5 posts tagged “poetry”
Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931 (1815-1820).
Bate, W. Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
You can't do this kind of concurrent reading with every writer (the thought of trying it with Henry James gives me the shivers), but Keats's career is so brief and changes so rapidly that periodic switching from work to life and back again makes a pretty congenial project. What cheered me in the overall sad story was Keats's silliness as a person (at dinner he starts an impromptu concert with his friends; he makes the bassoon noises), his nerdy bookishness (Shakespeare and Milton are never out of his mind for a moment), and the way his ambition keeps pace about a league ahead of whatever he's actually working on. The unfathomably brilliant works -- the sonnets, odes, ballads -- appear almost by accident, while his greatest effort is turned to those longer pieces in which compositional brilliance is tied to structural flaws that he's always aware of, keeps trying to outpace, keeps discovering in new forms. It's the admission of uncertainty, the continued questing, that makes me feel so warm - maybe in this era of improved medical care there is still hope for us all.
I wish I had something to say about these poems that didn't just feel like wrapping them in a bunch of cotton wool.
Das angebrochene Jahr
mit dem modernden Kanten
Wahnbrot.Trink
aus meinem Mund.--------------------
The broached year
with its rotting crust of
madnessbread.Drink
from my mouth.
I never believed in the spirit of history
an invented monster with a murderous look
dialectical beast on a leash led by slaughterersnor in you -- four horsemen of the apocalypse
Huns of progress galloping over earthly and heavenly steppes
destroying on the way everything worthy of respect old and defenselessI spent years learning the simplistic cogwheels of history
a monotonous procession hopeless struggle
scoundrels at the heads of confused crowds
against the handful of the honest courageous awareI have
very little leftobjects
and compassion
The frost lies white
On the suspended
Magpies' Bridge.
The night is far gone.-Ōtomo no Yakamochi (718-785)
The Magpies' Bridge is both the bridge across the Milky Way by which the Herd Boy (Altair) visits the Weaving Girl (Vega) once a year on the seventh night of the seventh moon, and also a bridge in the Japanese Palace of those days, named, of course, after the mythical one. The poem can mean that he has very important business at court and has come early, or that he is stealing away from an assignation with one of the palace ladies, or that he has waited all night and she has not come.
The terrible thing about these reading notes is how quickly they turn into a trophy case, embalming everything they collect. I'll think about how many books I can still read before I die, how many languages I still have time to learn. Every night out without a book, that's one less book I'll carry to the grave, where it won't do me a bit of good. And only a particular sort of book can shake me out from under this sad compulsion.
