Poems For Whitsun

      Today is Whitsun (aka Pentecost) and it seems worthwhile to post a few pieces for the day. The first poem, an old favourite, was sent to me by RK, replete with stressmarks, and these appropriate instructions:

So here is the most glorious -- absolutely glorious -- poem I know for the occasion, to be read aloud with Dylan-Thomas-like POWER and Anglo-Saxon emphasis, and utter conviction (stress=ictus=passion, the passion of the English tongue, tongue, tongue).

For some reason, I put my own tongue intro traction trying to recite Hopkins and always seem to fall short; for an equally inexplicable reason, I always hear Richard Burton's voice (in full Equus mode) when I read this poem in silence; the latter is certainly better. Hopkins' self-described "sprung rhythm" has more in common with Old and early Middle English poetry than it does with just about anything written since those times. I dare all of you to try to recite it. It's trickier than it looks.

God's Grandeur

The wórld is chárged with the grándeur of Gód.
   It will fláme óut, like shíning from shóok fóil;
   It gáthers to a gréatness, like the óoze of óil
Crúshed. Why do mén then nów not réck his ród?
Generátions have tród, have tród, have tród;
   And áll is séared with tráde; bléared, sméared with tóil;
   And wéars man's smúdge and sháres man's sméll: the sóil
Is báre now, nor can fóot féel, being shód.

And for áll thís, náture is néver spént;
   There líves the déarest fréshness déep dówn thíngs;
And though the lást líghts óff the bláck Wést wént
   Oh, mórning, at the brówn brínk éastward, spríngs-
Because the Hóly Ghóst óver the bént
   Wórld bróods with wárm bréast and with áh! bríght wíngs.

--- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)

The Whitsun Weddings

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
      Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
      For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn't notice what a noise
      The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
      Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
      Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
      The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
      I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And
someone running up to bowl - and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
      Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

--- Philip Larkin (1964)

Whitsun

This is not what I meant:
Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows,
Bald eyes or petrified eggs,
Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets,
Lard-pale, sipping the thin
Air like a medicine.

The stopped horse on his chromium pole
Stares through us; his hooves chew the breeze.
Your shirt of crisp linen
Bloats like a spinnaker. Hat brims
Deflect the watery dazzle; the people idle
As if in hospital.

I can smell the salt, all right.
At our feet, the weed-mustachioed sea
Exhibits its glaucous silks,
Bowing and truckling like an old-school oriental.
You're no happier than I about it.
A policeman points out a vacant cliff

Green as a pool table, where cabbage butterflies
Peel off to sea as gulls do,
And we picnic in the death-stench of a hawthorn.
The waves pulse like hearts.
Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie
Sea-sick and fever-dry.

--- Sylvia Plath (1961)

The Larkin and the Plath poems are certainly less celebratory by nature, but they're good poems on their own. The phrase "spumy blooms" is worth adding to your everyday vocabulary, especially if you're a beer drinker. ;-) The invocation of "the death-stench of a hawthorn" might need some explanation, for which you can check here (see near the bottom of the page, particularly in regards to the Christian and post-Christian associations). Pay special attention to the stultifying, one might say putrefying, "whiteness" of the poem's first stanza (stucco arches, bald eyes, lard-pale clothing); leave it to Sylvia to jaundice the achromatic (though I'd prefer to coin the term 'chiaristic'). See also Matthew 23:27, which may have an 'under-presence' in the poem: "Whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of . . . uncleanness." Also, a "cabbage butterfly" is often called a "white." There's more I could do with all this-- "glaucous" ("pale grey"), the whitish foam of waves, assumedly white or grey gulls, the "chromium pole," the presumedly white "crisp linen"-- but hopefully you see what's happening here. This is why they should be paying me the big bucks, even if they're not. ;-)