Buried hearts of mine to beat

Lewis the poet was a master of rhyme. He was especially good at internal rhyme: something your brain registers as you read, even if your eye and ear don't. Many of his poems are dense with rhymes, as dense as plumcake. Take, for example, the poem I just posted: “The Day with a White Mark." I read this poem many times without stopping to notice how much is going on besides the obvious ABCB pattern. This is my crude attempt to show the rhyme (italics) and alliteration (underlined), and I'm sure there's much I've missed, to say nothing of what those particular sounds do to the speed, the emotion, the sense of the lines. The more you look the more you see, and it all leads to the question: how on earth do you write a poem like this?

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness:
Was it an elf in the blood? or a bird in the brain? or even part
Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave
Of a journeying angel’s transit roaring over and through my heart?

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?
No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends
On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself
Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.

My garden’s spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden;
The plann’d and unplann’d miseries deepen; the knots draw tight.
Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.
It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.

Yet I –I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of
My day was like a peacock’s chest. In at each sense there stole
Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew
Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there,
And shining roots worked visibly far down below one’s feet,
So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard
Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible
Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale,
Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling
Of glee, as kindly animals talk in a children’s tale. 

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?
No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends
On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself
Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.

The colour of my day

As I've mentioned, 1963 was a big year for author deaths: Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and, on the day John F Kennedy died, C.S. Lewis. Frost is one of my favourite poets. Plath I like, and I think if we'd known each other we could have been friends. But Lewis, for me, is on a shelf of his own. How do you describe a writer you've known since before you could read? Whose voice narrated your childhood and who furnished your imagination from his own? I'm loth to sound like one of those mad, starry-eyed Lewisites who run societies and newsletters and colleges in his honour (wouldn't he have hated that?), which is why I don't talk about him much in these pages. But I'd be lying if I said he hadn't influenced and shaped me more than any other writer I've ever read. The fiftieth anniversary of his death falls this November. Between now and then I would like to use the occasion to write about him, and try to say something of what he has meant to me. In particular, I'd like to draw attention to his poetry, which seems largely unknown and underrated. Today, then, a poem I've had humming in my head these last few days. Not his best or my favourite, but lovely. Lewis's life seemed so full of hardship and sacrifice and forebearance, it's nice to think of him having one unreasonably good day. 

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness:
Was it an elf in the blood? or a bird in the brain? or even part
Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave
Of a journeying angel’s transit roaring over and through my heart? 

My garden’s spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden;
The plann’d and unplann’d miseries deepen; the knots draw tight.
Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.
It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.

Yet I –I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of
My day was like a peacock’s chest. In at each sense there stole
Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew
Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there,
And shining roots worked visibly far down below one’s feet,
So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard
Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible
Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale,
Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling
Of glee, as kindly animals talk in a children’s tale. 

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?
No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends
On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself
Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.

Words, words, words

There's a particular kind of absurdity that creeps into the language when people are trying to be formal. You notice it a lot in the distortions Don Watson complains of, and if you've spent any time in the public service you'll know immediately the kind of false, convoluted, roundabout rhetoric that passes for intelligent discourse in that culture.

I came across a particularly absurd specimen recently, when I had to call a government phone line. The young person on the other end, clearly aspiring to a tone of formality and dignity, found himself not only subverting good grammar but inventing entirely new words.

He asked me for "the residential address of yourself," which no doubt sounded to him much more impressive, or at least more correct, than "your residential address"; and he promised me he would "make a note that you've callen today," obviously feeling that ordinary past tense ("called") doesn't sound nearly as grand. 

George Orwell complained in 1946 that modern English was afflicted with false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. It seems the disease he complained of then has continued to grow, even as the resources of the language itself have shrunk. The unabated impulse to sound formal now has fewer words at its disposal, but it wants more than ever to use more words than necessary - even if it has to make them up.

Leave me a place underground

There’s an innate symbolism in the act of exhuming the body of a poet. It makes patent the contrast between his literary afterlife and his bodily mortality. It speaks of the persistence, among the detritus of human history, of objects laden with meaning; objects that can be read and can shed light on the past. The act of making a poem is itself both a burial and an unearthing of meaning. 

Pablo Neruda died in September 1973, within days of the coup that brought Pinochet to power in Chile. A couple of years ago accusations surfaced that he had not died of cancer as supposed, but that he had been murdered by the regime. Last month, his body was exhumed. Initial tests show only that he had advanced prostate cancer when he died; we still don't know if he was poisoned or not. 

The poets’ words will always outlast the works of tyrants, but here, the poet himself is reclaimed in the bend toward justice of the moral universe’s arc. Justice demands this unearthing, and poetry can't help but attend it. Of Neruda's own work, what comes inevitably to mind is his poem "Leave me a place underground." I’m not sure I understand this poem, but I know it’s deeper than any mark left by the dictator, and it will live far longer.

Leave me a place underground, a labyrinth,
where I can go, when I wish to turn,
without eyes, without touch,
in the void, to dumb stone,
or the finger of shadow.

I know that you cannot, no one, no thing
can deliver up that place, or that path,
but what can I do with my pitiful passions,
if they are no use, on the surface
of everyday life,
if I cannot look to survive,
except by dying, going beyond, entering
into the state, metallic and slumbering, 
of primeval flame? 

And warm desire

Here, the trees are nearly bare; the days are growing darker; the cold is closing in and nightly frosts begin to take the flowers. So Milton's little 'Song on May Morning' belongs to another world. But it's somehow warming, somehow cheering this chill day.

Now the bright morning Star, day's harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose.
Hail bounteous May that dost inspire
Mirth and youth and warm desire,
Woods and Groves are of thy dressing,
Hill and Dale doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early Song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long.