Robert and his Graves

I have been reading a few of Robert Graves' poems recently. His name coincidentally chimes with many of his poems' subject matter from many different perspectives. I have even found an article on him titled 'The Haunted Mind', a very good read.

For today we shall look at 'The Cupboard', the entire message of which slips beyond my understanding, for now. Nevertheless I can feel the emotions he is trying to convey. After all, each person forms their own reading of any writing, and this is mine only.

Unfortunately I cannot find a print of the text which I can use here, so instead I shall provide a link to the poem on the Poetry Foundation website:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=14&issue=5&page=23

The most intriguing thing to me about this poem is the voices. Here we have a mother asking questions of a daughter. Not in the typical way that a mother asks her young child questions she already knows the answers to, but with persistent curiosity to a presumably adult woman, who appears to want children of her own now but for some reason cannot. That is my reading. From another perspective one could imagine that the daughter is perhaps young, but old enough to understand that when her mother has miscarried her to-be sibling, the trauma has deeply affected the older woman, leading the girl to try to hide any remembrance of it.

Within my interpretation, there are two imaginings of the mother: she is either mentally able, and therefore prying into her daughter's affairs; or she is ageing mentally with dementia or a disabling condition, and so is trying to recall what is in the cupboard for her own sake. I shall put forward my arguments for both these cases henceforth.

Concerning the first interpretation, we have the terms of address. By using 'Mary' to address her daughter, perhaps the mother is wanting to take control of her daughter's attention and remind her of her superior status as mother. It could be read aloud in a warning tone. After all, the mother has control over the name 'Mary' as she is the one who gave it.

Following this, we have the unequal address from Mary to the mother as 'Mother dear'. The latter endearment could be a pragmatic balm to soothe the inquisitive and domineering mother, who never offers that affection in return. The 'dear' augments to 'dearest' and 'mine', as if trying to put off her inquisitor, maybe even sarcastically. The fact that the final stanza ends this form of address and even ends the whole poem with a simple 'you' supports the theory that once the information has been withdrawn, the relationship's amicable façade breaks, and the daughter finally stands offensively rather than defensively with her own question, 'what's it to you?'.

My preferred reading is this: the mother is not able to remember that her daughter has been unable to have a baby, whether this is because she has not found the correct partner, or because she is physically unable, or even has had a miscarriage. Whatever the reason, the daughter has now both her personal worry and the worry of caring for her mother. For that reason she uses the terms of endearment sincerely, possibly feeling she has to remind her mother who she is in order for her to remember her in the long term. To me, this makes the poem all the more poignant when we reach the final line; the mother is so dependant on how the daughter perceives their world that 'the truth' could be anything said by Mary and the mother would believe it. Also, her harrowing experiences will not much upset the mother as perhaps she will forget the conversation in a few hours or even minutes.

In this poem, the focus on a standard household object highlights the domestic issues of our time. Why else would a cupboard be so important?

Hughes up next?

This week is the long-awaited poet, Ted Hughes. He has been a great influence upon modern poets and so I feel it is worth time to look at a longer poem than usual; I found 'Daffodils' but apparently I can only get a part of the poem. I shall have to do some more hunting for that one. Another that I like is this:

Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days

She gives him his eyes, she found them
Among some rubble, among some beetles

He gives her her skin
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment

She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her

He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
And sets them in perfect order
A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired
She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing
Incredulous

Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them
So that his whole body lights up

And he has fashioned her new hips
With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled
He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it

They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily
To test each new thing at each new step

And now she smoothes over him the plates of his skull
So that the joints are invisible

And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach
With a single wire

She gives him his teeth, tying the the roots to the centrepin of his body

He sets the little circlets on her fingertips

She stitches his body here and there with steely purple silk

He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth

She inlays with deep cut scrolls the nape of his neck

He sinks into place the inside of her thighs

So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.

This poem is beautifully intimate without being explicit. It encapsulates the symmetry of husband and wife and how the physical connection aids the spiritual or mental one. The theme is giving and sharing - a marital theme. Both man and woman act in return to the other's act, showing their equality.

I am glad that the woman's 'fearfulness' recedes into 'perfection', for the tone would have become eerie if that emotion had been further pursued. What is slightly odd is the mechanical motif, with oil and steel depicting the scene. Perhaps the suggestion is that a marriage builds itself slowly, eventually creating a working machine that might need repairing from time to time but hopefully was built to last. Also, Hughes sees intercourse as a matching process, where specific parts are compatible with others, requiring them in order to function properly.

So marriage is about renewal, fitting two people together as they were made to be. Perhaps Hughes believed in soul mates, or maybe the 'new' parts show that anyone can make a marriage work, even against the odds.

More me poetry

This week I came across a poem I wrote a while back in the spur of the moment and thought that it's time to share it. It's short and sweet (I hope rather like me!) and doesn't' have a particularly interesting title, but I like to think it follows the vein of my favourite country-focused poems. I have just visited Cornwall and so it's been on my mind a lot.

Enjoy!

Rainy walk with a loved one

It's raining, muddied ground, chilly air

But we walk

Bitter cold of winter stinging hands

But we walk

Wind so strong you need one another's support

But we walk

Because whenever we walk this path, this track, this field,

We smile as if it were sunny

Like the last time.

Like the first time.

Edible Poetry

Today I baked three batches of yummy cooked goods, and feel inspired to cover a foody poem. And the one I have found has lines that strangely link in with last week's poem, noting how 'good night' is not always a pleasant notion. Also, I love the coincidence of the poet's name: Mary Lamb.

Breakfast

A dinner party, coffee, tea,
Sandwich, or supper, all may be
In their way pleasant. But to me
Not one of these deserves the praise
That welcomer of new-born days,
A breakfast, merits; ever giving
Cheerful notice we are living
Another day refreshed by sleep,
When its festival we keep.
Now although I would not slight
Those kindly words we use ‘Good night',
Yet parting words are words of sorrow,
And may not vie with sweet ‘Good Morrow',
With which again our friends we greet,
When in the breakfast-room we meet,
At the social table round,
Listening to the lively sound
Of those notes which never tire,
Of urn, or kettle on the fire.
Sleepy Robert never hears
Or urn, or kettle; he appears
When all have finished, one by one
Dropping off, and breakfast done.
Yet has he too his own pleasure,
His breakfast hour's his hour of leisure;
And, left alone, he reads or muses,
Or else in idle mood he uses
To sit and watch the venturous fly,
Where the sugar's piled high,
Clambering o'er the lumps so white,
Rocky cliffs of sweet delight.

The main image in this poem is that breakfast is a rejuvenator, bringing a new beginning with each new day. The modifier 'new-born' is strongly emotive, connoting the bare purity which babies have and adults lack. Power is given to 'breakfast', as it is named 'the welcomer', and is personified to '[merit]' praise, again evoking the image of the benign child.

I perceived a sad yet relieved note in the section, 'we are living/ Another day'. It is broken up by enjambment and so I felt the slight pause imitated a sigh of relief that 'another day' has been given to the narrator. Ergo, I researched the poet's life and found she suffered with mental illness, which caused her to kill her mother, leading her to confinement. So the importance of breakfast is heightened in this case, as perhaps the thought of suicide, destitution or imprisonment was looming, and eating at leisure became a sign of safety for another few hours at least.

'Parting words are words of sorrow'. As I have mentioned, this chimes with Shelley's words a few decades before. The contrast of night and morning is highlighted with the rhyme to 'morrow'. This was a time of polite company, where one would stay with friends far longer than today, and so again the feeling of security is reinforced through the meeting in the 'breakfast-room'.

Even the servants ('Sleepy Robert') were given 'leisure' at breakfast. Then we drop further down the social scale to the 'fly', who is made akin to humans in the way that it enjoys breakfast in its own way, with a metaphorical 'cliff' symbolising human love of nature at the time also. Perhaps we are all, like animals, slaves to our appetites, but why not enjoy that fact as well as one can?

P.B.S: Poems by Shelley

Shelley's is another life cut short, at the age of 29. And yet another who was not fully appreciated in his time either. Some say he drowned himself, others that it was an accident in a storm. Either way, it is incredible how much work he managed to put out into the world in such a short time.

I often come to research a poet and find that I have read one of their works before. This time, I find it is Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias', which I rather enjoyed when I came across it at GCSE level. The poem I have chosen, however, has a different focus from that of ancient kingdoms to the very present, written perhaps about one of his two wives, or even many of his female companions, with whom he often had platonic relations.


Good Night

Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be good night.

How can I call the lone night good,
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood --
Then it will be -- good night.

To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,
They never say good-night.                         

This poem revolves around a rather solemn pun; that the 'good' in 'good-night' might be an elliptical phrase, wishing someone well on departure, but can be received by that someone bitterly due to the very fact of the departure.

The poem begins as if a mental musing after being wished a 'good-night'. The narrator questions himself as to how the speaker could have truly wished this if they loved him as equally as he loves them. For surely, he thinks, they would have stayed 'unite[d]' in order for all to be happy and good.

The questioning continues in the second stanza, with less violent and angry a temperament as in the first ('severs'). He admits that his lover's use of the 'good night' phrase is a 'sweet' one, as if to calm himself in an afterthought through right branching. He follows his question with an imperative prayer, augmented from the hortatory 'let us', to relay his increasing passion on the subject. The repetition of 'be' emphasises his focus on the state of separate existence of the two lovers, of what is and is not.

He then focuses on the distance itself, with the spatial adjectives 'near' and 'close' juxtaposed line by line. The hypallage of the the latter depicts the evening as a time to be spent intimately with a companion, meaning that separation should occur rather in the day, when 'light' comes. The rhyme with 'light' and 'night' following shortly links the two part of the day, however, suggesting that he wishes the night to be spent as they do the days. It almost appears paradoxical, then, that when the night is good, good-night is 'never' said. But perhaps the implication is that words are not needed when the physical will suffice during the night time.