Poetry Page

[BarbStAubrey]

Welcome to September Poetry Page ~ Seamus Heaney
Let's Honor both Fairanna and Babi by
sharing the poems of of one of their favorites
Irish poet, Seamus Heaney.
Maybe all three are gathered with their friends in heaven's Pub...

Postscript And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightening of flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you'll park or capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

A few Links:

• Famous Poets and Poems about Autumn
• Poetry Foundation: Seamus Heaney
• Paris Review: Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry
• The Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry

Discussion Leaders: Barb

[JoanK]

JUDE: "why just birds?" You'll have to ask Collins that.

But he answers it in his introduction. We humans have always been fascinated by birds: their ability to both fly and sing. I am one of those who have felt that fascination since I was a child: if I were a poet, I would use my tongue to celebrate them. So this little collection delights me.

After all, poetry is not necessarily about broadening the field, but about seeing the eternal in the small.

[BarbStAubrey]

OH JoanK i have never heard it put so well - poetry is about seeing the eternal in the small - that is a quote to remember.

Have you been following the series on Birds on PBS - missed a few but those I have watched are fascinating and informative beyond what I thought I knew and I thought I knew a lot about birds, their migrations, and their habitat.

[PatH]

Marjifay, thank you for reminding me of Heany's The Burial at Thebes.  We read Antigone here recently, and I became aware of it then.  It wasn't relevant to our discussion, since we wanted quite literal texts, but now I would like to read it and see what he made of the original.  I just got a copy from my library.  It's fourth in line, after three books with deadlines for discussions, but since my library system has nine copies and mine is the only one out, I can probably renew it as much as needed.

[BarbStAubrey]

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984


When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives--
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

[JoanK]

Barbara: that's lovely. Is that Heaney?

[BarbStAubrey]

Yes JoanK - we are only doing Heaney and sprinkling in some of Fairanna's this month - Next month is so the epitome of Autumn, with so many poems celebrating the season we just have to devote a month to the season and then in November how about we do your suggested Birds.

[JoanK]

By then I will have had to return the bird poetry book to the library, although I'm tempted to buy a copy.

[BarbStAubrey]

At The Wellhead

Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed  
As you always do, are like a local road
We’ve known every turn of in the past-
That midge-veiled, high-hedged side road where you stood
Looking and listening until a car  
Would come and go and leave you lonelier  
Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,  
Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran.

Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,
Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbor
Who played the piano all day in her bedroom.
Her notes came out to us like hoisted water  
Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead  
Where next thing we’d be listening , hushed and awkward.

That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician  
Was like a silver vein in heavy clay.
Night water glistening in the light of day.
But also just our neighbor, Rosie Keenan.
She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille
In books like books wallpaper patterns came in .
Her hands were active and her eyes were full  
Of open darkness and watery  shine.

She knew us by our voices. She’d say  she “saw”
Wherever or what ever. Being with her
Was intimate and helpful, like a cure
You didn’t notice happening. When I read  
A poem with Keenan’s well in it , she said,  
“I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.”

[JoanK]

I love the picture you've found for this.

[PatH]

I love the lines from In Memoriam:
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

[BarbStAubrey]

Yes he sure shows the different ways we seek and achieve comfort in that poem doesn't he - would we all have someone to work next to that fills the heart with silence while using our hands to do the ordinary that will feed the body - seems to me the potato for the Irish is like Bread for others - a staple that will nourish those using hammer and tongs to build a place for themselves in the here after. His poetry has so many levels.

[BarbStAubrey]

The Disappearing Island

Once we presumed to found ourselves for good
Between its blue hills and those sandless shores
Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil,

Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth
And hung our cauldron in its firmament,
The island broke beneath as like a wave.

The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it "in extremis".
All I believe that happened there was vision.


(in ex·tre·mis (ĭn ĕk-strē'mĭs) -- adv.
At the point of death. In grave or extreme circumstances.)

[Frybabe]

I'm not a big poetry reader, but these are lovely, if I can use that word. I can feel the emotion in them; I can envision the scene. The Disappearing Island punctuates the book I just finished which was set along the coast of the Florida Panhandle where the action often took place on sandy islands that were built up or destroyed by the hurricanes that passed over.

[BarbStAubrey]

Changes

As you came with me in silence
to the pump in the long grass

I heard much that you could not hear: the bite of the spade that sank it,
the slithering and grumble as the mason mixed his mortar,

and women coming with white buckets
like flashes on their ruffled wings.

The cast-iron rims of the lid
clinked as I uncovered it,

something stirred in its mouth.
I had a bird's eyes view of a bird,

finch-green, speckly white,
nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still,

suffering the light.
So I roofed the citadel

as gently as I could, and told you
and you gently unroofed it

but where was the bird now?
There was a single egg, pebbly white,

and in the rusted bend of the spout
tail feathers splayed and sat tight.

So tender, I said, 'Remember this.
It will be good for you to retrace this path

when you have grown away and stand at last
at the very center of the empty city.'

[JudeS]

In the last issue of "The New Republic" there were four lovely pages devoted to Heaney. Much of it was devoted to his funeral, which the author of the piece attended. Her name is Helen Vendler and she too is a poet who knew Heaney. I will give you some of the more interesting passages:

"SH's funeral in Dublin was televised live, marking an event that occupied the front pages in Ireland for several days.....
Seamus established an immediate intimacy even with strangers. The eldest of nine children, he could be anyone's older brother.....Seamus scanned people in a clairvoyant way, realizing that faculties of mind and temperament instantly and deeply.
...volume by volume, decade by decade, Heaney translated feelings in resonant word clusters. For "the troubles in Northern Ireland: "neighborly murders". For early marriage: "the lovely and painful\Covenants of flesh..\The respite in our dewy dreaming faces."  For the destruction of the Twin Towers: "Anything can happen".

Brought up a Catholic he was no longer a believer as an adult, but he also remarked that one cannot forget the culture in which one was raised.(At the funeral ) Peter Fallon read Heaney's poem "The Given Note":
"So, whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don't care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still, he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow of gravely.
Rephrases itself into the air."

There is much more but I hope you enjoyed this tidbit.
Again, Barb, you are doing a wonderfully impressive job on this site.


 

[JudeS]

Sorry, the fifth line of the last poem had an extra word. It is :"Comes off the bow gravely." I apologize for the extra 'of".

[BarbStAubrey]

Wouldn't have been lovely to have seen an excerpt of the funneral on a Youtube or really the best would have been to see a bit included in at least PBS news.

The poem that you found JUde that was read at the funeral sounds like Seamus Heaney tying all the spirits of here and there together.

[BarbStAubrey]

The smells of ordinariness

Were new on the night drive through France:
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car.

Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went
Each place granting its name's fulfilment.

A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smouldered out.
One by one small cafés shut.

I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.

[BarbStAubrey]

"A Kite for Michael and Christopher"

All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I'd tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe,
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.

[BarbStAubrey]

THE CATECHISM

Q.and A. come back, They "formed my mind."
"Who is my neighbour?" "My neighbour is all mankind."

[Octavia]

Beautiful poetry, and I will be back. I have so much to catch up with.
I have just bought 2 books of poetry by the Irish poet John O'Donohue, who died much too young.
I have 'Echoes of Memory' and Conamara Blues.
I think his most well known book is Anam Cara(spiritual wisdom from the Celtic world)
 www.johnodonohue.com

[BarbStAubrey]

So good to see your post Octavia - just read of your trials - please hang on -

[Octavia]

Thank you Barb, I love that Irish Blessing.
 I've just been reading all Heaney's poems here, and thinking perhaps I should buy a book of his. My book supply is creeping up. I've been ordering books, mainly poetry, but some fiction. I call them 'keepers', ones that will go to the Old Folks Home with me, if I last that long:-)
The trouble is I keep finding more and more, I just have to have!
I'm waiting on a book of Norman MacCaig's poetry, and I see Heaney said of him 'He means poetry to me.' What better recommendation?

[Dana]

I'm about halfway thru Shakespeare's sonnets....Folger of-course, I didn't appreciate quite how much he played on words and how much that word play adds to the meaning of the poems.  I also did not realise that the first 20 are written to a young man.......how ignorant can one be really, how much there is to learn and so little time to do it all in....

[JoanK]

That's wonderful. I'll have to get that edition.

[Dana]

Actually, its most of the sonnets--written to a young man I mean....I had only got to about 20 when I posted...."Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"....."Shakespeare in Love" totally misrepresented that one...not that I liked that movie anyway.....I have not got to the dark lady ones yet,  but the double and triple and even quadruple meaning of words is quite extraordinary and would have gone completely over my head without Folger.  What a total genius, what a facility with language.

[BarbStAubrey]

Dana you are prompting me to dig out my book of Shakespearean Sonnets -

I love the definition of a Sonnet - The word sonnet comes from the Italian word “sonetto” which means “little song”. A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line.

From what I learned the first sonnets are credited as being written by Petrarch although some disagree and say other poets during the Italian Renascence were the poets - then we skip to the English sonnets and the first poets were Wyatt and Henry Howard.

The rhyme scheme for the octave is typically a b b a a b b a. The sestet is more flexible. Petrarch typically used c d e c d e or c d c d c d for the sestet. Some other possibilities for the sestet include c d d c d d, c d d e c e, or c d d c c d (as in Wordsworth's "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convents Narrow Room" poem). This form was used in the earliest English sonnets by Wyatt and others.

I think Folger's Shakespearean Library does a nice web page on the History of the Sonnet

I always think of the sonnet as a more romantic view of life - I wonder if there are any that show the seamy side or disruptions in life?

Focusing for a bit on Shakespearean Sonnets would be a lovely way to spend the next few weeks - would you enjoy this page if we do just that - focus on the Sonnet or just focus on Shakespearean Sonnets or leave it open to whatever poem strikes your fancy?

 I am so glad to see someone interested again is sharing poetry - those who love poetry that were part of this group are no longer with us however, i feel their spirit on these pages. It seems to me we did share sonnets in the past however, poems are read over and over each time with a new appreciation and another chord within seems to be plucked.

Dana I think I will  join you sharing a few of Shakespeare's sonnets.

[BarbStAubrey]

this Shakespeare sonnet is about winter taking summer away but for me to replace winter with the drought and it is perfect - perfectly sad making us feel helpless as we see the bounty of our summer dry up into raw rasping skeletons shading the few ants that remain.  It also reminds me of us as we age - there are so many losses of friends, but even our ability to do things that were so easy for us as recently as 10 years past - I am smiling thinking of us as bundled sheaves with white and bristly beards that for many of us describes our hair. Makes me think and wonder are we really all sheaves of memories from the summer of our lives?

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
     And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
     Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

[Dana]

I quote Folger, "As he observes the motions of the clock and the movement of all things towards death and decay, the poet faces the fact that the young man's beauty will be destroyed by Time.  Nothing besides offspring, he argues, can defy Time's scythe."

The first 17 sonnets talk about how the young man's beauty will be lost to time and death, unless he procreates.  The 18th is "a radical change" which says that the young man's beauty will live on in the poet's verse. ( But actually I don't think its such a radical change, because of the "eternal lines"  which graft him to Time.)

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
 Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

"eternal lines" means "immortal verse"and also echoes the "lines of life" of sonnet 16, "so should the lines of life that life repair", referring  to living children, so "eternal lines" refers to the poet's poetry AND the children the young man should have....

[BarbStAubrey]

Interesting Dana - we all have our queues - For me the structure of a sonnet is my queue - The first 8 lines showing the wonders of the topic followed by 2 lines that are the turn picking out where the last 4 lines are going to either justify or argue with the first 8 lines. 

Either way, the structure or the words you picked from the poem, do seem to support your realization that beauty represented in this young man can fade and like the seasons will fade but there is a deeper eternal beauty that death does not destroy and as long as there are eyes to see beauty has life.

Lovey thought, that leaves us with such a deep appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us that springs from nature, human or otherwise, as well as, the beauty created by ourselves and others. I love the line, "And summer's lease hath all too short a date." Sorta smooth on the tongue when it is said aloud.

Off this deeper appreciation of beauty and I smile thinking - for us around here, not a summer's day, although a summer's day can have it own beauty appreciated by some when the sun is like an blacksmith's hammer on the anvil that is the dried up earth with  every living thing looking for any shade in the triple digit temps. Soundless, Hawks wheeling on the thermals against an expansive blue sky. Darling buds can be in May but here more likely in March and April. 

[BarbStAubrey]

This concept of describing a temporary beauty and linking it to the eternal appears to be a theme taken up by others - here is another poem using the theme.

An Eternal Beauty!!!

by Kumar

As the sun sets,so many colors seems to fill the sky,
With you around,i always seem to get lost in your eyes,
One after another,the waves come and touch your feet,
by dying at your feet they feel their life is complete.

The way you leave your foot prints on the sand,
The way you come near and hold onto my hand,
The way you dance and kick the waters away,
walking behind,almost speechless i would stay.

As the birds fly over the sky to their nest
its ur mesmerizing voice that puts them to rest,
some of them descend and try to have a look at you,
wondering how this bird looks more beautiful than we do.

No poet on this earth can capture your beauty in a book,
Ur beauty is such,even the stars come out and have a look,
Even though all those stars belongs to the heaven above,
Each and every one of them adore the angel i love.

Your beauty is the only one i will always admire,
Everyday of my life,i pray god to keep this desire,
It doesn't matter whether you are twenty or ninety,
In my heart,you will always remain "An Eternal Beauty"

[Dana]

Isn't this a nice one--I remember it from school.  Think we had to memorize it!

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him,like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

[BarbStAubrey]

Wow - I never really paid attention to this sonnet - I am blown away - this is strongly suggesting he is supporting the downtrodden or those beyond the pale - of course then there would not be this sentiment towards women but it sure fits now.

[Dana]

I see it as him saying that if he's feeling miserable and sorry for himself (pretty much exaggerating his despair as we sometimes do) and then thinks of his beloved his heart leaps like the lark and his self pity is replaced by joy.

[PatH]

We don't have the English larks here, but I've been told that they fly up, so high you lose sight of them, then let loose with their amazing song.  That's got to be a good image for hope and uplifting and joy.

[BarbStAubrey]

Yes Dana I can see the turn is where he takes the universal and turns it to himself

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

There are so many poets who include the lark as their metaphor - Pat I did not know they fly so high and then sing their song - now you have me curious to find out more about the habits of a lark  - ask and you shall receive - I love the internet - anyhow this is a web site that explains more about the habits of the lark and how it is often used in British poems including by Shakespeare.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40624200?uid=3739920&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104313248343

[Dana]

http://wn.com/category:english_classical_violinists#

What an interesting website Barb.

The above is a link to The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams.  Its lovely.  I listened to some lark song and it does have that ongoing trilling captured in the music, which is joyous.

[BarbStAubrey]

It is lovely - something about it sounds almost like Chinese music - the trilling is done beautifully - I do not think I hear on particular bird in the early morning - they all seem to call at about the same time or at least several different kinds call - we have so many doves again and they call early but they are not alone. What birds do you have in your neighborhood calling in the morning?

[BarbStAubrey]

looks like Mary Oliver has a poem about the lark.

THE LARK

And I have seen,
at dawn,
the lark
spin out of the long grass
and into the pink air -
its wings,
which are neither wide
nor overstrong,
fluttering -
the pectorals
ploughing and flashing
for nothing but altitude -
and the song
bursting
all the while
from the red throat.
And then he descends,
and is sorry.
His little head hangs
and he pants for breath
for a few moments
among the hoops of the grass,
which are crisp and dry,
where most of his living is done -
and then something summons him again
and up he goes,
his shoulders working,
his whole body almost collapsing and floating
to the edges of the world.
We are reconciled, I think,
to too much.
Better to be a bird, like this one -
an ornament of the eternal.
As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,
“Squander the day, but save the soul, ”
I heard him say.