Dylan Thomas on poetry

I've been studying Dylan Thomas and his poetry for a paper I'm writing, about his play "Under Milk Wood." In my reading today I stumbled upon this quote which I love:

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, 'Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship.' But you're back again where you began.

You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.

- Dylan Thomas, "Notes on the Art of Poetry"

A thought

The real value of poetry lies
not in expressing a moment
but
in expressing the thing of which
the moment itself
is but an expression.

The Pilgrim's Song

My blessing fall on this fair world,
On mountain, valley, forest, ocean,
The clarion winds in ceaseless motion,
And heaven's blue banner high unfurled.

And bless the staff that hither bore me,
And alms that helped me on my way,
The boundless plain that lies before me
The glowing morn, the evening grey.

The very path by which I wander
Shows glorious, golden, bathed in light.
No blade of grass that glistens yonder
But seems a star in heaven's height.

O might I in my exultation
To all the world this joy impart,
Would I might clasp the whole creation,
Lovers or strangers, foes or brothers,
Would I might clasp them, the whole creation,
In fervent rapture to my heart.

- Alexey Tolstoy, with an unknown translator

Tchaikovsky composed a lovely setting for this poem, which I learned for voice lessons a couple of years ago. It's not a song that hangs around my mind a lot, but it came to me strongly today. YouTube has a beautiful recording of it in the original Russian. The best English version I can find is this one by Jerome Hines.

Have you not heard?

We're reading through the prophets right now in my Old Testament class. I didn't realize how many poetic treasures there there are hidden in these books. Take this dramatic part of the second chapter of Nahum, for instance. It's talking about the destruction that will finally come upon Nineveh, the proud capital of the Assyrian empire, after years of her tyranny over Israel. You might want to read it aloud.

Shields flash red in the sunlight!
     See the scarlet uniforms of the valiant troops!
Watch as their glittering chariots move into position,
     with a forest of spears waving above them.
The chariots race recklessly along the streets
     and rush wildly through the squares.
They flash like firelight
     and move as swiftly as lightning.
The king shouts to his officers;
     they stumble in their haste,
     rushing to the walls to set up their defenses.
The river gates have been torn open!
     The palace is about to collapse!

Or, on the other hand, look at Zephaniah 3:17, which may be my new favorite verse. Read it quietly to yourself and ponder its promise:

The Lord your God is with you,
     he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
     he will quiet you with his love,
     he will rejoice over you with singing.

I love the fourth line especially. It's such a beautiful thought, and it makes such lovely poetry. Such things there are buried in those minor prophets...

I have seen this light before--

It's not really autumn yet, but there are hints of it all over. The wind is coming back after a long, quiet summer; we've had days of soft, steady rain without thunder or lightning; and in the evenings sometimes the light touches the leaves with gold. So, as my mind follows the mood of the season, things that I've read and enjoyed in the past have been coming to memory. Like the Chronicles of Narnia (which it's really been far too long since I read). Or like this poem, which Fa-So-La-La (over at the Beehive) wrote a couple of years ago. (Whence comes my post title, by the way.)

It was rather strange tonight. For once, midnight came around and I didn't still have homework to do. Last week I had my first exams--Humanities, Bible, and Speech--and I spent extra time doing review for those. None of them were as hard as I feared, but I'm glad to have them over with.

P.S. This week the Humanities class is starting to read Greek tragedies. First will be Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) and then we'll be doing Oedipus Rex and Antigone.

Haven't You Been Wondering How to Do This?

Just when it seemed like it couldn't be done, this came across my RSS feed:

How To Describe a Smell

God's World

(For Giselle.)

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

- Walter de la Mare

(John Duke did a lovely job putting this poem to music. I'm learning the song for my voice lessons.)

Kwikila

We've had a two-week stretch of brown drought here, and in the last few days this poem has been coming to my mind over and over again. Beatrice posted it at the Beehive a couple of years ago. Unfortunately she didn't know the author, and as I can't find anything more about it online it will have to stay anonymous. It's no less powerful for that.



Kwikila

Two still-green trees rub together
as if for reassurance
that the wind that grates
will carry too;
carry clouds, heavy clouds,
full clouds and black;
to fall and to dampen,
to drench and to soak —
deep into the pores of the earth.

The stream-beds are paths
for the lizard and the snake;
the reed-beds are brown
and blackened — (last week,
another fire went along there)
and the boulders which
rolled along
in the floods are quite still;
still with the stillness
of tragedy brewing,
still with the stillness
of death.

Men curse the wind
for its transitory promises—
dark clouds build up
(and our hopes with them too)
and are blown away;
or, worse still, come over,
intact and inticing,
to cynically spatter
verandahs and faces
before passing on . . .

A desk — and textbooks strewn;
lately my eyes have been wandering
more and more. But my window
still frames the same picture
of a bright, empty sky
(called gorgeous in Sydney, where
storm clouds abound),
and grass, grey with despair—
dust hangs in a curl
(thrown up by a wheel);
it seems, almost, to have
been hanging there
for months now.

O Lord, I murmur,
and murmur again-

Please send us rain.




[In the calm of the evening the clouds broke today, and after two weeks we at last had rain. - Tim]

How Does a Poem Mean?

How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi

I'm going to be reading this with Tim and J over the summer; we'll start Monday and plan to read 8-10-ish pages at a time, reading 6 days in the week, and hopefully finishing before Tim goes off to college and J starts school/co-op. Here is our schedule; if you have the book, we'd welcome some conversation as we read and post.

June 29-July 5
Introductory/C.h 1 How Does a Poem mean? pg 663-671
after Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Eve pg 671-677
Ch. 2 A Burble Through the Tulgey Woods pg 678-685
Folk Ballads pg 685-692
Edward pg 692-702
The Yarn of Nancy Bell pg 702-708

July 6-12
Ch. 3 By Rippling Pools pg 709-716
The Haystack in the Floods/The Listeners pg 716-721
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner pg 721-738
Mr. Flood's Party pg 738-744
The Eve of St. Agnes/Death of the Hired Man/Love Song of Alfred Prufrock pg 744-761
Ch. 4 The Words of Poetry pg 762-768

July 13-19
The Word in a Poem pg 768-774
The Phrase as a Form pg 774-781
Pier delle Vigne pg 781-790
6. The Language of good poetry is exact pg 790-795
Burning the Letters pg 796-802
Blue Girls pg 802-811

July 20-26
Poems for Study pg 811-818
Adonais pg 818-830
In Memory of WB Yeats pg 830-836
Dover Beach pg 836-845
Ch. 5 The Sympathetic Contract pg 846-852
When He Who Adores Thee pg 853-858

July 27-Aug 2
Lady, Was It Fair of Thee pg 858-863
Ch. 6 The Image and the Poem pg 864-872
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning pg 872-882
Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat pg 883-892
This is Just to Say pg 892-900
Poems for Study pg 900-910

Aug 3-9
How Do I Love Thee pg 910-919
Ch. 7 The Poem in Motion pg 920-926
With Rue My Heart is Laden pg 926-934
Poems for Guided Study pg 934-945
To Mistress Margaret Hussey pg 946-953
Poems for Individual Analysis pg 953-964

Aug 10-16
Tom O' Bedlam's Song pg 964-972
The 'Revenge' pg 972-984
Early Evening Quarrel pg 984-993
Ch. 8 The Poem in Countermotion pg 994-998
The Fury of Aerial Bombardment pg 998-1004
Before Disaster pg 1005-1013

Aug 17-18
My Luve pg 1013-1022

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. I'd like to make a poetry post a day this month, but whether I will or no remains to be seen (one a week seems more likely). But to begin, at least, I give you the opening to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

(For more, Harvard has an interlinear translation of the prologue, Librarius.com has the full text with side-by-side translations, and this information on pronouncing Middle English is helpful. As an aside, I think this opening must win the prize for the longest opening sentence in literature.)