Intellectuals

Robinson Jeffers

Is it so hard for men to stand by themselves,
They must hang on Marx or Christ, or mere Progress?
Clearly it is hard. But these ought to be leaders . . .
Sheep leading sheep, ‘The fold, the fold.
Night comes, and the wolves of doubt.’ Clearly it is hard.

Yourself, if you had not encountered and loved
Our unkindly all but inhuman God,
Who is very beautiful and too secure to want worshippers,
And includes indeed the sheep with the wolves,
You too might have been looking about for a church.

He includes the flaming stars and pitiable flesh,
And what we call things and what we call nothing.
He is very beautiful. But when these lonely have travelled
Through long thoughts to redeeming despair,
They are tired and cover their eyes; they flock into fold.

A. E. Housman

by W. H. Auden

“Any fool can write a sonnet, and most fools do.”
A. E. Houseman (1859 – 1936)

No one, not even Cambridge was to blame
(Blame if you like the human situation):
Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin Scholar of his generation.

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.

In savage foot-notes on unjust editions
He timidly attacked the life he led,
And put the money of his feelings on

The uncritical relations of the dead,
Where only geographical divisions
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.”

My Friend

Penelope Shuttle

Sometimes I glimpse my friend
glinting beneath
the shape-shift silvers
of the waves
I don’t know how she got down there
so near and so far from the blessed isles nor how long she’ll stay
but there she is
                 fathoms deep
pacing the boulevards of Lyonesse
searching each casement and porch
of water-wounded temple and storm-shattered fame
hauling her sorrow through the coral crossways
She isn’t alone       my friend
Others while away the long hours
treading alley and ope of that green translucency
looking for the ones      who will never be found
down there in a city laid-out       in its own legend
____________________

From the cover of Lyonesse:

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth and the oral tradition, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but now an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change. And there was indeed a Bronze Age inundation event which swept the entire west of Cornwall under the sea, with only the Isles of Scilly and St. Michael’s Mount left as remnants above sea-level. Lyonesse was also Thomas Hardy’s name for Cornwall where Penelope Shuttle has lived all her adult life, always fascinated by the stories and symbolic presence of Lyonesse.

I Will Return

Pablo Neruda

In his brilliant book, The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers, citing Neruda’s poem “I Will Return,” Robert Zaller writes:

“If Neruda approaches the Jeffersian attitude, it is perhaps in his “I Will Return,” with its striking echoes of “Post Mortem.” The attentive reader of Jeffers may find here an echo of the image in his “November Surf” of “rivers mouth to source pure,” and although Jeffers’ purpose in this poem is to imagine a postapocalyptic future with “the people fewer and the hawks more numerous,” Neruda expresses in “I Will Return” a rare desire to ‘return’ not as ego but essence, both “discovered and lost” in the greater world that now contains him. Perhaps nowhere else, indeed, does he more nearly approach Jeffers’ own spirit.”

Hell is empty, And all the devils are here

Act 1, Scene 2, The Tempest,
William Shakespeare

ARIEL

Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and played
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me. The King’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—
Was the first man that leaped; cried “Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.”

Hope Is Not For The Wise

BY ROBINSON JEFFERS

Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools;
Change and the world, we think, are racing to a fall,
Open-eyed and helpless, in every newcast that is the news;
The time’s events would seem mere chaos but all
Drift the one deadly direction. But this is only
The August thunder of the age, not the November.
Wise men hope nothing, the wise are naturally lonely
And think November as good as April, the wise remember
That Caesar and even final Augustulus had heir,
And men lived on; rich unplanned life on earth
After the foreign war and the civil wars, the border wars
And the barbarians: music and religion, honor and mirth
Renewed life’s lost enchantments.  But if life even
Had perished utterly, Oh perfect loveliness of earth and heaven.

Bess

BY WILLIAM E. STAFFORD

Ours are the streets where Bess first met her   
cancer. She went to work every day past the   
secure houses. At her job in the library
she arranged better and better flowers, and when   
students asked for books her hand went out   
to help. In the last year of her life
she had to keep her friends from knowing   
how happy they were. She listened while they
complained about food or work or the weather.   
And the great national events danced   
their grotesque, fake importance. Always

Pain moved where she moved. She walked   
ahead; it came. She hid; it found her.   
No one ever served another so truly;   
no enemy ever meant so strong a hate.   
It was almost as if there was no room   
left for her on earth. But she remembered
where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers;   
she did not weep when she passed its houses;   
and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner   
and slipped from pain, her hand opened
again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.

On Uncharted Seas

BY PETER TROWER

There is no orderly way
out of this mortal riddle –
we are seldom packed and ready
on that last decisive day.

Trailing loose ends
we are pulled willy-nilly from the game
full of unspoken last words
leaving the useless grief of friends.

Into light’s last arabesque
we dance dully-
there are clean socks in the drawer,
a final letter lies forever unfinished
on the cold desk.

The blunt facts are these –
death is a mischievous boy
waiting to cut our towropes
to set the boats of us adrift
on uncharted seas.

Yesterday Never Existed

Osip Mandelstam’s tender nostalgia ran counter to an era of ruthless modernity.

BY SOPHIE PINKHAM

Osip Mandelstam, 1934. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Osip Mandelstam once started a poem with the line, “No, I have never been anyone’s contemporary.” He was born in 1891 but inhabited a poetic world in which he had conversations with Dante and sat at the seaside with Ovid, in which he was as much Greek, Roman, and Florentine as he was Russian. Born in Warsaw to a Jewish leather merchant and his music teacher wife, Mandelstam grew up in St. Petersburg, where French governesses taught him about Napoleon and Joan of Arc; as a teenager, he studied in France, Germany, and Italy, where he experienced the first twinges of what he later called “nostalgia for world culture.” His tender, aching preoccupation with the past set him apart in an era obsessed with the future. 

Mandelstam’s poetic career was launched under the aegis of Symbolism, a movement that treated the poet as a medium offering access to the distant world of the real, which could be perceived only through the veil of paraphrase. For Symbolists, language was a mere approximation: a means rather than an end. Like other Russian Symbolists, Mandelstam was much influenced by the 19th-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev, who wrote highly ambiguous metaphysical poetry devoid of lyric heroes. (One of Tyutchev’s most famous poems begins, “The mind cannot grasp Russia.”).

Read the complete article

Sick Love

Robert Graves

O Love, be fed with apples while you may,
And feel the sun and go in royal array,
A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,

Though in what listening horror for the cry
That soars in outer blackness dismally,
The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury:

Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head,
Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood,
That shivering glory not to be despised.

Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark—a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.