National Poetry Day

“All sad peopled like poetry” Vanessa Ives – Penny Dreadful. I could not have put it better, and I too love poetry, especially gothic poetry, William Blake being my favourite of all. But there are a plethora of gothic poets that I admire, Tennyson, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Byron to name a few. So for this year’s National Poetry Day, I give you William Wordsworth. Although I had read this poem before, it really struck a chord when recited by “John Clair” at the funeral of “Venessa Ives” in Penny Dreadful’s final episode. Although he only recites two stanzas, it is perfectly formed and adds gravitas to the scene. But the poem needs to be enjoyed in full. I have therefore posted the scene from PD and the poem in full. I hope you enjoy it.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learn{e}d art
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his “humorous stage”
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul’s immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

A Poem From My Past…

I wrote this many years ago about my experience of being an unwanted child.  Not by my mother, but by my father.  Needless to say, I have not seen him for well over half my life.

My Dad & I

“I never wanted you, I didn’t want boys”
The words spoken by a grown man to his eight-year-old son.
A callous off the cuff remark?
No, it was a cruel and calculated remark.
His son could see in his eyes that he meant it.
Head down feeling ashamed of being a boy.

“I never wanted you, I didn’t want boys”
Years of cruelty followed.
A backhander here, a punch there.
The boy’s sister was the father’s favourite.
Sweets for her, but nothing for him.
Don’t tell your mother or you’ll get a slap.

“I never wanted you, I didn’t want boys”
The remark embeds itself in his head.
He watches other Dads love their son.
Fatherly love was something he never knew.
Fatherly love was absent, missing, gone.
Fatherly love was wanted, envied, but always denied.

“I never wanted you, I didn’t want boys”
Get to your room, get out of my sight.
His room became his sanctuary from cruel words.
He worked hard at school and passed all exams.
A report card came home at the end of each term.
No praise did his father give him, that was for the girls.

“I never wanted you, I didn’t want boys”
It was time to go as the divorce papers arrived.
Many years later, he met him again.
He told him this is my son, but it wasn’t this child.
A half-brother he never knew he had.
Realisation dawned and his head dropped again.

“I never wanted you, I didn’t want boys”
A lie and a truth in the same sentence.
A letter years later confirming rejection.
A hate builds up, but he realises it’s wasted.
His father missed out on so much, he knew.
I know how this ends, as I am that son.

“I never wanted you, I didn’t want boys”
I see him in the street, he knows not who I am.
The old man looks back but no recollection.
I smile to myself, I am the better man.
My want for my father has been and gone.
I’m strong through loss, I have coped with the pain.

‘I never wanted you, I didn’t want boys”
The time will come when you’re deep in the ground.
I may come around and speak to you then.
Tell you of cruelty made to your first son.
You’ll not answer back, and I will not hide.
I don’t want you, Dad, though I needed you before.

National Poetry Day…

So, with that I give you two fun poems…

Electric Chair
The Volts,
The Jolts,
The End.

Dog Love
I saw you in the park,
I wanted to be your friend,
So I tunnelled my nose,
Up your non-barking end.

I Am! by John Clare

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

 

I love poetry, and always have done, especially from the Romantic Era, including the writings of Samual Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Blake and many many others, but this has to be my favourite from John Clare.

Poetry

So, I have my poetry prompt book by Jo Bell, and I now have “The Very Best Of 52” too in order to assist me in getting to grips with writing poetry too.  I enjoy poetry, but some of it I really struggle to get to grips with.

When I was doing a degree in English Language and Literature we covered poetry by Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes to name a few.  One that both Plath and Hughes wrote was about one of their children, which came from each others perspective. Both really good pieces, but, I have to say, it took me many readings of them to get a grip of them. Some in the class got them immediatly, but I did struggle.  I got it in the end, but I learned that sometimes, that is the way of poetry. I also learned a valuable lesson in reading it properly, as I had in the past read each line and at the end of the lines paused rather than follow the punctuation.

This week the prompt is on travel, however, so far I am stumped. I travel all the time, but putting pen to paper, or in this case, fingers to keyboard I sit and wait for it to flow, and wait, and wait, and yes, I wait some more. Nothing comes forth.

I mentally wrote on in bed at 5am about winter, but as for travel, the timble weeds blow through and nothing else.  I have till tomorrow night to complete this weeks exercise, so fingers crossed, and off to the poetry archive and poetry foundation to get the juices flowing.

I do have a favorite poem, that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” detailed below from the Poetry Foundation website.

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Kubla Khan

BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.