A Causley poem for Holy Week

Composer Jussi Chydenius's 

setting of "I Am the Great Sun" by Charles Causley,

a poem inspired by a seventeenth-century Normandy crucifix.

Hofstra Chamber Choir

David Fryling, Conductor

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          I AM THE GREAT SUN

          I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
          I am your husband, but you turn away.
          I am the captive, but you do not free me,
          I am the captain you will not obey.

          I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
          I am the city where you will not stay,
          I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
          I am that God to whom you will not pray.

          I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,
          I am the lover whom you will betray.
          I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
          I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

          I am your life, but if you will not name me,
          Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

* * *

Thanks to a years-back recommendation from editor John Wilson, I've long been fond of Cornish poet Charles Causley--loved and admired in his lifetime by Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin--and this poem is one of my favorites. The sonnet is simple and profound, using a parallelism that invokes the Hebrew poetry of the Bible, particularly the beautiful language of the King James version, but also grasps at the idea of God as "the great I AM." 

Its Elizabethan-sonnet rhyme scheme is curious, eight of its lines depending on final identical rhyme that again invokes God. The six remaining lines add only one more final rhyme sound, so Causley gives us only two sets of end-word rhymes, both ending the lines on long vowels. Each line is a full, complete thought, framed by "I am" and one of those two long-vowel rhymes. 

Looking closer, we see that Causley has chosen to expand the scheme by rhyming the words that precede "me," the identical rhyme sound of eight lines. So we meet internal rhymes "see/free," "believe/leave," "hear/cheer," and "name/blame." The accent falls strongly on those penultimate words. Identical sounds also occur inside quatrains; particularly noticeable is the repetition of "do not" and "you will not" and "you will," reinforcing the idea of human free will, choice, and the swerving away from God that marks and informs the poem. 

The tightness of the rhyme scheme makes the couplet feel especially surprising because it breaks the shape of prior lines, completing the thought in two lines, and tying up the poem with another two-word rhyme-plus-identical-rhyme in "name me" and "blame me." In those last lines, the poem enters--just barely, and not with confidence--into a realm where another path is possible.

On the other hand, "if you will not name me" is an interesting thing to say in the final turn of thought. Recalling that "I AM" is one of the names of God, the reader may well think that he or she has indeed been naming God, though in fact naming God and admitting the rejection of God at once.

If you don't perceive why this is a remarkable poem, I suggest that you try reading it aloud three times. (Remember that you are speaking in the voice of God. As the poem was inspired by crucifix-and-inscription, you can even imagine that you speak the words from the cross.) And then if you don't feel in your bones that the poem is good, well, I guess it is not for you. Or as we might say, "I am your poem, but you do not know me."

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Donation site for The Friends of Notre Dame: 

http://www.notredamedeparis.fr/friends/donate/

Re-reading The Whitsun Weddings

Creative Commons, Wikipedia. Chichester Cathedral.
Monument to Richard Fitzalan III, 10th Earl of Arundel (c.1307-1376)
and Eleanor of Lancaster (d. 1372.) Unusual for the linked hands
and the wife's crossed legs and turn toward her husband.
By Nabokov at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

I do not love Philip Larkin; instead, I am fond of Charles Causley, the Cornish poet Larkin admired (as did Ted Hughes and Siegried Sassoon and many others, though he is still not as well known in the states as he ought to be.) Causley was a clerk, a playwright, a seasick sailor in war-time, an organist and all-round musician, a teacher of children, and more. I believe that I am fond of him as a person, not just a poet. They are related, Causley and Larkin, two sides of a coin, but I love Causley and am still trying to love Larkin.

Larkin, Larkin, what a trouble you are to me! I don't like the way you write about women, especially women "in specs," but I'll ignore all that for the sake of your lovely moments. But if I do, I still don't like the way you talk about the ordinary impulses toward more life--children and marriage, particularly, and the way you often see strangers in a rather loveless way. I am afraid that I picture you at dreary work with the in-box and "loaf-haired" secretary.

And yet, and yet... I see so many lines to admire, and it is no small thing to write a poem with a single moment worth remembering. I like "Sporting-house girls like circus tigers" and "spend all our life on imprecisions, / That when we start to die / Have no idea why" and "A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain." Listen to the sound of "dark-clothed children at play / Called after kings and queens" and "An immense slackening ache, / As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, / Spreads slowly through them" and "dark towns heap up on the horizon." The "sudden scuttle on the drum" pleases me, and the billboard scene, where "A glass of milk stands in a meadow." Clive James describes the poet's "privileged duty" as "to be concerned with everything, in the hope of producing something--a poem, a stanza, even a single line--that will live on its own, in its own time" (Poetry Notebook, p. 77.) Larkin has plenty of special moments.

Larkin also has a good instinct for metrics. The line, "The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went" is a great example, starting with three strong iambic feet but in the last two feet giving us a reversed foot (so that it dwindles) and a dwindled monosyllabic foot. Or take a look at the thicket of accents in "And dark towns heap up on the horizon." Or try this line: "And the widening river's slow presence." It's almost as neat a combination of metrics and sense as Pope's "Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain, / Flies o'er th'unbending Corn, and skims along the Main." Those smooth iambic combined with "o'er" and "th'unbending" are speedy.) "And the widening river's slow presence" appears in the midst of established iambic pentameter lines but varies from them by giving us a ten-syllable tetrameter line, essentially widening out the expected first three feet by substituting extra slack syllables with two anapestic feet. That last trochaic foot is the perfect word for a river that is widening and slowing: no motion but merely presence.

See credits above.

When I come to the last poem in the book, there are tears in my eyes as I read of the earl and countess in stone fidelity on their Arundel tomb, their absurd little dogs at their feet (his is actually a small lion), while all the world whirls on and the people change around them. Time happens: "Snow fell, undated. Light / Each summer thronged the glass. A bright / Litter of birdcalls strewed the same / Bone-riddled ground...." Then I realize that the reason the poem moves me is that I identify not so much with the changed world of "endless altered people" but with Larkin's image of the faithful, clasped stone hands of the dead "to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love."

And think on this: in our time, doesn't Larkin's poem belong to that older world--the world where grace caught in iambic tetrameter meter and an abbcac rhyme scheme could be considered achievement? Julian Stannard writes, "Post-1945, English poetry, thanks to Larkin and the Movement and Philip Hobsbaum and the Group, distanced itself from international modernism, re-establishing the English line and privileging form and meaning." Nevertheless, we are neck deep in the diminishing rear-guard returns of Modernism (perhaps truly free verse can only be written by those who have experienced the shackles of form, as in early Modernism), where line and form and meaning are in abeyance. Do I need to say I don't object to free verse? I don't. I object to slackness and to being bored (that goes for my own poems, too, though sometimes I don't dislike them until they are already circulating, which is annoying.) Clive James calls our own time one in which "almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem" (Poetry Notebook, p. 66.)

All the same, the poem's little dogs at the feet of Richard and Eleanor make me think of Causley's "Eden Rock" portrait of his parents waiting for him on the other side of the Jordan with the little terrier Jack trembling at their feet, while the sky whitens as if from the light of three suns. "They beckon to me from the other bank; / I hear them call, See where the stream-path is! / Crossing is not as hard as you might think." Here comes a stanza break and then the final line: "I had not thought that it would be like this."

Ah, well, maybe I love Causley a lot but Larkin a little after all....

Give me your arm, old toad;

Help me down Cemetery Road.

SaveSave

Another poem at Autumn Sky

I've been seldom-seen in these airy rooms--lots of celebrations and time-consuming activities and also deadlines. But here's a little nibble:

Icarus, Icarus, Paratrooper

Homage to Charles Causley

Slung down from heaven, torn silks whipped

By precipitous wind, he tripped

From air and rammed the blasting sea

Read the whole poem here. And yes, I love the poems of the Cornish poet Charles Causley; this is a nod to his beautiful work, particularly the poems inspired by his naval service. A surprising and often ravishing writer, he is neglected on this side of the puddle. But not by me.

So please take a plunge if you're not violently opposed to myth, sea, falls, and rhyme. You can also comment or use a whole wild array of like-share buttons, and there are links to three other poems by me at the foot, "I Met My True Love Walking," "Epistle to F. Douglass," and "Landscape with Icefall."

***

Elsewhere, thanks to novelist Emily Barton for recommending Catherwood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996) in the new issue of Post Road Magazine (issue 31.) Must check on that reprint! Forthcoming...

Is. Poetry. Dead. Redux.

Addendum: I'm a bit sick of reading is-poetry-dead and the-novel-is-dead articles. Journalists never tire of the topic. Tomorrow I think I'll write about something entirely different. Wombats. Ladybugs. Cat videos. Nobody ever seems to get tired of cat videos.

This morning I was reading a 2009 Sally Thomas column, Is Billy Collins Killing Poetry?  and wanted to leave a comment, but the comments were closed. I was not thinking about Billy Collins so much as about the survival of poetry and the need to pay attention beyond the poets thrust into our faces by--by whom? the so-called poetry establishment? by the fact that it's easier to keep repeating the same old names?

For the record, I do not think in the least that Billy Collins is killing poetry, even though I admit to having written a riposte to "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes" that was published in The Raintown Review and later made into a video by that multi-media artist, Paul Digby. Eventually "A Fire in Ice" appeared in my collection The Throne of Psyche (Mercer, 2011.)

Poetry survived the Dark Ages and the great vowel shift and one historical period clashing with another. It has even survived the tedium of the "authorless poem" and the enshrining of poetry in the ivory tower. It has survived mountains of terrible poems. It even survives all the people who claim they hate the stuff but haven't bothered to read enough to discover what's good out there.

What itched at me about the column had to do with the comments. Sally Thomas waxes enthusiastic over one of my favorite contemporary poets, the not-long-late Charles Causley, both his poems published for children and those not. I dearly love Causley and was glad to see her piping the news. A number of people left comments, and took the chance to bash Collins about the head a bit. But not one said, "Charles Causley. He sounds wonderful. I'll look him up." In fact, not one who wrote in even mentioned Causley.

Is it the same-old, same-old? Are people quite willing to talk over and over about how dreadful contemporary (academic! dull! pretentious! etcetera) poetry is--and some of the time, they are quite right--but not willing to explore somebody of beauty and joy and music and humor and depth like Causley? Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin rated Charles Causley very highly indeed, and they were both pretty demanding readers.

Plenty of interesting poets work quietly among us. Is it possible that some readers--even those who are writers--would rather disparage Collins (or Olds or Graham, or whoever their most-disliked "popular" poet is) than do some digging for poets they might like better?

On the web, Charles Causley is little seen because of copyright issues, but he is well worth seeking out. You might like him.

Light heart, broken heart, child heart--

Olana - Matthew Six

Mineral Pigments, Gold on Kumohada
60 x 48"
2007-2009

This modest little post is dedicated to my friend Makoto Fujimura, who lost 20 major works and 50+ smaller ones in the flooding of Chelsea's Dillon Gallery during Hurricane Sandy. He has served on the NEA board, founded International Arts Movement and Fujimura Institute, and is well known worldwide for his nihongan paintings.

Yesterday afternoon the mail brought me the most delightful little book by royal mail. I now have a beautiful Godine edition of the late Charles Causley's selected poems, and I have a paperback collected poems that I wish were a bit higher quality, but this is a little charmer: a paperback of the Selected Poems for Children, the poems chosen by him not long before his death.

"Among the English poetry of the last half century, Charles Causley's could well turn out to be the best loved and most needed." --Ted Hughes

I dearly love Causley and can't fathom why he's not better known on this side of the Atlantic puddle. Editor John Wilson introduced his poems to me some years ago, and I've been very glad of it.

Writers and readers cast a kind of after-burial vote for whose books will last and whose words are worth reading, and I'm casting one for Causley. Charles Causley is one of those still-water-running-deep people one longs to have known, and I could feel a little envious of those who have, were envy not one of the seven deadlies... Invidia.

In this book, one meets elephants and mermaids and sea-lovers and tales of kings or paupers that make one laugh or crack the heart. I've just started to dip into it here and there, seeing poems I know (like the marvelous "Timothy Winters" or "Mary, Mary Magdalene" or "Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience") and poems entirely new to me, bright or sometimes uncanny or grim(m). Here's a poem to drive a child--or you or me--out of bed and into the blooming sun:

Early in the Morning

Early in the morning
The water hits the rocks,
The birds are making noises
Like old alarum clocks,
The soldier on the skyline
Fires a golden gun
And over the back of the chimney-stack
Explodes the silent sun.

And here's one of his lively tales in small:

Charity Chadder

Charity Chadder
Borrowed a ladder,
Leaned it against the moon,
Climbed to the top Without a stop
On the 31st of June,
Brought down every single star,
Kept them all in a pickle jar.

Here's a snip from a jolly, longish poem called Three Green Sailors. Causley was a sailor, and that was the source of many a grief-struck or lovely poem of his. But this one is a comedy for children and the child-hearted, and reminds us that Causley was a teacher of young children. I wonder if he once recited this poem to a class:

Three Green Sailors

Three green sailors
Went to sea
In a sailing ship
Called The Flying Flea.
Their caps were round,
Their shirts were square,
Their trousers were rolled
And their feet were bare.
One wore a pigtail,
One wore a patch,
One wore ear-rings
That never did match.
One chewed baccy,
One chewed cake,
One chewed a pennyworth
Of two-eyed steak.
One danced to,
One danced fro
And the other sang the shanty
Haul Away Joe.

And here's a little weather poem especially for Mako, with the hope that his every painting day is a sweet Saturday:

All Day Saturday

Let it sleet on Sunday,
Monday let it snow,
Let the mist on Tuesday
From the salt-sea flow.
Let it hail on Wednesday,
Thursday let it rain,
Let the wind on Friday
Blow a hurricane,
But Saturday, Saturday
Break fair and fine
And all day Saturday
Let the sun shine.

The book is illustrated by John Lawrence, who traveled to Launceston, Cornwall to meet with Charles Causley and make sure his work was accurate to the place. Small, vigorous vignettes decorate the book and add much pleasure and charm.

Merchant sings Causley

Go here for an interview with Natalie Merchant and then a video of her singing a children’s poem by Charles Causley, a wondrous and a very underrated poet from Cornwall who died a few years ago. And, if you are curious, here are the words of the ballad Natalie Merchant sings:

Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience

I had a silver penny

And an apricot tree

And I said to the sailor

On the white quay

'Sailor O sailor

Will you bring me

If I give you my penny

And my apricot tree

A fez from Algeria

An Arab drum to beat

A little gilt sword

And a parakeet?'

And he smiled and he kissed me

As strong as death

And I saw his red tongue

And I felt his sweet breath

'You may keep your penny

And your apricot tree

And I'll bring your presents

Back from the sea.'

O, the ship dipped down

On the rim of the sky

And I waited while three

Long summers went by

Then one steel morning

On the white quay

I saw a grey ship

Come in from the sea

Slowly she came

Across the bay

For her flashing rigging

Was shot away

All round her wake

The seabirds cried

And flew in and out

Of the hole in her side

Slowly she came

In the path of the sun

And I heard the sound

Of a distant gun

And a stranger came running

Up to me

From the deck of the ship

And he said, said he

'O are you the boy

Who would wait on the quay

With the silver penny

And the apricot tree?

I've a plum-coloured fez

And a drum for thee

And a sword and a parakeet

From over the sea.

'O where is the sailor

With the bold red hair?

And what is that volley

On the bright air?

O where are the other

Girls and boys?

And why have you brought me

Children's toys?'

*

And if you want to know how the snow is going up here, well, it's as much snow as in a fairy tale. As I said elsewhere, there's a mound as big as a coffin on the iron table in the yard, and here's to hoping that King Winter is melting inside.

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The medieval image is all Gode Cookery courtesye: http://www.godecookery.com/clipart/misc/clmisc.htm