POETRY

POETRY

KEEPING THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

‘The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOAD, George Orwell, 1946

 

Democratic socialist, polemicist;

novelist, poet, writer of social

and economic commentary;

Old Etonian, ex-Superintendent

of the Indian Imperial Police,

veteran of the Spanish Civil War;

Sergeant Eric Blair (aka George Orwell)

commanded a Home Guard platoon in London.

 

The platoon – which was known locally

as the ‘Foreign Legion’ because so many

of its members were refugees from

persecution in Nazi Germany

and Tzarist Russia – was one of twelve hundred

volunteer groups of part-timers mustered

nationally to delay and to frustrate

a German invasion long enough

for full-time troops to arrive and deploy.

 

Orwell, rejected from active service

because of his lungs – he would die from TB

ten years later – thought the Home Guard a

peculiarly British institution.

More than two million men being ordered

to keep an Enfield 303 rifle

and ammunition at home suggested

a complacent, almost feudal state of mind.

 

The author of ‘1984’, ‘The Road

to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Decline of the English

Murder’ had a flat in Langford Court,

Abbey Road – some thirty years too soon

to hear the Beatles sing, ‘Love is all you need.’

From the roof of his building he could observe

the fires of the Blitz in the Thames’ docks

and their adjoining terraced streets – and stray bombs

falling quite near him on Lords’ Cricket Ground

and London Zoo in The Regent’s Park,

one of many public spaces owned

by the Crown. History does not record

his being aware that a zebra

and a wild ass and its foal had escaped

during a raid. They were caught in Camden Town,

not very far from the edge of the parkland.

If he had known he might perhaps have made it

some sort of metaphor.

 

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POETRY

THE OLD RAPTURES

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.1K views

‘When on a sudden, “Crickley,” he said. How I started
At that old darling name of home, and turned,
Fell into a torrent of words warm hearted
Till clear above the stars of summer burned
In velvety smooth skies.
We shared memories,
And the old raptures from each other learned.’

CRICKLEY HILL, Ivor Gurney, Lord Derby’s Military Hospital, Warrington, July 1918

 

Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on a Theme

by Thomas Tallis’ was first performed

in 1910 at the Three Choirs Festival,

held annually in the cathedrals

of the three great cities of the Welsh Marches,

Worcester, Hereford and, that year, Gloucester.

 

The composer himself conducted the piece

for double string orchestra. Applause

in church then was unfashionable

so the last long attenuated chord – that

moves from fortissimo to pianissimo,

from slight discord to silent harmony –

hung untroubled in the Nave’s towering air.

 

In the audience were two close friends, sons

of local tradesmen, musically gifted,

articled pupils of the organist –

who had said of the Fantasia, “a queer,

mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea.”

 

Ivor Gurney and Herbert Howells both

became composers, and one a poet.

The friends, so rapt by the music, walked

all night through the city’s gas-lit, summer streets –

north past the Cattle Market’s pens and sheds,

west to the Severn, south to the Docks

and the ship canal, east, as the sun rose,

along the London Road – their young voices

inspired, impervious. Herbert will die

revered in a nursing home, mourning his son.

Ivor will die alone in a madhouse.

 

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POETRY

‘CROSSING THE BROOK’: J.M.W. TURNER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.7K views

In the foreground is the brook, the Tamar

not far from its source, deep woods on either side

and close, almost a canopy of shade.

A young woman has crossed. She is barefoot,

still holds up her skirts as if drying them.

She has turned to a mastiff that has stopped

in mid-stream. Another young woman,

her companion presumably, is resting

on the other bank, next to a white bundle.

Some ten yards or so behind her is a cave.

 

***

 

In the middle-ground is an aqueduct

or viaduct as if this were Provence:

the artist’s invention to draw the eye,

to bridge the canvas, to evoke the mood.

And his vision – for a hundred years later

in Calstock downstream a railway viaduct

was built to trundle ore from the tin mines

down to the navy yards at Devonport.

 

Turner, from his travels in the West Country

at the new century’s start, painted,

in an eighteenth century French style,

this oil of the Tamar Valley in summer.

The painting was exhibited first

the year of the Battle of Waterloo:

a sort of English landscape to celebrate

what was a sort of English victory.

We can almost but not quite see the sea,

and imagine Plymouth, the Sound, and folk

strolling complacently on the Hoe –

the ships of the line, sails furled, at anchor.

 

***

 

The  dog will continue to stand its ground,

woofing for frolics. The exhausted friend

will still silently refuse to move. The barking

and the young woman’s teasing laughter

will echo from the cave.

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POETRY

REFLECTIONS ON BURLESQUE AND CALAMITY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments3 min read2K views

‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’

THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE, Karl Marx

‘If I cut my finger that’s tragedy. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.’

ALL ABOUT ME! Mel Brooks

 

Tragedy shows how, inadvertently,

we may destroy our own lives, as well

as those of others’, through some fatal flaw –

pride, insouciance, self-obsession, fear. Farce,

meanwhile, is the only art form that shows

how so-called inanimate objects,

things-in-themselves, shape human destiny.

 

Consider whether the dumb-show that follows,

set – in an earlier, apparently

less chaotic epoch – on the island

of Ireland, is drama or pantomime.

 

Two young lovers, having consulted

an appropriate almanac, choose

what is forecast to be a moonless night

to elope. Unfortunately two rungs

of the wooden ladder the young woman –

a Catholic –  has brought break and the man –

a young scion of the Protestant

Ascendancy – falls on top of her.

 

Meanwhile the moon appears, and distracts

an old woman passing by – a writer

of bucolic verses occasionally

published in The Lady but an admirer

of narrative verse.  She collides head first

with a lamp post (which the lamplighter

has forgotten to light), and so drops

the banana she has just finished eating,

a comparatively exotic fruit

for the time. The elderly father –

of the putative but prone bridegroom –

learned of the elopement (which is not

now happening the lovers having had,

as it were, almost literally, a falling out)

from an anonymous note at his club.

 

The cab he has taken stops in the street

near the Aberdeen granite gates of his house.

He pays, then runs, but does not see –

clouds having obscured the moon again –

the unconscious poet nor her discarded

banana skin, and, crying out, slips,

cracking open his congenitally

thin skull on the Yorkstone paving.

The old woman regains consciousness,

and, oblivious of the corpse, wanders home,

suffering from partial amnesia.

 

The police discover the young woman’s third

cousin was hanged as a Fenian.

She is arrested and questioned frequently.

She becomes a republican. The young man,

in due course, marries a scioness

of the Ascendancy. They return

from their honeymoon to discover

the house he inherited has been burnt down.

The published poet, reading an account

of some of the events in the Irish Times,

thinks briefly what a grand tale they would make.

 

You may well ask, Dear Reader, what has all this

to do with Hegel, Marx, Louis Bonaparte,

his uncle Napoleon, revolutions,

dialectical materialism,

Melvin Kaminsky aka Mel Brooks

of ‘The Producers’, ‘Young Frankenstein’,

‘Blazing Saddles’, and ‘The Elephant Man’?

In Ancient Greek Tragedy the actor

who played the protagonist, as well as

wearing a mask, wore buskins – thick-soled

laced boots – to give him height.

 

 

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POETRY

FROM AGINCOURT TO MARIUPOL

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

Much of the history of modern Europe,

from Agincourt to Mariupol,

seems to comprise ignorant, arrogant

purportedly Christian armies – some ragged,

most well financed – advancing, retreating,

slaughtering innocents, telling lies,

with brief respites for rearmament,

and victory’s parades and revenges.

 

Even respectable men who should know

better, scholars and poets, politicos

and hacks, pretend to be soldiers, to ‘Hear

the drums of morning play. Hark the empty

highways crying “Who’ll beyond the hills away?”‘

They broadcast the recruiting sergeant’s drum roll –

for volunteers to step up and play

one of humankind’s most ancient games,

border disputes and the massing of troops.

 

The Soviets created the famine

in Ukraine, as the British did in Ireland,

to chasten the natives, remove them.

Such holodomors need not just a Peel,

a Russell, snug in 10 Downing Street,

or a Stalin, secure in the Kremlin –

choosing which omelettes are on the menu,

which eggs, and how many, should be broken –

but hierarchies of aiders and abetters,

dutiful enablers of iniquity.

 

 

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POETRY

THE LITHOGRAPH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

The pandemic was daily news last year,

often from someone’s kitchen or study.

Once, behind a British virologist’s

talking head, was a black and white lithograph

from the same series of a hundred

as one we have: ‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’,

ours bought in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Market –

the May Putin was first crowned – from the artist’s

son, the father an emigré in New York.

 

Uncle Vanya and the Three Sisters

might stray into the etching’s romantic

melancholy, its stillness, its almost

ominous quietude, its imminent

sense of loss – as if the hawser taut

across the quarry in ‘The Cherry Orchard’

were about to snap at any moment.

Through a tangled thicket of leafless birch trees

a stretch of water gleams: beyond, a low rise

with a pale fence, and a wooden dacha small

against an alabaster sky.

 

 

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