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The Ferry

I kneel and bow and pray you come with me,
And we will dance beneath these scattered lights,
Concealed for days by dawn’s diviner rites,
Until each night unseals our wait and see.
Dance with me as I ask on bended knee:
Awash in ocean’s orchestrated nights,
Afloat in inky blackness that indicts
Another reason, no, another plea.
You must remember, we are parasites
Until we pray or prey, receiving all
We take for given, or mistaken call
Our contributions to these passing sights.
Some thing eternal feeds us, and we thrive,
Rejoicing through this passage none survive.

PGE 6-27-2008

Coleridge’s problems did not only come from his laudanum addiction. Look at one of the poems we most obviously identify with the ill-understood effects of withdrawal, and see if you cannot see here in the beginning the reason Coleridge woke from sleep with terrors–or, rather, as those pangs were probably drug-related, why his reaction was a poem which ended with the plaintive “But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? / To be beloved is all I need, / And whom I love, I love indeed.”

His problem was hard enough; his efforts to compose himself, however, were seriously defective:

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees ;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication ;
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Pains of Sleep“)

“My spirit I to Love compose.” The “I” that is mine, the “spirit I” and not the gross one, the one that may be “compose[d]” by the efforts of the Imagination, “composed” by such efforts “to Love” as the concord of Will (which directs the Imagination) and Reason (which Coleridge cannot but identify with the Spirit speaking within “My spirit”) called Faith (conducing always to Love wholly thus defined), a concord identical with the indifference among “in me” and “round me” and “every where” that the “Eternal Strength and Wisdom” perdure in being. . . .

Yet do we not decompose when we see such action to “compose”? Read the rest of this entry »

Getting the Drift

Today I find my world in banking snow,
Accounting for this winter’s days, the cold
Within my heart, and costs still left untold
Until I settle down with one I owe.
In silent drifts I heap up all I know,
Accumulating here like Fafnir’s gold,
Sole hoard of things I’ve bought that never sold,
Investment in this winter’s window show.
In unrelenting ardor I confess
My love for silver moonlight and the days
Twice brightened, cloud and snowbank, and the haze
That spreads through world and mind at my address
To one who hears these secrets with a smile:
Who longs for spring, yet stays to talk a while.

PGE 2-6-2008

 …you’d have to think, wouldn’t you?

What’s in your mind, my dove, my coney;
Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life;
Is it making of love or counting of money,
Or raid on the jewels, the plans of a thief?
(W. H. Auden, November 1930)

(reading the rest of the poem would render the question academic.)
(of course, if you read the rest of the poem, you probably are. academic.)

. . . that suffering for Truths sake
Is fortitude to highest victorie,
And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life;
Taught this by his example whom I now
Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest.

To whom thus also th’ Angel last repli’d:
This having learnt, thou hast attained the summe
Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the Starrs
Thou knewst by name, and all th’ ethereal Powers,
All secrets of the deep, all Natures works,
Or works of God in Heav’n, Aire, Earth, or Sea,
And all the riches of this World enjoydst,
And all the rule, one Empire; onely add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,
Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,
By name to come call’d Charitie, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier farr.
Let us descend now therefore from this top
Of Speculation;
(Milton, PL 12)

Ars Techne

Some scanty image of a former day
Flits by my eyes in tandem with a thought,
And here you are, and I bewail my lot,
Who can recall you only in this play.
Thin words and memories put on display
Substantial wishes thought of and forgot,
Remembered, misremembered, like a plot
Awash in who we are and what we say.
Some word you left me saying still repeats:
As though a record still could sound each note,
Cascading harmonies of grace and cheats
Stride giddily down corridors of rote,
Producing this: some green growth reaching day,
Plucked up to cheer some traveller on the way.

PGE 2-1-2008

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
(John Donne, “Death be not proud“)

memento mori
(compare to the song referenced in the post title)