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.