the young Vladimir, lying in bed with a childhood illness, visualises his mother entering a stationer's shop and coming out with her footman carrying a pencil – which must surely be a giant pencil. And then there she is, by his bed, bearing the gift of a gigantic, four-feet long Faber pencil that had hung in the shop window (and was, Nabokov was delighted to discover, a working pencil with four feet of graphite inside).  
   In chapter 3 of Transparent Things, Hugh Person finds a pencil in the half-open drawer of an old desk, and suddenly, in a vertiginous bravura passage, we have the whole history of that pencil...

It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never found. Now comes the act of attention.

In his shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath but one should be above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors). On the whole, it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned make. Going back a number of seasons (not as far, though, as Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction, we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is placed in a metal cylinder which has a blue eye, a sapphire with a hole drilled in it, and through this the caviar is forced. It issues in one continuous appetizing rodlet (watch for our little friend!), which looks as if it retained the shape of an earthworm's digestive tract (but watch, watch, do not be deflected!). It is now being cut into the lengths required for these particular pencils (we glimpse the cutter, old Elias Borrowdale, and are about to mouse up his forearm on a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in our haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.

Now let us not lose our precious bit of lead while we prepare the wood. Here's the tree! This particular pine! It Is cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark. We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here's the board that will yield the integument of the pencil in the shallow drawer (still not closed). We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes.

Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us! But he won't, oh no. 

'Why is it this that stays...?'

Yesterday I was walking with my brother and walking friends by the Thames in London, from Southwark Cathedral to Rotherhithe, by way of St Margaret Pattens, All Hallows by the Tower, Tower Bridge, the Mayflower Inn (lunch) and St Mary, Rotherhithe, accompanied by a more than lively breeze and flurries of hail. In the event, this enterprise involved a total of something over eight hours of travel by train, London Underground and Overground, a chunk of it occasioned by a lengthy delay on the return journey to Lichfield. Never mind – I was equipped with two books to while away the time. One was Max Beerbohm's Mainly on the Air, a collection of pieces most of which were broadcast on the radio (and duly published in the late lamented Listener).  The other was my latest Dick Davis acquisition, a slim volume titled Belonging.
   Davis, as well as being a fine poet, is a widely admired translator of the classical Persian poetry that was one of the great achievements of that civilisation, centuries before Iran fell prey to a brutal, life-hating theocracy – which soon, God willing, will be gone, whereas the poetry of Fardousi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and many others will live on. Here, in a poem from Belonging, Davis addresses those great poets –  

To the Persian Poets

What rights have I, trespassing in your rooms,
Pilfering your lines, sifting your sacred dust,
Searching for what you were and are not now?
As if I came to where Achilles flickered,
Drawn by the blood Odysseus spilt for him.

But, in another tongue, a stranger speaks,
The revenant who shows me what I am:
In whose hermetic words I recognise
The animals and angels of my heart,
My happiness, my longing, my despair.

This poem, too, honours the poets, albeit obliquely: Hafez was a native of Shiraz, Nayshapur was the home town of Omar Khayyam and of the sufi poet Farid uddin Attar. The poem also describes and explores a curious phenomenon I've often noticed myself, when after visiting some magnificent and supposedly memorable place, what I recall most vividly, often many years later, is an incidental detail, an apparently meaningless moment... 


Iran Twenty Years Ago

Each summer, working there, I’d set off for
The fabled cities – Esfahan, Kashan,
Or Ecbatana, where Hephaestion died,
The poets’ towns – Shiraz and Nayshapour,
Or sites now hardly more than villages
Lapped by the desert, Na’in or Ardestan . . .

 

Their names now mean a dusty backstreet somewhere

Empty and silent in the vivid sunlight,

A narrow way between the high mud walls –

The worn wood of the doors recessed in them

A talisman to conjure and withhold

The life and lives I never touched or knew.

Sometimes I’d hear a voice, a radio,

But mostly there was silence and my shadow

Until a turn would bring me back to people,

Thoroughfares and shops . . .

 

                                              Why is it this that stays,

Those empty afternoons that never led

To anything but seemed their own reward

And are more vivid in my memory

Than mosques, bazaars, companionship, and all

The myriad details of an eight year sojourn;

As if that no epiphany, precisely,

Were the epiphany?  As Hafez has it,

To know you must have gone along that way;

I know they changed my life for ever but

I know too that I could not tell myself

– Much less another – what it was I saw,

Or learnt, or brought back from those aimless hours.

From Max Beerbohm and Mostly On The Air, I offer you this little nugget: in the essay 'Music Halls of My Youth', Max reveals that he was such a devoted admirer of the 'frankly fantastic, but nevertheless very real, very human and loveable' singer Albert Chevalier (of 'My Old Dutch' fame) that he was 'sorely tempted to offer him an idea which might well have been conceived by himself: a song about a publican whom the singer had known and revered, who was now dead, whose business was carried on by his son, Ben, an excellent young man, – 'But 'e'll never be the man 'is Father woz'. The chorus was to be something of this sort: 
(Sung) 'I drops in to see young Ben
            In 'is tap-room now an' then,
            And I likes to see 'im gettin' on becoz
           'E's got pluck and 'e's got brains,
           And 'e takes no end o' pains, 
           But – 'e'll never be the man 'is Father woz.'

All together now...

 

'This can hardly be too vehemently recommended'

 Back in the days when the late Sage of Tiverton and I were exchanging frequent text messages, he somehow convinced himself that my nightly routine was to retire to bed and read Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. I've no idea where he got this notion, as I had never read the much praised Memoirs, but it was a book I had long intended to get round to reading one day. This state of affairs continued until very recently when, spotting it on the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop, I nerved myself to buy it and – yes, at last – read it. I am not sorry: I'd say it is perhaps the best thing of its kind I have read. 
   Published in 1951, after a very long gestation, it is, as the title suggests, an account of his life written in the first person by the Emperor Hadrian (who is remembered today chiefly for his wall, his love of Antinous, and his poetical farewell to his soul, 'Animula vagula blandula...'). His death drawing near, Hadrian sets out his memoir in the form of a long letter to his grandson Marcus Aurelius (of the ever popular Meditations), who will in due course succeed him. Yourcenar's endeavour was inspired by a sentence she came across in Flaubert's correspondence: 'Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.' It's a questionable statement (Christ had been around a good while by the time of Marcus Aurelius, and the old gods had gone nowhere), but the idea is strong, even intoxicating, and it spurred the young Yourcenar to write the first of many versions of her Hadrian. These she mostly destroyed, retaining just one eloquent sentence: 'I begin to discern the profile of my death'. With this sentence, she wrote later, 'I had at last found a point from which to view the book'. 
   The dying Hadrian is an entirely convincing figure, and the world he inhabits, both outer and inner, has the ring of authenticity. Yourcenar devoted years to research, but her approach is not that of the encyclopaedically inclined Flaubert, who liked to throw in everything including the kitchen sink – has anyone ever read Salammbo a second time for pleasure? She had created the whole of Hadrian's world in her head, and all she had to do was place him in it (in this she resembled Penelope Fitzgerald in her later novels). Because the book is, of course, written in the first person, no explanation, no wider view, is needed. You are in Hadrian's world, his empire, his philosophy, his career, his struggles and triumphs, loves and losses, enemies and lovers, memories and (few) regrets, as he surveys his past, assesses his present and prepares, with Stoic calm, to leave the world. Written in an elegant and balanced (indeed classical) prose, Memoirs of Hadrian is an astonishing feat of historical imagination on Yourcenar's part. When it came out, it received rave reviews, one of which – by Raymond Mortimer in the Sunday Times – is quoted on the back of my (Penguin) edition: 'As a picture of the whole various Empire with its manners and beliefs, no less than as an imaginary portrait of its ruler, this can hardly be too vehemently recommended.' They don't write them like that any more, but he's right, and I am so glad I finally got round to it.

Poet to Poet

 It's World Poetry Day today (though it should be World Music Day, as it's Bach's birthday).
To mark the occasion I've assembled a little collection of poems in which one poet addresses or encounters or hails another – thereby doubling the poetical headcount. Or even tripling it, as here, where Keats encounters Homer by way of Chapman's wonderfully vigorous translation, and is moved to write one of the finest sonnets in the language –

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Auden's great elegy 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' is also one of the finest things of its kind. It's too long to quote in its entirety here, but the beautiful closing section will suffice –

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
          William Yeats is laid to rest.
          Let the Irish vessel lie
          Emptied of its poetry.

          In the nightmare of the dark
          All the dogs of Europe bark,
          And the living nations wait,
          Each sequestered in its hate;

          Intellectual disgrace
          Stares from every human face,
          And the seas of pity lie
          Locked and frozen in each eye.

          Follow, poet, follow right
          To the bottom of the night,
          With your unconstraining voice
          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse
          Make a vineyard of the curse,
          Sing of human unsuccess
          In a rapture of distress;

          In the deserts of the heart
          Let the healing fountain start,
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.  

The great, nurturing friendship of Robert Frost and Edward Thomas made a poet of the latter and a better poet of the former. Here Frost remembers his friend... 

I slumbered with your poems on my breast
Spread open as I dropped them half read through
Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb
To see, if, in a dream they brought of you,
I might not have the chance I missed in life
Through some delay, and call you to your face
First soldier, and then poet, and then both,
Who died a soldier-poet of your race.
I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain
Unsaid between us, brother, and this remained—
And one thing more that was not then to say:
The Victory for what it lost and gained.
You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day
The war seemed over more for you than me,
But now for me than you—the other way.
How over, though, for even me who knew
The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine,
If I was not to speak of it to you
And see you pleased once more with words of mine?

R.S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens are two poets you wouldn't naturally yoke together, but the yankophobic Welshman was a huge admirer of this particular American. Here is his heartfelt 'Homage to Wallace Stevens' –

I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens.
Insured against
everything but the muse,
what has the word-wizard
to say? His adjectives
are the wand he waves
so language gets up
and dances under
a fastidious moon.
We walk a void world,
he implies, for which,
in the absence of the imagination,
there is no hope. Verbal bank-clerk,
acrobat walking a rhythmic tight-rope,
trapeze artist of the language,
his was a kind of double-entry
poetics. He kept two columns
of thought going, balancing meaning
against his finances. His poetry
was his church and in it
curious marriages were conducted.
He burned his metaphors like incense,
so his syntax was as high
as his religion.
Blessings, Stevens,
I stand with my back to grammar
at an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.

Elegies and poetic epitaphs can be pompous, overblown affairs – Shelley's 'Adonais', anyone? But there's no danger of that when Gavin Ewart's on the job. Here is his preposterously rhymed 'In Memoriam Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984)' –

So the last date slides into the bracket
that will appear in all future anthologies –
and in quiet Cornwall and in London's ghastly racket
we are now Betjemanless.
Your verse was very fetching
and, as Byron might have written,
there are many poetic personalities around
that would fetch a man less!

Some of your admirers were verging on the stupid,
you were envied  by poets (more highbrow, more inventive?);
at twenty you had the bow-shaped lips of a Cupid
(a scuffle with Auden too).
But long before your Oxford
and the visiting of churches
you went topographical – on the Underground
(Metroland and Morden too)!

The Dragon School – but Marlborough a real dragon,
with real bullying, followed the bear of childhood,
a kind of gentlemanly cross to crucify a fag on.
We don't repent at leisure,
you were good, and very British.
Serious, considered 'funny',
in your best poems, strong but sad, we found
a most terrific pleasure.

Which naturally brings us to Philip Larkin's tribute to Ewart, one of the last poems he completed – 

Good for You, Gavin

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
   (That is, when you are young),
The heart-shaped hypnotics the press is polite about
   Rise from an unriven tongue.

Later on, attic'd with the all-too-familiar
   Tea chests of truth-sodden grief,
The pages you scrap sound like school songs, or sillier,
   Banal beyond belief.

So good for you, Gavin, for having stayed sprightly
   While keeping your eye on the ball;
Your riotous road-show's like Glenlivet nightly,
   A warming to us all.

And finally, here's Richard Wilbur elegantly wishing a happy birthday to poet and Blake enthusiast Kathleen Raine – 

For K.R. On Her Sixtieth Birthday

Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark,
Who round with grace this dusky arc
Of the grand tour which souls must take.

You who have sounded William Blake,
And the still pool, to Plato's mark,
Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark.

Yet, for your friends' benighted sake,
Detain your upward-flying spark;
Get us that wish, though like the lark
You whet your wings till dawn shall break:
Blow out the candles of your cake.