Both these books consider how Dante’s Divine Comedy has been transmitted to and through later readers but they do so in radically different ways. One explores the poem’s influence on a selection of later writers and artists. The other republishes a single, historically important translation which the introduction flags as ‘An American Voice for Dante’. This republication is introduced by a scholarly introduction and accompanied by interpretative illustrations. I’ll look at both books in terms of what I think they can offer non-specialist literary readers, though it’s only fair to say that the republication of Charles S. Singleton’s translation seems … Continue Reading

Baudelaire uses rhyme in strikingly different ways. ‘Spleen’ and ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ can illustrate contrasting ends of one kind of spectrum.

Spleen

Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entière,
De son urne à grands flots verse un froid ténébreux
Aux pâles habitants du voisin cimetière
Et la mortalité sur les faubourgs brumeux.

Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière
Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux;
L’âme d’un vieux poète erre dans la gouttière
Avec la triste voix d’un fantôme frileux.

Le bourdon se lamente, et la bûche enfumée
Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumée
Cependant qu’en un jeu plein de sales parfums,

… Continue Reading

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, … Continue Reading

The only actual verse by C S Lewis that I’ve read is what’s quoted in Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, where it didn’t catch my imagination in the way Ward’s discussion of Lewis’s ideas did. However, I do think of Lewis as essentially a poet, concerned with crystallising states of being or strong emotions in scenes or pictures that live in the timeless present of the lyrical imagination. There are many such moments in the Narnia books, of course – moments which feel as if a strong light of meanings beyond analytical formulation is shining through them. I’m not talking here … Continue Reading

I wish I could remember exactly what Edward Wilson-Lee said on today’s The Verb about the way rhyme worked in Keats’ sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ – something about how by folding ideas together the rhymes created a kind of palimpsest of impressions transcending the movement of time. I thought it was beautifully put and gelled with my own much more inarticulate feelings. It’s the way syntax, metre and rhyme work together in Dante’s Commedia, for example, that make me feel it’s vital to read key cantos in the original, however gropingly dependent on parallel texts you may … Continue Reading

I want to mention apparent allusions that have struck me in two recent poems.

One is in A Bird Called Elaeus, David Constantine’s brilliant book of versions from The Greek Anthology. The first quatrain in his Coda of Anthology-inspired original poems is called ‘Laws of War’:

We too had laws of war: don’t poison wells
Don’t fell the olive trees (they take so long to grow)
Don’t bomb the schools, don’t bomb the hospitals …
Stranger seeking our monument, look around you.

There are actually two apparent allusions here – one to Wren’s epitaph in St Paul’s Cathedral, the other to W B Yeats’ … Continue Reading

Click here for my review of this enchanting book for The London Grip.

David Constantine, A Bird Called Elaeus, Bloodaxe Books, £12.00

There’s a delightful quickness of fantasy in early Yeats. When I was a boy, critics seemed to enjoy disparaging his ‘Celtic twilight’ poems as – I suppose – trivial and escapist. I don’t know if that’s still the case. Carrying Jeffares’ MacMillan paperback selection around with me, I loved intoning those early poems quite as much as the later ones and for the same reason – I gorged on the sheer richness and control of their music in a quite indiscriminate way. Nowadays the solemn drone of the Rose poems has lost its appeal for me. I don’t mean I … Continue Reading

Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar: Selected Poems is a very substantial volume bringing together work from her three collections published in Australia. Its sumptuous production chimes happily with the style of her writing: culturally sophisticated and highly intelligent as she clearly is, it’s above all the seemingly effortless sensuous evocativeness of her work that makes an impression from the beginning. Bloodaxe’s generous spacing and the poet’s fine rhythmic sense allow these impressions to flower in the mind.

‘Exhaustion’, from Aria, the first collection represented here, can illustrate the physicality of Holland-Batt’s writing at the basic level of literal description:

One afternoon … Continue Reading

I’ve been dipping into Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’s All the Sonnets of Shakespeare. As ever, I find this one particularly gripping:

……….How like a winter hath my absence been
……….From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
……….What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
……….What old December’s bareness everywhere!
……….And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time,
……….The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
……….Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
……….Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
……….Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
……….But hope … Continue Reading