Autumn Journal IX (Louis MacNeice)

Now we are back to normal, now the mind is

    Back to the even tenor of the usual day

Skidding no longer across the uneasy cambers

    Of the nightmare way.

We are safe though others have crashed the railings

    Over the river ravine; their wheel-tracks carve the bank

But after the event all we can do is argue

    And count the widening ripples where they sank.

October comes with rain whipping around the ankles

    In waves of white at night:

And filling the raw clay trenches (the parks of London

    Are a nasty sight).

In a week I return to work, lecturing, coaching,

    As impresario of the Ancient Greeks

Who wore the chiton and lived on fish and olives

    And talked philosophy or smut in cliques;

Who believed in youth and did not gloze the unpleasant

    Consequences of age;

What is life, one said, or what is pleasant

    Once you have turned the page

Of love?  The days grow worse, the dice are loaded

    Against the living man who pays in tears for breath;

Never to be born was the best, call no man happy

    This side death.

Conscious - long before Engels - of necessity

    And therein free

They plotted out their life with truism and humour

    Between the jealous heaven and the callous sea.

And Pindar sang the garland of wild olive

    And Alcibiades lived from hand to mouth

Double-crossing Athens, Persia, Sparta,

    And many died in the city of plague, and many of drouth

In Sicilian quarries, and many by the spear and arrow

    And many more who told their lies too late

Caught in the eternal factions and reactions

    Of the city-state.

And free speech shivered on the pikes of Macedonia

    And later on the swords of Rome

And Athens became a mere university city

    And the goddess born of the foam

Became the kept hetaera, heroine of Menander,

    And the philosopher narrowed his focus, confined

His efforts to putting his own soul in order

    And keeping a quiet mind.

And for a thousand years they went on talking,

    Making such apt remarks,

A race no longer of heroes but of professors

    And crooked business men and secretaries and clerks;

Who turned out dapper little elegiac verses

    On the ironies of fate, the transience of all

Affections, carefully shunning an over-statement

    But working the dying fall.

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it

    Page by page

To train the mind or even to point a moral

    For the present age:

Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,

    The golden mean between opposing ills

Though there were exceptions of course but only exceptions - 

    The bloody Bacchanals on the Thracian hills.

So the humanist in his room with Jacobean panels

    Chewing his pipe and looking on a lazy quad

Chops the Ancient World to turn a sermon

    To the greater glory of God.

But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;

    These dead are dead

And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas

    I think instead

Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists

    The careless athletes and the fancy boys,

The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics

    And the Agora and the noise

Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring

    Libations over graves

And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly

    I think of the slaves.

And how one can imagine oneself among them

    I do not know;

It was all so unimaginably different

    And all so long ago.

from 'On Keeping a Notebook' (Joan Didion)

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen­ year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and­-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.

from Everything I Know About Love, Thirty (Dolly Alderton)

It was my friend Pandora who first recognized that my useless superpower is a propensity for needless nostalgia.  I have an unerring ability to metabolize, ritualize and memorialize the passing of time at breakneck speed so everything becomes a grand moment in history within a year of it happening.

'You can refer to a house party you went to last month with the same wistfulness and romance as if it were the Summer of Sixty-Nine,' she commented.  I didn't deny it.

'On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble' (A.E. Housman)

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves. 

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood. 

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there. 

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

from Busman's Honeymoon, Epithalamion, 3, Talboys: Crown Celestial (Dorothy L. Sayers)

One of the most admirable features of the English criminal law is said to be its dispatch.  You are tried as soon as possible after your arrest, the trial takes three or four days at most, and after your conviction (unless, of course, you appeal), you are executed within three weeks.

Crutchley refused to appeal, preferring to announce that he done it, that he'd do it again, and let them get on with it, it made no odds to him.

Harriet, in consequence, was left to form the opinion that three weeks was quite the worst period of waiting in the world.  A prisoner should be executed the morning after his conviction, as after a court-martial, so that one could get all the misery over in a lump and have done with it.  Or the business should be left to drag on for months and years, as in America, till one was so weary of it as to have exhausted all emotion.

from Middlemarch, chapter XX (George Eliot)

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

Fielder (Zaffar Kunial)

If I had to put my finger on where this started,
I’d trace a circle round the one moment I came to, or the one
that placed me, a fielder - just past the field, over the rope,
having chased a lost cause, leathered for six ...
when, bumbling about, obscured in the bushes,
I completely stopped looking for the ball -
perhaps irresponsibly - slowed by bracken, caught by light
that slipped the dark cordon of rhododendron hands,
a world hidden from the batsmen, the umpires and my team,
like the thing itself: that small, seamed planet, shined
on one half, having reached its stop, out of the sphere of sight.
And when I reflect, here, from this undiscovered city,
well north of those boyish ambitions - for the county,
maybe later, the country - I know something of that minute
holds something of me, there, beyond the boundary,
in that edgeland of central England. A shady fingernail
of forest. The pitch it points at, or past, a stopped clock.
Still, in the middle, the keeper’s gloves
clap at the evening. Still, a train clicks
on far-off tracks. And the stars are still to surface.
The whole field, meanwhile, waiting for me,
some astronaut, or lost explorer, to emerge with a wave
that brings the ball - like time itself - to hand. A world restored.
But what I’d come to find, in that late hour
was out of mind, and, the thing is, I didn’t care
and this is what’s throwing me now.

from Tinkers, chapter 3 (Paul Harding)

It seemed to me as if my father simply faded away. He became more and more difficult to see. One day, I thought he was sitting in his chair at his desk, writing. To all appearances, he scribbled at a sheet of paper. When I asked him where the bag for apple picking was, he disappeared. I could not tell whether he had been there in the first place or if I had asked my question to some lingering afterimage. He leaked out of the world gradually, though. At first, he seemed merely vague or peripheral. But then he could no longer furnish the proper frame for his clothes. He would ask me a question from behind the box on which I sat shelling peas or peeling potatoes for my mother, and when I answered and received no reply back, I would turn around, to find his hat or belt or a single shoe sitting in the door frame as if placed there by a mischievous child. The end came when we could no longer even see him, but felt him in brief disturbances of shadows or light, or as a slight pressure, as if the space one occupied suddenly had had something more packed into it, or we’d catch some faint scent out of season, such as the snow melting into the wool of his winter coat, but on a blistering August noon, as if the last few times I felt him as another being rather than as a recollection, he had thought to check up on this world at the wrong moment and accidentally stepped from whatever wintry place he was in straight into the dog days. And it seems that doing so only confirmed to him his fate to fade away, his being in the wrong place, so that during these startled visits, although I could not see him, I could feel his surprise, his bafflement, the dismay felt in a dream when you suddenly meet the brother you forgot you had or remember the infant you left on the hillside miles away, hours ago, because somehow you were distracted and somehow you came to believe in a different life and your shock at these terrible recollections, these sudden reunions, comes as much from your sorrow at what you have neglected as it does from dismay at how thoroughly and quickly you came to believe in something else. And that other world that you first dreamed is always better if not real, because in it you have not jilted your lover, forsaken your child, turned your back on your brother. The world fell away from my father the way he fell away from us. We became his dream.

Another time, I found him fumbling for an apple in the barrel we kept in the basement. I could just make him out in the gloom. Each time he tried to grab a piece of fruit, it eluded him, or I might say he eluded it, as his grasp was no stronger than a draft of air threading through a crack in a window. He succeeded once, after appearing to concentrate for a moment, in upsetting an apple from its place at the top of the pile, but it merely tumbled down along the backs of the other apples and came to rest against the mouth of the barrel. It seemed to me that even if I could pick an apple up with my failing hands, how could I bite it with my dissipating teeth, digest it with my ethereal gut? I realized that this thought was not my own but, rather, my father’s, that even his ideas were leaking out of his former self. Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, and as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes. Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father’s fading was because he realized this: My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected that he was whittling at my skull – no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels. I looked away and ran back upstairs, skipping the ones that creaked, so that I would not embarrass my father, who had not quite yet turned back from clay into light.

from The Wild Places, chapter 13, Saltmarsh (Robert Macfarlane)

Northern European myth tells of an event called 'The Wild Hunt'.  On tempestuous nights, Wodan would lead across the land the troop of warriors who had died in battle, accompanied by their war-hounds.  Travellers who found themselves in the path of the Wild Hunt were advised to lie face down.  In this way only the cold feet of the black dogs who ran with the hunt would touch them, and they would not be harmed.  The purpose of the Hunt was to collect the souls of the recently deceased; its riders were the summoners of the dead.  Many different versions of the Hunt exist: in a Christian form of the myth, it was said to occur when Gabriel rallied his angels into battle.  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle detailed how, on 6 February 1127, the Wild Hunt galloped through the deer part of Peterborough and then through the woods up to Stamford: a 'furious host' rushing through the dark forest paths, across the heaths, over the fells, along the coast, and between the places of 'mirk'.  Gervase of Tilbury recorded in the thirteenth century that Arthur and his knights still led a Wild Hunt along the holloway that ran between Cadbury and Glastonbury.

The ur-myth of the Wild Hunt was almost certainly an explanation of the autumn migrations of wild geese - brent, snow, Canada.  Most years, the geese travel in skeins, in groups of fewer than a hundred birds.  Some years, however, they fly low and in large numbers, and when they pass overhead in the darkness, the noise of their wings is so loud that it can resemble a plane or - to pre-aviation ears - a war-host of angels.  An eerie German soldiers' song, composed in the trenches in 1917, spoke of how 'The Wild Geese rush through the night | With shrill cries to the North. | Beware, beware this dangerous flight | For death is all around us.'

from The Lord of the Rings, book 6, chapter 7, Homeward Bound (J.R.R. Tolkien)

'Well here we are, just the four of us that started out together,' said Merry.  'We have left all the rest behind, one after another.  It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded.'

'Not to me,' said Frodo.  'To me it feels more like falling asleep again.'

Calendae Maiae (George Buchanan, trans. Philip Ford)

salvete sacris deliciis sacrae
Maiae Calendae, laetitiae et mero
ludisque dicatae iocisque
et teneris Charitum choreis.

salve voluptas et nitidum decus
anni recurrens perpetua vice
et flos renascentis iuventae
in senium properantis aevi.

cum blanda veris temperies novo
illuxit orbi, primaque saecula
fulsere flaventi metallo
sponte sua sine lege iusta,

talis per omnes continuus tenor
annos tepenti rura Favonio
mulcebat et nullis feraces
seminibus recreabat agros.

talis beatis incubat insulis
felicis aurae perpetuus tepor
et nesciis campis senectae
difficilis querulique morbi.

talis silentum per tacitum nemus
levi susurrat murmure spiritus,
Lethenque iuxta obliviosam
funereas agitat cupressos.

forsan supremis cum Deus ignibus
piabit orbem, laetaque saecula
mundo reducet, talis aura
aethereos animos fovebit.

salve fugacis gloria saeculi,
salve secunda digna dies nota,
salve vetustae vitae imago
et specimen venientis aevi.

Hail, May Day, sacred to sacred delights, dedicated to joy and wine, games, jesting, and the delicate dances of the Graces. Hail pleasure, and bright glory of the year returning in an eternal cycle, and bloom of reviving youth, hastening towards time’s old age. When spring’s pleasant warmth shone upon a new world, and the first generations gleamed with golden metal, naturally righteous without any laws, an uninterrupted course like this through all the years caressed the countryside with a warm West Wind, and renewed the fertile fields without seeds. Such is the endless warmth from delightful breezes which lies over the Isles of the Blessed, and over the fields which know not crabbed old age or complaining disease. Such a breath murmurs in a gentle whisper through the quiet grove of the Silent ones, and stirs the deathly cypress trees beside Lethe, river of forgetfulness. Perhaps when God purifies the world in the final conflagration and brings back happy ages to the universe, such a breeze will refresh the heavenly spirits. Hail, glory of a fleeting age, hail, day worthy of a favourable mark, hail, picture of a former life, and token of an age to come.

from The Lord of the Rings, book 6, chapter 4, The Field of Cormallen (J.R.R. Tolkien)

'Noon?' said Sam, trying to calculate. 'Noon of what day?'

'The fourteenth of the New Year,' said Gandalf; 'or if you like, the eighth day of April in the Shire-reckoning. But in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King.'

The Annunciation and Passion (John Donne)

Tamely, frail body, abstain to-day; to-day
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away.
She sees Him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away;
She sees Him nothing, twice at once, who's all;
She sees a cedar plant itself, and fall;
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life at once not yet alive, yet dead;
She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha;
Sad and rejoiced she's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen;
At once a son is promised her, and gone;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John;
Not fully a mother, she's in orbity;
At once receiver and the legacy.
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th' abridgement of Christ's story, which makes one —
As in plain maps, the furthest west is east —
Of th' angel's Ave, and Consummatum est.
How well the Church, God's Court of Faculties,
Deals, in sometimes, and seldom joining these.
As by the self-fix'd Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where th'other is, and which we say —
Because it strays not far — doth never stray,
So God by His Church, nearest to him, we know,
And stand firm, if we by her motion go.
His Spirit, as His fiery pillar, doth
Lead, and His Church, as cloud; to one end both.
This Church by letting those days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one;
Or 'twas in Him the same humility,
That He would be a man, and leave to be;
Or as creation He hath made, as God,
With the last judgment but one period,
His imitating spouse would join in one
Manhood's extremes; He shall come, He is gone;
Or as though one blood drop, which thence did fall,
Accepted, would have served, He yet shed all,
So though the least of His pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords.
This treasure then, in gross, my soul, uplay,
And in my life retail it every day.

from The Wind in the Willows, chapter I, The River Bank (Kenneth Grahame)

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

'This is fine!' he said to himself. 'This is better than whitewashing!' The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side.

'For Life I had never cared greatly' (Thomas Hardy)

For Life I had never cared greatly,
As worth a man's while;
Peradventures unsought,
Peradventures that finished in nought,
Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately
Unwon by its style.

In earliest years - why I know not -
I viewed it askance;
Conditions of doubt,
Conditions that leaked slowly out,
May haply have bent me to stand and to show not
Much zest for its dance.

With symphonies soft and sweet colour
It courted me then,
Till evasions seemed wrong,
Till evasions gave in to its song,
And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller
Than life among men.

Anew I found nought to set eyes on,
When, lifting its hand,
It uncloaked a star,
Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar,
And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon
As bright as a brand.

And so, the rough highway forgetting,
I pace hill and dale
Regarding the sky,
Regarding the vision on high,
And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting
My pilgrimage fail.

'Alleluia, dulce carmen' (anonymous, trans. J.M. Neale)

Alleluia, dulce carmen,
Vox perennis gaudii,
Alleluia laus suavis
Est choris coelestibus,
Quam canunt Dei manentes
In domo per saecula.

Alleluia laeta mater
Concivis Jerusalem:
Alleluia vox tuorum
Civium gaudentium:
Exsules nos flere cogunt
Babylonis flumina.

Alleluia non meremur
In perenne psallere;
Alleluia nos reatus
Cogit intermittere;
Tempus instat quo peracta
Lugeamus crimina.

Unde laudando precamur
Te beata Trinitas,
Ut tuum nobis videre
Pascha des in aethere,
Quo tibi laeti canamus
Alleluia perpetim.


Alleluya, song of sweetness,
Voice of joy, eternal lay;
Alleluya is the anthem
Of the quires in heavenly day,
Which the Angels sing, abiding
In the house of God alway.

Alleluya thou resoundest,
Salem, Mother ever blest;
Alleluyas without ending
Fit yon place of gladsome rest;
Exiles we, by Babel’s waters
Sit in bondage and distrest.

Alleluya we deserve not
Here to chant for evermore:
Alleluya our transgressions
Make us for awhile give o’er;
For the holy time is coming
Bidding us our sins deplore.

Trinity of endless glory,
Hear thy people as they cry;
Grant us all to keep thine Easter
In our home beyond the sky;
There to thee our Alleluya
Singing everlastingly. Amen.

Machines (Michael Donaghy)

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

in time of daffodils(who know (e.e. cummings)

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me