The Journey As A Psychological Quest

One of my favourite travel books is Goethe's Italian Journey . . .

Some journeys — Goethe's was one — really are quests. Italian Journey is not only a description of places, persons and things, but also a psychological document of the first importance. 

WH AUDEN

Some quotes from the book itself . . . 

My purpose in making this wonderful journey is not to delude myself, but to discover myself in the objects I see.

Wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world; everything is just as I imagined it, yet everything is new. It is the same with my observations and ideas. I have not had a single idea which was entirely new or surprising, but my old ideas have become so much more firm, vital, coherent that they could be called new. 

Naples.

Naples is a paradise; everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness, myself included. I seem to be a completely different person whom I hardly recognise. Yesterday I thought to myself: either you were mad before, or you are mad now.

Naples.

When I indulge in self-reflection, as I like to do occasionally, I discover in myself a feeling which gives me great joy. Let me put it like this. In this place, whoever looks seriously about him and has eyes to see is bound to become a stronger character . . .  At least I can say that I have never been so sensitive to the things of this world as I am here. The blessed consequences will, I believe, affect my whole future life.

Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones.

GOETHE

In Praise Of Limestone

There is now a third Auden poem at The Hidden Waterfall for comment and discussion . . .

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones, 

Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly 

Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes 

With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath, 

A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs 

That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle, 

Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving 

Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain 

The butterfly and the lizard . . .

WH AUDEN The opening lines of In Praise of Limestone

You can read a good article by Alexander McCall Smith about his love of Auden here.

A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods

More poetry from WH Auden at my poetry discussion site, The Hidden Waterfall.

A well-kempt forest begs Our Lady's grace;

Someone is not disgusted, or at least

Is laying bets upon the human race

Retaining enough decency to last;

The trees encountered on a country stroll

Reveal a lot about a country's soul.

A small grove massacred to the last ash,

An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:

This great society is going to smash;

They cannot fool us with how fast they go,

How much they cost each other and the gods.

A culture is no better than its woods.

WH AUDEN From Woods (the last two stanzas)

Auden And Armitage

W. H. Auden was born in Yorkshire in 1907. The contemporary poet Simon Armitage was also born in Yorkshire but in 1963. In 1996 Faber published a co-written collection of his entitled Moon Country, which retraced a visit to Iceland made by Auden and Louis MacNeice in 1936. However Auden and Armitage are quite different types of writer. Armitage gained a postgraduate qualification in social work from Manchester University and his first job was as a probation officer. This has clearly influenced his poetry - this, and the industrial hinterland of Huddersfield and the northern Pennines where he was born and grew up. I met Simon a few years ago at a poetry reading in Lincoln at which he signed my copy of his Selected Poems (2001). This is the 2nd poem in the book and comes from his 1st collection Zoom! (1989).

It Ain't What You Do It's What It Does To You

I have not bummed across America
with only a dollar to spare, one pair
of busted Levi's and a bowie knife.
I have lived with thieves in Manchester.

I have not padded through the Taj Mahal,
barefoot, listening to the space between
each footfall picking up and putting down
its print against the marble floor. But I

skimmed flat stones across Black Moss on a day
so still I could hear each set of ripples
as they crossed. I felt each stone's inertia
spend itself against the water; then sink.

I have not toyed with a parachute cord
while perched on the lip of a light-aircraft;
but I held the wobbly head of a boy
at the day centre, and stroked his fat hands.

And I guess that the tightness in the throat
and the tiny cascading sensation
somewhere inside us are both part of that
sense of something else. That feeling, I mean.

We may travel in search of thrills and exotic experiences or we may skim stones in our own back yard or we may comfort a child with cerebral palsy. But what matters is not just what we do. It's how we react to and interact with the experience that counts; how we register with sensitivity its effect upon us. And that "something else" experience, described so beautifully as a "tiny cascading sensation", is as much within us as it is somewhere out there.

Armitage's poems always seem effortless and are almost always conversational in tone. But behind this apparent effortlessness and conversational intimacy lies a great talent and a polished craft.

In Praise Of Limestone

Talking of limestone brings to mind W. H. Auden's poem In Praise Of Limestone. He writes of ...rounded slopes/With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,/A secret system of caves and conduits... and ...the springs/That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,/Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving/Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain/The butterfly and the lizard...

Auden (1907-1973) wrote the poem in May 1948 on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. In it he celebrates the limestone landscape of the Mediterranean - which also recalls for him the karst topography of the Yorkshire Dales near his native English birthplace.

But this poem is not for the faint-hearted. Though memorable, its difficulty is challenging to say the least. Critics have given it many different interpretations - political, psychological, sexual, allegorical.

Auden seems to argue that Mediterranean civilization has, over time, built up layer upon layer like sedimentary beds of limestone; that Mediterranean culture is more sensual and hedonistic, yet also more religious and artistic, than the rationalist, Gothic, northern world; that the physical life of the body is just as important as the life of the spirit.

The English poet Stephen Spender (1909-1995) considered this poem one of the greatest poems of the 20th century.