Poems of the Week: Lionel Johnson
This week I am going to put up several poems by Lionel Johnson. Johnson was a fine, not to say exquisite craftsman, a friend of Yeats and the "Decadents." He is mainly known today as a religious poet, but he has a gift for evoking a scene.
Johnson's best known poem is:
By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross
Sombre and rich, the skies ;
Great glooms, and starry plains.
Gently the night wind sighs ;
Else a vast silence reigns.
The splendid silence clings
Around me : and around
The saddest of all kings
Crowned, and again discrowned.
Comely and calm, he rides
Hard by his own Whitehall.
Only the night wind glides:
No crowds, nor rebels, brawl.
Gone, too, his Court : and yet,
The stars his courtiers are :
Stars in their stations set;
And every wandering star.
Alone he rides, alone,
The fair and fatal king :
Dark night is all his own,
That strange and solemn thing.
Which are more full of fate :
The stars ; or those sad eyes ?
Which are more still and great :
Those brows, or the dark skies ?
Although his whole heart yearn
In passionate tragedy,
Never was face so stern
With sweet austerity.
Vanquished in life, his death
By beauty made amends :
The passing of his breath
Won his defeated ends.
Brief life, and hapless ? Nay :
Through death, life grew sublime.
Speak after sentence ? Yea :
And to the end of time.
Armoured he rides, his head
Bare to the stars of doom ;
He triumphs now, the dead,
Beholding London's gloom.
Our wearier spirit faints,
Vexed in the world's employ :
His soul was of the saints;
And art to him was joy.
King, tried in fires of woe !
Men hunger for thy grace :
And through the night I go,
Loving thy mournful face.
Yet, when the city sleeps,
When all the cries are still,
The stars and heavenly deeps
Work out a perfect will.
Here is a short piece called,
Precept of Silence
I know you: solitary griefs,
Desolate passions, aching hours!
I know you: tremulous beliefs,
Agonized hopes, and ashen flowers!
The winds are sometimes sad to me;
The starry spaces, full of fear:
Mine is the sorrow of the sea,
And mine the sigh of places drear.
Some players upon plaintive strings
Publish their wistfulness abroad:
I have not spoken of these things,
Save to one man, and unto God.
ANOTHER
Cadgwith
My windows open to the autumn night, In vain I watched for sleep to visit me; How should sleep dull mine ears, and dim my sight, Who saw the stars, and listened to the sea ? Ah, how the City of our God is fair! If, without sea, and starless though it be, For joy of the majestic beauty there, Men shall not miss the stars, nor mourn the sea.
I could not find online texts of Dryden's Juvenal to crib from. When I do, I'll continue the discussion of satire.
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Dr. Fleming has a good eye and ear for lyrics that rise almost to the level of the sacred (or at least circle such places ) and evidently Lionel Johnson had glimpses of such places too. "One man and to God" sounds so unnecessary for we lonely moderns who can never be public enough with our virtues or private enough with our sins. But good poets always see truth in proportion -- right about where the spirit and flesh (or justice and mercy) meet -- "one man and to God" is a fine, fine, line for a poem. Thank you for the good post.
Cadgwith
My windows open to the autumn night,
In vain I watched for sleep to visit me;
How should sleep dull mine ears, and dim my sight,
Who saw the stars, and listened to the sea ?
Ah, how the City of our God is fair!
If, without sea, and starless though it be,
For joy of the majestic beauty there,
Men shall not miss the stars, nor mourn the sea.
St. Augustine Book XII Chapter 8:
"But that heaven of heavens was for Thyself, Oh Lord; but the earth which Thou gavest to the sons of men to be seen and felt was not like the earth which we now see and feel."
Chapter 11:
"Already, Lord, in my inner ear I have heard your voice loud and strong telling me that you are eternal, Who only hast immortality, since you suffer no change in form or by motion, and your will is not altered in the course of time (for a will which is now one thing and now another is not immortal). This is clear to me in your sight, and I pray that it may become clearer and clearer and with this truth evident to me I may continue calmly to dwell beneath the shadow of your wings.
"Also, Lord, in my inner ear I have heard your voice loud and strong telling that all natures and all substances, which are not what you are but which nevertheless exist, are created by you. Only what does not exist is not from you. ..."
Johnson's best known poem:
By the Statue of King Charles at Charing
Cross
Sombre and rich, the skies ;
Great glooms, and starry plains.
Gently the night wind sighs ;
Else a vast silence reigns.
The splendid silence clings
Around me : and around
The saddest of all kings
Crowned, and again discrowned.
Comely and calm, he rides
Hard by his own Whitehall.
Only the night wind glides:
No crowds, nor rebels, brawl.
Gone, too, his Court : and yet,
The stars his courtiers are :
Stars in their stations set;
And every wandering star.
Alone he rides, alone,
The fair and fatal king :
Dark night is all his own,
That strange and solemn thing.
Which are more full of fate :
The stars ; or those sad eyes ?
Which are more still and great :
Those brows, or the dark skies ?
Although his whole heart yearn
In passionate tragedy,
Never was face so stern
With sweet austerity.
Vanquished in life, his death
By beauty made amends :
The passing of his breath
Won his defeated ends.
Brief life, and hapless ? Nay :
Through death, life grew sublime.
Speak after sentence ? Yea :
And to the end of time.
Armoured he rides, his head
Bare to the stars of doom ;
He triumphs now, the dead,
Beholding London's gloom.
Our wearier spirit faints,
Vexed in the world's employ :
His soul was of the saints;
And art to him was joy.
King, tried in fires of woe !
Men hunger for thy grace :
And through the night I go,
Loving thy mournful face.
Yet, when the city sleeps,
When all the cries are still,
The stars and heavenly deeps
Work out a perfect will.
"But good poets always see truth in proportion -- right about where the spirit and flesh (or justice and mercy) meet --" -end quote.
Justice has a definite context, is of the middle ground or the Aristotelean 'mean' i.e. middle. The age old eye for an eye tooth for a tooth. Justice is closed if as itself. Mercy on the other hand has a wholly discretionary context, it's therefore open-Ended. If someone knocks out my tooth by mistake the middle ground is they can pay for my damages rather than my unjustly demanding I extract a tooth since that wouldn't be by mistake. If they're poor and I'm either also poor or wealthy regardless I can choose to 'turn the other cheek' and say 'hey forget about it, you didn't mean it.' That's mercy but it's Not JUSTICE. So I justly, and mercifully for your own sake if you're confused or deluded about it, take vehement issue with your apparent 'meeting' of the two; unless it's clarified as to what you mean? The metaphor used to suggest the meaning "right about where the spirit and flesh (justice and mercy) meet --" doesn't help [me] with clarification because the spirit and flesh are happening simultaneously not as if we were God automatically and omnisciently aware of that which is Not Himself. -?- Perhaps on the other hand you know what you meant, though in honesty left this imperfect reader confused about your meaning.
There's a poem, wow. Imperfect is the world and in its totality. Imperfect's perfect through His Will only immortality.
"So I justly, and mercifully for your own sake if you're confused or deluded about it, take vehement issue with your apparent 'meeting' of the two; unless it's clarified as to what you mean?"
Thank you, Michael, for the comment. As you say, it's very difficult to combine two different things into a third thing regardless of whether it is a man and woman attempting a marriage, love and need in the art of making a living, or providing a beginning, middle and end for both comedy and tragedy. Spirit and matter, breathing and eating, thinking and doing are all things that can be difficult at times to combine in proper human proportions. I think my comment was directed at the poets attempt to tell enough about himself to both God and Man, that he could see a little clearer what jusitice and mercy really mean. It's a fine line to write about in more ways than one.
Once described in a famous play as : "The quality of mercy is not strained It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed- It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes."
Thanks Mr. Reavis. Always love your posts. I'm hoping, to put it in my own lexicon to live to see today's world move *generally from a choice between either being pathetic or swinish, to (in my own 'words') being either adamantine [stubborn] or preposterous [outrageous]. Believe it or not that shift alone would be monumental. Don't ask me what I'm talking about, I may not even know. Write it off to what's been discouraged speaking in tongues? I believe like Augustine if it exists it's from Him and so that includes fun. No one thing alone is true it's all true, that-is. Some things aren't and so illusions but 'nothing' doesn't exist. So I differ slightly with Augustine as to how the creation may have been constellated or created. It's all--still--only happening simultaneously in each passing moment moving and not moving part of the Unmoved Mover's Eternal Paradox. The past doesn't exist now [except for its traces in the present] the future doesn't exist now [except for its traces in the present]...Now is the accepted time, a nice evidence itself of mercy.
Dr. Fleming,
Here are some websites for Dryden:
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Readings/satire10.html
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/dryden3.html
http://www.bartleby.com/204/218.html
I am enjoying all three poems and am thankful once again to meet another poet of whom I've never heard. While I'm not trying to focus on meter, I am trying to pay attention to the mechanics because my baseline understanding is so poor. Also, since, at some point in the future Dr. Fleming plans to go over Eliot & Hopkins and how English poetry was changed, I'm trying to make sure I have some sort of handle on the "before" picture.
So, dullard that I am, will someone confirm that this is iambic pentameter? Also, I could follow the sonnets in the sense that they had a very strict structure. What governs poetry that is not in a specific form? Is it just that there has to be some sort of scheme to the rhythm and lines, regardless of how that structure is set up?
For example, there are 3 poems here. One is 13 4-line stanzas with 6 syllables a line and an abab rhyme scheme. Another is 3 4-line stanzas with 8 syllables a line and an abab rhyme scheme. The third is 8 lines, 10 syllables, and an ababcbcb scheme. So long as the poem is internally consistent, you can have as many lines/stanzas/syllables as you like?
I work in accounting type stuff with Excel spreadsheets most of my day. You'll have to be patient with me; my brain can't help but try to discern numeric patterns.
A little lesson on rhythm and meter.
Rhythm means, basically, a perceived pattern of alternating elements, loud and soft, long and short, even light and dark. At a minimum, the reader or listener can perceive some sort of pattern, even though it is not absolutely the same--a parallelism of structure, for example, that is highlighted by similar rhythmic sequences as in the Canticles in the Anglican Prayerbook, where some of the rhythm is imposed externally by the plainsong melody. Ancient prose writers often were careful with the rhythms of the sentences, particularly the endings (known as clausulae in Latin). Cicero's patter -u uu --, for example, in the phrase esse videatur was a favorite.
Meter is stricter than rhythm in that once the pattern is established, it is more or less unvarying, though the pattern may involve differing types of lines grouped into stanzas. The names of English meters are derived from Latin and Greek, though the names are often erroneous. It is not a difficult code to break. I think I named the most common in my first posting. Here again are a few common meters.
Iambic: alternating unstressed and stressed:
"He did not wear his Scarlet coat for blood and wine are red..."
Trochaic: alternating stressed and unstressed
"What they lived once thus in Venice where the merchants are the kings
Where St. Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings...
Anapaestic: two stressed followed by a stressed syllable
"The Asssyrian came down like a wolf on the fold."
Dactylic: One stressed followed by two unstressed syllables, though in English the line often ends stressed
"Take her up tenderly/Lift her with care"
Longfellow tried to imitate the Dactylic hexameter in Evangeline:
"This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.
By far the commonest meter in English is iambic, and the commonest unit is the pentameter, whose name obviously means 5 iambs. This is the meter of blank (unrhymed) verse and also of most rhymed couplets.
Tetrameters (4 iambs) are also popular, and in some stanza forms pentameters and tetrameters alternate or tetrameters and trimeters. It is the simplest thing in the world, then, to identify these basic and simple meters and stanza patterns.
Dr. Fleming,
Thank you. That helps a great deal.
Mr. Cornell, let me recommend a little book to you that explains poetic forms and exemplifies them as it does: Rhyme's Reason by John Hollander. It's in its third edition, but get any edition you want. Changes are slight from one to the other.
I haven't looked at Hollander's book, but his formal verse is a bit wooden and uninspired. Frankly, anyone teaching English at Yale deserves to be shunned. Older books on verse are far better than more recent productions, precisely because even poets who today call themselves formalists have a limited education and a very limited grasp of poetic technique. Just look at Timothy Steele's defense of formal verse, Missing Measures. It is so filled with mistakes it should be an embarrassment to author and publisher alike, but when I point this out to formalist poets, there answer has been invariably. "Well, it's all we've got." In that case, the neoformalists fall into the same category as neoconservatives, namely, cultural fifth columnists. Some of them are decent poets and bright men--Frederick Turner, for example--but most of them are drudges.
Tom,
Did Peter Stanlis ever write any poetry or put together a small collection of poems? I have enjoyed his book on Frost and was pleased it was published before the dear professor's death. Other than the monthly issue of Chronicles, Dr. Stanlis's book on Frost was the most contemporary thing I have read since finishing Waugh's book on Edmond Campion.( or maybe it was your book on Socialism) I was going to look up Ray Olson's recommendation on Hollander until you reminded me that Mr. Olson still reads from time to time for pay, which is good but also different from reading for delight.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money", but reading is not writing. I find Hollander's very little book useful in the manner of a dictionary when consulted to refresh my memory as to what a term of versification denotes. It's what librarians call a "ready reference" work, the kind of thing Wikipedia and its like have made obsolete for quick reference work but that those learning the vocabulary of verse-writing should enjoy browsing.
I don't know Steele's book. Are the mistakes substantial? Does he inaccurately describe forms and meters? Are his examples faulty and his history bad?
Few books on versification, prosody, etc., are any good, and the more recent tend to be the worst. Steele pontificates on the history of meter, taking up languages and literatures he simply knows nothing about. It has been decades since I looked at it but Saintsbury's History of Prosody struck me as useful. I suppose people like Hollander do little harm but very few of the books written in the past 50 years should have been published. Bad books drive out good, though not in the same as Gresham law works. Better to annotate and update a classic than to replace it with an inferior book. Bury's annotated edition of Gibbon is far more useful than his own volumes on the later Roman Empire--though they in turn are better than most of the books churned out in recent years. It's an exhilarating and breathless race to the bottom.
PS, When I was an philologist and metrist, I noted that even good scholars tend to go mad when they take up meter, and sometimes the smarter they are the more loony is their work. I believe I can safely say that I have gone over over 90% of stuff remotely worth reading on the meters of Greek and Latin poetry. Vanitas vanitatum. Omnia vanitas. It is the same problem with most academic work in the humanities: the pretense that inventing a name is the same thing as discovering a thing.
Thanks. I've hauled Steele's second book on prosody from Chicago to here, unread. I may not dump it yet, but now I am forewarned about it. Of course, as you well know, I know nothing about classical verse directly, so if he doesn't attempt to gild himself with his knowledge of it in the book I have, maybe it will be not wholly useless.
In the interest of having a reference text for when my children are old enough to start teaching poetry, I'm hunting down the Saintsbury book. It's actually still somewhat available (all three volumes) either as reproductions of the original text (circa 1923) or some of the original volumes themselves.
While I always appreciate warnings on what not to waste my time on, I agree with Mr. Olson that it's nice to have a good reference book and not have to rely on Wikipedia.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money", but reading is not writing.
Ray, Thank you and of course you are correct. I believe the man who said that also said, "no gentleman would write about himself."
The economy and autobiography ----- signs of the times.
I looked up a bit of Rhyme's Reason online--big parts are available. I strongly recommend against it, firstly because Hollander's doggerel verse is simply stupid, his knowledge of form and meter rudimentary, his treatment mostly time-wasting. There is nothing that cannot be found in a decent dictionary.
It is--and this is saying a lot for me--the most useless work on meter I have ever examined. I only wish I could read his justification for saying that a monostich (a one-line poem) is really a couplet. Why doesn't that other gasbag, Robert Pinsky, do a similar book that he can then read on NPR.
I stand corrected. Don't bother with it, Mr. Cornell.
Forgot to cite Hollander's excuse for what he says about a monostich, namely that it is "almost always really a couplet, an epigram formed by the title and the line itself". His subject abut which this remark is made he calls "The one-line poem (in Greek, a monostich)". Since the concern of the whole book is English Verse, perhaps he should have deleted the parenthesis and made his description less offensive.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money",
My response to this and similar gibes – such as that this site "enables" its commenters – is this: I can quit anytime I want to, and my pen, not being bought and paid for, writes true. I think of the difference between a gigolo and a husband: one woman gets what she pays for, the other gets true love.