It’s not bad. Blimey. OK, it’s not Wallace Stevens, but I, astonishingly, don’t hate it. So you’ll have to read it again yourselves. I insist.

No snow, no frost, again this year,
No ice nor sleet nor hail;
The south-west wind brings in the rain,
The rain brings in a gale,

And twinkling Santas, reindeer, stars,
Strain against their ropes -
Not dreams of warmth and food and light,
No need for self-same hopes,

No dark, no cold, no starving night,
And this not one bright jewel,
No candle held for sun’s return,
No hopes to dash – oh, cruel -

And then I went back to work and more or less forgot about it until this evening. Oh yes! Friday! Poetry! [Oh, give it a rest - Ed]. So I did look it up, and the poem I meant was Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens. And I had been particularly thinking of the thirteenth, and last, section: ‘It was evening all afternoon./ It was snowing/ And it was going to snow./ The blackbird sat/ In the cedar-limbs.’

The odd thing is, I had remembered the poem as being rather affected and only intermittently interesting. And now, the more I read it, the more I like it. The haiku-like structure. The quasi-mythical outbreaks hinting at whole worlds of untold story in sections VII and XI. The strange journey it takes you on, in and out of simplicity, from one blackbird in the snow, to an ‘I’, a man and a woman, multiplying into heraldic creatures haunting the poem, as sign and countersign of themselves (and a small part of my brain says, sable a blackbird countercoloured Or, to go with the coach and equipage), hunting something, someone, through the sections, before collapsing back into a numinous starkness, crossing the river (rivers are Highly Significant to poets who know their mythology. Lethe. Styx. Etc.) and coming to rest as the single blackbird in the snow again.

[On the other hand, Section XII still sounds like a spy's sign and countersign in a Terry Pratchett spoof. As for 'bawds of euphony' in section X? Oh, FFS, really].

Eh. No doubt there are people out there who love the bawds of euphony, infelicitous as they may sound in a poem based on a kind of zen, stripped bare, imagist aesthetic. On balance, I still like it very much. I think I see what he wanted the bawds of euphony for, for the echoes of ‘bored’ and ‘phony’, and the grubby taste of tawdryness, of prettinesses for popularity’s sake, against the unadorned birds and the green light. It possibly sounds much dafter to a 21st century ear than it did at the time – it was published in 1917. Think on that.

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

I like this one in particular. The sestet is haunting me.

Sonnet XLIII

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

I wrote this a grand old whole five hours ago, while drinking tea and eating caramel short-bread after a hard day’s staring at Officially Interesting Things. And tomorrow I shall probably hate it. At the moment, however, I am pleased, because I’ve had a dry spell and written pretty much eff-all poetry for a while, and because despite the arguable lack of a proper caesura or kireji, it does use an appropriate kigo or season word, and it is about the wonder of nature in a wistful sort of way, making it a humble [very] low-ranking [exceedingly] contender in the Great Art of Proper Haiku. [pfff].

[What? It's not my job to like Reed's scribblings].

Botanic Gardens, Oxford

A white fish below
Drifting leaves and begging ducks
Waits out cold water.

At the eleventh hour, I snuck off into the stacks at work, so I could stand for two minutes in silence without being interrupted. My first year working at the Current Place of Employment (affectionately nicknamed the Library of Glum several years ago), I automatically stood at my desk at 11:00 am on the 11th of November, and bowed my head, and after a few seconds I realised I was the only person in the office doing this, and a few seconds after that, someone came up to ask me a question, and I just stood there, crimson with embarrassment, staring at my keyboard and staying upright and silent now out of sheer bloody-minded pride. My mind was certainly not full of thoughts of sorrow and longings for peace.

After that, I tended to slope off to find a private corner to stand about in. I am not Spartacus.

Anyway, as it’s Friday, and I haven’t written a poem this week (I’ve written half of one poem, and half of another poem, and they are quite clearly not part of the same poem and it is absolutely maddening), and it was Armistice Day and on Sunday it will be Remembrance Sunday, I thought I’d give you my favourite Wilfred Owen poem. It’s not as well known as Anthem for Doomed Youth, or Dulce et Decorum Est, but I find it far more moving than either.

Futility

Move him into the sun–
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds–
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,–still warm,–too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
–O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen, 1918.

Funeral Cortege

Taken back, little boats, as we turned homewards,
The which of us unmoored,
The which of us dissolving?

In Spring this old magnolia puts forth
White hands held up in prayer, is
One hundred saints on one worn trunk,
And passers-by lift up their faces.

Oh birdie, I would have shown you it,
And you, just old enough to see,
Raising your own white hands, so tiny,
Astounded at the sudden brightness -

Your absence underneath my heart
Still haunting me in all things perfect,
Weightless as just one hand praying,
My clenched fist in the midst of glory.

January Daylight

Is cold one day in five, is wet,
Is kept awake by gales,
Is astonishingly still by dawn.

Is grey as a tupperware box, is clear,
Is an arctic glass-cold summer,
Is thick with salty water,

Is shrunken, swallowed in dark, is brief,
Is seen through windows only,
Is gone, with an escort of street-lamps.

That’s your lot for today. Like I said, still busy.

Damn those Management essays.

(Photo courtesy of Ramson)

At dawn of day the apple-thief
Comes dancing in her leitmotif,

Slotting each foot in a previous slot
Made yesterday in the orchard plot,

Returns again to where left off she -
The leafless, branch-bent apple-tree -

And among the windfalls idly browses
Safe from guns so near the houses.

So dainty-legged, her sister-beast,
Reducing apples was reduced to feast,

And seeing her pause, I think in pain,
Oh, she the apples, we the gain

Posting on the first of January was naturally out of the question, as I only got home from my parent’s residence [not a typo, just the one parent at said residence - Ed] at An Hour We Shall Insist Was UnGodly and I think I went as straight to bed as possibly consistent with eating dinner, faffing about and pretending to do laundry. The second, I had a migraine. The third, I went to work. Which was, as ever after a prolonged season of lie-ins, bloody knackering. And anyway, I was sleep-deprived, as the husband was unwell and therefore uninclined to lie still and breathe quietly, and I had migraine hangover, which consists of deep, persistent dorkishness, inability to spell, and tendency to walk into door-posts. Today, husband still tiresomely not in charge of his own respiratory passages, but I’ve got the hang of this coherent thought thing again [hah!].

And so, to prove it, here is a little New Year poem for you all. Lucky you.

Arbitrary

The date, the hour of sunset, midnight.
Weather. Floods. All arbitrary.
The right-now so-dark well of the year
Rises high above and out of sight

And yet begins afresh. It’s here
At the starting-gate, so arbitrary,
We each eyeing the climb ahead,
Denying or feeling or succumbing to fear,

Here, that we believe, and it is said,
Is our redemption, arbitrary,
While the endless sunlit year spreads out
Chance after chance we could take instead.

I assure you, despite the extreme obviousness of above title, that it arrived well before the rest of the poem. And then the first two lines. You could say it is the poem that is obvious, in turning its own title into a motet like that.

I was temporarily uninspired to continue, and left the two lines lying about on a jotter somewhere. And then, of course, yesterday I was still awake considerably after midnight [see above] so I tried to bore myself to sleep by considering my two lines, and ended up setting myself a little technical exercise – a strict rhyme scheme, the repeating use of the word arbitrary. And it says a lot about my general keenness at work at the moment that I spent over an hour the next afternoon polishing and fiddling with the results. So there you have it.

On comparing this poem to the nameless one about Christmas in the previous entry, I note that am clearly Mistress Grouchy-Pants these days. [Heigh ho].