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Poetry

Four Poems by Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan from 1927

Regular readers of this site know that I am slightly obsessed with bringing the work of Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan back to light (and back to print via the Recovered Books series at Boiler House Press). Though I thought I had exhausted the resources of the Internet and numerous archives in search of information about Trevelyan, I recently stumbled across four poems that were published in Nineteenth Century and Beyond in 1927 following her graduation from Oxford and her winning the Newdigate Prize for her poem “Julia, Daughter of Claudius.” Not only are these the only works by Trevelyan published between her Newdigate poem and her first novel Appius and Virginia (1932), but the poems are credited to G. Eileen Trevelyan, suggesting this was how she preferred to be known — at least in print.

In the interest of making Trevelyan’s work more accessible, I reprint here the four poems. The poems appeared in the September 1927 issue of Nineteenth Century and Beyond and were prefaced by the following note from the editors: “Miss G. Eileen Trevelyan of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, was the authoress of the Newdigate Prize poem of this year. It is the first award of this prize to a woman.”

Vale Atque Ave
I shall not hear the wailing and the chants,
I shall not see the smoke’s thin, acrid spire,
Nor hear the long, low throbbing of the drums,
Nor cast one blossom on your funeral pyre.

My feet will not read out the ancient dust
That stirs about Benares’ mystic shrine,
Nor, when your ashes flutter to their rest,
May there attend them any prayer of mine:

Yet shall I hail you in the setting sun,
In every changing glory of the air,
And find you ever in each blade and bloom
That grows on earth. Beauty is everywhere.

  
The Prisoner
“Do your chains clash loud on floor and wall,
Do you gnaw the bars of some dark den
Deep in the earth, where reptiles crawl,
Where day is harsh with frenzied brawl
And night with the shrieks of men?”

“My cell is clean and white and bar,
It echoes to no warder’s tread;
The hushed foot-falls of memory
Die slowly on the stagnant air,
And a sigh not born of misery,
A long-drawn, passionless despair,
The breath of the living dead.”

  
The Jewel
They brought the radiance from the violet wings
Of exquisite moments; myriad-plumaged hours
Of light and green-blue evening, starred with thought;
Dove-grey silences and emerald showers
Of song; and burned ecstacies of gold,
Crimson, amethyst and jade to mould
A jewel of limpid fire.

The brought the brazier
Of molten dreams; entwined curved filigrees,
Tortuous soul-threads, anguish-bright, drawn fine
By poignant fingers. Intricately now
Each facet blazed with subtle artistries
Of pain, a glory pendant in Life’s brow,
A flaming lamp in His eternal shrine.

  
Portrait
Broad white cliffs that face the sea,
Feathered spray and glistening loam:
Broad white brow that bends to me,
Bright as the foam.

Elfin smile that, dimpling, plays
At hide and seek with her lips and eyes:
Thistle-down the light wind sprays
Among hovering butterflies,

While far below where sea-birds sweep,
Where the blue sea takes the sky to mate,
The surge is hushed and the smooth sands sleep
And the still depths wait.

Ian McMillan Recommends Five Books by Neglected Poets

L to R: Pete Morgan; Philip Callow; Haorld Massingham; Anne Cluysenaar; Agneta Falk.
L to R: Pete Morgan; Philip Callow; Harold Massingham; Anne Cluysenaar; Agneta Falk.

This is a guest post by Ian McMillan

Let’s face it, most poets are neglected (or they think they are) and, oddly, even when poets published by small independent presses are out of print, they’re still somehow in print because the publisher has got loads of copies of unsold books under the bed and in the wardrobe in the spare room.

Here, though, are five poets who seem to be out of print; two of them are so out of print that I almost lost their books. I found them under the bed, of course.

Cover of The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed

• Pete Morgan: The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed, Secker and Warburg (!973)

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Secker and Warburg had a fantastic poetry list, including poets like James Fenton, Jon Hollander and writers known in other fields like Erica Jong. For me, Pete Morgan was one of the best; his poetry is lyrical, beautifully constructed and written for performance. Pete was one of the poets I took as a model for the freelance life when I was a young poet starting to make my way in the literary world: he did workshops and gigs and school visits and wrote copy for advertising firms; anything to keep the wolf from the door. The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed was his first collection and it brims with work that begs to be performed, like ‘My Enemies Have Sweet Voices,’ which Al Stewart later turned into a song. His other Secker books A Winter Visitor and The Spring Collection are well worth hunting out.

Cover of Cave Light by Philip Callow

• Philip Callow: Cave Light, Rivelin Press (1981)

Philip Callow was a marvellous novelist as well as a poet; his novels like The Hosanna Man and The Story of my Desire are well worth reading. The wonderful Bradford-based Rivelin Press, run by another neglected poet, David Tipton, published a number of Callow’s collections, including this one, full of beautifully observed poems of love and the natural world: ‘After you hear the rustle in a denim shirt/of a pocketful of apple leaves/Gathered by your pocket under eyes of apples.’

Cover of Frost-Gods by Harold Massingham

• Harold Massingham: Frost Gods, Macmillan (1971)

Massingham always suffered from being a couple of years below Ted Hughes at Mexborough Grammar School, so his work seems to be endlessly in Hughes’s long shadow. I’ve always enjoyed Massingham’s imagistic, Anglo-Saxon influenced, word-drunk work. In later life he made a living as a crossword complier under the name Mass, and that makes sense to me because his poems can often feel like crossword clues, as in the poem ‘Cow’: ‘Tub-sided galleon-/But O, her walk, stalwart, a wonder of hundredweights/Borne by sure bone.’ Marvellous!

Cover of Double Helix by Anne Cluysenaary and Sybil Hewat

• Anne Cluysenaar: Double Helix, Carcanet Press (1982)

Anne Cluysenaar was born in Belgium in 1936 and I knew her when I was writer-in-residence at Sheffield Poly in the mid-1980’s; she taught English and Creative Writing and had an evangelical zeal for the power of poetry to change lives. Double Helix was published by Carcanet Press in 1982; it’s a remarkable example of hybrid writing, being a combination of Cluysenaar’s poem and her mother’s prose memoirs and letters; the writing bridges the generations and invites us to examine our own pasts. Tragically, Anne was killed by her son in 2014.

Cover of Here by Choice by Agneta Falk

• Agneta Falk: Here by Choice, Trigram Press (1980)

Agneta Falk is a Swedish poet who was born in 1946. She lived in the endlessly creative enclave of Hebden Bridge for many years until she moved in the late 1990’s to the equally creative enclave of San Francisco, where she’s still very active on the literary scene. Here By Choice is her first pamphlet and I’ve always enjoyed her striking and unsettling lines like ‘A car goes by/rocking the floor boards/the wood creaks/like petals of red roses/hitting the tarmac.’ Or, from her poem ‘Hanna’: ‘She knew nothing of fear or hope/laying her bare bones in the/arms of soft lichen.’

Ian McMillanIan McMillan is a poet and host of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His most recent book is Yes But What Is This Exactly?, published by the Poetry Business in 2020.

Marriage, Widowhood and After: Three Poems by Dorothy Livesay

Dorothy Livesay, around 1960
Dorothy Livesay, around 1960

Wedlock

Flesh binds us, makes us one
And yet in each alone
I hear the battle of the bone:
A thousand ancestors have won.

And we, so joined in flesh
Are prisoned yet
As soul alone must thresh
In body’s net;

And our two souls so left
Achieve no unity:
We are each one bereft and weeping inwardly.

Widow

No longer any man needs me
nor is the dark night of love
coupled

But the body is relentless, knows
its need
must satisfy itself without the seed
must shake in dreams, fly up the stairs
backwards.

In the open box in the attic
a head lies, set sideways.

This head for this body is severed.

The Unquiet Bed

The woman I am
is not what you see
I’m not just bones
and crockery

the woman I am
knew love and hate
hating the chains
that parents make

longing that love
might set men free
yet hold them fast
in loyalty

the woman I am
is not what you see
move over love
make room for me

Dorothy Livesay was attending a seminar in London in early 1959 when her husband Duncan died at their home in Vancouver, Canada. In her memoir, Journey with My Selves, she recalled how she learned of his death:

In the narrow hallway of the club was a rack for letters and a bulletin board. I barely glanced there when I noticed a thin blue envelope with my name on it. Tearing it open, I read, “Father passed away last night, February 12. Love, Peter.”

I stood in the hall, shaking. Instead of going upstairs to my room, I went outside again, stumbling along into the twilight street. The only words that would come to me were, “I’m free … I’m free …”

[After the funeral] … In one week’s time we sold the house on Grand Boulevard. I flew back, into the arms of London. There, at the end of 1959, I was heading for my fiftieth birthday. What lay ahead was a new life in Paris, with UNESCO. Then Lusaka.

I had had four hoods: childhood, girlhood, womanhood and motherhood. Now there were two more waiting: widowhood and selfhood.

“Wedlock” was written before Duncan’s death, “Widow” and “The Unquiet Bed” after.

Dorothy Livesay’s Collected Poems: the Two Seasons is available on the Open Library: Link.

New Years, 1948 (Boston: Washington and Dover Streets), from Hello, Darkness, by L. E. Sissman (1978)

Cover of

Three Stanzas from “New Years, 1948

TWO
‘“Well, happy birthday,” Sally Sayward says,
Endowing me invisibly with bays,
Each leaf to mark a year. “Now, go away,”
She tells me, twenty, but, near-man, I stay
To press my case with passive rhetoric
Where deeds are needed. Nonetheless, her quick
Rejection is retracted. By degrees,
I talk my way down to my bony knees
And kneel and squat and sit beside her, where
My drinkless hand can infiltrate her hair
And fathom her resistance. Soon her square
Mouth may traverse to meet my mouth, and then,
Our crossed stars nodding, we’ll be off again.

FOUR
I’m taking Sally Sayward out to lunch.
Inside the Union — say, this place has changed
Since I last ate here; look at all those wild
Magenta murals on the walls — all eyes
Lock onto us, the hunter and his prey
Brought back alive, if only for a day,
A date, a lunch, a showing-up of all
The bucks and stags stuffed in that musty hall.
We march abreast, my hand dressed on her arm.
My eyes right on her onionskin disdain,
Toward the serving line, where old colleens
Stand and deliver soup, slaw, salad greens,
Lamb patties, peas, beets, coffee, brick ice cream.
This round room has changed, too; it’s lavender.
Sashed with long draperies in jungle green.
Look — there’s a blood-red change booth with a brass
Wicket enclosing money and a man.
We step up to get nickels. The change man
Becomes my father. Recognition. Up
Goes the gold wicket, bang!, and out he shouts —
Face lit with flame, no doubt a trick of the
Sensational decor — “No, no, no, no!”
Dream ends. Escapement of small hours resumes.

FIVE
Doze, wake, and entertain those sawed-off dreams
That spring on you at morning, when all things
Distort and shiver; men on stilted legs
Mutate into short blobs, and blots explode
Into thin alphabets of wiry stars;
Simples turn double, petals form whole heads
Of leaves like cabbages, perspectives go
Back to beginnings like a Chirico,
And you fall down the fun-house chute of sleep,
And land, awake, in trouble, on the street
Of dreams, where every door turns you away
To face the undeclared but actual day.

Louis Edward Sissman was born in Detroit 91 years ago today. When he was 37, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he spent the next ten years anticipating death. After the first three years, he was well enough acquainted with it to title his first collection of poems Dying: An Introduction. In the title poem from that collection, he recalls walking out of the clinic after first receiving the news:

Outside, although November by the clock.
Has a thick smell of spring,
And everything —
The low clouds lit
Fluorescent green by city lights;
The molten, hissing stream
Of white car lights, cooling
To red and vanishing;
The leaves.
Still running from last summer, chattering
Across the pocked concrete;
The wind in trees;
The ones and twos.
The twos and threes
Of college girls.
Each shining in the dark.
Each carrying
A book or books.
Each laughing to her friend
At such a night in fall;
The two-and-twos
Of boys and girls who lean
Together in an A and softly walk
Slowly from lamp to lamp,
Alternatively lit
And nighted; Autumn Street,
Astonishingly named, a rivulet
Of asphalt twisting up and back
To some spring out of sight — and everything
Recalls one fall
Twenty-one years ago, when I,
A freshman, opening
A green door just across the river.
Found the source
Of spring in that warm night.
Surprised the force
That sent me on my way
And set me down
Today. Tonight. Through my
Invisible new veil
Of finity, I see
November’s world —
Low scud, slick street, three giggling girls —
As, oddly, not as sombre
As December,
But as green
As anything:
As spring.

Cover of Scattered ReturnsIn a scene in Mad Men, Don Draper is shown in his den reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency. If we’d seen the same scene shot ten years later, Draper would have been reading Dying: An Introduction. Sissman was a copywriter himself, though most of his time was spent in Boston rather than New York. But he is perhaps the ultimate bard of the Mad Men generation, who wrote of dinners at Luchow’s, beautiful young socialites, and men in Dacron-and-worsted suits who found themselves up late at night wondering, “Is that all it is?”:

Men past 40
Get up nights
And look out at
City lights.
Wondering where they
Made the wrong
Turn, and why life
Is so long.

And Draper would appreciate Sissman’s sense of humor, which is summed up by the poem he included in his second collection, Scattered Returns (1969): “Upon Finding Dying: An Introduction, by L. E. Sissman, Remaindered at 1s.”

Happy New Year, everyone.

Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman, edited by Peter Davison
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978

“The City Cosmic,” by Roy Ivan Johnson, from The Fourth Watch

The City Cosmic

This morning
The lure of the street
Entangled my feet
And I walked … and walked … and walked …

I turned into the narrowest streets, I breathed the smoke of the factories, I smelled the reek and rot of the tenements;
I passed by ancient spacious lawns and piles of masonry century-old, the pride of the city fathers;
I walked through parks and down the singing boulevards …
And I discovered what a cosmic thing a city is.

Dirt….
Congestion…
A heap of rubbish…

Blocks and stones and buildings;
White granitoid, smoked gray, like second-day collars of respectability;
Whistle-topped, grim-eyed factories;
The air, heavy with the aroma of coal-tar gas and the packing-house;
A network of wires and rails;
Bill-boards, the sign of the dollar.

Squares of artificial landscape called parks and gardens;
A sea of roofs and chimneys…
Houses … and houses … and houses …
Time’s driftwood packed together by the force of the tide!
And that is the city:
A huge mass of Material,
Looped and bound by the oily-black ribbon of the boulevards green-selvedged in the spring.

The people
Are not the city.
They infest the city, as rats and roaches the driftwood left high on the bank —
Or they build the city, as a beaver builds its dam, bit by bit.
Yet, the people and the city are very much alike.
They are like two mirrors, each reflecting the other,
For those who do not make the city are made by the city.

At dusk
The smoky-bright,
Soft-calling night
Led me again through streets … and streets … and streets…

I mingled with late-shopping crowds, I rubbed against the clay-crusted garments of laborers, I watched the rush for clinging-space on a Main Street car;

I heard the drone of the beggar in the doorway with his pencils and shoestrings, I met women in brilliant coats — with painted cheeks ghost-white, I caught the innocent laugh of whirling youth from a flashing car;

I noted the unblinking eyes of the hypnotized throng of cinema-worshippers pouring in and out past the shrieking posters flaming red and yellow;

I listened to the incessant colloquy of the city’s victims and creators rising like the shrill hum of a steel-cutting wheel;

I passed into the quieter and poorer streets and saw the ill-clad mothers of children, born and unborn, taking the early spring air of a front doorstep overlooking the pavement, and as I passed they looked at me with eyes unfearing and curious;

I glimpsed half-way down a dim deserted street a figure that slunk, thief-like, into the mouth of
an alley;

I walked upon the boulevard and saw through the windows of the rich the luxury of wealth;

I turned into the park — and there was love, twin-souled, ecstatic, gripping with twining fingers the edge of Passion;

And I sat upon a smooth-worn bench and gazed with new understanding at the evening star….
And I thought what a cosmic thing the population of a city is.

Souls….
Souls that harbor ignorance and are cramped in the cage their ignorance has built;
Helpless souls,
That sit on doorsteps and breathe the smell of refuse;
Dust-dwelling souls,
Whose wings have atrophied;
Striving, struggling, suffering souls,
Toiling in the net;
Strong, soaring souls,
That seek the sunlight in the open ;
Souls that murmur, and tired-eyed souls that are mute;
Souls of youth, wild-flowered, tossing their wind-tangled hair!
And that is the population of a city:

Souls … souls …
House-huddled souls …
Bound to the earth by soiled pink ropes of clay …
Bound by earth to earth …
Bound … bound …

From The Fourth Watch: A Book of Poems, by Roy Ivan Johnson
Boston: The Cornhill Company, 1920

Available on the Internet Archive: Link.

“Stepping out in these streets,” by Linards Tauns from Contemporary Latvian Poetry (1984)

Riga Street in the 1970s

Stepping out in these streets

Stepping out in these streets
Is like drifting away in the rivers’ sweep.

In a shop window, pots of paint on display,
But my glance strays past them to former days:
Tarred old roofs, and fences painted a long time ago
And I with paint-stained hands, and tar on my toes,
Roamed as I pleased
with blissful contentment and ease
In a world that was apple-green.
My uncle in the Salvation Army
Pounded his drums at every rally;
I smeared them all over with paint,
And when he set out to proclaim
the end of the world, he looked pained
Since the world and its mischiefs are ever reborn.
But I meant no harm —
In a world that was green
I was green and speckled and happy as happy can be,
All the colors blended and fused into light for me.

Stepping out in these streets
Is like drifting away in the rivers’ sweep.

From Contemporary Latvian poetry, edited by Inara Cedrins
, available on the Open Library (Link).

“Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret,” by Mary Leapor (1746)

Wine stain on book

Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret

Welcome, dear Wanderer, once more!
Thrice welcome to thy native Cell!
Within this peaceful humble Door
Let Thou and I contented dwell!

But say, O whither haft thou rang’d?
Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue?
Thy fair Complexion’s greatly chang’d:
Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.

Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where
Didst thou contract this sottish Dye?
You kept ill Company, I fear,
When distant from your Parent’s Eye.

Was it for This, O graceless Child!
Was it for This, you learn’d to spell?
Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d:
Go drown thyself in yonder Well.

I wonder how thy Time was spent:
No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring.
Hast thou not climb’d the Monument ?
Nor seen the Lions, nor the King ?

But now I’ll keep you here secure :
No more you view the smoky Sky :
The Court was never made (I’m sure)
For Idiots, like Thee and I.

From Poems Upon Several Occasions by the late Mrs. Leapor, of Brackley, in Northamptonshire, in two volumes printed by J. Roberts of Warwick Lane, London, 1751. Available in the Internet Library (Volume 1 and Volume 2).

The daughter of a gardener, Mary Leapor worked as a maid and was entirely self-taught. Yet she took to writing naturally and when she was dying of measles at the age of 24, asked her friend Bridget Freemantle, a rector’s daughter, to undertake a subscription to publish a collection of her poems and other writings with the aim of providing her aging father some money for his last years. It’s thanks to the success of Bridget’s enterprise that we can read Mary’s work today.

As Bridget writes in the introduction to the collection, Mary made no great claim for her poems:

She always call’d it being idle, and indulging her whimsical Humour, when she was employed in writing the humorous Parts of her Poems; and nothing could pique her more than Peoples imagining she took a great deal of Pains, or spent a great deal of Time, in such Composure; or that she set much Value upon them.

She told me, that most of them were wrote when cross Accidents happen’d to disturb her, purely to divert her Thoughts from dwelling upon what was disagreeable; and that it generally had the intended Effect, by putting her in a good Humour.

The play that was returned with the claret stain was the manuscript of her magnum opus, a play set in ancient Rome titled The Unhappy Father. Bridget also informs us that “Mrs. Leapor’s whole Library consisted of about sixteen or seventeen single Volumes, among which were Part of Mr. Pope’s Works, Dryden’s Fables, some Volumes of Plays, etc..”

“After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs“, from Studies for an Actress and Other Poems, by Jean Garrigue (1973)

Mrs. Todd in the garden with the frontispiece from The Country of Pointed Firs
Mrs. Todd in the garden with the frontispiece from The Country of Pointed Firs

After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs

She was the one who lived up country
Half in the woods on a rain-washed road
With a well not near and a barn too far
And the fields ledgy and full of stones
That the crows cawed over and liked to walk in
And the hill and the hollow thick with fern
And in the swamp the cattails and rushes.

It was next to living in a town of birds
But she had hens and a row of bee hives.
When her mother died, and her girl, and Joel,
She told the bees so they’d not fly away
And hung black flags on the doors of the hives
Though they’d always go when they could to the woods
Or swarm on Sunday when she was at meeting.
For each who went she had told the bees.

Change and loss was what the brook cried
That she heard in the night — but she kept snug
With crow-wood for kindling, and the sun shone good
Through the tops of the pines, and her plants
Didn’t fail her, and the rosebush always bloomed
By the gnawed fencepost — what the horse had done
When they had a horse and a cow and a dog.

O there had been many, and now was there none?
Lost at sea, they said, her son gone to sea
Lost at sea they said. But if he wasn’t
And if he’d come back — so she’d stay till he came
Or whether or not.
Change and loss was what the brook cried
That she heard in the night when the clock whirred.

But when the fog from the southbank came through the firs
Till the air was like something made of cobwebs,
Thin as a cobweb, helpless as shadows
Swept here and there as the sea gulls mewed,
O then it seemed it was all one day
And no one gone and no one crossed over
Or when the rain gurgled in the eave spout
Or the wind walked on the roof like a boy.

Change and loss was what the brook cried
That she heard in the night when the clock whirred
Just before it clanged out its twelve heavy strokes
In the thick of the stillness, black as a crow,
But no scritching now with a scrawny great crackling,
And the rain not trickling, nothing to hark to,
Not even the tree at the north chamber window.

Till she routed it, horse and foot,
Thinking of walking to town through pastures
When the wood thrushes wept their notes
And the most was thick on the cobbled stones
With the heron wading among the hummocks
Of the pursy meadow that went down to the sea.

And she had knitting and folks to visit,
Preserves to make, and cream tartar biscuit,
She knew where was elocamp, coltsfoot, lobelia,
And she’d make a good mess up for all as could use it,
And go to the well and let down the bucket
And see the sky there and herself in it
As the wind threw itself about in the bushes and shouted
And another day fresh as a cedar started.

This was one of Jean Garrigue’s last poems, published posthumously in her last collection, Studies for an Actress and Other Poems. The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) was Sarah Orne Jewett’s most successful novel. Jewett tells the story of a woman novelist who travels to Maine to find peace and quiet and finish a book. She stays with and becomes fascinated with Mrs. Todd, the woman she boards with, a herbalist and the spiritual heart of her rural community.

In her study Jean Garrigue: A Poetics of Plenitude (1991), Lee Upton makes a good case that The Animal Hotel was, in part, inspired by The Country of the Pointed Firs and the character of Mrs. Todd. One can certainly see parallels between Garrigue’s bear and Mrs. Todd:

Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks’ experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.

And, like the bear, Mrs. Todd carries with her “a loneliness you noticed in her that you saw in none of the other animals”:

It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.

As Upton writes, in Garrigue’s poem, “The sense of community oscillates with isolation.” The same sense carries through The Animal Hotel and, indeed, seems to have through the later works of Garrigue’s other inspiration, Josephine Herbst.

“The Black Day,” from Collected Poems (1917-1952) by Archibald MacLeish

The raven
The Raven from scoundreltime.com

The Black Day

to the memory of Lawrence Duggan

God help that country where informers thrive
Where slander flounshes and lies contrive
To kill by whispers
Where men lie to live!

God help that country by informers fed
Where fear corrupts and where suspicion’s spread
By look and gesture, even to the dead

God help that country where the liar’s shame
Outshouts the decent silence to defame
The dead man’s honor and defile his name

God help that country, cankered deep by doubt,
Where honest men, by scandals turned about,
See honor murdered and will not speak out

God help that country
But for you– for you–
Pure heart, sweet spirit, humble, loyal, true,
Pretend, pretend, we know not what we do

MacLeish and Mark Van Doren later discussed this poem, written in immediate response to the suicide of Laurence Duggan, who had been accused (justly, it was later shown following the declassification of the Venona telegrams) of passing military secrets to the Soviets:

Van Doren: And your poem appeared in a newspaper. I believe it was the New York Herald Tribune. You were very indignant, obviously. As I read that poem that day, in that morning’s paper, I realized that you were simply blazing.

MacLeish: Right!

Van Doren: Now, don’t you think that’s a right thing to do? Don’t you think there were many people who understood you?

MacLeish: I think the wrath was right. And I think that wrath might perhaps provide a touchstone for a poem attempting to involve itself in a political situation in an effective way.

Later in their dialogue, published in The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren, they discuss the purpose of poetry:

Van Doren: I don’t think you should expect poetry to make things happen in the world if you mean by things, actions of individuals or actions of nations. I don’t know that poetry has ever had that effect. To the extent that it is real I shouldn’t think it ever did anything more than remind us of what the world already is. The world is whatever it is. Now, that is begging a great question, I know, but the world is what it is. And I think–I’d be subject to correction here–I think the function of poetry is to remind us of our own knowledge of what the world is. Because we know what it is already.

MacLeish: I think you and I agree on the fundamental position here. I’m sure we do from what you’ve written and what we’ve said to each other. I think both of us feel that the real effect of a great poem is to make one really know what he thought he knew. What a great poet does is to bring to knowledge what had become so well known that it ceased to be knowledge at all.

“The Black Day” can be found in a number of collections of MacLeish’s poems, including Collected Poems (1917-1952), available on the Internet Archive: Link.

by Archibald Macleish

John Quill, from Weeds of Witchery, by Thomas Haynes Bayly (1837)

John Quill, from Weeds of Witchery by Thomas Haynes Bayly

John Quill

John Quill was clerk to Robert Shark, a legal man was he,
As dull, obscure, and technical as legal man could be;
And, perch’d before his legal desk, Quill learnt the legal rules
That give high principles to all who sit upon high stools!
John Quill with skill could doubt distil where all before was clear,
One would suppose that he was born with a pen behind his ear!
Though merely clerk to Robert Shark, so great was his address,
That many really thought J. Q. as knowing as R. S.

John Quill, however small the job, huge drafts of deeds could draw,
A puzzle quite to common sense, according to the law;
With vulgar, vile tautology to indicate his skill,
He did “enlarge, prolong, extend, and add unto” the bill
And thus he did “possess, obtain, get, have, hold, and enjoy”
The confidence of Robert Shark, who called him worthy Boy.
Birds of a feather were the pair, the aim of both their breasts
To pluck all others, plume themselves, and feather their own nests.

But ’tis a theme too dark for jest; oh! let him who embarks
Upon the troubled waters of the Law—beware of Sharks;
And such my dread of legal Quills, I readily confess
That Quills of “fretful porcupine” would terrify me less.
When poor men seek a legal Friend, the truth the Fable tells,
The Lawyer eats the oyster up, the Client has the shells;
And could the shells be pounded to a palatable dinner,
The legal Friend would swallow that, and Clients might grow thinner.

From Weeds of Witchery, by Thomas Haynes Bayly
London: Ackerman and Co., 1837

Available on the Internet Archive: Link

This is one in a series of neglected poems taken from the Internet Archive.

“The Vote,” by Ralph Knevet from Another World Than This (1657)

an abandoned helmet

The Vote

The helmet now an hive for bees becomes,
And hilts of swords may serve for spiders’ looms;
   Sharp pikes may make
   Teeth for a rake;
And the keen blade, th’ arch enemy of life.
Shall be degraded to a pruning knife.
   The rustic spade
   Which first was made
For honest agriculture, shall retake
Its primitive employment, and forsake
   The rampires steep
   And trenches deep.
Tame conies1 in our brazen guns shall breed.
Or gentle doves their young ones there shall feed.
   In musket barrels
   Mice shall raise quarrels
For their quarters. The ventriloquious drum,
(Like lawyers in vacations) shall be dumb.
   Now all recruits.
   But those of fruits.
Shall be forgot; and th’ unarmed soldier
Shall only boast of what he did whilere.
   In chimneys’ ends
   Among his friends.

1 conies: rabbits

Ralph Knevet (160O-1671) was an follower of George Herbert who took orders during the English Civil War, which clearly forms the background of this poem. It appears in Another World Than This, which is something of a commonplace book compiled by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson from decades of their reading. In their introduction, they wrote,

The compilers of this anthology have tried not to cheat. They have, on the whole, adhered honourably to the underlinings they found they had already made in their own books on the shelves of their separate rooms. They had both been in the habit for many years of marking passages which particularly pleased them, and of scribbling an index for reference at the end of each book–as every true reader of books should train himself to do. The residue, as embodied in the following pages, thus represents the lifetime literary taste of two persons with somewhat different occupations in life; a taste pursued in each case from adolescence to middle age; yet so curiously homogeneous in its ultimate result, that in a sudden spirit of amused comparison they decided to pool their book-markings into one printed volume.

The short poems and brief prose excerpts collected in Another World Than This are laid out across the twelve months, providing not quite a year’s worth of daily readings. Their selections are, like Knevet’s poem, mostly obscure and mostly from centuries before theirs, and on the whole, vivid and memorable. An excellent bedside companion, you can find it in electronic format on the Internet Archive: Link.

The only collection of Knevet’s work, The shorter poems of Ralph Knevet, edited by Amy M. Charles, dates from 1967. It can be found in electronic format on the Open Library: Link.

Five Short Poems by Anne Wilkinson

Anne Wilkinson
Anne Wilkinson
Zigzagzip

Zigzagzip
Cat o’nine tails whip
The tender night
To splintering applause.

 

I never see a stone

I never see a stone
Without an inward groan
And feel again the impact of my race.
For should I chance to peer beneath
Its smooth and granite face
I see no other
Than a brother
Come crawling out with looping squirm,
Wet, white and eyeless, fellow worm.

 

Confession

I know so well what I want to say,
I even know some of the words
And the rhymes that wait to translate it.
And then I begin–and begin–and prevaricate–
I hedge my course with blinded byways
I tunnel under lighted highways
I cannot say “this is how it is
On the flood lit road”
And thrust my pen ping into a reality;
I buck or shy left, I suggest
A graveyard fixed in night
Rather than look an honest hour
In the face, by broad daylight.

 

If you should die

If you should die
I’d give my flesh
For purpose of worms
And ivory grow my bones
And moss my hair

Until I grew desirable
To death
And you moved over
And we shared the earth

 

I am so tired

I am so tired I do not think
Sleep in death can rest me

So line my two eternal yards
With softest moss
Then lengths of bone won’t splinter
As they toss
Or pierce their wooden box
To winter

Do not let the children
Pass my way alone
Lest these shaking bones
Rattle out their fright
At waking in the night

Anne Wilkinson was a Canadian poet whose first book first book wasn’t published until she was forty and only published one more before she died in 1961 at the age of fifty. Raised in a somewhat unconventional family and educated by her mother and in several Montessori-influenced schools, she struggled throughout her life between the pull of poetry and the demands of her life as a wife and mother. If a woman “acquires an interest,” she once wrote, “cultivates a talent outside husband, children and house, she automatically is subject to the qualms of divided loyalties.”

Cover of Collected Poems of Anne WilkinsonAs Ingrid Ruthig writes in The Essential Anne Wilkinson, the only easily available collection of her work, Wilkinson’s poetry is “direct in approach, incisive, and unflinching,” something well illustrated in the above poems. Her lines are almost always short: “She did not dress/Except to wear/A word across her groin”, for example, is the opening to “La belle dame sans dormi.” Most of her poems are a page or so long; none is more than four to five.

And they were usually slow in gestation, as is suggested in “Confession” above. She wrote in one diary entry, “The pattern is irritatingly familiar. The first heaven flowing rush–this is it! A week later the desolation of knowing that this not only is not ‘it,’ but is atrocious, has no relation, except for the odd line, to poetry.” Yet she seems to have always had a clear idea of what she wanted to achieve in her poems–which was to avoid what she saw as the two flaws in much of the modern poetry she read. “Those who attempt the simple are thin to the vanishing point,” while most of the other “… are obscure, tortuous, and torturing.”

Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson (2004), edited by Dean Irvine, is out of stock on Amazon but still seems to be available from the publisher, Véhicule Press, in Montreal. A good selection, if not complete, can be found in The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson (1968), edited by A. J. M. Smith, which includes “Four Corners of My World,” a memoir of her childhood that was published shortly after her death in Tamarack Review, a literary journal she helped found. It’s also available in electronic format on the Open Library (link).

“Death at Teatime,” by K. Arnold Price, from The New British Poets (1945)

Death at Teatime

That afternoon
when everything stopped at four o’clock
the houses suddenly looked old as fossils
cold in the rigid sunlight transfixed from prehistoric time.

Sound
raved up in spate from College Green,
released from utterance
for there was now no more to be said:
released from laughter
for there would be no more quips.

Faces were floating
blind facades shuttered upon nothingness,
sense and spirit having slipped apart for ever;
and the dreaming trams went reeling by me
fleeing to their last termini,
for now there would be no going and returning,
no returning at evening with flowers from the mountains,
for all the ragged streamers of roads from Dublin
were blowing out upon a wind of death
to nowhere.

But the cyclists in College Green kept up their mesmeric cycling
moved by a tic of to and fro called living.
And through all that heaving, maggot-seething
superfluous spume of a city,
young women in telephone booths were ringing up their lovers
not knowing that from four o’clock that afternoon
love had been discontinued.

from The New British Poets, edited by Denys Val Baker
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1945

Available on the Internet Archive: Link.

This is one of a series of neglected poems taken from the Internet Archive.

K. Arnold Price was an Irish writer who only published two books: New Perspectives (1980) and The Captain’s Paramours (1987). When invited to name his favorite neglected book by The Guardian back in 2007, Colm Toibin wrote of New Perspectives,

This is a short Irish novel which deals entirely with private life; it is a middle-aged woman’s most subtle and sensuous and intelligent study of her relationship with her husband. I found it haunting at the time and I am still haunted by its stillness and rich cadences and powerful distinctions between levels of feeling, but I have only ever met two other people who have read it and they are both writers. It does not read like a first novel and has some of the hallmarks of a Bergman movie. The author, I later learnt, was 84 when it was published. She published only one other novel.

Toibin inspired several bloggers to locate the book, and you can find their assessments here: The Mookse and the Gripse; Just William’s Luck; and Pechorin’s Journal. Price published poems and short stories in English and Irish literary magazines from the 1940s through the 1980s, but seems never to have gained much recognition aside from an entry in an encyclopedia of Irish literature.

“Lament,” by Brenda Chamberlain, from The New British Poets

Lament

My man is a bone ringed with weed.
Thus it was on my bridal night,
That the sea, risen to a green wall
At our window, quenching love’s new delight,
Stood curved between me and the midnight call
Of him who said I was so fair
He could drown for joy in the salt of my hair.
We sail, he said,
Like the placid dead
That have long forgotten the marriage bed.
On my bridal night
Brine stung the window.
Alas, in every night since then
These eyes have rained
For him who made my heart sing
At the lifting of the latch,
For him that will not come again
Weary from the sea.
The wave tore his bright flesh in her greed:
My man is a bone ringed with weed.

from The New British Poets, edited by Kenneth Rexroth
New York: New Directions, 1949

Available on the Internet Archive Link.

This is one of a series of neglected poems taken from the Internet Archive.

“In Sleep,” by Robert Kotlowitz (1954)

Man Sleeping in Car - Vivian Maier -VM1955W02739 – New York, NY, 1955
Man Sleeping in Car — Vivian Maier, New York City, 1955

In Sleep

What do I see in my sleep?
A steady seepage of life
in dreams
that are of no use
to a practical body.

I awake like you,
sapped by a watchful reality,
defined by a soft-boiled egg.
Today’s newspaper
tucked under my arm,
swats invisible enemies on the fleeing subway.

Time, then, is transformed
from uptown to downtown,
and through its metamorphosis
I move into the material of life.
It catches fast,
holding in its swell
the sweating molecules of the morning,
the darting enzymes of eternity.

I watch, I wonder,
and wondering,
am caught in perpetual bombardments
of anxious demands, urgent moments,
that, like dreams after all,
streak the illumined air
with startling beauty:
the heart’s silhouette
of desire, sorrow and eager mortality.

This poem comes from Discovery no. 3, the third of the brief run of Discovery, a paperback magazine edited by Vance Bourjaily and published by Pocket Books between 1953 and 1955. Although Kotlowitz was, at the time, trying to write a novel, he ended up going into editing and, later and somewhat by accident, public broadcasting. He did, however, write four novels, beginning with Somewhere Else in 1972. His memoir of combat as a U.S. Army rifleman in World War Two, including the skirmish following the D-Day invasion in which virtually his entire platoon was killed—Before Their Time—was published in 1999 and is still in print. His son, Alex, is a journalist who wrote the award-winning account of life in the Chicago projects, There Are No Children Here (1992).

Four Poems by Eithne Wilkins

Spoken Through Glass

Here the big stars roll down
like tears
all down your face;
darkness that has no walls, the empty night
that fingers grope for and are lost,
is nightfall in your face.

The big stars roll,
the glittering railway-line unwinds into the constellations.

Over and under you the dark,
in you the rocking night without a foothold,
and no walls, no ceiling,

the parallels that never meet, the pulses winding out to the
stars.

Night has no end.
Light travelling from the stars is out
before you ride along it
with the black tears falling,
falling,

all fall down.

 

Passage of an August (1938)

In solitary august, like a story
he met grief’s lassie with the quartz-bright hands;
and she became his darling,
who was young, was sorry
there among the grasses blowing over pit and brands.

She walked beside him back the way he came,
into the whitening hills, and cut his throat.
Although she called him by another name,
she was no stranger, love. And none
can drive her out.

 

barbedwire

Barbed Wire (1940)

The silence, with its ragged edge of lost communication,
silence at the latter end,
is now a spiked north wind.

Last words
toss about me in the streets, waste paper
or a cigarette butt in some gutter stream
that overflows
from crumpled darkness.
“Look, I am plunged in the midst of them, a dagger
in their midst.”

and over the edge
the nightmares peer, with their tall stories
and the day’s unheard-of cry.

 

Failure

What can forgive us for
the clothes left lying and the rocking journey,
flashing poles and pylons standing into fields of air,
in flooded fields?

Something flew out of our hands,
the cup incomplete,
air of invasions and land of defeat.
There was the tree felled in another valley,
behind the flown carpet
and nothing left to remember, all to forgive.

Nothing to remember but
the windows slammed against the cold,
the helmet crushed down on the eyes.

And who, beside the darkened station lamp,
remembering, started back.

These are stark, grim poems, very much in the spirit of their time, when there was little good news and a great deal of bad, and no one knew how far away better days might be. But there is an underlying toughness and realism that reflects the attitude of a survivor, of someone who wasn’t going to give up in the face of loss. I would have included more such poems had discretion not held me back. Sadly, Eithne Wilkins never published a collection of her poems, so one has to root through the pages of long-defunct little magazines to find them.

She attended Oxford in the early 1930s, then moved to London, where she worked as a translator and reader for various publishers. Her poems began to be published in British literary journals around 1937, and in 1949, a selection of them were included in The New British Poets, a collection edited by Kenneth Rexroth and published by James Laughlin’s just-founded New Directions Press. That same year, she married the Austrian writer and translater, Ernst Kaiser. Although she worked on English translations of a number of well-regarded books, including Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, she appears to have stopped submitting her poems for publication sometime after the New Directions collection was published, and her one book, The Rose-Garden Game (1969), was a popular history about the origins of rosary beads as an accessory to Catholic worship.

from The New British Poets, edited by Kenneth Rexroth
New London, Connecticut: New Directions Press, 1949

Available on the Internet Archive: Link.

This is one in a series of neglected poems from the Internet Archive.

“Jerked Heartstrings in Town,” by E. B. C. Jones (1918)

oxfordstreet

Jerked Heartstrings in Town

I have heard echoes and seen visions of you
Often of late. Once yawning at a play
A sad keen rapture suddenly pierced me through
Because one puppet moved and sighed your way;

An omnibus’conductor fixed your glance
— Intense, preoccupied — upon my fare ;
I saw your stooping shoulders, at a dance,
Lean by a doorway: but you were not there.

Down Oxford Street, in the slow shopping crowd,
Hearing your very voice, ” Ah, that’s superb ”
I turned, — a tawdry simpering little dowd
Passed by, and left me trembling on the kerb.

from Songs for sale, an anthology of recent poetry, edited by Emily Beatrix Coursolles (E. B. C.) Jones
Oxford: B. H. Blackwell; New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1918

Available on the Internet Archive: Link.

This is one in a series of neglected poems from the Internet Archive.

“To a Poet Yet Unborn,” from Collected Poems, by Abbie Huston Evans

leap

To a Poet Yet Unborn

Attempt what’s perpendicular. Scale what’s impossible.
Try the knife edge between two voids; look into both abysses.
Bring back some word of wordlessness if strength enough is in you.
Write doggedly of dizzying things; with small implacable digits
Delimit space to fit the brain, that it may bulk and be.

No one but you can help us much. Subdue what blasts. Dare do it.
Ride formlessness, word wordlessness. Be not aghast. Be poet.

from Collected Poems, by Abbie Huston Evans
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970

“West End Life,” from Revolving Lights, by Dorothy Richardson

westendstreet

Within the stillness she heard the jingling of hansoms,
swinging in morning sunlight
along the wide thoroughfares of the West End;
saw the wide leisurely shop-fronts
displaying in a restrained profusion,
comfortably within reach of the experienced eye
half turned to glance from a passing vehicle,
all the belongings of West End life;
on the pavements,
the trooping succession of masked life-moulded forms,
their unobservant eyes,
aware of the resources all about them,
at gaze upon their continuous adventure,
yesterday still with them as they came out,
in high morning light,
into the adventure of to-day.
Campaigners,
sure of their weapons in the gaily decked mélée,
and sure every day
of the blissful solitude of the interim times.

When I first read this in Revolving Lights, I immediately marked it and wrote in the margin, “poetry.” Certainly, it wasn’t written as poetry, but I think it works better as a poem than the few genuine poems (example) she wrote.

From Revolving Lights, by Dorothy Richardson
London: Duckworth, 1923

“Open Air Concert, Ohio,” from Poems, 1947-1961, by Elizabeth Sewell

openairconcert

Open Air Concert, Ohio

We sit by stone and ivy leaves
For flute and oboe’s disquisition;
The evening, after heat, receives
This gentle Middle West rendition.

The foursquare walls of courtyard cup
Two funnels at their intersection,
The music running down and up
On lukewarm currents of convection,

So that the twin parabola
Of clarinettists’ conversation
May tunnel for mandragora
Or plummet to a constellation.

The body may be earthed or skied,
But mind, extrinsic to seduction,
Spreads out into a thin glass slide,
Incising music’s cones of suction.

Leave those twinkling points to pair
With ground bass in a Bach Invention
Cry me not up to meet them there —
I balance on my disc of air —
In a glass darkly I shall stare
At inklings of a fourth dimension.

from Poems, 1947-1961, by Elizabeth Sewell
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962

Available on the Internet Archive Link.

This is one in a series of neglected poems from the Internet Archive.