Poem of the Week 2014/46

The Soldier Address His Body

I shall be mad if you get smashed about,
we've had good times together, you and I;
although you groused a bit when luck was out,
say a girl turned us down, or we went dry.

But there's a world of things we haven't done,
countries not seen, where people do strange things;
eat fish alive, and mimic in the sun
the solemn gestures of their stone-grey kings.

I've heard of forests that are dim at noon
where snakes and creepers wrestle all day long;
where vivid beasts grow pale with the full moon,
gibber and cry, and wail a mad old song;

because at the full moon the Hippogriff
with crinkled ivory snout and agate feet,
with his green eye will glare them cold and stiff
for the coward Wyvern to come down and eat.

Vodka and kvass, and bitter mountain wines
we've never drunk; nor snatched the bursting grapes
to pelt slim girls among Sicilian vines,
who'd flicker through the leaves, faint frolic shapes.

Yes, there's a world of things we've never done,
but it's a sweat to knock them into rhyme,
let's have a drink, and give the cards a run
and leave dull verse to the dull peaceful time.

Edgell Rickword

For Veterans Day tomorrow: a poem by a World War I poet. Rickword was an officer in the British army.

The soldier begins by addressing his body as if it were a separate entity, a buddy of his rather than something inseparable from his existence: perhaps the stress of war requires this sort of psychological divorce between yourself and the body you are constantly forced to put into danger. He is fond of his body/buddy; they've been companions through good times and also bad – not bad compared to war, of course (war and the constant imminent threat of mutilation or death loom over and shape everything this man says: he's not just a young man speaking to his body, he is specifically a soldier). Just the usual young man's bad luck: rejection by a girl, no booze at hand, a run of bad luck.

Moving into the second stanza, he's still not directly mentioning war, but the thought clearly underlies the track his thoughts do take: the whole vast and thrilling world he has not yet seen. He begins with easily identifiable and, for him, exotic and far-away lands, where people do things like eat raw fish (this was written long before sushi or even ceviche became international staples). His imagination (again, under the unspoken constant pressure of possible mutilation or death, and the fear of battle, and whether you will behave as a man and soldier should in battle) grows wilder, more heated: he dreams now of jungles writhing with snakes and creepers (creepers are creeping or climbing vines, here indistinguishable from snakes), and maddened wild things under the pale haunted light of a full moon: and then he moves into straight-out fantasy, in which hippogriffs and wyverns are real.

A hippogriff is the offspring of a griffin and a mare. A griffin has the body, tail, and back legs of a lion and  the head, wings, and forelegs of an eagle, so a hippogriff is a winged horse with the head and upper body of an eagle. A wyvern is a reptilian creature, with a dragon's head and wings and only two feet, and a barbed tail. I've never before seen the the hippogriff and wyvern described as working in concert as they do here, or seen the wyvern described as cowardly. These things may have been invented by the poet. He's also given the basilisk's paralyzing stare to the hippogriff. There may be another element here, though. Both hippogriffs and wyverns are found not in real life but in medieval bestiaries and books of heraldry: perhaps the two represent the ruling classes (marked by heraldic beasts, based in the Middle Ages, whose existence our age no longer believes in), working together to kill the "vivid beasts": vivid has its root in the Latin vivere, to live. These heraldic animals conspire to feed themselves off the anonymous but intensely alive beasts. And the beasts know this, they know that it happens when the moon is full, so they "wail a mad old song" – mad, just what the soldier said he would be if his body got "smashed about."

After the striking and perhaps allegorical appearance of the two imaginary beasts, the soldier begins to turn his thoughts back (always with the consciousness of possible imminent loss, of being snuffed out in a flash, or so crippled that he'll wish he had been) to the booze and girls he had mentioned in the first paragraph: only now they're all vivid and strange and new, very different from his English life: eastern European drinks like vodka and kvass, and southern European drinks like "bitter mountain wines." The scene is lively and erotic, with bursting grapes and slim girls among the vines; it is also evanescent, and the girls are flickering and faint, vanishing figures. Even if he were sent to fight on the Russian or Italian fronts, he would not have the experience of vodka, kvass, or wine, or of playing with slim girls among the vines.

And so his thoughts cool down, and he becomes the matter-of-fact good fellow, drinking and playing at cards and putting aside the hard yet fancy work of poetry. And this is how many of us see soldiers. It's a class-based view – that they're good but unintellectual fellows, doing our dirty work for us. But the speaker here has just shown us what mad poetry, what vividness, lie hidden under the drab surface, what practically unmentionable fears, what longing for life. He leaves "dull verse to the dull peaceful time" – war can be a surge of adrenalin, a dangerously exciting and appealing constant surge in place of the dullness of daily peacetime life. While war (with its intensified sense of the precariousness and preciousness of life) hangs over him, he will try to live as much as he can, even if all he has are booze and cards, and even if he knows they are only a weak substitute for the enchanting endless world he may never come to know.

Since this year marks the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, there have been a growing number of anthologies devoted to the poems and fiction inspired by the war. I took this poem from The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, but Penguin appears to have issued another, different compilation under that title. The one I have is the second edition of an older anthology, edited and introduced by Jon Silkin.

Haiku 2014/313

loops of colored lights
glow along the dingy eaves
of a shuttered house

Haiku 2014/312

salvaged from today
in its only appearance
that one light gleaming

Haiku 2014/311

mesmerizing moon
so low on the horizon
so pure, so distant

Friday photo 2014/45

a pair of eyes, from the classical galleries, the Metropolitan Museum, New York

Haiku 2014/310

strolling down a street
feeling yourself pricked by love
passing like your day

Haiku 2014/309

remember rising
wind and grey clouds at your back
when it used to rain

Haiku 2014/308

like a thin curved cloud
haunting late afternoon's light
pale ghost of a moon

Haiku 2014/307

down dim corridors
striding as purposefully
as if we had one

Poem of the Week 2014/45

The Unquiet Grave

"The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.

"I'll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I'll sit and mourn all at her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day."

The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
"Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?"

" 'Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek."

"You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.

" 'Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that ere was seen
Is withered to a stalk.

"The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away."

Anonymous

I thought I'd continue the ghostly poems for another week. I was looking for something suitable for the Día de los Muertos and I thought of this poem, which is not directly about it but is not unsuitable, since it's about the continuing presence of the beloved dead, remembering their spirits, and dealing with the loss in life.

Like The Haunted Oak from two weeks back, this poem is in ballad form: it's a narrative, told in quatrains with a 4-3-4-3 beat and rhymes at the end of the second and fourth lines. Certain phrases get repeated, for emphasis and rhythm, such as "one kiss of your clay-cold lips," which we hear three times. And the vocabulary has some archaic touches: 'Tis, and ere (meaning earlier, before, so that the sense of "the finest flower that ere was seen" is "the finest flower that we saw in the time before this, back when we used to walk together in the garden" – though I wonder if the word is meant to be e'er, the contraction for ever, so that the sense is "the finest flower that ever was seen"?).

This seems like a poem Edward Gorey might have illustrated. It is written by the prolific Anonymous, but feels very Victorian to me, particularly the last two lines, with their sense that:

* you can create your own attitude, sort of an emotional and philosophical way of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps ("make yourself content"),

* the attitude it is wisest to try for is contentment (rather than, say, happiness; it's a reconciliation with life, a way of making the best of things), and

* a presumably benevolent Deity is watching over things and has a plan for you.

There are suitable atmospherics that give a late autumn/wintry feel: the wind, the rain, the cold grave. After the fairy-tale "year and a day" (a year was the length of time assigned to official deep mourning by the Victorians, so the speaker is showing that he will do more than society requires), the dead woman speaks. She has already moved into the kingdom of the dead, and responds to his passionate mourning with dispassionate wisdom: her kiss would mean death; death will come to him eventually, just as it did to the most beautiful flowers they saw on their walks together; he should move on as best he can until the inevitable happens to him. It's kind of a carpe diem poem, with the acknowledgement that the diem can be tough to get through sometimes.

My first assumption was that the speaker was a young man, given the lines "I'll do as much for my true-love / as any young man may," which I took to mean that he will do the utmost possible in mourning, compared to anyone else in his position. But it could possibly be read as "although I am no longer a young man, I will do just as much as any young (implying physically strong, headstrong, passionate) man." The language, she is slippery. I think my first assumption was probably correct, but I find it more poignant to think of this poem as about an old man with not much time left himself, yearning for one more kiss from his life-long and lost love.

I took this from Poems Dead and Undead, edited by Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust. It's a new addition to the excellent series of anthologies available from Everyman Library's Pocket Poets.