Poetical potpourri
POETRY seldom makes the news, but it does have its moments. What’s more, spring has now sprung, and poets have celebrated it in ways which help us understand its meanings; maybe not news, but renewal.
Poetry Day
National Poetry Day was Friday, August 25. My colleague Jacob Edmond ensured the day was marked, by poets reading their own work or each other’s, or by others reading favourites. Guess which poet I chose.
Paradise Lost
Chose is not the right word. Milton chose himself, because his epic appeared in print in August 1667, 350 years ago, in its first or tenbook form. We mostly know it in its second, twelvebook form. (That change is a story in itself.) Its printer, Samuel Simmons, registered it, whereupon the poem began its published life. Read about it in the excellent posting by Anthony Tedeschi, once of the Dunedin Public Libraries, now of the Turnbull Library in Wellington. Google lostturns350.
Spring is sprung
And spring has come. Poets have jubilated about this, not always memorably. Opinions vary about Wordsworth’s Daffodils. Browning yearned: O to be in England now that April’s here/ And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware/ That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf/ Round the elmtree bole are in tiny leaf/ and so forth. But springtime springs earlier here than our equivalent of April. And how do you see unaware? Isn’t seeing to be aware?
Give poets a chance
We must give poets a fair chance. Browning is enraptured by the thought of spring, remembered from exile. Though the circumstances and timing of spring shift around, his feeling rings true, sharpened not muted by absence and memory. The same goes for those daffodils. Yellow is (luckily) not spring’s only colour, but it was not their colouring which smote William and his sister Dorothy on 15 April 1802. She said: I never saw daffodils so beautiful . . . Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. He said, later: They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude. Between them, they said it well, with truth of feeling.
Eliot and Shakespeare
Or is a rapture like Browning’s made intense by the contrast, with flowers of exile? For T.S. Eliot, April is the cruellest month/ Breeding lilacs out of the dead land. The land is dead because of all the war dead, his lost friends, and a deadened soul. The loss is made worse by the spring sap rising.
Shakespeare
For sheer natural joy in spring, Shakespeare takes the biscuit; not in a poem but in a song. He equates spring with birdsong and lovesong. It was a lover and his lass/ With a hey and a ho and a hey nonnyno/ . . . When birds do sing/ hey ding a ding ding ding . . . / In springtime, in springtime, in springtime/ The only pretty ringtime . . . What’s a ‘‘ringtime’’? And what’s this hey ding a ding, is it bells ringing, or was he stuck for a rhyme?
What’s all this heynonnying?
Never mind! Shakespeare takes sound beyond words, into joyous noises, which music is. The song (from As You Like It) is best of all heard in Thomas Morley’s lutesong setting: google YouTube Morley lover.