Wilfred Owen - Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918



Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

**********

Supplemental Notes
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw3.html

Dulce et decorum est Pro Patria mori is a line from the Roman lyrical  poet Horace's Odes (III.2.13) roughly translated into English as "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." In a letter written by Owen  to his mother he transcribes it as: "The famous Latin tag means of course It is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Sweet! and decorous!"

Written in 1917 and first published in 1920, the above poem can be found in: Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Early drafts of the poem contain the dedications 'To Jessie Pope etc' and 'To a certain Poetess'. Before World War I, Pope was the author children's books and light verse, her war related verse was collected in 1915 in Jessie Pope's War Poems and More War Poems.


Further Context

The poem from which the line comes exhorts Roman citizens to develop martial prowess such that the enemies of Rome, in particular the Parthians, will be too terrified to resist them. In John Conington's translation, the relevant passage reads:


To suffer hardness with good cheer,
In sternest school of warfare bred,
Our youth should learn; let steed and spear
Make him one day the Parthian's dread;
Cold skies, keen perils, brace his life.
Methinks I see from rampired town
Some battling tyrant's matron wife,
Some maiden, look in terror down,—
“Ah, my dear lord, untrain'd in war!
O tempt not the infuriate mood
Of that fell lion I see! from far
He plunges through a tide of blood!

“What joy, for fatherland to die!
Death's darts e'en flying feet o'ertake,
Nor spare a recreant chivalry,
A back that cowers, or loins that quake.*

*The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace, John Conington. trans. London. George Bell and Sons. 1882


Usage

The line has been commonplace in modern times throughout Europe. It was quoted by Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, immediately before his beheading on Tower Hill, London, in 1747. It was much quoted in reference to the British Empire in the 19th century, particularly during the Boer War. Wilfred Owen used it satirically in his poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" which was written during World War I. (Owen was killed in action one week before the war ended in 1918.) In WW2 Glyndwr Michael was buried under the gravestone bearing his post mortem alias: William Martin Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori.

A humorous elaboration of the original line was used as a toast in the 19th century: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, sed dulcius pro patria vivere, et dulcissimum pro patria bibere. Ergo, bibamus pro salute patriae" In English this is rendered as: "It is sweet and right to die for the homeland, but it is sweeter to live for the homeland, and the sweetest to drink for it. Therefore, let us drink to the health of the homeland."  (Ludwig Berg, "Pro fide et patria!", Böhlau, 1998, p.144).

Sappho - Ode out of Longinus

Sappho, c.610 - c.580 BC

Translated by William Bowles (17th century)

Ode out of Longinus

I.

THE Gods are not more blest than he,
Who fixing his glad Eyes on thee,
With thy bright Rays his Senses chears,
And drinks with ever thirsty ears.
The charming Musick of thy Tongue,
Does ever hear, and ever long;
That sees with more than humane Grace,
Sweet smiles adorn thy Angel Face.

II.

But when with kinder beams you shine,
And so appear much more divine,
My feeble sense and dazl'd sight,
No more support the glorious light,
And the fierce Torrent of Delight.
Oh! then I feel my Life decay,
My ravish'd Soul then flies away,
Then Faintness does my Limbs surprize,
And Darkness swims before my Eyes.

III.

Then my Tongue fails, and from my Brow
The liquid drops in silence flow,
Then wand'ring Fires run through my Blood,
And Cold binds up the stupid Flood,
All pale, and breathless then I lye,
I sigh, I tremble, and I dye.

 **********

Supplemental Notes
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw28.html

The above translation can be found, for example, in:

Tate, Nahum, ed. Poems By Several Hands, and on Several Occasions London: for J. Hindmarsh, 1685.

Poole, Adrian, and Jeremy Maul, eds. The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

The anthologist, Nahum Tate, was Poet Laureate of England from 1692 until 1715.

William Blake - The Tyger & The Lamb

The Tyger

Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand did seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake, 1757-1827



The Lamb

Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is callèd by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are callèd by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!

William Blake, 1757-1827

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence

 

 

Blake's frontispiece for
Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

"Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a time and a state of protected "innocence," but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience," a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes.

The volume's "Contrary States" are sometimes signaled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow; in Innocence, The Lamb, in Experience, The Fly and The Tyger.


Songs of Innocence was originally a complete work first printed in 1789. It is a conceptual collection of 19 poems, engraved with artwork.

The poems are each listed below:

Introduction

The Shepherd

The Echoing Green

The Lamb

The Little Black Boy

The Blossom

The Chimney Sweeper

The Little Girl lost

The Little Girl found

The Little Boy lost

The Little Boy found

Laughing Song

A Cradle Song

The Divine Image

Holy Thursday

Night

Spring

Nurse's Song

Infant Joy

A Dream

On Another's Sorrow

Blake's title plate (No.29) for Songs of Experience

Songs of Experience is a 1794 poetry collection of 26 poems forming the second part of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Some of the poems, such as The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found were moved by Blake to Songs of Innocence, and were frequently moved between the two books.

In this collection of poems, Blake contrasts Songs of Innocence, in which he shows how the human spirit blossoms when allowed its own free movement with Songs of Experience, in which he shows how the human spirit withers after it has been suppressed and forced to conform to rules, and doctrines. In fact, Blake was an English Dissenter and actively opposed the doctrines of the Anglican Church, which tells its members to suppress their feelings. Blake showed how he believed this was wrong through his poems in Songs of Experience.

The most notable of the poems in Songs of Experience are: "The Tyger", "The Sick Rose", "Ah, Sunflower," "A Poison Tree" and "London". Although these poems today are enjoyed and appreciated, in Blake's time, they were not appreciated at all.

Blake lived this whole life in poverty and in heavy debt. Songs of Experience only sold 20 copies before his death in 1827. It is now used in the school GCSE and A-level curriculum.

Introduction (at wikisource)

Earth's Answer

The Clod and the Pebble

Holy Thursday

The Little Girl Lost

The Little Girl Found

The Chimney Sweeper

Nurse's Song

The Sick Rose

The Fly (at wikisource)

The Angel

The Tyger

My Pretty Rose Tree

Ah! Sun-Flower (at wikisource)

The Lily

The Garden of Love

The Little Vagabond

London

The Human Abstract (at wikisource)

Infant Sorrow

A Poison Tree

A Little Boy Lost (at wikisource)

A Little Girl Lost

To Tirzah

The Schoolboy (at wikisource)

The Voice of the Ancient Bard (at wikisource)

Musical Settings

 

Poems from both books have been set to music by many composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sven-David Sandström, and Benjamin Britten. Individual poems have also been set by, among others, John Tavener, Jah Wobble, Tangerine Dream. A modified version of the poem "The Little Black Boy" was set to music in the song "My Mother Bore Me" from Maury Yeston's musical Phantom. Folk musician Greg Brown recorded sixteen of the poems on his 1987 album Songs of Innocence and of Experience[1] and by Finn Coren in his Blake Project.

Poet Allen Ginsberg believed the poems were originally intended to be sung, and that through study of the rhyme and meter of the works, a Blakean performance could be approximately replicated. In 1969, he conceived, arranged, directed, sang on, and played piano and harmonium for an album of songs entitled Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg (1970).^[2]

The composer William Bolcom completed a setting of the entire collection of poems in 1984. In 2005, a recording of Bolcom's work by Leonard Slatkin, the Michigan State Childrens Choir, and the University of Michigan on the Naxos label won 3 Grammy Awards: Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Best Classical Album.^[3]

 

 

References

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ginsberg-Blake.php
3. ^ http://www.music.umich.edu/about/BolcomGrammy.pdf

William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand:
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939



Biographical References

Biography -  by Poemhunter

Biography - by Wikipedia



Supplemental Notes
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first World War. The above version of the poem is as it was published in the edition of Michael Robartes and the Dancer dated 1920 (there are numerous other versions of the poem). The preface and notes in the book contain some philosophy attributed to Robartes.

 

This printing of the poem has a page break between lines 17 and 18 making the stanza division unclear. Following the two most similar drafts given in the Parkinson and Brannen edited edition of the manuscripts, I have put a stanza break there. (Interestingly, both of those drafts have thirty centuries instead of twenty.) The earlier drafts also have references to the French and Irish Revolutions as well as to Germany and Russia.

 

Several of the lines in the version above differ from those found in subsequent versions. In listing it as one of the hundred most anthologized poems in the English language, the text given by Harmon (1998) has changes including: line 13 (": somewhere in sands of the desert"), line 17 ("Reel" instead of "Wind"), and no break between the second and third stanza.
 

• Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Chruchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Chuala Press, 1920. (as found in the photo-lithography edition printed Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970)
• Yeats, William Butler. "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
• Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

* * * * * * * * * *

Summary by SparkNotes
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/yeats/section5.rhtml

The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”

 

Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

 

Form

 

“The Second Coming” is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”

 

Commentary

 

Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the question of what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.

 

Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development).

 

“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:

The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...

In other words, the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is now coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre. The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.

 

This seems quite silly as philosophy or prophecy (particularly in light of the fact that it has not come true as yet). But as poetry, and understood more broadly than as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of A Vision, “The Second Coming” is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. The poem may not have the thematic relevance of Yeats’s best work, and may not be a poem with which many people can personally identify; but the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.


 

Lord Byron - She Walks in Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!


Lord Byron (George Gordon), 1788–1824

William Shakespeare - Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

 
Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
 
 
William Shakespeare, 1564–1616
ref: The Oxford Shakespeare: Poems. 1914.



 

TS Eliot - Burnt Norton, No. 1 of "Four Quartets"

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

Part I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
 

* * * * * * * * * * *

 

to read the complete poem see the sidebar below "Poets and Poetry" for the link to
Eliot's Four Qaurtets or go here: http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/index.html

to read J.B. Burnett's review of Four Quartets see this blog's review section - http://reslater.blogspot.com/2011/04/review-ts-eliot-four-quartets.html

to read the biography of TS Eliot see this blog's biography section - http://reslater.blogspot.com/2011/04/biography-ts-eliot.html




 

Charles Dickens - Squire Norton's Song

HE child and the old man sat alone
In the quiet, peaceful shade
Of the old green boughs, that had richly grown
In the deep, thick forest glade.
It was a soft and pleasant sound,
That rustling of the oak;
And the gentle breeze played lightly round
As thus the fair boy spoke: -

"Dear father, what can honor be,
Of which I hear men rave?
Field, cell and cloister, land and sea,
The tempest and the grave: -
It lives in all, 'tis sought in each,
'Tis never heard or seen:
Now tell me, father, I beseech,
What can this honor mean?"

"It is a name - a name, my child  -
It lived in other days,
When men were rude, their passions wild,
Their sport, thick battle-frays.
When, in armor bright, the warrior bold
Knelt to his lady's eyes:
Beneath the abbey pavement old
That warrior's dust now lies.

"The iron hearts of that old day
Have mouldered in the grave;
And chivalry has passed away,
With knights so true and brave;
The honor, which to them was life,
Throbs in no bosom now;
It only gilds the gambler's strife,
Or decks the worthless vow."


by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens.
Ed. F>G> Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.

Charles Dickens - The Song of the Wreck

HE wind blew high, the waters raved,
A ship drove on the land,
A hundred human creatures saved
Kneel'd down upon the sand.
Threescore were drown'd, threescore were thrown
Upon the black rocks wild,
And thus among them, left alone,
They found one helpless child.

A seaman rough, to shipwreck bred,
Stood out from all the rest,
And gently laid the lonely head
Upon his honest breast.
And travelling o'er the desert wide
It was a solemn joy,
To see them, ever side by side,
The sailor and the boy.

In famine, sickness, hunger, thirst,
The two were still but one,
Until the strong man droop'd the first
And felt his labors done.
Then to a trusty friend he spake,
"Across the desert wide,
Oh, take this poor boy for my sake!"
And kiss'd the child and died.

Toiling along in weary plight
Through heavy jungle, mire,
These two came later every night
To warm them at the fire.
Until the captain said one day
"O seaman, good and kind,
To save thyself now come away,
And leave the boy behind!"

The child was slumbering near the blaze:
"O captain, let him rest
Until it sinks, when God's own ways
Shall teach us what is best!"
They watch'd the whiten'd, ashy heap,
They touch'd the child in vain;
They did not leave him there asleep,
He never woke again.


by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens.
Ed. F>G> Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.

Charles Dickens - Lucky's Song

OW beautiful at eventide
To see the twilight shadows pale,
Steal o'er the landscape, far and wide,
O'er stream and meadow, mound and dale!

How soft is Nature's calm repose
When ev'ning skies their cool dews weep:
The gentlest wind more gently blows,
As if to soothe her in her sleep!

The gay morn breaks,
Mists roll away,
All Nature awakes
To glorious day.
In my breast alone
Dark shadows remain;
The peace it has known
It can never regain.


by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens.
Ed. F>G> Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.

Charles Dickens - The Ivy Green



Van Gogh's Undergrowth with Ivy, 1889
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam



Van Gogh's Tree Trunks with Ivy, 1889
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

The Ivy Green

Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,
          That creepeth o'er ruins old!
Of right choice food are his meals, I ween,
          In his cell so lone and cold
The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,
          To pleasure his dainty whim:
And the mouldering dust that years have made
          Is a merry meal for him.
                    Creeping where no life is seen,
                    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,
          And a staunch old heart has he.
How closely he twineth, how tight he clings
          To his friend the huge Oak Tree
And slyly he traileth along the ground,
          And his leaves he gently waves,
As he joyously hugs and crawleth round
          The rich mould of dead men's graves.
                     Creeping where no life is seen,
                     A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Whole ages have fled and their works decayed,
          And nations have scattered been;
But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,
          From its hale and hearty green.
The brave old plant, in its lonely days,
          Shall fatten upon the past:
For the stateliest building man can raise
          Is the Ivy's food at last.
                    Creeping on where time has been,
                    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.


by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens.
Ed. F.G. Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.

Biography - Poetry Foundation & Wikipedia



Ivy vines girdling tree

Analysis
from Immortal Muse, comments by Zireaux

... Now, 200 years and 7 days after the birth of Charles Dickens, we look at the “rare old plant” which “slily” (snake-like) twists and twines around the greenwood tree: Ivy.

There’s nothing “rare” about ivy. Such words — including the two “daintys” in the first stanza — have less to do with describing ivy than with befriending it. The poem is loaded with these chummy terms of endearment; not just “dainty” (as in “excellent”), but stout (as in “strong”), staunch, rare, brave, hearty, hale and old. These are the words that sailors and ruffians sing in pubs to their fellow drunks — which is ironic, because “The Ivy Green” is recited in The Pickwick Papers not by a bunch of burly rogues, but by an old clergyman.

 

Composed with a healthy dose of hyberbaton (“ivy green,” “scattered been,” “fast he stealeth”), our “Ivy Green” — like Shakespeare’s “Greenwood Tree” — works best as music. Just read aloud the seventh line of all three stanzas. So rhythmically identical are they, so perfect for a pop-song, we could have Miley Cyrus sing them for us (“So I hopped off the plane at LAX” becomes “And the mouldering dust that years have made.”).

 

Yet here’s the wonder of it all: Sound and song, the visual arts and meaning — they’re constantly crossing over, changing sides. Sound creates sight, and sight creates sound, and meaning can’t live without this sort of constant synesthesia.

 

Let me explain what I mean: Vincent Van Gogh, the best of what can be called the “poet-painters” (Longfellow, Blake, Cummings, O’Hara, Tagore and so on) also befriended ivy. Sometimes ivy was a creative force: “Like the ivy on the walls, so my pen must cover this paper.” (I quote from van Gogh’s letters). Or a source of comfort, as when he described a new pair of black gloves as “good like ivy, good like going to church.” But equally, he saw ivy as a kind of killer, a strangler, an agent of death: “Illnesses…are perhaps to man what ivy is to the oak.”

 

He admired “The Ivy Green,” and even quoted two lines of the poem — from memory — to his brother Theo. (See one of the actual letters here). I say from memory because both lines are, in fact, misquoted, van Gogh preferring to follow meter rather than a direct transcription. “A strange [instead of "rare"] old plant is the ivy green;” and, most tellingly, from line 11, “which stealeth on though he wear no wings.”

 

Vincent recalls both lines in the same meter (iamb, iamb, anapest, iamb), whereas Charles’s line 11 is actually the most metrically unusual (five-footed, trochaic) of all the lines in the poem.

 

The point is this: The idea that ivy is like a snake (despite all those leaves, no winged angel, it!) — dangerous, untrustworthy, cold-blooded, slyly entwining an innocent oak — this idea no doubt resonated with van Gogh. But it’s the song that made it memorable to him; the song that produced the imprint in his mind.

 

That is to say, the song, the music — as much as text and meaning — creates the impression. If you look at van Gogh’s paintings of ivy, you can hear the leaves rustling in the wind. And if you recite Dickens’s “Ivy Green,” you glimpse the essence of that “rare old plant,” its duplicity, its ravenous hunger, its creepiness if you will, in a way that metaphor alone could never create. We sing out of dread, not love. Trying to appease the unappeasable, we make song.

 

“Ivy loves the trunk of the old oak tree,” writes van Gogh, “and so cancer, that mysterious plant, attaches itself so often to people whose lives were nothing but ardent love and devotion. So, however terrible the mystery of these pains may be, the horror of them is sacred, and in them there might indeed be a gentle, heartbreaking thing.”

 

Dickens, too, saw this sacred horror. It inhabits the undergrowth of everything he wrote, attaching itself to so many “heartbreaking things” in his books. Which is why “The Ivy Green” — a kind of snake-charmer’s hymn to death — is the perfect song for a clergyman after all.

 

 

 



Charles Dickens - The Hymn of the Wiltshire Laborers

GOD! who by Thy prophet's hand
Didst smite the rocky brake,
Whence water came, at Thy command,
Thy people's thirst to slake;
Strike, now, upon this granite wall,
Stern, obdurate, and high;
And let some drops of pity fall
For us who starve and die!

The God who took a little child
And set him in the midst,
And promised him His mercy mild,
As, by Thy Son, Thou didst:
Look down upon our children dear,
So gaunt, so cold, so spare,
And let their images appear
Where lords and gentry are!

O God! teach them to feel how we,
When our poor infants droop,
Are weakened in our trust in Thee,
And how our spirits stoop;
For, in Thy rest, so bright and fair,
All tears and sorrows sleep:
And their young looks, so full of care,
Would make Thine angels weep!

The God who with His finger drew
The judgment coming on,
Write, for these men, what must ensue,
Ere many years be gone!
O God! whose bow is in the sky,
Let them not brave and dare,
Until they look (too late) on high,
And see an Arrow there!

O God, remind them! In the bread
They break upon the knee,
These sacred words may yet be read,
"In memory of Me!"
O God! remind them of His sweet
Compassion for the poor,
And how He gave them Bread to eat,
And went from door to door!


by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"A Child's Hymn" is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens.
Ed. F.G. Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.

Charles Dickens - George Edmunds' Song

UTUMN leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around he here;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
How like the hopes of childhood's day,
Thick clust'ring on the bough!
How like those hopes in their decay -
How faded are they now!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!

Wither'd leaves, wither'd leaves, that fly before the gale:
Withered leaves, withered leaves, ye tell a mournful tale,
Of love once true, and friends once kind,
And happy moments fled:
Dispersed by every breath of wind,
Forgotten, changed, or dead!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!


by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from  The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens.
Ed. F>G> Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.

Charles Dickens - Gabriel Grub's Song

RAVE lodgings for one, brave lodgings for one,
A few feet of cold earth, when life is done;
A stone at the head, a stone at the feet;
A rich, juicy meal for the worms to eat;
Rank grass overhead, and damp clay around,
Brave lodging for one, these, in holy ground!


by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"Gabriel Grub's Song" is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens.
Ed. F.G. Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.

Charles Dickens - A Child's Hymn

HEAR my prayer, O heavenly Father,
Ere I lay me down to sleep;
Bid Thy angels, pure and holy,
Round my bed their vigil keep.

My sins are heavy, but Thy mercy
Far outweighs them, every one;
Down before Thy cross I cast them,
Trusting in Thy help alone.

Keep me through this night of peril
Underneath its boundless shade;
Take me to Thy rest, I pray Thee,
When my pilgrimage is made.

None shall measure out Thy patience
By the span of human thought;
None shall bound the tender mercies
Which Thy Holy Son has bought.

Pardon all my past transgressions,
Give me strength for days to come;
Guide and guard me with Thy blessing
Till Thy angels bid me home.


by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"A Child's Hymn" is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens.
Ed. F.G. Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.