First Love

Yeats is really the master of moon poetry. There are so many moon poems to choose from it seems  just to pick one. Much of his philosophical systematizing was based on the moon’s cycle, which produced poems as different as the violent ‘Blood and the Moon’, and the quiet, insinuating ‘The Cat and the Moon’, which compares the crescent moon to a cat’s pupils. He had begun mooning much earlier, of course, and in successive versions of ‘The Sorrow of Love’ its moon changes from ‘curd-pale’ to ‘crumbling’ to ‘climbing’, as it is emptied of poeticisms the better to stand starkly symbolic. Perhaps these revisions inspired a bitter love poem that insisted itself on me and made me reread it again and again recently – with some of its language stripped astonishingly bare (it was written the same year as ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in 1926) it reads almost like a brutal folk tale, and the coldness and frenzy and longing of it seems properly lunatic.

First Love

Though nutured like the sailing moon
In beauty’s murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.

(from ‘A Man Young and Old’, The Tower 1928)

Just say no

We interrupt these whimsical literary musings with a non-party political broadcast..

 Come on Ireland, just say NO! Presidential candidate Sean Gallagher is a man who

a) in 2009 gave himself an illegal tax-evading interest-free loan of €82, 829 from his public speaking company to his personal account. His accountants noticed and informed him he was breaking the law. He now claims this was an accidental clerical error. This is either corrupt or a matter of the most enormous incompetence (the loan was worth 70% of the company).

b) claimed that he with his cable expertise company, subcontractors of big property developers, to have created 100 jobs. He admitted yesterday that in the downturn he had to get rid of 80 people. That’s 20 jobs then Sean. Hardly Microsoft. And having been sacked twice yourself you’ll know tough it is. Let’s bring this entrepreneurial spirit to the Aras.

c) boasted in January 2009 of ‘a long record of involvement and commitment to Fianna Fail over the past 30 years’. Nothing wrong with this, except then to serve on the National Executive of Fianna Fail for two years, resigning in January 2011, and then to run as an ‘independent’ presidential candidate 5 months later following the March election meltdown is hardly credible. The same January 2009 letter remembers ‘I first served on the National Executive with Charlie Haughey in 1985-1987′, and notes his work as Political Secretary to Rory O’Hanlon as Fianna Fail Minister for Health and Minister for the Environment, and as a ‘full time’ fundraiser for the party ‘in Fianna Fail headquarters’. These are not the actions of a ‘grass-roots’ member, which he claims to be.

d) lied yesterday on live television.  He claimed he did not organise and personally collect donations for a 2008 Fianna Fail fundraiser. He did. Under closer questioning he then panicked, and eventually backtracked. He was forced to admit driving to a house to drop off photographs of the event. He still denied accepting there a €5000 donation. Under further pressure he admitted he might have taken a brown envelope. Ye Gods. It seems the businessman involved was also a convicted criminal.

It doesn’t matter who people vote for but surely, surely no voting  preferences should go to this man. From his own testimony he is a liar, a crook, and an ‘independent’ candidate who is fact an influential executive and fundraiser for a corrupt political party whose decisions condemned Ireland to economic armageddon.

Here are reputable printed sources for a) the illegal loan

c) the Fianna Fail connection

d) the €5000 donation

For b) visit here

and for all of these stories here’s a link to the RTE Frontline Presidential debate

Remember Zammo, Ireland. Just say no. Don’t listen don’t listen to anyone else. All you gotta do is be yourself.

Cats are not to be depinded on

W.B.Yeats spent much of the late 1880s writing to the poet Kathleen Tynan, praising her work, offering her advice, correcting the rhythms of her poems. Part of this was justifying (to himself as to her) his living with his family in ‘hateful London’ with its miserable poor, offensively rich, and literary men without convictions. His letters though describe his own precocious convictions beautifully, and an increasing attraction towards the whirl. Occasionally he was able to leave and consider his tenacious imaginative hold on the Irish west, and what it meant to him and to his writing, as in this lively letter. There is some of the strain of self-presentation here, but I see nothing of the cynicism he has latterly been accused of. He was also, as it happens, the most vibrant and unexpected of letter writers, always a pleasure to go back to:

to Katherine Tynan [13 Aug 1887]

Rosses Point, Sligo

You will see by the top of this letter that I am down at Sligo. I reached here Thursday morning about 2 oc having come by Liverpool but will return by Dublin perhaps.

Have been making a search for people to tell me fairy stories and found one or two. [...] It is a wonderfully beautiful day the air is full of trembling light. The very feel of the familiar Sligo earth puts me in good spirits. I should like to live here always not out of liking for the people so much as for the earth and the sky here, though I like the people too. I went to see yesterday a certain cobler of my acquaintance and he discoursed over his cat as though he had walked out of one of Kickhams novels “Cats are not to be depinded upon” he said and told me how a neighbours cat had gone up the evening before to the top of a tree where a blackbird used to sing every night “and pulled him down” and then he finished sadly with “cats are not to be depinded upon”. [ here follows some found verses and other stories…]

Your Friend

W B Yeats

PS [...] How does your article go on? I wish it were an Irish article, though at the comencement one I supose cannot chose ones own subjects always; but remember by being as Irish as you can you will be the more origonal and true to your self and in the long run more interesting even to English readers.

I am going now to a farm house where they have promised me fairy tales so I can write no more.

W.B.Yeats and the Arts

 

W.B.Yeats and the Arts begins on Friday 26th August at 12 noon.

 

See http://echoforum.wordpress.comfor more details.  

 

Yeats & the Arts

I am pleased to announce in association with ECHO, an international interdisplinary symposium on Yeats and the Arts, taking place at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway.  Only €50 (€40) for two days – and free to members of NUI Galway.

See the ECHO website for more details, or contact adrianpaterson@yahoo.com , or thomas.walker@ell.ox.ac.uk

Masterful

C.P.Snow. The Masters. 1951. (London: Penguin Books, 1956) 312pp.

Sixty years old, this – well, the only word is masterful – book on psychology and power relations has still to be bettered. It looks and smells all of its sixty years, the atmosphere and trappings seeming to savour of ambered wines and musty times past, the Cambridge college in which it is set cocooned in the opening’s deadening snow – and my paperback copy has long loosened its hold on itself – but its taste is crisp, clear, contemporary. In fact it describes a time of change, new money beginning to shift the college on its axis and anticipating future developments by remembering its past evolution. More than this, it describes so well things that do not change, the thoughts of men, their pride, ambitions, their subtleties, manoeuvrings, and self-deceptions, and in its swift sentences layering tension and suspicion contains more hard clear gems of human insight than barrowloads of contemporary psychological fiction. I say men – the focus is on men, the dying Master of a college, and his thirteen colleagues who must gather to elect a new leader. If this sounds dull, nothing could be less so. They are observed absorbed in action, in feeling and testing and using their influence, in trying their power, their strength, their allegiances, facing their own vanities and humiliations, in defeat, death, and annihilation. Women are actors too, it must be said, although as wives and loves far from alone centre stage, and they like all the people here are glimpsed in movement or helpless stasis as the clock ticks towards the election’s resolution. In short, this is politics writ naked, but instrumentally, cunningly, beautifully dissected. C.P.Snow himself was a molecular physicist, but had a good war: he became involved in the Civil Service selecting of scientific personnel, and his judgements of personality were tested in white heat. His narrator thus exacts an expert scrutiny on men judging and being judged, and finds unpredictability in the dullest, predictability in the most imaginative. The book should not therefore only be read by disillusioned university lecturers, though it describes better than almost anywhere I’ve seen the thirst for knowledge and the drying of its streams, and better than anywhere the politics of university living, the mutual suspicion of the arts and sciences, the pressure of both under dwindling resources. Its level dryness can make brief quotation from it seem, summary, spare, even unconvincing; yet in so squarely building its effects one detail or sentence can drop us with sickening suddenness through a hole in the human heart. The compassion, grief, and vulnerabilities glimpsed beneath the surface means the novel by no means lacks an emotional centre. It opens to view all the things, in other words, that matter to people in the world. Within its small canvas it is one of the wisest and most moving novels imaginable, and like the best realist fiction a living, dying world in miniature.

The moon and then the Pleiades

In honour of one of the largest moons in recent times I thought to post one of the smallest moon poems of all times…

Tonight I’ve watched

The moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone

Sappho (trans. Mary Barnard)

(Apparently several editors have denied this is by Sappho but then they fail to say who else might have written it..)

Prayer before birth

Prayer before birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Louis MacNeice

Eclipse

Long past time for another moon poem, I think, and having missed the recent eclipse, here is an anti-eclipse versicle from Ben Jonson, who entreats the earth not to shadow something so ‘excellently bright’.  This is a poem that thus carefully enweaves astronomy with mythology:

 Hymn to Diana

Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep:
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.

Earth, let not they envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia’s shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wishéd sight,
Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever:
Thou that mak’st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright!

Ireland & Romanticism

Another super publication available to buy here at amazon.  Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations, and Scenes of Cultural Production, from Palgrave MacMillan, nobly edited by Jim Kelly.  I’ve a jolly piece in it called ‘Drawing Breath: The Origins of Moore’s Irish Melodies’.

No doubt it's full of lovely gurls like this one.

With the best compliments of this season

Hiroshige: Evening Snow

Irish Studies in Britain

For those who are interested in these things: just published is a new volume called Irish Studies in Britain, delicately edited by Brian Griffin and Ellen McWilliams, and containing a good variety of essays historical and literary, including one of mine called ‘The Curlew and the Abbey: Peter Warlock and W.B.Yeats’.

out now!

Buy it here now! Ok, don’t get too excited. Anyway, here is an unbiased assessment:

“This lively collection of essays offers illuminating rereadings of modern Irish literature. It is often interdisciplinary in scope, but is meticulous rather than modish in its methdologies, drawing on the rich interplay between literary, musical, filmic and historical texts. Its diversity of subject and theme creates a collection that, far from being disparate, diagnoses a series of competing tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first century Irish literature: between the innovative and the inherited, the high and low, the real and the mythic, the appropriated and the imposed. The 1916 Uprising is a historical touchstone that prompts a series of revealing responses; the essays on Irish modernism and music also offer striking and informative reassessments of the prevailing critical consensus. Scrupulously and sensitively edited throughout, it offers a welcome intervention in the ongoing reconsideration and re-evaluation of modern Irish Literature, and is an excellent resource both for students and scholars in the field”.

—Dr. William May, Research Fellow in Humanities, University of Southampton

‘The Curlew and the Abbey: Peter Warlock and W.B.Yeats’, Irish Studies in Britain, ed. Brian Griffin and Ellen McWilliams (Sunderland: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 173-191. (buy)

Above the Dock

I post this short poem by T.E.Hulme, an acerbic casualty of the Great War, because the moon has been doing things like this above the docks, sadly not really much used, in Galway. Ezra Pound printed it with Hulme’s very few other terse poems in his collection Personae, with the note that ‘in publishing his Complete Works at thirty, Mr Hulme has set an enviable example to many of his contemporaries who have had less to say.’

Above the Dock

Above the quiet dock in mid night,
Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

So we’ll go no more a roving

Recent scientific studies have suggested the moon exerts a genuine pull on us. Some of this is wishful thinking of course, the ultimate in poetic fallacies, as no one can come up with a convincing reason as to why. Gravity won’t cut it, as the moon has no effect on lakes, never mind our body fluids. Still, we want to believe that we work to the rhythms of the moon, and we do undoubtedly seem to sleep less and behave odder when the full moon comes round. Certainly animals of assorted kinds behave according to the moon’s cycle: toads of various kinds get more excited, and mate more frequently. They are not the only ones. And wolves it seems really do howl more at the moon. They also prowl around less, perhaps because the other creatures they are hunting can see them better. All this brings to mind that prowler poet George Gordon, a.k.a Lord Byron, who knew all this long before the scientists. He also knew that the time for roving was short, and thinking so produced what has to be one of the finest moon poems.

So We’ll Go No More A Roving

So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

Joyce’s best moon poem

Another moon poem, a slightly archaic feeling one from James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach. It’s a Galway poem too though, which distinguishes it, and unusually for Joyce seems to be spoken by a woman mourning a lost lover. The situation, and some of the turns of language (‘falls softly, softly falling) is recognisable from his short story ‘The Dead’, and both apparently derive from his wife Nora’s youthful experience of love with the miserable young Michael Bodkin (or Furey), who stood outside her window in the rain, and shortly thereafter died and was buried in Rahoon (or Oughterard in the story). Though the theme is touching there persists just hint of jealousy on the part of the author, something on which Joyce throve (and built Ulysses). Still, its conspicuous remembering the dead seems fitting for All Souls Night, and for me makes a good prelude to the Yeats poem of that name (set in Oxford) which I hope everyone reads tonight.

She weeps over Rahoon

Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,
Where my dark lover lies.
Sad is voice that calls me,sadly calling,
At grey moonrise.

Love, hear thou
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,
Then as now.

Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold
As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould
And muttering rain.

Nowadays you might weep over Rahoon for other reasons, but that’s another story. You can however visit Michael Bodkin’s grave in the cemetary – Joyce did this himself, as well as taking a trip to Oughterard to see the more fictional resting place. I did this and fittingly it plummet-rained. But as the American said, it only rains here between the showers.