W/o Comment

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

--Vachel Lindsay

Tu Fu

"There is a firm consensus," says A. C. Graham, "that Tu Fu is the greatest Chinese poet."  If he "sounds in English like anyone's idea of a  Chinese poet," Graham suggests, it is precisely because he is so great--he defines Chinese poetry, I surmise, the same way (say) Sophocles defines tragedy.   In Poems of the Late T'ang, Graham offers selections from seven poets but Tu Fu gets pride of place.  But he restricts his selection; his offerings are "chosen from the last four years of [Tu Fu's] life;" no wonder, then, that they "illustrate the beginnings of some of the tendencies which transformed the poetic language in the ninth century."

Graham elaborates:

The climax both of T'ang poetry and of the power of he dynasty was the reign of Ming-huang (713-55); from 755 the rebellion of An Lu-shan permanently weakened the dynasty and scattered the poets to the ends of China. Tu Fu left the capital Ch'ang-an in the north west in 758, and arrived in 766 at K'uei-chou on the middle Yangtse.

In one perhaps slightly untypical selection from the late poems, Tu Fu remembers perhaps the most remarkable feature of his capital:

Well said Ch'ang-an looks like a chess-board:
A hundred years of the saddest news.
The mansions of princes and nobles all have new lords:
Another breed is capped and robed for office.
Due north on the mountain passes the gongs and drums shake,
To the chariots and horses campaigning in the west the winged dispatches hasten.
While the fish and the dragons fall asleep and the autumn rivers turn cold
My native country, untroubled times, are always in my thoughts.

Ch'ang-an, modern Xi'an, is famous among tourists today as the home of the terra cotta army.The old central city retains its chess-board form.

The End of the Olympics

I wish Michael Phelps long life and good health and an autumn surrounded by adoring grandchildren.  Meanwhile:

To An Athlete Dying Young

THE time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,	5
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,	10
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers	15
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.	20
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head	25
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

--A.E. Housman (link).

Prudent Enterprise

No bars are set too close, no mesh too fine
To keep me from the eagle and the lion,
Whom keepers feed that I may freely dine.
This goes to show that if you have the wit
To be small, common, cute, and live on shit,
Though the cage fret kings, you may make free with it.

That's The Sparrow in the Zoo, Howard Nemerov, which I first learned from my daughter, visiting at the  Washington zoo with her boyfriend some years ago.  It struck me so funny I remembered it on the spot (but I refreshed my memory here).  Today the boyfriend, now her husband, is due back at the zoo with their two teen-aged sons.  

Caedmon's Hymn

Now we must praise to the skies the Keeper of the heavenly kindom,
The might of the Measurer, all he has in mind,
The work of the Father of Glory, of all manner of marvel,

Our eternal Master, the main mover.
It was he who first summoned up, on our behalf,
Heaven as a roof, the holy Maker.

Then this middle-earth, the Watcher over humankind,
Our eternal Master, would later assign
The precinct of men, the Lord Almmighty.

---From Bede's History (7C AD)

Translated by Paul Muldoon

Reprinted in Benson, Chernaik and Herbert, Best Poems on the Underground (2110)

A gift from Michael, heathen to a heathen, on what may or may not be Easter Sunday.  Thanks, Michael. 

The Brits Understand "Snug"

   On Julian Assange's British hidey hole:

The Frontline Club in London is the kind of place where war correspondents and investigative reporters mingle with admirers and wannabes, fired by a shared passion for exposing government spin, revealing the truth — and fine dining.

So when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange found himself at the center of an international firestorm over the website's publication of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, he knew where he would be well-fed and, more importantly, safe.

Link.   Apparently it worked, in the sense that no one outed him; by what I read, he outed himself.  Not the same for his famous predecessor:

A thump, and a murmur of voices—
    (”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
   And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:
“Mr. Woilde, we ‘ave come for tew take yew
   Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
   For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

Link. That would be "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel," by John Betjeman.

Looking for a Poem (Updated: Found It!)

For reasons that will be clear in a moment, I had hoped to post this poem back on Easter Monday. Trouble is, I can't remember it, and can't find it. I heard it, or perhaps read it, back int he 50s. My recollection is that it was billed as a translation from the Welsh--though I must say, it sounds a lot more like an homage. I believe the translator was Dudley Fitts. Anybody recognize it? The only fragments I can bring up are:

I have loved loving you oh my linnet, oh my dove....

and

March, begone, April, haste!
Til Easter Monday all are chaste!

Anybody recognize this one?

Update: Found it! Michael Gilleland, proprietor of this fine blog, responds in an instant:

According to Google Book Search, it appears in Rolfe Humphries, Collected Poems (Indiana University Press, 1965), pp. 247-248. Google Book Search only gives a "snippet view", so you can't see the entire poem online.

Rolfe Humphries, Dudley Fitts, looks like I mixed up m translators-with-quaint-names. A thousand thanks to Michael, and I'm off to the library.

Update update: Patrick Kurp crossed the tape just moments later. Thanks to Patrick, whose own blog alsos remains on my a-list.