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

* * *

          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."

* * *

Donation site for The Friends of Notre Dame: 

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

NPM4: I give you water-devil whirligigs--

April, national poetry month, no. 4

Image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
 from the back of The Foliate Head

"I Heard Their Wings Like the Sound of Many Waters,"
The Foliate Head (hardcover from Stanza Press, 2012)

*

I like bigness in a poem, and this one started with a phrase that has a cosmic largeness to it. I also like mystery in a poem, and don't think all that much of a poem that exhausts all its mystery in short order, so I hope this one retains both largeness and mystery. It first appeared in the qarrtsiluni here.

*

"I Heard Their Wings Like the Sound of Many Waters"

In the dark, in the deeps of the night that are
Crevasses of a sea, I heard their wings.
I heard the trickling of tiny feathers
With their hairs out like milkweed parachutes
Floating idly on the summer air,
I heard the curl and splash, the thunderbolts
Of pinions, the rapids and rattle of shafts—
Heard Niagara sweep the barreled woman
And shove her under water for three days,
I heard a jar of fragrance spill its waves
As a lone figure poured out all she could,
Heard the sky’s bronze-colored raindrops scatter
On corrugated roofs and tops of wells,
I heard the water-devil whirligigs,
I heard an awesome silence when the wings
Held still, upright as flowers in a vase,
And when I turned to see why they had stilled,
Then what I saw was likenesses to star
Imprisoned in a form of marble flesh,
With a face like lightning-fires and aura
Trembling like a rainbow on the shoulders,
But all the else I saw was unlikeness
That bent me like a bow until my brow
Was pressed against the minerals of earth,
And when I gasped at air, I tasted gold.

Interior division page with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
The Foliate Head book design by Andrew Wakelin

The Flower Girl

THE FLOWER GIRL

with many thanks to Paul Digby

  

 Here's a not-much-more than newborn poem from me, embodied in an even newer video by the wonderful Paul Digby. It's a blank verse poem, tying off with a rhyme, and looks to be the first of a group--at least, I have already written a related poem and have some scattered flecks of thought about a few more.

Paul reads the poem, and he made the video. He is one of the most creative people I know--a composer, a videographer, a carpenter, a painter in oils, a knitter and designer, a custom frame maker, and endlessly on. Lately he has been singing a great deal. He's a special person, and I appreciate the many kind things he has done for my poems. You can see six more of his videos of my poems here.

P. S. I agree with Marja-Leena, the other one didn't deserve to be on the same page! So I took it down... Shall post it on Facebook for the curious.

"The Wish for Roses," again--

This evening Paul Digby posted a link to his video for "The Wish for Roses," and though I've already shared his rendition elsewhere, I think it ought to be here as well. Thanks to those who have shared the poem on facebook, and to commenters on various pages... I've seen it on six pages already, so hope it is sailing out into the world.

The poem originally appeared at Sienna Latham's wonderful Hindsight, where it was joined with the original photograph and an account by Fredric Koeppel of his great-aunt Hazel Tuttle. I'm so glad that he wrote her story and posted!

An earlier reading of the poem appeared from librarykris of New Zealand at Audioboo at the beginning of the year--so lovely to hear different interpretations of a poem. Kris also recorded my poem "Sixteen Hundred Years."

Memory Palace, no. 3

Image courtesy of Michaela Kobyakov of Leonding,
Austria and sxc.hu

I find your project to memorize poetry and then write about it intellectually stimulating, lovely, and touching. You may be right about only poets wanting to read about poetry, but a huge percentage of people are poets who just don't write poetry. If they have the ability to be moved, they can and do love poetry. --Philip Lee Williams

What do you think about that lovely summation? Is it true?

Perhaps I'll continue writing notes about the poems I memorize; perhaps not. At any rate, I am learning and feeling things about poems that one can't learn in any other way. A memorized, delivered poem (in the mind or outloud) seems to engage the whole person, and the importance of pauses increases. One is not longer juggling words and doing a degree of study about how to read the poem when the poem flows forth, memorized. I find that the longer one repeats a poem, the more subtle variation in in pause and emphasis becomes evident. A memorized poem partakes of a natural out-springing like a stream from earth and rocks.

The second poem I memorized was this one by Shakespeare (no. 98), not one of the best known of his sonnets. I memorized it once in college for an exam, but had forgotten much of it over the years.

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
   Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
   As with your shadow I with these did play.

This one does not want to stay lodged in my head, and though I have it now, I fear that I'll have to work to keep it from tumbling out again (rather like the two knotty lines in the Hopkins poem I memorized first.) Some of the difficulty may be due to inversion of syntax, but while memorizing it I noticed other things as stumbling points. "Nor the sweet smell / Of different flowers in odour and in hue" always feels a little redundant to me, so I kept thinking that I had the lines wrong. The stop in the third quatrain gives a bit of trouble because the quatrain splits into related parts, and the jump from the rose and lily to the "figures of delight" (which seem to work both as images and as rhetorical figures) drawn after the red and white complexion trope beloved of Renaissance writers made me go blank a few times.

Also, the turns in thought that mark the Shakespearean sonnet happen remarkably early, and so I didn't expect a shift in the fifth line. In fact, the whole poem with its yets and nors becomes turn, turn, turn, long before the closing couplet and the closing turn from summer to winter, from bright to dark.

Courtesy of Istvan Benedek of Budapest, Hungary and sxc.hu

Memory Palace, no. 2

Photo courtesy of Micha Sankowski of Warsaw, Poland
and sxc.hu

Wrestling tournaments and minor disasters have temporarily delayed my poems-by-heart project. So I've decided to shift to one a week, reciting all I've learned so far every day to review. The first poem I learned was this one, an old favorite by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I knew it fairly well already...

Spring and Fall

  to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

I found this one quite easy to memorize aside from the compression of "Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed." And the way that I managed that was to remember to move from "springs" to "mouth" (as of a spring.) Then I had a little trouble wanting to swap "mind" and "heart," but alliteration is a great help there, as "mouth" and "mind" are bracketed together by sound, as well as "heart heard."

There are some things I like especially well about this poem: the strong, sonnet-like ending, the Anglo-Saxon influence on alliterative line structure and words that resemble kennings (wanwood, leafmeal, Goldengrove); the constriction and knottiness of syntax that comes at the same time that revelation approaches; the many meanings circling spring/springs and leaving/leaves. I like the way that the poem questions and doubts language, showing us that the word death, say, doesn't matter because all sorrows have the same springs--in fact, heart and spirit are quick to know more than mind and its words.

* * *

Addendum: Still wondering whether this sort of post is desirable--the internet makes me grasp how few non-poets care about poetry in English these days. Although I note that Iris the "interactive semi-conscious AI" seems to like Wallace Stevens. If you have an opinion, please say so!

Memory Palace frolics--

Courtesy of Eva Schuster
of Dresden, Germany
and sxc.hu--"vaults in
colour from the palace
Alcazar in Seville."

I've decided to work my brain a little harder, now that I've had such a big birthday and am arrowing toward twilight on planet Earth. After all, when I'm writing, I'm having the sheer mad joy of making things up, and when I'm reading--when lucky in my choices--I am reveling in somebody else's words. It doesn't feel much like work, as for good or ill I'm not one of the sorts of writers who sweats blood at the keyboard. Maybe that only works with typewriters. I tend to enjoy it even more when things get knotty, and I like taking a machete and slashing away at what I've made. So neither writing nor revising nor reading is sufficiently unpleasant as to seem like brain exercise (perhaps I should read theory? abstruse alchemical texts? Kierrkegaard?)

So I'm going to re-memorize poems I once knew--should be fairly easy--and memorize new ones--less easy. I just started with Hopkins, "Spring and Fall" and Shakespeare's sonnet 98, "From you have I been absent in the spring." Both of those I knew long ago.

Once I took a seminar from critic Mark Spilka. We all had to deliver a paper, and mine included seven Frost poems. (I don't even remember which ones, now, except that "After Apple-Picking" was harder to learn than the others.) As the course went on, I noticed that our professor never looked at the students when they were reading their papers. I memorized all seven of the poems in my essay and practiced them well, and I remember feeling it a signal victory that we stared each other in the eyes during the recitation portions.

What a funny young woman I must have been!

Anyway, I'm now bad at remembering poems and would like to be good at it once again. So I'm planning on using these methods:

• paying extra attention to the first and last words of each line
• paying attention to meter 
• attention to sensation and color in the poem
• adding extreme mental images where needed (staff music above Shakespeare's birds, cartoon wiggly lines for fragrance above flowers, etc.)
• paying extra attention to the words that start stanzas and suggest structure (As, in 98, I'm focusing on "From, Yet nor, Nor, Yet," a succession that is a little confusing, especially since "nor" comes in for quite a bit of use in the poem.)
• focusing on repeating the lines that are particularly odd in syntax (Hopkins's "Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed," for example)
• using buildings that mean something to me as memory palaces when needed--as, my rickety federal house in Cooperstown and the also-rickety arts-and-crafts/Tudor house in Greenville, the Queen Anne house and the primitive house where I spent part of my summers as a child

Just call me Loci-loki, mischief-maker!

Sixteen Hundred Years

"Trees and moon" courtesy of sxc.hu
and Siddharth Nair of Bangalore, India.

LibraryKris aka Kris Weihipeihana of New Zealand has read another of my poems on Audioboo (it follows her reading of "The Wish for Roses") this time a poem in the current issue of Mezzo Cammin (click to see the text.) It's fascinating to see what poems attract readers, and to hear one's words with the emphasis and accents of another.

A whole series of readings of the same poems would make an interesting site, wouldn't it? To hear the differences in pause and length of syllable, the variety of accents, the subtle changes in sense and emotion that would sometimes occur.

Thank you to Kris!