Birds and poetry (6 Viewers)

[Tyke]

Yes I enjoyed your blackbird piece too Andrew-very thoughtful words about that strident songster!

Your Neruda poem & the discussion with Steve on translated poetry set me thinking.

These are the first four lines of El pajaro yo in the original Spanish:-

ME llamo pájaro Pablo,
ave de una sola pluma,
volador de sombra clara
y de claridad confusa,


These are the same lines in translation to english

I am the Pablo Bird,
bird of a single feather,
a flier in the clear shadow
and obscure clarity,

What immediately leaps off the page is the lilting metre which disappears to be replaced by free verse in that translation. Even for someone who learned only a little spanish, years ago-the sound in the mother tongue is so much more appealing to the ear, despite not understanding all the words....fascinating. I suppose that this just underlines how much more there is to a poem than the meaning of the words.It seems doubtful that translation can ever reveal it .

You might be interested in the whole poem in Spanish:-

El pájaro yo

ME llamo pájaro Pablo,
ave de una sola pluma,
volador de sombra clara
y de claridad confusa,
las alas no se me ven,
los oídos me retumban
cuando paso entre los árboles
o debajo de las tumbas
cual un funesto paraguas
o como una espada desnuda,
estirado como un arco
o redondo como una uva,
vuelo y vuelo sin saber,
herido en la noche oscura,
quiénes me van a esperar,
quiénes no quieren mi canto,
quiénes me quieren morir,
quiénes no saben que llego
y no vendran a vencerme,
a sangrarme, a retorcerme
o a besar mi traje roto
por el silbido del viento.
Por eso vuelvo y me voy,
vuelo y no vuelo pero canto:
soy el pájaro furioso
de la tempestad tranquila.


Pablo Neruda
_____________________

Pablo was quite a character wasn't he?-what a life!

Colin

 

[scampo]

Thanks for posting "Taught by a Bird", John - a lovely piece of writing. I especially liked these two lines:

"But lo! from amids the storm I heard,
The sweet, glad song of a tiny bird."

The bird's welcome song brought to mind John Keats' poem, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", which has already been posted (post 18), but here's the first verse:

"O what can ail thee, Knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing."

 

[Nerine]

John, I enjoyed reading "Taught by a Bird" , many thanks.

Steve I just love that line by Keats: "And no birds sing." Crazy really, such a simple line but wonderful! Great poem.

Thinking about blackbirds, I don't think we've had this one by Tennyson. Andrew, I hope you don't mind!

The Blackbird

O blackbird! sing me something well:
While all the neighbors shoot thee round,
I keep smooth plats of fruitful ground,
Where thou mayst warble, eat, and dwell.
The espaliers and the standards all
Are thine; the range of lawn and park;
The unnetted black-hearts ripen dark,
All thine, against the garden wall.

Yet, tho’ I spared thee all the spring,
Thy sole delight is, sitting still,
With that gold dagger of thy bill
To fret the summer jenneting.

A golden bill! ths silver tongue,
Cold February loved, is dry;
Plenty corrupts the melody
That made thee famous once when young;

And in the sultry garden-squares,
Now thy flute-notes are changed to coarse,
I hear thee not at all, or hoarse
As when a hawker hawks his wares.

Take warning! he that will not sing
While yon sun prospers in the blue,
Shall sing for want, ere leaves are new,
Caught in the frozen palms of Spring.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Nerine

 

[Tyke]

John-Ellen P Allerton is a new poet for us here-and a nice poem too. Thanks.

Nerine-I like The Blackbird-particularly the second verse & had to look up the meaning of "fret" and "jenneting". They are "eat" and a particular variety of apple!!-lovely!

Colin

 

[Nerine]

had to look up the meaning of "fret" and "jenneting". They are "eat" and a particular variety of apple!!-lovely!

Colin

Yes I looked that up also, and "black-hearts" are cherries. Glad you liked this, Colin.

Nerine

 

[Bascar]

Probation for just one more week, eh?

Be lenient with him!



Nerine

Nerine

I tell you what, I’ll swap my blackbird for your thrush, and then neither will be in any danger! Anyway I’m sure my chap could do with some sea air.

Tennyson’s bird obviously didn’t cause him any bother because he gorged him on cherries and apples. He probably had incessant collywobbles. Btw, thanks to you and Colin for the definitions: otherwise I would have thought the bird spent the summer worrying about falling off a Spanish horse! Good poem though, I didn’t know it.

Before leaving blackbirds, I think my favourite BB poem is Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ (posted at #1183 on page 48).

‘Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak –
On the grass when I arrive,
In the ivy when I leave.’

Wonderful! I love the last two lines and now always think of them when I see one of the pesky creatures.

I agree about the line ‘And no birds sing’. It is one of those (many) single lines of poetry that are utterly memorable and come instantly to mind in appropriate circumstances. La Belle Dame itself is full of such lines: ‘Alone and palely loitering’, ‘On the cold hill’s side’, ‘And the harvest’s done’, ‘And her eyes were wild’, ‘And made sweet moan’, etc. I have quoted all of them at various times. Then there is Ode to a Nightingale: ‘Singest of summer in full-throated ease’, ‘O for a beaker full of the warm South’, ‘With beaded bubbles winking at the brim’, ‘And purple-stainèd mouth’, ‘Where but to think is to be full of sorrow’, and so on and on. Goodness, one could start a thread of its own on this topic!

John, I too enjoyed the poem ‘Taught by a Bird’.

‘Ah, little bird, had I faith like you,
When life and the world are dark to view!
When lowering skies are above me bent,
Could I feel your trust and your sweet content.’

These lines remind me of this from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’:

'Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan'

Do post some more poems.


Andrew

 

[scampo]

Ah, thank goodness for memorable lines. I'm sure these have been posted before, but I think we can afford to repeat them:

from Endymion

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darken’d ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

John Keats

 

[Nerine]

Yes and of course Keats wrote so many memorable lines. What about from Ode to Autumn - "And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core." "Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind." "While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day". I still think Keats wrote the most beautiful poetry of all and as for those lines from Endymion, well what can beat that?

Andrew, no way would I ever part with my song thrush, even to save a blackbird!

Nerine

 

[scampo]

Words, eh? So powerfully full of both meaning and feeling.


Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, —
Keats

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; and the
mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and
all the trees of the fields will clap their hands.
Isiah

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
Corinthians

 

[Bascar]

Colin, many thanks for your post on translations. It was very interesting to compare the translation of ‘The Me Bird’ with the Neruda original, which I agree has a lovely rhythm and sound (and I say this without knowing more than a couple of words of Spanish!). It is, I suppose, inevitable that in a literal translation (which this one clearly is) the music of the original – metre, rhyming etc – will be lost. On the other hand, for all their deficiences, literal translations do serve a useful purpose in alerting us to poetry which would otherwise be completely inaccessible because of the language barrier.

Yes, Neruda certainly did lead a full life. I read that he chose the pseudonym Pablo Neruda at the age of 16 – that shows confidence!

Nerine, I thought it was probably a long shot! Ah well, life is full of compromise, so I guess I’d better adopt the principle of live and let live! (Actually, with all the rain we have been having, my bird has been relatively quiet, so I’m feeling quite benevolent to him just now!)

Memorable lines:
‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ (Donne)

Here are some verses from Matthew Arnold, who seems to be under-represented on this thread:

from The Scholar Gypsy

And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here
In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,
Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass
Where black-wing'd swallows haunt the glittering Thames,
To bathe in the abandon'd lasher pass,
Have often pass'd thee near
Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown:
Mark'd thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,
Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air;
But, when they came from bathing, thou wert gone.

At some lone homestead in the Cumnor hills,
Where at her open door the housewife darns,
Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate
To watch the threshers in the mossy barns.
Children, who early range these slopes and late
For cresses from the rills,
Have known thee watching, all an April day,
The springing pastures and the feeding kine;
And mark'd thee, when the stars come out and shine,
Through the long dewy grass move slow away.

In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood,
Where most the Gypsies by the turf-edged way
Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see
With scarlet patches tagg'd and shreds of gray,
Above the forest-ground call'd Thessaly—
The blackbird picking food
Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all;
So often has he known thee past him stray
Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither'd spray,
And waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall.

And once, in winter, on the causeway chill
Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go,
Have I not pass'd thee on the wooden bridge
Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow,
Thy face towards Hinksey and its wintry ridge?
And thou hast climb'd the hill
And gain'd the white brow of the Cumnor range;
Turn'd once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,
The line of festal light in Christ Church hall—
Then sought thy straw in some sequester'd grange.

Matthew Arnold

Andrew

 

[scampo]

Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar Gypsy" reminds me very much of Edward Thomas's "Lob", Andrew. It's a lovley poem - Matthew Arnold is much less read these days, except for his "Dover Beach" of course.

I suppose both poems share the theme of the "Green Man", that wonderful rural character of "olde" England!


from Lob

At hawthorn-time in Wiltshire travelling
In search of something chance would never bring,
An old man’s face, by life and weather cut
And coloured, - rough, brown, sweet as any nut,
A land face, sea-blue-eyed, - hung in my mind
When I had left him many a mile behind.
All he said was: ‘Nobody can’t stop ‘ee. It’s
A footpath, right enough. You see those bits
Of mounds - that’s where they opened up the barrows
Sixty years since, while I was scaring sparrows.
They thought as there was something to find there,
But couldn’t find it, by digging, anywhere.’

To turn back then and seek him, where was the use?
There were three Manningfords, - Abbots, Bohun, and Bruce:
And whether Alton, not Manningford, it was,
My memory could not decide, because
There was both Alton Barnes and Alton Priors.
All had their churches, graveyards, farms, and byres,
Lurking to one side up the paths and lanes,
Seldom well seen except by aeroplanes;
And when bells rang, or pigs squealed, or cocks crowed,
Then only heard. Ages ago the road
Approached. The people stood and looked and turned.
Nor asked it to come nearer, nor yet learned
To move out there and dwell in all men’s dust.
And yet withal they shot the weathercock, just
Because ‘twas he crowed out of tune, they said;
So now the copper weathercock is dead.
If they had reaped their dandelions and sold
Them fairly, they could have afforded gold.

Edward Thomas

 

[Bascar]

Steve, what a splendid and absorbing poem ‘Lob’ is, quite delightful. I like your suggestion of a link to the theme of the Green Man – interestingly there is a reference in the poem to Herne the Hunter, who seems to be one of many characters associated with the GM! I hope you won’t mind if I quote a few more lines from the poem:

The man was wild
And wandered. His home was where he was free.
Everybody has met one such man as he.
Does he keep clear old paths that no one uses
But once a lifetime when he loves or muses?
He is English as this gate, these flowers, this mire.
And when at eight years old Lob-lie-by-the-fire
Came in my books, this was the man I saw.
He has been in England as long as dove and daw,
Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree,
The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery;
And in a tender mood he, as I guess,
Christened one flower Love-in-idleness,
And while he walked from Exeter to Leeds
One April called all cuckoo-flowers Milkmaids.

Here is another, rather more typical, Edward Thomas poem, which I like very much (great last line):

The Glory

The glory of the beauty of the morning, -
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart: -
The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning
All I can ever do, all I can be,
Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,
The happiness I fancy fit to dwell
In beauty's presence. Shall I now this day
Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,
Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start
And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,
In hope to find whatever it is I seek,
Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things
That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?
And shall I ask at the day's end once more
What beauty is, and what I can have meant
By happiness? And shall I let all go,
Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know
That I was happy oft and oft before,
Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.

Edward Thomas


Andrew

 

[arco13]

Icelandic Poet, Jon ur Vor



Wintergull

The sea preserves my poems,
like all the rest
of it's secrets,
in hardlocked silence.

In the quick of its eye
I awake, a small boy,
and wait for one
after another
strange fragile
shells.

I still see
the broad wings
of the wintergull
over the falling wave.

The seawind wipes
my face,
sun and wind
dry my face
with soft motherhands,
but the sea,
the sea preserves
all its secrets.

 

[scampo]

A fine poem, Andrew. He is incapable of writing poor verse, I feel sure. "Lob" is very special, as you say - and, I would say, very typical of Thomas.

 

[scampo]

Icelandic Poet, Jon ur Vor

Wintergull...

In the quick of its eye
I awake, a small boy,
and wait for one
after another
strange fragile
shells.

...

Brilliant lines - I really enjoyed reading that poem. The images the poet creates are as clear and sharp as crystal.

 

[Bascar]

Wintergull – a fine poem, arco, thanks for posting it.

When I was reading The Scholar Gypsy, and indeed Lob, I thought of W H Davies and his early life tramping the roads. Here are two poems of his: the first melancholic, the second charmingly idealistic.

The Hawk

Thou dost not fly, thou art not perched,
The air is all around:
What is it that can keep thee set,
From falling to the ground?
The concentration of thy mind
Supports thee in the air;
As thou dost watch the small young birds,
With such a deadly care.

My mind has such a hawk as thou,
It is an evil mood;
It comes when there's no cause for grief,
And on my joys doth brood.
Then do I see my life in parts;
The earth receives my bones,
The common air absorbs my mind --
It knows not flowers from stones.

W H Davies


Come, Let Us Find

Come, let us find a cottage, love,
That's green for half a mile around;
To laugh at every grumbling bee,
Whose sweetest blossom's not yet found.
Where many a bird shall sing for you,
And in your garden build its nest:
They'll sing for you as though their eggs
Were lying in your breast,
My love--
Were lying warm in your soft breast.

'Tis strange how men find time to hate,
When life is all too short for love;
But we, away from our own kind,
A different life can live and prove.
And early on a summer's morn,
As I go walking out with you,
We'll help the sun with our warm breath
To clear away the dew,
My love,
To clear away the morning dew.

W H Davies

(Btw, Steve, I’m sorry for giving a misleading impression when I described The Glory as being a more typical Edward Thomas poem than Lob. What I had in mind was the length of Lob and its narrative form, with its rhyming couplets, rather than the substantive content of the poem, which I agree is entirely typical of him.)

Andrew

 

[scampo]

Hi Andrew - I guessed what you meant as Lob is perhaps the archetypal Thomas poem. It's a superb piece if writing, isn't it? So evocative of a lost England - the Thomas' poem where the war existed "beyond the poem's edges" as Stan Smith wrote in his excellent study of Edward Thomas.

 

[Bascar]

Steve, I agree, Lob is a great poem, a wonderfully sustained blend of folklore, legend, rural tradition, and realism. It is certainly evocative of an England long gone, written affectionately but without sentimentality, and with lovely flashes of humour:

‘The next man said: He was a squire's son
Who loved wild bird and beast, and dog and gun
For killing them.’

‘Yet Lob has thirteen hundred names for a fool,
And though he never could spare time for school
To unteach what the fox so well expressed,
On biting the cock's head off, - Quietness is best, -
He can talk quite as well as anyone
After his thinking is forgot and done.’

‘When he was but a lad
He won a rich man's heiress, deaf, dumb, and sad,
By rousing her to laugh at him. He carried
His donkey on his back. So they were married.’

I like the poem very much. It has certainly given me a greater understanding and appreciation of Edward Thomas. Here is another one from his pen (reminding us of days when July meant summer!!):


July

Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake
Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.
The boat itself stirs only when I break
This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
To prove if what I see be bird or mote,
Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.

Long hours since dawn grew, - spread, - and passed on high
And deep below, - I have watched the cool reeds hung
Over images more cool in imaged sky:
Nothing there was worth thinking of so long;
All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.

Edward Thomas


Andrew

 

[scampo]

This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
...
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.

Edward Thomas

Andrew

Ah! Such days - made all the rosier, I suspect, by the carefreeness of the young minds that create them. I was reminded of Brooke's poem:

from The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

...would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester!—
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing the Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

Rupert Brooke

 

[Bascar]

Yes indeed, those hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer! Nice to read Brooke’s poem, Steve.

I read that The Old Vicarage, Grantchester gave rise to a brilliant anagram in a crossword a few years ago in The Guardian (at the time when the present incumbent had his spot of bother with the law):

"Poetical scene has surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating" (3,3,8,12)


Not such lazy, hazy days this summer. This poem from John Clare seems more appropriate.

Sudden Shower

Black grows the southern sky, betokening rain,
And humming hive-bees homeward hurry by:
They feel the change; so let us shun the grain,
And take the broad road while our feet are dry.
Aye there, some drops fell moistening on my face,
And pattered on my hat—‘tis coming nigh! -
Let's look about, and find a sheltering place.
The little things around us fear the sky,
And hasten through the grass to shun the shower.
Here stoops an ash-tree--hark! the wind gets high,
But never mind; this ivy, for an hour,
Rain as it may, will keep us drily here:
That little wren knows well his sheltering bower,
Nor leaves his covert, though we come so near.

John Clare


Andrew