O What Is That Sound

O What Is That Sound

O what is that sound that so thrills the ear

  Down in the valley drumming, drumming?

Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

  The soldiers coming.

 

O what is that light I see flashing so clear

  Over the distance brightly, brightly?

Only the sun on their weapons, dear,

  As they step lightly.

 

O what are they doing with all that gear,

  What are they doing this morning, this morning?

Only their usual manoeuvres, dear,

  Or perhaps a warning.

 

O why have they left the road down there,

  Why are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?

Perhaps a change in their orders, dear,

  Why are you kneeling?

 

O haven't they stopped for the doctor's care,

  Haven't they reined their horses, their horses?

Why, none of them are wounded, dear,

  None of these forces.

 

O is it the parson they want, with white hair,

  Is it the parson, is it, is it?

No, they are passing his gateway, dear,

  Without a visit.

 

O it must be the farmer who lives so near.

  It must the farmer, so cunning, so cunning.

They have passed the farmyard already, dear,

  And now they are running.

 

O where are you going? Stay with me here!

  Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?

No, I promised to love you, dear,

  But I must be leaving.

 

O it's broken the lock and it's splintered the door,

  O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;

Their boots are heavy on the floor,

  And their eyes are burning.

 

-W. H. Auden

 

Why has this poem been running through my head lately? I'm sure I can't explain it. Though it's true I did almost lead with a picture of a 'Notorious El Salvadoran Prison'. 

Does this mean I'm going to be more active on the blog again? Hmm...maybe. But I have been lately thinking that that three-month blogging vacation I just took was what I needed, and that it's been long enough. We'll see.

Thomas Hardy's Afterwards

Afterwards

When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,

  And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

  "He was a man who used to notice such things."?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,

  The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,

  "To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,

  When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures would come to no harm,

  But he could do little for them, and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,

  Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,

  "He was one who had an eye for such mysteries."?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

  And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,

  "He hears it not now, but used to notice such things."?

-Thomas Hardy

'Afterwards' comes from Thomas Hardy's volume of poetry Moments of Vision of 1917, when he was 77. The poem was later read at a memorial service after his death ten years later.

It's possible I've read it before, but I don't really remember. It shows up here now because I recently finished Nicholas Jenkins' biography of W. H. Auden's early years in England, The Island. 'Afterwards' was a favorite poem of the teen-aged Auden; he apparently liked it because it emphasized observation of the natural world, hedgehogs travelling furtively over the lawn, dew-fall hawks landing on wind-warped thorns. Though I suspect the general melancholy of the poem appealed to Auden, teenage boy poet, just as much.

(In fact, according to Jenkins, Auden was also reading Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts at the time, Hardy's unperformably long verse drama about the Napoleonic wars. Soldiers and mopery. Maybe Auden was a perfectly normal teenage boy after all?)

Jenkins' book came out in 2024 and definitely got some buzz, (Edward Mendelson: "a Copernican revolution in Auden studies.") I thought it was good, but not necessarily as amazing as that. His father was as important in Auden's life as his mother; given the usual clichés about gay men, this may be a necessary corrective, but since I wasn't all that up on Auden studies anyway... Still if you're interested in Auden, you might very well like it. I learned things.

Hardy's poem is my current memorization project, and, as I'm finding it difficult, I was hoping that typing it in would help. It hasn't seemed to yet. It's got rhyme, it's got meter--those usually help in memorizing. And it's clever about seasons and times of day--that feels like it should help, too. Why is it so difficult? Is it the recondite vocabulary? 'Dewfall', 'outrollings'? Or is it too much holiday season distraction?

Lakes

 

Lakes

(for Isaiah Berlin)

A lake allows an average father, walking slowly

  To circumvent it in an afternoon,

And any healthy mother to halloo the children

  Back to her bedtime from their games across:

(Anything bigger than that, like Michigan or Baikal,

  Though potable, is an "estranging sea").

Lake-folk require no fiend to keep them on their toes;

  They leave aggression to ill-bred romantics

Who duel with their shadows over blasted heaths:

  A month in a lacustrine atmosphere

Would find the fluvial rivals waltzing not exchanging

  The rhyming insults of their great-great-uncles.

No wonder Christendom did not get really started

  Till, scarred by torture, white from caves and jails,

Her pensive chiefs converged on the Ascanian Lake

  And by that stork-infested shore invented

The life of Godhead, making catholic the figure

  Of three small fishes in a triangle.

Sly Foreign Ministers should always meet beside one,

  For, whether they walk widdershins or deasil,

The path will yoke their shoulders to one liquid centre

  Like two old donkeys pumping as they plod;

Such physical compassion may not guarantee

  A marriage for their armies, but it helps.

-W. H. Auden

Well, that's only the first half of the poem, but since I'm typing this late, that's all I'm going to do for now. 😉 It's a favourite of mine, since I've lived most of my life near lakes, though more of the 'estranging sea' variety--first Michigan, and now Ontario. 

The Ascanian Lake is an allusion to the First Council of Nicaea. Widdershins and deasil are Auden using show-off-y words for clockwise and counter-clockwise. But who am I to complain?

A Northern Ontario lake that one could actually halloo across:

The Unknown Citizen

 

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07/M/378, This Marble Monument Is Erected By The State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

A phonograph, a radio, a car, and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinion for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.

He was married and added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong we should certainly have heard.

-W. H. Auden

This could almost have been yesterday, except for the Instalment Plan, which lost out to credit cards, and five children, which would nowadays be a statistical anomaly, but Auden (1907-1973) wrote this in March of 1939. (Oh, and newspapers are going...)

This was the first Auden poem I ever knew, and for a long time while I remembered half the poem, I didn't know it was by him.

Some clerihews by W. H. Auden

 

Edward Lear

Was haunted by the fear

While traveling in Albania

Of contracting kleptomania.

     -o-

Louis Pasteur

So his colleagues aver,

Lived on excellent terms

With most of his germs.

     -o-

No one could ever inveigle

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Into offering the slightest apology

For his Phenomenology.

     -o-

When the young Kant

Was told to kiss his aunt,

He obeyed the Categorical Must,

But only just.

     -o-

Charles Dickens

Could find nothing to say to chickens,

But gossiping with rabbits

Became one of his habits. 

W. H. Auden's series of clerihews appears first in Homage to Clio, but then with illustrations by Filippo Sanjust in Academic Graffiti. That's Sanjust's drawing above of Dickens/with rabbits and chickens. The chickens look rather offended to me.

The clerihew form was invented by E. C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley (1875-1956), also author of the mystery series featuring Philip Trent, the first of which is Trent's Last Case. (The last shall be first?) Since we're here...I can't resist quoting my favorite Clerihew clerihew:

George the Third

Ought never to have occurred.

One can only wonder

At so grotesque a blunder.

And, oh heck, it's catching...

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

acted most irreverently,

like he was one of the playahs

with Dorothy L. Sayahs.

Or supply your own concluding couplet! 😜

Poem for a Thursday: Auden

Roman Wall Blues

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose. 

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why. 

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone. 

Aulus goes hanging about her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face. 

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish. 

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay. 

When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

-W. H. Auden

Well, having just posted about Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian yesterday, and reading in Lives of the Later Caesars today, this poem was on my mind. It's been a bit of an earworm. Especially as I just learned that Tungria is Tongres/Tongeren, a town now in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium. And that because I also learned today, the assassin who murders the emperor Pertinax in 193 A.D. is a Tungrian member of the imperial guard. I suspect Auden had been reading Lives of the Later Caesars, too.

Anyway, this one is an old favorite. Hope you like it, too.

Jennifer has a lovely poem by Carl Dennis, a poet new to me. Brona compares two translations of a Wislawa Szymborska poem. Szymborska is definitely a favorite of mine.