Other lovely poetry blogs

I thought it would be nice to highlight some of the poetry blogs that I have found and read, because it is lovely to hear other interpretations and learn about all the poets I am yet to discover. These range from professional essayists to novices like me, but all share the same passion and avid interest that drives me to this page each week. So without further ado (don't you just love that phrase? I've never actually used it myself!), here are my favourites:

http://magmapoetry.com/blog/ Has a range of comments on poetry collections and competitions. Very accessible.

http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.uk/ A very interesting method of combined authorship has been used in the most recent post as a collection of lines from the blog's history.

http://www.eatthispoem.com/blog/ Right up my street: food and reading both in one place.

Do comment if you have found any blogs that you love as well, I find sharing opinions and different and new poets so much fun.

How Hardy can it be?

Thomas Hardy lived during the Victorian era, full of change and invention, patriotism and glory. Yet I have found that his poems do not give inklings to any of these; they rejoice in nature, perhaps because he felt the typically British focus on this was being overwhelmed by the wider appeals of the Empire. For this reason, I was reminded on Wordsworth when researching his works, especially the poem I have chosen for today. I do love a bit of Romanticism and Naturalism...

The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House

One without looks in tonight
Through the curtain-chink
From the sheet of glistening white;
One without looks in tonight
As we sit and think
By the fender-brink.

We do not discern those eyes
Watching in the snow;
Lit by lamps of rosy dyes
We do not discern those eyes
Wandering, aglow
Four-footed, tiptoe.

I think I need to do a study of how knowledge of a title affects how you read something and whether the title should be known by the reader before commencing, because I probably would have taken the four-footed creature rather ominously knowing my overactive imagination; it seemed, if not a deer, a were-wolf with rosy eyes of blood lust! I suppose Hardy assumed the reader would know of the title he provided, thus avoiding silly confusion such as mine.

Therefore, what I am finding is that the title sets a calm yet isolated setting and tone to the piece; this place is removed from the rush and hurry of growing London and the animal is as far from exotic as you can get to the Victorian Brit.

From an ecocritc's point of view, there is still, however, separation of the natural world and the human-construct of the house. The deer is 'without', the opposite of 'in', and these two words are separated by the verb 'look', thus Hardy is using iconic phrasing to comment upon the distancing of humanity from nature.

By using the pronoun 'one' to represent the deer, Hardy almost personifies the creature, giving it higher status in the natural world as it performs the exact same action that the humans doing in looking. And by setting the scene in a 'lonely' house at night, which contains a comforting 'fender', but only for the humans, the people seem to be mistreating the deer by neglecting it's intrigue into the house and its inhabitants. The 'sheet of glistening white' is circumlocution for ice, implying that the deer must be very cold and even envying the humans their comfort. This could be validated by the fact that humans, as Hardy reminds us, are above creatures in the fact that they can 'think'.

Yet the word 'aglow' hints that the deer is either (a) warm enough in its natural environment or (b) has a mental fire just as the humans do; it can manage higher thought just as people can. This is supported by the fact that the humans cannot 'discern' the creature, finding fault in human logic when faced with true nature and its power.

Larkin about

The title of this post rather incorrectly implies that this week's poem will be light-hearted. I am afraid/pleased to say that no, it is actually rather dark. To me it reads with the thought of Yeats and the structure of Hardy or even Hughes. This makes sense as all these poets were probably influences on his works; he was writing in the mid 1900s. I know that Hardy was a favourite of his at least.

So, an aubade is a poem written for the dawn or morning. This is the worst time of day for an alcoholic, as set out in the beginning of the poem. It seems the poet was in fact prone to alcoholism himself, and eventually it sadly killed him. Both the themes of drink and death are present in the poem, foreshadowing his own demise, and I think knowingly.

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

To me, the narrator is a little unreliable. He claims to be only 'half-drunk' but then wakes at the hour of 'four' and thinks such dark thoughts that he must have had more than a few drinks. Perhaps by the end of the poem the narrator has realised this, with his simile about 'doctors' signifying an acceptance in the need for help after the reference to 'anaesthetic'.

Larkin touches on the near-taboo topic of death. I suppose after so much war in that century, people no longer wanted to accept the fact that natural death was an option. Loss of the self was not to be considered either. When pondering it, though, within yourself, you feel both the extent of 'never' and 'ever', as juxtaposed and rhymed on two subsequent lines. Human nature means we are sure of what happens to everyone else, but we cannot 'accept' it for ourselves.

His cynical attitude to 'religion' either offends the Christian reader (whilst making them think about their own belief) or pleases the atheist reader, which is ironic because the certainty of death is now being thought about and even welcomed in order to disprove something.

The constant comparisons and parallelisms, aided by rhymes like 'brave' and 'grave', remind the reader that death is always there and cannot be overcome, even by the virtues men struggle to achieve in life.

The final paragraph returns him to reality, demonstrating how easily we wish to forget the topic and focus on living another day. The final three lines are blunt sentences, removing all emotion from the voice and displaying how this narrator's life hardly seems worth the 'work'. He is actually most passionate about death, not life, which is sad but terribly beautiful.

It seems I have not yet studied Hardy, so it will probably be his poetry that you will find here next week. Have a good one!

So this is Modern Love

This week I felt I should cover a topic which affects so many people these days in so many ways. It's not a nice one in any way but people do produce some very touching work around it and so I felt I should share some of it and my thoughts as well.


No one needs to hear any of the disheartening figures about divorce, affairs, walk-outs, and everyone who is lucky enough to have two parents I am sure has experienced that awful feeling when they are shouting at one another and there is nothing you can do and you ask yourself if this is it. The end. Sure, things go back to normal for most people but not everyone is so lucky.


So here I will post two poems, one from the point of view of the two spouses, one from the child, because both perspectives are important and both poems are touching.




Modern Love: I
by George Meredith


By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet
Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
Each wishing for the sword that severs all.





Strangely, this poem is not as 'modern' as I had first thought by the title. It was written during the Victorian period but I'm sure you will agree it is still relevant today. I am assuming that the reason for the 'I' in the title is to imply that 'modern love' is about the self, or at least it is after love has left a marriage. Its isolation in the title reinforces this all the more.




The poem starts with an exophoric reference, 'this'. Thus the reader is placed 'in medias res', and 'this' could mean any little crack in a marriage that has slowly been chipped into a hole. The tragedy of this poem is the reminder of how a marriage should be shared, with words like 'common' and the singular 'head', as if they are one body. This is broken by the end of the poem, when they both wish for severance, a violent image which implies death would be better than their current situation, or, more worryingly, that each wishes to be rid of the other. 'Til death do us part' and all.




But this latter interpretation has not much proof, mainly because the 'he' in the poem does not seem to hate or even dislike his wife. He relates her weeping as 'venomous' but I read that more as a disappointment and regret in hisself that he could not keep her happy. The marriage is a part of him and it is dying and so he feel injured. He is also trying to be tender, with his hand quivering 'by her head', but this only emphasises the distance they feel between one another. And they both seem to be doing the same thing by being 'moveless', still ironically in sync even when their marriage is falling apart.






Now for my second choice: Divorce by Jackie kay


I did not promise
to stay with you till death do us part, or
anything like that,
so part I must, and quickly. There are things
I cannot suffer
any longer: Mother, you never, ever said
a kind word
or a thank-you for all the tedious chores I have done;
Father, your breath
smells like a camel’s and gives me the hump;
all you ever say is:
‘Are you off in the cream puff, Lady Muck?’
In this day and age?
I would be better off in an orphanage.

I want a divorce.
There are parents in the world whose faces turn
up to the light
who speak in the soft murmur of rivers
and never shout.
There are parents who stroke their children’s cheeks
in the dead of night
and sing in the colourful voices of rainbows,
red to blue.
These parents are not you. I never chose you.
You are rough and wild,
I don’t want to be your child. All you do is shout
and that’s not right.
I will file for divorce in the morning at first light.


I love how this poem begins and ends as if the narrator were a spouse. it highlights how there are more than two members of a marriage once children have been born. it also makes the younger person the one with the most sense as they can see that the relationships in the house are unhealthy and destructive. Not only are the parents here arguing with each other but they are neglecting their child because if they cannot love one another they cannot love what they produced together.




Yes, some of the lines come as shocking, like being 'better off in an orphanage' but they mimic the types of statements that are said in the heat of the moment and cause so much harm, even if unintentionally. We wish we could take them back but we cannot. That is why the line causes the end of the stanza, I think; a new start to the argument is needed. And that start is a straight forward sentence, showing that calm has returned to the voice of the narrator.




The fact that it is addressed throughout to the parents with the pronoun 'you' creates this feeling of argument and justice once it ahs been said. Thus, by the end of the poem, the narrator is ready to move on after having bottled up so many emotions and suddenly let them out. And like the first poem I looked at, 'I' is placed as most important from the outset as it is the pronoun which begins the poem, and can even have stress when spoken because it would highlight that she is a part of the marriage but did not ask to be a part of it.




...







For anyone who'd like to look at a poem with the same theme but with a less serious tone, 'How much do I love thee' is an affective piece, based on my favourite love poem, 'How do I love thee' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Whatever helps you cope.