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.