Sang Solomon to Sheba, And kissed her dusky face, ‘All day long from mid-day We have talked in the one place, All day long from shadowless noon We have gone round and round In the narrow theme of love Like a old horse in a pound.’
To Solomon sang Sheba, Plated on his knees, ‘If you had broached a matter That might the learned please, You had before the sun had thrown Our shadows on the ground Discovered that my thoughts, not it, Are but a narrow pound.’
Said Solomon to Sheba, And kissed her Arab eyes, ‘There’s not a man or woman Born under the skies Dare match in learning with us two, And all day long we have found There’s not a thing but love can make The world a narrow pound.’ ____________________________
“Solomon to Sheba” [was] written shortly after Yeats’s marriage to George Hyde-Lees in 1917, [the poem imagines] the conclusion reached by Solomon after a day of physical and mental intimacy with Sheba. The lines suggest that Yeats has found with George, whom he described as ‘a student in all my subjects’, the kind of mystical marriage he had sought with Gonne. Shortly before their wedding he had written to her, ‘I will live for my work & your happiness & when we are dead our names shall be remembered – perhaps we shall become a part of the strange legendary life of this country.’
They’re coming up the trail big blue-veined hands cramped from a lifetime of tyrannical wooden handles of gnawing the big ones down the hard way of hearing the undercut timber cry as it grudgingly gives.
They have stoical Svenska faces white-stubbled cured to creased red leather by a many-weathered craft.
They have crinkled Svenska voices like wind in the branches of the countless killed trees who have given them their tongues.
They are older than rumours unbending as mountain granite. They have been lured from boozy retirement to fall the West Fork setting.
With their tedious crosscuts they will topple the rockslide cedars spitting snoose hoping to lessen the breakage.
They have returned to the resinous hills like ancestral gunslingers for one final showdown with the reluctant trees. ____________________
This documentary looks at the writing life of BC coastal logger-turned-poet, Peter Trower, (August 25, 1930 – November 10, 2017) illustrated by re-enactments and visits to some old logging camps on the coast. After publishing his first collection of poems in 1969, Peter Trower quit logging and went to work for Raincoast Chronicles as an Associate Editor in 1971. A dozen poetry collections and three novels have expressed his awe and respect for the magisterial and dangerous power of nature. Trowers’ coastal memoirs, hard earned by his own back breaking effort, are artfully poignant and empathetic to the working life from a bygone era. He is joined on stage for a tour of small coastal logging communities by the legendary “laureate” of BC coastal poetry, Robert Swanson, and other poets and writers Bus Griffiths, Bill Moore, Howie White accompanied by Roy Ashdown’s music.
Six weeks after his death, you depart for the Ontario countryside — a B&B on fifty acres, nestled among thousands of trees. Blemished keys cling to maples, blackened apples litter the lawn. The owner tells you about the light — how it creeps from the bottom of the windows, floods the walnut table, by midday has inched across the living room to the grand piano. This tide of light. He brings you berries on a china plate, tea in a cosy, has the stooped gait and merry eyes of a gnome. You pace the country road for hours, gravel underfoot, curled caterpillars. Ponds and horses and geese honk alarm at your passing. You try to out-walk the grief but it rises like a sandstorm and then you’re inside, stung, blinded. The weekend he died you went to work, celebrated your partner’s birthday, without a flicker of feeling. Now you lie in bed, in a floral room with knickknacks and needlepoint, raking your nails down your arms. Had he called from the hospital, would you have gone to Hope? Neither of you believed in forgiveness — the bodies of your enemies floated downstream and you stood on shore, cheering. You said he was stunted, sour, but you were the same. For two decades after it ended you stayed married to your hatred, and now a Persian cat watches you cry with bored blue eyes.
White-maned, wide-throated, the heavy-shouldered children of the wind leap at the sea-cliff. The invisible falcon Brooded on water and bred them in wide waste places, in a bridechamber wide to the stars’ eyes In the center of the ocean, Where no prows pass nor island is lifted … the sea beyond Lobos is whitened with the falcon’s Passage, he is here now, The sky is one cloud, his wing-feathers hiss in the white grass, my sapling cypresses writhing In the fury of his passage Dare not dream of their centuries of future endurance of tempest. (I have granite and cypress, Both long-lasting, Planted in the earth; but the granite sea-boulders are prey to no hawk’s wing, they have taken worse pounding, Like me they remember Old wars and are quiet; for we think that the future is one piece with the past, we wonder why tree-tops And people are so shaken.)
That night, Slim Abernathy pushed the wrong button and wrapped his best friend three times around a driveshaft in directions bones won’t bend.
They shut her down and eased him out broken most ways a man can break yet he clung to his ruin for twenty-four hours like a man to a liferaft for his death’s sake.
They’d hardly hurried him away from there as we stood around shockdrunk, incapable of help when they cranked those expensive wheels up again, started rolling out more goddamn pulp.
“Hamburger for lunch tonight boys!” joked a foreman to the crew. I wish he’d smelled our hate but he never even flinched as the red-flecked sheets came through.
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy— Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato’s parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t’other there And wonder if she stood so at that age— For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler’s heritage— And had that colour upon cheek or hair, And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind— Did Quattrocento finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mess of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledaean kind Had pretty plumage once—enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide, Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother’s reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts—O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise— O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
This graphic summary of the dominant idea of Western philosophy is casually tossed off by a ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’ walking, as the title of the poem puts it, ‘Among School Children’. Tellingly, he walks ‘through the long schoolroom questioning’. With the violence of rebellion and war behind him, this visit to a school is an occasion for the poet to question what he has learned and, indeed, whether it is possible to know anything with certainty.
He starts his inquiry with Plato, who posited a world of ideas outside the world we perceive with our senses. Carlo Rovelli suggests that it was in order to escape anxiety about time that Plato imagined a world of ideas.
Curtains of rock And tears of stone, Wet leaves in a high crevice of the sky: From side to side the draperies Drawn back by rigid hands.
And he came carrying the shattered lyre, And wearing the blue robes of a king, And looking through eyes like holes torn in a screen; And the distant sea was faintly heard, From time to time, in the suddenly rising wind, Like a broken song.
Out of his sleep, from time to time, From between half open lips, Escaped the bewildered words which try to tell The tale of his bright night And his wing-shadowed day The soaring flights of thought beneath the sun Above the islands of the seas And all the deserts, all the pastures, all the plains Of the distracting foreign land.
He sleeps with the broken lyre between his hands, And round his slumber are drawn back The rigid draperies, the tears and wet leaves, Cold curtains of rock concealing the bottomless sky.
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers, The exuberant voices of music, Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness That makes beauty; the mind Knows, grown adult. A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean, A throbbing of engines moved in it, At length, a stone’s throw out, between the rocks and the vapor, One by one moved shadows Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing each other Following the cliff for guidance, Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-fog And the foam on the shore granite. One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me, Out of the vapor and into it, The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient and cautious, Coasting all round the peninsula Back to the buoys in Monterey harbor. A flight of pelicans Is nothing lovelier to look at; The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue Against the essential reality Of creatures going about their business among the equally Earnest elements of nature.
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