Tag: Dante

June runes

(Évrard d’Espinques, Arthur’s Knights at the Round Table)

June 1909. The seventh issue of the English Review, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer, begins with ‘Modern Poetry’, begins in fact with a notice (signed ‘E. R.’) of the death of the novelist and poet George Meredith on 18 May. Ford begins: ‘Mr Meredith follows Mr Swinburne into the shadows; and now, indeed, the whole Round Table is dissolved.’ And he comments on the suitability of that phrase given the Arthurian cycle’s domination of the age, among such writers and artists as Alfred Tennyson, Lewis Carroll, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Dyce, John Collier and J. W. Waterhouse. As well as the poetry, this issue offered work by Hilaire Belloc, Wyndham Lewis, Olive Garnett, H. M. Tomlinson, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Reynolds and Edward Thomas.[1]

But those ‘Modern Poets’? They were represented, in a downward sliding scale, by four poems, three, two and one. The four were by John Galsworthy, prolific novelist and playwright (but whose 1934 Collected Poems ran to just under 140 pages); there were three poems by Gerald Gould, poet, journalist and essayist, and two by Eden Phillpotts, astonishingly prolific novelist, poet and playwright (some 250 books).

And the one poem? That was by a certain Ezra Pound. Entitled ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, it began thus:

I
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.[2]

Two anecdotes attaching to this, ‘the Bloody Sestina’ as Pound’s friends and acquaintances dubbed it, are, firstly, the poet declaiming it at full volume at a table in the Tour Eiffel restaurant, the occasion on which the waiter felt the need to place a screen around the offending party; and, secondly, Pound delivering it in a similar fashion to the sculptor Henri Gaudier. Deeply impressed, Gaudier reported to the writer and translator John Cournos his excitement at the fact that Pound had dared to use the word ‘piss’ in the opening line of his poem.[3] Perhaps one more note: in ‘How I Began’, relating the circumstances of its composition, Pound commented: ‘Technically it is one of my best, though a poem on such a theme could never be very important.’[4] That ‘theme’ being bloodlust, war, slaughter and other exultations (the title of the volume in which the poem was collected). A little more than a year after that comment, of course, that theme would become very prominent indeed.

And yet . . . rather like the case of Melville’s Moby Dick, everyone knowing that it begins ‘Call me Ishmael’—except that it doesn’t, a page or so of ‘Etymology’, supplied by ‘a late consumptive usher to a grammar school’, being followed by more than a dozen pages of ‘Extracts’, supplied by ‘a sub-sub-librarian’, before those magic and memorable words appear—the case of Pound’s ‘Sestina: Altaforte’ also has some preliminary matter.

It actually begins thus:
LOQUITUR: En Bertrans de Born.
            Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife.
            Eccovi!
            Judge ye!
            Have I dug him up again?
The scene is at his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur.
“The Leopard,” [later in the poem] the device of Richard (Coeur de Lion).’

(Gustave Doré ill., Dante, The Vision of Hell, 1866)

And yes, Dante put Bertrans down in the Ninth Bolgia, among the makers of discord, carrying his own severed head by the hair.

E perchè tu di me novela porti,
sappi ch’ I’ son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli
che diedi al Re giovane I ma’ conforti.

‘And that thou mayst bear news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born, he that gave evil backing to the Young King. I made rebellion between the father and the son; Ahitophel did no worse for Absalom and David with his wicked goadings. Because I parted those so joined I carry my brain, alas, parted from its root in this trunk; thus it is observed in me the retribution.’[5]

More than 700 years further on, we may not feel so sure about a literal hell, though metaphorically, symbolically, huge numbers of people must feel themselves there on a daily and nightly basis. And we surely have a great many stirrers up of strife, for political or personal advantage, makers of discord, rabble rousers. Where might we put them now?

The novelist Sarah Moss once wrote (in what may still be my favourite of her books, or very close to it), ‘No one who knows what happens in the world, what humans do to humans, has any claim to contentment.’[6]

And a general sense of unease, of restlessness, is hardly surprising, as we see what this country (among others) is in worsening danger of becoming. The British—or the English—used to be widely admired for their qualities of tolerance and common sense—or so we believed, were led to believe. Could we believe it now? And if so, for how much longer?

Notes

[1] English Review, II, 7 (June 1909).

[2] Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 105.

[3] Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 612.

[4] ‘How I Began’, T.P.’s Weekly (6 June 1913), 707. A note on De Born’s war songs added later to The Spirit of Romance read: ‘This kind of thing was much more impressive before 1914 than it has been since 1920.’

[5] Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. I: Inferno, Italian text with translation and comment by John D. Sinclair (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 353, Canto XXVIII.

[6] Sarah Moss, Signs for Lost Children (London: Granta Books, 2016), 97.

Those autumn leaves (turn, turn, turn!)

(Henry Robinson Hall, Coniston Lake from Lake Bank: The Dock Museum, Barrow-in-Furness)

As early as 1 August, John Ruskin at Coniston Lake declared that, ‘The summer is ended. Autumn begun.’ Gilbert White, though, also a close watcher of the seasons, the natural world and everything in it that occurred before his eyes, wrote on 9 September 1781: ‘Red-breasts whistle agreeably on the tops of hop-poles etc., but are prognostic of autumn.’[1] We tend to associate that word now with the progress of a disease but it means only ‘knowing before’ and a prognosticator, my dictionary assures me, means a predictor, especially a weather prophet. Looking forward to autumn, anyway.

On this same day in 1767, White had looked back to the previous summer and feeding his tame bat, which would take flies out of a person’s hand. He added that: ‘Insects seemed to be most acceptable, though it did not refuse raw flesh when offered: so that the notion, that bats go down chimnies and gnaw men’s bacon, seems no improbable story.’[2]

Momentarily, ‘raw flesh’ offers to my suggestible mind the ‘person’s hand’ just mentioned (biting the hand that feeds you, I suppose); while ‘gnaw men’s bacon’ is also oddly disturbing, probably traceable to the word ‘gnaw’. It tends to recall to me the image of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, though, when I look at the painting again (it was first a mural, then transferred to canvas), it’s not what I think of as ‘gnawing’. Werner Hofmann distinguishes Goya’s Saturn from that of Rubens, because there is no delight here: Goya’s cannibal ‘horrifies the observer because he himself is horrified.’ Hofmann also notes that madness has driven him to his crime, ‘like Ugolino devouring his sons in the tower of Gualandi.’[3]

(Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring his Son: Museo Nacional del Prado)

This is from Dante’s Inferno, the penultimate canto (which T. S. Eliot cites in his notes to The Waste Land). Count Ugolino was head of the Guelf government in Pisa for a time until overthrown by a Ghibelline uprising initiated by the Archbishop Ruggieri, in what John Sinclair refers to as ‘this competition of mutual knavery and intrigue’. Locked in a tower with his children and left without food, he watches his sons die one after another and, deranged by grief, eats them. Now, in Dante’s Hell, he gnaws on the skull of the Archbishop (the word occurs in a reference to a tale from ancient history—one of the seven kings who besieged Thebes, mortally wounded by an assailant whom he killed ‘and gnawed the head with rage’). Having told his story, Ugolino ‘with eyes askance took hold of the wretched skull again with his teeth, which were strong on the bone like a dog’s.’[4] Yes, that to me is gnawing – with a vengeance, you might say.

On 9 September 1929, Sylvia Townsend Warner lay under London plane-trees and experienced a moment of extreme joy. ‘There like a bird I sat and sang. An antediluvian old lady with a bow streaming from the back of her hat sat sketching nearby, two little girls played dodge round a tree, and I heard the swish-swish of dead leaves sweeping. It was a moment for ever. Spring cannot bring me the same ravishment. Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.’[5]


(John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves: Manchester City Art Gallery)

Yes, if I had to choose, I might well come down on the side of autumn (eschewing all references to the seasons of a life as opposed to the life of the seasons), though why choose? The pleasures of spring are just a little too obvious, perhaps. Here, in autumnal mode, is young Olive Garnett (sister of the more famous Edward), author and diarist, to whom we’re indebted for some of the earliest glimpses of Ford Madox Ford, his wife Elsie, Conrad, James and others of the period. She’s on Hampstead Heath, skirting the heath in fact, ‘gathering blackberries the while & arrived at that delightful little footpath to the Finchley Road. In the field behind the paling were two haystacks, a pig & some cows.’[6]

(What do you do in the autumn? I do this).

And now the rain has stopped, started again, stopped again. Tiring weather. My sympathies stray towards Elizabeth Bishop, who writes to her friend, the writer and editor Pearl Kazin, 9 September 1959. ‘And—oh well, we read and read and read, all the time, and the books pile up, and I remember a little here and there, and the magazines are snowing us under, and what good it all does drifting around in this aging brain I don’t know!’[7]

We are waiting for a gap in the clouds.



Notes

[1] Ruskin, 1884 diary entry and White quoted by Geoffrey Grigson, The English Year: From Diaries and Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 103, 122.

[2] Gilbert White, The Illustrated History of Selborne (London: Macmillan, 1984), 39.

[3] Werner Hofmann, Goya: ‘To every story there belongs another’, translated by David H. Wilson (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 243.

[4] Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. I: Inferno, Italian text with translation and comment by John D. Sinclair (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), Canto XXXIII, 405-409; Tydeus, one of the leaders of expedition of the ‘Seven against Thebes’, mentioned 402.

[5] Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman (London: Virago Press, 1995), 43.

[6] Diary entry, Tuesday 9 September: Tea and Anarchy! The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett, 1890-1893, edited by Barry C. Johnson (London: Bartletts Press, 1989), 46.

[7] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters, edited by Robert Giroux (London: Pimlico, 1996), 376.