Poetry of Sadness

Speaking of whom, here's the poem that was on his mind when he died:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Beautiful. I can understand that! (Most of it, anyway.) How great to be in a group so poetically inclined that they'd all start reciting together. I LOVE it. Of course I love the Dylan Thomas poem, too.

Here's one by Yeats that has some of the same feelings of a lost love, mystery and the stars --
He Thinks of His Past Greatness When a Part of the Constellations of Heaven

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young
And weep because I know all things now:
I have been a hazel tree and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind:
I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
Would not lie on the breast or his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies;
Although the rushes and the fowl of the air
Cry of his love with their pitiful cries.

(Hmmm, my version came from the Viking Press portable library - 1950 but I just found an alternate ending couplet online:
... O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,
Must I endure your amorous cries?)

W B Yeats

Hmm, the alternate ending doesn't really sound as Yeatsian as the first: I have 'the Bible' of Yeats' poems somewhere; I should check it.

I love it, Piffka; that's only the second time that I have come across it; doesn't reading a poem also take you back to the first time that you read it? (It was one of the rare occasions that people liked poetry as well as I do. Back in England, people derided me for it violently.)

Poetry is the best, Drom. Don't take it to heart if some unfeeling blockheads put it down. They stink.

I'd be interested in what your Yeats "Bible" says. You'd think that my five-volume Poets of the English Language would be accurate but <shrug>.

I wasn't saying that your copy was inaccurate. The book comprises everything that he ever wrote, from youth to age, and so it'll show whether the alternate ending was written in youth, or whatever. Sorry if you thought that I meant otherwise .

I agree; poetry is a wonderful incapsulation of everything... when I was back in England, my telephone was stolen, because they thought that I deserved it, having what they called a 'posh' accent and reading a Collected Poems, because I wouldn't not get off 'their' bus like they commanded. That's the height of the ignorance around.

Amazing words, Cav. Do you like much of Rimbaud?

Dockery and Son:

'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with-' Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much . . . How little . . . Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of . . . No, that's not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They're more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Drom, I have Rimbaud's Complete Works (sadly in translation) in a handy paperback, and dual-language versions of 'Illuminations' and 'Collected Poems.' I've been a fan of the French Symbolists since high school.

Cav -- Wish I could read French.

Drom -- *I* was wondering about the accuracy of my book (It's old and one of a set of volumes picked up at a tag sale). I'm sure there is an explanation, likely, as you say, Yeats was editing himself. Just a little oddity!

Geez, Dockery is a bummer (good... but depressing). It is so hard to brazen up to that ultimate downfall for us all. <sigh>

Who would steal your phone? I'm shocked.

Piff-- one of us could translate it, if you want! (Or, even better, we could set up a thread to teach French to you.)

I suspect that the first one that you have is his final work. All of us change some things as we go along. Do you have other poets in this volume?

Thugs, because it's a thug culture.

Oooh, that would be an effort to teach me French!

Yeats is in the final volume - Vol. V -- Tennyson to Yeats. Emily Bronte is in that volume with six poems... haven't looked at them yet. It's a lovely set, still with good dust jackets.

Thugs huh? There are a lot of them about, everywhere, but I'm sad they gave you grief. I'm off to see if any teens in the community want to see Anime at the library. I'll be back.

Dockery is very depressing. There's a better poem about this called 'Aubade,' though, I feel. He wrote this despite decaying.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.



The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.


And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of its rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.







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We could teach you. All you have to do is start by thinking in Shakespearean English-- I find that the idiosyncracies soon become Common sense that way.

I preferred Emily's WH, but I love 'Remembrance;' have you all six, by the way?

*Five, that should read.

Aubade has some great images... that vast moth-eaten musical brocade... telephones crouching.

These are the six poems listed:
The night is darkening round me
Plead for me
Fall leaves, fall
Remembrance
The Two Children
No Coward Soul is Mine

Shakespearean English, huh? Hmmmmm. Why?

Oh, good poems by Emily. Thinking of her, I should post Rememberence, but I always end up stopping two verses early, due to some uncontrollable urge.)

Larkin wrote some very happy poetry-- but he won fame for 'writing about sad gits and the bad side of things.' He had a tender side, not shown by the majority of poems, but shown in 'The Whitsun Weddings,' 'An arundel tomb,' and his early poetry. In fact, I'm writing an article about 'What will survive of us is love,' and his other side, at this moment...

Learning Shakespearean English is a better option than falling into French right away. It's easy to speak if you know modern English, but it also shows key parts of French in a very simple way.

For instance. In French, the motion verbs make their composite past from 'etre' (to be) rather than avoir (to have.) This makes sense when you think in Shakespearean English-- they would use 'I am come,' 'you are come,' instead of 'you have com, etc.' So it makes an easier translation:

I am come
To bid my king and master aye good night:
Is he not here?

(King Lear)

Translating directly from either 'thou' or 'you' (informal and polite) meants that you have less of a chance of insulting someone by calling them 'tu' if they're above you or 'vous' if you're familiar with them.

And plenty of other reasons, too. -, -(e)st, -(e)th, makes translating into French conjugations (je parle, tu parles, il/elle/on parle, etc) easier too...

Or maybe I'm alone in this one.

Remembrance

Cold in the earth and the deep snow piled above thee!
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my Only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all wearing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains on Angora's shore;
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
That noble heart for ever, ever more?

Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into Spring -
Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive if I forget thee
While the World's tide is bearing me along:
Sterner desires and darker hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure but cannot do thee wrong.

No other sun has lightened up my heaven;
No other star has ever shone for me:
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given -
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.

But when the days of golden dreams had perished
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened and fed without the aid of joy;

Then did I check the tears of useless passion,
Weaned my young soulfrom yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine!

And even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in Memory's rapturous pain,
Once drinking deep of the divinest anguish
How could I seek the empty world again.

Remembrance in my book has a curious note: (R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida). I ended up reading an essay by C. Day Lewis that explained what could be explained and had this poem (among many others)... another sad one:

I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn;
I never caused a thought of gloom,
A smile of joy, since I was born...

First melted off the hope of youth,
Then fancy's rainbow fast withdrew,
And then experience told me truth
In mortal bosoms never grew.

'Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there.


<sigh> Great essay, btw.... is that the sort of article you are writing?

That's a wonderful essay, Piffka. What does that note mean? Do you know, or have any guesses? Is it handwritten, or typen?

What a very depressing, but beautiful, poem...