The Other

(Peggy’s Cove from the Rocks, Nova Scotia, by Hilton
Hassell, 1910-1980, Canadian artist)

“What I’m after,” the poet R. S. Thomas once said, “is to demonstrate that man is spiritual.”

THE OTHER

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl
calling
far off, and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake, listening
to the swell born somewhere in
the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and
falling,
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without
light
and companionless. And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

~ R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet

Notes on the Art of Poetry

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Tara. You can visit her here at A Teaching Life.


(Der Buchbinder or The Bookbinder by
Jost Amman, 1539-1591, Swiss artist)

Jost Amman’s woodcut is one of 114 illustrations he created for The Book of Trades published in Germany in 1568. Each depicts a different trade or profession, leaving us with a fascinating portrait of Renaissance life in Northern Europe.

NOTES ON THE ART OF POETRY

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on
in the world between the covers of books,
such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,
such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,
such and so many blinding bright lights,
splashing all over the pages
in a million bits and pieces
all of which were words, words, words,
and each of which were alive forever
in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

~ Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), the great Welsh poet and writer

Poetry for Supper

(Music by Jorge Luis Medina López, born 1955, Puerto
Rican artist)

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.” ~ Plato (427?-347 B. C.), Greek philosopher, from The Republic

POETRY FOR SUPPER

“Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.”

“Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.”

“You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.”

“Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enters a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.”

So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlor, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

~ R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet

Sowing

(Spring in the Country by Grant Wood, 1891-1942,
American painter)

This famous verse from Ecclesiastes (3:1-9) reminds us of life’s order of events and prepares us for the future:

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

~ from The Authorized King James Version of the Bible, marking the 400th anniversary of its publication this year. “The scholars who produced this masterpiece,” wrote Winston Churchill, “are mostly unknown and unremembered. But they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking people of the world.”

SOWING

It was a perfect day
For sowing; just
As sweet and dry was the ground
As tobacco dust.

I tasted deep the hour
Between the far
Owl’s chucking first soft cry
And the first star.

A long stretched hour it was;
Nothing undone
Remained; the early seeds
All safely sown

And now hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.

~ Edward Thomas (1878-1917), British poet

A Winter's Tale

(Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, circa 1608, by
Hendrick Avercamp, 1585-1634, Dutch painter)

Every poem benefits from being read out loud, the melodious poems of Dylan Thomas especially.

from A WINTER’S TALE

It is a winter’s tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

~ Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), the great Welsh poet and writer

The Bright Field

(Wheatfield with Rising Sun by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890, Dutch Post-Impressionist painter)

“Her father had put up a swing for the younger children in the wash-house. She could hear one of them now, crying, ‘Higher! Higher!’ Except for the baby asleep in the cradle, her mother and she were alone in the room, which, on that dull day, was aglow with firelight. Her mother’s pastry board and rolling-pin still stood on a white cloth on one end of the table, and the stew for dinner, mostly composed of vegetables but very savory-smelling, simmered upon the hob. She had a sudden impulse to tell her mother how much she loved her; but in the early ’teens such feelings cannot be put into words, and all she could do was to praise the potato cake.” ~ Flora Thompson (1877-1947), Over to Candleford

THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the burning bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

~ R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet

Birds’ Nests

(Tree by Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944, Dutch painter)

All is revealed.

BIRDS’ NESTS

The summer nests uncovered by autumn wind,
Some torn, others dislodged, all dark,
Everyone sees them: low or high in tree,
Or hedge, or single bush, they hang like a mark.

Since there’s no need of eyes to see them with
I cannot help a little shame
That I missed most, even at eye’s level, till
The leaves blew off and made the seeing no game.

’Tis a light pang. I like to see the nests
Still in their places, now first known,
At home and by far roads. Boys knew them not,
Whatever jays and squirrels may have done.

And most I like the winter nests deep-hid
That leaves and berries fell into:
Once a dormouse dined there on hazel-nuts,
And grass and goose-grass seeds found soil and grew.

~ Edward Thomas (1878-1917), British poet

The Shapes of Sounds, part two

The limerick is one form of poetry that plays with what Dylan Thomas called the shapes of sounds and the colors of words. These three limericks are also delightful tongue-twisters.

BERTHA AND GERTIE

(The Brooklynese is easily translated into English.)

Boita and Goitie sat on de coib
Reading the Woild and de Joinal.
Said Boita to Goitie, “Der’s a woim in de doit.”
Said Goitie to Boita, “De woim don’t hoit,
But it soitenly looks infoinal!”

~ Anon.

A CANNER

A canner exceedingly canny,
One morning remarked to his granny,
“A canner can can
Anything that he can,
But a canner can’t can a can, can he?”

~ Anon.

A FLY AND A FLEA

A fly and a flea flew up in a flu.
Said the fly to the flea, “What shall we do?”
“Let’s fly,” said the flea.
“Let’s flee,” said the fly.
So they fluttered and flew up a flaw in the flue.

~ Anon.

The Shapes of Sounds, part one

In 1951, a college student prepared five questions for Dylan Thomas. The poet answered him in writing.

“You want to know why and how I first began to write poetry, and which poets or kind of poetry I was first moved and influenced by.

“To answer the first part of this question, I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world.

“And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milk-carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing. I did not care what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack & Jill & the Mother Goose rest of them; I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions, made in my ears; I cared for the colors the words cast on my eyes.”

Thomas’s works are acclaimed for their musical beauty. His poems, his “plays for voices,” his short stories, they’re all meant to be read out loud.

This is one of his best, a reflective look at the carefree days of his youth. Fill your ears with the sweet sound. (See John Fletcher's poem, posted March 23.)

FERN HILL

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honored among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

~ Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), the great Welsh poet and writer