Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

A Girl

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast -
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child – so high – you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

–Ezra Pound

Return

In your current is the laughter of the gods,
Saronica immortal, the blessing of our ship,
like your deep calm, and just as deep the tempest
we’d have heard here.

Beneath the hoar-frost, body damply torpid,
the dove that’s Athens shivers,
is enraptured, and awaits the distant sunrise
like a bride.

Where the clouds clear, there the sky is Pegasus’ flank,
as fair as the fate of the Parthenon;
Zeus inverts a glass to spill the
flood of dreamlight.

Prodigal, I arrive a child again to you, to bend
before the breeze just like a flower;
earth, sky, and sea of Attica, to you I’ll always
owe the Song!

Kostas Karyotakis
30 October 1896 – 20 July 1928

Photo DTH

Ancient Music

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm.
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.

Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.

Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

—

A little seasonal verse from Ezra Pound, born this day in 1885

The Albatross

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners’ hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?”—With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.

Illustration by Gustave Doré, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834)

To Autumn – MS

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The Companions in Hades

fools, who ate the cattle of Helios Hyperion;
but he deprived them of the day of their return.
— Odyssey

Since we still had some hardtack
how stupid of us
to go ashore and eat
the Sun’s slow cattle,

for each was a castle
you’d have to battle
forty years, till you’d become
a hero and a star!

On the earth’s back we hungered,
but when we’d eaten well
we fell to these lower regions
mindless and satisfied.

Tyrant as Poet

Stalin’s early verses explain his obsessional, destructive interest in literature as dictator as well as his reverence for — and jealousy of — brilliant poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak. The words and influence of this ‘Kremlin crag-dweller’ and ‘peasant-slayer’ on literature were, as Mandelstam wrote in his famously scabrous poem denouncing Stalin, ‘leaden’, his ‘fat fingers…greasy as maggots’. But, ironically, the swaggering brute rightly notorious for his oafish philistinism concealed a classically educated man of letters with surprising knowledge. Stalin never ceased caring about poetry. Mandelstam was right when he said, ‘In Russia, poetry is really valued, here they kill for it.’

The ex-romantic poet despised and destroyed modernism but promoted his distorted version of Romanticism, Socialist Realism. He knew Nekrasov and Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could recite Walt Whitman. He talked endlessly about the Georgian poets of his childhood, and he himself helped edit a Russian translation of Rustaveli’s Knight in the Panther Skin, delicately translating some of the couplets himself and asking modestly: ‘Will they do?’

Stalin respected artistic talent, generally preferring to kill Party hacks instead of brilliant poets. Hence on Mandelstam’s arrest Stalin ordered, ‘Isolate but preserve.’ He would preserve most of his geniuses, such as Shostakovich, Bulgakov and Eisenstein, sometimes telephoning and encouraging them, at other times denouncing and impoverishing them. When he called Pasternak in one of his telephonic lightning-strikes from Olympus, he asked about Mandelstam: ‘He’s a genius, isn’t he?’ Mandelstam’s tragedy was sealed not only by his suicidal decision to mock Stalin in verse — the medium of the dictator’s own childhood dreams — but also by Pasternak’s failure to assert that his colleague was indeed a genius. Mandelstam was not sentenced to death, but nor was he preserved, perishing on the dystopian road to Gulag hell. But Stalin did preserve Pasternak: ‘Leave that cloud-dweller in peace.’

–From Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Thalero

Glowing, festive, warm, the moon looked down
            over the vineyards
while the sun still scorched the bushes, setting
            in total stillness.

The heavy grass up on the windless height sweated
            its pungent sap,
and among the new-leaved vines that climbed
            the terraced slope

the buntings fluttered and called, the robins
            hovered on the banks,
and the heat spread a fine filmy veil across
            the moon’s face.

On the path between the wheat fields three oxen,
            one behind the other,
ascended the mountain slope, their pendant
            dewlaps swaying.

The slender hound, his muzzle to the earth
            in the quiet evening,
leaped from rock to rock, searching
            for my tracks.

And at the house ahead, beneath the unripe vine,
            a ready table
waited for me, a lamp hung out in front of it –
            the evening star.

Then the master’s daughter brought me honeycomb,
            cold water, country bread;
her strength had engraved around her rock-like throat
            a circle like a dove’s ring;

and her look, like the evening light, disclosed virginity’s
            lucid flame,
and through the tight dress that covered her virginal breasts
            the nipples stood out boldly.

Her hair was plaited in two braids
            above her forehead –
braids like the cables of a ship, too thick
            for my hand’s grip.

The dog, exhausted now from the steep footpaths,
            stood there panting,
and, motionless, stared into my eyes,
            waiting for a crust.

There, as I heard the nightingale and ate fruit
            from the dish in front of me,
I had the taste of wheat, of song and honey
            deep on the palate.

As in a glass hive my soul moved inside me,
            a joyful bee-swarm
that, secretly increasing, seeks to release into the trees
            its grapelike cluster.

And I felt the earth was crystal beneath my feet,
            the soil transparent,
for the strong and peaceful bodies of ancient plane trees
            rose up around me.

There the old wine was opened for me, smelling rich
            in the oaken jar,
as mountain scents when the cool night dew falls
            on the bushes.

Glowing, festive, warm, there my heart consented
            to repose for a while
in sheets made fragrant by herbs, azure
            by washing blue.

–Angelos Sikelianos, trans. Keeley and Sherrard