Juana Inés de la cruz: Soneto 164

Juana Inés de la cruz (12 November 1651 – 17 April 1695)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soneto 164

En que satisface un recelo con la retórica del llanto.

 

Esta tarde, mi bien, cuando te hablaba,
como en tu rostro y tus acciones vía
que con palabras no te persuadía,
que el corazón me vieses deseaba;

 

 

y Amor, que mis intentos ayudaba,
venció lo que imposible parecía:
pues entre el llanto, que el dolor vertía,
el corazón deshecho destilaba.

 

 

 

Baste ya de rigores, mi bien, baste:
no te atormenten más celos tiranos,
ni el vil recelo tu inquietud contraste

 

 

 

con sombras necias, con indicios vanos,
pues ya en líquido humor viste y tocaste
mi corazón deshecho entre tus manos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sonnet 164

In which she allays mistrust with the rhetoric of tears.

 

This evening, my love, as I with you I was speaking,
When on your face, your feelings I observed,
And when my words I saw could not persuade you
To see whereof it was my heart desired,

 

 

Love came to my aid, to help me with my cause
And win what seemed to be beyond achieving.
Then between the ache and flooding tears
Was the essence of my dismantled heart distilled.

 

 

 

Enough my love, be done with harshness: Cease!
Neither let tyranny and jealousy torment you
Nor let vile suspicions your concern obstruct

 

 

With foolish shadows tinged with vanities,
When now in liquid form you see and touch
My heart unmade, undone, within your hands.

 

 

Translation Dia Tsung.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is late afternoon or evening somewhere in the Colonial Mexico of over three centuries ago. Dusk has not yet fallen, and two young women are locked together in the grip of shared emotion. Tears are shed, words, exchanged, and a lovers’ quarrel or lovers’ misunderstanding is being intently addressed. One of the women  is a noble of the viceregal court, in fact she is  married to no less a personage than the viceroy of Mexico himself. The other is a nun and a poet.

Perhaps the evening light pouring through the window finds them ensconced in a quiet room, the nun’s private quarters, a large room filled with hundreds books and several scientific instruments, or perhaps they are in a secluded spot in the palace grounds or a convent garden. They are alone in each others’ company.

The nun is speaking urgently and sincerely, trying to persuade and convince the lady that she has no need to feel tormented. In fact, it is the nun who has the most cause to be jealous and suspicious, because it is the lady who has other calls on her affections. But since it is the nun who happens to be the gallant in this pairing, it is she who must minister to the other’s need.

It may appear to an onlooker – if indeed there was one to watch the scene form behind a tree or a curtain (as we the readers do now) – that the scene is simply of one woman pleading with another to not be upset. But what we are really seeing is a highly skilled emotional operation – that of open-heart surgery.

The chest is cut open, and delved into. It must be so, because all the symptoms of lovesickness so dictate. Acute longing, ardent emotions, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety, tears and pent-up emotion have brought about a crisis. It is a tender but dangerous moment, and must be handled with the greatest care. The cause of all the trouble, jealousy,  mistrust, disquiet and suspicion, must be found, and lovingly addressed.

Everyone longs for this –  to not have to speak or explain, but to have one’s expressions, one’s feelings, perfectly intuited, one’s mind read, one’s heart seen into and touched, the vulnerary applied, the wound soothed and dressed and set well on its way to healing. Does the lover exist who who does not fervently long for this –  For her lover to see what is worrying and disturbing her and to tenderly  and gently administer the remedy?

And all this must be accomplished before the lady will consent to wipe away the tears of the nun, for the tears are a required propitiation, the price that must be paid. The nun’s tears are the proof of her devotion and of her surrender.

Therefore she must be assiduous. She must enter and delve into the lady’s heart, leaving nothing undone to appease it and heal it, to reassure and restore calm. She must not  seem detached, but be fully engaged in every instant. Her skill as a lover and a psychologist must exceed even her skill as a poet. All, and not just some, of the ingredients of healing an emotional wound must present, a wonderfully deft treatment and a profound understanding of female psychology must be brought to bear if the destructive event is to be made to pass peacefully. Complete healing is required, and not mere amelioration.

As we watch, we see that such is her perfection of insight and comprehension she that she is able to formulate and express the other’s feelings, to speak for her. She knows the torment of jealousy is corrosive, and with her unwonted skill she must catch it at its inception and lead the way from confusion to comprehension, and from the heavy sense of unknowing within the clouds of feeling into a peaceful clarity, yet remain within the ambiance of the cloud. She must understand the nature of limmerance (a ‘psychosis’ of sorts, related to falling in love, of limited duration and a word which will not be invented for several centuries), and reason must be so sweetened as to please, and  to not be rejected.

The nun seems to have succeeded in assuring the doubter of her love and of her constancy. It was as if Thomas did not even have to lift a finger to have his doubts and  suspicions allayed, but that Christ had himself tenderly taken the hand of the doubter and placed it on the wound. The one with a greater wound heals the one with the lesser.  Surely the lady, though married, possessed a vastly more ample freedom than the cloistered nun, and far less cause for jealousy. Nevertheless, she is the one who now receives the other’s care and comfort.

This is a profound feat of healing, requiring a perfect touch, almost an excess of skill, like a surgeon, a doctor, diagnosing, opening up the body, removing the obstruction, applying the remedy, closing the wound, and then caring for the post-operative trauma of the patient.

Nor, I surmise, was the lady disappointed. Her emotions were read and  sedulously interpreted. She was reassured and comforted. The storm  has spent itself into a gentle rain. The last line with its erotic tinge suggests that thirst has been quenched and all is refreshed with he tears which have been shed onto her palms. It is as if  though at first, in the kind of at-sea-ness of love, she has been safely guided to the shore.

This is one of  Juana Inés’s best-known poems, I wonder if it is it a scene from the past she recalls, or is it more immediate? An old memory? Did she present the lady with this sonnet the following day, or did she dispatch a servant of the convent  to carry it to the viceregal court, accompanied perhaps with a box of the best convent confections?  Or did she write it years later, when the lady had long since left for Spain, and when the news of her death reached Juana Inés in Mexico?

The poet is a secret jeweller and goldsmith, who is well able to recognise a gem, to hold it until the right moment, which may come years later, and cut and polish it and persuade it to reveal its inherent brilliance and glory in a setting of her apt devising. It demands seemingly mutually exclusive skills, those of complete immersion and complete objectiveness.  But if not objective but still in love, at what pains was she to achieve the distance to create this accurate account and set it in a sonnet from like a gem in an elegant ring?

Perhaps it is the inspiration of the personal transcending Muse who is able to transmute the variegated mass of personal feeling into the clear colour of  flawless poetry.

“Love came to my aid,” writes Juana Inés, but what was ‘Love’, if not her own intuition, and her own virtuosity in matters of love?

 

Read Full Post »

H.D. The Wise Sappho (written circa 1916 – 18)

H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle; September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Little, but all roses’ is the dictate of the Alexandrine poet, yet I am inclined to disagree. I would not bring roses, nor yet the great shaft of scarlet lilies. I would bring orange blossoms, implacable flowerings made to seduce the sense when every other means has failed, poignard that glints, fresh sharpened steel: after the red heart, red lilies, impassioned roses are dead.

‘Little, but all roses’  –  true there is a tint of rich colour (invariably we find it), violets, purple woof of cloth, scarlet garments, dyed fastening of a sandal, the lurid, crushed and perished hyacinth, stains on cloth and flesh and parchment.

There is gold too. Was it a gold rose the poet meant? But the gold of a girl-child’s head, the gold of an embroidered garment hem, the rare gold of sea-grass or meadow-pulse does not seem to evoke in our thought the vision of roses, heavy in a scented garden.

‘Little, but all roses.’ I think, though the stains are deep on the red and scarlet cushions, on the flaming cloak of love, it is not warmth we look for in these poems, not fire nor sunlight, not heat in the ordinary sense, diffused, and comforting (nor is it light, day or dawn or light of sun-setting), but another element containing all these, magnetic, vibrant; not the lightning as it falls from the thunder cloud, yet lightning in a sense: white, unhuman element, containing fire and light and warmth, yet in its essence differing from all these, as if the brittle crescent-moon gave heat to us, or some splendid scintillating star turned warm suddenly in our hand like a jewel, sent by the beloved.

I think of the words of Sappho as these colours, or states rather, transcending colour yet containing (as great heat the compass of the spectrum) all colour. And perhaps the most obvious is this rose colour, merging to richer shades of scarlet, purple or Phoenician purple. To the superficial lover – truly -roses!

Yet not all roses – not roses at all, not orange blossoms even, but reading deeper we are inclined to visualize these broken sentences and unfinished rhythms as rocks – perfect rock shelves and layers of rock between which flowers by some chance may grow but which endure when the staunch blossoms have perished.

Not flowers at all, but an island with innumerable, tiny, irregular bays and fiords and little straits between which the sun lies clear (fragments cut from a perfect mirror of iridescent polished silver or of the bronze reflecting richer tints) or breaks, wave upon destructive passionate wave.

Not roses, but an island, a country, a continent, a planet, a world of emotion, differing entirely from any present-day imaginable world of emotion; a world of emotion that could only be imagined by the greatest of her own countrymen in the greatest period of that country’s glamour, who themselves confessed her
beyond their reach, beyond their song, not a woman, not a goddess even, but a song or the spirit of a song. A song, a spirit, a white star that moves across the heaven to mark the end of a world epoch or to presage some coming glory.

Yet she is embodied – terribly a human being, a woman, a personality as the most impersonal become when they confront their fellow beings.

The under-lip curls out in the white face, she has twisted her two eyes unevenly, the brows break the perfect line of the white forehead, her expression is not exactly sinister (sinister and dead), the spark of mockery beneath the half-closed lids is, rather, living, destructive irony.

‘What country girl bewitches your heart who knows not how to draw her skirt about her ankles?’

Aristocratic – indifferent – full of caprice – full of imperfection – intolerant.

High in the mountains, the wind may break the trees, as love the lover, but this was before the days of Theocritus, before the destructive Athenian satyric drama – we girls hear no praise of country girls nor mountain goats. This woman has still the flawless tradition to maintain.

Her bitterness was on the whole the bitterness of the sweat of Eros. Had she burned to destroy she had spent her flawless talent to destroy custom and mob-thought with serpent-tongue before the great Athenian era.

Black and burnt are the cheeks of the girl of the late Sicilian Theocritus, for, says he, black is the hyacinth and the myrtle-berry.

But Sappho has no praise for mountain girls. She protrudes a little her under-lip, twists her eyes, screws her face out of proportion as she searches for the most telling phrase; this girl who bewitches you, my friend, does not even know how to draw her skirts about her feet.

Sophisticated, ironical, bitter jeer. Not her hands, her feet, her hair, or her features resemble in any way those of the country- bred among the thickets; not her garments even, are ill-fitting or ill-cut, but her manners, her gestures are crude, the bitterest of all destructive gibes of one sensitive woman at the favourite of another, sensitive, high-strung, autocratic as herself.

The gods, it is true, Aphrodite, Hermes, Ares, Hephaistos, Adonis, beloved of the mother of loves, the Graces, Zeus himself, Eros in all his attributes, great, potent, the Muses, mythical being and half-god, the Kyprian again and again are mentioned in these poems but at the end, it is for the strange almost petulant little phrases that we value this woman, this cry (against some simple unknown girl) of skirts and ankles we might think unnecessarily pretty, yet are pleased in the thinking of it, or else the outbreak against her own intimate companions brings her nearer our own over-sophisticated, nerve-wracked era: ‘The people I help most are the most unkind,’ ‘O you forget me’ or  ‘You love someone better,’ You are nothing to me,’  nervous, trivial tirades. Or we have in sweetened mood so simple a phrase ‘I sing’ – not to please any god, goddess, creed or votary of religious rite – I sing not even in abstract contemplation, trance-like, remote from life, to please myself, but says this most delightful and friendly woman, ‘I sing and I sing beautifully like this, in order to please my friends – my girl-friends.’

We have no definite portraits from her hands of these young women of Mitylene. They are left to our imagination, though only the most ardent heart, the most intense spirit and the most wary and subtle intellect can hope even in moments of ardent imagination to fill in these broken couplets. One reads simply this ‘My darling,’ or again ‘You burn me.’ To a bride’s lover she says, ‘Ah there never was a girl like her.’ She speaks of the light spread across a lovely face, of the garment wrapped about a lovely body; she addresses by name two of these young women comparing one to another’s disadvantage (though even here she temporizes her judgement with an endearing adjective), ‘Mnasidika is more shapely than tender Gyrinno.’ We hear of Eranna too. ‘Eranna, there never was a girl more spiteful than you.’

Another girl she praises, not for beauty. Though they stand among tall spotted lilies and the cup of jacynth and the Lesbian iris, she yet extolls beyond Kypris and the feet of Eros, wisdom. ‘Ah,’ she says of this one, beloved for another beauty than that of perfect waist and throat and close-bound cap of hair and level brows, ‘I think no girl can ever stand beneath the sun or ever will again and be as wise as you are.’

Wisdom –  this is all we know of the girl: that though she stood in the heavy Graeco-Asiatic sunlight, the wind from Asia, heavy with ardent myrrh and Persian spices, was yet tempered with a Western gale, bearing in its strength and its salt sting, the image of another, tall, with eyes shadowed by the helmet rim, the goddess, indomitable.

This is her strength – Sappho of Mitylene was a Greek. And in all her ecstasies, her burnings, her Asiatic riot of colour, her cry to that Phoenician deity, ‘Adonis, Adonis  – ‘her phrases, so simple yet in any but her hands in danger of overpowering sensuousness, her touches of Oriental realism, ‘purple napkins’ and ‘soft cushions’ are yet tempered, moderated by a craft never surpassed in literature. The beauty of Aphrodite it is true is the constant, reiterated subject of her singing. But she is called by a late scholiast who knew more of her than we can hope to learn from these brief fragments,’The Wise Sappho’.

We need the testimony of no Alexandrian or late Roman scholiast to assure us of the artistic wisdom, the scientific precision of metre and musical notation, the finely tempered intellect of this woman. Yet for all her artistic moderation, what is the personal, the emotional quality of her wisdom? This woman whom love paralysed till she seemed to herself a dead body, yet burnt, as the desert grass is burnt, white by the desert heat; she who trembled and was sick and sweated at the mere presence of another, a person, doubtless of charm, of grace, but of no extraordinary gifts perhaps of mind or feature – was she moderate, was she wise? Savonarola standing in the courtyard of the Medici (some two thousand years later) proclaimed her openly to the assembled youthful laity and priests of Florence –  a devil.

If moderation is wisdom, if constancy in love is wisdom, was she wise? We read even in these few existing fragments, name upon curious, exotic, fragrant name: Atthis – Andromeda – Mnasidika – Eranna – Gyrinno –  more, many more than these tradition tells were praised in the lost fragments. The name of muse and goddess and of human woman merge, interspersed among these verses. ‘Niobe and Leda were friends – ‘ it is a simple statement –  for the moment, Niobe and Leda are nearer, more human, than the Atthis, the Eranna who strike and burn and break like Love himself.

The wise Sappho! She was wise, emotionally wise, we suspect with wisdom of simplicity, the blindness of genius. She constructed from the simple gesture of a half-grown awkward girl, a being, a companion, an equal. She imagined, for a moment, as the white bird wrinkled a pink foot, clutching to obtain balance at the too smooth ivory of the wrist of the same Atthis, that Atthis had a mind, that Atthis was a goddess. Because the sun made a momentary circlet of strange rust-coloured hair, she saw in all her fragrance, Aphrodite, violet-crowned, or better still a sister, a muse, one of the violet wreathing. She imagined because the girl’s shoulders seemed almost too fragile, too frail, to support the vestment, dragging a little heavily because of the gold-binding, that the same shoulders were the shoulders of a being, an almost disembodied spirit. She constructed perfect and flawless (as in her verse, she carved from current Aeolic dialect, immortal phrases) the whole, the perfection, the undying spirit of goddess, muse or sacred being from the simple grace of some tall, half-developed girl. The very skies open, were opened by these light fingers, fluffing out the under-feathers of the pigeon’s throat. Then the wise Sappho clamours aloud against that bitter, bitter creature, Eros, who has once more betrayed her. ‘Ah, Atthis, you hate even to think of me – you have gone to Andromeda.’

I love to think of Atthis and Andromeda curled on a sun-baked marble bench like the familiar Tanagra group, talking it over. What did they say? What did they think? Doubtless, they thought little or nothing and said much.

There is another girl, a little girl. Her name is Cleis. It is reported that the mother of Sappho was named Cleis. It is said that Sappho had a daughter whom she called Cleis.

Cleis was golden. No doubt Cleis was perfect. Cleis was a beautiful baby, looking exactly like a yellow flower (so her mother tells us). She was so extraordinarily beautiful, Lydia had nothing so sweet, so spiced; greatness, wealth, power, nothing in all Lydia could be exchanged for Cleis.

So in the realm of the living, we know there was a Cleis. I see her heaping shells, purple and rose-edged, stained here and there with saffron colours, shells from Adriatic waters heaped in her own little painted bowl and poured out again and gathered up only to be spilt once more across the sands. We have seen Atthis of yester-year; Andromeda of ‘fair requital’, Mnasidika with provoking length of over-shapely limbs; Gyrinno, loved for some appealing gesture or strange resonance of voice or skill of finger-tips, though failing in the essential and more obvious qualities of beauty; Eranna with lips curved contemptuously over slightly irregular though white and perfect teeth; angry Eranna who refused everyone and bound white violets only for the straight hair she herself braided with precision and cruel self-torturing neatness about her own head. We know of Gorgo, over-riotous, too heavy, with special intoxicating sweetness, but exhausting, a girl to weary of, no companion, her over- soft curves presaging early development of heavy womanhood.

Among the living there are these and others. Timas, dead among the living, lying with lily wreath and funeral torch, a golden little bride, lives though sleeping more poignantly even than the famous Graeco-Egyptian beauty the poet’s brother married at Naucratis. Rhodope, a name redolent (even though we may no longer read the tribute of the bridegroom’s sister) of the heavy out-curling, over-lapping petals of the peerless flower.

Little –  not little  – but all, all roses! So at the last, we are forced to accept the often quoted tribute of Meleager, late Alexandrian, half  Jew, half Grecian poet. Little but all roses!

True, Sappho has become for us a name, an abstraction as well as a pseudonym for poignant human feeling, she is indeed rocks set in a blue sea, she is the sea itself, breaking and tortured and torturing, but never broken. She is the island of artistic perfection where the lover of ancient beauty (shipwrecked in the modern world) may yet find foothold and take breath and gain courage for new adventures and dream of yet unexplored continents and realms of future artistic achievement. She is the wise Sappho.

Plato, poet and philosopher in the most formidable period of Athenian culture, looking back some centuries toward Mitylene, having perspective and a rare standard of comparison, too, speaks of this woman as among the wise.

You were the morning star among the living (the young Plato, poet and Athenian, wrote of a friend he had lost), you were the morning star before you died; now you are ‘as Hesperus, giving new splendour to the dead’. Plato lives as a poet, as a lover, though the Republic seems but a ponderous tome and the mysteries of the Dialogues verge often on the didactic and artificial. So Sappho must live, roses, but many roses, for tradition has set flower upon flower about her name and would continue to do so though her last line were lost.

Perhaps to Meleager, having access to the numberless scrolls of Alexandria, there seemed ‘but little’ though to us, in a cheerless and more barren age, there seems much. Legend upon legend has grown up, adding curious documents to each precious fragment; the history of the preservation of each line is in itself a most fascinating and bewildering romance.

Courtesan and woman of fashion were rebuked at one time for not knowing ‘even the works of Sappho’. Sophocles cried out in despair before some inimitable couplet, ‘gods  – what impassioned heart and longing made this rhythm’. The Roman Emperor, weary to death, left his wreathed drinking cup and said, ‘It is worth living yet to hear another of this woman’s songs.’ Catullus, impassioned lyrist, left off recounting the imperfections of his Lesbia to enter a fair paradisal world, to forge silver Latin from imperishable Greek, to marvel at the praises of this perfect lover who needed no interim of hatred to repossess the loved one. Monk and scholar, grey recluse of Byzantium or Roman or medieval monastery, flamed to new birth of intellectual passion at discovery of some fatal relic until the Vatican itself was moved and deemed this woman fit rival to the seductions of another Poet and destroyed her verses.

The roses Meleager saw as ‘little’ have become in the history not only of literature but of nations (Greece and Rome and medieval town and Tuscan city) a great power, roses, but many, many roses, each fragment witness to the love of some scholar or hectic antiquary searching to find a precious inch of palimpsest among the funereal glories of the sand-strewn Pharaohs.

 

 

 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/h-d

http://www.justaboutwrite.com/Herstory-Poet-HildaDoolittle.html

Read Full Post »

Juana Inés de la Cruz, on the relative detriments of absence and jealousy.

Juana Inés de la Cruz (November 12 1651 – April 17 1695)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only with acute and ingenious effort could the proposition

be verified  that absence could be a worse ill than jealousy.

 

Version 1

 

The absent one provokes her jealous lover
to indulge by turn in sentiment and rage
To here suspect her of unseen offenses
And disregard the evidence of the senses.

Here furious madness finds its moderation
Discoursing even as delirium raves
And when she with ceaseless sighing is afflicted
No earthly force this sorrow can assuage.

 

 

 

 

Unquiet doubts whereby patience is resisted
Offer weak opposition to these woes
And agonies by which sleep is disrupted.

Disconsolate, then you here repine without her,
And in the final damage her absence on you imposes
Is much finer torment than jealousy could devise.

 

 

 

 

Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Translation Dia Tsung

 

 

 
Version 2

 

By her absence is one’s jealousy provoked
There to sentiment, and here to helpless rage
Here it presumes hidden and unseen offenses
And relives the reality of distant senses

Though perhaps one’s furious madness can be tempered
When its delirium is moderated by discourse
And without relief sigh the unrelenting sighs
That puissant sorrow nothing can oppose

 

 

 

Here by doubts is patience oft afflicted
There by certain pain it will arouse
Here to you grief offers its sole resistance.

And without her, inconsolable and bearing
In the end the damage wrought by absence
Will  be eclipsed by  the torment caused by jealousy.

 

 

 

 

Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Translation Dia Tsung.

 

 

 

 
SÓLO CON AGUDA INGENIOSIDAD ESFUERZA EL DICTAMEN

DE QUE SEA LA AUSENCIA MAYOR MAL QUE LOS CELOS.

 

 

El ausente, el celoso, se provoca,
aquél con sentimiento, éste con ira;
presume éste la ofensa que no mira,
y siente aquél la realidad que toca.

Éste templa, tal vez, su furia loca,
cuando el discurso en su favor delira,
y sin intermisión aquél suspira
pues nada a su dolor la fuerza apoca

 

 

Éste aflige dudoso su paciencia,
y aquél padece ciertos sus desvelos:
éste al dolor opone resistencia,

aquél, sin ella, sufre desconsuelos;
y si es pena de daño, al fin, la ausencia,
luego es mayor tormento que los celos.

 

 

 

 

Juana Inés de la Cruz.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translating the work of a genuine poet such as  Juana Inés Asbaje is always a tremendous challenge, because of the  tightly wrought perfection of her work. Her intense play of words and ideas, and the games of disputation and logic which find their way into her poems  can at times make  the translator’s job very nearly impossible.

I chose this poem because I could not find an English translation of it anywhere, and I loved it so much that I couldn’t resist the fool-hardy temptation to attempt take a stab at it.  Even after working on two different versions I still am not entirely convinced I have done a creditable job.

I took one revisionist liberty here, in the manner of the pronouns, which the original Spanish with its gendered nouns permits me to do. I know that with this poem of  Juana Inés, both Muse and poet are female, so that, to my mind made both the jealous one and the absent one female as well. Therefore I saw no need for engaging in the practice of pronoun dissimulation which many lesbians in the past have been forced to adopt.

Juana Inés  sometimes treats playful subjects seriously, and serious subjects playfully, but one thing is always true of her poems – form and substance are both brilliantly in evidence.

Since the late ’50’s a kind of rot began to find its way into the manner in which poetry was read and written and appreciated. A kind of empty technicality came to be admired and exemplified, and a certain heartlessness as well.

The ego of the poet came to take centre stage but in a way that was indirect and  horrible to contemplate. One of the greatest anti-poets of the last century, Sylvia Plath, was a masterful exponent of this genre.  While there are few personal pronouns in her poems, the Huge ‘I’ hovers over the hopeless grandeur of bleak  and ugly landscapes  of her poems.  I sometimes wonder if her suicidal impulses  were not the result of a lifetime given to offending the Muse.

While I am obviously not an admirer of Plath – I can see the essence of her poetic predicament. Heterosexual women do not have either a natural or a genuine Muse. The male muse is poetic distortion, and very few poets are able benefit from his inspiration. If they do, they are usually homosexual males like  Jacques Prévert and  Constantine Cavafy, or  poor Gerard Manley Hopkins with his clattering rhythms and his crucified saviour – the Muse’s midsummer sacrifice.

Even the male muse of St.John of the Cross has his origins in the old Caananite songs of the sacred marriage, so ancient and well established that the Hebrew compilers of the old testament could not bring themselves to exclude  even such a purely humanistic chapter of their cultural history.

True and genuine poets are exponents of an ancient art. Their work can stand up to the most rigorous scrutiny and withstand the abrasive inquiry of the touchstone, and the corrosive kiss of Acqua regia.  While meaning may be encoded – even hidden – in their poems, diligent effort can extract it whole. The sense in a true poem is unassailable, and  it contains no false logic, no lies, or mistakes of language. The etymology of all words found in true poems is apt and apposite, and  as for its emotional content, the presence of the Muse will always be felt.

Even a poem of the intellect – which has Apollo as its patron finds Juana Inés paying tribute to the Muse by stating clearly one or another of the themes which are part of the poetic cycle. Absence – when the Muse leaves the poet in order to perform her sinister offices, and the jealously which comes in its wake  – is a genuine poetic theme.

Juana Inés is free of all the detriments and defects of false poets. Her poetic technique is impeccable, and her  brilliant intellect is always placed exactly where it belongs, at the feet, and in the service of her Muse. She is a rarity; and someone like her comes along only about once in a thousand years.

When she bends her constellation of poetic talents towards elucidating a philosophical proposition, she does so not in the dry and emotionless way of a logical proof, but with images and words and phrases which show a deep insight into matters of the heart, and of its secret ways.

Her logic here in which she weighs jealousy and absence in the balance and  concludes that absence is worse, is enormously convincing. It is better, she seems to say, to endure the pangs of jealousy – to see it for what it is  – a fabrication of the mind when the heart is troubled, rather than risk a total estrangement, when,  with the beloved’s  absence, the poet’s  heart mind and senses are painfully separated from their chosen object.

Absence then, is  hererin asserted to be the more onerous of the two evils, and the more difficult to endure.

 

 
http://myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=CRUZ_Fredericksburg_Academy

http://www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/culture/SorJuana/

Read Full Post »

Charlotte Mew: On the Road to the Sea – and four other poems.

Charlotte Mew (November 15 1869 - March 24 1928)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Road to the Sea.

 

 

 

We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way,
I who make other women smile did not make you–
But no man can move mountains in a day.
So this hard thing is yet to do.

But first I want your life:–before I die I want to see
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes,
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
And in grey sea?
I want what world there is behind your eyes,
I want your life and you will not give it me.

Now, if I look, I see you walking down the years,
Young, and through August fields–a face, a thought, a swinging dream
perched on a stile–;
I would have liked (so vile we are!) to have taught you tears
But most to have made you smile.
To-day is not enough or yesterday: God sees it all–
Your length on sunny lawns, the wakeful rainy nights–; tell me–;
(how vain to ask), but it is not a question–just a call–;
Show me then, only your notched inches climbing up the garden wall,
I like you best when you are small.

Is this a stupid thing to say
Not having spent with you one day?
No matter; I shall never touch your hair
Or hear the little tick behind your breast,
And as a flying bird
Brushes the branches where it may not rest
I have brushed your hand and heard
The child in you: I like that best
So small, so dark, so sweet; and were you also then too grave and wise?
Always I think. Then put your far off little hand in mine;–
Oh! let it rest;
I will not stare into the early world beyond the opening eyes,
Or vex or scare what I love best.
But I want your life before mine bleeds away–
Here–not in heavenly hereafters–soon,–
I want your smile this very afternoon,
(The last of all my vices, pleasant people used to say,
I wanted and I sometimes got–the Moon!)

You know, at dusk, the last bird’s cry,
And round the house the flap of the bat’s low flight,
Trees that go black against the sky
And then–how soon the night!

No shadow of you on any bright road again,
And at the darkening end of this–what voice? whose kiss? As if you’d say!
It is not I who have walked with you, it will not be I who take away
Peace, peace, my little handful of the gleaner’s grain
From your reaped fields at the shut of day.

Peace! Would you not rather die
Reeling,–with all the cannons at your ear?
So, at least, would I,
And I may not be here
To-night, to-morrow morning or next year.
Still I will let you keep your life a little while,
See dear?
I have made you smile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I started out to make this post with the idea that it would be of a single poem by Charlotte Mew, but that turned out not to be the case. I chose ‘On the Road to the Sea’ because of its largeness of scope, its inclusiveness of themes which fascinate and captivate me, and its psychological complexity.  I had foolishly thought that it would be possible to sort it out with a couple or three careful and thoughtful readings, but that  too turned out very much not to be the case.

I had an unexpectedly difficult time meeting my simplest requirement for a poem, which  is that I should be able to rewrite it to have ordinary prose sense.  My next requirement – one which I have adopted from Robert Graves –  is that I should be able to compress its meaning as in a telegram, and not have very much left over; this I abandoned because I did not wish to create a parody of over-simplification. Besides, telegrams are of course now a relic of the past.  Mew’s poems too appear to have gone the way of the telegram and fallen into what might seem to be an irremediable desuetude.

But trying to unravel all the hidden implications and the ‘between the lines-ness’ of Mew’s poetry might well be an impossible task. So much of the meaning — such as “As if you’d say ” —  comes with spoken inflection, and there are the parts of the poem where the Is and yous seem to snake between each other and switch places.  The central word in the poem, “Life,” too,  seems to carry a meaning that is quite different from the meaning suggested in the phrases in which it embeds itself.

And yet, this is truly a Muse poem. Strange homonymnical coincidence that — and also the fact that without the vertical stroke of the ‘E,’ Mew’s name reads the same both upside down and side to side.

 

 

 

Here is my attempt at a prose paraphrasal:

 

 

We ran into each other and after a brief conversation went our separate ways.  I found that even though I can make most women smile, I couldn’t make you. I would like to make you smile, but before I set myself such a difficult task I want your life. I want to know your inner world — even though it seems like a world that is without life except perhaps for a single “haunting purple bloom”.

Yet you will not give me this .

I can see into your past, and see you as a child, and even though it seems cruel of me,  I would have liked to have taught you to cry (that is to feel) but more than that I would have liked to have made you happy.

The past is the past, and this is the present, and neither is enough — but god sees both: your childhood days, and how you grew  – I like you best as a child.

Is this stupid of me to contemplate when I have not even spent a day with you?
I will never know the intimate things about you — how it feels to touch your hair  or hear your heartbeat or do more than brush your hand with mine.

I can imagine you as a beautiful child — small, dark, sweet,  grave and wise.
I wish we could have held each other’s hands then.

I won’t pry to deeply into your childhood because I don’t want to upset you. But I want to know you before my own life bleeds away. I want to know you here on earth – I want you now – I want the impossible, because I have sometimes found it to be possible….

You know how soon the days pass, and the days of our lives pass, from evening into night, and how soon life will be over.

You will have slipped away from this world not even leaving a shadow behind — and when you die then — what will become of your voice? Who would have had your kiss?  I know you will not answer this question. But I will not be the one who takes away – I who who have only the barest scantiest smallest handful of grain from your life’s fields after they have been harvested at the end of your life.

Wouldn’t you rather die in the midst of all the trouble and conflict of life? I know I would — and I might not live beyond this moment — but still, I want to hold your life in my heart and in my thoughts at least for now. I will let you have your secrets…

And I have made you smile ruefully at  the sheer presumption of my claim!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mew seems to be toying with her reader when she makes the claim “I want your life”.  And yet, far from being preposterous, her assertion is modest and humble. She is not claiming the power of life and death over her beloved — far from it — she is saying she wants the beloved to live — to come to life — and she wants to know about the portion already lived of her beloved’s  life. She has sensed an aridity and a greyness behind the  grave unsmiling face, and she wishes to animate it — to revitalise it, to vivify it.

There is more than an echo here of John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and Andrew Marvell’s ‘Ode to His Coy Mistress’. Mew would never be so bold as to make such straightforward heterosexual assertions, but her message is no less clear than theirs. She does not wish to alarm the woman to whom this poem is addressed: I hear her use of the words “peace, peace” as someone would who is trying to calm a skittish animal.  She is using extraordinarily gentle means to  bring someone back to life from the brink of emotional death — someone she feels may have already surrendered to a death of the heart.

In order to do this she has to raise her hand and point a finger at the spectre of death itself,  but to do so in a quiet and unstartling way. It is a difficult task, because sometimes the only way to bring the nearly dead  back to life is to shock them into living.

Then again, it is possible that Mew may have wished there was someone to speak these words to her – and that the “I” in this poem is someone else – and she herself the unsmiling one. The only photograph of Mew as an adult shows a slender unsmiling woman in soberly tailored dark suit. The dark bow at her throat seems as unlike a frippery as it is possible to be.

When she committed suicide at the age of 59, Mew had come to the end of her endurance.  The third oldest of seven children of an architect who died without providing for his family, she lost three brothers while they were children. A brother and sister were committed to a mental asylum, and Mew and her sister Ann feared that they too would share a similar fate.

Mew’s mother died in 1924, and  Ann died in 1927.  Tormented by the thought that her sister Ann had been buried alive, Mew seemed to have felt her sanity beginning to unravel. She had neglected to leave instructions  for a vein to be opened  on Anne prior to burial, as a means of ensuring that there was no risk of a live burial. The gathering impetus of intense grief and guilt complicated by deep depression led her to be committed – or commit herself – to an institution. Under these grim and dismal conditions, Mew went out and bought the bottle of Lysol – a corrosive cleaning agent containing a lethal amount of creosote – which she drank in order to kill herself.  Mew had wished that her work be destroyed at her death. During her life she had used her manuscripts in order to light her cigarettes, but fortunately for us, her publications and some of her unpublished work survived her.

The elusiveness of obvious meaning, and even what might have seemed a willful incomprehensibility in some of her poems – ‘The Road to the Sea’ might be an example –  seem to have caused confusion in some of  Mew’s readers even during her own lifetime, when the common standard of English literacy and literary understanding was much higher than it is today. Certainly her poems did not conform to the simple clarity of ordinary speech. But even a contemporary reader with exposure to a century of intervening poetry might find find Mew’s poems difficult to work out, not because they lack sense  (as most modern poetry does) but because the sense is so cleverly devised and arranged. It makes one wonder if  one of the reasons Mew’s work is still so deplorably neglected today is that most of us who read poetry have grown accustomed to the idea that it is not meant to make sense – so that when  the sort of sense which only yields itself to persistent and dilligent effort is encountered, it is taken for nonsense.

Mew’s lifelong penury was relieved to a small degree by the pension she was awarded through the good offices of Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter De La Mare.  Hardy’s memory must be blessed for this if for no other reason — he was a good and faithful benefactor to his impecunious friends (one of whom was Robert Graves) in their times of need.  Mew had many admirers amongst the illustrious literati: Virginia Woolf called her “the greatest living woman poet,”  and Thomas Hardy  said she was “far and away the best living woman poet of the day”.  Mew was respected and admired by  John Masefield, May Sinclair (for whom Mew cherished an unrequited love) Walter De La Mare, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann,  Rebecca West, Sigfried Sassoon, Vita Sackville West and Louis Untermeyer.

It is a judgement of our undiscerning times that Mew is so little known in our day. When I look at her image – this extremely petite (she was 4’10” tall) woman  with  arresting features,  in her dark tweed coat, and a strong pale right hand firmly grasping its lapel – I mourn her obscure brilliance and her unhappy life.  Mew herself was at considerable pains to ensure that not much biographical material would survive her. I think only only one photograph of her exists.

“Dead is dead, but that is why memory is all and all the immortality there is” wrote Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans, and if indeed she is right, we have a solemn obligation to remember Charlotte Mew.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are four more of Mew’s Poems.

 

 

 

 
The Peddler

Lend me, a little while, the key
That locks your heavy heart, and I’ll give you back–
Rarer than books and ribbons and beads bright to see,
This little Key of Dreams out of my pack.

The road, the road, beyond men’s bolted doors,
There shall I walk and you go free of me,
For yours lies North across the moors,
And mine lies South. To what seas?

How if we stopped and let our solemn selves go by,
While my gay ghost caught and kissed yours, as ghosts don’t do,
And by the wayside, this forgotten you and I
Sat, and were twenty-two?
Give me the key that locks your tired eyes,
And I will lend you this one from my pack,
Brighter than colored beads and painted books that make men wise:
Take it. No, give it back!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Changeling:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toll no bell for me, dear Father dear Mother,
Waste no sighs;
There are my sisters, there is my little brother
Who plays in the place called Paradise,
Your children all, your children for ever;
But I, so wild,
Your disgrace, with the queer brown face, was never,
Never, I know, but half your child…

Sometimes I wouldn’t speak, you see,
Or answer when you spoke to me,
Because in the long, still dusks of Spring
You can hear the whole world whispering;
The shy green grasses making love,
The feathers grow on the dear grey dove,
The tiny heart of the redstart beat,
The patter of the squirrel’s feet,
The pebbles pushing in the silver streams,
The rushes talking in their dreams,
The swish-swish of the bat’s black wings,
The wild-wood bluebell’s sweet ting-tings,
Humming and hammering at your ear,
Everything there is to hear
In the heart of hidden things.
But not in the midst of the nursery riot,
That’s why I wanted to be quiet,
Couldn’t do my sums, or sing,
Or settle down to anything.
And when, for that, I was sent upstairs
I did kneel down to say my prayers;
But the King who sits on your high church steeple
Has nothing to do with us fairy people!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Farmer’s Wife

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe – but more’s to do
At harvest-time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter’s day.
Her smile went out, and ’twasn’t a woman–
More like a little, frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.

“Out ‘mong the sheep, her be,” they said,
‘Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wasn’t there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.

She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk stay away.
“Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.

Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me?
The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low gray sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie’s spotted feathers lie
On the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
What’s Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!

She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ‘Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh, my God! – the down,
The soft young down of her; the brown,
The brown of her – her eyes, her hair, her hair!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Call.

From our low seat beside the fire
Where we have dozed and dreamed and watched the glow
Or raked the ashes, stopping so
We scarcely saw the sun or rain
Above, or looked much higher
Than this same quiet red or burned-out fire.
Tonight we heard a call,
A rattle on the window pane,
A voice on the sharp air,
And felt a breath stirring our hair,
A flame within us: Something swift and tall
Swept in and out and that was all.
Was it a bright or a dark angel? Who can know?
It left no mark upon the snow,
But suddenly it snapped the chain
Unbarred, flung wide the door
Which will not shut again;
And so we cannnot sit here any more.
We must arise and go:
The world is cold without
And dark and hedged about
With mystery and enmity and doubt,
But we must go
Though yet we do not know
Who called, or what marks we shall leave upon the snow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a Greek translation of ‘On the Road to the Sea’ by Olvia Papaeliou  from April 2000, which  serves to show that Mew is still sufficiently beloved in other lands to rate the  dedicated trouble of translating her poems.

 

 
Στο δρόμο για τη θάλασσα

Η μια την άλλη προσπεράσαμε, γυρίσαμε, σταθήκαμε λιγάκι
κι ύστερα συνεχίσαμε το δρόμο. Εγώ, που έκανα άλλες να γελούν,
δεν πήρα από σένα ούτ’ ένα τόσο δα χαμογελάκι,
μα σε μια μέρα μέσα δεν κουνήθηκαν βουνά,
πρέπει κανείς να περιμένει, για κάποια πράγματα, αρκετά.

Απ’ όλα πρώτα, θέλω τώρα τη ζωήσου’ πριν χαθώ,
τον κόσμο που ‘χεις στα παράξενά σου μάτια θέλω να δω.
Δεν έχει άνθη εύθυμα, πράσινα, να διαλέξω,
μα μέσα στα καφέ χωράφια, ίσως ένα μοναχά πορφυρό ανθάκι να συλλέξω.

Υπάρχει πάντα κάτι όμορφο θαρρώ
στη γκρίζα θάλασσα, στο σκούρο ουρανό.
Να δω τον κόσμο στη ματιά σου δε μ’ αφήνεις
και τη ζωή σου θέλω, μα δε μου τη δίνεις.

Τώρα, πίσω στα χρόνια αν ψάξω,
θα σε βρω στ’ Αυγούστου το χωράφι νεαρή.
Το πρόσωπο, τις σκέψεις σου, είσαι παλλόμεν’ όνειρο σε φράχτη κουρνιασμένο,
θάθελα, η φαύλη, τ’ όμορφο το πρόσωπο σου δακρυσμένο,
μα πιο πολύ θα ήθελα να σ’ είχα γελαστή.
Το τώρα δε μου φτάνει, ούτε το χτες,
μα παντεπόπτης είναι μόνο ο Θεός.
Το μάκρος σου στη χλόη, μες στο φως,
τις βροχερές, τις άγρυπνες νυχτιές.

Πες μου, κι ας είναι μάταιο που ρωτώ,
τις εγκοπές στον τοίχο, σου ζητώ,
που σκαρφαλώνοντας δείχνανε να ψηλώνεις•
τις εγκοπές του τοίχου σου, εκεί…
Σε προτιμώ όπως ήσουνα μικρή.
Θα φαίνεται αυτό που λέω χαζό –
ούτε μια μέρα δε σε έχω ζήσει εγώ…
Δε με πειράζει. Δε θ’ αγγίξω τα μαλλιά σου
ούτε θ’ ακούω το χτύπο της καρδιάς σου
κι ας είν’ εκεί. Και σαν πουλί πετούμενο που φεύγει
και να καθήσει στα κλαδιά δε στέργει,
έτσι αγγίζοντας το χέρι σου εγώ
σ’ άκουσα: Το παιδί που ήσουν προτιμώ.

Μικρούλα, καστανή, γλυκειά…
Κι ήσουνα πάντα τόσο σοβαρή, βαρειά;
Πάντα, νομίζω. Μα έλα τότε, δώσε το χέρι το μικρό σου να κρατήσω
και μες το σύμπαν των ματιών σου δε θα εισδύσω.
Δε θέλω να τρομάξω ό,τι αγαπώ
ούτε θα ήθελα εσένα να ενοχλήσω.
Μα θέλω τη ζωή σου,
πριν φύγει η δική μου αιμορραγούσα,
τώρα, κι όχι στο ουράνιο κατόπιν,
ένα χαμόγελο δικό σου ν’ αποσπούσα.
Το πιο τρελλό μου πάθος, κάποιοι είχανε πει,
ήταν να θέλω τη Σελήνη, κάποιες φορές την είχα βρει.

Ξέρεις, στο σούρουπο ενός πουλιού τραγούδι τελευταίο,
στο σπίτι γύρω νυχτερίδας πέταγμα,
μαύρα τα δέντρα, φόντο ο ουρανός,
κι ύστερα της νυχτιάς σκοτείνιασμα μοιραίο.

Ποτέ πια τη σκιά σου δε θα δω
ξανά σε κάποιο δρόμο φωτεινό.
Στην άκρη τούτου ‘δώ τη σκοτεινή,
ποιανού φωνή, ποιανού φιλί σε περιμένει;
Λες και ποτέ θα μου ‘χες πει.

Δε θάναι το δικό μου το φιλί,
όχι εγώ, κι ας περπατήσουμε μαζί
δε θάν’ η χούφτα η δική μου με καρπούς
που απ’ το χωράφι σου θα είναι μαζεμένοι.
Ησύχασε… Μα δε θα προτιμούσες να πεθαίνεις
κάτω από βρόντους κανονιών,
αντί άλλον να έχεις κι όχι εμένα;
Εγώ, αλήθεια λέω, θα προτιμούσα!
Ακόμα κι αν δεν ήμουν τώρα εδώ,
σήμερα, αύριο, τη χρονιά που μπαίνει…
Ωστόσο τη ζωή δε σου αφαιρώ,
μα παραδέξου το σε μένα, αγαπημένη,
πως να γελάσεις σ’ έκανα, μπορούσα.

 

 

μετάφραση: Όλβια Παπαηλιού
– Οδός Πανός – τχ. 108, Απρίλιος 2000

 

 

http://authorsandwriterstooktheirownlives.blogspot.com/2011/05/60.html

 

 

 

 

 

This is a poem by a poet to a poet – Elizabeth Bartlett to Charlotte Mew:

"Don't keep me, let me go." Charlotte Mew, last words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlotte Mew *
Charlotte, to-day I walked along streets where you died,

That remote and desolate Spring of nineteen twenty-eight,

With Anne dead, Ma gone, and the other two immured inside

Some asylum still, or dead, but lost to you, all hate

Shadowed and masked and laid away, which ever way it was.

Charlotte, to-day the balustrated houses balanced in pity

Above the chimes of sunlight and waiting ambulances,

And all around, the soft and moulded web of your city

Hung like a shroud of sound, and the pigeons drank

From the gutters, nervously treading the sloping tiles.

Don’t keep me. Let me go, you said,

And I thought of the first sessions

Starting in the clinics, and the bread

For the day’s hunger in the ovens

Of the bakery, and the swirl of wings

Beating around the stained pillars

Of St. Marylebone church, and all the Springs

Which have restored to vogue or memory since then

Wavered and faded and dissolved until I saw you

As you went out alone and bought the disinfectant

Which killed you, Charlotte Mew, said to be a writer.

Don’t keep me. Let me go, you said,

And you lay with your small dead

Face turned to the grey light

On the blank brick wall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* When her death was reported in the local Marylebone newspaper, she was casually described as “Charlotte Mew, said to be a writer” –  from a memoir by Alida Munro.

And here are some important links. I regret that they are not ‘live’, but a ‘cut and paste’ will take you to their sites.

 

 

 

Charlotte Mew as a girl with her old nurse.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2201071/Elizabeth-Bartlett.html

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/mew_c.html

http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=486

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/sep/01/poemoftheweekthefarmersb

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charlotte-mew

http://poemhunter.com/charlotte-mew/
Charlotte Mew in her own words.

(Superb resource)

http://www.studymore.org.uk/xmew.htm

Charlotte Mew Chronology

(extensive)

http://www.studymore.org.uk/ymew.htm#

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Subscribers to the London Review of Books will find in Vol 24 No.10 23 May 2002 a fine article about Mew’s life and death entitled ‘The Death of a Poet’ by Penelope Fitzgerald.

 

 

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/penelope-fitzgerald/the-death-of-a-poet

Read Full Post »

Wu Tsao: Three Sapphic Poems.

This photograph of a Chinese woman stands in for Wu Tsao, of whom no image is known to exist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the Courtesan  Ch’ing Lin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On your slender body
Your jade and coral girdle ornaments chime
Like those of a celestial companion
Come from the Green Jade City of Heaven.
One smile from you when we meet,
And I become speechless and forget every word.
For too long you have gathered flowers,
And leaned against the bamboos,
Your green sleeves growing cold,
In your deserted valley:
I can visualize you all alone,
A girl harboring her cryptic thoughts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You glow like a perfumed lamp
In the gathering shadows.
We play wine games
And recite each other’s poems.
Then you sing `Remembering South of the River’
With its heart breaking verses. Then
We paint each other’s beautiful eyebrows.
I want to possess you completely –
Your jade body
And your promised heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
It is Spring.
Vast mists cover the Five Lakes.
My dear, let me buy a red painted boat
And carry you away

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Untitled Poem I

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bitter rain in my courtyard
In the decline of Autumn,
I only have vague poetic feelings
That I cannot bring together.
They diffuse into the dark clouds
And the red leaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
After the yellow sunset
The cold moon rises
Out of the gloomy mist.
I will not let down the blinds
Of spotted bamboo from their silver hook.
Tonight my dreams will follow the wind,
Suffering the cold,
To the jasper tower of your beautiful flesh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Untitled Poem II

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have closed the double doors.
In what corner of the heavens is she?
A horizontal flute
Beyond the red walls
Blown as gently as the breeze
Blows the willow floss.
In the lingering glow of the sunset
The roosting crows ignore my melancholy.
Once again I languidly get out of bed.
After I have burned incense,
I loiter on the jeweled staircase.

 

 

 

 

 
I regret the wasted years,
Sick, afraid of the cold, afraid of the heat,
While the beautiful days went by.
Suddenly it is the Autumn Feast of the Dead.
Constantly disturbed by the changing weather,
I lose track of the flowing light
That washes us away.
Who moved the turning bridges
On my inlaid psaltery?
I realize–
Of the twenty five strings
Twenty one are gone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All three poems Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wu Tsao was born sometime around 1800; her year of birth and death are uncertain. She was the daughter of a merchant and married a merchant herself. Her experiences with these men were not positive and she sought out the company of women, as friends and as lovers. She wrote erotic poems to courtesans, creating unashamed lyric passages full of the sweetness of yearning.
She was China’s great lesbian poet, and she was popular while she lived, her songs sung throughout China. Her poetry dealt with a variety of topics, unlike other women poets of her time. This versatility, combined with casual style and personal tone, probably contributed to her popularity.
Later in life, Wu Tsao moved to seclusion and became a Taoist priestess.
In regards to Wu Tsao, Kenneth Rexroth writes “She is one of the great Lesbian poets of all time, perhaps not as great as Sappho, but certainly greater than any modern ones.” According to Rexroth, Wu Tsao is usually regarded as the third woman poet of China, after Li Ch’ing-chao and Chu Shu-chên, and with Ne-lan Hsin-tê as one of the two leading tz’u poets of the Ching (Manchu) Dynasty.
Given the quality of Wu Tsao’s work and her history, it is disturbing to find that her name rarely appears in Western profiles of poets, and she is not included in literary discussions of the lesbian poetic tradition.

This text is by Alix North

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
If anyone reading this post comes across any additional sources of information about Wu Tsao, please contact   LesbianPoetry@sappho.com and  diatsung@yahoo.com

Read Full Post »

Four Poems by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner (Dec 5th 1893 - May 1st 1978)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In these Four poems written by Sylvia Townsend Warner in the years after the death (on November 9th 1969,) of Valentine –  “The treasure of my soul” –  is retained the echo of the profoundest and grief and loss one can imagine. Sylvia and Valentine had been partners for 39 years.  After the cremation Sylvia wrote “I unmake the death-bed, I remake the marriage-bed I said. And as I lay thinking of all the beds we had lain in, she came and pulled aside the sheets and leaped in beside me. And so I slept all night with her ashes in a respectable little fumed oak tabernacle beside me.”

Warner’s biographer Clare Harman writes that when Warner came across Walter De La Mare’s poem ‘Autumn’* in a book she was given as a present on the Christmas following Valentines death, Warner thought she would die then and there from “The shock of this sudden assault of the truth.”  She wrote in her diary that “Total grief is like a minefield: No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.”

Valentine had chosen Non omnis moriar for her epitaph, and for Sylvia this underscored Valentine’s promise that she would never leave her. Valentine continued to appear in Sylvia’s dreams, and she felt “not so much haunted but possessed.”

Sometime in 1972 she wrote, rather remarkably for such a determinedly secular person as she was,  ” … somewhere about 3 a.m. I woke in my sleep and there she was beside me in actuality of being: not remembered, not evoked, not a sense of presence, Actual.

I was sitting in the kitchen and she standing beside me, in a cotton shirt and grey trousers, looking down on me, with love, intimately, ordinarily, with her  look of tantalising a little, her easy amorous look. She was within touch of my hand. I looked at her and felt the whole force of my love for her, its amazement, a delighted awe, entrancement, rapture.

We were familiar, ourselves  to ourselves. I was withheld from speaking. I looked. I gave myself. I loved with my whole being. No words occurred to me. I knew I must not try to touch her, and I was wholly an embrace of her. And then, without ending, it was an end. I was conveyed into another layer of sleep.”

Since then, and following her sorting out of the letters and other papers relict of her life with Valentine, Warner abandoned completely her style of writing realistic stories, and began her stories of ‘Elfindom’ – indelibly  tinged with a strange mix of fantasy and reality  – set in a time that was no time, yet steeped in the unhistorical medieval, and about a fairy-folk who thought and acted more like irascible and capricious humans than anything resembling Tinkerbell.

Warner died on the morning of the first of May 1978 aged 84 years.

Miss Green's house, first home of Sylvia and Valentine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“On this plain house…”

 

On this plain house where I

Dwell and shall doubtless die

As did my plain forefathers in times past

I see the willow’s light-limbed shadow cast.

 

I watch in solitude

Its flying attitude

Laid on that brick and mortar soberness

Like the sharp imprint of a fleeting kiss.

 

Just so, I think, your shade,

Alien and clear, was laid

Briefly on this plain heart which now plods on

In this plain house where progeny is none.

West Chaldon - another home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Ah, sleep, you come not…”

 

Ah, Sleep, you come not, and I do not chide you.

You the ever-young, the sleek and the supple,

How should I bride you

Who am so harsh with care, so grimed with trouble?

 

You to the child’s cot and the lover’s pillow,

You to the careless creation in field and steading,

And to my roof-mate swallow

Come with goodwill, who come not to my dull bidding.

 

Like lies down with like. If I am to woo you

Sylvia in the garden at Frome Vauchurch (another of their homes) in 1948

I must disguise myself, and in youth’s green

Habit pursue you,

Or imagine myself to what I never have been:

 

Or you in pity put on death’s leaden likeness

To follow my weariness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Azrael

 

Valentine feeding the cats at Frankfort Manor.

Who chooses the music, turns the page,

Waters the geraniums on the window-ledge?

Who proxies my hand,

Puts on the mourning-ring in lieu of the diamond?

 

Who winds the trudging clock, who tears

Flimsy the empty date of calendars?

Who widow-hoods my senses

Lest they should meet the morning’s cheat defenseless?

 

Who valets me at nightfall, undresses me of another day,

Puts tidily and finally away?

And lets in darkness

To befriend my eyelids like an illusory caress?

 

Valentine.

I called him Sorrow when first he came,

But Sorrow is too narrow a name;

And though he has attended me all this long while

Habit will not do. Habit is servile.

 

He, inaudible, governs my days, impalpable,

Impels my hither and thither. I am his to command,

My times are in his hand.

Once in a dream I called him Azrael.

Sylvia with a kitten

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Fie on the hearth-ill-swept…”

 

Fie on the hearth ill-swept

Where sorrows over-kept

Sodden with tears and foul

Lie mouldering cheek by jowl

 

With mildewed revenges,

Grown tasteless with time’s changes,

Limp wraths and mumbled visions,

Fly-blown into derisions,

 

Delights jellied to slime

And tag-ends of rhyme

Life! Grant me a harder

Sylvia in Valentine's sitting room, 1960s.

Housewifery in my larder,

 

And if I may not eat

Fresh-killed meat,

Crisp joy and dewy loathing,

Let me have done with loving.

 

Aye, though philosophy’s

Wan pulse my palate freeze

Ere I to carrion swerve

Carrion-like, let me starve.

Joyce Finzi's drawing of Valentine Dead, November 9th 1969.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Autumn

There is a wind where the rose was;

Cold rain where sweet grass was;

And clouds like sheep

Stream o’er the steep

Grey skies where the lark was.

Nought gold were your hair was;

Nought warm where your hand was;

But phantom, forlorn,

Beneath the thorn,

Your ghost where your face was.

Sad winds where your voice was;

Tears, tears where my heart was;

And ever with me,

Child, ever with me,

Silence where hope was.

Walter De La Mare.

Read Full Post »

Sappho, Fragment 31*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

English Translation

 

He appears to me, that one, equal to the gods,
the man who, facing you,
is seated and, up close, that sweet voice of yours
he listens to

And how you laugh your charming laugh. Why it
makes my heart flutter within my breast,
because the moment I look at you, right then, for me,
to make any sound at all won’t work any more.

My tongue has a breakdown and a delicate
— all of a sudden — fire rushes under my skin.
With my eyes I see not a thing, and there is a roar
that my ears make.

Sweat pours down me and a trembling
seizes all of me; paler than grass
am I, and a little short of death
do I appear to me.

 

 

Translation by Gregory Nagy
(date unknown)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

English Transliteration

 

phainetai moi kênos îsos theoisin
emmen’ ônêr ottis enantios toi
isdanei kai plâsion âdu phonei-
sâs upakouei

kai gelaisâs îmeroen to m’ ê mân
kardiân en stêthesin eptoaisen.
ôs gar es s’ idô brokhe’ os me phônai-
s’ oud’ en et’ eikei,

alla kam men glôssa eâge lepton
d’ autika khrôi pur upadedromâken
oppatessi d’ oud’en orêmm’ epirom-
beisi d’ akouai,

kad de m’ idrôs kakkheetai tromos de
paisan agrei khlôrotera de poiâs
emmi tethnakên d’ oligô ‘pideuês
phainom’ em’ autai.

Alla tan tolmaton , [epei kai penêta] …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Original Greek.

 

φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν’ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φονεί-
σας ὐπακούει

καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, τό μ’ ἦ μὰν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν·
ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ’ ἴδω βρόχε’, ὤς με φώναί-
σ’ οὐδ’ ἒν ἔτ’ εἴκει,

ἀλλά κὰμ μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγε†, λέπτον
δ’ αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ’ οὐδ’ ἒν ὄρημμ’, ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ’ ἄκουαι,

κὰδ’ δέ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω ‘πιδεύης
φαίνομ’ ἔμ’ αὔτᾳ.

ἀλλὰ τὰν τόλματον, ἐπεὶ †καὶ πένητα†…

 

* Texts taken from Wikipedia

Read Full Post »