Invictus (15)

Poetry now, every bit as much as in the Romantic age, is a utopian demonstration, by aesthetic means, of what true freedom would be like. It engages us to imagine something better than what at present we are afflicted with; it helps keep hope alive; it incites us to make more radical demands. And poetry does that out of the enjoyment of its own autonomy, which it is duty-bound not to forfeit. DAVID CONSTANTINE Poetry

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. NELSON MANDELA Long Walk to Freedom 

This is the poem which helped Mandela through his 27 years in prison:

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

WE HENLEY

Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of my favourite poets, though I suppose some may find him a little too melancholy and introspective. I was fortunate enough to study Rilke under the sensitive aegis of poet, translator and short story writer David Constantine (he is now co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and a commissioning editor for Carcanet Press) at university many years ago.

Rilke's poetry and other writings deal with solitude, transience, beauty, longing, love, life, death, God, angels, creativity, the created universe and our place in it: all the important things. Rilke struggles for meaning and connection and, in the very act of creating his beautiful, transcendent poems, achieves both.

The following three pieces (two poems and one journal entry) are translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, and can be found in their book A Year with Rilke on the pages headed November 21, November 23 and December 1 respectively.  

Autumn Tree

Oh tall tree of our knowing, shedding its leaves:

It's a matter now of facing the preponderance

of sky appearing through its branches.

Filled by summer, it seemed deep and thick,

filling our minds, too, so comfortably.

Now its whole interior is an avenue of stars.

And the stars do not know us.

Uncollected Poems

Friends

Friends can only be compared to dance and music. You cannot approach them intentionally, but only out of some involuntary need.

Friends must be the ends and not the means. Otherwise they can get in the way.

Early Journals

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Hölderlin's Tower

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), now considered one of the greatest German Romantic lyric poets, was little read and largely misunderstood in his lifetime. Even after his death it took at least another fifty years before his importance was recognised. One of the first people to acknowledge the genius of Hölderlin, and, indeed, to be influenced by him, was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

A cataclysmic event in Hölderlin's life was his love affair with Susette Gontard, the wife of Frankfurt banker Jakob Gontard, who employed the poet as a private tutor. Hölderlin was dismissed when the affair was discovered, but the couple continued to meet each other in secret, until Susette fatally contracted influenza in 1802. Already showing signs of mental illness, Hölderlin never really recovered from Susette's death (she became the 'Diotima' of his poems), and his mental condition worsened.

After a fruitless stay in a clinic in Tübingen — where he was given three years to live — a local carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, took pity on Hölderlin, giving him a room in his house, a tower in the old city walls overlooking the river Neckar (see pic). Zimmer and his family were to look after him for the next thirty-six years until his death in 1843. During this time Hölderlin's own family and friends (who included the philosophers Hegel and Schelling) completely deserted him. The only mourners at his funeral were the Zimmer family themselves.

Another day

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere
Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN (Translated by DAVID CONSTANTINE)

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Watching For Dolphins

Watching for Dolphins

In the summer months on every crossing to Piraeus
One noticed that certain passengers soon rose
From seats in the packed saloon and with serious
Looks and no acknowledgement of a common purpose
Passed forward through the small door into the bows
To watch for dolphins. One saw them lose

Every other wish. Even the lovers
Turned their desires on the sea, and a fat man
Hung with equipment to photograph the occasion
Stared like a saint, through sad bi-focals; others,
Hopeless themselves, looked to the children for they
Would see dolphins if anyone would. Day after day

Or on their last opportunity all gazed
Undecided whether a flat calm were favourable
Or a sea the sun and the wind between them raised
To a likeness of dolphins. Were gulls a sign, that fell
Screeching from the sky or over an unremarkable place
Sat in a silent school? Every face

After its character implored the sea.
All, unaccustomed, wanted epiphany,
Praying the sky would clang and the abused Aegean
Reverberate with cymbal, gong and drum.
We could not imagine more prayer, and had they then
On the waves, on the climax of our longing come

Smiling, snub-nosed, domed like satyrs, oh
We should have laughed and lifted the children up
Stranger to stranger, pointing how with a leap
They left their element, three or four times, centred
On grace, and heavily and warm re-entered,
Looping the keel. We should have felt them go

Further and further into the deep parts. But soon
We were among the great tankers, under their chains
In black water. We had not seen the dolphins
But woke, blinking. Eyes cast down
With no admission of disappointment the company
Dispersed and prepared to land in the city.

DAVID CONSTANTINE

Watching For Dolphins is probably David Constantine's most celebrated poem. On the surface it seems to tell a simple, uneventful narrative about looking for dolphins while crossing by boat to Piraeus, the busy port which lies a short distance south of Athens, the Greek capital. (The harbour has a long history - stretching back into classical times.) But, as in most of Constantine's poems, this poem contains resonances, allusions and hidden depths - in this case, literal hidden depths.

All the desires, hopes and dreams of the disparate passengers are focused on one thing: to see the dolphins. Isolated as they are individually, there's a common feeling that, if the dolphins had appeared, they would have bonded together in the shared unity of their experience: ... and had they then / On the waves, on the climax of our longing come / ... We should have laughed and lifted the children up / Stranger to stranger ...

Gradually throughout the poem this personal yet common longing becomes spiritual, religious in its intensity. The fat man stares like a saint; the gulls could be a sign; everyone wants epiphany. It's interesting that Constantine says that children would see dolphins if anyone would, for children are often more naturally receptive to and accepting of the wondrous and the divine, the numinous and the miraculous, than adults.

In the end the epiphany doesn't happen, and the poem ends anti-climactically. The people disembark with eyes cast down. They wake, blinking, as if emerging from a dream, a thwarted vision, another world. Though disappointed, they hide their disappointment, and leave the shared boat as isolated individuals once again.

I know this poem reverberates on many levels, but ultimately I think it's about the difficulty of locating the spiritual and the numinous in today's world, the world of the abused Aegean, which was once a mythical place of purity, a Garden of Eden before the Fall. (Athens is well known for its smog and pollution.) Now both it and the world are corrupted by tourism, materialism, shallow 'surface' experience, polluted with the great tankers, under their chains / In black water ...

David and Helen Constantine edit the magazine Modern Poetry In Translation, which I highly recommend. You can find more details on their website http://www.mptmagazine.com/.

And you can see David Constantine himself reading Watching For Dolphins here.

Estuarine

Estuarine

Big river giving up what made it
It. No fighting visible
But all the colossal loss of self
Flat silent under a hemisphere
Of stillness. Then I'd only been
Three or four years on the dry land
Still wrapped in native wonder. I recall
This much: a level the lowest possible above
The sea and it
Was greening gold, sheep safely grazed, the lark
And curlew signed it differently, water
Holed and threaded it so that it blinked between
More dry than wet, more wet than dry,
An earth dissolving into steppingtufts and mud, the water
Salting. How I loved
My game of pondering a route
Dryfoot and intricate to the farthest out. I thought myself
Out there where the wavering decided on
The sea, the river,
Biggest imaginable, lapsed without any trace
And on the brink of guessing at a place
Of nowhere, nothing, no one evermore
I reached up for love's
Always waiting to be reached for hand.

DAVID CONSTANTINE

After yesterday's poetry post I'm inspired to carry on awhile with some of my favourite poems. David Constantine is a name you may not be familiar with. However, in my opinion he's one of the UK's most thoughtful and interesting poets and short story writers (in fact he's just won this year's BBC National Short Story Award). David used to be a lecturer in the German Department at my old university, and he was a constant source of inspiration to me. His quietly captivating lectures, seminars and tutorials cemented and enhanced my own natural love of literature. I owe a great debt to him. He was one of the guiding intellectual lights of my life.

His poems are understated, carefully worked, subtly suggestive, resonant with myth and allusion. Estuarine is one of my favourite poems of his, a poem I've mentioned before on this blog. There are many things I like about this poem. First of all, what a wonderfully tangible description of a river estuary - ...  a level the lowest possible above / The sea and it / was greening gold ... ; ... water /  Holed and threaded it so that it blinked between / More dry than wet, more wet than dry, / An earth dissolving into steppingtufts and mud ... Second, what an astonishingly new, pristine, innocent, unclouded vision of this watery landscape he portrays as seen through the eyes of a very young child (but recollected through an adult mind). Next, what original and beautiful language he uses to encapsulate this vision - ...  the lark / And curlew signed it differently ... ; And on the brink of guessing at a place / Of nowhere ...

But what does it all add up to, what do we take away from the poem, what's the meaning? I think that the colossal loss of self is the clue. Estuaries are places where a river loses its identity in its comingling with mudflat and salt marsh. Where does the river become the sea? It's a confusing, amorphous area, a no-man's-land (yet a beautiful land). A child, feeling a little lost in this place and in need of reassurance, can reach up to grasp the hand of a parent - I reached up for love's / Always waiting to be reached for hand. Can we find the same reassurance as adults? Whose hand can we reach for? Or can we rationalize the 'lostness', because of our greater maturity and experience, and offer a helping hand to those who may reach out to us?

This is a marvellous poem, I think. Further resonances come from the Biblical allusions ( ... sheep safely grazed ... ) and the Wordsworthian overtones (Still wrapped in native wonder ... ) In fact I can never read this poem without being strongly reminded of Wordsworth's The Prelude and its emotions 'recollected in tranquillity'.

I would love to hear anyone else's responses to this accomplished and lovely poem.

David Constantine

Sometimes we are fortunate enough to encounter, at just the right young and impressionable age, an influential teacher or educator in our lives. If we are unlucky, this person may turn out to be a Miss Jean Brodie. I was lucky. For this mentor in my own life was David Constantine - university lecturer, German scholar, translator and poet. This man transformed the way I thought about texts and felt about literature. Or perhaps he (in the true sense of the word 'educate' - from the Latin 'educare', meaning 'to bring out') awoke and germinated what was already within. His influence remains strongly with me even now, and I will always be grateful for it. His lectures and seminars on Goethe, on Kleist, on Hölderlin, on Büchner, on Keats, on Romantic poetry, were a revelation. Perhaps many of us have a similar story?

Among poetry circles Constantine is now very well known. He's a mainstay of the Bloodaxe poetry catalogue, and is currently working on a translation of Faust Part Two for Penguin Books (Part One was published in 2004 and is definitive). I've recently read his superb translation of another work by Goethe, Elective Affinities, that startlingly cynical early 19th century novel about order and chaos, fate and free will. Bloodaxe published his Collected Poems in 2004 and this is one of my many favourite poems from it. You can easily trace his homage to Wordsworth's Prelude in this wonderful poem.

Estuarine

Big river giving up what made it

It. No fighting visible

But all the colossal loss of self

Flat silent under a hemisphere

Of stillness. Then I'd only been

Three or four years on the dry land

Still wrapped in native wonder. I recall

This much: a level the lowest possible above

The sea and it

Was greening gold, sheep safely grazed, the lark

And curlew signed it differently, water

Holed and threaded it so that it blinked between

More dry than wet, more wet than dry,

An earth dissolving into steppingtufts and mud, the water

Salting. How I loved

My game of pondering a route

Dryfoot and intricate to the farthest out. I thought myself

Out there where the wavering decided on

The sea, the river,

Biggest imaginable, lapsed without any trace

And on the brink of guessing at a place

Of nowhere, nothing, no one evermore

I reached up for love's

Always waiting to be reached for hand.

I would also strongly recommend Constantine's book of short stories Under The Dam (2005).