pen and paper, rows and tapers
It was a few months ago that I ran across this one, discarded in some campus library booksale. It's a collection of poetry by a woman named Anne Ridler, but it was sometime this week that I actually got to thumb through and then actually read what was on the pages inside. I liked it, there were about eight poems that (in whole or merely parts) that stood out in my eye.

Sometimes it is the particular point(s) of the poem that will endear it to me, sometimes the general feeling it has surrounding it, other times something else. Sometimes it means something to me, sometimes it's merely no more for what it illustrates and presents and that I value it for doing.

I don't get that "little joy" of running across a poet who happened to inscribe something that takes with me very often... I can appreciate much that people decide to create and what they're saying with it more often, no matter the size, and a plainer and more genuine/purely original piece of art can mean far more to me than someone else's overelaborate attempt at "depth". Typically that simple yet honest and beautiful aspiration toward art and/or their mere expression of a plain idea/emotion/thought... is all that's exactly required sometimes, to make a thing good enough. (quality and composition aside this time - whether the structure of the writing itself, the words/meaning, or the structure of the presentation in the poetic form)

But there's that threshold of something that genuinely digs into you and more or less you feel some vague kinship with the writer, and that's what makes me appreciate some of these. I don't know a thing about Anne Ridler, but I am glad she decided to do that poetry thing for long enough to get her stuff into a book.

This is undoubtedly my favorite, probably because... well, guess, if you've never shot for the stars by now:


Dividing forms can disappear,
Leaving the elements that they share;
And a human eye not only see
But cause this change, if it look rightly--
Jerusalem is not above all wars,
And wilder and more skillful eyes
Could see it now, and in these places.
~"Ringshall Summer"

--


Kirkwall, 1942

Far again, far,
And the Pentland howling psalms of separation
Lifts and falls, lifts and falls between.
But present pain
Folds like a firth round islets that contain
A sheepfold and a single habitation--
Moments in our summer of success--
Or the greater islands, colonized and built with peace.

Cold knives of light
Make every outline clear in a northern island,
The separating light, the sea's green;
Yet southern lives
Merge in the lupin fields or sleepy coves,
In crowstepped gables find a hint of Holland,
And Europe in the red religious stone:
All places in the room where we in love lie down.


--


Ringshall Summer

Never was such a year for sun
At Ringshall as this dreadful one.
We seem sequestered on an island:
Bracken rolls for miles around,
The tips with silver sparkles shine,
And the green deeps close us in.
Though from that water come angry cries
Of soldiers at their practices,
Bobbing like boats in a rough sea
Above the fronds, in tank and lorry,
Or crouching camouflaged and slack,
Snails with their safety on their back;
And though the planes rove through our skies
Constantly, moving like jealous eyes
Over the house, and serve to warn
Us to expect the locust soon--
These only make our survival stranger,
Leaving us the unrivaled summer.

But while the shining of this sun
Making catastrophe seem unreal
Divides the mind, it joins in one
These outward forms. For I could call
The changing tide that laps the terrance
Where I work, water or flowers;
Roses roll right to our doors,
Whorls of white foam; snapdragon flares
Burn up in phosphorescent fires;
Pink and purple sweet-pea spools
Are coloured weeds in tropic pools.
The leaves part with flicker and leap
Of fish, where wrens court and creep
Stripping the grubs; when twilight comes
Our home a solitary lighthouse gleams,
And clumps of white daisies show
Where a shoal swims past the window.

Early, the air's thin silky blue
Only the finest sun lets through,
While through the wide-meshed air of evening
Pours the light of his coarsest shining.
In draughts the garden drinks it in.
Circus flowers of the haricot bean,
White waxy potato blooms, and green
Marrow, hidden in a flannel tent,
And curved like a wind instrument--
All are pleasant for what they promise,
Unlike flowers, grown for the eyes
To please at once, for when the frore
Weather has beaten our ships from shore,
Or hostile guns have bit too deep,
These shall defer the frozen sleep.

Even plants in the grass delight
The taste in fancy: yellow and white
In spring were milky curds here
Of cowslip and cuckoo-flower;
Now eggs and bacon grow, and toad-flax
Hereabouts called buttered haystacks.
Mushrooms fatten in a night,
The yaffle sucking up ants takes fright,
And flies to the little spinney, that
A glacier under bluebells lay,
Rich and warm now with rose-bay.
There he hangs, his body pressed
To the trunk, like a sailor on a mast:
Only his brilliant head betrays him,
Lolling back from the trunk which hides him.

Children, walking on a road, can say
They row in a boat, and thus they
Enjoy the double world, and know
The road both road and river; so
When I leave our hills for the plain below,
To cross the bracken I need a boat,
And from our porch with oars strike out.
When I was little these fronds were tall
To make a tunnel or banqueting hall;
They still reach over my head, as pulling
Through their green waves gently rolling
I and my boat enter the grove
Out of the sunshine. As in a cove
That makes in monstrous cliffs a salient
Each sound echoes, and makes more silent
The cove by contrast, and men speak soft,
Silence hangs in the trees. Aloft
A pigeon takes off with a sharp crack
Like a wave breaking against a rock.
Looking upwards I see no sky;
Delayed by leaves the light slips by
Mellow as honey. Here to look up
Is like gazing down through deep
Clear water, watching a pendent world
A touch will break; pale trunks rise whorled
With leaves like waving weeds, where
Birds quick as minnows cut the close air.

Below the woods widen the plains
As far as Oxford and the Thames,
And the church on its little hill of tombs
Floats over all: fields of barley
With prawn's whiskers, still white and creamy;
Wheat feathers brown or orange; oats
The first to be reaped, where lurk the rabbits
Close in the ever-lessening square
Uncut; they think, while they've an ear
Above their heads, life can go on,
Normal, though outside waits the gun.
Like us, they'd rather pretend than run.

This, then, is our summer country,
Wherein at times, remote and tiny,
I see my own familiar shape
Moving across a painted landscape.
But if the special character
Dividing forms can disappear,
Leaving the elements that they share;
And a human eye not only see
But cause this change, if it look rightly--
Jerusalem is not above all wars,
And wilder and more skillful eyes
Could see it now, and in these places.


--


For a Christening

1

In June the early signs,
And after, the steady labour of subcutaneous growth:
Past the danger of dissolution in the third month,
And in the fifth, quickens.
But hidden while the leaves thicken, through the season when smooth corn
Grows beared, through the peeling of the summer's gold fleece;
Hidden but with heart throbbing, while stars sharpen and throb in the skies,
While sunsets grow cold and orange, while winter airs are whirled and torn;
And at Candlemas with pain is born.
Lying with a left occipital position, what prompts it we may never know,
But at the appointed time dives down, down into the light--
Blinding snow-light, piercing the darkest corner with white,
Brightness of prick-eared cyclamen pink against the snow--
So long hidden, so sudden into sight.

2

You are our darling and our foreign guest;
We know all your origins, and this is to know nothing.
Distinguished stranger to whom we offer food and rest;
Yet made of our own natures; yet looked for with such longing.
Helpless wandering hands, the miniature of mine,
Fine skin and furious look and little raging voice--
Your looks are full human, your qualities all hidden:
It is your mere existence we have by heart, and rejoice.
The wide waters of wonder and comprehension pour
Through this narrow weir, and irresistable their power.
The rainbow multiple glory of our humanity cannot pierce
As does the single white beam of your being.
This makes your presence so shattering a grace,
Unsheathed suddenly from the womb: it was none of our intending
To set in train a miracle; and yet it is merely
Made palpable in you, missed elsewhere by diffusion.
Therefore we adore god-in-our-flesh as a baby:
Whose being is his essence, and outside it, illusion.
Later, the fulfillment, the example, death, misprision--
Here the extraordinary fact of being, which we see
Stripped and simple as the speechless stranger on my knee.

3

Blessing, sleep and grow taller in sleeping.
Lie ever in kind keeping.
Infancts curl in a cowrie of peace
And should lie lazy. After this ease,
When the soul out of its safe shell goes,
Stretched as you stretch those knees and toes,
What should I wish you? Intelligence first,
In a credulous age by instruction cursed.
Take from us both what immunity
We have from the germ of the printed lie.
Your father's calm temper I wish you, and
The shaping power of his confident hand.
Much, too, that is different and your own;
And may we learn to leave you alone.
For your part, forgive us the pain of living,
Grow in that harsh sun great-hearted and loving.

Sleep, little honey, then; sleep while the powers
Of the Nine Bright Shiners and the Seven Stars
Harmless, encircle: the natural world
Lifegiving, neutral, unless despoiled
By our greed or scorn. And wherever you sleep--
My arms outgrown--or waking weep,
Life is your lot: you lie in God's hand,
In His terrible mercy, world without end.


--


Dead and Gone

2

'For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage'
St. Matthew's Gospel

The specialty of time and place
Were of love's making, and are gone;
From the unfocused blur of space
And the indifference of time
Struck by the force of joy or pain--
These will never come again.

True, the environment retains
A faithful passion: earth or stone,
Archway, tree or moving-stair--
The place cries out, cries out in pain:
Its cries are heard by you alone,
The moment will not come again.

So place is widowed. What remains?
Sayings and anniversaries,
Saints'-days that loss discovers,
Hagiography of lovers;
Worse, the gradual death of pain,
For the image will not come again.

And after such a loss, what gain?
Not the longed-for, that is certain.
Nothing, or else a new thing.
If there is any final meeting
It is past desire or pain.
If love is, love is to be born again.


--


Blood Transfusion Centre

'He that gives, let him do it with simplicity.'

But which of us, waiting to offer his oblation
Can look at what he does with entire simplicity?
For between the lifeblood and the dying man
Science interposes its marvelous devices,
Isolating microbes, magnifying cells,
Testing, sealing, measuring, preserving.

So here we stand, in a queue for pure love
(Or it may be, for guilt, or it may be, for pride):
Shop-soiled housewives, typists and gardeners,
Lads and old soldiers--we look at each other
And wonder that health could spring from such complexions,
That such or such a man should design such a gift.
Yet each in his veins is offering the ichor,
Each has entertained the secret vision
Of health by his sickness; of life by his loss.

And here are the couches, with their patient figures
Whose blood is now flowing; and beyond these
The resting figures; and the cups of tea
Tasting of ether. The design is forgotten
In the details of performance: in chatting with the nurse,
In a sore vein, a thumping heart, a wearisome waiting.

To see this as godlike in the rest is to burden
The self who is one of them; belittling it here
Belittles it in them. TO give for those we love
Is natural as breathing, but should we not be hypocrites
To say that we loved this abstraction of Humanity?
The pelican's breast was not pierced for a stranger.
The man who gives his seed to beget for another
Creates he knows not what. THe man who gives his blood
Restores he knows not what. We call in question
Such dangerous goodwill as moves in the first,
But what of the second? Who would have the right
To pretend to the impartial love of a god
And divide himself, not for a man but for Men?

Dindrane who gave her blood to succour a sick woman
And died so, did truly die another's death;
But the woman had her part--to live another's life,
And pain is as hard to relinquish as to bear.
So, toward a presence not abstract though not seen,
Both move, giver and receiver, through darkness.
(We speak of Love as blind, because his day is dark to us.)

The queue moves forward. Humbly we consider--
Humbly and with amazement--
'He that gives, let him do it with simplicity.'


--


The Constellation

Silent the Lyre that streams among the stars
And lulled is the fierce Lion:
So is Orpheus; torment turned
To memory and peace
Pricked out in stars a counterpoint that cannot sound.

So fixed, so quiet, the family constellations
Are memories of love or hate:
Yet each has had its hot creation
When with new sons the old forms fade
Before the calm irrevocable past is made.


These grow and sing: with their sweet jangling cries
The bickering soaring children
Elder with younger jostle for place.
Their milky light, their all-regarding gaze
Has traveled here a billion miles of space:
Distant they are, not fixed, nor frozen, nor at peace.


--


The Images That Hurt

"The images that hurt and connect"
W.H. Auden

All the materials of a poem
Are lying scattered about, as in this garden
The lovely lumber of Spring.
All is profusion, confusion: hundred-eyed
The primulae in crimsion pink and purple,
Golden at the pupil;
prodigal the nectarine and plum
That fret their petals against a rosy wall.
Flame of the tulip, fume of the blue anemone,
White Alps of blossom in the giant pear-tree,
Peaks and glaciers, rise from the same drab soil.

Far too much joy for comfort:
The images that hurt because they won't connect.
No poem, no possession, therefore pain.
And struggling now to use
These images that bud from the bed of my mind
I grope about for a form,
As much in the dark, this white and dazzling day,
As the bulb at midwinter; as filled with longing
Even in this green garden
As those who gaze from the cliff at the depths of sea
And know they cannot possess it, being of the shore
And severed from that element for ever.


--


Nothing Is Lost

Nothing is lost.
We are too sad to know that, or too blind;
Only in visited moments do we understand:
It is not that the dead return:
They are about us always, though unguessed.

This pencilled Latin verse
You dying wrote me, ten years past and more,
Brings you as much alive to me as the self you wrote it for,
Dear father, as I read your words
With no word but Alas.

Lines in a letter, lines in a face
Are faithful currents of life: the boy has written
His parents across his forehead, and as we burn
Our bodies up each seven years,
His own past self has left no plainer trace.

Nothing dies.
The cells pass on their secrets, we betray them
Unknowingly: in a freckle, in the way
We walk, recall some ancestor,
And Adam in the colour of our eyes.

Yes, on the face of the newborn,
Before the soul has taken full possession,
There pass, as over a screen, in succession
The images of other beings:
Face after face looks out, and then is gone.

Nothing is lost, for all in love survive.
I lay my cheek against his sleeping limbs
To feel if he is warm, and touch in him
Those children whom no shawl could warm,
No arms, no grief, no longing could revive.

Thus what we see, or know,
Is only a tiny portion, at the best,
Of the life in which we share; an iceberg's crest
Our sunlit present, our partial sense,
With deep supporting multitudes below.