To lead and not to rule

I recently came across a couple of books by Clive James - one, an anthology of his favourite poems from various poets with his notes on each poem. Which is almost like a teacher in a book, showing you how to read poems, what to see. Second, his Poetry Notebook. It is a collection of essays, notes, thoughts on poets and poetry. 

One is fortunate to come across certain books, essays, blogposts where people reveal what they respect, look up to. And more so, when it is a poet who talks about poetry he looks up to. Be it Borges in his 'This Craft of Verse', or in this case, Clive James. Anyone, who has read and written a lot, and hence often done that journey inwards to the source of wholeness, wisdom, being and nothing. It kind of makes the day when one comes across notes from these inward journeys!

The way they see things. They inadvertently show us how to see, what to see, they guide our gaze, they show us the path to tread to reach that source which sits inside all of us, and for that, all humble thanks.

*

Here, following from his list of five favorite poetry books. The books as well as various referred poems. A good list to begin a poem-reading journey.

W.B. Yeats, The Tower

It is available at Project Gutenberg here. 

"This has his masterpieces like 'Sailing to Byzantium', 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', 'Leda and the Swan', 'Among School Children', and one of the greatest poems written in twentieth century - 'All Soul's Night'." It can be read here. 

"Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tight / Till meditation master all its parts, / Nothing can stay my glance / Until that glance run in the world’s despite/ To where the damned have howled away their hearts, / And where the blessed dance;"

He also talks about 'every separate collection of Yeats' poems from Responsibilities (1918) onward os tremendous, but The Tower is his favourite'. 

Robert Frost, Collected Poems

"The trick with the Collected Poems is to avoid the longer poems until the shorter ones have taken over your mind. The longer poems have good things in them, but the self-contained showpiece poems give you his essence, and his essence is one you should learn to recognize before watching him distribute over the framework of an extended edifice."

Collected poems can be accessed here on Archive.org. And selected poems is available at Project Gutenberg here. 

Looking for it, also led me to this small collection of American poetry from 1920s, here, a Miscellany.

And here is 'The Silken Tent' as Clive James mentions it in his note:

The Silken Tent

She is as in a field of silken tent

At midday when the sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,

So that in guys it gently sways at ease,

And its supporting central cedar pole,

That is its pinnacle to heavenward

And signifies the sureness of the soul,

Seems to owe naught to any single cord,

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound

By countless silken ties of love and thought

To every thing on earth the compass round,

And only by one's going slightly taut

In the capriciousness of summer air

Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

W. H. Auden, Look, Stranger!

This collection is also known as 'On This Island' in certain countries. He mentions Poem No. IX and Poem No. XXX

One can read Auden poems here at Babelmatrix, and here at Voetica.

All collected poems of Auden here. But perhaps what Clive James iterates in this essay is the beauty of poet's small collections as the poet plans it rather than the overall collected poems.

Poem No. IX is also known as 'Through the looking glass'

And Poem XXX is famously known as 'To a writer on his birthday'. Can be read here. From the poem, the last two stanza:

"So in this hour of crisis and dismay

What better than your strict and adult pen

Can warn us from the colours and the consolations,

The showy arid works, reveal

The squalid shadow of academy and garden,

Make action urgent and its nature clear?

Who give us nearer insight to resist

The expanding fear, the savaging disaster?

This then my birthday wish for you, as now

From the narrow window of my fourth floor room

I smoke into the night, and watch reflections

Stretch in the harbour. In the houses

The little pianos are closed, and a clock strikes.

And all sway forward on the dangerous flood

Of history that never sleeps or dies,

And, held one moment, burns the hand."

Richard Wilbur, Poems 1943-1956

"It contains elements from three of his separate books, The Beautiful Changes, Ceremony and Things of the World. "

"Anthony Hecht's wonderful poem about Japan, would never, I am sure, have been the meticulous miracle that it is if Wilbur hadn't set the standard for a filigree stanza."

He mentions "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarria". Can be read here.

He also mentions another poem, Grace. I found it here on this blog.

Then there is Ceremony.

But ceremony never did conceal,

Save to the silly eye, which all allows,

How much we are the woods we wander in.

Richard Wilbur's collected poems can be found here, but what perhaps Clive James here refers too are earlier poems.

From elsewhere, on Richard Wilbur: 'In his words “It is fatal for a writer to have one hero only; submitting to a single model, admiring but one syntax and lexicon, means that you will say what you do not mean, and that you will never find the right words for what you do mean. A commanding imagination, as many have said before me, steals not from one writer, but selectively from all of writers, taking whatever will help in the articulation of its own sense of things.”'

 “I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy…that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good,” 

Looking up, here's another poem, A Black Birch in Winter, found here on another blog.

"Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth,

New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth,

And this is all their wisdom and their art—

To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart."

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

"There might not, at first blush, seem to be much joy in him: but he gets the whole truth of life's transience into unforgettably beautiful poetry, and it is hard to think of a greater source of joy than that."

The Whitsun Weddings can be read here.

And Collected poems, including, The Whitsun Weddings, High Windows and Aubade can be read here.

Perhaps, worth mentioning a couple of his other poems - Church Going, and The Trees

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

-- 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

(Pretty much a long time project, to get to know these poems and poets!)

**

One can read the whole essay by Clive James here.

And this is Clive James' website for a few more of his writings online. 

Looking up, came across another Clive James archives website, here.