Please note that all poems here quoted are done so from memory, and are thus likely to contain errors. You are encouraged to compare them with the originals, and upon finding errors, write me derisive emails containing cutting remarks.
I'm continuing on with the topic of poetry, since that is the thing that is occupying most of my excess mental time these days. Since the last post, I have taken up the habit of pausing morning and night to recite the poems that I have thus far memorized.
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 muted to that tender light
Which heaven the gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired that nameless grace
That waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lighten's o'er her face
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their resting place
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow
So soft, so pure, yet eloquent
the smiles that thrill, the glints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Ok - I know for sure I fucked up a line there - specifically the fourth from the last, but you get the point. What bothers me about this poem, and a number of others, is that it starts out so well - the first few lines are absolutely immortal in sense and sound - I think had that line been spoken by anyone, including the most bumpkin of a farmer, in the most rural of late-night pubs, one off-hand night, these lines would still have caught on and been quoted and bandied-about and written on a napkin and scrawled on a wall, and probably would have ended up as a lyric in a popular song of the day. Those lines are just so damn good that I cannot imagine them being birthed into the world and the world not stopping to acknowledge them.
But we start with an image, of beauty, like the night - we have repeated references to dark and light, day and night, but she - she walks in beauty, like the night. Beauty in motion, she is. She has the beauty of a starry sky in a cloudless clime. She has a dark beauty that the brilliant day could never aspire to. And then she starts expressing thoughts serenely sweet and pure and dear!
Do you see my problem there? I was seeing a woman of cream-white skin, and raven-black hair, walking graceful as the night - with an almost feline-like movement, the white of her skin and the glints of her looks dodging between the dark-as-coal locks of hair reminding one of of a starry sky on a cloudless night. And suddenly she turns all serenely pure and dearly sweet? I guess if we are going to end up with a saccharine-child, I need a different image to start from:
She laughs her joy, dark-trilling bright
That tells of youth and hopes and dreams,
And 'twixt the raven falling locks
A starry soft-lit side-glance gleams,
As though a star on cloudless night
In race-play 'gainst far-off moonbeam
Should 'midst the forest my face see
and worthy to taste her lips me deem.
OK - do you see what I mean? Introduce the "Innocence" early in the poem, so we can start with an appropriate mental image. Now, obviously that was a rather imperfect two stanzas, but I'm just doing this off the top of my head, and I am not . . . help me here . . . who is this . . . Lord Byron. And he had ALL fucking day to work on this! That's what "Lord" means - it means you have all day to do fuck all except recover from hangovers, shag the domestics, engage in the odd war of liberation against the Ottomans, and write bleeding poetry! And that being the case, it ought to be fucking good, and not give me jarring notes that cause me to go from having an enchantingly dark creature of amazing feline-like grace moving about an enchanted night-scape to some simpering little butter-coated creature of 12 expressing thoughts of serene innocence and purity while sprinkling sugar on her crumbly scone!
Which brings me to my next poem of a problem. I chose this one of Whitman's, because it was so . . . antagonistic, and pompous, that it seemed to suit me well. And perhaps it is slowly growing on me, but I still cannot help but think that this poem really is a great example of a work that precisely characterizes a lack of all the things that poetry is supposed to have - like, I don't know - rhythm, artistic merit, etc.
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose.
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground, toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought, o dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?
To begin with, the poem's lines seem jagged - there is so little rhythm in them that I feel as though I am swallowing my breath and at every line break. That, and the writer's supposition that others would naturally find or assume him to be heroic, coupled with a completely superfluous, apropos of nothing, reference to eastern-mysticism shoe-horned in (to the detriment of what little rhythm there was,) at the end, just unintentionally confirms the portrait of the author as the full-on jackass he seems to have intended to imply that he might be.
But enough about suck things. Let us go on to talk of a book that left me breathless when I was 18 or 19. I am speaking of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. When I was first back in the states after high school, I ran across this book in a second-hand bookshop, and was transfixed to the spot as surely as if someone had nailed my shoes to the floor.
The first 5 quartos made little sense to me - it took me a few pages to catch on to the types of images and metaphors he (or Fitzgerald,) was repeatedly using, and the direction in which his comments were drifting, but after that I just couldn't get enough. I've always been a sucker for mortality metaphors, and people extolling the wisdom of wine, women, and song. But then to go on and ask the Almighty: Who here has done more to create this situation, and who has done less? Why do I, who only walk this path, when my foot slips, ask pardon of you who not only created me, but created the treacherous path, and then strew it with snares and traps? I mean, if YOU created the world, and YOU allowed sin in, and then YOU allowed me to be born into it, exactly to what degree am I to blame vs. YOU?
Throw in a minor dash of the romanticism of the far-off east, and I was hooked.
Amazing, though, how a person with sufficient time to write, (or translate) such a poem would need to begin multiple stanzas with the same trope:
Come fill the cup, and in the fires of spring
The winter garment of repentance fling.
The bird of time hath but a little way to fly,
and lo, the bird is on the wing!
Ah, come fill the cup that today clears
of past regrets and future fears.
Tomorrow? Why tomorrow I may be myself,
With Yesterday's seven-thousand years.
But - as he said - the bird (of time) is on the wing, and Turkish class starts all to soon, so to the store I must go, or I will not drink milk tonight.
Think! In this battered caravanserai,
Whose alternate portals are night and day,
How Idiot after Idiot blogged his bit,
Abode his hour, then went his way!
No comments:
Post a Comment