Skelferinging

Well, the Skelf had a one-off extraskelf last night: Gosia Mamica, who is leaving Scotland to return to Poland on Saturday, introduced us to Wislawa Szmborska. I'll post some soon, when I have my Polish head on. Anyroad, I need to post this, so that I will stop looking for it in a sheaf of electronic fullscap.

Mushrooms, by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very

Whitely, discreetly,

Very quietly

Our toes, our noses

Take hold of the loam

Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,

Stops us, betrays us;

The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on

Heaving the needles,

The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.

Our hammers, our rams,

Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,

Widen the crannies,

Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,

On crumbs of shadow,

Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.

So many of us!

So many of us!

We are shelves, we are

Tables, we are meek,

We are edible.

Nudgers and shovers

In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning

Inherit the earth

Our foot's in the door.

Apologies for any clericals, the blog doesn't take a pasting so I type. Which in itself is a positive discipline, to learn her words. 

Because she's amazing

Good to see the skelfies (is that our collective noun - apologies if not) that made it along to the SLP Round Table on Monday. We had a wee bit of Sylvia Plath, among other things, which inspired me to take her down from my shelf and read a little more. I think this is amazing:

Elm

I know the bottom, she says.
I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.

I do not fear it:
I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,

Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing,
that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me.

Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.

How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Ariel's love song

Right, it's taken me far too long to actually post this, but you might remember the Auden poem I brought along to the last skelf at Lorraine's? Here it is for those of you wishing to take a bit more time over it...

Postscript

(Ariel to Caliban, Echo by the Prompter)

Weep no more but pity me,
Fleet persistent shadow cast
By your lameness,
caught at last,
Helplessly in love with you,
Elegance, art, fascination,
Fascinated by
Drab mortality;
Spare me a humiliation,
To your faults be true:
I can sing as you reply
...I

Wish for nothing lest you mar
The perfection in these eyes
Whose entire devotion lies
At the mercy of your will;
Tempt not your sworn comrade, - only
As I am can I love you as you are -
or my company be lonely
For my health be ill:
I will sing if you will cry
...I

Never hope to say farewell,
For our lethargy is such
Heaven's kindness cannot touch
Nor earth's frankly brutal drum;
This was long ago decided,
Both of us know why,
Can, alas, foretell,
When our falsehoods are divided,
What we shall become,
One evaporating sigh
...I

- W.H. Auden

Sappho Assignment - Fragment 31

Skelfers

Please feel free to tell me to cut the homework - but, as you can see, I am becoming increasingly hooked on skelf. I love having a poem to play with, ticking round in my brain through a busy week.

So here is another assignment - to interpret a fragment by Sappho. There is a direct translation of her poem from the Greek below- followed by various beautiful interpretations by other poets (my favourite is the one by John Hollander). Then, if you feel inspired, write your own.



Fragment 31

That man seems to me to be like a god, to
Sit so close to you and to hear your sweet voice
And your charming laughter - and all this, truly,
Makes my heart tremble;

For I only, briefly, need to glance at you to
Find my voice has gone and my tongue is broken,
And a flame has stolen beneath my skin, my
Eyes can no longer

See, my ears are ringing, while drops of sweat run
Down my trembling body, and I've turned paler
Than a wisp of straw and it seems to be I'm
Not far off dying.

(Translation by Robert Chandler)

----------------------------------------------

Peer of the Gods

Peer of the gods is that man, who
face to face, sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
laughter.

It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.

Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.

Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow paler
than dry grass and lack little
of dying.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
------------------------------------

After an Old Text

His head is in the heavens, who across the
Narrow canyon of pillow from yours harkens
With gazing hand and hearing knees through darkness,
Looking and listening

To the sweet quietude of terminating
Conversation, the gentle brief wake for the
Long-dead day, the keening of his shortened
Breath on your shoulder:

This revision of you sucks out the sound of
Words from my mouth, my tongue collapses, my legs
Flag, my ears roar, my eyes are blind with flame; my
Head is in hell then.

JOHN HOLLANDER

------------------------------------------------

Maik O the Gods He Seems to Me

Maik o the gods he seems to me,
thon man that sits in front o ye,
and hears your talkan couthilie near,
sae saftlie and clear,

your luvelie lauchan. My hert stounds
rowsan i ma breist when your lauch sounds
and gif I glent at ye sittan there
I canna speak mair.

Ma tung freezes i ma mou, a nesh
lowe rins chitteran throu ma flesh;
nae sicht i ma een; wi thier nain thunner
ma lugs dunner.

Swyte reems doun me; frae heid to fuit
a trummlan grups me, sae's I sit
greener nor gress, in sic a dwalm
I kenna wha I am.

maik= peer
couthilie=cosily, comfortably
stounds=is stunned
rowsan=leaping
glent=if I glance
nesh=delicate
lowe=glow, fire
nain=own
dunnner=my ears resound
swyte reems=sweat pours
dwalm=trance

DOUGLAS YOUNG
--------------------------------

First attempt at Iain Crichton Smith

You are at the bottom of this poetry

(after Iain Crichton Smith)

You have changed the landscape of my mind.

Like nameless mountains, remote and fixed

Which glaciers carve their mark in - but not I.

Still dazzled by your heights,

clawing and clawing at your crumbling sides

With these weak hands.



You went astray, obscured by clouds

And sun so fierce I had to look away

And now my eye is lost in looking.

I do not have the know of your shape

I cannot trace your faces

I never scaled your path.



And I shall never claim you

Though I bear this flag high hopelessly,

Half-lifted by love's straining.

Memory draws meandering maps;

sketches ropes without holdings,

My fault-lines tremble with each climb.

Michael Longley - The Evening Star

Also, I was convinced I'd never heard of Michael Longley (who lead the lovely MacNeice session) - but I realised last night that he's the author of a poem that I love. Here it is:

The Evening Star

(In memory of Catherine Mercer, 1994-6)

The day we buried your two years and two months
So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you
I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower:
A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dayligone,

The evening star, the star in Sappho's epigram
Which brings back everything that shiny daybreak
Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat
And brings the wean back home to her mammy.

Michael Longley

Entirely - Louis MacNeice

Here's the Louis MacNeice poem that Claire and I enjoyed so much at the SPL Michael Longley session - enjoy Marjorie (it even rhymes)! x x

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song.
And when we eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find happiness entirely
In somebody else's arms
We should not fear the spears of spring nor the city's
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of love entirely.

And if the world were black and white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice

There Was a Young Bard of Japan...

(Anon)

There was a young bard of Japan,
Whose limericks never would scan:
When told it was so,
He said: 'Yes, I know,
But I always try and get as many words into the last line as I possibly can'.

chidiock tichbourne revisited

I didn't do justice to him on Tuesday: it seems he was one of 6 conspirators in the "Babington Plot", which freed Elizabeth I's hand to execute Mary Queen of Scots.

His poem was one of 3 he wrote home to his wife from prison. Wikipedia makes great play on his Renaissance use of Antithesis and Paradox -- so, perhaps not much scope for jihadist feeling.

He and the other 5 were disembowelled live in St Giles Fields, which caused such a stir that the next 'traitors' were hung and drawn first. They were all convicted of colluding with Philip of Spain

Louis MacNiece, writing 70 years ago

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden

Louis MacNeice 1937