Know your Poe: Fairy Land

Blogger's note. I think this is going to be my last entry in Know your Poe. And while I haven't covered every single work he wrote in his scant 40 years on earth, you must admit I have bitten off a good chunk. 

I am hardly a Poe scholar, and my mucking around in his work is merely an exploration, but it has been compelling (for me, anyway). What I have noticed, especially in his dense, difficult poetry, is that he often starts off on a positive, even exalted note: but at a certain point, there is a "turn". By the end of the poem the mood is extremely dire, terror-stricken, even hopeless. What happens here, and why?

It is as if Poe does not trust happiness. It will all fall out from underneath him eventually (and here we see why I feel a certain kinship with him and his work). He knows it will end, as surely as life ends. And he does not trust women. They are exalted to the point of appearing supernatural, or at least supernaturally beautiful. He sits beside them and woos them. He does not have sex with them. Now surely, he must have had sex with someone, because it's the rare person who doesn't. A lot of these types who exalted women went to prostitutes for fulfillment (Beethoven comes to mind: and it gave me a thrill of shock to realize that Poe was born while Beethoven was in his heyday. They walked the earth at the same time, though Beethoven managed his self-pity much better.)

I wasn't sure whether to post this only with illustrations (subconscious images, in case anyone wonders why I don't do "line about a rose" (picture of rose); "line about eyes" (picture of eyes). This sort of approach makes me yip and scream with its unimaginitiveness.) But I have things to say about this, and I need to interject. So I will have to run it twice. Hoo-ha. 

FAIRY LAND.

————

Sit down beside me, Isabel,

Here, dearest, where the moonbeam fell

Just now so fairy-like and well.

Now thou art dress’d for paradise!

I am star-stricken with thine eyes!

My soul is lolling on thy sighs!

Thy hair is lifted by the moon

Like flowers by the low breath of June!

Sit down, sit down — how came we here?

Or is it all but a dream, my dear?

You know that most enormous flower —

That rose — that what d’ye call it — that hung

Up like a dog-star in this bower —

To-day (the wind blew, and) it swung

So impudently in my face,

So like a thing alive you know,

I tore it from its pride of place

And shook it into pieces — so

Be all ingratitude requited.

The winds ran off with it delighted,

And, thro’ the opening left, as soon

As she threw off her cloak, yon moon

Has sent a ray down with a tune.

And this ray is a fairy ray —

Did you not say so, Isabel?

How fantastically it fell

With a spiral twist and a swell,

And over the wet grass rippled away

With a tinkling like a bell!

In my own country all the way

We can discover a moon ray

Which thro’ some tatter’d curtain pries

Into the darkness of a room,

Is by (the very source of gloom)

The motes, and dust, and flies,

On which it trembles and lies

Like joy upon sorrow! ­

O, when will come the morrow?

Isabel! do you not fear

The night and the wonders here?

Dim vales! and shadowy floods!

And cloudy-looking woods

Whose forms we can’t discover

For the tears that drip all over!

Huge moons — see! wax and wane

Again — again — again —

Every moment of the night —

Forever changing places!

How they put out the starlight

With the breath from their pale faces!

Lo! one is coming down

With its centre on the crown

Of a mountain’s eminence!

Down — still down — and down —

Now deep shall be — O deep!

The passion of our sleep!

For that wide circumference

In easy drapery falls

Drowsily over halls — ­

Over ruin’d walls —

Over waterfalls,

(Silent waterfalls!)

O’re the strange woods — o’er the sea —

Alas! over the sea!

FAIRY LAND.

————

Sit down beside me, Isabel,

Here, dearest, where the moonbeam fell

Just now so fairy-like and well.

So what's the mood here? Warm, inviting, certainly comfortable, with a romantic mention of moonbeams - in fact, she's sitting on the moonbeam, an odd thing. 

Now thou art dress’d for paradise!

I am star-stricken with thine eyes!

My soul is lolling on thy sighs!

Poe uses words like "lolling" and "gloating" as a sort of onomatopoeia (though I am not sure how gloating works - and yet, it does). This is sensuous, even sexual language, as if he's swooning at her feet. Almost.

Thy hair is lifted by the moon

Like flowers by the low breath of June!

Sit down, sit down — how came we here?

Or is it all but a dream, my dear?

Oh-oh, we have our first indication that all this pleasure isn't real.

You know that most enormous flower —

That rose — that what d’ye call it — that hung

Up like a dog-star in this bower —

To-day (the wind blew, and) it swung ­

So impudently in my face,

So like a thing alive you know,

I tore it from its pride of place

And shook it into pieces — so

Be all ingratitude requited.

The winds ran off with it delighted,

And, thro’ the opening left, as soon

As she threw off her cloak, yon moon

Has sent a ray down with a tune.

I just don't know where to begin here, it's so brilliant and strange. The "what d'ye call it" shouldn't work at all, but does, in establishing a sort of naturalness. The dog-star is the strangest thing I've ever heard - a rose that looks like a star? Now the rose is in his face, literally, and he grabs it "from its pride of place" (Poe had a thing about status) and tears it to pieces, not exactly a romantic or friendly gesture. Why does he do this? "Be all ingratitude requited" - what's that all about? The rose is ungrateful, is it - or is he? Or is Isabal? (I could stay here all day, especially in light of the symbolism of rose as female genitalia.)

And this ray is a fairy ray —

Did you not say so, Isabel?

How fantastically it fell

With a spiral twist and a swell,

And over the wet grass rippled away

With a tinkling like a bell!

Be prepared for the "turn". Fairyland lasts but a moment. And let's not ask about that "swell".

In my own country all the way

We can discover a moon ray

Which thro’ some tatter’d curtain pries

Into the darkness of a room,

Is by (the very source of gloom)

The motes, and dust, and flies,

On which it trembles and lies

Like joy upon sorrow! ­

O, when will come the morrow?

Eddy, don't go there! But he has already gone. "In my own country" surely refers to more than the United States of Poetry. He means HIS psychic landscape, his place of doom. The moonbeam has exposed all the ugliness that lurks in his soul, darkness and crawling things. He already wants it to be tomorrow, so where has gone the joy?

Isabel! do you not fear

The night and the wonders here?

Dim vales! and shadowy floods!

And cloudy-looking woods

Whose forms we can’t discover

For the tears that drip all over!

Genius is something that makes us smack ourselves on the forehead and exclaim, "Why didn't *I* think of that? " (Because you're not a genius, is why, but that's the form it takes.) It's also something so deceptively simple, it's as if anyone COULD think if it, but somehow didn't. Moreover, it is as if it has always been there. "Dim vales! and shadowy floods!/And cloudy-looking woods" - not "cloudy", but "cloudy-LOOKING", as if seen through a fogged-up windowpane, fogged up by, perhaps, someone's desperate breath. "For the tears that drip all over" is candlewax (a candle that sheds light only for a brief while, then consumes itself with flame and dies?), the melting of hope, uncontainable sorrow, pitiless rain and its drippy aftermath - I could go on and on, but he does it in a few words. Damn.

Huge moons — see! wax and wane

Again — again — again —

Every moment of the night —

Forever changing places!

How they put out the starlight

With the breath from their pale faces!

Poe knows how to use repetition, sometimes to an outrageous degree. From the raven's relentless "nevermore" to the "bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells," he not only gets away with it, he haunts us, grabs us, shakes us with it. This moon is, to say the least, not the lovely shining silver thing we see every night, but some inexplicaby multiple, ghastly phantom that changes shape and location, waxing and waning bizarrely as if in time-lapse photography. These "huge moons" even have the capacity to blow out and extinguish the stars like so many birthday candles.

Lo! one is coming down

With its centre on the crown

Of a mountain’s eminence!

Down — still down — and down —

Now deep shall be — O deep!

The passion of our sleep!

For that wide circumference

In easy drapery falls

Drowsily over halls — ­[page 58:]

Over ruin’d walls —

Over waterfalls,

(Silent waterfalls!)

O’re the strange woods — o’er the sea —

Alas! over the sea!

Why does it end this way, on a note of terror, even hysteria? This horrible moon, personified into some creepy animate being (and just "one" is coming down, so what about all the rest?) is settling over everything like a suffocating blanket. Thus everything is ruined, waterfalls dried up, the "strange" woods stilled, and - at last - the sea itself conquered. And those eerily erotic, narcotic lines about sleep: "Down - still down - and down - /Now deep shall be - O deep! The passion of our sleep!"

You could spend a month squeezing this, and not get it all. Was Poe as afraid of sleep as death itself? Was he just a scaredy-cat, having strange visions in the woods? Had he gotten into the laudanum again (though the Poe Society site keeps insisting he didn't use it)? It has a hallucinogenic, almost insane quality, describing not just a menacing moon but mutiples of ghastly, ghostly, animated phantoms, sending a lunar ambassador down to expose his inner ugliness as well as suffocate and conquer everything.

Was Poe writing about "lunacy" then? And what about poor Isabel? Whatever happened to her? She must have run screaming at some point. Talk about a lousy date.

OK, the moon. . . women's sexuality. . . waxing and waning. . .the menstrual cycle (which he may have barely known about). . .something you howl at. . . something lovers stroll under. . .something that makes you insane (oh-oh, it's a full moon tonight) - OK, I give up, Poe, you've thrown us a good one this time, and beautiful as it is, I have to confess I don't understand it at all.

ADDENDA.

A little more information about the "dog-star", verse 2, line 3:

Sir·i·us  [sir-ee-uhs] noun

1. Astronomy . the Dog Star, the brightest-appearing star in the heavens, located in the constellation Canis Major.

2. Also, Seirios. Classical Mythology  a)  the dog of Orion.

    b) Icarus' faithful dog, who was changed into a star.

Origin: 1325–75; Middle English, Latin Sīrius; Greek Seírios

It is a binary star whose companion, Sirius B, is a very faint white dwarf. 

So now we are off again! Faithful dog; that which "dogs" you and won't let you go; Icarus, whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun (the tears that drip all over!). . . and on and on. . .and of course, the obvious play on "serious'. . . Interesting that the dog-star has a twin, so that its brightness is something of a cheat.

The name Isabel,a variation of Elizabeth, means "God is my oath".

And I can't resist this - I took another look at that title and thought, "Fairy Land - Sirius-ly?"

Badda-boom.

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In the burrows of the nightmare: or why I liked English class

I have a horrible confession to make. I liked English class. I liked it so much I had to hide it. I never said anything, never contributed a single comment to any discussion, though my mind was teeming with ideas about everything we studied.


It was decades later, when I was an adult and went back to school, that I found the courage to say the things I felt and saw. By this time my perceptions had shifted, of course. Even the most familiar poem wasn't the same; someone had gone in there and changed it, in every textbook in all the world.

I guess Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening is my favorite poem because it makes me want to scream that I ever dared to write poetry and try to get it published. I DID get a dozen or so of my poems published in small literary mags, but maybe seven people bothered to read them, mostly the contributors. Sometimes I wondered if the editor had bothered to read them at all.


Example. I wrote a poem called Lightning - God must've been punishing me for writing a poem called Lightning, because in the final printed version it came out Lightening.

"Well, it's only one letter different," squawked the 19-year-old assistant editor who had neatly inserted an error where there was none before. She must have thought I had made a spelling mistake.

So now my poem, which HAD been about childhood sexual abuse and doing hard time in a mental institution, was suddenly about a much more powerful subject: Coffee Mate "lightener", guaranteed to replace cream with a metallic-tasting petroleum-based powder which would never go sour.

So much for MY adventures. In my last post I decided to illustrate that favorite poem from high school (written by that dry, craggy desert of a man, W. H. Auden), and in doing so, some of that English class stuff came back to me.

My teacher in high school, Mr. Griffin  (probably dead by now, I realize with a shock) read this one out loud one day, and I was riveted. Maybe it was the way he read it.
The class called this teacher Griffy Baby (though not to his face), and he was given to telling tales out of school, recommending we watch a literary-based movie called Carry On Up the Jungle. Sometimes when he was tired of teaching he told funny stories about his kids, one of whom resembled a baby Dylan Thomas. Then there was the day he showed us a home movie of a tawdry drama he had filmed with his drunken friends.

Griffy Baby was partial to giving me As, but was curious as to why I never said anything in class. My soul was so crushed with social isolation and constant, relentless bullying that I didn't dare open my mouth. But I was grateful for that magnificent poem, and I never forgot it.


So to make up for my silence in class, I want to do a blow-by-blow analysis here and now, which is maybe appropriate given Auden's legendary sexual orientation. (He also wrote an infamous poem called The Platonic Blow which I don't think I will post here, but I do encourage you, even urge you to look it up. It'll make your literary hair stand on end, or something else if you're gay. Short of out-and-out porn, it's the most sexually-explicit writing I have ever seen.)

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.


When the poem opens, the scene is just so. . . normal. The poet is out for a nice little stroll. Just walking down the street. Then he sees crowds upon the pavement. . . not other people strolling along, but crowds. Assembled for what? And these crowds, which sound about as friendly as the spectators at a Roman coliseum, are fields of harvest wheat. I mean, they don't look like wheat or sound like wheat or smell like wheat or taste like wheat. This is no synonym, folks, it is that deadliest of things: a metaphor! And speaking of deadly, isn't it just a little obvious that these wheaten folk seem all ready for the scythe of the Grim Reaper? "Harvest" wheat, indeed.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.


Arch of the railway. This is why I included in my last post's illustrations quite a few images from a superb movie called Notes on a Scandal, with Cate Blanchett playing a 40-year-old teacher having an affair with a 15-year-old student. Having to meet in such a drippy place smells of the illicit, or at least of the damned uncomfortable. And that brimming river: hey, that's assonance, folks! He does it three times, too, which makes it magical. The river could be Lethe, the river of oblivion, which would surely match the dire tone of the rest of this thing. And brimming, like tears, like a cup about to run over. But that nasty cup appears later on.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,


'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

Here he seems to be introducing silly mythical images which would be highly inappropriate if it weren't for the sing-songy, nursery-rhyme-esque form of the poem, with its strict rhyme and meter. Personally I wonder why he spends so much time on these innocent-sounding pronouncements, when I always thought the dank, furtive image of the arch of the railway implied meeting up with a prostitute, male or female.

Idealism, maybe? Or is this guy or girl, or guys or girls, just incredibly stupid, given to ludicrous hyperbole? In any case, all these blatherings seem sum-up-able in one word: "Forever." I will love you, dear, I'll love you. . . for all eternity.


'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

The years run like rabbits, as if to say, my, how time flies when you're having fun! Or is it something else? They may be running away, but it has nothing to do with us chasing after them. Some day, such as NOW, we may fervently wish those rabbits would slow down.  Rabbits also imply a sort of dumb, embarrassing fertility, not to mention the rabbit being pulled out of a hat ("Nothing up my sleeve!") and Alice's white rabbit, who is somehow always running "late". (And note the double meaning of late!)

And just what does "rabbiting on" mean? That you talk too much?

And that "first love of the world" cannot be anyone but Eve, the first woman. Hmmm, I wonder what she charges?

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.


I like this. I love this. I love the "device" of Time speaking to us, of all the clocks in the city starting to protest the bullshit of the lovers writhing under the arch. The audacity, too, of allowing Time to address us, as if God Himself decided to step up to the plate (which He does, all the time, in the Old Testament).

And already we have our warning: my teacher read this in a slightly smug tone. "You cannot conquer time."

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.


This is one of those ravishing verses of poetry that you don't want to touch because it's just so fucking magnificent. I wanted to write that on my term paper - "fucking magnificent" - but I didn't, and still got an A.

But he's doing the same thing here, capitolizing and I suppose personifying the Nightmare, Justice, etc. Justice being not blind, but naked. Pull down the blinds, please. And how about that little cough, ahem. Excuse me. Do you know who's in charge here?

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.


Nobody wants to read this because it makes them groan inwardly, especially those first two lines. It's so bloody true, even in the most goal-directed, achievement-stuffed life. And Time, that wonderful personified Wizard of eternity, will have his "fancy", much as a rich man might pick out a particularly tasty prostitute from the lineup. Fancy is a silly, ephemeral, frou-frou sort of thing, the opposite of plain: fancy this, fancy that. And it also means fantasy. The "tomorrow or today" is sort of like setting up a delivery time for a parcel: "oh, I'll be here tomorrow, I think, you can bring it round then. Or, wait a minute, I'll be home today."

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.


I had a little trouble with this until I stole an interpretation from someone else. Green valleys are very British, of course - how green is my valley, and all that -  but why is the snow (grey hair, old age) so "appalling"? It casts a pall over the valley, even obscures it completely so that the green life beneath it does not show. It might as well not be there at all. The next two lines are all shivery and liquidescent. I don't know what a threaded dance is, but I think the diver is Cupid. Once more, eroticism is shattered by that dirty old man, Mortality.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

This is among Auden's most famous lines, for some reason almost always misquoted (like Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle) as "stare, stare in the mirror". The mirror does come, but a few verses later, and in a much more disturbing manner. This one is effective, I think, because of understatement. Or: is the subject just washing his hands of the whole thing? (Didn't Pilate do the same thing? And Lady Macbeth? Oh, I'm going overboard here.)

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.


Probably my favorite verse, because it makes me want to scream and never write again. Glacier, desert, crack in the tea-cup, land of the dead, where we all end up, unless you believe in Heaven, which Auden obviously does not. The safe comfort of the everyday and the brutal fact of mortality are so closely juxtaposed that we no longer take any notice. It's as close as the skin on your face.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.


This is a weird one, and I suppose it echoes the nursery-rhyme quality of some of these verses. The Giant must be a reference to Jack and the Beanstalk, but what does it mean that he's "enchanting to"? I hope not what I think. Most Americans won't know this, but the Lily-white Boy (also a strange image) is a character in an English folk song called Green Grow the Rushes-o. Jill goes down on her back, well. . . innocence begins to prostitute itself. This is the Land of the Dead, which is beginning to resemble Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell.

'O look, look in the mirror
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

Yes. THIS is the verse with the mirror in it, and it has that "o look, look -", that sense of shock, almost of horror at the inevitable, strenuously-denied passage of time. I don't want to look, but I must look! And those ironic lines - life remains a blessing, but we're about to die so why is a blessing even relevant? And the stinging self-contempt of "YOU cannot bless", as if you have somehow, and mysteriously, lost all your power.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'


There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile. . . and the whole human condition is drawn in slanted lines.

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.


And thus, the soft, gentle benediction, as we lie howling and writhing in the face of eternal Hell.

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What in Christ's name does this mean?

The Starlight Night

LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! 

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! 

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! 

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! 

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! 

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows. 

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! 

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! 

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house 

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse 

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

So what does the poem mean?

What means this bizarre double-jointed curvature, this sharp hairpin turn from fireworks "ooooooohs" and "ahhhhhhhhs" into the kind of heavy and even suffocating religiosity that leaves me completely kerflummoxed?

I don't know much about Gerard Manley Hopkins except to say that when he became a Jesuit, he burned every poem he had ever written. Thus perhaps some of his best works were relegated to the ashcan.

He's the one who wrote about depression, that Carrion Comfort one that I find so harrowing, to the point that I think he must have been a true sufferer. But why must everything in Hopkins be Christified?

The poem starts off very much like an innocent Robert Louis Stevenson verse for children, a "how would you like to go up in a swing" sort of thing. But there is a sort of urgency to it, as if we'd better look now or we'll be too late. It seems to tug and poke at us, hey, take a look up there, look at Casseopeia (which I can NEVER see - I am the poorest of visual discerners and can't tell one bloody constellation from another). Then comes a flood of almost-precious elven description right out of Lord of the Rings. Cockle-shells and dingle-bells. Except that, because it's Hopkins, he can get away with it. It's a surprising, even shocking quality, the art of verbal daring.

Fire-folk sitting in the air, why yes, that's a line any poet would kill for. Quickgold: that's perfect, isn't it - why didn't anyone think of that before? The air swirls with magic, you can see your breath, you're shivering yet too warm, your companion's hand is like ice in yours. Yes, you're there, transported, borne up like a downy feather (take THAT, Gerard!) as the constellations wheel drunkenly over your head.

Where I go off-course is in the line, "Ah well! It is all a purchase, all is a prize." What can he be getting at? Taken literally, it makes no sense at all. Purchase what? Prize what? Does he mean we have to earn the right to get into heaven, so to speak - heaven represented by the rapturous star-filled night? Is immortality a kind of lottery, a spiritual 6-49?

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.

I don't know if he's talking about "buying your way in", trying to bribe God (good luck!), or the cheapness and crassness of reality compared to the gasping celestial vision. It's one of those weirdball Hopkins-ian things that makes you want to toss the book across the room.

But then he gets back to the "look, look" stuff, which by now is getting a little old (can't help but think it!) in spite of the "Maymess" (a word I really thought *I* had invented) and the "mealed-with-yellow sallows".

But then come the strangest lines of all.

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

I don't know, this grounds the poem with a thud, steals all its magic. Hopkins must have had some sort of a thing for Christ, and it's weird. When I first read this startling thing, my reaction was "what"? These are indeed the - barn? And what are "the shocks"? Kindly explain yourself, poet.

I can only guess - and I am really guessing here, because this is an odd thing that doesn't make much sense even after a lot of analysis - that he thinks of the heavens/nature and all that jazz as "housing" Jesus and Mary and all those holy folk who to him represent God. Or does he glimpse the holy/eternal in and through, are those starfolk sitting in the air little glints of God, God's little birthday candles maybe?

Is the universe just God's skin?

I might be reading more into this than I should. Hey, maybe I'm smarter than he was, or at least less obscure. But there are things I don't like here, words that may or may not be used for jarring effect: "barn" (barn? Haven't we just travelled to the farthest reaches of the universe? Why use the image of an outbuilding that is basically full of shit?); "shuts" (an awful word, implying "shut-in" and even "shut up!); "spouse", a sort of creaky word referring to one's life partner - oh, that's creepy! Oh, that's creepy! Is he married to Jesus, or his mother? I guess "espouse" can mean just believing in something. Or something.

Or surrendering to it? Oh God. I was never one for surrender, though in certain circles (does the term 12 Step Program mean anything to you?) it's considered the highest achievement.

And that word "hallows" is not one I am comfortable with either - all hallows eve, hallowed be thy name (which for some reason always reminded me of the inside of a pumpkin, that punky smell). So he throws in some language which could not be more at odds with the dazzling fluidity of those first few lines. What of buying, selling, bidding - what's he on about? Maybe it would be better to stop at Line 7. Can the Sunday school lesson; just dazzle us.


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In the burrows of the Nightmare

As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending.' 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean    Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking    Like geese about the sky. 'The years shall run like rabbits,    For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages,    And the first love of the world.' But all the clocks in the city    Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you,    You cannot conquer Time. 'In the burrows of the Nightmare    Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow    And coughs when you would kiss. 'In headaches and in worry    Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy    To-morrow or to-day. 'Into many a green valley    Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances    And the diver's brilliant bow. 'O plunge your hands in water,    Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin    And wonder what you've missed. 'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,    The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens    A lane to the land of the dead. 'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes    And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,    And Jill goes down on her back. 'O look, look in the mirror,    O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing    Although you cannot bless. 'O stand, stand at the window    As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour    With your crooked heart.' It was late, late in the evening,    The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming,    And the deep river ran on.