Poetry notes

Yeats died in January 1939. Auden’s elegy (three sections) is a public poem, not a private sob. Section I is public weather. He disappeared in the dead of winter; brooks were frozen; snow disfigured the public statues; the mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. The instruments agree: the day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness the wolves ran on through the evergreen forests: nature does not stop. For him it was his last afternoon as himself, an afternoon of nurses and rumours; the provinces of his body revolted; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities; the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. A few thousand will think of the day “as one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.” Ireland is mentioned; Europe is already the “nightmare of the dark” that section III will name. Unit 1’s Modernism sits here: the master is dead; history does not stop for verse.

Section II turns from the weather to the man and the job of poetry. “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.” Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry. Then the famous refusal: “poetry makes nothing happen.” It survives “in the valley of its making,” a way of happening, a mouth. That is not a sneer at Yeats. It is a limit: verse does not run armies. Unit 1’s existential note (no alibi from history) starts here. Hold winter, the guts of the living, silly like us, and “nothing happen.” Section III will still command the poet to praise.

Section III is ceremonial verse, closer to an ode-stanza than to the free lines of I and II. Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie emptied of its poetry. Time, that is intolerant of the brave and innocent, worships language and forgives “everyone by whom it lives.” The next stanzas look out from the grave to 1939: “In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark.” Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face; the seas of pity lie locked and frozen. Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night; with your unconstraining voice still persuade us to rejoice. In the prison of his days teach the free man how to praise.

So the elegy does two jobs that Unit 1 named. Allusion: Yeats the public man, Ireland, Europe on the eve of war. Modernism’s late face: art cannot govern, yet the poet is still ordered to praise. It is not Owen’s underworld (that is a different set meeting). It is not Yeats’s own prayer for a daughter (Unit 2’s last lyric). An RTC from “poetry makes nothing happen” must still reach the last command: teach the free man how to praise. Do not stop at the winter weather.

“Fern Hill” (1945) is a memory of a farm childhood in Wales, sung in six long stanzas of green and gold. It is not an ode on the official list, and it is not Auden’s public elegy. The speaker was young and easy under the apple boughs, happy as the grass was green, the night above the dingle starry. Time let him hail and climb golden in the heydays of his eyes. Prince of the apple towns; famous among the barns; the calves sang to his horn; the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold. Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me. Unit 1 already used this lyric as a cousin of stream of consciousness: grammar rushes, colour repeats, Time is a person who holds the child.

The close turns the gold. Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea. Childhood was never outside Time; the farm was already a chain that sang. Personification of Time, colour-symbol (green/gold), the farm as a remembered kingdom: that is the exam handful. Do not call it surrealist membership; the dream-syntax still serves an elegy for youth. Beside Frost’s apple-picking, Thomas’s apples are joy before the sleep; Frost’s are labour at the edge of sleep. Stay on Fern Hill.

Frost’s first set lyric is harvest at the edge of sleep. My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree toward heaven still. A barrel that I didn’t fill; two or three apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. Essence of winter sleep is on the night; the scent of apples; I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of ice I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough, and held against the world of hoary grass. Magnified apples appear and disappear; stem end and blossom end; every fleck of russet showing clear. The instep ache of the ladder; the rumbling from the cellar bin. For I have had too much of apple-picking: I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. One can see what will trouble this sleep: the form of apples, with every fleck. The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his long sleep, as I describe its coming on, or just some human sleep. Unit 1’s stream-cousin is this drift: labour, ice-pane, heaven-ladder, animal hibernation, human death-sleep, not sorted into a farm-account. Symbolism: apples as the desired harvest that now weighs; the ladder toward heaven as work that still points past the orchard. It is not “Stopping by Woods.” Keep the pane of ice and the woodchuck. Do not import the snowy horse.

The second Frost lyric is four tight quatrains, rhyme aaba bbcb ccdc dddd. Whose woods these are I think I know; his house is in the village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.

Unit 1 put these woods under symbolism: rest, temptation, even death-sleep, held against promises and miles. The repeated last line is not decoration; sleep is said twice so that ordinary night-sleep and a last sleep both sound. Existentialism as a climate: a choice at the edge of the dark. Allusion is light — a fairy-tale forest without naming a tale. Do not call the lyric dystopia. Do not merge it with apple-picking’s cellar bin. Beside Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen,” this speaker still has promises that make something happen: he leaves the woods. Beside Owen, there is no enemy in the snow, only a horse and a duty.

Edwin Thumboo is the Singapore poet on this list. “Words” (1977) is a short lyric about language after it leaves the mouth. Words are dangerous, especially the simple kind you leave behind for others, for undesirable relatives and assorted purposes. They are understood simply, edited, taken with a kind of air, a careful disregard: their plainness complicates. When you mean to be polite, careful, explicit, considerate, circumspect — Tell him please that the anger has come to pass / That friendship is not maimed — you are likely to be quoted as saying He won’t. Unit 1 placed this lyric under Post Colonialism as language owned, used, and argued after empire, and under Post Modernism only as a glance: words as words, not a cathedral of one meaning.

Words are words. Except for us they are not personalities. We make them into poems. That close is the poet’s claim, not Shaw’s phonetics class. Beside Pygmalion (Unit 4), language is still power, but Thumboo’s worry is quotation and misuse, not Eliza’s vowels. Beside Gandhi’s swaraj, this is not a political programme; it is how a sentence travels in a multilingual city. Do not call Thumboo Harlem. Do not dump the lyric into magic realism. Hold danger, the polite message twisted to “He won’t,” and the last making of poems.

Owen Knowles’s 1999 Wordsworth Editions text is the paper’s named Owen. “Strange Meeting” is a Great War lyric of descent, not a trench-report only. It seemed that out of battle I escaped down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. One sprang up, and stared, with piteous recognition in fixed eyes. Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. I knew we stood in Hell. Then the other speaks: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.”

Whatever hope is yours, was my life also; I went hunting wild after the wildest beauty in the world, which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, but mocks the steady running of the hour. Courage was mine, and I had mystery; wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: to miss the march of this retreating world into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells. None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. The pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled, or discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. Let us sleep now. Unit 1: allusion (underworld, not a full Dante retelling); Modernism’s war-disillusion; existential stripping of official meaning; surrealism only as cousin (dream-hell still serves pity). Do not write the rest of Owen’s book. This meeting is the set page.

Anne Yeats was born in 1919; the lyric is a father’s prayer in a storm. Once more the storm is howling, and half hid under this cradle-hood and coverlid my child sleeps. There is no obstacle but Gregory’s wood and one bare hill whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind, bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed. He has walked and prayed an hour, and heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, under the arches of the bridge, and in the elms above the flooded stream. Imagining in excited reverie that the future years had come, dancing to a frenzied drum, out of the murderous innocence of the sea. May she be granted beauty and yet not beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught, or hers before a looking-glass; for such, being made beautiful overmuch, consider beauty a sufficient end, lose natural kindness, and maybe the heart-revealing intimacy that chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life unlucky; and that Queen who rose out of the spray, being fatherless, could have her way yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man. Allusion (Unit 1): Troy and Maud Gonne without a biography lecture. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn, because of her opinionated mind, barter that horn and every good by quiet natures understood for an old bellows full of angry wind? An intellectual hatred is the worst, so let her think opinions are accursed. In courtesy I would have her chiefly learned; hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned. The linnet is the image of a mind that will not shriek in argument. Do not retell the whole of Yeats’s life. The storm, the cradle, Helen, and the angry wind are this half of the prayer.

The last movement names what should root the girl. May she become a flourishing hidden tree, that all her thoughts may like the linnet be, and have no business but dispensing round their magnanimities of sound. Nor but in merriment begin a chase, nor but in merriment a quarrel. O may she live like some green laurel rooted in one dear perpetual place. His own mind, because the minds he has loved prosper but little, has dried up of late; yet he knows that to be choked with hate may well be of all evil chances chief. If there is no hatred in a mind, assault and battery of the wind can never tear the linnet from the leaf. Then the bridegroom: may he bring her to a house where all’s accustomed, ceremonious; arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares. The famous close: how but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn, and custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Unit 1’s Modernism needed a new form to hold fragments: Yeats answers with ceremony, not with Joyce’s stream. Symbolism: horn of plenty, laurel, linnet, storm versus rooted tree. Beside Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen,” this father still wants a social form that can happen for a child. Beside Frost’s promises, Yeats’s promises are custom. Two rooms for the exam: storm, Helen, angry wind; then linnet, laurel, custom and ceremony. That is the set prayer.