Without the state

Shakespeare always seems to find a word for it

In Shakespeare's Henry V, the King wanders the camp talking incognito to various of his soldiers about the day to come. One of them, Michael Williams has this to say:

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection.

 

Retrospective - double portrait - from February 2005

 

Based on a detail from a snatched photo in a cafe. For a time I had an obsession with pictures like this, two heads rarely looking directly at each other. Some times they were the same person, sometimes, as in this one, a transient arrangement of shapes.

I linked some of them to this poem by Derek Walcott

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Guerilla Poetry

A doctors' surgery was delighted with a poem by Francis Burroughs (little known) that urged the waiting-room to think not of the body's malfunctions but of the miracle that it works at all. Our valiant independent bookshop filled two ­windows with our local laureate ­Gawain Douglas. The dogfood shop was besieged for copies of the New Zealand laureate Elizabeth Smither's poem "On the Euthanasia of a Pet Dog". Our wonderful fruit shop ­("Everything local") put up Keats's "Ode to Autumn", and we allowed the manageress of Wy­man's Electrical to keep Yeats's "When you are old and grey and full of sleep" because she had loved it all her life. The children who go to the ice-lolly shop in the afternoons liked Spike Milligan's "Things that go 'bump' in the night" so much that we let them keep it till Christmas. The art gallery owner fearlessly chose Anon's "Christ, if my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again!", which she hung on the outside wall and it stopped the ­traffic twice on Breezy Corner. A young man – all in black gear –came down Paradise Row, stopped outside the house with a sonnet by ­(local lad) Christopher ­Marlowe, ­"Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?", on the door and ­recited it aloud all through.

via www.guardian.co.uk

15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will | The A.V. Club

Number 7.

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."

Though this quote comes from the World War II-centered Mother Night (published in 1961), its wisdom and ugly truth still ring. Vonnegut (who often said "The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected") was righteously skeptical about war, having famously survived the only one worth fighting in his lifetime. And it's never been more true: Left or right, Christian or Muslim, those convinced they're doing violence in service of a higher power and against an irretrievably inhuman enemy are the most dangerous creatures of all.

[via "Our Word is our Weapon"]

Anger

I have been infected ‑
infected by a dark and bitter mood.
I don't know where it came from
but it's here.

Black, bitter bile is rising,
rising on the flood.
It's overwhelming my defences,
it's destroying my foundations,
it's exposing unseen urges
that were hidden in my heart.

Then finally I crumble
into incoherent rages
and I hurl abuse at strangers
as they pass.

A situation I often feel in after reading blogs these days

normblog: poetry poll

Norm is still drumming up business for his poetry poll. Come on people - share your favourites

Poetry Poll

Norm is having one of his regular polls, this time looking for your three favourite English language poets (not 'the best', thank goodness) but even so I'm not sure I have three favourites in the sense that I go to their work rather than to particular volumes or poems (with the possible exception of Hardy) but nevertheless:

Thomas Hardy

and now it gets difficult to choose from:

Ted Hughes (for Birthday Letters)
Robert Frost
Ogden Nash
Rudyard Kipling (vastly underrated)
John Betjeman
Christopher Logue
e e cummings
John Milton
Derek Walcot
D H Lawrence

and of course Bob Dylan.

I suppose this is a strange mix.

I have only read Birthday Letters once - I did read it, from cover to cover soon after it was published and it made a huge impression on me, but it was so painful that I haven't been able to read it again.

I used to like much of Marianne Moore's work, but the the poem in BIrthday Letters about her and Sylvia Plath so destroyed my mental picture of her that I haven't read anything by her since.

Frost I have liked since O level - Apple picking, Mending wall, The road not taken etc - all read at 16 but unusually I wasn't put off.

I read Milton then too - Paradise Lost - and still dip into it at regular intervals. I am no more likely to finish than I was at 16, but I love the rolling, sonorous feel of it.

Nash is of course not a major poet but wonderful fun. cummings is I think a major writer, but his greatness is masked for many by the form he chooses.

My favourite poetry book (after Hardy's collected poems) is a collection called Conductors of Chaos, compiled by Ian Sinclair and if I was forced to choose in Desert Island Dics fashion it would probably be that rather than any particular writer. Having said that Logue's War Music series would be a close second.

My final three therefore:

Thomas Hardy
e e cummings
Robert Frost

Norm also asked for links to a favourite poem, so here is "The Revisitation" from Hardy

Your Dad Did What?

Another vignette. I found it via here which took me to this.

No extracts - just read it all.

This seems apposite...

Pay earnest need to that which others say
And seek to enter thou the speaker's mind;
If wrong in thought or deed thyself shalt find
Then gladly change the error of thy way.
Seek only Truth, which shall not bring defeat;
Hurt lies with ignorance and self-deceit.

I've always liked the passage from Marcus Aurelius which is rendered into verse above and after my two earlier posts from the Meditations, I was going to post it anyway. However the events of the past few days make it particularly apposite.

The version above is from a small book of such renderings by John Lyth, published in 1942 as a PEN book, by George Allen and Unwin. It has a preface by Professor Gilbert Murray, from which I presume, Dr Lyth was not a nonentity, but I can find nothing about him, other than a version of the same book for sale on Canadian eBay. Any information would be gratefully received.

The prose version is from Book Eight verse 16 and in my version reads as follows (the link above is to an older translation):

To change your mind and defer to correction is not to sacrifice your independence; for such an act is your own, in pursuance of your own impulse, your own judgement, and your own thinking.

(trans. Maxwell Staniforth)