How are the mighty fallen

The outfit that published this dismal tosh,

“Mary said: ‘Why chooseth me? A lowly maid am I that knoweth no man? But I will obey if what you say is God’s own plan.’” 

which I might have mentioned on 8th November, and even, I dare say, ranted about, and I hope I live long enought to do it again one day, and then again and again, was also the outfit that in a nobler previous existence published this:

LA FIGLIA CHE PIANGE

  

         O quam te memorem virgo… 

 

    

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—  

Lean on a garden urn—  

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—  

Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—  

Fling them to the ground and turn         

With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:  

But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.  

  

So I would have had him leave,  

So I would have had her stand and grieve,  

So he would have left  

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,  

As the mind deserts the body it has used.  

I should find  

Some way incomparably light and deft,  

Some way we both should understand, 

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.  

  

She turned away, but with the autumn weather  

Compelled my imagination many days,  

Many days and many hours:  

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.        

And I wonder how they should have been together!  

I should have lost a gesture and a pose.  

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze  

The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.  

--------------------------------------------------------

together with pretty well everything else by one of the most influential male poets of the early 20th century, Thomas Stearnes Eliot.

Postmodernists, who appear to have taken over the teaching of Eng. Lit. in our universities, more's the pity, and whose only role in life now is to find subtexts to justify the continuation of their tenure, will tell you that this poem reveals that Tom Eliot was basically an MCP.  Feminist readers would probably agree.  And they may all be right, for the simple gloss of this poem is as follows:

Bloke rejects woman.  Woman hurt and angry.  Reader supposed to realise that heartless poet has used said woman as fuel for agonised love pome.

(Google "la figlia che piange".  The majority of critiques say just that, though not in the same words.)

But it has always seemed to me that the meat of this poem is in the last stanza: lines of almost painful honesty, which is precisely what poetry should be about - elliptical utterances with the utmost economy of means, expressed within a formal structure.  The maximum of expression with the minimum of means.

I have lived with this poem lodging in my mind for nearly half a lifetime, and for one very good reason:  I don't quite understand what it's saying, even now, but I love the sound it makes.

A near-contemporary of Tom Eliot's, and his principal mentor, identified the essential dynamics, or attributes, if you prefer, of poetry as logopoeia (meaning), phanopoeia (imagery) and melopoeia (sound). Ezra Pound was talking about translation from one set of cultural expectations to another, but I think we can usefully pinch the same terms to talk about the essence of poetry.

Two important writers from different cultures and languages to ours, Jorge Luis Borges (South American Spanish) and Umberto Eco (Italian), have been wonderfully well served by their translators, and both writers have written about the difficulty of translation, and they both, in different words, say much the same thing: sense, sound, and imagery.

This is what Eng. Lit. students should be learning about, not whether the sonnets prove that Shakespeare never washed his underpants.

There is a remnant here from a early draft of this post.  I can't remember the rationale now, but I think I was being cynical, in true Choirstalls mode, so I'll keep it.  Like La Figlia, it is a Lurv Pome.

"Gladys, sweet,

thou art the Best.

But, most of all,

I love your Chest."

(Anon; from a cave in southern France, c. 3000BC)