Defining beautiful and enduring...

From 14A

There are records that similar sessions took place in Georgetown as early as the 1940s when Edgar Mittelholzer was involved. They continued through the 1960s into the 1970s and beyond and included Miles Fitzpatrick and Rupert Roopnaraine.

Ian McDonald most recently provided narratives out of these sessions during which poems were read, there were intellectual discourses and the consistent flow of rum. (Rum was a constant in Mittelholzer’s time and he commented on it satirically). McDonald, in the Sunday Stabroek, stressed the love of poetry among participants, but chiefly the reverence with which it was held by Carter. In a moving narrative, he related how Carter would call for a reading of “Among School Children”, how he would listen in silence with tears filling his eyes. Poetry has experienced no greater love. In particular, Part VIII, the final stanza of this poem, quoted at different times by McDonald and de Caires, one has to agree, is among the most moving closing lines in modern poetry.

“O chestnut tree . . .

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, . . .

How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Yeats (1865 – 1939) was an Irish poet, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923, who became quite involved in the Irish liberation wars, and eventually was a Senator between 1922- 1928. Among his duties was the inspection of schools, and this poem was inspired by a visit to a

Roman Catholic school in 1926. At that time, Yeats was beginning to reflect on age and youth, the relationships between them, and the future of the youth in the current society.

He explored these in a very neat, well structured poem with an easy rhythm, driven by casual rhyme and the narrative of a 60-year-old inspector of schools reflecting on the wide philosophical concerns because he was driven to reflect on his own youth and the prospects for the school children when they got to his age. He reflected on differences and similarities, dislocation and unity.

These thoughts also drove the poet to classical and mythological references, including his confrontation with Platonic theory. Man used to exist as a complete round being, but Zeus split him into two halves, because, as a whole, Zeus found he was too powerful. Since then, man has been seeking his other half and if he acquires it, he would achieve the completeness of Platonic love. That is why the poet in the final stanza reflected on the whole as against the sum of its parts. He expressed this in the most beautiful poetry.

Further, Greek mythology was explored in the reference to Leda who, while bathing in a lake, was raped by Zeus in the disguise of a swan. The poem is rich with these qualities of metaphor and myth and these, no doubt, appealed to Carter.

This kind of high quality poetry equates with the majesty and might of the great chestnut tree; no need to break it down into its various beautiful parts. Similarly, in the enthrallment of a powerful performance one would not wish to distinguish the dancer from the dance.