York Elegies

 

This summer I read Joseph Brodskys Roman elegies, a set of poems invoking the minutiae of everyday life and the great shadow of history at the same time. Having been to Rome some time ago I felt the poems resonating with me and it made me think of other places I had visited, places where I had spent as much time as it appeared Joseph Brodsky had spent in Rome. My thoughts naturally fled to York, a city regular readers of this blog will know I have a special place for in my heart. The next course of action was inevitable: I decided to write my own elegies in emulation of Brodsky's, only these were to be set in the heart of Yorkshire rather than the eternal city.

York Elegies

After Joseph Brodsky

I) January

The rain in England is different. By the banks of the Ouse

there are imprints of boots in dried and sun-cracked silt:

some vagrant walked here. It was - perhaps - me,

carefully making sense of a different home

like a mendicant scouting the city's outskirts

before lining up his hospital.

The river is borne away into the twilight

while I have just arrived,

still are we both just passing through

and even in this month of beginnings the end

can be sensed far closer than I should like.

So like the silt-framed footprint will I fade

until devouring time has wiped away

all traces of my visit I had left behind me.

II) February

Vagrants find their homes in the strangest nooks.

So I, the prodigal scholar, have found

my sheltered perch among the pigeons.

Here I share the skyline with these English chimneys

that breathe their carboniferous fogs mingling

with the mists of each and all seasons. Smoke

speaks of Albion's slumber, of giants long receded

from the world's theatrics, content with the quiet moor,

the country life. I, too, am content with little:

the writing desk, the sink, the creaking wardrobe,

the bed and bookshelves begging to be stacked;

this is the detail I find most pleasing.

Here will I make my garrison, and from this outpost

must I conduct my campaigns through the books

only the fool thinks he can conquer. You, O House,

have an emperor's name and your dilapidations

become a bitter metaphor for the fall of too proud men.

III) March

The world seems at an end beyond this precinct.

Engulfed in the sunset's imperial holocaust

the earth's rim fades to ashes and go black,

and I, shielded by the guardian archer's

crenellated vantage point, can almost see

my own conclusion mirrored in the waning light.

Have you ever walked the walls of York at sundown,

seen its ghosts parade in the evening, or with your naked eye

trailed the minute stitches of their tapestry?

The sun requires no more than this:

to have its death lamented by the mirroring Ouse.

Why, then, should I demand a boisterous farewell?

Let me rather like the sun recede into enveloping darkness,

let me wind my way through the world and back

so that when I return I will be greeted

not as a prodigal but as a native, and let me once again

feel the weight of History upon my bones.

IV) April

This city has seen much blood. Here kings and queens

with royal cunning placed their sigils in the stone

to the dirge of wailing women and the crackling flame.

O heart of the harried north: what tears you may have left

spare them for the years to come: History

has not yet run its course. Once this was warrior country,

then longboats were replaced by the merchant's cogs

that brought about an empire in their golden wake.

I have no stomach for the trader's tricks, the drawn sword

or the government's orderly cartography

dividing the terrain like a knife does a hog's shank.

I much prefer the brick-walled lanes,

the domestic nooks that are Albion's heartland:

weather-beaten, plain and half-forlorn

save by the pigeon's armies. Rather than famous

battlefields I find a pleasure roaming these homely streets

and observe from a safe and objective distance

the ubiquitous ivy's recalcitrant advance.

V) May

This is a city of books. The various and time-worn

stones and bricks are pages of the city's history,

and this makes churches, walls and houses tomes

composed in a language different yet somehow quite familiar.

Select, then, a volume from this library, peruse its chapters,

illuminations, marginalia; read in the churches and gates

a history we try to be a part of. Famed men have

by their quills and pens put York to paper:

Bede, Alcuin, Auden, Joseph Brodsky.

Yet York has not been written by scribes or scholars,

but by the master mason, the architect, the carpenter,

the glazier who bound these books by their own

enduring crafts, lined on the earth's bleached parchment

the margins with their instruments, prepared the churches' quires

and stacked the streets with chronicles, shelving

the houses according to an old, time-honoured system

like librarians part serious, part playful.

 
VI) June

Can one mourn what one has not possessed?
Yes: like the eye mourns the horizons it has not seen

or the mind the books unread, so do I mourn

that I have not yet known the City of York

as it appears in June, attired for the first of summer's masques.

June, the epoch of the daffodils guarding Clifford's Tower

like sentries superannuated by the whims of time,

the epoch of strangers and vagrants,

roaming about the streets like ghosts or gods

exiled from a long-lost fabled country

so distant and so different from ours,

the epoch of sun and tired sundays broken only

by the chime of minster bells, summoning

the faithful and the faithless by the same forsaking ting.

 
VI) July

Speak not to me of love, for it has lost its touch

by taking too many forms; for precision

speak rather of longing and that aching absence

July demands from the homebound exile. Sighs

are the prodigal's tithe and all must pay.
I did not at first believe mere stone could command

such obedience, yet here I am - a wandering man -

remembering the churches, the walls, the scattered spolia

that frames the gardens and keeps the flowers at bay

in almost-monastic discipline. These were all framed by love

and in the end torn down by a different love,

a worldy love of kingship and inheritance that

plows the potter's ground. By that act it seemed

the age-old war was over, the mundane sword

cleaving the sacred stone claimed monarchy supreme,

blasphemed the mason's craft and outlawed monastic houses

for the sake of a coppiced kingdom frail in its burgeoning.

 
VIII) August

Like a road redundant yields to the willow herb,

the dandelions and the tall grass so I,

a native stranger, consider a year too long

and yield to the gnawing urges,

packing my bags and go down the westward road.

Albion rises in the mind's horizon

pressing heavenward with its spired, craggy bulk,

green-coated, wind-harrowed, arching

as in pain under the weight of its past.

And there, there is Albion's jewel:

heart of the Northern reaches,

chiming its sundry bells to a song I know.

There they received their freedom, there

they performed their plays in honour of God

and Christ, and the Holy Spirit:

Barkers, carpenters, mercers, men of all trades,

Coaxing me thither with a song of the heart-stringed lute.

So I come, heeding its beckoning whisper

Like a vagrant gyrfalcon the pipe of its falconer.

 
IX) September

Darkness is easily endured with good friends.

We make our way through evening and the air

is still, clear and the light of lamps

hints at the city's outline in the quietness.

Once light was scarce and the world wild,

the wanderer was prey to the mighty beasts

who ruled the wood of Galtres and craved tallage

in flesh of men and women. Lest a guiding flare

ablaze in the lantern of St. Helen's Church

would lead them to salvation, the children of men

might fall as sheep for wolves whose haughty sermons

pander to nothing at all but their maw's faith.

The wood is long since gone, the light remains

and even in the labyrinth of lamp-posts

the lantern shines so meekly and yet and so bright

it still may lead the wayward through the world's maze.

 
X) October

Rot is October's fragrance: decaying, brittle leaves

gather in clusters by the iron fences,

in glutted ditches, ponds of no man's dominion

and sweetly ooze through the suburbs

on the road to Micklegate Bar as once did

the spiked heads of traitors on the gate's front.

I am a traitor too: my affair with the English tongue,

old and long-standing, has proved far more than a fling.

Rot is a poignant metaphor for a human thing:

Loyalty; houses; flesh; identity.

There is a gentler scent suffused in the pubs and

the rented rooms, of oak and fungi,

beer and decomposing wood, like frail lives

growing musty in the hands of History

to fall as oblivious vestiges into marginal notes.

This is the place I love: My Albion is crumbling at the edges

and curls as a dying leaf in October days.

Such was the first encounter;

it will not do to go separate ways.

XI) November

From this point men can rule a world:

lords of the spiritual North with pious pomp

wielded their sceptred croziers

in the face of kings to have the world's sword

tarnished. Atop St. Peter's minster a priest,

guarded by grinning gargoyles

and xiphoid spires piercing the firmament,

may feel removed from the secular stain. Below

archbishops steeped themselves in the ways of flesh,

to fight or to be fought with in their chosen manner,

dying as rich men or as God's minstrels.

This is a nest of stone, a phoenix's nest

that burns and rises at quaint intervals,

making the mason mourn his lost handiwork

and weep like an angel. Sing, then, a dirge for

what Earth has lost, for King Edwin's minster,

the glazier's vitrified blood, the weather-worn woodwose

and men who abandoned their faith for the sword's work.

 
XII) December

I write this in August imagining a white world.

I hope one day to discover how the snow descends

upon these fractured ruins: history's great slumber

haunted by dreams of blood and martyrdom,

rigid justice, blank eyes staring hostless

from an iron spike. In that time

the frost will forge its finest filigree

formed like fossilised ferns on the city's flagstones,

memorials of time immemorial honouring

the earth-evicted ammonite, the raptor,

the trilobite class-caged and far removed from

primordial seas. Once this was wild country,

left to the reign of beasts, to fangs and claws.

Time has worn away that wild country,

what remains holds little semblance

while wild and tamed alike lie heavily

sleeping, white-capped and covered

waiting for sun and spring.

- June - August 2012



Notes

January

"while I have just arrived" - I arrived in York January 07 2011 ready to begin my studies at the University of York. The pictures from January are among the first I took.

February

(...) my sheltered perch - I lived on the upper floor in Constantine House and I was frequently bothered by nesting pigeons.

(...) of giants long receded - a nod to William Blake's The Emanation of the Giant Albion and a reference to York's significantly diminished importance in England's political life compared to its Medieval days.

(...) an emperor's name - the house being named after Emperor Constantine who was reportedly born in York.

March

my own conclusion - I left York 30 March 2011.

April

(...) their sigils in the stone - In the Middle Ages York was the nexus of the English king's northern politics and sometimes a thorn in the side. William the Conqueror and Henry VIII both wrought havoc on the city due to its reticence in accepting the former's accession to the throne and the latter's reformation. Other royals as well have made their mark upon York. John granted the city its liberties in 1212, Henry III refurbished the royal residence now known as Clifford's tower, Richard III established the council of the north and had his son invested as Prince of Wales here in 1483.

(...) the harried north - The Harrowing of the North was William the Conqueror's response to northern dismissal of his claim to the English throne.

then longboats were replaced - York grew to be an important mercantile centre in the Middle Ages and had ties to several European ports.

May

by their quills and pen - Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People is an important source to York's early Medieval history. York native Alcuin wrote a poem about York as did Joseph Brodsky. Auden's inclusion is primarily due to him, too, being a native of the city, hence fastening the city to paper by biographical circumstance.

July

for the sake of a coppiced kingdom - Henry VIII's divorce from the Roman Church came about primarily due to his need of a son to sustain the newly-established Tudor dynasty. St. Mary's Abbey was torn down in the 1540s.

August

there they received their freedom - John's charter of 1212 granted the city its liberties, a charter he issued to raise money for his military troubles in northern France. The octocentennial for this historical milestone is being celebrated this year.

they performed their plays - the York Mystery Plays started up in the 14th century and is one of the most important and formative cycles of mystery plays in Medieval England. The plays were discontinued in the 16th century as a part of the reformation, but started up again in the 1950s.

Barkers, carpenters, mercers - each play was performed and arranged by one of the guilds of the city. The barkers prepared hides for leather manufacture and were responsible for the The Fall of the Angels. The carpenters were responsible for The Resurrection, while the merces arranged The Last Judgement.

September

Darkness is easily endured - this entire stanza revolves around an evening out with friends in September 2011 when I was visiting my friends and former flatmates in York.

(...) Lest a guiding flare - St. Helen's Church is one of at least three churches in York whose spires are shaped like lanterns designed to guide people through darkness in a world before streetlamps. The wood of Galtres is no longer extant but it was once infested with wolves and a considerable obstacle for travellers.

(...) wolves whose haughty sermons - a reference to Archbishop Wulfstan of York's (d.1023) Sermo lupi ad anglos, a sermon admonishing Englishmen for their sins and claiming the Vikings as their just punishment from God.

October

Rot is October's fragrance - this stanza revolves around my first trip to York back in October 2009 and I remember very distinctly the smell of England.

the spiked heads of traitors - Micklegate Bar was the main gate of York in the Middle Ages and also where beheaded traitors were put on display as a warning to the people.

November

archbishops steeped themselves - Archbishops were among the most important political figures in the Middle Ages and the heart of the religious life in the North and consequently were very much engaged in secular matters, either in opposition or as partakers in the mundane affairs.

(...) a phoenix's nest - York Minster has been subject to fire and refurbishings throughout the centuries. The last fire was in 1984 and, as all Medieval cathedrals, it is perennially undergoing renovation. I owe this particular image to the tv series Pillars of the Earth based on Ken Follett's novel.

King Edwin's minster - St. Peter's minster was erected for the baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria in 627. This was a major step in the christianisation of England.

December

(...) class-caged and far removed - a nod to Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species where Darwin rhetorically asks whether the beautiful ammonites were created so that men could put them behind glass.

haunted by dreams of blood and martyrdom - In the time following England's turn away from Catholicism York saw several martyrs of the old faith, most famously Margaret Clitherow.

formed like fossilised ferns - I have seen the frost make very fern-like patterns on the flagstone in York Exhibition Square in January.

City of Books, part III - Same Procedure as Every Year

those who love knowledge are like people afflicted with dropsy who, the more they drink the more they burn with thirst

- Retribution, Liutprand of Cremona (translated by Paolo Squatriti)

The first time I visited York was in October 2009 and I explored the city's bookshops with such diligence that I left the city with 18 books and 2 booklets in my luggage. Since then I have visited the city three times and each time I have rummaged through the bookshops and seldom left any of them empty-handed. In the spring of 2011 - when I studied at the University of York - I had to ship a number of packages in the mail because in those three months I had acquired far too many books for me to bring back in my suitcase. When I revisited my friends and flatmates in September that year I was almost forced to repeat my modus operandi on my departure due to the several books purchased only in the course of one week.

Earlier in August I visited York again, but this time around I tried my very best not to buy too many books. My sojourn in York was a conclusion of the summer holidays and I was leaving directly for the university, meaning I had too much luggage to allow myself any great acquisition of printed material. As a consequence I deliberately avoided bookshops for a couple of days, trying my best not to get sucked into their wonderful worlds of shelves, stacks, walls and windows filled with that greatest of all human things: books. However, I have never been particularly good at suppressing my true nature for very long and in the end I decided to casually pass by Minstergate Bookshop to see if there were any interesting books placed on the discount shelves outside. This was of course a mistake. Well, actually not, because there were some really captivating titles on display. I stopped, picked up two books, went inside, skimmed the first bookshelf by the door and found another title I picked up as well. The whole thing can not have taken more than about five minutes.

I returned to the Minstergate Bookshop once more during my stay and bought two books more, but on the whole I remained faithful to my original intent. I stayed away from Fossgate books, for instance, knowing I would only take with me more than I could possibly afford at that juncture. This is not to say, however, that I stopped there. I did also visit a charity shop on Goodramgate, the giftshop of York Minster and that of Yorkshire Museum, but compared to my previous trips the catch was rather meagre. This was, however, no great sorrow, for being a bibliophile is not just about collecting books or building your own private library. Being a bibliophile also means you walk by bookshelves, stop, pick a title or two, glance at this greatest of manifests of human creativity and feel awestruck by what that particular book represents. Sometimes you catch a line that makes you buy that book, sometimes you find a line to carry with you, but you leave the book, sometimes you just read the titles, sometimes you remember books you've already read. Being a bibliophile does not mean being materialistic in one's approach, but I would lie if I did not admit it can sometimes be very, very hard not to bring a book home, promising by that act to one day read it, enjoy it and reflect upon its content. Being a bibliophile is, in other words, quite like Liutprand of Cremona's description of those who seek wisdom, for if you first start reading there really is no end to it.

Being a bibliophile also means to interact with fellow bibliophiles, and for this reason I present to you what I purchased during my most recent trip to York.

From Minstergate bookshop

From Amnesty Charity Shop, Goodramgate

From Yorkshire Museum giftshop

From York Minster giftshop

For more about books in York, see my blogpost on York National Bookfair and assorted bookshops in York

A place where I used to live

Now in another town
You lead another life

- A place where we used to live, Mark Knopfler

This August I returned to York to visit friends, walk the city, buy books and reminisce. It was almost one year since last time I had been there and about a year and a half since I concluded my studies there. Even though I lived in York for a space of three months only I became very attached to the place, an attachment due both to the atmosphere of the city and - perhaps chiefly - the good friends I made during my stay there.

During my two previous sojourns in York I had resided in Constantine House, a Grade-II-listed accommodation run by the University of York in St Mary's, a street branching into Bootham. It was here I had met and made friends with my fellow residents, it was here I had experienced some of my fondest memories from my days in York and it was here I became a Constantine, a part of a community comprised of people I deeply respect and whose company I enjoyed. We had bonded over mutual interests, a common place of residence and an evolving animosity towards the accommodation office in their arrogant treatment of the students.

This time around, however, I had to seek my lodgings elsewhere. I no longer knew anyone at Constantine House, a new generation of students had occupied the precinct and I was estranged from a house once the hub of my student days. However, since I am a nostalgic character I found it hard to accept this loss and one day I was strolling through the Yorkshire Museum gardens I made my way through Marygate Lane and walked past Constantine House to remember and to once again see the place that still means quite a lot to me.

Everything is gone
But my heart is hanging on 

-  A place where we used to live, Mark Knopfler

Piers Plowman

(...) til I gan awake

- The Vision of Piers Plowman, William Langland

Last week I finished reading The Vision of Piers Plowman, a 14th-century unrhymed alliterative poem in Middle English, written by a cleric of minor orders, William Langland (c.1330-c.1386), of whom little is known beyond his Worcestershire provenance and his career as a London psalter-clerk. The poem exists in four versions, Z, A, B and C, written within the timeframe c.1365-c.1386, although the authenticity of Z is still a matter of contention. It was Walter Skeat who gave the poem its title in the late 1800s while working on what came to be its standard edition for about a century, a task that took about 20 years to complete. The revision of the B text was conducted by A. V. C. Schmidt.

 
I no longer remember how I came to learn about Piers Plowman, but I suspect it was during a course on the Late Middle Ages in the spring of 2009 and the work caught my interest fairly quickly. Shortly afterwards I ordered the Oxford World Classics edition, but became repulsed when I discovered this was a Modern English prose rendition. Fortunately I came upon the Everyman edition by chance during my first visit to York the autumn of that year. It did, however, take me quite a while to find time for the read itself, and after years of waiting, aborted beginnings and other preoccupations I finished the prologue one day I was waiting for my supervisor to get back to me on a thesis draft. By that time I had taken a course in Middle English romance at the University of York and thus become better acquainted with the language, and I believe this gave me the courage I so far had lacked to undertake the enterprise.

The Vision of Piers Plowman. or Piers Plowman for short, is a magnificent and challenging read. The narrator of the poem speaks of himself accordingly: "'I have lyved in londe,' quod I, 'my name is Longe Wille.'" and through a succession of dreams he conducts a search for the elusive Piers Plowman and the figures Dowel, Dobet and Dobest who will lead the Christians away from their irreligion and to the true Christian Church. This dreamwalk (and here be spoilers) brings Longe Wille to a wide range of allegories depicting his contemporary England, Biblical episodes, virtues and vices in a manner that spoke to the common man and highborn alike through a range of similes and a vocabulary echoing the life a 14th-century Englishman was familiar with. Christ is spoken of in chivalric terms who is jousting in Jerusalem to die on the rood, the titular character, Piers Plowman, is Simon Peter, the head of the true Church, Unitee, while Dowel, Dobet and Dobest are personifications signifying the three stages of Christ's life on earth, Dobest being his ultimate sacrifice on the cross. These things are not properly revealed until passus XIX and from the Prologue onwards the reader is kept in the dark as to the true nature of these particular allegories. I found this quest surprisingly suspenseful, despite the fact that the intervals between each time they are mentioned are both tangential and prolix, but William Langland - the author, as distinguished from Longe Wille the narrator - masterfully makes their names pop up with sufficient frequency to keep the reader alert to the true goal of his protagonist.

The poem is first of all an exploration of and an elegy over how Christians have failed to follow the teachings of Christ, and how mankind is punished for their sundry sins. William Langland is adamant that the plagues and dearths of the 14th century owed their occurrences to the wickedness of mankind, and he is equally adamant that the chief cause of these failings are the haughty clergy - more preoccupied with philosophy than pastoral work - and the shortcomings of the king and his advisors. It is stated that the most true Christians are the plowmen, the shepherds and the common labourers who conduct their business faithfully and do not sink into vice. However, although the author (and narrator, no distinction between them are needed on this level) are eager to have the Church and society undergo a reform, they do not want to abolish the institutions. The king is a necessity, it is stated, whose absence would be catastrophic. Similarly the forces of true Christianity - Conscience, Contricion and Cardynale Vertues to name just a few - are not bent on destroying the Church but to replace it with the true Holy Church, that of Unitee, a place where all Christians should unite. This is made especially clear in the concluding episode - passus XX - where the various Christian personifications are fighting against the forces of Antichrist led by Coveitise besieging the Church of Unitee. At this juncture Coveitise and his ally Symonye have already chased Good Feith flee from the halls of Westminster, illustrating the state of the secular rulership very poignantly. The state of the clergy proves equally detrimental for at the height of battle Conscience calls:

'Help, Clergie, or ellis I falle

Thorugh inparfite preestes and prelates of holy Chirche!'

Freres herden hym crye, and comen hym to helpe -

Ac for thei kouthe noght wel hir craft, Conscience forsook hem.

- Passus XX, lines 228-31

In other words not even the monks who followed Conscience into the newly established Unitee are sufficiently schooled in the craft of Christian love, the craft Conscience asks for in this passage. Inevitably Unitee falls, a fall brought about by Frere Flaterere (Flattery) who in the guise of a surgeon is allowed into the church to help Contricion who is badly wounded. This illustrates perfectly how the medieval mind perceived the role of the clergy: as spiritual doctors. Frere Flaterere, however, proves to be a bad doctor and fails - deliberately - in his task. After the fall of Unitee Conscience goes wide in the world in search of Piers Plowman and then Longe Wille wakes up.

From the 14th-century Luttrell psalter.

William Langland has in this poem created a very powerful social and religious critique whose allegories are deeply human and whose narrator is painfully aware of the human condition. Towards the end of the poem, after Longe Wille wakes up from one of his dreams, he describes how he is troubled with gout and impotence, and how aging afflicts him after the personification of old age - Elde - has ridden over his skull and left its imprint in the waning of his hair:

And Elde anoon after hym, and over myn heed yede,

And made me balled bifore and bare on the croune:
So harde he yede over myn heed it wole be sene evere.

- Passus XX, lines 183-85

Although aware of human frailty William is also concerned with mankind as a being wrought by a divine Creator:

For be a man fair or foul, it falleth noght for to lakke

The shap ne the shaft that God shoop hymselve

-Passus XI, lines 394-95

For man was maad of swich a matere he may noght wel asterte [escape]

-Passus XI, line 400

Mankind's divine provenance makes it holy, but this also calls for humility. "Although men made bokes, God was the maister" (Passus XII, line 101) William states and it is in part lack of such humility that has caused the current detrimental state, that and the workings of poorly schooled priests:

Right so out of Holy Chirche alle yveles spredeth

There inparfit preesthode is, prechours and techeris.

- Passus XV, lines 92-95

or:

Grammer, the ground of al, bigileth now childre:
For is noon of thise newe clerkes - whoso nymeth hede -

That kan versifie faire ne formaliche enditen,

Ne naught oon among an hundred that an auctor can construwe,

Ne rede a lettre in any language but in Latyn or in Englissh.

- Passus XV, lines 371-75

Piers Plowman is, in sum, a powerful call for reform of a failing and dilapidated society. This struck a chord in William Langland's contemporaneity as can be witnessed by a letter from John Ball, a leading figure in the 1381 rebellion, to the peasants of Essex, in which he alluded to the figure of Piers Plowman. The poem was very popular and has survived in more than sixty manuscripts. It is tempting to say that this popularity can be ascribed to Langland's message being very apt for his time and succeeding times, but this is conjecture on my part. For any medievalist and any Christian this text is a fascinating window into ages past and a thought-provoking search to the original state of Christianity, presented with a timeless vitriol and occasional humour. It may not cause an awakening - and should perhaps not either - but it is well worth the time spent reading.

A place of one's own

A little lowly Hermitage it was
Downe in a dale, hard by a forests side,
- The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser

A short while back I read an article in the Huffington post about the retreats of famous writers and I was thrilled to see a selection of the various nooks and cells to which people repaired for the sake of literary production. I have myself for quite some time been fascinated by the idea of leaving the world and humanity behind for a brief space of time and dedicate oneself to the task of writing, thinking and reading.

Since I am currently overdue on my MA thesis I needed to do some editing this summer. This can be very difficult to get done when there are duties to take into consideration at home, when your days are not entirely your own and when things move a bit too fast when they shouldn't move fast at all. Consequently I took two Sundays off, installed myself in my late paternal grandparents' house and brought with me food and other material I needed for the work.

I established my tryst by the window in my boyhood room and placed my books within reach, put the kettle (or rather a pan with water in it) on in the kitchen and started working. It was delightful to get back to my thesis after weeks of non-academic labour and I found an immense serenity in the task, letting the hours pass by only to break my work flow whenever tea or food was needed.

Late in the evening of the first Sunday I finished after I had edited the second and third chapters, leaving the fourth and fifth to the next day when I realised I was no longer paying proper attention to my own words. The rest of the evening was spent reading Joseph Brodsky's Rome Elegies while dabbling a bit with poetry of my own while listening to a deluge hammering down at the world outside.

The next session was this Sunday and lasted only the afternoon since the task at hand was less daunting and I had already managed to get some of it done earlier in the day. Again I found my room to be a perfect anchorite cell for this purpose, and I found the house very well situated for a writer at work since I could - when needed - step out on the verandah and stare idly at the water, smell the summer and observe my native community at a small distance.

When today's alloted load was done I retreated to my bed briefly and relaxed with the words of Pablo Neruda. I always find poetry to be a good diversion after time spent reading things demanding more focus and there is a particular joy in reading 20th century verse in a house where the 20th century still lingers in every wall and corner, and where nostalgia makes it easier to absorb the sense of longing one so often find in poets of that period.

In response to Titian

The London National Gallery is currently housing an exhibition called MetamorphosisTitian 2012, launched this very day (July 11) and celebrating the 16th-century Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio known by his nicknames Belluno or, more famously, Titian (1488/90-1576). The exhibition features commissioned works by contemporary artists and poets responding to three of Titian's paintings after Ovid's Metamorphoses, three paintings that occupy the exhibition's centrestage. Being an admirer of Titian's work myself I became very enthusiastic to learn about this and I have just begun to immerse myself in the project, which is a part of the Cultural Olympiad's London 2012 Festival and features poets like Simon Armitage, George Szirtes, Frances Leviston and numerous others. Personally I was most excited by the inclusion of Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney, whose chilling poem "Actaeon" can be heard here.

Inspired by this exhibition I decided to put up one of my own responses to one of Titian's works, albeit a paiting very different from the dramatic and mythological illustrations of Ovid's poetry. The work in question is the famous Venus of Urbino from 1538, commissioned two years earlier by the duke of Urbino, Guidobaldo della Rovere.

Venus Couchant

After Titian's Venus of Urbino

I notice how she eyed you from the start,

Her playful eyes fast fixed in your direction,

But this you noticed only for the art,

It was included merely for perfection;
You just percieved her looks, not her affection.

Imagine then, Belluno, for a girl

Of her estate to show herself like this,

For one short while the centre of your world

Beholding how you worked, then think: "this is

A handsome man, oh would he dared to kiss!"

And you? You eyed her maidens and her house,

Her little lapdog sleeping on the bed;
Perhaps this negligence was what aroused

Her smile and that coy tilting of the head,

While you were painting furniture instead.

Perchance she thought that you were such a man

Her maids would whisper of in nightly hours,

A man to kiss her lips and take her hand

And lead her to a dark secluded tower

Or let some fragrant grove serve as a bower.

She would not know the full depths of her dream,

Her being only young and innocent,

Almost a child, not more than seventeen,

Yet with a stare so yearning, reverent

Which your stern silence seemed but to augment.

And so she blushed, ah, yes, you caught that, too,

Yet failed to see her passion was that strong;
You were the world to her, Belluno, you,

A man of fifty years and her so young;
You noticed but her tresses, how they hung.

She loved you, dear Belluno, verily,

She loved you for your movements and your grace,

She studied both, you see, quite avidly

And mapped your features with her dreaming gaze,

So dreaming she might conjure up your face.

These were her thoughts, you see them plainly there

Made manifest in blushes and her eyes;
To all but you, of course, they seem so clear,

But you did never heed them, and likewise

Will never she heed any husband's eyes.

- November 01-02 2010

Reading Jane Griffiths - Part I

A couple of months back I decided to explore the works of female poets, having realised that the vast majority of poets in my library are men. This led me to the works of Jane Griffiths, a poet born in 1970 and perhaps most famous for her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and Poetic Authority. I purchased her first collection, A Grip on Thin Air, and read it with great anticipation after I had browsed through the tantalising titles in the index. I realised, from the titles alone, that Jane Griffiths is the sort of poet I very much want to like and admire. After having read her first collection, however, I could not make up my mind what I thought of her poetry and I decided to dedicate two blogpost to how I read Jane Griffiths so as to elucidate the matter for myself. I have decided to make this an opus germinatum, a twin-work with a prose component and a poetic component, in the manner of Sedulius Scotus and Aldhelm of Malmesbury. This blogpost is the poetic part and it treats my reaction to A Grip on Thin Air. The poem is not exhaustive in this regard, it does not explore all the motley particulars of my reaction to this collection, but it sums up the general idea. Once I have read her second collection, Icarus on Earth, I will compose the prose part.

Middle-Worlds

For Jane Griffiths

He, when thinking of her poetry, imagines fields

that playfully stretch towards the horizon,

the artificially divided landscapes

and skylines begging travellers to play catch.

He imagines the middle-worlds of airports

whose transient inhabitants are reduced

to numbers and last names, whose faces

are by the edifice made faceless, mute and blank.

He imagines the kingdoms that the airports make:

realms of their own reality whose strange laws

dictate their own geography and claim

that Schiphol is not really a part of Holland.

He imagines the armadas of aeroplanes,

quaint homeless things on whom they all depend:

the kingdoms and their rulers and their denizens

whose gyrovague existences come and go.

He imagines the sun through windows. Behind glass

the sun reflects in metals and the fleeting clouds

and sometimes, almost taunting, can be seen

singeing the horizon in its constant calm.

He imagines this and more of these conjured kingdoms

when her versed pages pass beneath his gaze,

perfunctorily and well beyond his scrutiny,

drifting but leaving imprinted memories.

- May 27 2012