words

neume
n. - in plainsong: a prolonged phrase or group of notes sung to a single syllable

huggers its way through

You're magisterial in judgment's gorge
where the rocks are at all angles and the stream
huggers its way through.

Geoffrey Hill, "Discourse for Stanley Rosen"

-

Showings are not unknown: a six-winged seraph
somewhere impends--it is the geste of invention,
not the creative but the creator spirit.
The night air sings a colder spell to come.

Geoffrey Hill, "Epiphany at Saint Mary and All Saints"
* italics are mine. Hill italicizes to mark direct quotations.

words

littoral
adj. - of or pertaining to the shore of a lake, sea, or ocean

elegies

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,
The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,
Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,
Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat
In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,
That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout
After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles
In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,
I stand, for this memorial's sake, alone
In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann
Whose hodded, fountain heart once fell in puddles
Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun
(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly
Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;
She would not have me sinking in the holy
Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep
And need no druid of her broken body).
But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all
The seas to service that her wood-tongud virtue
Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,
Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods
That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,
Blessed her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull
Is carved from her in a room with a wet window
In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.
I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.
These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm
Storm me forever over her grave until
The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

Dylan Thomas, "After the Funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)"

'that one long sentence of astounding beauty'

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

Samuel Coleridge, "The Ancient Mariner"

curricula

...now to let your eyes wander as it were over all the lands depicted on the map, and to behold places trodden by the heroes of old, to range over the regions made famous by wars, by triumphs, and even by the tales of poets of renown, now to traverse the stormy Adriatic, now to climb unharmed the slopes of fiery Etna, then to spy out the customs of mankind and those states which are well ordered; next to seek out and explore the nature of all living creatures, and after that to turn your attention to the secret virtues of stones and herbs. And do not shrink from taking your flight into the skies and gazing upon the manifold shapes of clouds, the mighty piles of snow, and the source of the dews of the morning; then inspect the coffers wherein the hail is stored and examine the arsenals of the thunderbolts. And do not let the intent of Jupiter or Nature elude you, when a huge and fearful comet threatens to set the heavens aflame, nor let the smallest star escape you of all the myriads which are scattered and strewn between the poles: yes, even follow close upon the sun in all his journeys, and ask account of time and demand the reckoning of its eternal passage.

John Milton, "Prolusion: An Attack on Scholastic Philosophy"

loving desperately

VI

Between bay window and hedge the impenetrable holly
strikes up again taut wintry vibrations,
The hellebore is there still,
half-buried; the crocuses are surviving.
From the front room I might be able to see
the coal fire's image planted in a circle
of cut-back rose bushes. Nothing is changed
by the strength of this reflection.

IX

On chance occasions--
and others have observed this--you can see the wind,
as it moves, barely a separate thing,
the inner wall, the cell, of an hourglass, humming
vortices, bright particles in dissolution,
a roiling plug of sand picked up
as a small dancing funnel. It is how
the purest apprehension might appear
to take corporeal shape.

XIII

Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?
Who can now tell what was taken, or where,
or how, or whether it was received:
how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over-
laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around,
rotted down with leafmould, accepted
as civic concrete, reinforceable
base cinderblocks:
tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up
with the Baltic and Pontic sludge:
committed in absentia to solemn elevation,
Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral
music, for male and female
voices ringing a capella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting,
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?

XVII

If the gospel is heard, all else follows:
the scattering, the diaspora,
the shtetlach, ash pits, pits of indigo dye.
Penitence can be spoken of, it is said
but is itself beyond words;
even broken speech presumes. Those Christian Jews
of the first Church, huddled sabbath-survivors,
keepers of the word; silent, inside twenty years,
doubly outcast: even so I would remember--
the scattering, the diaspora.
We do not know the saints.
His mercy is greater even than his wisdom.
If the gospel is heard, all else follows.
We shall rise again, clutching our wounds.

XXVIII

As I have at times imagined: Melancholy,
the more inert we are, thrusts us
into the ways of things violently
uprooted. And there, for her own
increase, grants us a little possession,
that we may then lose all. Boerenverdriet--
peasant sorrow? peasant affliction?--you cannot
cease feeling their uncouth terror, whose flesh
is our own. The slaughterers relish their work
of sport: landsknechts as Callot depicts them,
hideously-festive-death's foragers;
so he draws them among us,
slouch-feathered, shin-booted, jangle
of slove-worn iron: ruyter, ritterkind,
rutterkin, over the low shrub hill--hoyda!
hoyda!--heel-kicking their nags.

XXXVIII

Widely established yet with particular
local intensities, the snow
half-thawed now hardens over again,
glassen-ridged, or pashed
like fish-ice: refracted light
red against copper. The hedged sun
draws into itself for its self-quenching.
If one is so minded, these modalities
stoop to re-enter the subterrane of faith--
faith, that is, in real Being;
the real being God or, more comprehensively, Christ--
as a sanctuary lamp treadles its low flame
or as the long-exiled Salve Regina was sung
in the crypt at Lastingham on the threshold
of a millennium.

LXXVIII

You say how you are struck by the unnatural
brightness of marigolds; and is this music,
or what. Are clowns depressives? The open
secret is to act well. Can the now silent
witnesses be questioned? What hope remains
to get him out alive? I'm sorry, her.
Tomorrow he died, became war-dead, picked
off the sky's face. Fifty years back, the dead
will hear and be broken. Get off the line.
Who are you to say I sound funny.

from CIX

No matter that the grace is so belated;
no matter who staked out and reaps
the patent-commodity; no matter how
grace is confused, repeatedly, with chill
euphoria. Ad te suspiramus,
gementes, flentes: Which, being interpreted,
commits and commends us to loving
desperately, yet not with despair, not
even in desperation.

CXXI

So what is faith if it is not
inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns
are breast-high, head-high, the days
lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder.
Light is this instant, far-seeing
into itself, its own
signature on things that recognize
salvation. I
am an old man, a child, the horizon
is Traherne's country.

CXXXIV

Machado who, to say the least, is your
grand equal, sat out his solitude, habitué
of small, shaky, wicker or zinc tables--
still-life with bottle, glass, scrawled school-cahiers--
put his own voice to slow-drawn induration.
I admire you and have trained my ear
to your muted discords. This rage twists
me, for no reason other than the site
of anarchy coming to irregular order
with laurels; now with wreaths: Duomo drone-
bell, parade-mask shout, beautifully-caught
scatter of pigeons in brusque upward tumble,
wingbeat held by a blink.

CXLVIII

Obnoxious means, far back within itself,
easily wounded. But vulnerable, proud
anger is, I find, a related self
of covetousness. I came late
to seeing that. Actually, I had to be
shown it. What I saw was rough, and still
pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more.
Pride is our crux: to be angry, but not proud
where that means vainglorious. Take Leopardi's
words or--to be accurate--BV's English
cast of them: when he found Tasso's poor
scratch of a memorial barely showing
among the cold slabs of defunct pomp. It
seemed a sad and angry consolation.
So--Croker, MacSikker, O'Shem--I ask you:
what are poems for? They are to console us
with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.
Let us commit that to our dust. What
ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad
and angry consolation. What is
the poem? What figures? Say,
a sad and angry consolation. That's
beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry
consolation.

Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love

within you

See, I strike my hands together at the dishonest gain you have made, and at the blood that has been shed within you. Can your courage endure, or can your hands remain strong in the days when I shall deal with you? I the LORD have spoken, and I will do it. I will scatter you among the nations and disperse you through the countries, and I will purge your filthiness out of you. And I shall be profaned through you in the sight of the nations; and you shall know that I am the LORD.
Ezekiel 22:13-16, NRSV

colors

The wild heart grew white in the forest;
Dark anxiety
Of death, as when the gold
Died in the grey cloud.
An evening in November.
A crowd of needy women stood at the bare gate
Of the slaughterhouse;
Rotten meat and guts fell into every basket;
Horrible food.

The blue dove of the evening
Brought no forgiveness.
The dark cry of trumpets
Travelled in the golden branches
Of the soaked elms.
A frayed flay
Smoking with blood,
To which a man listens
In wild despair.
All your days of nobility, buried
In that red evening!

Out of the dark entrance hall
The golden shape of the young girl steps
Surrounded by the pale moon,
The prince's court of autumn,
Black fir trees broken
In the night's storm,
The steep fortress.
O heart
Glittering above in the snowy cold.

Georg Trakl, "The Heart"

poetry

There is a tradition in Irish poetry in which the poem itself is an answer to a question someone has posed. Somebody says to a guy who is standing in a bar: "What are you doing with those dice?" The guy turns and says:

God rest that Jewy woman,
Queen Jezebel, the bitch
Who peeled the clothes out of the window
Among the geraniums, where
She chaffed and laughed like one half daft
Titivating her painted hair--

King Jehu he drove to her,
She tipped him a fancy beck;
But he from his knacky sidecar spoke,
"Who'll break that dewlapped neck?"
And so she was thrown from the window;
Like Lucifer she fell
Beneath the feet of the horses and they beat
The light out of Jezebel.

The corpse wasn't planted in clover;
Ah, nothing of her was found
Save those grey bones that Hare-foot Mike
Gave me for their lovely sound;
And as once her dancing body
Made starlit princes sweat,
So I'll just clack: though her ghost lacks a back
There's music in the old bones yet.

Which is a way of saying, "You sing your business and I'll sing mine."

James Wright, The Paris Review Interview (Poem: F. R. Higgins, "Song for the Clatter-Bones")

now the heart must break at evening

...It is a strange thing now
To feel how restlessly the bones live out
Unfinished life. Here in the valley where
The lithe creek writhes through fields made doubly fertile
With earth's most nourishing and nervous rain
That fell from us into the eager ground,
The blue-smocked peasants reap the grain with scythes
Whose strokes cut through me here, remembering
The Colorado plain and the long wheat.
So like our fathers in the windy West
We found a patch of land and paid our life.
Yet the rain's taste is like American rain
And from this little distance under earth
The sun is no more angry and the moon
Moves through its phases in no other way
Than when it climbed along the Rockies' edge
And dropped into the prairie. if a man
Must take his little dreaming under earth
Where idiot day can no more mock it, shrieking
Its violent laughter of the livid light,
This valley is as good a place as any,
But now the heart must break at evening
Hearing the homeward children on the road
Shouting the words he cannot understand,
The little scraps of song, the running games,
And birds whose crying is a stranger thing.
Yet here deep under is my doom. I take it.

Paul Engle, "Belleau Wood"

all the black same

Aware to the dry throat of the wide hell in the world,
O trampling empires, and mine one of them,
and mine one gross desire against His sight,
slaughter devising there,
some good behind, ambiguous ahead,
revolted sons, a pierced son, bound to hear,
mid hypocrites amongst idolaters,
mocked in abysm by one shallow wife,
with the ponder both of priesthood & of State
heavy upon me, yea,
all the black same I dance my blue head off!

John Berryman, "King David Dances"

of

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
horse of our courage, in which beheld
the singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we meant or wish to mean.

Richard Wilbur, "Advice to a Prophet"

some twinge

Too much flying, photons perforating us,
voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman
out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating
yet getting brighter. Remember running
barefoot across hot sand into the sea’s
hovering, remember my hand as we darted
against the holiday Broadway throng,
catching your train just as it was leaving?
Hey, it’s real, your face like a comet,
horses coming from the field for morning
oats, insects hitting a screen, the message
nearly impossible to read, obscured by light
because carried by Mercury: I love you,
I’m coming. Sure, what fluttered is now gone,
maybe a smudge left, maybe a delicate under-
feather only then that too, yes, rained away.
And when the flying is flown and the heart’s
a useless sliver in a glacier and the gown
hangs still as meat in a locker and eyesight
is dashed-down glass and the mouth rust-
stoppered, will some twinge still pass between us,
still some fledgling pledge?

Dean Young, "Winged Purposes"

story

The woman at the counter was measuring cloth off of a bolt. she held the cloth to her chin and measured down the length of her arm and she cut the cloth with straightedge and a knife and folded it and pushed it across the counter to a young girl. The young girl doled out coppers and ancient tlacos and pesos and crumpled bills and the woman counted the sum and thanked her and the girl left with the cloth folded under her arm. When she'd left the woman went to the window and watched her. She said that the cloth was for the girl's father. Billy said it would make a pretty shirt but the woman said that it was not to make a shirt but to line his coffinbox with. Billy looked out the window. The woman said that the girl's family was not rich. That she had learned theses extravagances working for the wife of the hacendado and had spent the money she was saving for her boda. The girl was crossing the dusty street with the cloth under her arm. At the corner were three men and they looked away when she approached and two of them looked after her when she passed.

Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing