Fame

      It is dull and grey outside, for it is that time of year, and the news, whether is is to do with politics, economics, or religious faith, seems to be just as bleak. But there is good news also, in that those of us who don't have the responsibility of looking after more weighty things, have been getting on with life: sitting around in suburbia discussing poetry; and this time, the theme was, "Fame".

Well, having missed the last meeting, and hearing just a few days ago that the theme was Fame, my first thoughts were philosophical: to do with the nature and origin of things: what is fame? where does it come from? and more importantly, is it a necessary condition of what it is to be human? So if you like, I was looking for a poet-philosopher. But short on time and fearing that I might be on a hiding-to-nothing, my brain took a more practical turn. Queen Victoria (in all her blackness), came instantly to mind, as did poetry from the First and Second World Wars, as did Beowulf and Pan Tadeusz (both epic or long narrative poems), after which, I had the best of all ideas. In an attempt to do justice to my colleagues, and myself, I would focus on two books of poetry, on Scanning The Century (the 20th century that is), edited by Peter Forbes, and on Czeslaw Milosez, whose tomb I stumbled across in Poland. Well knowing where Czeslaw lives, I went there, and came back to my desk with two of his neighbours, Paul Eluard, and Charles Baudelaire. Paul Eluhard was a Christmas present from Leo in 2006, and I could see at a glance that I hadn't read him, for there were no telltale signs: no ticks in the Contents pages, and no signature, dated, at the end  And what is interesting about Flowers of The Forest, is, that when it first appeared, in 1857, it was prosecuted for outrage to public decency, with Baudelaire, ordered by the court to suppress a half dozen of the poems. Well, here's a poem by Baudelaire that in this quick scan of his work, (for I had read all of his poetry in the past), I liked, but didn't bring to the meeting:

Remorse After Death

When, sullen beauty, you will sleep and have
As resting place, a fine black marble tomb,
When for a boudoir in your manor-home
You have a hollow pit, a sodden cave,

When stone, now heavy on your fearful breast
And loins once supple in their tempered fire,
Will stop your heart from beating, and desire,
And keep your straying feet from wantonness,

The Tomb, who knows what yearning is about
(The Tomb grasps what the poet has to say)
Will question you these nights you cannot rest,

"Vain courtesan, how could you live that way
And not have known what all the dead cry out?"
-And like remorse, the worm will gnaw your flesh.

__________

Now it must be said that when we decide on a theme; (next month it is "heavenly bodies"), the task is not prescriptive, something that is reflected in today's choice of poems. But let us begin at the beginning, with this: The Glories of our Blood and State, by the sixteenth century poet, James Shirley. He was a contemporary of another of this mornings poets, John Milton, and there is a sense in which they travelled in opposite directions. Shirley was a Church of England clergyman, who became a Roman Catholic, a schoolteacher, and a prolific writer of plays, while Milton, whose father, John, came from a devout Catholic family, became a protestant, as a consequence of which, his son, the poet John, in turn became a clergyman in the Church of England; and a civil servant in the Commonwealth of England, under Oliver Cromwell. And he is of course famed for his epic poem, Paradise Lost.

Shirley's poem is powerful, for it is direct, and to the point, and leaves no room for manoeuvre. And though it was written at a turbulent time: when the concept of "the Divine Right of Kings" was called spectacularly into question, in bloody civil wars, and the execution, by beheading, of King Charles 1, it is worth mentioning that unlike the Republican Milton, Shirley was a Monarchist. But in saying this I must also acknowledge, that the sentiments expressed in this poem, are universal:

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings.
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill;
But their strong nerves at last must yield,
They tame but one another still.
Early or late,
They stoop to fate,
And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives, creep to death.

The garlands wither on your brow,
Then boast no more your mighty deeds;
Upon death's purple altar now,
See where the victim-victor bleeds.
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.
__________

Now for whatever reason, and accepting that Milton is a "major" as distinct from a "minor" poet, his poetry has never had much appeal for me, so I am going to pass over Lycidas, or rather, that portion of it, 15 out of 200 lines, that someone brought along today, and move on instead to one of my fellow countrymen,Oliver Goldsmith; and his well known poem, The Deserted Village. An idealized view of village life, this poem ii not without humour, and its rhyming couplets so skillfully constructed, that they could almost pass unnoticed. And its ending, crisp and coming as it does a century after John Shirley, conveys the same idea: the transient nature of Fame.

Beside yon struggling fence
With blossomed furze unprofitably gay,
There, in his noisy mansion, skill'd to rule,
The village master taught his little school;
A man severe he was, and stern to view;
I knew him well, and every truant knew;
Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace
The day's disasters in his morning face;
Full well they laugh'd with counterfeited glee,
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;
Full well the busy whisper, circling round,
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned;
Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault;
The village all declar'd how much he knew;
'Twas certain he could write and cypher too;
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And even the story ran that he could gauge.
In arguing too, the person owned his skill,
For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around,
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.

But past is all his fame. The very spot
Where many a time he triumphed, is forgot.

__________

Now of necessity I have to be selective, so, as mentioned previously, I am passing over the poetry of Milton, of Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, and Ruyn E Rice, and concentrating instead on two poems, Napoleon, by Elizabeth Jennings, and, St. Peter's Denial, by Charles Baudelaire. But as I knew nothing of Elizabeth Jennings before today, I have been doing a little research: extracting bits and pieces from, Lives of the Poets, by Michael Schmidt; So here is something of what I found, in as coherent a fashion as brevity will allow:

"She was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1926. She had a troubled childhood and attempted suicide more than once. Unlike Plath, [Sylvia Plath] Jennings does not allegorize the causes for her mental disturbance Poetry is not exorcism but sacrament, a sharing. However extreme her illness, poetry is a way back from the edge, not over it; at her most disturbed she witnesses other people. Without recourse to stylistic ironies, she gains a perspective on herself. The seasons, landscapes, artifacts and people surrounded her....

"She attended st Anne's College, Oxford, and became a librarian in the city. Her early distinction made her a focal figure for younger poets. They gathered about her and called themselves Elizabethans.....

"By 1961, after she had written her first celebrated collections of poems - A Way of Looking, A sense of the World and Song for a Birth or Death - she published her most substantial critical work. Of Every Changing Shape, a series of related essays, she writes: "I am concerned of three things - the making of poems, the nature of mystical experience, and the relationship between them." She was thirty-five, working as an editor at a publishing house in London, on the threshold of a religious and psychological crisis which was to last her for twenty years. She wrote this book "at the pitch of poetry", with entire concentration."

And lastly:

"She compares making poems to the practice of prayer: it reconciles the individual with what is outside it, self is lost in a larger stability. "Each brings an island in his heart to square/With what he finds, and all is something strange//And most expected." Prayer and poetry also risk the terrifying world of shadows. In her poem on Rembrandt's late self-portraits, in which she implicates herself, she declares, "To paint's to breathe/And all the darknesses are dated.""

Now accepting that this is a highly selective set of quotes from a much longer appraisal of her and her work, the important thing to remember is, that not only had I not come across this poem before, but I hadn't heard of Elizabeth Jennings either. She died in 2001:

Napoleon

Many who spoke with him a little found
Him most indulgent to the common voice
And sensitive to quirks of character.
I wonder, then, was this sent underground,
This gift for understanding, when he choose
All the impersonal power of emperor?

So much the legend haunts us. His last days
Slide easily into the sentiment
We like to hide our great men in. But was
The truth elsewhere, his talk with valet and
Children a screen while his real thinking went
Still to the thought of Europe in his hand?

There is no answer. Emperors elude
Our logic and survive within the small
Moment when they seemed ordinary. All
Our thoughts of greatness disappear when we
Can catch the emperor quite off his guard
And think he lived such hours continually.

__________

Now as this poem was read out, the image of Hitler leapt out at me, and making this known in the discussion that followed, we found ourselves sharing our thoughts about Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. For some, the response to the poem was, well we know that people can function on more than one level at the same time, that is, get on with the immediate task in hand, while working towards an unstated longer term objective. And another response, drawing on the human qualities that were attributed to Napoleon, was, that we remember these, because they are the things in Famous people that we can relate to. But for me, the implications of Jennings observation about concealment, was sinister, which was what prompted the memory of Hitler. Hitler could be charming, and he knew how to delegate; giving considerable freedom to his underlings; but he also knew how to manipulate public opinion, and the law toward a long term goal that he never lost sight of, and that never became apparent to the mass of German public opinion, until it was too late. His goal of absolute power, in which would be crushed, all the positive elements in society that he had used and manipulated (including the law),to get there. And when I mentioned that I could find no redeeming features in Stalin, it was suggested that many people in Russia loved Stalin and believed that if he had known what was going on in the countryside he would have stopped it. This point of view was offered with sincerity, to which I replied that this was part of the lie; (that, in some respects Stalin was just like us), and reinforced the point by explaining how shocked I was, (thinking that I knew something about China), to discover the extent of his involvement in the affairs of China. Without pity, and aided by Mao (who understood that he needed the backing of Stalin, if he himself was to come to power), he pursued his objective, using the Chinese as pawns, and with Mao as his agent, subjected the rural Chinese especially, to appalling suffering, as a means of establishing himself, and a newly industrialized Russia, as an unassailable force in a Marxist dominated world. And in respect of Stalin, I must mention also, that it was said, in this discussion, that when his daughter, Svetlana, came to the West, she described him as a loving father; at which, I kept silent about her troubled life, and the suicide of her mother, Stalin's second wife.

Now you might wonder how we could have had a discussion at this level in response to a poem; but it wasn't difficult. For a start, it has taken me longer to write the above paragraph as an accurate reflection of what was said, than for the discussion itself to take place; and also, all of us appreciated that we were not meeting as a group of social or political historians, that the focus was on poetry, and so, as to accommodate everyone, we had to move on

As for Jennings poem, it is interesting in that it poses questions, without providing answers, but there are some key pointers along the way, that suggest deep meaning: in respect of Napoleon's human qualities, the word "underground", and the word "choose" in respect of the "impersonal power of emperor." The suggestion is, that his quest for absolute power was deliberate, and at the expense of his humanity, rather than that he had fame thrust upon him. And what about the inference in the second stanza, that it is easier to believe the myth, than to confront the lie, an idea that is carried into the final stanza.

This last poem St. Peter's Denial, was my contribution to the meeting. In effect, it is in three parts. While the first two stanzas rage against God, to the point of blasphemy, accusing him of having an insatiable appetite for suffering; the next five stanzas are a sympathetic treatment of the person of Christ, (though it would seem not of God the Father), (stanza 3). And what is especially interesting in these stanzas, is the contrast in the language that is used when describing Christ's executioners, and Christ himself. "Scum" is not the language of faith, but it is key in this clash of sentiments, as is "Chagrin" A word that might have been prompted in the mind of the poet, by Christ's words from the cross: "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me". From the point of view of the voice in the poem, these are the only credible sentiments, a view seemingly carried over to the third sections, or final stanza. Here the voice picks up the powerful Gospel image of the sword, (Which Peter actually used in defence of Christ at the time of his arrest), and paraphrasing Christ's words, he wields it defiantly in the face of the Godhead; for it seems that he is neither capable of a Christlike response, nor convinced by Christianity. As he puts it, "the dream and the deed do not accord". But, as I suggested to the group, in the context of the rest of the poem, the final line seems weak: it lacks conviction. Is that, I asked, because it represents less than the truth, as the voice in the poem knows that after the threefold denial of Christ, Peter, full of remorse, "went out and wept bitterly". In effect, he had come to terms with his conflict of emotion, an attitude or disposition that is at variance with the premise of the poem.

And as I acknowledged, I had spent some time arguing with myself about the ending, which prompted a scholar among us, (who seemed uncertain about it also), to say that he would need to see what word was used in the original French, that in my Oxford World's Classics edition, has been translated as "justified."

Now believing that everyone, with or without faith, would accept that Christ was, and is, famous, I explained that my reason for bringing the poem, was, that it makes the point, that while the idea of "Fame" in any given situation, might require a response, Fame, of itself, is not enough, that for it to mean something, you have to be able to identify with the substance of what it is, that makes for Fame.

St. Peter's Denial

What, then, had God to say of cursing heresies,
Which rise up like a flood at precious angel's feet?
A self-indulgent tyrant, stuffed with wine and meat,
He sleeps to soothing sounds of monstrous blasphemies.

The sobs of martyred saints and groans of tortured men
No doubt provide the Lord with rapturous symphonies.
And yet the heavenly hosts are scarcely even pleased
In spite of all the blood men dedicate to them.

- Jesus, do you recall the grove of olive trees
Where on your knees, in your simplicity, you prayed
To him who sat and heard the noise the nailing made
In your live flesh, as villains did their awful deed,

When you saw, spitting on your pure divinity,
Scum from the kitchens, outcasts, guardsmen in disgrace,
And felt the crown of thorns around your gentle face
Piercing your temples, home of our Humanity,

When like a target, you were raised above the crowd,
When the appalling wrench of broken body's weight
Stretched out your spreading arms, and as your blood and sweat
Streamed down your body, and across your pallid brow,

Did you remember all the days of brilliant calm
You went forth to fulfill the promise made by God,
And on a gentle ass triumphantly you trod
The streets all strewn with blooms and branches of the palms,

When with your heart so full of hope and far from fear,
You lashed with all your might that money-changing lot,
And were at last the master? O, and then did not
Chagrin strike through your side more keenly than the spear?

-Believe it, as for me, I'll go out satisfied
From this world where the dream and deed do not accord;
Would I might wield the sword, and perish by the sword!
Peter rejected Jesus . . . he was justified!

__________
© Cormac McCloskey
The poems not included above that were read at the meeting, either in whole or in part, were:
Patriotism: 2 Nelson, Pitt and Fox, by Sir Walter Scott
Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
On Fame, by John Keats
Daffodils, by Ted Hughes (Not to be confused with Wordsworth)
Mandela, by Euyn P. Rice