The King and Queen of This Night

The Erl-King

Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?
The father it is, with his infant so dear;
He holdeth the boy tightly clasp'd in his arm,
He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

'My son, wherefore seek'st thou thy face thus to hide?'
'Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!
Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?'
'My son, 'tis the mist rising over the plain.'

'Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me!
Full many a game I will play there with thee;
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold.'

'My father, my father, and dost thou not hear
The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?'
'Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;
'Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.'

"Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there?
My daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care.
My daughters by night their glad festival keep,
They'll dance thee, and rock thee, and sing thee to sleep."

'My father, my father, and dost thou not see,
How the Erl-King his daughters has brought here for me?'
'My darling, my darling, I see it aright,
'Tis the aged grey willows deceiving thy sight.'

'I love thee, I'm charm'd by thy beauty, dear boy!
And if thou'rt unwilling, then force I'll employ.'
'My father, my father, he seizes me fast,
Full sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last.'

The father now gallops, with terror half wild,
He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child;
He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread,
The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.

Tomorrow's All Saints' Day, which is followed by All Souls' Day, (You have to have a holy day if you are to have its eve.) and I may come over all metaphysical on either of them. Today's All Hallow's Eve (which is also Hallowe'en, which is also Samhain -- pronounced Saw-en in Irish Gaelic and Sah-vin -- the 'v' hovering between 'w' and 'v' -- in Scottish Gaelic; the accent's on the first syllable in both) and I feel anything but holy. I'm in numerous (nine, thirteen) black cat modes, and I'm going to offer you a handful of else-ish verse with minimal explanation. If you want details in your haunts, then follow the links.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Christopher (Kit to his friends and possibly to the people who knifed him through the eye, ending his career through life, in the Elizabethan equivalent of a sandwich shop in Deptford) Marlowe gave us versions of Faust, which brings me nicely from Germany to the British Isles and from a king to a queen, and a tale told, here, by Robert Burns:

Tam Lin

O I forbid you, maidens a',
That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there.

There's nane that gaes by Carterhaugh
But they leave him a wad,
Either their rings, or green mantles,
Or else their maidenhead.

Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has braided her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree,
And she's awa' to Carterhaugh,
As fast as she can hie.

When she came to Carterhaugh
Tam Lin was at the well,
And there she fand his steed standing,
But away was himsel.

She had na pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twa,
Till up then started young Tam Lin,
Says, "Lady, thou's pu nae mae.

"Why pu's thou the rose, Janet,
And why breaks thou the wand?
Or why comes thou to Carterhaugh
Withoutten my command?"

"Carterhaugh, it is my ain,
My daddie gave it me;
I'll come and gang by Carterhaugh,
And ask nae leave at thee."
Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has snooded her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree,
And she is to her father's ha,
As fast as she can hie.

Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the ba,
And out then cam the fair Janet,
Ance the flower amang them a'.

Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the chess,
And out then cam the fair Janet,
As green as onie grass.

Out then spak an auld grey knight,
Lay oer the castle wa,
And says, "Alas, fair Janet, for thee
But we'll be blamed a'."

"Haud your tongue, ye auld-fac'd knight,
Some ill death may ye die!
Father my bairn on whom I will,
I'll father nane on thee."

Out then spak her father dear,
And he spak meek and mild;
"And ever alas, sweet Janet," he says.
"I think thou gaes wi child."

"If that I gae wi' child, father,
Mysel maun bear the blame;
There's neer a laird about your ha
Shall get the bairn's name.

"If my love were an earthly knight,
As he's an elfin grey,
I wad na gie my ain true-love
For nae lord that ye hae.

"The steed that my true-love rides on
Is lighter than the wind;
Wi siller he is shod before
Wi burning gowd behind."

Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has snooded her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree,
And she's awa' to Carterhaugh,
As fast as she can hie.

When she cam to Carterhaugh,
Tam Lin was at the well,
And there she fand his steed standing,
But away was himsel.

She had na pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twa,
Till up then started young Tam Lin,
Says, "Lady, thou pu's nae mae.

"Why pu's thou the rose, Janet,
Amang the groves sae green,
And a' to kill the bonie babe
That we gat us between?"

"O tell me, tell me, Tam Lin," she says,
"For's sake that died on tree,
If eer ye was in holy chapel,
Or christendom did see?"

"Roxbrugh he was my grandfather,
Took me with him to bide,
And ance it fell upon a day
That wae did me betide.

"And ance it fell upon a day,
A cauld day and a snell,
When we were frae the hunting come,
That frae my horse I fell;
The Queen o Fairies she caught me,
In yon green hill to dwell.

"And pleasant is the fairy land,
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years
We pay a tiend to hell;
I am sae fair and fu' o flesh
I'm feared it be mysel.

"But the night is Halloween, lady,
The morn is Hallowday;
Then win me, win me, an ye will,
For weel I wat ye may.

"Just at the mirk and midnight hour
The fairy folk will ride,
And they that wad their true love win,
At Miles Cross they maun bide."

"But how shall I thee ken, Tam Lin,
Or how my true-love know,
Amang sae mony unco knights
The like I never saw?"

"O first let pass the black, lady,
And syne let pass the brown,
But quickly run to the milk-white steed,
Pu ye his rider down.

"For I'll ride on the milk-white steed,
And ay nearest the town;
Because I was an earthly knight
They gie me that renown.

"My right hand will be glovd, lady,
My left hand will be bare,
Cockt up shall my bonnet be,
And kaimd down shall my hair;
And thae's the takens I gie thee,
Nae doubt I will be there.

"They'll turn me in your arms, lady,
Into an esk and adder;
But hold me fast, and fear me not,
I am your bairn's father.

"They'll turn me to a bear sae grim,
And then a lion bold;
But hold me fast, and fear me not,
As ye shall love your child.

"Again they'll turn me in your arms
To a red het gaud of airn;
But hold me fast, and fear me not,
I'll do to you nae harm.

"And last they'll turn me in your arms
Into the burning gleed;
Then throw me into well water,
O throw me in wi speed.

"And then I'll be your ain true-love,
I'll turn a naked knight;
Then cover me wi your green mantle,
And cover me out o sight."

Gloomy, gloomy was the night,
And eerie was the way,
As fair Jenny in her green mantle
To Miles Cross she did gae.

About the middle o' the night
She heard the bridles ring;
This lady was as glad at that
As any earthly thing.

First she let the black pass by,
And syne she let the brown;
But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed,
And pu'd the rider down,

Sae weel she minded whae he did say,
And young Tam Lin did win;
Syne coverd him wi her green mantle,
As blythe's a bird in spring.

Out then spak the Queen o Fairies,
Out of a bush o broom:
"Them that has gotten young Tam Lin
Has gotten a stately groom."

Out then spak the Queen o Fairies,
And an angry woman was she;
"Shame betide her ill-far'd face,
And an ill death may she die,
For she's taen awa the bonniest knight
In a' my companie.

"But had I kend, Tam Lin," she says,
"What now this night I see,
I wad hae taen out thy twa grey e'en,
And put in twa een o tree."

If you want to hear it sung (and if you do, then you do tonight), then here's a version by Thumpermonkey and Vanessa Hawes (click on 'Tam Lin' at the top of the page).

Shakespeare brings the Wild Hunt (which takes place tonight, in more countries than you might think) to brief life in The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV:iv.28-38):

There is an old tale goes, that Herne the Hunter
(Sometimes a keeper here in Windsor forest)
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns,
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd and did deliver to our age
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.


Yeats lingers more descriptively with 'The Hosting of the Sidhe':

The host is riding from Knocknarea,
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;
Caolte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling, 'Away, come away;
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart,
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.'
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day;
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caolte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling, 'Away, come away.'

You wouldn't want them cornering you in a dark alley.

The first Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to lock itself in my memory was Ruddigore. This is one of the songly whys. (If you're feeling melodic, you have the option of listening while you read. US residents can listen here, as well.)

When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls,
And the bat in the moonlight flies,
And inky clouds, like funeral shrouds,
Sail over the midnight skies.
When the footpads quail at the night bird's wail,
And black dogs bay at the moon,
Then is the spectres' holiday--
Then is the ghosts' high noon!
For then is the ghosts' high noon,
High noon -- then is the ghosts' high noon!

As the sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees
And the mists lie low on the fen,
From grey tombstones are gathered the bones
That once were women and men,
And away they go, with a mop and a mow,
To the revel that ends too soon,
For cock crow limits our holiday,
The dead of the night's high noon!
The dead of the night's high noon!
High noon -- the dead of the night's high noon!

And then each ghost with his lady toast
To their church-yard beds take flight,
With a kiss, perhaps, on her lantern chaps,
And a grisly grim "goodnight!"
Till the welcome knell of the midnight bell
Rings forth its jolliest tune,
And ushers in our next high holiday,
The dead of the night's high noon!
The dead of the night's high noon,
High noon -- the dead of the night's high noon!

Hallowe'en, by any name, should be at least a little bit (Edward) Gorey:

Each night Father fills me with dread
When he sits at the foot of my bed;
I'd not mind that he speaks
In gibbers and squeaks,
But for seventeen years he's been dead.

Today is Samhain (pronounce it as you will), the Celtic new year. May the night be as warm and as chilling as you need it to be and may your new year be the best of all you've known to date and the worst of all to come.

What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?

(It still is.)

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the JubJub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

'And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Opening detour: The title of this entry is the title of a James Thurber story. (Keep checking; implicit in The New Yorker's statement that the archives are not yet fully on line is the promise of intention that they will be.) Please don't allow yourself to get all huffy at the opening paragraph. Thurber wrote in his era, as do we all. He wrote not only in, but of it: double-thick walls. Here endeth the detour.

According to Princeton's lexical database, 'portmanteau' has two meanings:

a large travelling bag made of stiff leather

blend: (a new word formed by joining two others and combining their meanings) `smog' is a blend of `smoke' and `fog';`motel' is a portmanteau word made by combining `motor' and `hotel'"; `brunch' is a well-known portmanteau

Prior to Lewis Carroll (henceforth PLC), only the first of those meanings existed. Carroll Throughout Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll packed two words into one, simultaneously compressing and expanding the English language. In Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Carroll has Humpty Dumpty explain it all, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy…You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

When I was young (prepubescent), I caught a flu and developed the kind of fever that brings delirium. Being of my peculiar sensibility (each of us having sensibilities peculiar to him or herself), what else would I do in an untoward state? I unpacked all of the portmanteau words in Jabberwocky. Was it the soundest of choices? Perhaps not, but the fact that I remember it with such distinct clarity (amidst the fog of hands laying cold towels across my brow, endless sweats, turbulent sleep and other broken moments) induces in me a belief that the unpacking was healing: words into their constituent parts (a mental focus), body back to health (a physical determination).

I don't think that was the onset of my devotion to Carroll. My much-suppressed passion for words fuelled it, surely. A later interest in origami (Americans, look here. Those who want to be awestruck by the possibilities in paper, turn to Origamido.) and, in a particular way, mathematics, deepened the interest.

Far too much has been written about Carroll for the world to need another biography, even a single-page one. There are Lewis Carroll Societies in the UK, the US, Japan, New Zealand and points -- from any direction -- farther at sea. If you're tired of Waiting for Godot and aching to do more active; there's a Finding Lewis Carroll site. Feeling game? There's an Alice in Wonderland games site. You, too, can play chess with the Red Queen (and your head, physically if in no other way, will be perfectly safe). Do you want to go Through the Looking Glass online? Done and done. Care to see a few of his puzzles? Here you are. Want to wear your Tenniel? Bergamot Brass Works reproduced his plates as belt buckles (Alice goes into the mirror on one side and comes out on the other; Humpty Dumpty swells the top of his buckle). Bergamot no longer produce the buckles, but they might (You never know.) succumb to pressure. It's happened before. From time to time, you can find them at street fairs and in online auctions.

It's plain that I went a little bit Lewis-mad, but more in a Cheshire than a Hatter fashion. The smile was mine alone.

That's a lie. In grammar school, Carroll broke my shyness barrier. I rang my tutor (How did she not kill me?) at home and asked whether we could learn 'You Are Old, Father William' for school.

'Would you recite it?' she asked.

That was a bridge too far. I could not accede to recitation, but was willing to commit myself to an act of memory. Why not? I'd learnt Keats and Shakespeare, both of whom preceded Carroll in my miniverse. Shakespeare had nudged and winked at (and told a few atonal jokes to) my inner absurdist. Carroll took it out and fed it cakes and cream.

My tutor and I agreed and I condemned my unwitting (and a few intentionally witless) classmates to a round of Carroll.

"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head --
Do you think, at your age, it is right?

"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And you have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door --
Pray what is the reason for that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment -- one shilling a box --
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak --
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose --
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs.

You have to hand it to Father William -- and to his progenitor. He ages with rare gusto.

In Celebration of Ordinary Men

For My Father, Who Fears I’m Going to Hell

And who last week spent three hours wading
through the dregs of the just-drained pond
whose former owner had assured him
could not support life. Though as the last
brown water gave way to grime, he bore witness
to the rip-flash of five slivered backs struggling
like sharks in sand – mudcats, he called them –
all on the verge of a bright, dry death
in the inadequate air. For my father, who worked
without waders through the afternoon, grappling
toward their slick, sharp bodies with bare hands,
who twice swallowed pond scum, twice
lost a shoe to the suction of sludge, and once
fell prone in the mire – a seven-pound catfish
with skin-piercing fins cradled in his arms.
For my father, who rinsed their silt-laced gills
and bathed each muck-thick body
with a hose, who placed them gently
into white buckets of water, called up friends
and neighbors, anyone with access to a lake
or large enough tub, anyone who would promise
not to slice the round bellies, not to spill
their polished viscera. And for my father,
who for the first time in months, slept
the deep untroubled sleep of a man who neglected
nothing – of a man, who for at least one night
had saved all in this life that he could.

I've never met her father, but I owe Cindy May Murphy a debt of gratitude for thoroughly introducing into my life the presence of this man, who thinks his daughter is going to hell and who is so strongly, passionately bound to life that he -- I have no doubt about it -- spent the coinage of one day of his worldly existence exactly as she described.

There are those (and they are many) who believe that poetry should focus prettily on lovely things. Now, this poem's is by no means an ugly topic, but people -- and poets -- might well skirt away from it: mud, viscera, pond scum (and swallowed scum, at that), suction of sludge and skin-piercing fins, the story of a man saving catfish -- catfish, for mercy's sake -- from a drained pond, harming himself, finding them homes, providing salvation and begging the promise of safe lives for creatures some people wouldn't even view as dinner (and few would term attractive). This man, this (likely) eater of fish, stood like a god and saved a group of pain-inflicting catfish from an arid end.

'For my Father' serves a necessary function. It is a reminder that the ordinary is extraordinary. I'm not writing a world seen through fish eyes. There is nothing so uncommon as the common (as in 'ordinary', not in 'vulgar') being. We carry vastness within us. It is not always the international crisis that calls it out.

How powerful (the rip-flash of its slivered backs) is this poem and its protagonist (who worked with neither gloves nor waders through what cannot have been anything but an endless afternoon). How tender and plain is the affection with which the writer sees her father, how honest and clear is her love for this man. Yes, she opens with his judgement and fear, but consider, consider the unwritten strength, the deep-muscled emotion tendoning this piece of work, consider the catfish flapping for their dry-drowning lives and consider -- stop and consider -- the bonds of hard-wrought love that keeps everything (including love) from passing before, beyond and finally, without even a fish-still gasp, away.

And Yet . . .

This world of dew
is a world of dew--
and yet, and yet

Kobayashi Issa's animal poems are memorised by Japanese schoolchildren (who won't encounter Basho and Buson until time has deepened them -- not the poets, who are beyond deepening, but the students, whose bodies may well incorporate the poet's dust as well as words). Issa's life was not without sorrows: his mother died young (young for her and for him), his stepmother was, by all accounts, straight out of a traditional fairy tale, he was financially impoverished, his children predeceased him and his second marriage was a misery (a misery and therefore to misery).

Issa lived from 1763 to 1827 or 8, depending on whom you ask. If you hear about Kobayashi Yataro or Nobuyki (the name his parents gave him), you're hearing about Issa, so it's well to know him by his words and not by name alone. He was born to a farmer in Kashiwabara and studied under a local poet (Shimpo) before moving to Tokyo (which was then Edo) and studying with Mizoguchi Sogan and Norokuan Chikua. He may be a member of the prodigy collection. It's said that he was a child when he wrote

Come play with me,
parentless sparrow.

If Issa had an understandable compassion for the orphaned, he also had an open-eyed appreciation for natural beauty --

Autumn wind --
mountain's shadow
wavers

-- an awareness of inner irony:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

-- and a healthy sense of the wry:

So this is where
I end up living --
five feet of snow.
Where I come from
even flies
bite.

I'm getting ahead of his life. Issa moved to Tokyo when he was fourteen. He may have worked as a clerk in a Buddhist temple, which would have affected his outlook. Certainly, he studied haiku. (For those of you hard-wired to the strictly syllabic translation of haiku -- 5/7/5 -- you might want to close this page. With no ill intention, I am going to offend you.)

He took any job he could find to keep body and soul conjoined until he was accepted by the Kasushika poetry school. Later, he was employed there as a tutor, but the constraints were too narrow and he left. For two years, he travelled. In 1792 changed his name to Issa: a powerful symbolic act in any culture.

He wrote. He acquired a patron, Seibi Natsume and, upon returning to Tokyo, published his first collection. Issa worked in the short form (haiku) and the long (prose). He journeyed around Japan and wrote about his travels. These accounts were published.

His father died at the age of 65 and Issa's step-family disregarded the will. In 1912, Issa returned to his birthplace and his feud with his stepmother and her family. He married. His four children died in infancy. (There's a life in two too-brief sentences.) The poem which opens this entry was written about Issa's daughter. How plaintive: And yet. And yet.

(Yes, he won the contest over the will and inherited his father's lands. I am not having a linear mind.) In 1823, Issa became a widower.

Issa was not without optimism:

Where there are humans,
you'll find flies
and Buddhas.

For reasons of my own, I am taken with

Cold cold
In the eaves
Evening cidadas and red peppers.

I don't like being cold and cicadas send me into a mindspin, they're so unlikely, peppers joy me in arrays of ways, and the contrast of chill and buzz and pepper-clad heat is all together . . . It's clarity. And that's what haiku should do. A satori moment in seventeen syllables, more or less.

Issa's final child, a daughter who lived, was born shortly after Issa's death. His other progeny include over 20,000 haiku, hundreds of tanka and several works of haibun. They, too, survived.

Compass

Lost
David Whyte

Stand still. The trees ahead
And bushes beside youz
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers.
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come again,
Saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

It's no shock to learn that the man who wrote that poem, David Whyte, is a naturalist. It might invite the raising of an eyebrow that he studied marine zoology (However it may seem, it isn't all about trees.) in Wales and trained as a nature guide in the Galapagos. A pragmatic idealist, he's an Associate Fellow at Said Business School at the University of Oxford. White leads l anthropological and natural history expeditions and teaches corporations (usually the driest of entities) how to bring creativity into the workplace.

'Lost' finds its roots and branches in the wisdom and traditions of Native American elders. (That people from one country often see things in another land that its native-born do not -- and do not take wisdom from their own birthplace -- is its own verse about sight-lines, forests and trees. This is not a comment about David Whyte. It is a by-breeze of an observation, stirring leaves.)

I've not had as much wilderness training as I want. I've not had as much time sailing as I want. Time and wanting . . . Another post, maybe, if I find the right verse.

The best leaders I've had have taught that, if you are (or think you are) lost, you should stop and think. Be still. Open your senses. Heed.

Breathing and stillness come more easily to some places than in others. (It is, I noticed, impossible for me to read 'Lost' aloud without coming and returning to stillness. I begin to think that I should memorise it against the day . . . or night.)

We forget. Wrapped and rapt in the busy-ness of our lives, we forget how to breathe with the world around us, we forget (forgive the abuse of grammar) what we are part of, we forget who we are and whose children we are.

Dust and sky-dirt. We are the stuff that stars are made on. And we forget how to, forget to, neglect to live slowly. It is, on every front, a shame.

Slow can be wondrous. Indeed, how can wonder arise when one is living life on 'hurtle'? How can we see a tree or branch, let alone consider what it does?

I've had the privilege of spending time alone in the woods at Gaunt's House in Dorset. It may be possible to get lost there, although I cannot readily imagine it. It is easier to conceive of finding oneself, or of getting lost in trying to avoid finding oneself in the ancient stillness of those trees.

Once, late at night, in the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana, I mislaid my way back to camp. Circumstances led me to an act of trust; I closed my eyes and walked. I wasn't afraid. We were with a group of the San (people about whom I am proudly biased and who are not being given the respect -- or much of anything else -- they deserve). They're among the best trackers in the world, if they are not in fact the best, so if I got lost myself, they'd find me. As it happened, there was no need for tracking. I walked, eyes shut, trusting the Hills to bring me home. When I opened my eyes, there was our 22-seater bus standing tall and angular beneath the southern sky.

The Kalahari knew where I was.

Fell Creatures

I do not like thee, Dr Fell.
Why this is, I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well.
I do not like thee, Dr Fell.

It's not as great a leap from Catullus as you might think (Okay, it is.). Tom Brown (you know he had some school days) wrote this in 1680. It was inspired in part by a Latin poem (There's the Catullus connection.) and in part by the existence of one Dr Fell, a clergyman and dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, who very much desired the expulsion of young Tom Brown.

Fell gave Tom a test: to write a poem in the style of an epigram and to translate work by Martial. What came before Tom Brown's (inner or outer) eyes was this:

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;
Hoc tantum posso dicere, non amo te.

Brown translated this thus:

I don't like you, Sabidius, and I can't say why; all I can say is I don't like you.


Fell paved the road; Brown walked it.

As a child, I knew none of this. When I first sniffed the darker winds of fell, the definitions that went beyond the past tense of 'to fall', I felt a shivery kinship with my predecessor who hadn't liked the doctor.

It is fortunate that I lived in a single-storey apartment, for another I didn't like lived between levels:

When I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd go away.

This, by Hughes Mearns, is one of those malleable pieces whose words change from one collection to the next: go away or stay away; I wish, I wish or I wish that he would. No matter. There he was, waiting to be seen, not on the landing but shadowy and solid on the stair.

Over the years, not entirely to my surprise (having been given an early warning system in the forms of Brown, Mearns, Gorey, Thurber and Addams), I have met my allotted share of men on stairs and fell doctors. By and large, I have to agree that I didn't like them, could not (politely, at any rate) say why, and wished wholeheartedly that they would go away.

To a one, succumbing to time's wearings, they have, to date, obliged.

Of Your Unworlding

As Catullus wrote it:

Multus per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenia has misera, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postromo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.
Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

As respun by the late Robert Fitzgerald:

By strangers' coasts and waters, many days at sea
I came here for the rites of your unworlding,
Bringing for you, the dead, these last gifts of the living.
And my words -- vain sounds for the man of dust.
Alas, my brother,
You have been taken from me. You have been taken from me,
By cold Chance turned a shadow, and my pain.

Here are the foods of the old ceremony, appointed
Long ago for the starvelings under earth:
Take them; your brother's tears have made them wet; and take
into eternity my hail and my farewell.

I lose myself in 'unworlding'. It awestrikes me. Even if you (o lucky soul) have never mourned, how could you not weep for 'by strangers' coasts and waters'? 'And my words -- vain sounds for the man of dust.' I want to have written that and count myself amongst the fortunate for having read it. One of my writing tutors inveighs (repeatedly) against the sin of repetition. Here, in the midst of forward motion juxtaposed with death, we have that pause: 'You have been taken from me. You have been taken from me.' We stand among the mourners who are frozen by their grief. As to 'the starvelings under earth', if those aren't God-touched words, then I know none that are.

As an entity, that translation . . . If Fitzgerald had sone nothing else with his life, he would have been born for good reason.

I promise not to take permanent residency in the biographical, but who would miss such a dual opportunity as this? Fitzgerald and Catullus, taken in either direction, make a tantalizing ride.

There are two of them. This may not be the briefest journey.

Gaius Valerius Catullus was a 1st century (but not centurian) Roman poet who lived from 84 to 54 BCE -- thirty whopping years. (Most of us, in this era, assume we'll be granted more, and will do less.) It is widely believed that the scene of his entry into this world was set in fair Verona. He was born into an equestrian (among the upper classes) family and lived most of his life in Rome.

Robert Fitzgerald was a 20th century American who lived from 1910 to 1985. He grew up in Springfield and (in fellowship with others in this blog) went to Harvard. While he was there, his work saw print in Poetry Magazine. Before WWII, he worked for the late New York Herald Tribune and Time Magazine. During the war, he served in Guam and at Pearl Harbor. After the war, he taught at Sarah Lawrence and Princeton and was the poetry editor of The New Republic.

Neither man spent much time far from a passable center of his current microcosmic universe. Both knew a thing or ten about loss, which links them with every member of the species, regardless of era, shape or land.

Catullus' time was also that of Cicero, who lived from 106 to 43 BC, when somebody else decided that he'd lived long enough. (Cicero watched the assassination of Julius Caesar, made speeches calling for Octavian to overthrow Antony, and thus manoeuvred himself onto a list of people to be killed. Life amongst the mighty isn't always either safe or lengthy, and is even more seldom both. Down time's Roman roadway, Cicero's son Marcus, then a consul, announced Antony's suicide to the senate. There are many ways to imagine that speech.)

One of my ancestors saw a then modern-dress version of Julius Caesar, with Orson Welles playing the lead. The Cicero-Caesar-Antony-Marcus story would transpose neatly to modern dress and stage or screen. The casting might horrify, but the story would shift eras without scratching a flea.

Many of Cicero and Catallus' contemporaries liked the latter's poems; the former questioned their morality. His work can be sexually explicit and he explores homosexuality, which would have been enough to see his books burnt and him beaten in eras later than his own -- but need poems be moral? Do poems have to deal only with beauty? Should they reflect -- or pretend to reflect, or attempt to reflect -- cleanly, without distortion? Of what use is a bound medium? And who's to be the determiner of morality in verse? It stirs the anti-McCarthy globules in my blood, and they are legion.

Catullus' affair with 'Lesbia' (so named in honour of Sappho -- and you have to give some due to a man who cloaks his mistress in the word-robe of a lesbian), a woman a decade older than he, birthed a number of poems. Sex and romance aside, Catullus also wrote hymns, tirades (properly called 'invectives', but he might forgive me for being other than proper) and condolences, and was not above sniping at ex-lovers and the ex-lovers of ex-lovers. He had, at the least, an enviable range.

Fitgerald did, as well, and not in writing alone. He edited, taught, translated and wrote. That's an enviable CV. He didn't haul around that, 'I'm not a waiter. I'm an actor,' luggage. He did his jobs and he did them well. Full dedication on all fronts. That's admirable.

Faith (in a nonreligious sense) is another parallel. Catullus catted about. Fitzgerald was married three times. A literally literary death-side note: Fitzgerald was Flannery O'Connor's literary executor. Fitzgerald's third wife, Sally Fitzgerald, compiled Flannery O'Connor's letters and essays. Note, please, the congruency.

Catullus' work influenced that of Ovid, Homer and Virgil. The admirers of Ovid & Co. have been relatively constant, maintaining their passion throughout the years. Those of Catullus (here's faithlessness again) let him fade away. His was rediscovered in the late Middle Ages. He also influenced Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations of his work are -- for good reason -- highly valued. Here, Catullus has company. Among the ancients in the Fitzgerald canon are Sophocles and Euripides. Moving to the moderns, he edited collections of James Agee's work. If those Fitzgerald edited and translated could sit around a pub table and talk . . . I'd pour the beer if it meant being able to eavesdrop on the conversations.

Even if you bed down with Cicero, morally speaking, Catullus is due some recognition for influence in terms of time span alone: Virgil, Homer, Ovid, writers in the Middle Ages, writers in the 20th century -- That's a good run, even if the house was sometimes not sold out.

Fitzgerald died in Connecticut at the age of 74. Catullus' ending is not known. Some of his poems refer to events that took place in 55 BCE, so he was around then. No poems of his can be found from later than 54 BCE, so it is presumed that he died that year. If he lived and died thus now, he might be buried in a paupers' field. He who writes and fades away . . .

So much for these menfolk. For my part, I am a 21st century woman, uncharted, often lost, usually attempting to use words as a compass (and knowing that to be as useful as storing a magnet in her hard drive).

For the moment, at least, I'm still ticking. The two other vessels lie, emptied of their poetry. Or, as my friend Walter says, 'They've joined the majority.' So, in our courses, must we all. It would be nice to leave a body of work, instead of only a body, behind.

The Only One Who Could Ever Reach Me . . .

death(having lost)put on his universe

and yawned:it looks like rain

(they've played for timelessness

with chips of when)

that's yours;i guess

you'll have to loan me pain

to take the hearse,

see you again.

Love(having found)wound up such pretty toys

as themselves could not know:

the earth tinily whirls;

while daisies grow

(and boys and girls

have whispered thus and so)

and girls with boys

to bed will go,

§

Before I come over all biographical, let me urge you (if you have not done so already) to read Cummings aloud, whenever you find him, at least three times. It takes trial and openness to find the rhythm of you and him.

'Before' is over. Edward Estlin Cummings completes my current triad of preachers' progeny. This is privately peculiar, as my sweetest memory of Cummings' words involves having them read to me, not in a lecture hall or seminar and not by the son of a preacher man or woman. Ansel Adams' photographs are strong because of contrast. They do not teach me to shy away from the stuff. With that forewarning, onward.

Cummings was born on the 14th of October, 1894. His father (also an Edward, but not an Estlin) was a professor who became a (conservative in outlook; when considering the son, this aspect of the father must not be overlooked) clergyman. He taught sociology and political science at Harvard. At the turn of the 20th century, he became an ordained Unitarian minister. If Cummings' father was verbally fluent, then his mother had words in her blood, as well, being related to writers. (This doesn't always work. Trust me.)

Cummings' parents called their son Estlin, to distinguish him from his father. It's difficult to imagine 'Junior' being bellowed in that household.

Carrying on the theme of prodigies, Cummings was drawing by the age of four. Taking a shortcut to later in his life, there not being much to say about most literary four-year-olds, E. E. Cummings went to Harvard (where he studied classics -- think Greek -- and joined a circle of artists -- think in many media) and then followed what might appear a traditional writerly migratory path first to New York City and then to France.

The path was less (by artistic standards) ordinary than it might seem. While Cummings and his father disagreed on many points, both were against the war. Cummings lasted in New York only a few months. He worked writing business letters. Imagine the punctuation he suppressed. Eager to avoid conscription, Cummings joined Harjes-Norton American Ambulance Corps. That's what took him to France.

Consider the shocks to his imaginative system: that place, that time, that age and those propensities. It is no wonder that his framing of words seems, to many of us, askew, even as it is potent and therefore appealing. Chiaroscuro again: Horror can spawn strong beauty. Consider the works of, say, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, both the artistic sons of war.

(Backing up a bit: The gnarliness of bureaucracy -- forgive me -- militated to Cummings' advantage in that he had a month of freedom, before wiring himself to the ambulance, in which to fall in love with Paris. All was not ill and darkness.)

When a friend of his came under suspicion for writing letters the censors didn't like, Cummings stood by his friend, and both of them landed in prison in La Ferté Macé. Any adolescent can resonate to this matter of getting in trouble with a friend. This unity belongs to many humans. It doesn't always land you in an interrogation room in jail, but the front room of the parental units can be a scary place.

Cummings' father -- note here the family skill with words (Sometimes, the breeding is true.) -- wrote to President Wilson. Cummings was freed. He was then conscripted. Fortune favoured that son, in that the war ended a few months later.

Cummings was married more than once, but his relationship with Greenwich Village was solid. He moved to the Village in 1923 and there he stayed. After his first marriage (to Elaine Orr, ex-wife of Cummings' friend Scholfield Thayer) ended, he held himself together with prayer, work and women. See Tulips and Chimneys, 1923. That marriage produced Cummings' a daughter, Nancy, Cummings' only child. For those who've never visited the Village, it may be comforting to know that passages are unchanged. You can still walk there and sense Cummings' footsteps drift-pacing yours.

Greenwich Village makes, to me, simple sense as a choice for Cummings' base. Many religions -- although not the one Cummings' father preached -- celebrate spirit and flesh, and that aesthetic could be supported in that place. The dual delight is plain in these of Cummings' words:

when God lets my body be

From each eye shall sprout a tree
fruit that dangles therefrom

the purpled world will dance upon
Between my lips which did sing

a rose shall beget the spring
that maidens whom passion wastes

will lay between their little breasts
My strong fingers beneath the snow

Into strenuous birds shall go
my love walking in the grass

Their wings will touch with her face
and all the while shall my heart be

With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea

How many layers are in that poem? Start to peel it and you find strata within strata. What looked like a short jaunt turns into a major excursion.

On the subject of excursions, Cummings' second marriage was to a serious party girl (which term, of course, means anything but serious), Anne Barton. It was her second marriage, as well, and as ill-fated as both of their firsts.

Cummings was prolific and published, loved to travel, which is a comfort to peripatetic me. He was (like many artists) given to being spectator as much as (if not more than) participant, was as sombre as he was sensuist, and could plait words like a nimble-fingered teenaged girl at a slumber party braiding hair.

One of his best-selling books bore the title of . It had no title. Periodically, I try to imagine ordering that from a bookstore. How would you ask for it? 'You know. Cummings' book with no name.' That would convey nothing to a 'look I just have a job here because my parents say I have to work' bookstore clerk and little to even the above average book-loving shop employee.

Fortune and timing altered Cummings' life again when his father was forced to retire (due to the merging of different quarters of the church). That retirement reunited -- and perhaps united -- father and son. There was a family trip to Europe. There were chances to reconcile differences. The two Edwards, met (finally) as adults, and were given and took a chance to know each other in new ways.

Cummings the Elder died in 1926, in a car accident, putting ends to many stories. Cummings the Younger received recognition for his poetry, but not for his other works.

It's almost a pity that Cummings' work is ineffably untranslatable. He created something that can be only so. In that, there is a kind of perfection. How could you translate 'death(having lost)' into hiragana, katakana and kanji? Into sign language, that most intimate of hands, maybe, but into other words and other symbols, no.

In E. E. Cummings: the Magic Maker, the late Charles Norman writes, 'the mere mention of his name can bring entire poems to mind . . . an artist lives by his works of art.'

Peering at his life through that light, Cummings cannot be seen as truly dead. How dead could such a celebrant of life be, how dead one who so sang the body? I hear these words in the warm voice of a loving, living man (not in a lecture hall). They are words that lover will offer to lover, in different timbres and chambers, again and again:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
- firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . And eyes big love-crumbs.

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

Separation

Separation
by W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

§

When I first read this poem, I was in Columbia University, The Norton Anthology of Poetry in front of me, ignoring my professor and skimming the book. (Seduction comes in paperback.) I had been reading Byron and found myself faced with a modern poet who, in nineteen words and three lines had said everything there was to say about death, separation, your best friend moving away and every other form of loss.

'Why,' I thought (and probably said), 'do I bother?'

Years passed before I found the beginning of an answer to that why.

Merwin now lives in Hawaii. Like Denise Levertov, he was the son of a religious man (using 'religious' in the professional sense). Merwin's father was a Presbyterian minister. In another near-parallel, Merwin began writing hymns when he was five years old. As a young man (as against young boy), he went to Europe, travelled and discovered a love for languages that would enable him to serve as a translator of poems from other tongues: surely, an ultimate form of bridge-building, poet to reader, writer between words to seeker between words.

He's won too many awards to mention, and he's done it while alive, which is unto itself noteworthy.

I travel fairly often and cycle through welcomes and farewells more often than through weeks. My history with death is an intimate one (not always by my choice, although it could be argued that volunteering with the dying was a purposeful seeking-out and finding). I've copied 'Separation' into uncounted notes and cards and anticipate, without foreseeing specifics, doing so again. His words have woven themselves through my story, threading into other lives.

Today, as I ready myself to board a flight, as I approach a departure (mine) and farewell (to one I leave behind, albeit in in terms only of location), 'Separation' speaks me: Your absence has gone through me . . .

Midnight After Noon

Writing in the Dark
by Denise Levertov

It's not difficult.
Anyway, it's necessary.

Wait till morning, and you'll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.

Fumble for the light, and you'll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.

You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don't always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There's nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.

Never mind about crossing your t's, dotting your i's--
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.

Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,

or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:

words that may have the power
to make the sun ruse again.

§

That poem is reason enough -- in every possible permutation of the verb -- to circle thoughts.

As one who gets dragged out of bed to write a thought before it crosses from 'elusive' to 'lost', as one who knows that she should write it down because the notion (they're not called 'passing' for nothing) will be forgotten, and as one who absents herself within the lands of others' words . . . Maybe I simply need a midnight space. It's always midnight somewhere. It's half-past one in the heartland, as I type this, which doesn't mean it isn't midnight somewhere inside me. Nighttimes aren't measured only in cycles of outer light.

Daily word-nappings, daily musings upon (vampire and other; I understand some people have muses that are gentle), daily detours . . . And there's naught to say that any other eye must rest upon the words I type.

Levertov was born an Essex girl on the 24th of October in 1923. She knew herself to be a writer at an early age: five. The child of an Anglican priest, she was home-schooled. When she was twelve, she sent off some of her poetry -- to T. S. Eliot, who was wisely encouraging. During World War II, she served as a nurse, which must have affected her on levels seen and unseen. After the war, she married an American writer, Mitchell Goodman (guaranteeing herself a partner who'd understand that the primary relationship was with words and that all other forms of intimacy were tertiary with flashes of higher standing . . . although all breeds of intimacy and awareness interweave). In the course of her life, Levertov bred, loved, taught, edited, and eventually returned to poetry. On the 20th of December, 1997, she died of complications due to lymphoma. Two years later, her final book, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, came into print.

Writing at midnight presents problems. Turn on the light and your brain jolts from dreams or half-slumber to full waking, and shy ideas may bolt. That's an 'if you're alone' problem. If you're sharing space (a bed, a room, an open chamber, a tent . . .) then it's unlikely that your late night lamplight will be welcome by a person or people blissfully insensible.

It's a delicate line. The words must be captured (which they do not always like). They must not be scared away. The darkness in which they move should not be deranged or disarranged. How do you tempt shy adverbs to your palm when you are half in dreams?

Levertov does not address what is for me a key issue: not writing in darkness, but reading in daylight what I scrawled the night before.

That's always the problem, isn't it? The pain comes in the morning that trails behind the preceding night.