The Second Mrs. E

Taxmom spotlights a curiosity: the death of the widow of T.S. Eliot.  Don't know about you, but for me it sounds a bit like the death of Lafayette's drummer boy.  When I did college English in the 50s, we thought of Eliot as a widower. Well, we were right: his first wife had died, unhappy and unhappily, in 1947.  He didn't marry the second until 1957--coincidenteally, just about the time I left college and put away childish things.  By what I read now, the second marriage was happy, at least for him, perhaps for both--not quite what you remember when you think of the glob-girdling Anglophile grump.  She seems to have enjoyed her career as the role of poet's widow, though it is not clear the assorted Eliot-watchers of the world enjoyed her. In any event, for comparison, I note that a person born in the months after the death of the first Mrs. E might be eligible for Social Security today.

The Upmarket Version

You say that yesterday's limerick was a tad, well, impertinent?  Well sure, but it is the job of limericks to be impertinent--not least to help us bear the awfulness of the underlying message.  But for a more dignified version, we pass the mike to Edna St. Vincent Milllay:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

So Sonnet XLIII.   Repeating:

Stands the lonely tree/Nor knows what birds have vanished..."  

An echo of

"Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang..."

--one of he many best lines Shakespeare ever wrote.

Nostalgia Quiz

For readers (listeners) of a certain age, a nostalgia quiz:

The most rah-rah of sentimental poems, the least convincing and most annoying, the one known to people who cannot otherwise quote a line of verse, perhaps the first poem-as-bumper-sticker, is surely..

Surely who?  Go here. 

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Larkin

Great piece in this week's NYRB, of a new edition (byArchie Burnett) of the poems of Philip Larkin--reviewed by the great appreciator, Christopher Ricks. I suspect Ricks is one of only three post-War poets some Brits can name--the others being Syvlia Plath and Ted Hughes. I tend to bracket him with what you might call the "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" generation--the bleak and sometime exhausted Britain, waking up to the fact that it had won the War but lost the piece and that never again would they hear the trumpets of Empire. I'll bet Maggie Thatcher never heard of Larkin, or never admitted to having hear of him; and if she had, she probably hated his gut.


It amuses me that Larkin was apparently great buds with another bleak comic, Barbara Pym. Someone--I forget who, perhaps it was me--wrote:

When Pym's spirits began to darken
She'd ring up Philip Larkin.


When clouds o'ershadowed him.
He'd call on Pym.

Maybe he repeated for you the tag-line to his aubade on death:

Most things never happen: this one will...

Baroque Puritanism

One of the many challenges of Milton as a poet is that this austere puritan offers a vision of Eden that "has the fleshly abundance of a Venetian painting:"

Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm,
Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind,
Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed,
Or palmy hillock; or the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose:
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant;...


Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honour clad
In naked majesty seemed lords of all:


His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
She, as a veil, down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved ...

So Wylie Sypher in Four Stages of Renaissance Style, excerpting Book IV of Paradise Lost.  Sypher continues: "Milton's own ethic was, we know, austere, disciplining strictly that 'visible and sensuous colleague, the body.'  Yet this Paradise of his shows how imperative a style can be, for it was created by the golden and copious vision of Counter-Reformastion art." 

Aside from the Venetians, Sypher compares Milton also to Rubens, with whom (Sypher says) Milton shares "a certain domain of baroque imagination...."    Rubens, he says, "is a witness to the heroic traditions of renaissance humanism--a humanism powerful enough to create its own myths simply by the splendor of its scenes."

Critical Judgment of the Day

Two in a row, actually. Patrick on Robert Frost:

One is never certain with Frost what is self-revelation and what is performance. He’s a poet one would never bother with if so many of his poems weren’t so good.

Link.

Best-Ever Economics Poem?

What is the best-ever economics poem? I would nominate Robinson Jeffers' "Boats in a Fog," available here. I quote only the climax:

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.

I wonder if there is a better.

Milosz the Anthologizer

It's tempting to say that we get a poetry anthology from Czeslaw Milosz because he is, well, Czeslaw Milosz, and as the voice of Western Civilization, he gets to publish anything he wants.

That was my ungracious first impulse when I first happened upon A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry just lately (the copyright is 1996; Milosz died in 2004).

A more considered judgment would infer that maybe he gets to publish it because he is a very good anthologizer and because exhibits his remarkable personality in all its luminosity. Anthologizing itself can be, after all, a creative act: what to choose and what to leave out? But more than just choosing, Milosz has fleshed out his collection with commentary, to the end of explaining what he is about.

His program is ambitious. "I have always felt," he declares in an introduction,

that a poet participates in the management of the estate of poetry ... . Thinking about that estate, such as it is at the present moment, I decided I could contribute to its possessions provided, however, that instead of theory, I brought to it something of practice. . . . My intention is not so much to defend poetry in general, but, rather, to remind readers that for some very good reasons it may be of importance today. (xv-xvi)

And so we are off on an quest that brings back no Byron, no Shelley, no Keats, no Shakespeare nor (for what it is worth) any T. S. Eliot or Hart Crane--not even any Berthold Brecht. It is, then, a highly personal collection. There is a sort of a "theme" in that virtually all the poems are short, pithy and to the point. It is heavy on Asian--maybe there is an Asian tendency to be pithy and to the point. There's a bit of Polish and other Eastern European but not, perhaps, quite as much as you might expect. It's all organized thematically ("Epiphany," "Travels," "Woman's Skin," that sort of thing). There are 11 such; the last one is called "History," but Milosz explains:

This chapter is in reality an anti-chapter. For poets of the wentieth century, history has been all-pervading, and much as they owuld like to turn to the eternal subjects of love and death, they ahve been forced to be aware of wars, reovlutions, and the changes of political systems. (293)

Milosz says that he is "reticent" even so much as to offer such a chapter in troubled times. But he declares:

... I rejoice in being able to make an anthology such as this one, and it may be source of optimism that in this cruel century such an anthology can be made. (Id.)

Here's one of the translations, this from the Chinese:

On branch tips the hibuscus bloom
The mountains show off red calices.
Nobody. A silent cottage in the valley.
One by one flowers open, then fall.

--Wang Wei, "Magnolia Basin,"
Czeslaw Milosz, A Book of Luminous Things 136 (1996)
Translation by Tony and Willis Barnstone and Xu Haixin