God Save the Queen

Back after a break

Haven't blogged Philip for a longish while. Time to correct it with this cheerful little poem about doom and failure. What a guy!

It's a movement

Further to the theme of this post (oh, and this piece of genius): now even some Americans are starting to see the light.

(Via Donald Sensing.)

More Loyal Britons

Now, I want the translation.

'The Jews of Gibraltar are the only Jewish community to sing the anthem in Hebrew, asking not only for the Queen to be saved, but also "her husband".'

Coming from America

Rather than obsess about the last-minute polls and stories coming from the US this Election Day, may I recommend Bill Bryson's fine book Made in America about the history of American English? It has any amount of good stuff in it, but perhaps my favourite bits so far have been about the place-names. American place-names are a longstanding enthusiasm of mine, I think because of their combination of quirkyness, familiarity and variety. E pluribus unum.
This engaging combination applies to states: Connecticut, Tennessee, New Hampshire.
To rivers: Susquehanna, Rappahannock, Potomac.
To cities: Philadelphia, Tuscaloosa, Fort Lauderdale.
To towns: Truth or Consequences, Boring, Power Cable.
And so on. I wonder if some of the differences between American and British English may have something to do with the arising of all these names, or if, conversely, having to frame one's speech to pronounce such a swathe of Indian, French and Spanish place-names might have given rise to the differences themselves. That's a silly question: obviously both processes have gone on.
Right, enough, now I'm going to go back to the obsessive following of the last-minute polls and news.

Dammit!

I meant to post this yesterday as it was the anniversary of its writing, so I'm told. I forgot. Whatever. I looked it up after reading this Normblog profile and recited it aloud. I choked up a couple of times near the end. Try it (not in public).

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle---
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me---
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads---you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred Tennyson

It can be read as over-proud and even suicidal. But that's what you get for thinking too much.

Until they're dead

Robert Conquest is a better historian than poet, but he can string words together a bit:

Get Lost, Gulag Archipelago!

"The present Soviet generation is not obsessed with the errors of the past. It looks to the future..."

For years those dreary old complaints
That we'd unfairly snuffed the lives
(We've never claimed we're plaster saints)
Of husbands, brothers, sisters, wives.

Thank God for the present lot!
They won't act up like those others.
After all, we only shot
Their fathers, uncles aunts and mothers.

(From the collection Forays.)

Couldn't find that on the web so I actually had to type it in instead of my usual lazy copy-and-paste routine. What's the world coming to? More pertinently, why am I still so keen to refight the Cold War nowadays? By training I'm a historian. We're not really interested in any events until everyone's dead, as it's only then that one can come to even a tentative judgement. But that means one distrusts contemporary assessments. What Klio remembers is unlikely to be what journalists think important at the time. Lincoln and Roosevelt were vilified as widely as Bush. George Orwell worried about something called 18b - what was that? (Short answer: the 1941 equivalent of the Patriot Act.) My point is fairly banal: newspapers may be the first draft of history, but most first drafts are not worth reading.

A word of advice

...appropriate to Andrew Motion, Tom Paulin and anyone else who thinks they have the right to pontificate at the present time. I know that's not all Yeats is saying here, but the third line is just true.

On being asked for a War Poem

by William Butler Yeats

I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

(Via LovePoems.)

Poem of the day

Too bludgeoned with other bloggers' opinions to have any of my own. So here's a poem instead. Would have been one of Larkin's, but today I'm not in the right mood for his brand of miserabilism. Lamenting the death of creativity seems more like it. He's right, of course.

To the Muses

Whether on Ida's shady brow
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the Sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceased;

Whether in heaven ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air
Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea,
Wandering in many a coral grove;
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry;

How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few.

William Blake

Seventeenth century beauty

Particular recommendation in the new typelist: English Verse.com, from which I found this pearl:

Henry King, Bishop of Chichester

Exequy on his Wife (extract)

But hark! my pulse, like a soft drum,
Beats my approach, tells thee I come;
And slow howe'er my marches be
I shall at last sit down by thee.
The thought of this bids me go on
And wait my dissolution
With hope and comfort. Dear—forgive
The crime—I am content to live
Divided, with but half a heart,
Till we shall meet and never part.

Both beautiful in itself - the image of the heartbeat as the harbinger of approaching death is immediately arresting - and useful to bear in mind next time some academic zombie tries to tell you that pre-modern marriages were by nature essentially patriarchal. Maybe Henry King was patriarchal - seventeenth-century churchmen would usually have some such tendency - but that was evidently far from the whole story. It never is the whole story.

Also at the same site, this late poem by John Donne, from that same extraordinary century:

A Hymn to God the Father

WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sins their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Is that a poem by a scared, sin-obsessed old man, his intelligence crushed by suffocating Christian dogma, or by a man (grown wise with age) making a serious attempt at coming to terms with his past faults, and not trying to pretend (as is usually the case today) that those faults aren't important or, worse, aren't faults at all? Well, in his later years, Donne was nothing if not serious.

For a last act I wanted to post the lyrics to a seventeenth-century anti-capitalist protest song called 'The Clothiers' Song', but they don't appear to be available. I can only recommend this site - the song is no.24 on the disc. (I have nothing to do with the performers or the production company, by the way.)
It begins:
'Of all sorts of callings that in England be
There is none that liveth so gallant as we;
Our trading maintains us as brave as a knight,
We scorn for to toil and taketh delight.
We heap up our bags of silver and gold,
and conscience and charity with us are cold;
By poor people's labour we fill up our purse,
Although we do get it with many a curse.'

And on for several verses in that vein. It's a very jolly song with a good tune. The only reservation I have about it is that it makes grinding the poor sound like fun, whereas as we know it's very hard work being a capitalist exploiter.

Quinquireme

And the award for the most effective use of an antique nautical term for a galley rowed by five men to an oar goes to:

Cargoes – by John Masefield

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes, and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

This gets mixed responses. Some read in it a valuing of the past over the present, a nostalgia for an apparently finer age, an implicit condemnation of mass consumerism. That never seemed right to me. The earlier ships might be elegant or beautiful in their way but one’s heart goes out to the old workhorse making its routine trip down the coast. The stokers feed the furnace, their naked upper bodies glowing red by its glare; McAndrew casts a critical eye over his gauges; above, men in duffel-coats cling to the ladders trying not to be ill. So far from being less romantic, the romance of the British steamer is palpable.
And for what it’s worth, her crew, unlike the other crews, have a reasonable chance of living past fourty.
It’s a great poem to recite aloud.