T.S. Eliot in 1948, on accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature:

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

For Good Friday

The Heart of Jesus
On The Day of The Lord

Disbelief at disbelief,
Healing man, Obedient to Father.

Seeing with eyes what man could not,
Hearing with ears that knew the prisons
Man had bought.

Declaring release to all,
Through the Power of the Spirit,
The Power of the Spirit upon Him,
The Favour of the Lord on His day.

Heavy, Torn, Aching,
Loving man, Loving Father.

Obedient, Bold, Strong,
Loving Father, Loving man.

Forsaken, Alone, in Agony,
Crying out,
Shaking earth's bowels
To depths before known not.
It is finished,
Weep not for me,
My task complete.

Yours but beginning,
For the world I weep,
Pick up my Cross,
If you dare, if you dare.
And if you do
There is one promise I make to you:
It is there I will be,
I will give you all you need.

Go on My Way,
For THIS IS
The Day Of The Lord.

maggie 1998

Modernism....bywayofprotest....e.e. Cummings

E.E. Cummings, or e.e. Cummings, as he preferred to write his name, is someone who I became interested in, as a result of reading his book, The Enormous Room. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Second Edition makes mention of Cummings's incarceration in France during W.W.I.

Being held in the 'enormous room' at Mace, he was basically in a no-man's land - he was held in La Ferte Mace (which was not classified as a prison) but rather as a place of detainment for those whom the French government considered to be threats, and it was never known how long one would remain there. It was his friend, Wm. Brown who actually landed him in this place, because of some letters Brown had written back home to the United States, concerning his impression of the war, and the state of the troops. The censors jumped on these and Brown, and included Cummings because of his 'suspect' friendship with Brown.

Cummings had volunteered for the ambulance corps. because it meant he could help with the war effort, but not have to bear arms. Somewhere in the background, the officer in charge (Anderson), hated both Cummings and Brown, because they decided, while they were there, to begin learning French and fraternized with some of the locals. This also made them suspect by their U.S. fellow ambulance crew, who, mostly from the mid-west of the United States, had no desire to expand their linguistic ability. When Cummings was arrested and taken away, he believed he was being taken to Marseilles, not Mace. Cummings's father, wrote to the President, Woodrow Wilson in an attempt to have his son released from Mace. I realize there are always books to be read, but I would recommend this book if you are interested in a first hand glimpse into conditions within places of detention during W.W. I.

Cummings was a Harvard graduate in Greek and English Literature, and was living in New York as a cubist painter, when the War called him. He was not interested in politics, but was drawn by atrocities that he had heard of occurring in Belgium. Cummings has included drawing sketches he made of his fellow inhabitants at Mace, and sprinkles French throughout the book, and writes some intriguing and insightful character sketches of his fellow citizens of the enormous room, and also of the 'keepers'. There is no question in my own mind that this experience affected his views. It can been seen in his poetry, that he rebelled against much of what was perceived to be 'sacred rites and rituals' of those 'nice people' who wielded power - the establishment.

The Norton Anthology says that "part of Cummings's attack on the establishment was directed against the typographical establishment. He used punctuation only for special effects, and many of his poems expoloited odd typographical arrangements, allowing letters of words to trail over from one line to the next in total indifference to syllables. By persisting, Cummings won acceptance for it as a kind of wisdom. It became clear that the arrangement of a poem on a page reflected the way it was to be read aloud, roused tensions and effected resolutions, offered an intriguing puzzle, and gave vent to Cummings's iconoclasm [iconoclast is a person who seeks to overturn or destroy traditional beliefs and practises]. It is in fact the badge which he wears as a self-styled misfit, one still capable of feeling love and lust in an unfeeling, mechanized world. He is in revolt against people in high places, in crowded cities, in ruts, to whom the only pronoun that he considers applicable is "it"."

[a man who had fallen among thieves*]

a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal [loyal]
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brooks
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whome the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars

*A modern version of Christ's parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37).

e.e. Cummings 1926

[plato told]

plato told

him:he couldn't
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn't believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him, and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn't believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth
avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

Notes:
"tsze" - Lao Tse, the ancient Chinese philosopher and originator of the doctrine of Taoism.

"sherman" - William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), Union general in the Civil War, who is reported to have told a military academy's graduating class that "War is hell."

last line "him" - A scandal of the late thirties arose over the sale to Japan of scrap metal obtained when the elevated railway over New York's Sixth Avenue was pulled down; it was made into weapons and ammunition which were subsequently used against American forces in the Second World War.

e.e. Cummings 1944

[maggie and milly and molly and may]

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

e.e. Cummings 1958

To close this posting, I have chosen a quote from e.e. Cummings, again found in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Second Edition, which I think gives much food for thought:
He is against expressions like "most people," which he runs into one word: "it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs...Life,for mostpeople, simply isn't. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by 'living'? They don't mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives." He is against science as an impersonalizing force when the only reality is the person.

This Is The Day!

No matter the press to keep producing, I've been spending this day gently, by reading some poetry. This is one of those days that just seems to hang suspended in time....blue sky, white snow, bright sun that causes crisp shadow lines of muted grey trees painted onto the white earth, and I think to myself that winter will be gone soon, and spring is beginning to nudge at the door, wanting in. At the points where the seasons come closest together and begin to mingle that little bit, I never cease to find myself wanting to breathe in every moment and remember it. We like to think we have four seasons, and the calendar tells us we have four, but how can this be possible on a day like today?

I have been pondering T.S. Eliot's life, the impressions he must have soaked in with a country centering around the War effort. Eliot was an assistant at Harvard in 1913-14. He was then awarded a travelling fellowship, and went to study for the summer at Marburg in Germany, but the outbreak of war forced him to Oxford. This move for Eliot was pivotal in his life because three major life changes happened: he gave up the appearaance of the philosopher for the reality of the poet, he married, and he settled in England.

I have also been pondering my paternal Grandparents' lives and that of my Dad too. Grandmother in England with young children, Grandfather in France in the trenches, lives in uproar, W.W. I, then immigration to Canada, 1926, and what my Dad always recalled as one of the best days of his life, to finally know he was here and walking around.

To get back to my daydream....I found this wonderful Eliot piece (The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry Second Edition, P504.) It's the last of Eliot's Four Quartets. Each Quartet is based upon one of the four elements. Each of his Quartets is divided into five parts and this, "Little Gidding" being based on "fire". This is the First Part, of the Fourth Quartet.

Little Gidding
II
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
when the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindnes in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more suddern
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

T. S. Eliot 1942

Note: Little Gidding was an Anglican religious community founded in 1625 by Nicholas Ferrar; it is now a village in Huntingdonshire. Although the community lasted only twenty-two years, the memory of its devotion persisted, and the chapel was rebuilt in the nineteenth century.

Another Visit......

Cocoon

When leaves have changed and fallen to earth,
A sense instilled waits signs of re-birth,
Deliverance from blanket of nature’s rest,
Wherein hope abides with patience blessed.

These days are short, sun scarce and bleak,
Stark trees, bare branches like naked arms weak
Against chill winds and sleet of icy hand,
As though in death, and yet--and yet
Beneath this solemn silence
Life struggles to renew its days;
Cocooned by promise enfolding and sure,
When you will rise and live and love once more.

Revised, March, 2005

with help and thanks to Dr. J. and my friend, the troll

Maggie

Lone Voice

The Listeners

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
"Is there anybody there?" he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:--
"Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Walter de la Mare 1912 (Norton Anth. 1120)

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) lived through a lot of changes in his lifetime, given the dates that he lived - WWI, The Great Depression, WWII, to name three. In reading the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Second Edition, it is written that "his theme is the unsuccessful quest, which never reaches its goal: the integral vision he associates with childhood, or some imaginative land which can be dreamed of, or dimly apprehended, before being lost." Further, "if estrangement pervades his verse, the model of expression is a reconciliation of what he calls two voices, that of verbal sounds and of verbal symbols."

This poem, "The Listeners", leaves the Traveller's voice as an "echoing through the shadowiness of the still house". It also leaves me pondering whether it is mostly simply 'hearers' that inhabit the spaces where we too travel, and that in reality our voice goes out to "a host of phantom listeners". At the end of the poem, after he has broken the silence, the Traveller keeps moving on, and the silence "surged softly backward" filling the space where the voice had been. This makes me think about death and loss of those we have loved. When someone dies, perhaps it is the silence that has 'surged softly backward' where their voice once was, that leaves us missing them, perhaps even sometimes more than their physical presence. I think de la Mare's poem contains imagery that is easily identified with, and because of this, the words of the poem are those that pull the reader into a space of deep thought.