Scary poems, part two: “Dover Beach”

 

Managed to scoop up another poem. It was more difficult than I thought it would be. My Audible collection of “classic” poems hasn’t been that helpful. It seemed rather like what people might have picked a hundred years ago – or at least before I was born. Yeah … who even reads poems today? At least nobody I know. But – as the conversation that triggered this proved – “we” know a lot more of them than we think. And, contrary to this seeming indifference – not least my own! – as soon as I have sunk my teeth into one, they prove to be really good poison …

 

 

Dover Beach (by Matthew Arnold)

 

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits.

On the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone. The cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand.

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring,

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by the distant northern sea.

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once too at the full, and round the earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind

Down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another, for the world which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

And we are here as on a darkling plain,

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

 

Every time I read this, I find it more amazing, more … kind of unbelievable – and it generates new, different thoughts, so that I may never come to write something definite about it. But maybe this is not the point at all - which might be to discover other qualities of reader-text relationships that I don’t discover in long prose or drama, or clever and glossy TV series. First of all, that it is just impossible to APPRECIATE a little bit of text like this to the hight of its potential of being appreciated. Or that the main “function” of a poem is to GET ME DOWN to that state where I am able to shut out everything else and WANT to listen to it.

 

And I have now located my central issue with poetry – apart from its not being immediately satisfying or entertaining. The main difference for me approaching it compared to other fictional text: I have to be much more ACTIVE to stay with it LONG ENOUGH to make it work on me. At school or at uni you always have these boxes to tick off – like verse, rhyme, imagery and tropes, historical background and so on. As a means to understand poetry, in my experience, they are mostly counter-productive, but they were useful as a means to tie me to the text long enough for it to unfold its “vortex energy”. Which is something that never ceases to amaze me in great poems.

 

What I noticed, though, already when I read Barrett Browning, is that it would probably be really useful to know the person who has written this a little better – or rather a lot! And this feeling that many readers have about their favourite authors was never a big concern of mine. Now I came to think that it depends as well on the KIND of fictional communication. In my opinion it doesn’t really matter where drama is concerned, or just marginally. That we don’t really know anything about William Shakespeare doesn’t impair our communication with these plays the least bit when we see them on the stage. Obviously – because the author stays completely outside of them, having to put all he has to convey into the hands, mouths and expressive faculties of the characters, respectively: the actors. It's already different with prose – though only gradually. As a rule, the author does well to stay out of it, in my opinion, but there are multiple clandestine or indirect ways of putting oneself into it. I find it interesting that Richard Armitage, trying to find out about the man Chekhov, stated that he had to revert to the short stories for that purpose. I think I found out what I find most interesting about Chekhov seeing and reading the plays: the way he is dealing with his characters. By “allowing” them to be so independent and alive – so various in their respective personal unhappiness - he made a big impression on me AS A FELLOW HUMAN BEING. But there is not that much about the DIFFERENCE we also need to understand. For example about what he was actually thinking about the world he was living in. We find a lot more about this in his prose. Nonetheless it is an INDIRECT contact – struck through conclusions. Where poetry is concerned, there usually is this DIRECT connection being struck with the human being that is speaking in this fictional situation we are getting into ourselves. Maybe my instinct to stay clear of the author is also something that makes poetry difficult for me.

 

Nonetheless I didn’t act on that impulse and googled … I guess I thoroughly distrust the image of a person mirrored by other people And to get it from them direct – even if there are letters and stuff – is rather a hopeless undertaking. And, of course, rather time-consuming. Therefore my communications with poems will have to remain what was called “text immanent” at uni, a way to deal with fiction that we were encouraged to despise. Of course! – every attempt to link to a text directly was discouraged. (Understandably so – these pointless discussions I remember would have become MORE pointless. We were there to learn something, not to share our lack of experience of ourselves and life …) And, at least where poetry is concerned, it’s a bit like “method”. Not a strict parallel, of course, just because of the risk. If you fail, NOTHING will happen. If you are successful, UNEXPECTED things will happen to a degree that might become SCARY. I suppose it’s the reason that, for me, every poem that I can get to cooperate will become a tad scary. Or a lot.

 

I think I hung on to this poem in the first place because of its realism. Because I RECOGNIZED the moment it describes without remembering to actually having lived it myself: looking out on the sea by night and hearing the noise of the pebbles being pushed up on the shore and then drawn back … I could HEAR the noise – which I must have heard myself at some point. And I could hear and feel the waves through the fabric of the verse, though only faintly. (The reading on the recording wasn’t special, I can now read it much better myself, though it turns out DIFFERENT every time I read it. It’s so much alive …) This made me overcome my initial difficulty and find a way to STAY with the text, trying to figure out the “sound scheme” myself, spending hours trying out how it might be written down. It was not really an enjoyable way of dealing with it – and ultimately pointless. I shouldn’t have worried about that because, as I unintentionally found out when I finally googled the text, there is no definite sound scheme. It might actually be the first poem written in free verse – which makes it even more fascinating – this unique point in time! -  because: how does anyone come to INVENT something like this? Though, when all was done, the pointless hours of toiling with it were not in vain. I might have learned it by heart, which again I didn’t, but I think I became even more acquainted with it in THIS way because I really got to the bottom of the fabric and the reality of these words coming into existence kind of being “pulled” through this fabric. There is scant likeliness of them being chosen. (A sonnet, for example, and, of course, any kind of rhyme, makes what is going to get into a poem much more predictable.)

 

So, looking back, it became much more important to me than what “ignorant armies clash by night” might mean how these words came into being through the initial realistic imagery of waves inexorably and endlessly pushing pebbles onto the shore and drawing them back. The process how this eternal moment that erases itself from consciousness every time it happens gets turned into this creative metaphor. And the experience of a poem as this device to fabricate my SOUL – the kind of soul I re-discovered in my last post about Barrett Browning’s sonnet. Of course it EXISTS – in the way text exists, actually and potentially in my brain, but I cannot reach out to it. It doesn’t really belong to me. It is my IMAGINATION that will throw itself out there, into the darkness, and bring in unknown and surprising content and connections, but it needs some kind of efficient tool – like this poem – to do it. And it fascinates me that I am actively creating my soul -  by painstaking and annoying work, not by kind of “dreaming it up”, because this makes it more real. It is the REAL USE something like a poem has – and the actual point of not being so lazy as I have become during this year of lockdowns. Just bothering with the few things I HAVE to take care of – which makes me constantly dissatisfied and angry.  It is not immediately obvious, like running. I cannot believe it has taken me until now to take up running because of the big difference a little running makes to my life. I am a changed person. And poems are kind of like this! Only much harder.

 

That this is indeed a “classic” poem is made evident to me by this certainty that so many people’s souls have found their own way from listening to the noise of the pebbles slashing on the shore towards the “darkling plain” of their own fears about the world surrounding them when the “bright girdle” of received ideas and certainties - ultimately of day-dreaming! - is wearing thin. As it does rather a lot, right now. (I just found out that, for me, the greatest danger of the corona virus might be how it is beginning to mess with my HEAD …) And probably encountered the only remedy that there is against it: GENUINE human contact. In the poem, the anonymous speaker is defined by where he is standing and by the physical presence of a loved person he can call to his side. (“He” in this case because the author is male. Or should be …?) Someone he can rely on. Weirdly enough for me, I am constantly finding out that this isn’t just a bit of comfort. Kind of like children having imaginary friends, reaching out to “people like me” still seems to be what is keeping my soul alive – protected from the virus.

Scary poems, part one: "How Do I Love Thee …"

Of course I am way behind on my poetry. One poem a week …😏!
At least I have downloaded another batch of “classic” poems. Well. it’s not as if it was a race. Nobody here to beat me to it.

 

My first stab at it turned out interesting, though. I just committed to the first of the “Classic Love Poems” - a sonnet by Elizabeth Barett Browning which must be a big “classic” indeed as even I knew it already - because I thought it wouldn’t matter. Even though I am still IN love, I am not very much INTO IT just now. Not much into anything, I am afraid – which needs to change! And I was right, it didn’t (matter).

 

 

HOW DO I LOVE THEE? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth, and breadth, and height

my soul can reach when feeling out of sight

for the ends of being an ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of ever day’s

most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strife for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

smiles, tears of all my life. And, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

 

 

So – even if I had been into love, or poetry, for that matter – I wouldn’t have expected the random poem to be a success with me. Therefore my instant discovery NOT that it was a sonnet - I paid no heed to it until much later – but that I DIDN’T LIKE IT shouldn’t have come as a surprise. What surprised me, though, was the knee jerk reaction. Poems are usually beautiful, therefore difficult to dislike.

 

Not a promising start, but what I discovered almost at the same time is something I experienced time and again: POETRY MAKES MY MIND RACE. That’s why I always chose poetry when there was something at stake. For example, in my final exams at college I chose a poem – one of these boring “baroque” ones at that – my teacher was appalled! But I did good, as I knew I would, because I knew I could always squeeze something out of a poem. Or rather, as I find now, a poem can always squeeze something out of me …

 

So, I was like: Great! It’s exactly what I need. I already GOT a result.

 

But then followed the trying and always slightly annoying part because a poem usually makes my mind race in different directions. (That is what happened with Sonnet 5 at the beginning of my blog.) Now I have to run and catch these thoughts – or wait until they have settled a bit …

 

First of all: Where does the antipathy come from? The knee jerk reaction … I suppose it is because the whole thing sounds so … smug. So CONFIDENT. I used to feel pretty confident about love myself. Has this changed … ???  Another result! I didn’t expect poetry to be so efficient so fast when it comes to the “mind palace”. So good at forcing doors open I’d rather not go through … This poem, I realized, makes me feel HUGELY inadequate. And I want to know why.

 

Another thing I noticed, almost immediately as well, is something I was pleased with. Probably because I have started doing it myself recently. Basically, Barrett Browning was making a list. She was using her love to create this INVENTORY of her soul. Everything that was there, that had been important at the time, and how love had changed it. I experienced this myself: how love made me feel so sure about myself and about everything that is in my life. That everything suddenly seemed to be set in stone … I should be able to do it! Not a poem but an inventory. But it could never turn out like this. So complete … And so impersonal because, in my inventory, the person I am in love with couldn’t have been left out … I don’t know – but somehow this poem challenges me. Not in a good way.

 

Approximately at this point it became suddenly important that it is a SONNET. I don’t think I noticed this until I LISTENED to it again. I was too lazy to learn it – which I should have done! – but I listened again to Richard Armitage reading it – just very naturally, as if trying to retreat behind it, not “disturb” it in any way - which made come out the sonnet naturally. And made me realize why it is crucial that it is a sonnet.

 

What is a sonnet? This might suddenly get very philosophical, but I just mean that I realized how a sonnet “works”, and why it works in this way. It is not that something entirely different might have been invented for the same purpose. It is a random form that got canonized. A random invention that got chosen for being so good at what it does. In this case at solidifying content that is anything but solid – like the content of one’s soul. The inventory of someone’s love should be this LIMITLESS list – and the sonnet only consists of a few verses, kind of closing in on themselves through the rhyme scheme. But this potential for limitation is exactly its strength. Nothing can be added and everything that is in it must be utterly RELEVANT. And then – if it works – there is this COMPLETE world of meaning confined to this small space. The sudden realization HOW MUCH can be expressed with such a limited number of verses. A PERFECT sonnet always is this blissful aesthetic surprise and – if it expresses what many people feel – likely to become a “classic”.

 

These reflections on the status of the poem made me realize why my own “inventory” could never have turned out like this.

 

Of course there is no reason that it should because of the huge historical gap. But it isn’t that simple. I always had an issue with the Romantics – which partially consists in me being one myself. This is why the poem made me uncomfortable. I would never have said this about myself BEFORE I had the experience of love changing everything that was in my life. Pervading everything. The REALITY of making me feel the way I always wanted to feel. On the other hand, I am totally sceptical of any notion of absoluteness. Therefore I was always fascinated AND repelled by “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”. Only fiction can make us get so close to a state where we would never want to be in in real life. I think this was why I reacted so strongly to “Desperate Romantics” – the TV series. I found it genuinely threatening to raise this demand for absoluteness IN REAL LIFE. And, of course, it doesn’t work!

 

Now Barret Browning isn’t “aggressively” romantic in this way. Far from it. She is even rather rational about her feelings. Very solid. Do I want to be that “solid” myself? Probably part of me does. The part of me that makes inventories. I envy her having made such a good one … But then there is the part that just doesn’t BELIEVE in them. It would never work because I just cannot represent my soul in this way.

 

This was when I remembered another text that suddenly explained a central but until then totally unexplored part of my life to me. After having seen “A Single Man” with Colin Firth and being impressed, I read the novel and there I found this amazing bit about the soul being like the flood that comes in at night, filling everything inside us and suddenly making us connect with “everything”, making everything available. And that then retreats at daytime, leaving all these isolated tiny pools where nothing makes sense anymore. And I realized that this is how I experience my soul. Not as this solid content INSIDE myself which I have control over, and even less as this subconscious store of trauma and disease that has control over me, but as something that is mostly OUTSIDE … I never realized until now what a groundbreaking discovery this has been because THIS is what makes me able to CONNECT with “everything” without actually having to go there. This is why I finally ceased to feel limited and threatened by my limited expectations. But – as to everything that is great – there is a downside which I realized reading the poem: This way of experiencing and “using” the concept of the soul makes the content that should be most personal, that should be “me” more than anything, very impersonal. Which is not really how I WANT it to be.

 

Without being grafted to the soul in this way, love can never be this overwhelming, resonant, big thing that is even supposed to survive death. I take it that many people are feeling kind of like this. We WANT to have these big feelings about ourselves, but when people admit to being “romantic” or “sentimental” it always sounds as if they shouldn’t be. Know what - IF somebody can feel like this, I envy them their treasure! I am not glad that my love could never be this big, solid “sonnet thing”, but I also realized that it would be no use to me. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. MY love is much better for me, and it always was. It probably never was “more” than this: the perfect answer to a fundamental need. The centrepiece of my constant endeavours to IMPROVE MYSELF by connecting with something that is far beyond me.

Reasons for reading (continued): the impact of poetry

 

This year I don’t even feel like Halloween - and lots of horror movies … I am in low spirits and somehow cannot look as high as something like “Shakespeare” to build them up again. But I desperately need something to get out of the dullness of endless repetition even of occupations I like … and may have found it.

Last Sunday I was sitting with Claudia on my balcony - in the sunshine! - eating home-made apple pie (which surprisingly had turned out great. I cook, but I NEVER bake, therefore ... and I forgot to take a picture! 😞!) and we were talking about Brexit, the impending lock-down, and worse. Desperately groping for something uplifting (apart from the pie), I reported that I had bought "Classic Love Poems" read by Richard Armitage on Audible, but it didn't download properly so that I can't listen to them when I am not online. And I always forget when I am online ... Therefore: more 😞!

But I find it difficult to listen to poems anyway … “Yes”, she answered, “me too, because you always have to take text structure into consideration.” “Oh, I don’t think it is that,” I said, “It’s what I like. It is that I have to activate so much of MY OWN emotional stuff.”

Now I don’t think that this was a hundred percent honest answer – though it was what struck me at that moment. I think it is both. We always take text structure into consideration, I believe, one way or the other, when we are reading fiction. We are not CONTENT when it looks or feels anything like “real life”. I noticed this once, when I saw this French film adaptation of “Une Vie” by Guy de Maupassant which appeared to consist solely of uniform wide shots. I noticed that this was the main reason it was such a bad, boring film (- though it strikes me now that it MIGHT have been an aesthetic decision! A bad one nonetheless.) “We” just NOTICE the absence of structure and structural choices so seldom because we avidly take any kind of structure we can find and “feed” on it = make aesthetical sense of it. But we do this mostly subconsciously. The first big thing about poetry is what Claudia said: that we are compelled to take structure into conscious consideration. And this is always some kind of inhibition, or hurdle to climb over. In my terminology, poetry is fictional text with a VISIBLE text vortex. (Though “visible”, strictly speaking, is a metaphor. It would be audible, most of the time, if we read it aloud …) The reason why poetry is so intense and demanding is probably both. We have to be so much more active – and precise! – both on an aesthetical and an emotional level.

I think we were mostly on the same plane about this, though, because Claudia said that, even though she rarely reads poetry, she remembers the three poems that struck her to the core. I immediately thought: I know that this can happen but don’t remember that it has ever happened to me - and instantly felt inferior. But would she tell me which poems they were? She did, and I was awestruck because, just in a couple of minutes, she told me exactly about each bit of poetry and her reaction to it – including a recitation of the relevant passages from the poems!

I won’t try to repeat this here. I couldn’t anyway, and I won’t even paraphrase it because it is partly extremely personal stuff. But I was totally delighted to find three entirely DIFFERENT reactions to poetry related to me in a way that I instantly RECOGNIZED them – even though, to my knowledge, I had never HAD them myself … ??? But I might just have forgotten so much about my “past lives” …  

The first was a short poem by Sarah Kirsch which I don’t quote (- it’s completely heartbreaking and, of course, in German) and that kind of fell like a bombshell into a situation of personal distress and expressed this situation as no other kind of comment ever could. I have been thinking a lot, implicitly, that one of my most important reasons for reading – which appear to be like some kind of cluster with lots of the bits playing into each other - probably is to find CONSOLATION. It is seldom or never that strong but it is always there. And in some situations – probably most really bad situations! – we cannot find it in other people because, at that moment, we are feeling so strongly and the other person doesn’t feel anything. So, even though the poem makes the feeling stronger and, therefore, worse, it ultimately makes it better because, at the bottom of this, there must be this other human being that has been through the same and understands me!  

The second one was a long, lyrical poem which is telling us about a voyage and basically says the same as the adage: “The journey is your reward”:

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
(…)

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

 

(By C. P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley)

The way it is told, though, activates the reader’s feelings about having taken a voyage like this and how they felt about it. And we suddenly understand what this universal truth means because it becomes imbedded in our own experience. This is something that poetry does like nothing else: to suddenly turn GENERAL KNOWLEDGE in which we believe into TRUTH because we understand what it has to do with us.

The last example was a poem by Georg Trakl – which made me instantly remember how I had felt when I read those. How much I had liked them not because of any personal involvement but just because of the unique sensual texture they have. You kind of recognize what he describes – otherwise it wouldn’t work on us – but it adds so much of an unfelt sensual quality. New sensations. Poetry can make us aware of how much we need – and are able to! – FEEL the world that is around us.

 

Landschaft

Septemberabend; traurig tönen die dunklen Rufe der Hirten
Durch das dämmernde Dorf; Feuer sprüht in der Schmiede.
Gewaltig bäumt sich ein schwarzes Pferd; die hyazinthenen
Locken der Magd
Haschen nach der Inbrunst seiner purpurnen Nüstern.
Leise erstarrt am Saum des Waldes der Schrei der Hirschkuh
Und die gelben Blumen des Herbstes
Neigen sich sprachlos über das blaue Antlitz des Teichs.
In roter Flamme verbrannte ein Baum; aufflattern mit dunklen
Gesichtern die Fledermäuse.

This extraordinary crash course on poetry gave me the idea that this might be what I need, and I set myself a task: ONE POEM A WEEK. The first one will have to be a classic love poem because I will have to figure out first how to find poems I want to read. That’s already a big issue, and at the moment this appears rather like toil, or desperation, actually. But I have had this feeling for some time that I needed to do something different. While I am outwardly really busy on my countless “construction sites”, I must be dying inside, of boredom. I am just always doing the same thing, and even though there is some kind of evolution, and I find new things there all the time, there is nothing genuinely constructive. Something that makes me move FORWARD and might get me to a different place. Poetry will not automatically achieve this – no more than any other reading could. What gave me the idea was the realization that I would have to deal more – and maybe more seriously – with my OWN stuff. And we cannot circumvent our own life when we are dealing with poetry.

I was really happy and thrilled when I discovered my own “mind palace” technique. How I can access my own inner space when I really need to. The most important thing about imagining it as different rooms are probably the doors – because I can walk out and CLOSE them behind me. It was very encouraging, but the only thing I have done so far – apart from completely “updating” one room, throwing things out, dusting, moving the furniture about – is to make inventories of what is there. Now I might have discovered why the technique is so useful in THIS context = for READING. I have a general idea how text works, simplified as “the vortex”. But the simplification works because, if I REALLY read, the vortex automatically reveals itself. It is different for every text and can be described. Therefore the text never remains this BLACK BOX, it becomes the playing field. And what I DON’T find when I am there doesn’t matter. At least for my part I am usually doing very well without any theories about a fictional world cooked up by other people. But the other part of my text production process is more doubtful. The black box that is called MYSELF. I actually feel much more uncertain and “inferior” about myself than I feel about what is “in” the text. Visiting my “mind palace” – even though it has already been this incredible improvement as to the possible content of the black box – has made me more aware of the uncertainty. I have a feeling that it is very difficult to deal entirely HONESTLY with what I find, and I am interested if poetry might help me with that. 

Oh, and I found the room with "Myself" on the door! Accidentally, rummaging through the old stuff. (And this time I won't tell how I found it, and who helped me find it! 😁)

It had to be there, of course, and it was not, as I had expected, something scary. Though I interact with Loki, and concede that he is a part of me, it is not who I am. MYSELF is where I go to feel SAFE. It is an almost empty room, maybe rather boring, but I like to go in there. I think now that I must be going in there all the time because it felt so familiar when I discovered it, though not “resolutely” enough. There are no decorations, cushions and stuff, or DVDs, or music that make me feel good about myself. MYSELF is where I keep my greatest treasure – I think the greatest treasure anybody can have. I once discovered it in “Hamlet” without quite realizing that I did. It is how Hamlet feels – and how I feel, obviously: “If I achieve to be a good person, whatever happens, I am in the clear.” (That’s why “Hamlet” is a tragedy!) - And I believe that “everybody” has this room. (Even Henry VIII had it, I think I agree about this with Hilary Mantel – but not Donald Trump!) We just need to be in this room MORE OFTEN.

What I find in there is this belief that I am what I want to be more than anything: a DECENT HUMAN BEING.