In the past and under the title: "Not quite a coffee morning", I have written about the poetry meeting that I attend each month. The last was in July, and having missed the meeting in June, I felt uneasy when I was told that the theme for our next meeting was, "Summer"; a a topic so deceeptively simple as to be positively dangerous.
Well proud of my home-made computer index: "Poems by Author", that over several months required hours of tedious work, I was well placed to tap into the theme, and in so doing, I passed bye: Fleur Adcock; W. H. Auden; George Barker; William Blake; John Clare; Idris Davies; Michael Drayton; Emily Dickinson; Goethe; Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney; and Nathan Mark Wilks Call, before settling for this: "When summer took in hand the Winter to assail". By Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; this poem belongs to the sixteenth century, and when I came across it, I knew at once that this was what I had been looking for. But along the way, I was tempted by: Fleur Adcock, Seamus Heaney, and Thomas Hardy; and surprisingly, not at all by John Clare, an agrarian poet if ever there was one, but about whom I still have to make up my mind, though some consider him to be England's - Robert Burns.
What drew me to Fleur Adcock's poem: Summer in Bucharest, was the fact that it has nothing to do with summer, but instead, is a metaphor for political oppression; and it is sufficiently clear, and at the same time obscure, as to allow endless scope for the imagination. Though in saying this, I must warn you that this poem is included in a compilation by the Poetry Society, under the title, "Poetry On A Plate"; and it is indexed under Puddings.
See what you think:
We bought raspberries in the market;
but raspberries are discredited:
they sag in their bag, fermenting
into a froth of suspect juice.
And strawberries are seriously compromised:
a taint - you must have heard the stories.
As for the red currants, well, they say
the only real red currants are dead.
(Don't you believe it: the fields are full of them,
swelling hopefully on their twigs,
and the dead ones weren't red anyway
but some mutation of black or white.)
We thought of choosing gooseberries,
until we heard they'd been infiltrated
by raspberries in goosberry jackets.
You can't tell what to trust these days.
There are dates, they say, but they're imported;
and its still too early for the grape harvest.
All we can do is wait and hope.
It's been a sour season for fruit.
__________
Now though I have read a significant number of poems by Seamus Heaney, I have been careful to given him a wide berth; that is, not allow him to get up close, for fear that the magnetic pull in his use of words, might cramp my style, and my poetic voice, (such as it is), lost. A situation not helped either by some tenuous links: he was at secondary school with my older brother Kevin, and we had a mutual friend in Sean Armstrong. Sean was a family friend, whom I knew, though not especially well, but when he last called at the house the visit ended with a number of us, Sean included, going off to The Londonderry, a Bar owned by another family friend, for a drink. From the liberal wing of Ulster protestantism, Sean, as Seamus Heaney reminds us, took a bullet through the forehead when he answered the door to a stranger: the price he paid for his involvement in cross-community work in strife-torn Belfast. He had travelled widely, and married a girl from Japan, and he didn't have to be a social worker; he could have been successful in any number of careers. In, A Postcard From North Antrim, and in so far as any man can be, Sean is "immortalised" by Seamus Heaney; and the essence of what made him who he was, is captured instantly, in the opening stanzas, in which we are confronted with the image of Sean standing, "alone" and "half afraid" on Carrick-a-Read: rope bridge: a local landmark that stands as a metaphor for the society that made him who he was:
A Postcard from North Antrim
In memory of Sean Armstrong
A lone figure is waving
From the thin line of a bridge
Of ropes and slats, slung
Dangerously out between
The cliff-top and the pillar rock.
A nineteenth-century wind.
Dulse-pickers. Sea campions.
A postcard for you, Sean,
And that's you swinging alone,
Antic, half-afraid,
In your gallowglass's beard
And swallow-tail of serge:
The Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge
Ghost-written on sepia.
Or should it be your houseboat
Ethnically furnished,
Redolent of grass?
Should we discover you
Beside those warm-planked, democratic wharves
Among the twilights and guitars
Of Sausalito?
Drop-out on a come-back,
Prince of no-man's land
With your head in clouds or sand,
You were the clown
Social worker of the town
Until your candid forehead stopped
A pointblank teatime bullet.
Get up from your blood on the floor.
Here's another boat
In grass by the lough shore,
Turf smoke, a wired hen-run -
Your local, hoped for, unfound commune.
Now recite me William Bloat,
Sing of the Calabar.
Or of Henry Joy McCracken
Who kissed his Mary Anne
On the gallows at Corrnmarket.
Or Ballycastle Fair.
"Give us the raw bar!"
"Sing it by brute force
If you forget the air."
Yet something in your voice
Stayed nearly shut.
Your voice was a harassed pulpit
Leading the melody
It kept at bay,
It was independent, rattling, non-transcendent
Ulster - old decency
And Old Bushmills,
Soda farls, strong tea,
New rope, rock salt, kale plants,
Potato-bread and Woodbine.
Wind through the concrete vents
Of a border check-point.
Cold zinc nailed for a peace line.
Fifteen years ago, come this October,
Crowded on your floor,
I got my arm round Marie's shoulder
For the first time.
"Oh, Sir Jasper, do not touch me!"
You roared across at me,
Chorus-leading, splashing out the wine.
__________
Now the poem that I might have chosen from Seamus Heaney, was: The Summer Of Lost Rachel, in which the voice in the poem, against a backdrop of fruitfulness and abundance of life, has a longing, "To run the film back", beyond the point of the, "twisted spokes" and "Awful skid marks..."
This sense of the passage of time, and change in all of us, that is not necessarily apparent to others, is to be found also in the poetry of Thomas Hardy; and in the context of our meeting, I was minded to go with: This Summer And Last. In this short poem, Summer is personified, to the extent that it has to listen to the provocative voice of a bragging lover:
Unhappy Summer you,
Who do not see
What your yester-summer saw !
Never, never will you be
It's match to me,
Never, never draw
Smiles your forerunner drew,
Know what it knew !
Divine things done and said
Illumined it,
Whose rays crept in to corn-brown curls,
Whose breezes heard a humorous wit
Of fancy flit. -
Still the alert brook purls,
Though feet that there would tread
Elsewhere have sped.
So, bran-new summer, you
Will never see
All that yester-summer saw !
Never, never will you be
In memory
It's rival, never draw
Smiles your forerunner drew,
Know what it knew !
_______________
Now the question that I hope is exercising you, is this: If I had all these options to choose from, why did I settle for the sixteenth century, and a poem by Henry Howard Earl of Surrey? : a young man from Norfolk, favoured at the court of Henry VIII, but who later was executed on a spurious charge of treason.
Well among the various reason that I gave to the group for choosing this poem, was its antiquated use of language, language that takes us beyond the norm, and that however different from what we are used to, has its own charm.
As it stands, this poem is a moral tale, about unrequited love and the consequence of failure; and a warning to all those who might venture into these treacherous waters. Depressed, through the dark months of winter, the voice, with the arrival of summer, is loath to go outdoors, even though his instinct is telling him that it is the thing to do. But venturing out, his spirits are revived by the sense of space, freedom and abundance in nature that is everywhere about him; and in particular, in the birds singing and happily building their nests. In this changed mood he gives thanks to God and is repentant for having blamed Him for his misfortune. But once back indoors his state of melancholy deepens, so that he sees his woes as increasing, and God, (who out-of-doors was merciful), as still angry with him, for what he calls "my rebell".
Now the words "As it stands" are important, for the only thing that we can be absolutely certain of, is that the story as told is about unrequited love and its consequences in this case. But given that it was written by Henry Howard, who, like Sean Armstrong, was cut down in the prime of life, it can reasonably be argued, as it was at the poetry meeting, that this poem is a metaphor for life, that for all of us, is complex and uncertain.
On paper the poem has the appearance of a monologue; and as published it is not indented, the indentations are mine, as a means of dividing it into manageable sections. And an interesting aspect of the rhymed endings is when we come to lines 5 and 6; "stir" and "dore" don't rhyme, but in the sixteenth century the word door (as we spell it now), when pronounced, may have had more of an "r" sound to it, in which case it would have rhymed with "stir". And among the many things that I like about this poem, (not withstanding uncertainty in the hyphenated words), are the dialogue that the voice engages in with itself; the change of pace and mood, i.e. the expressions of almost childish delight, where the voice out of doors exclaims "Lord, to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out". But the poem is more sophisticated than that, in that words that we would expect to be descriptive of winter, "force" and "might" become attributes of summer, that triumphs, over winter's "stormy blasts." : -
When Summer took to hand the Winter to assail
With force of might and virtue great his stormy blasts to quail,
And when he clothed fair the Earth about with green,
And every tree new garmented, that pleasure was to seen,
Mine heart gan new revive, and changed blood did stir
Me to withdraw my winter woes that kept within the dore.
"Abroad," quod my desire, "assay to set thy foot
Where thou shalt find a savour sweet, for sprung is every root;
And to thy health, if thou were sick in any case,
Nothing more good than in the spring the air to feel a space.
There shalt thou hear and see all kinds of birds y-wrought
Well tune their voice with warble small, as nature hath them taught,"
Thus pricked me my lust the sluggish house to leave,
And for my health I thought it best such counsel to receive.
So on a morrow forth, unwist of any wight,
I went to prove how well it would my heavy burden light.
And when I felt the air so pleasant round about,
Lord, to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out!
There might I see how Ver had every blossom hent,
and eke the new bethrothed birds y-coupled how they went,
And in their songs, methought, they thanked Nature much
That by her licence all that year to love, their hap was such,
Right as they could devise to choose them feres throughout;
With much rejoicing to their Lord thus flew they all about.
Which when I gan resolve, and in my head conceive,
What pleasant life, what heaps of joy, these little birds receive
And saw in what estate I, weary man, was brought
By want of that, they had at will, and I reject at nought:
Lord, how I gan in wrath unwisely me demean!
I cursed love, and him defied: I thought to turn the stream.
But when I well beheld he had me under awe,
I asked mercy for my fault that so transgressed his law:
"Thou blinded God," quod I, "forgive me this offence:
Unwittingly I went about, to malice thy pretence."
Wherewith he gave a beck, and thus methought he swore:
"Thy sorrow ought suffice to purge thy fault, if it were more."
The virtue of which sound mine heart did so revive
That I, methought, was made as whole as any man alive.
But here I may perceive mine error, all and some,
For that I thought that so it was, yet was it still undone;
And all that was no more but mine empressed mind,
That faint would have some good relief of Cupid well assign'd
I turned home forthwith, and might perceive it well,
That he aggrieved was right sore with me for my rebell.
My harms have ever since increased more and more
And I remain, without his help, undone, for ever more.
A mirror let me be unto ye lovers all:
Strive not with love, for if ye do, it will ye thus befall.
_______________
© Cormac McCloskey
Sean Armstrong was murdered on 29th June 1973, one of 263 people to die that year.
"Ver" = Spring.; "hent" = taken hold of, i.e., brought out every blossom "feres" = companions, mates.
Summer in Bucharest, by Fleur Adcock
from, Scanning The Century
The Penguin Book of the
Twentieth Century in Poetry
ISBN 0-67-088011-6
A Postcard from North Antrim, by Seamus Heaney
from,The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry
ISBN 0-571-13761-X
This Summer And Last, by Thomas Hardy
from The Works of Thomas Hardy
Publisher: Wordsworth's Poetry Library
ISBN 1-85326-402-4
"When Summer took to hand the Winter to assail"
by Henry Howard Earl of Surrey
from Silver Poets Of The Sixteenth Century
Publisher: Everyman
ISBN 0 460 87440 3
