Friday, January 24, 2020

Translation of Poem by Mikhail Lermontov, Михаил Лермонтов, "THE ANGEL," "Ангел"

Vrubel, "Flying Demon" (detail)




From the Series: Lermontov’s Earliest Verse
Михаил Лермонтов
(1814-1841)
Ангел
По небу полуночи ангел летел,
И тихую песню он пел,
И месяц, и звезды, и тучи толпой
Внимали той песне святой.
Он пел о блаженстве безгрешных духов
Под кущами райских садов,
О Боге великом он пел, и хвала
Его непритворна была.
Он душу младую в объятиях нес
Для мира печали и слез;
И звук его песни в душе молодой
Остался — без слов, но живой.
И долго на свете томилась она,
Желанием чудным полна,
И звуков небес заменить не могли
Ей скучные песни земли.
1831
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Translation by Vladimir Nabokov
The Angel
An angel was crossing the pale vault of night,
And his song was as soft as his flight,
And the moon and the stars and the clouds in a throng
Stood enthralled by this holy song.

He sang of the bliss of the innocent shades
In the depths of celestial glades;
He sang of the Sovereign Being, and free
Of guile was his eulogy.

He carried a soul in his arms, a young life
To the world of sorrow and strife,
And the young soul retained the throb of that song
--without words, but vivid and strong.

And tied to this planet long did it pine
Full of yearnings dimly divine,
And our dull little ditties could never replace
Songs belonging to infinite space.

From Vladimir Nabokov, Verses and Versions (compilation copyright 2008), p. 281
Dates of translation: 1944-46
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Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

The Angel
Across skies of midnight an angel did fly,
While singing a melody softly;
The moon and the stars and the dark clouds on high
Were at ease as they hearkened to holiness lofty.

He sang of the bliss of all wraiths without sin
Who dwell in lush gardens nirvanic;
He sang of Great God and his praise unto Him
Was guileless, full-throated, ecstatic.

He bore in his arms a young soul pristine-pure
To this world full of sorrows and tears;
And the sound of his song in the young soul endured,
A melody wordless that soothed earthly fears. 

Long languished that sweet soul alone on this earth,
Troubled e’er by desire chaste and wondrous,
And this world’s wretched tunes so devoid of all mirth
Next to heaven’s sweet song sounded banal and cumbrous.
Date of translation: January 23, 2020

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[“The Angel” is dated 1831, when Lermontov was 17. It is the only one of his early poems that he later submitted for publication.]

Anonymous commentary from the website RusStikh (RusVerse):

Анализ стихотворения «Ангел» Лермонтова

Стихотворение «Ангел» (1831 г.) относится к юношескому периоду творчества Лермонтова. В его основу поэт положил детскую колыбельную песню, которую слышал от матери. Это единственное юношеское произведение Лермонтова, которое он впоследствии сам передал в печать.
Стихотворение написано в то время, когда поэт полностью находился во власти идеалистических представлений. Он еще не столкнулся с суровым и безжалостным миром, который будет вызывать только презрение. Лермонтову очень далеко до мотивов острого одиночества и демонической темы. Его ощущения чисты и возвышенны.
Центральный образ произведения – летящий по небу ангел, который поет «тихую песню». Это божественное пение приковывает внимание всей природы. Ангел прославляет Бога и райскую жизнь. Он несет с собой юную душу, чтобы вдохнуть ее в младенца. Эта душа абсолютно безгрешна, она внимает песне ангела и навсегда сохраняет ее в своей памяти. Ангелу жаль оставлять невинную душу в «мире печали и слез», поэтому в песне он дарит ей надежду на будущее воскрешение в лучшем мире.
Автор считает, что слова этой песни и ее конкретное содержание не так важны. Ее основное достоинство — мелодичность. Достаточно сохранить в душе хотя бы звук, который вновь сделает песню первозданно живой. В несколько ином виде Лермонтов впоследствии разовьет эту тему в стихотворении «Молитва».
Автор сравнивает человеческую жизнь с бесконечным томлением души, которую может согреть только ангельская песня. «Скучные песни земли» никогда не заменят «звуки Небес». Это очень красивое поэтическое сравнение означает, что для любого человека первостепенными являются духовные ценности.
Произведение написано очень простым и доступным языком. Многократное использование союза «и» в начале строк придает ему библейскую торжественность.
В стихотворении «Ангел» Лермонтов еще не использует религиозные образы в качестве каких-то символов. В нем нет тайного смысла и скрытых намеков. Сюжет произведения не выходит за рамки православных канонов. Это действительно искреннее выражение наивной веры молодого человека, навеянное дорогими воспоминаниями из детства. Ангел может ассоциироваться только с любящей матерью, которая поет младенцу колыбельную песню перед тем, как отпустить его в самостоятельную жизнь, наполненную страданиями и болью.






Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Translation of Poem by Михаил Лермонтов, MIKHAIL LERMONTOV, "THE SAIL" "Парус"





From the Series: Lermontov's Earliest Verse

Михаил Лермонтов
(1814-1841)
Парус
Белеет парус одинокой
В тумане моря голубом!..
Что ищет он в стране далекой?
Что кинул он в краю родном?..
Играют волны — ветер свищет,
И мачта гнется и скрыпит…
Увы! он счастия не ищет
И не от счастия бежит!
Под ним струя светлей лазури,
Над ним луч солнца золотой…
А он, мятежный, просит бури,
Как будто в бурях есть покой!
1832
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Translation by Vladimir Nabokov
The Sail
Amid the blue haze of the ocean
A sail is passing, white and frail.
What do you seek in a far country?
What have you left at home, lone sail?

The billows play, the breezes whistle,
And rhythmically creaks the mast.
Alas, you seek no happy future,
Nor do you flee a happy past.

Below the mirrored azure brightens,
Above the golden rays increase—
But you, wild rover, pray for tempests,
As if in tempests there was peace!

From Vladimir Nabokov, Verses and Versions (compilation copyright, 2008), p. 287
                                                      Dates of translation: 1944-46

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Translation by U.R. Bowie

The Sail
A lone white sail that glistens, gleams,
On seascape haze cerulean blue.
What distant realms attract his dreams?
In dear homeland what’s left to rue?

The billows surge, the winds are shrieking,
The creaking mast writhes in distress,
Alas, not happiness he’s seeking,
Nor flight from once-sought happiness.

Beneath him azure water’s streaks,   
Above him sun without surcease . . .
While he, wild one, for tempests seeks,   
As if in tempests there were peace.
                                                            Date of translation: January 21, 2020

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                                                [Lermontov wrote this poem at age 18]

Anonymous commentary, from the website RuStikh (RusVerse):

Анализ стихотворения «Парус» Михаила Лермонтова

Лермонтов написал стихотворение «Парус» в 1832 г. Юный поэт еще только начинал свой творческий путь. Тем не менее, в произведении он уже затрагивает серьезные философские вопросы, разработкой которых будет заниматься в течение всей жизни.
По жанру «Парус» является лирическим стихом. Его тема непосредственно связана с реальным событием в жизни Лермонтова. В возрасте семнадцати лет поэт бросает учебу в Московском университете и переезжает в Петербург, где под давление бабушки поступает в школу прапорщиков. Переезд в столицу был первым ответственным решением Лермонтова. От него зависела вся дальнейшая судьба поэта. В стихотворении «Парус» в полной мере отразились его размышления и надежды.

Центральный образ стихотворения – одинокий парус в безбрежном море, который сравнивается с состоянием лирического героя. Лермонтов сразу ставит риторические вопросы о цели своего существования. В них аллегорически противопоставляются Москва («в краю родном») и Петербург («в стране далекой»).
Спокойное море поэт сравнивает со своей прежней безмятежной жизнью. Романтическая натура Лермонтова жаждет перемен. Карьера военного не была его идеалом, просто в ней поэт видел возможность активной деятельности. На самом деле он еще находился на жизненном перепутье.

В стихотворении просматривается мотив одиночества и неприятия окружающего мира, свойственный поздней лирике Лермонтова. Беспокойная натура поэта подобна «мятежному» парусу, который «просит бури». Большое значение имеет утверждение: «он счастия не ищет». Лермонтов признается, что его стремление к активной деятельности не связано с улучшением собственного положения. Он сознательно готов к жизненным лишениям и страданиям ради свершения какого-либо великого поступка.

Философский смысл стиха не умаляет его художественных достоинств. «Парус» — прекрасный образец пейзажной лирики. Яркие эпитеты создают перед читателем удивительно правдивую картину («голубом», «золотой»).

Произведение проникнуто особой динамикой. Автор применяет риторические вопросы и восклицания. Многоточия подчеркивают глубину размышлений лирического героя.

В целом стихотворение «Парус» — очень глубокое. В нем молодой Лермонтов смог показать наличие большого многогранного таланта. Мастерское сочетание чистой лирики с философской темой – редкое поэтическое качество. Лермонтов заявил о себе, как о поэте, которого ждет великое будущее.

                                                                      Ivan Aivazovsky




Poem declaimed in Russian by Svetlana Smirnova:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhOcBRhMvzc

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Translation of Poem by MIKHAIL LERMONTOV, "Небо и звезды" "SKY AND STARS"

Photograph of Dniepr River, Taken from Space



From the Series: Lermontov's Earliest Verse

Михаил Лермонтов
(1814-1841)
Небо и звезды
Чисто вечернее небо,
Ясны далекие звезды,
Ясны как счастье ребенка;
О! для чего мне нельзя и подумать:
Звезды, вы ясны, как счастье мое!
Чем ты несчастлив,
Скажут мне люди?
Тем я несчастлив,
Добрые люди, что звезды и небо
Звезды и небо! — а я человек!..
Люди друг к другу
Зависть питают;
Я же, напротив,
Только завидую звездам прекрасным,
Только их место занять бы желал.
1831

Translation by Vladimir Nabokov

The Sky and the Stars
Fair is the evening sky,
Clear are the stars in the distance,
As clear as the joy of an infant.
Oh, why can’t I tell myself even in thought:
The stars are as clear as my joy!

What is your trouble?
People might query.
Just this is my trouble,
Excellent people: the sky and the stars
Are the stars and the sky, whereas I am a man.

People are envious
Of one another.
I, on the contrary,
Only the beautiful stars do I envy,
Only to be in their place do I wish.
                                                       Date of translation: 1944-47

From Vladimir Nabokov, Verses and Versions (compilation copyright, 2008), p. 279

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Translation by U.R. Bowie

Sky and Stars
Pure is the sky in the gloaming,
Clear are the faraway stars,
Clear as a happiness is in a child.
O why am I forbidden to think:
Stars, you are clear as my happiness!

What makes you unhappy?
The people might ask me.
What makes me unhappy,
Kind people, is this:
That stars and the sky
Are all stars and all sky,
While me, what mere I am is man!

People nurse envy
The one for the other;
But I, as for me, not at all,
Envy I only the stars in their loveliness,
Only one wish do I have: to be stars.
                                                          Date of translation: Jan. 18, 2020

                                                      [Lermontov wrote this poem at age 17]
d


Anonymous commentary, from the website RuStikh (RusVerse):

Анализ стихотворения «Небо и звезды» Лермонтова

Произведение «Небо и звезды» Михаила Юрьевича Лермонтова – сочетание экспериментальной формы с глубиной философской лирики.
Стихотворение написано в 1831 году. Его автору исполнилось в эту пору 17 лет, он студент университета с похвальными оценками по гуманитарным предметам. Осенью этого года он лишился отца, умершего от чахотки. По жанру – элегия, дума, по размеру – дактиль без рифм, 3 строфы. Лирический герой – сам автор. Образы просты и вечны. Помимо тех, что стали названием стихотворения, есть еще: ребенок, счастье, люди. Поэт стремится к безыскусной красоте. Интонация человека, заговорившего после потока долгих одиноких слез. В ней чувствуется беззащитность и детскость: чисто небо, ясны звезды. Сравнение: как счастье ребенка. Для героя это, видимо, самое высокое сравнение из всех существующих. Анафора: ясны (в заключительной строфе она выражена словом «только»). Междометие «о!» и восклицание подчеркивают удрученность героя. Ему примерно 17 лет и он желал бы, чтобы его радость и принятие жизни вновь стали бы такими, как в раннем детстве. Разные события могли его настроить на минорный лад: смерть матери, разлука с отцом, а теперь и его смерть, поиск своего призвания, дружбы, две восторженные влюбленности, отрезвленные насмешливостью или холодностью избранниц его сердца. Конечно, чтение Д. Байрона также не прошло даром. Вторая строфа – воображаемый диалог с людьми, обществом, знакомыми, родными. Здесь применен прием параллелизма: «Чем ты несчастлив?» И ответ: я человек!.. В этом пятистишии есть и инверсия (скажут люди), и вопрос с ответом: чем ты-тем я, простонародное обращение «добрые люди», парадоксальное сравнение. Наконец, в 3 строфе констатация факта: люди зависть питают. Их привлекает статус, власть, материальные блага, внешность. Но герой смотрит не на них, а вверх. «Завидую звездам». Более того, «их место занять бы желал». В сиянии этих небесных тел он видит подлинную простоту, мудрость, величие. В их молчании куда больше смысла, чем в беседах людей. Свой путь им известен, и они не отклоняются от него. Есть здесь и некоторый вызов, очередное противопоставление себя обществу, возможно, даже толпе. Финальная строка звучит вполне пророчески: на литературном небосклоне М. Лермонтов такой звездой стал.
Впервые стихи «Небо и звезды» М. Лермонтова были опубликованы в «Библиотеке для чтения» уже после смерти поэта.





Poem declaimed in Russian by I. Kvasha:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmqibDI8K6k

Saturday, January 11, 2020

Ian McEwan, "NUTSHELL" Full Text of Poetry Mentioned or Cited in the Novel




Poems Mentioned, or Cited in Part, in Ian McEwan’s Novel, “Nutshell”
Page Numbers Refer to Anchor Books Paperback, 2017
Michael Drayton

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.

Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies;
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes—
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!


       Nutshell, beginning of Ch. 9, p. 82-84, FN (Fetus Narrator) writes a letter to his father, John Cairncross: “There was a poem you recited then, too good for one of yours, I think you’d be the first to concede. Short, dense, bitter to the point of resignation, difficult to understand. The sort that hits you, hurts you, before you’ve followed exactly what was said. It addressed a careless, indifferent reader, a lost lover, a real person, I should think. In fourteen lines it talked of hopeless attachment, wretched preoccupation, longing unresolved and unacknowledged. It summoned a rival, mighty in talent or social rank or both. Eventually, time would have its revenge, but no one would care or even remember, unless they chanced to read these lines.”

FN spends the rest of the letter applying the poem to himself and the world he is about to enter. In the last paragraph come these lines: “So say it again to me, this poem, with your dying breath, and I’ll say it back to you. Let it be the last thing you ever hear. Then you’ll know what I mean.”

A few pages later, in Ch. 10 (p. 91-92), just minutes before Trudy poisons him, John recites the Drayton poem to her again; the first line and three other lines are cited on p. 91. Trudy does not bother listening; she “talks over the last few words,” and then declares: “I don’t want to hear another poem for the rest of my life.” John answers, “You won’t; not with Claude.”





John Donne

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
   The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

Nutshell, Ch. 10, in the scene of the poisoning (p. 93), after he declaims the Drayton poem “John Cairncross may be considering [declaiming] one last poem. He could wheel out, as he used to before journeys, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.’ Those soothing tetrameters, that mature, comforting tone, would make me nostalgic for the sad old days of his visits. But instead he drums his fingers on the table, clears his throat, and simply waits.”


d

Shakespeare, Richard II  

Act 2 Scene 1


50This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
55As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
60Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
65That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

Still in the poisoning scene of Nutshell, Ch. 10, p. 94, John, Trudy and Claude discuss briefly the problem of the migrants pressing in on England, and apropos of that, John recites the following lines: “Ah, England, bound in with the triumphant sea, whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege.”
d


Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
       But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
       Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

In Chapter 15 of Nutshell (p. 145), after a long digression on “the new politics in university life”—the  issue involves trigger warnings, the demand of students for a safe place, the refusal to entertain “dangerous” ideas—FN remarks, “The womb, or this womb, isn’t such a bad place, a little like the grave, ‘fine and private’ in one of my father’s favourite poems.” The full quotation from two lines in Marvell would be, “The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace.”
d

W.H. Auden

Autumn Song
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse’s flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.

Dead in hundreds at the back
Follow wooden in our track,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food;
And the nightingale is dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain’s lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.

After John’s death, in Ch. 16 (p. 151) of Nutshell Elodie recalls, for Claude and Trudy, what a great teacher of poetry he was. Among numerous examples: “He set the assignment for the week ahead—a poem in four stanzas of trochaic tetrameters catalectic. We laughed at this gobbledygook. He had us singing an example, a nursery rhyme. ‘Boys and girls come out to play.’ Then he recited from memory Auden’s ‘Autumn Song.’ ‘Now the leaves are falling fast,/Nurse’s flowers will not last.’ Why is the missing syllable at the end of the line so effective?”

d
John Betjeman
Indoor Games Near Newbury
In among the silver birches,
Winding ways of tarmac wander
And the signs to Bussock Bottom,
Tussock Wood and Windy Break.
Gabled lodges, tile-hung churches
Catch the lights of our Lagonda
As we drive to Wendy’s party,
Lemon curd and Christmas cake

Rich the makes of motor whirring
Past the pine plantation purring
Come up Hupmobile Delage.
Short the way our chauffeurs travel
Crunching over private gravel,
Each from out his warm garage.

O but Wendy, when the carpet
Yielded to my indoor pumps.
There you stood, your gold hair streaming,
Handsome in the hall light gleaming
There you looked and there you led me
Off into the game of Clumps.

Then the new Victrola playing;
And your funny uncle saying
"Choose your partners for a foxtrot.
Dance until it's tea o'clock
Come on young 'uns, foot it feetly."
Was it chance that paired us neatly?
I who loved you so completely.
You who pressed me closely to you,
Hard against your party frock.

"Meet me when you've finished eating."
So we met and no one found us.
O that dark and furry cupboard,
While the rest played hide-and-seek.
Holding hands our two hearts beating.
In the bedroom silence round us
Holding hands and hardly hearing
Sudden footstep, thud and shriek

Love that lay too deep for kissing.
"Where is Wendy? Wendy's missing."
Love so pure it had to end.
Love so strong that I was frightened
When you gripped my fingers tight.
And hugging, whispered "I'm your friend."

Goodbye Wendy. Send the fairies,
Pinewood elf and larch tree gnome.
Spingle-spangled stars are peeping
At the lush Lagonda creeping
Down the winding ways of tarmac
To the leaded lights of home.

There among the silver birches,
All the bells of all the churches
Sounded in the bath-waste running
Out into the frosty air.
Wendy speeded my undressing.
Wendy is the sheet's caressing
Wendy bending gives a blessing.
Holds me as I drift to dreamland
Safe inside my slumber wear.

In the same passage where she mentions Auden’s “Autumn Song” (Nutshell, Ch. 16, p. 151), Elodie continues as follows: “Then what about a poem with a weak syllable restored? ‘Wendy speeded my undressing,/Wendy is the sheet’s caressing.’ He knew the whole of Betjeman’s ‘Indoor Games Near Newbury’ and made us giggle.”
     All of Elodie’s expansive blather, in tribute to her dead mentor—in which she compares him to the greatest of modern poets—is, apparently, a smokescreen. Later on we learn that FN’s suspicions may be accurate: “she’s come to find out who killed her lover.” This is confirmed in Ch. 18 (p. 174): “I always had my suspicions. How eagerly they believed Elodie. Now they know: nurse’s flowers will certainly not last.”

d

Peter Porter

An Exequy 

In wet May, in the months of change,
In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange
Dreams pursue me in my sleep,
Black creatures of the upper deep –
Though you are five months dead, I see
You in guilt’s iconography,
Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child,
The stranded monster with the mild
Appearance, whom small waves tease,
(Andromeda upon her knees
In orthodox deliverance)
And you alone of pure substance,
The unformed form of life, the earth
Which Piero’s brushes brought to birth
For all to greet as myth, a thing
Out of the box of imagining.
This introduction serves to sing
Your mortal death as Bishop King
Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme
His young wife, lost before her time;
Though he lived on for many years
His poem each day fed new tears
To that unreaching spot, her grave,
His lines a baroque architrave
The Sunday poor with bottled flowers
Would by-pass in their morning hours,
Esteeming ragged natural life
(‘Most dear loved, most gentle wife’),
Yet, looking back when at the gate
And seeing grief in formal state
Upon a sculpted angel group,
Were glad that men of god could stoop
To give the dead a public stance
And freeze them in their mortal dance.
The words and faces proper to
My misery are private – you
Would never share our heart with those
Whose only talent’s to suppose,
Nor from your final childish bed
Raise a remote confessing head –
The channels of our lives are blocked,
The hand is stopped upon the clock,
No one can say why hearts will break
And marriages are all opaque:
A map of loss, some posted cards,
The living house reduced to shards,
The abstract hell of memory,
The pointlessness of poetry –
These are the instances which tell
Of something which I know full well,
I owe a death to you – one day
The time will come for me to pay
When your slim shape from photographs
Stands at my door and gently asks
If I have any work to do
Or will I come to bed with you.
O scala enigmata,1
I’ll climb up to that attic where
The curtain of your life was drawn
Some time between despair and dawn –
I’ll never know with what halt steps
You mounted to this plain eclipse
But each stair now will station me
A black responsibility
And point me to that shut-down room,
‘This be your due appointed tomb.’
I think of us in Italy:
Gin-and-chianti-fuelled, we
Move in a trance through Paradise,
Feeding at last our starving eyes,
Two people of the English blindness
Doing each masterpiece the kindness
Of discovering it – from Baldovinetti
To Venice’s most obscure jetty.
A true unfortunate traveller, I
Depend upon your nurse’s eye
To pick the altars where no Grinner
Puts us off our tourists’ dinner
And in hotels to bandy words
With Genevan girls and talking birds,
To wear your feet out following me
To night’s end and true amity,
And call my rational fear of flying
A paradigm of Holy Dying –
And, oh my love, I wish you were
Once more with me, at night somewhere
In narrow streets applauding wines,
The moon above the Apennines
As large as logic and the stars,
Most middle-aged of avatars,
As bright as when they shone for truth
Upon untried and avid youth.
The rooms and days we wandered through
Shrink in my mind to one – there you
Lie quite absorbed by peace – the calm
Which life could not provide is balm
In death. Unseen by me, you look
Past bed and stairs and half-read book
Eternally upon your home,
The end of pain, the left alone.
I have no friend, no intercessor,
No psychopomp or true confessor
But only you who know my heart
In every cramped and devious part –
Then take my hand and lead me out,
The sky is overcast by doubt,
The time has come, I listen for
Your words of comfort at the door,
O guide me through the shoals of fear –
‘Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir.’2
(from The Cost of Seriousness, 1978)

1. "Enigmatic scale," musical scale used by Verdi in his
"Ave Maria." It has 4 whole steps followed by 3 half steps.
2. "Be not afraid, I am with you."


In Ch. 16 of Nutshell (p. 153), before Elodie leaves, Trudy offers to give her her choice of one of John’s books. She chooses a book by Porter. “’John’s put his name in it. Peter Porter. The Cost of Seriousness. It’s got ‘An Exequy.’ Tetrameters again. The most beautiful.”

d
John Keats
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In the last chapter of Nutshell (p. 195), immediately upon being born, FN writes: “A slithering moment of waxy, creaking emergence, and here I am, set naked on the kingdom. Like stout Cortez (I remember a poem my father once recited), I’m amazed.”

“Set naked on the kingdom” is another of numerous citations from Hamlet: 4.7: 43-44.

Note: Shakesperian Citations in Nutshell (largely from "Hamlet" and "Macbeth") are discussed in my book review article on the novel.