Afflictions

There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man—
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.

Stanza VI from Dejection: An Ode by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

First Lines

The first few lines of a poem are important ones. They have to arouse our interest and curiosity so that we want to read on. This introductory line or two may shock, and grab us by the throat; alternatively, it may seduce and captivate us in more subtle and gentle ways.

Some favourite first lines come immediately to mind. How about the stunning start to Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I,

When evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table . . .

Like a patient etherised upon a table! This must be one of the most original and daring similes in any poem ever written.

I've always loved the sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of Keats. Who could resist: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate . . . or When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past . . . or  My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk . . . or Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun . . . 

The opening to Coleridge's Kubla Khan thrilled me from an early age: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree:  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran  / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea . . .

I defy anyone not to read further when Patrick Kavanagh writes: On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew / That her dark hair would weave a snare that I would one day rue . . .

Adrian Mitchell has wonderful, attention-grabbing first lines, including this one from To Whom It May Concern: I was run over by the truth one day . . .

Finally, has anyone composed a more sensational and apocalyptic beginning to a poem than this: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn / looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly / connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .

These are, of course, the first few lines of Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

I would be fascinated to know any of your own favourite poetic first lines . . .

Walking As A Cultural And Aesthetic Act (8)

Camino, Spain

Nowadays we take it for granted that walking is a laudable pastime and recreational activity. We tend to give a positive nod to the walkers we see: they are taking exercise, they are getting out in the fresh air, they are enjoying being part of nature. All Good Things. It was not always thus.

Up until the late eighteenth century no one walked unless they could help it, unless they were poor and could not afford horse, carriage or coach. And, for the ubiquitous poor, walking was not always a pleasurable pursuit. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself - the practical, indeed the only way to drive cattle and pigs to market, to reach crops grown on feudal agricultural strips, to visit friends and family. Beyond the village, routes were uncertain, if not dangerous. Highwaymen and footpads roamed the highways and byways, and folk in other settlements could be suspicious of, or downright hostile to, strangers. Even as late as 1782 the German minister Carl Moritz, walking across England, found himself abused by innkeepers, and ejected from hostelries where he wished to spend the night. His crime? He was on foot! He wrote: A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man, or an out-of-the-way being, who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by everybody that meets him.

But, by the early nineteenth century, all of this had changed. Influenced by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who originated the idea of the 'noble savage' living free and uncorrupted in the wild, poets and writers like William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau wholeheartedly embraced the cultural, aesthetic and moral value of nature. And, to get close to nature, you had to walk through it. Thoreau's two-year sojourn in a hut by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is well known. He wrote: When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

And Wordsworth - often accompanied by his sister, Dorothy, or fellow Romantics like Coleridge or De Quincey - must have walked tens of thousands of miles during his lifetime. He would regularly cover fifteen or twenty miles a day, and, even when at home in his Lakeland cottage, would stride endlessly up and down the garden in a creative reverie. Walking in nature gave him solace and inspiration, and he would commonly compose his poems while walking, rather than at his desk. To return to Thoreau, Thoreau also wrote: When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.' Wordsworth's masterpiece of a poem, The Prelude, is really just a long walk in words. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, this walking lark really caught on. Tourism was invented - helped by the boom of the railways - and people travelled further, and walked further, to admire and be awestruck at picturesque views, raging cataracts and terrifying mountain scenery. Hikers and climbers started to explore the European Alps and other mountain chains. Souvenirs were manufactured, and cameras began to record it all. The activity of walking also began to appear in the literature of the day. If you read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, you'll find they are full of people walking.

The Person From Porlock

On the second day of my walk along England's South West Coast Path I passed through Porlock and down to Porlock Weir (see photo). The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to live not very far away - in the village of Nether Stowey between Minehead and Bridgwater to be exact - and he and his friends William Wordsworth, Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, and the poet and essayist Thomas de Quincey, used to take frequent long walks in the surrounding hills of Exmoor and the Quantocks. What lively, literary conversations they must have had! Or do you think they must have just grumbled about the weather and the state of their feet, like most walkers? (Though actually we know both from Wordsworth and from William Hazlitt that Coleridge was a brilliant conversationalist.)

Of course, the name of 'Porlock' resounds in the literary imagination because of Coleridge's famous story about being interrupted by a 'Person from Porlock' while feverishly writing his visionary poem Kubla Khan. Whether Coleridge was struggling to finish it, or whether his juices were in full creative flow, we will never know. Whether the 'Person from Porlock' really existed, or whether this was a fiction invented by Coleridge to excuse the fragmentary nature of his poem, we will also never know. But what is certain is that only fifty four lines were ever completed - out of a projected two to three hundred. And what is also highly probable is that the poem was composed in an opium-induced trance. For Coleridge was addicted to laudanum (an easily obtained, readily prescribed pain-killing drug at the time) - as were many of his friends and contemporaries, including Thomas de Quincey (whose book Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater I strongly recommend; it makes wonderful reading.) Indeed, some scholars believe that the actual 'Person from Porlock' was Coleridge's physician, Dr P Aaron Potter - who had called unexpectedly on that day in 1797 to supply Coleridge with his fix, thus diverting him from one of his wildest visions. Anyhow, the term 'Person from Porlock' has been alluded to by many poets and novelists ever since to mean any unwelcome visitor or unwanted intruder.

On a wider note, all this got me thinking about 'unfinished' art in general. Creative works may be 'unfinished' for many reasons: the death of the artist, the deliberate wish of the artist, the interruption of the artist. Consider the great 'unfinished' masterpieces: Jane Austen's Sanditon, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Does the fact that they're 'unfinished' really matter all that much? Personally I feel it matters not one jot. Indeed, for me, some works of art are all the better for being 'unfinished'. Perhaps this is why I like so much some of the suggestive, seemingly unpolished drawings and sketches by artists like Constable, Van Gogh and many others. Perhaps this is why I like so much the fragmentary nature of a poem such as Kubla Khan, with its half-fulfilled desires and half-complete visions. Sometimes the 'unfinished' work of art reflects more truly the life we really live. We can fill in any gaps and omissions and endings in our own imaginations.

Back at Porlock Weir, this family's having a good time crabbing and messing about by the boats ...

But this couple's striding off rather purposefully towards ... what ..? I leave this unfinished, as I don't know the answer myself ...

(If anyone is interested in the relationship between opium and English Romanticism, try reading Alethea Hayter's terrific book Opium And The Romantic Imagination, a book I read and enjoyed many years ago.)

The Inward Eye

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are my 2 favourite English Romantic poets. I've been reminded of Wordsworth this springtime by the lavish displays of daffodils in park, orchard and garden; and by the yellow-and-green woodland carpets of the shyer, more retiring lesser celandine. Wordsworth wrote poems about both flowers, though his 3 poems on the celandine are perhaps less memorable than his justly famous and much quoted poem about the 10,000 daffodils dancing in the breeze: I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud. This is as perfect a poem as you might ever wish for. It's very familiar, I know - but just read it again, as if for the first time, without any clouding thoughts or prejudice, and I think you'll find it a pure delight:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

This was one of Wordsworth's poems (there were big chunks of other poems of his too) I had to learn by rote as a teenager at school in the 1960s. (I've written before about learning poems off by heart here.) I've loved his poetry ever since, even though you sometimes have to sift through reams of more uneven and pedestrian material to find the real thing. This can often be the case with prolific poets - for, even if they show a rare poetic genius, they can't be first-rate all the time. It's rather comforting to know that a genius is only human after all. But I digress.

Wordsworth penned some exquisite short poems (eg Song and Stepping Westward) and sonnets (eg The World Is Too much With Us and Composed Upon Westminster Bridge), and a variety of longer, more discursive poems which are nothing short of sublime (eg Ode and Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey). The best passages in his best poems remain unsurpassed by any poet - except Shakespeare (and no one can surpass Shakespeare). The magnificent, long, autobiographical poem The Prelude is his masterpiece, a poem I dip into for inspiration time and again.

You sense in many of his poems (eg The Solitary Reaper, The Ruined Cottage, The Old Cumberland Beggar) that Wordsworth identified strongly and sympathetically with pedlars, beggars, shepherds, poverty-stricken cottagers, and other solitaries and vagrants; I think he wrote somewhere that, if fate had turned out slightly differently, he could easily have been one of society's outsiders like them, poor in coin but not deprived in spirit, full of fortitude and a secret wisdom such as that shown by the leech-gatherer in the poem Resolution And Independence.

Finally, and returning again to I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud - if I had to point out one of Wordsworth's recurrent and major themes, it's encapsulated completely and unambiguously in this short, well known poem about daffodils. The theme concerns how you can have a direct, immediate, life-enhancing, joyful experience of nature (often when young and 'thoughtless'); and then how you might later recapture and relive the experience in comfortable solitude using one's imagination or 'inward eye'. This idea of the recollection and attempted recovery of past, quasi-mystical experiences (usually from one's childhood) is explored in many of Wordsworth's poems. But more of this in subsequent posts...

(Thanks to Riverdaze for being one of the inspirations behind this piece.)

Aeolian

Although it's probably far too early to think about spring being around the corner, in the garden the winter aconites are in flower and the snowdrop, daffodil and crocus shoots are all coming through. Here's a poem I wrote about the coming of last year's spring. We all need a bit of cheering up on this wet and miserable January morning.

aeolian

long months hibernating
then hearing your voice melting snowfall

no axe breaking the frozen sea
but soft wind warming cold river

from dark earth crocus flowers
and cherry blossoms on twisted twigs

black crows strut on black earth
tricking the eye

and coyote howls the world
back into light

Both the the crow and the coyote figure - often as "trickster" characters - in various creation myths. Aeolus is the Greek god of wind. So "aeolian" means "carried by the wind" - new life, or inspiration perhaps. Coleridge mentions the strings of this Aeolian lute in his great ode, Dejection; and Lawrence talks of the wind that blows through me in his poem Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through. The 3rd line is supposed to recall Franz Kafka's idea that a book (art) must be the axe to break the frozen sea within us.