The Sunlight on the Garden

Ten years ago I challenged myself to learn some poems off by heart. Some of them have faded a bit in my mind, but not "The Sunlight on the Garden" by Louis MacNeice. Every autumn I think of it again, how it captures the mood of dusk closing in so perfectly, the wistfulness of summer memories too, and of course that dark premonition of the "evil iron, siren". MacNeice wrote it in the late 1930s and reading it now we know exactly what it was that he saw on the horizon. In late 2025 the horizon also looks ominous, but exactly how dark only future generations will know. 

Back in that post in 2015 I mentioned how I first heard this poem in an interview with Clive James, and how I was pleased that he seemed to be recovering from his most recent health problem. He died in 2019. This poem will always remind me of him. I discovered many great writers through him, in his interviews, and also in his wonderful book of essays Cultural Amnesia.

The Sunlight on the Garden
by Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too

For sunlight on the garden. 

What a coincidence?

I'd never heard of the poet Jack Gilbert until he came up for study in a writing class a few weeks ago. He was never particularly well known, published only six or seven collections in his lifetime, and died in 2012. But I was struck by the works we discussed, their earthiness and in-your-face honesty, the courage of the writer.

Then, in a mysterious coincidence, one of his poems was released this month in a moving video on a channel I follow.

Well, of course there's no mystery here, I simply wouldn't have noticed the video before the class.

The Adrian Brinkerhoff Foundation releases many wonderful videos on its channel (another example: the Doireann Ní Ghríofa poem I wrote about before) but there are very few subscribers. This venture must be making a big loss given the obvious high cost of the productions. I wonder what's behind it?

Muldoonisms

Paul Muldoon speaks the truth in his inimitable style, in a poem published in the Irish Times to marks the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement:

We think the playwright works in words
when her medium’s largely silence.  

and 

We think the plumber works in lead
when his medium’s mainly water.

Reading list

I haven't updated the list of books I've read since a post in August 2021. Here's my reading list for the period September 2021 to December 2022.

Fiction

Barnes, Julian: Levels of Life

Barrett, Colin: Homesickness

Borges, Jorge Luis: Labyrinths

Cusk, Rachel: Second Place

Erskine, Wendy: Dance Move

Galgut, Damon: The Promise

Ishiguro, Kazuo: Klara and the Sun

Jean, Michel: Kukum

Keegan, Clare: Small Things Like These

Magee, Audrey: The Colony

Mansfield, Katherine: Selected Stories

Mitchell, David: The thousand autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Murnane, Gerald: The Plains

Rooney, Sally: Beautiful World, Where Are You

Saramago, José: Blindness

Shafak, Elif: Three daughters of Eve

Tóibín, Colm: The Testament of Mary

Woolf, Virgina / Emre, Merve: The annotated Mrs Dalloway

My top three would be the books by Magee, Mitchell, and Saramago, with honorable mentions for Ishiguro and Tóibín. I didn't get on at all with the book by Murnane, simply finding it dull. The book by Sally Rooney was good, she writes well, but I really don't understand what all the hype is about. The narrator's voice in Rachel Cusk's 'Second Place' got on my nerves a bit, but thinking about it afterwards I sense that was deliberate on Cusk's part and I've resolved to read the book again.

I also read a lot of non-fiction and particularly enjoyed the personal history 'We Don't Know Ourselves' by Fintan O'Toole. His Ireland is also my Ireland, and unfortunately it includes the perverted and sexually abusive Christian Brother we both encountered in Colaiste Chaoimhin, me six years after him.

Poetry Collections

Caldwell, Anne: Alice and the North

Ducker, Christy: Skipper

Mahon, Derek: New Selected Poems

Ní Ghríofa, Doireann: Lies

Ní Ghríofa, Doireann: To Star the Dark

These are all great but the collection by Caldwell was particularly illuminating, showing me possibilities that I hadn't imagined before in a themed sequence of prose poems.

The Brightening, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

I 'discovered' Doireann Ní Ghríofa last year during the first months of lockdown when I was reading incessantly. Her book 'A Ghost in the Throat' still haunts me, one of the most compelling voices I've ever heard wandering through the lives of women whose souls are intertwined, centuries apart. So I was delighted to find her video performance of her poem 'The Brightening'. 

    I call it a performance rather than a reading, because like her book it's quite hard to tell where the line is between narrator and narrative. We move seamlessly back and forth from interior to exterior, from past to present. Given the title, 'The Brightening' and the way her west of Ireland accent draws out those long O sounds, I was reminded of these lines by Yeats:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, 

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

(from Among School Children by W.B.Yeats) 

    In this performance by Ní Ghríofa the dancer and the dance are truly one. I can't say that I understand it all (could you ever say that about a poem?) but the conjunction with Yeats doesn't seem accidental: the image of the grand old house going up in flames feels connected to last days of the old Irish ascendancy of Yeats and Lady Gregory, and just this moment I noticed  that the video was filmed in Coole Park.

    The poem is a response to 'The Planter's Daughter' by Austin Clarke, but whereas the eponymous daughter in that poem is passive and an apologist for her family of planters in the big house, this narrator is strong and subversive and burns the house down. 

    There are so many extraordinary lines and images in the poem, but I'll highlight these:

Ghosts, those flames, racing up the stairs,

sending smoke through slates,

a vast constellation of sparks

to star the dark.

    But listen to her say them for the full effect. The complete text of the poem is available here on the Irish Times website, though the version she performs has evolved a little since that publication.

Wow.

  

An October cycle in the Eastern Townships

 My partner-in-life and I went cycling in the Eastern Townships last Thursday. I took this photo, which prompted a haiku.

Through leaf fall tunnel,
wheel crushing the golden dead.
Autumn life cycle.

Roddy Lumsden, 1966 - 2020

Many years ago I searched the internet for famous Lumsdens. There weren't many. But I found a Scottish poet, Roddy. How likely was it that this relatively unknown poet I'd found was any good?

He was brilliant. Poems of dazzling wit and wordplay. And then I heard him read aloud in soft Scottish tones, and I loved his work even more. Over time he became quite celebrated, appearing on BBC radio, referenced by other poets as an influence on them.

Around 2014 he disappeared from public view. Finally I saw him again in a YouTube video giving a reading of new work in 2017, looking haggard and old beyond his years, though his new poems were as vibrant as always.

He died last month, just 53 years old.

His poem "The Young", an ode to youth that catches the breath, is so poignant now.

One cartwheel over the quicksand curve 
of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone, 
summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

He reads it beautifully here, in a recording that I hope never ever disappears from the internet. 

RIP Roddy.

Austerlitz, again

It's the book to which I continually return. I'm often aware of it swirling around in my mind like music, below the level of my consciousness, sombre and profound as a cello concerto.

Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald

Sebald died in a car crash just a month after his masterpiece was published in November 2001. So when we come to its end there is nothing more. The rest is, literally, silence. Unless we return to its beginning, which I do every few years.

Impossible to summarise but I'll try anyway. Jacques Austerlitz, 4 years old, is evacuated from Nazi-controlled Prague on a Kindertransport, never to see his Jewish parents again. His new life is in Wales, raised by a Calvinist preacher, his Jewish identity and all traces of his earlier life overwritten. Only when middle-aged does he come to realise what happened to him and sets off on a search for his former life. That's the plot, such as it is. It's also a book about monstrous buildings in old European cities, their architecture and morality, about the connection between mental illness and authenticity, about friendship and the barriers that prevent us individuals from truly understanding each other. And above all it's about the Holocaust, a shadow that darkens all time and every space, yet only seen obliquely. Sebald said: 

I've always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of  vilification of minorities, the attempt well nigh achieved to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it's practically impossible to do this, to write about concentration camps [...] so you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something that is on your mind, but that you do not necessarily roll out on every other page  

[from Bookworm Dec 6, 2001 Hosted by Michael Silverblatt]

That quote comes from a remarkable audio interview with Sebald that was recorded in those last four weeks of his life after the publication of his masterpiece. I found it by chance, and was delighted to hear him speak in sentences as sonorous as his prose.

Sebald is asked about the significance of the moths that feature in several scenes and he refers to a description of dying moths in a work by Virginia Woolf. He says:

[...] her description of a moth, coming to its end, on a window pane somewhere in Sussex, and this is a passage of some two pages only, written somewhere chronologically speaking between the battle fields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. And there is no reference to the battle fields of the Somme in this passage but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people's souls, the souls of those who got away and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite some way from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern

[from Bookworm Dec 6, 2001 Hosted by Michael Silverblatt]

Virginia Woolf is another author to whom I often return, to her novel Mrs Dalloway in particular, and certain similarities between Woolf and Sebald struck me in this interview. They both weave a novel around an "undeclared concern", seeing it obliquely from a perspective that adds to our understanding of it, shining a light on the seemingly trivial to show that it is anything but. And they do this with prose that is delicate and precise, and so sharp it catches you off-guard and cuts deep.

Each time I read Austerlitz it is a different part of it that leaves the greatest impression on me. I've been haunted by the images of the wide-eyed creatures of the Nocturama at the Antwerp Zoo, and the story of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt where Jacques' mother Agata was interned.  Somehow it was only on my most recent reading that I was struck by the story of Jacques' best friend, Gerald Fitzpatrick, at whose home Jacques often stayed and whose passion for flying leads to his death, an event that he and we can see on the horizon long before it arrives. Gerald is of Irish stock, and the opening of Yeat's poem "An Irish Airman foresees his Death" fits him well:

I know that I shall meet my fate  

Somewhere among the clouds above;  

Those that I fight I do not hate,  

Those that I guard I do not love;

At the novel's conclusion Austerlitz takes his leave of the narrator to continue his search and, in the novel's compressed time where past and present mingle, it seems to me that he may still be searching now, wandering amongst the brooding train stations and fortresses of old Europe that have borne witness to such terrible times.

In another interview Sebald recounted how he had watched a documentary about a real Kindertransport child, Susi Bechhöfer, and used some elements of her story in his novel. She was adopted by a Calvinist minister in Wales and only re-discovered her origins as an adult. She suffered appalling abuse from her step family and her biography is a harrowing read, though most of her story is quite different from that of the fictional Austerlitz. She was unhappy that Sebald used elements of her life in his novel, but his death prevented her from making that known to him.

Perhaps Susi Bechhöfer felt that her identity had been stolen from her for a second time, and that's a thought that upsets me. I felt that on behalf of Sebald the least I could do was to buy her biography and place it on my bookshelf next to my prized first US edition of Austerlitz. So when I next pick up Austerlitz I will also think of Susi, imagine her to life again, and think of her as the person, the little girl, she spent a lifetime seeking.

Rosa's Child: One Woman's search for her Past
by Jeremy Josephs and Susi Bechhöfer

Everything is Going to be All Right

Tomas Tranströmer is no more

A few months ago I mangled one of his poems, trying to get my mouth around eccentric Swedish vowels, and now he's gone. What have I done?

Robin Fulton wrote his obituary in The Guardian, but it doesn't say much to anyone who isn't already a fan. Better to read or listen to his poems - like this one, with a translation by the same Robert Fulton and a recording of Tomas himself reading it: Svenska hus ensligt belägna / Solitary Swedish Houses.

Farväl Tomas.

Off by heart - the payoff

I mentioned in my last off-by-heart update (Off by heart - halfway there) that Jim Harrison's poem Bridge presented quite a challenge to learn. My trouble with it was the lack of any rhyme or rhythm that I could discern - maybe it's not a poem at all but poetic prose? Anyway I did manage to get it in to my head, eventually, and I'm pleased about that because I really do like some of the lines:

I like it out here high above the sea bundled
up for the arctic storms of late fall,
the resounding crash and moan of the sea,
the hundred foot depth of the green troughs.

I discovered it a few years ago in an episode of the Writer's Almanac on NPR - that program is one of my secret pleasures when stuck in traffic on the way to work.

With that committed to memory I had two poems of my original six still to learn, and they were a real pleasure as I had saved two favourites for the end. Ever since I first became fluent in Swedish more than 20 years ago I've wanted to learn some Swedish poetry; it has always seemed to me a very poetic language not just in how it sounds but in how it feels in my mouth when I speak it: rich, resonant, a bit complicated and occasionally tongue-twisting. It was Seamus Heaney who led me to the poet, Tomas Tranströmer, in the tribute he made in this video:

I settled on Tranströmer's poem Romanska bågar, not least because there is a recording of the poet himself reciting it on YouTube, so I had something to aim at. Learning it was not too difficult, and my Swedish daughter Emily corrected my worst mispronunciations (the last syllable of "människa" gave some troubles as did "solsjudande" where I had my usual difficulty with the "u" sound. I have struggles with "u" in both French and in Swedish - that flat Dublin accent will out).

So with that poem off by heart I finished off the sextet with the poem I heard Clive James recite and which inspired me: The Sunlight on the Garden by Louis MacNeice.  The internal rhymes in this poem ring out as I speak it:

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

That's doom-laden and fantastic!

Thanks to Clive James for many years of inspiration and, happily, it seems his health has stabilised a bit. He gave another interview just before Christmas and he was as interesting as ever.

And I've a new list of poems learn. This is so enjoyable, I should have started years ago.

Off by heart - halfway there

Well it seems my 50-year-old brain is still capable of learning some new tricks: I have learned 3 of the 6 poems I set myself in my last post off by heart.

I began with Wind by Hughes and then The Given Note by Heaney. Learning them was straightforward, taking a few days for each via a process of mentally repeating a small number of lines at a time.  I found it helpful in both cases to listen to others reading the poems so as to catch the rhythm. I have a recording of Heaney reading his own poem (in The Poet and the Piper) and I copied his intonations. For example, in the line:

The house throbbed like his full violin

my initial prononciation was Vih-Oh-Lin in three even syllables, whereas Heaney says it more quickly, Viah-Lin, which makes the line flow better I believe.

Learning Soir d'hiver by Nelligan was rather more complicated. First I went looking for some good translations so as to ensure I really understood it. I particularly like this translation by Clarissa Ackroyd. (Her blog, The Stone and the Star, is a revelation of fine poetic things, and I love the name Clarissa - reminds me of Mrs Dalloway...) Next I went looking for a reading of the poem to hear its music and I settled on this one by Gilles-Claude Thériault - I find the background music in the recording to be a bit distracting but his voice is wonderful. The final part of the process was subjecting one of my francophone children to my recital and Tristan was patient with me, correcting my errors in return for me setting up the laptop he got for Christmas. For some reason the following line took me a long time to say to his satisfaction:

Je suis la nouvelle Norvège

It contains the first accent grave in the poem after a run of accents aigu, and in combination with an "r" it gave me some trouble. Anyway I can now pronounce it to Tristan's satisfaction, even if he says I still sound like an anglophone...

I'm currently learning Bridge by Jim Harrison, which presents different challenges. More news on that shortly.

Off by heart

He may not be with us for much longer but, though very unwell, Clive James remains irascible and insightful with a seasoning of wistfulness, and it makes me happy just to think of him. His book, Cultural Amnesia, has been a companion on my bedside table for a few years now and last week I delighted in the sound of his twanging Aussie voice in an interview on RTE radio.

Asked by interviewer Sinead Gleeson to name a poem that influenced him, James, flirting no doubt, came up with a poem by Irishman Louis MacNeice, and recited it from memory: The Sunlight on the Garden.

I can also recite poems from memory, works by Yeats and Kavanagh mostly that I learned at school. They're poems with which I am intimate, the process of learning them by heart has somehow made me internalize them and understand them deeply. I've read and loved many poems since my school days, but never tried to learn another one by heart.

Until now. Inspired by the dying Clive James (who I hope will be dying for a few years yet) I'm learning the following poems I love off-by-heart, four in English and (gulp) one each in French and Swedish

• Wind, by Ted Hughes
• The Given Note, by Seamus Heaney
• Bridge, by Jim Harrison
• The Sunlight on the Garden, by Louis MacNeice (Thanks Clive!)
• Soir d'hiver, par Émile Nelligan
• Romanska bågar, av Tomas Tranströmer

Progress reports will follow, assuming my 50-year-old brain does make progress...

Lady Lazarus

One poem leads to another. 

I meander through the volumes of poetry on my bedside table following a path that's sometimes obvious, often less so. From Ted Hughes' Wind I alighted on Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill, another poem that evokes a time long ago "when I sang in my chains like the sea". In my fifty-first year I understand that more than ever before. 

But Thomas was a a detour while I hesitated to take the step I knew I must. From Hughes to Plath.

Every few years I come back to Sylvia Plath. More often would be dangerous. Her poems are sharp as a scalpel, cutting directly to the truth, with the potential to cause deep and permanent damage.

Lady Lazarus is one of her finest, wielded precisely in her own voice in this 1962 recording by the BBC. But be warned:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware. 

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air. 

 Click on the link but be careful!

An interview with Ted Hughes

The Paris Review sends occasional tweets with links to old articles in its archive. A recent tweet brought this interview with Ted Hughes from (I'm guessing) the mid-nineties. It's a  fascinating thirty-minute read for anyone interested in poetry. Hughes talks about his life, how and why he writes, his influences, and about Sylvia Plath.

Here are a few of the many insights.

On why he writes with a pen rather than a typewriter or computer:

In handwriting the brain is mediated by the drawing hand, in typewriting by the fingers hitting the keyboard, in dictation by the idea of a vocal style, in word processing by touching the keyboard and by the screen’s feedback. The fact seems to be that each of these methods produces a different syntactic result from the same brain. Maybe the crucial element in handwriting is that the hand is simultaneously drawing. I know I’m very conscious of hidden imagery in handwriting—a subtext of a rudimentary picture language. Perhaps that tends to enforce more cooperation from the other side of the brain. And perhaps that extra load of right brain suggestions prompts a different succession of words and ideas.

 On the impact of poetry:

[...] the idea occurred to me that art was perhaps this—the psychological component of the autoimmune system. It works on the artist as a healing. But it works on others too, as a medicine. Hence our great, insatiable thirst for it. However it comes out—whether a design in a carpet, a painting on a wall, the shaping of a doorway—we recognize that medicinal element because of the instant healing effect, and we call it art. It consoles and heals something in us. That’s why that aspect of things is so important, and why what we want to preserve in civilizations and societies is their art—because it’s a living medicine that we can still use. It still works. We feel it working. Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry this healing. Poetry does it more intensely. Music, maybe, most intensely of all. 

On why poetry might be more popular in wartime (he was speaking in the context of the Balkan wars in the 90's)

[...] we all live on two levels—a top level where we scramble to respond moment by moment to the bombardment of impressions, demands, opportunities. And a bottom level where our last-ditch human values live—the long-term feelings like instinct, the bedrock facts of our character. Usually, we can live happily on the top level and forget the bottom level. But, all it takes to dump the population on the top level to the lowest pits of the bottom level, with all their values and all their ideas totally changed, is a war. I would suggest that poetry is one of the voices of the bottom level. 

One of my favourite poems by Hughes is Wind. It evokes our awe and our fears when confronted by nature in the raw, we modern humans huddled around our fireplaces. It brings the shadow of a memory to my mind of a dark night in Inch, Co. Kerry, when a wild Atlantic storm brought down our tent in the early pre-dawn hours and my Dad carried my sister and I, two and four years old, through the driven rain to the shelter of a caravan rocking in the wind. And a sleepless night in another tent in Morriscastle, Co. Wexford when we listened to the wind screaming through the guy ropes and the radio presenter solemnly telling of the unfolding disaster in the Fastnet yacht race.

I'd like to hear Hughes read Wind but I haven't yet found a recording. So here instead is a pretty good reading that I found on YouTube.

On the passing of Seamus Heaney

Sad news today that Seamus Heaney has died at the young age of 74.

He was a wonderful reader of his own works, but although this video isn't one of his better readings I've chosen it here because it was one of his last, recorded in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais this past June, and it begins with a poem about a musician that could also be about Heaney himself:

For he had gone alone into the island

And brought back the whole thing.

The house throbbed like his full violin. 

So whether he calls it spirit music 

Or not, I don't care. He took it

Out of wind off mid-Atlantic. 

- from The Given Note

The newspapers in Ireland are full of tributes and obituaries today but most seem hastily written and unworthy of their subject - the Irish Times is particularly disappointing. By contrast, The Guardian has a beautiful piece by Colm Tóibín who seemed well prepared with his thoughts and reflections on Heaney.

Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar a anam uasal.

Any light in the gloom over Ireland?

Late afternoon on Kippure, Wicklow, November 26th 2012.

I took this photo with the crappy camera on my BlackBerry Bold and for some reason it turned out quite well.

Centenary of Scott at the South Pole: the ridiculous, the sublime

There's been lots of coverage recently of the centenary of Scott reaching the South Pole on January 17th 1912 in that ill-fated expedition. The Guardian posted a series of photos, and the British Film Institute has restored the record of the expedition "The Great White Silence" - I haven't seen the latter but just the trailer is compelling.

It might seem odd that we remember Scott's failure more vividly than Amundsen's success, but really it's not that surprising. Scott's mistakes and pathetic end speak more eloquently to us about the human condition- it's "dying as an art" to quote Sylvia Plath. Or as Derek Mahon says, in his poem echoing the last words of Captain Oates, at the heart of the ridiculous there really was something sublime.

He takes leave of the earthly pantomime
Quietly, knowing it is time to go:-
‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ 
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

                                                                                              - Derek Mahon

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed

There's a real prospect of Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness becoming the President of Ireland next month. It sickens me that an unrepentant terrorist, a senior figure in an organization that murdered many innocents, could be so close to such a position. But with the success of the peace process in which he has been so influential he undoubtedly has a right to participate  in the election. Moreover I can understand his appeal to many voters, given the weak candidates put forward by the traditional parties and the abject failures of those parties in government. Indeed Sinn Fein may well be the only party who would dare to take Ireland out of the dead-end we've parked ourselves in; one could imagine a Shinner government standing up to European bureaucrats and walking away from the Euro if necessary.

Imagine too a Shinner administration and president celebrating the centenary of the 1916 rising, President Martin McGuinness and Taoiseach Mary Lou McDonald on the reviewing stand outside the GPO - my God I feel quite ill thinking about it.

Where oh where is the next generation of democrats and leaders to put forward an alternative vision for Ireland? Yeats was never more right.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

 - from "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, 1919