ATHENIAE OXONIENSES

Briefly back at my old Alma Mater, and unendingly surprised at my old College's having gone co-ed . .  .

There was a young lady from Exeter,
Who made all the young men crane their nexeter;
And some who were brave
Would take out and wave
The distinguishing marks of their sexeter.

CYMRU

In celebration of at last, after all those years, setting foot on Welsh soil (only 24 hours, but what a day), I thought I would put up a Welsh poem -- which, being Welsh, is a song. It is known by heart by two sets of people, Welshmen and rugby fans, but unknown to the rest of the world. Being Welsh, it is not just a song but a hymn; but oddly enough it has also become a rugby-fan song, sung by crowds of several thousand, and one website describes it as "Wales' second National Anthem". It was written by Daniel James, a steel puddler who assumed the bardic name of Gwyrosydd, and its music was by John Hughes, a miner who became an organist and composer, and who also wrote the famous "Cwm Rhondda".

Daniel James

John Hughes

         

CALON LÂN

Nid wy’n gofyn bywyd moethus,
Aur y byd na’i berlau mân:
Gofyn wyf am galon hapus,
Calon onest, calon lân.

Calon lân yn llawn daioni,
Tecach yw na’r lili dlos:
Dim ond calon lân all ganu –
Canu’r dydd a chanu’r nos.

Pe dymunwn olud bydol,
Chwim adenydd iddo sydd;
Golud calon lân, rinweddol,
Yn dwyn bythol elw fydd.

Hwyr a bore fy nymuniad
Esgyn ar adenydd cân
Ar i Dduw, er mwyn fy Ngheidwad,
Roddi i mi galon lân.

Translation:

I don’t ask for a luxurious life,
the world’s gold or its fine pearls:
I ask for a happy heart,
an honest heart, a pure heart.

A pure heart is full of goodness,
More lovely than the pretty lily:
Only a pure heart can sing -
Sing day and night.

If I wished worldly wealth,
He has a swift seed;
The riches of a virtuous, pure heart,
Will be a perpetual profit.

Late and early, my wish
Rises on the wing of song,
For God, for the sake of my Saviour,
To give me a pure heart.

And the most purely beautiful rendering of it is here, by the Welsh harpist and singer Siân James.

(If you listen to her while looking at the text, you can see some of the oddities (for us) of Welsh pronunciation: "u" is pronounced as "ee", "y" as short "eh" near the beginning of a word and as "ee" near the end, and the initial "c" can be a hard "c", a Scottish "ch" or a voiced "g" depending on what comes before it.) 

QUESTIONS PRESENT THEMSELVES

POETRY: SOBER AND SOBERING

It is no gift I tender,

  A loan is all I can;

But do not scorn the lender;

  Man gets no more from man.

Oh, mortal man may borrow

  What mortal man can lend;

And 'twill not end to-morrow,

  Though sure enough 'twill end.

If death and time are stronger,

  A love may yet be strong;

The world will last for longer,

  But this will last for long.

A.E. Housman

from 'Additional Poems'

Housman, a fine Oxford classicist, was always surprised when people saw his lyrics as somehow inspired by ancient Rome. He could never persuade them that his real influence was German Romanticism, notably Heinrich Heine.

HISTORICALLY . . . .

Another dire adventure of Seamy Otticks, in which he barely escapes with his life. 

POETRY UNFORGOTTEN, UNFORGETTABLE

One of my favourite modern poets has long been W.S. Merwin; and even the fact that in 2010 he was appointed US Poet Laureate couldn't change that. Here is a poem he published in the New Yorker last summer, which I thought moving, and worth passing on.

LEAR’S WIFE

If he had ever asked me

I could have told him

If he had listened to me

it would have been

another story

I knew them before

they were born

with Goneril at my breast

I looked at the world

and saw blood in darkness

and tried to wake

with Regan at my breast

I looked at the world

and covered my mouth

with Cordelia in my arms

at my breast

I wanted to call out to her

in love and helplessness

and I wept

as for him

he had forgotten me

even before they did

only Cordelia

did not forget

anything

but when asked she said

nothing

W.S. Merwin

New Yorker

June 25, 2012

FORGOTTEN POETRY: MUNICIPAL

There was a young lady of Wantage
Of whom the town clerk took advantage.
Said the borough surveyor,
'Indeed you must pay her:
You've totally altered her frontage.'

(this one works best in a North Midland accent)

AH SO . . . . . .

  

There was a young man from Japan,

Who wrote verses that just wouldn't scan;

When asked why he did it,

He said, 'I don't know, I just like togetasmanysyllablesintothelastlineasIpossiblycan.'

FORGOTTEN POETRY: A NEW HOME FOR DRAGONS

On my old LJ blog, I used to reproduce poetry from my old and tattered Dragon Book of Verse, which has on the school label inside the cover my name, my form (5M), and the date: 15/1/1952. These Dragons now have a new home, and from time to time I will let one out to rustle its scales here on Blogger. The first one is by a poet not many now remember: James Elroy Flecker, who died even younger than Sidney, at the age of 30 in 1915. I put up his haunting "The Old Ships" before; this time, also from the Dragon Book, "The Dying Patriot", with Gillian Alington's engraving of Oxford that accompanies it in the Dragon Book.

Day breaks on England down the Kentish Hills,

Singing in the silence of the meadow-footing rills,

Day of my dreams, O day!

   I saw them march from Dover, long ago,

   With a silver cross before them, singing low,

Monks of Rome from their home where the blue seas break in foam,

   Augustine with his feet of snow.

Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town,

-- Beauty she was statue cold -- there's blood upon her gown:

Noon of my dreams, O noon!

   Proud and godly kings had built her, long ago,

   With her towers and tombs and statues all arow,

With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there,

   And the streets where the great men go.

Evening on the olden, the golden sea of Wales,

When the first star shivers and the last wave pales:

O evening dreams!

   There's a house that Britons walked in, long ago,

   Where now the springs of ocean fall and flow,
And the dead robed in red and sea-lilies overhead
   Sway when the long winds blow.

Sleep not, my country: though night is here, afar
Your children of the morning are clamorous for war:
Fire in the night, O dreams!
   Though she send you as she sent you, long ago,
   South to desert, east to ocean, west to snow,
West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go
   Where the fleet of stars is anchored and the young Star-captains glow.

TRIVIA FOR A COLD MONDAY

More adventures of Seamy Otticks, in honour of Edmund Spenser.

FIDDLING?

As my 3 1/2 readers can tell, I'm still fiddling with Blogger's aesthetics, trying to get a page design that will be as pleasant as my old LJ one was. It's not easy: Blogger is more easily customized, but the basic designs are cruder and visually noisier. Bear with me. 

PURE ENJOYMENT

A month or two ago, I ordered via Amazon three Alec Guinness films I hadn't seen: The Card, The Captain's Paradise, and Father Brown (known as The Detective in the USA). That last I had in fact seen, but so many years ago that I remembered virtually nothing. Last night I had a chance to see it again, and found it quite splendid, entirely worthy of the same director's Kind Hearts and Coronets. Not only because of Guinness's performance, but also because of a young and very talented Peter Finch and of course my beloved Joan "The Voice" Greenwood, for once rather subfusc and un-outrageous. I've never seen the earlier 1930s version, but I'm sure that had G.K.Chesterton lived to see this one he would have been delighted. I was also pleased to find on the Web a picture of the original of the Father Brown character, Fr John O'Connor of Bradford. Fr O'Connor not only knew at first hand the violence, squalor and crime of the industrial slums he served in; he also, when the staff of a posh church rebuked a crippled down-and-out for soiling its marble floors, remarked that the man was the only lovely thing in an unlovely church, and went and served him Communion in his hovel. O'Connor's face, I was pleased to see, was well served by the Protean Guinness -- one can see the relation.

G.K. Chesterton

Fr John O'Connor

FORGOTTEN POETRY: A BELLOC BEAST

The other side of Belloc is seen in his Cautionary Verses. The first book was The Bad Child's Book of Beasts. This is from its successor, More Beasts for Worse Children, illustrated by Belloc's friend Basil Temple Blackwood.

The Python

A Python I should not advise,-

It needs a Doctor for its eyes,

And has the Measles yearly.

However, if you feel inclined

To get one (to improve your mind,

And not from fashion merely),

Allow no music near its cage;

And when it flies into a rage

Chastise it, most severely.

I had an aunt in Yucatan

Who bought a Python from a man

And kept it for a pet.

She died, because she never knew

These simple little rules and few;--

The Snake is living yet.

STRUCTURAL LEVITY (AGAIN)

FORGOTTEN POETRY: A YOUNG TRAVELLER IN 1908

In 1908, Hilaire Belloc visited the Norbertine monastery at Storrington. He saw three paintings there, and wrote a poem for the monastery's Prior (you can see the original manuscript on the Storrington website here).

I'll come back to Belloc soon, as he was also the author of the delicious Cautionary Tales for Children, which literate kids still enjoy for their surrealist brutality.
Meanwhile, here is his Storrington poem, with the pictures that inspired it.

Courtesy

Of Courtesy, it is much less

Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,

Yet in my Walks it seems to me

That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.

On Monks I did in Storrington fall,

They took me straight into their Hall;

I saw three pictures on a wall,

And Courtesy was in them all.

The first the Annunciation;

the second the Visitation;

The third the Consolation,

Of God that was our Lady's Son.

The first was of St Gabriel;

On Wings a-flame from Heaven he fell;

And as he went upon one knee

He shone with Heavenly Courtesy.

Our Lady out of Nazareth rode --

It was Her month of heavy load;

Yet was her face both great and kind,

For Courtesy was in her mind.

The third it was our little Lord, 

Whom all the Kings in arms adored;

He was so small you could not see

His large intent of Courtesy.

Our Lord, that was Our Lady's Son,

Go bless you, People, one by one;

My Rhyme is written, my work is done.



Here are the three pictures Belloc saw:

Filippo Lippi, The Annunciation

Mariotto Albertinelli, The Visitation

Sandro Botticelli, The Mystical Nativity

BACK TO LEVITY

Here is the second in the "Adventures of Seamy Otticks" series.

SQUEEZED BETWEEN TALIBAN AND NIHILISTS

Seeing General Disarray's thoughtful reply to several of my LJ posts, including one from July of last year, it occurred to me that anyone stumbling upon this conversation may be wondering what the hell it is about. So I'm taking the liberty of reprinting that earlier post, while fully aware that my thinking on the subject is frequently illogical and permanently unfinished.


'Hanging Horse', a work of art by Maurizio Cattelan - respectfully exhibited also at the Guggenheim, NYC. 


It occurs to me that many of those who want religion today – as opposed to those who live happily without it and would just as soon it went away -- not only want to be dispensed from thinking, but want strong constraints and rigid rules. This is of course a reaction to the perceived chaos, and the perceived immorality, of modern life. If they are wrong, we should be able to formulate, in reasonably simple terms, why we consider that they are wrong. 

1)    Modern life is no more chaotic than life in any past one cares to study (as opposed to the ‘past’ of a reasonably happy childhood, which is invariably seen selectively and idealized – quite rightly so). No other period of history produced events less chaotic and less depressing. Ponder the Great Depression; ponder World Wars 1 and 2; ponder the dark satanic mills with their child labour and their tuberculosis; ponder the imprisonment without trial of  the Ancien Régime and the trials without justice and guillotines of the New; ponder the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the expulsion of thousands of families, with their children taken away and forcibly re-educated in convents; ponder the St Bartholomew’s Massacre and the slaughter of the Indians in the Americas; and keep pondering as you go back. No; what I have called the ‘perceived chaos’ is in fact the chaos of perception: caused, not by an overwhelmingly terrifying situation (though some families may have that) but by the ceaseless presence of TV, Internet, radio and newspapers, and the ceaseless barrage of information about much of the planet that it brings. Much of this, if information, is information twisted, not just by op-ed (Glenn Beck or Rachel Maddow) but by the fundamental and undiscussed bias of news media, which is their appetite for drama and conflict, and their conscienceless stimulation of generalized anger. 

2)    Modern life is indeed in some ways more immoral. And here the culprit is not so much the news media as, perhaps, the arts.[1] In the latter, what began as a reaction and a protest against a certain kind of hypocritical Victorian bourgeoisie has by now, ca. 125 years later, triumphantly outlived said bourgeoisie but still dons what is now a specious mantle of courageous rebellion.[2] The real immorality, though, often has nothing to do with sex, and goes well beyond what fundamentalists protest against. The number of modern plays, films and novels (to say nothing of video games) in which fundamental values, not only of faith but of humanity, decency, kindness and worth are ridiculed, trodden underfoot, or ignored in favour of violence, cruelty, amusing worthlessness and plain evil – in some cases covered by an ostensibly noble moral purpose -- is depressingly great; and the visual arts have in large measure followed them. So yes: here the seekers after stricter rules are more understandable. They are also, to our understanding, wrong in that a) it almost certainly won’t work except in closed communities (from which many young adults will escape); and b) if it did work, it would necessarily go against other values that we also value, e.g. freedom of expression and democratic consultation and decision-making. It would, in other words, create a Taliban society – and how little that works in a modern context can be seen in Iran. Moreover, in such a society the very values of humanity, kindness, respect and consideration for the other would once again be trodden underfoot in an orgy of punishment.

Psychologically, this need for a religion of intellectual simplicity and moral constraint may also proceed from a need and desire to see others punished; but that edges into speculation. It does, though, have another and deeply negative consequence: the sustaining and encouraging of an aggressive (and equally simplistic) atheism and spiritual (as opposed to moral) nihilism on the other side.

What are the remedies against such tendencies? They may be twofold. For the intellectually sophisticated the first thing is not to give way to the temptation of confusing fundamentalism with faith, and to believe or proclaim that Muslim Jihadism or an obscurantist and condemnatory Christianity is what all ‘religion’ really is. The next step on this road is actually to study theology, with either an open mind or one ready to explore faith for oneself. It is not enough just to have questions. If Jews can study scripture and centuries of rabbinical wisdom, we can read the odd Church Father. Moreover, it involves regarding the fundamentalist with a positive eye upon his faith, not just his rules: for his faith may be stronger than ours.

Which brings me to the second remedy: working out a solid theology of one’s own, and not fleeing conversation with the fundamentalist but being ready to counter his arguments with equally strong ones, while showing respect for those aspects of his faith one can admire. A little spiritual séduction would do no harm.

As for the spiritual nihilist – who often calls himself, not without some self-satisfaction, an agnostic – with him there seems to be little possibility of conversation, since he doesn’t want it and sees no need for it. He regards the faith of another either as idiocy (in which case he is closer to the real atheists) or as a private hobby which he may personally think ridiculous but would not openly denounce or deride, out of good manners or out of fear of giving it unwarranted importance.

---

[1] I leave aside, here, the political or economic ‘immorality’ vigorously denounced by some protest movements: it is not except tangentially concerned with matters of religion.

[2] Just as the work of Lacan gave a whole new lease of life to Freudianism, so the cultural revolution of the Sixties gave a whole new lease of life to the ‘revolt against the bourgeoisie’.

---

David Czerny, Permanent Installation at FUTURA Gallery, Prague
Info: you climb a ladder and stick your head in the sculpture’s arse to see a video of two Czech politicians feeding each other slop to a soundtrack of ‘We are the Champions'.
Thanks to: http://villageofjoy.com/controversial-art-by-david-cerny/