Dance of the Macabre Mice

In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
At the base of the statue, we go round and round.
What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!
Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice.

This dance has no name. It is a hungry dance.
We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur’s sword,
Reading the lordly language of the inscription,
Which is like zithers and tambourines combined:

The Founder of the State. Whoever founded
A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?
What a beautiful tableau tinted and towering,
The arm of bronze outstretched against all evil!

– Wallace Stevens

An autumnal anecdote accounting an ambulatory adventure across ancient armaments augurs an auspicious ascendency: agile animals above anthropoid autocrats (America).

Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With bobtail cur
In a coat of fur
And a porpentine cat
And a wopsicle hat:
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
              (Whether is mouth be open or shut).

– T. S. Eliot

Eliot’s birthday was yesterday (happy birthday). Here is his self-portrait in the style of Lear. Eliot was never as serious as his critics claimed (Virginia Woolf writes of his “marmoreal” face and “four-piece suit”). I love porpentine and wopsicle and their nods to Lear’s own runcible. Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg were the names of Eliot’s two cats. The latter is also the name of a little-known 19th-century author who wrote Lalun the Beragun, or, The Battle of Paniput: A Legend of Hindoostan — an obscure entry from Eliot’s reading list, perhaps.

the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly

Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and a rumble
And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall,

  Of the Magazine Wall,
  Hump, helmet and all?

He was one time our King of the Castle
Now he’s kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.
And from Green street he’ll be sent by order of His Worship
To the penal jail of Mountjoy

  To the jail of Mountjoy!
  Jail him and joy.

He was fafafather of all schemes for to bother us
Slow coaches and immaculate contraceptives for the populace,
Mare’s milk for the sick, seven dry Sundays a week,
Openair love and religion’s reform,

  And religious reform,
  Hideous in form.

Arrah, why, says you, couldn’t he manage it?
I’ll go bail, my fine dairyman darling,
Like the bumping bull of the Cassidys
All your butter is in your horns.

  His butter is in his horns.
  Butter his horns!

Hurrah there, Hosty, frosty Hosty, change that shirt on ye,
Rhyme the rann, the king of all ranns!

  Balbaccio, balbuccio!

We had chaw chaw chops, chairs, chewing gum, the chicken-pox and china
  chambers
Universally provided by this soffsoaping salesman.
Small wonder He’ll Cheat E’erawan our local lads nicknamed him.
When Chimpden first took the floor

  With his bucketshop store
  Down Bargainweg, Lower.

So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous
But soon we’ll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery
And ’tis short till sheriff Clancy’ll be winding up his unlimited company
With the bailiff’s bom at the door,

  Bimbam at the door.
  Then he’ll bum no more.

Sweet bad luck on the waves washed to our island
The hooker of that hammerfast viking
And Gall’s curse on the day when Eblana bay
Saw his black and tan man-o’-war.

  Saw his man-o’-war
  On the harbour bar.

Where from? roars Poolbeg. Cookingha’pence, he bawls
  Donnez-moi scampitle, wick an wipin’fampiny
Fingal Mac Oscar Onesine Bargearse Boniface
Thok’s min gammelhole Norveegickers moniker
Og as ay are at gammelhore Norveegickers cod.

  A Norwegian camel old cod.
  He is, begod.

Lift it, Hosty, lift it, ye devil, ye! up with the rann, the rhyming rann!

It was during some fresh water garden pumping
Or, according to the Nursing Mirror, while admiring the monkeys
That our heavyweight heathen Humpharey
Made bold a maid to woo

  Woohoo, what’ll she doo!
  The general lost her maidenloo!

He ought to blush for himself, the old hayheaded philosopher,
For to go and shove himself that way on top of her.
Begob, he’s the crux of the catalogue
Of our antediluvial zoo,

  Messrs Billing and Coo.
  Noah’s larks, good as noo.

He was joulting by Wellinton’s monument
Our rotorious hippopopotamuns
When some bugger let down the backtrap of the omnibus
And he caught his death of fusiliers,

  With his rent in his rears.
  Give him six years.

‘Tis sore pity for his innocent poor children
But look out for his missus legitimate!
When that frew gets a grip of old Earwicker
Won’t there be earwigs on the green?

  Big earwigs on the green,
  The largest ever you seen.

  Suffoclose! Shikespower! Seudodanto! Anonymoses!

Then we’ll have a free trade Gael’s band and mass meeting
For to sod him the brave son of Scandiknavery.
And we’ll bury him down in Oxmanstown
Along with the devil and the Danes,

  With the deaf and dumb Danes,
  And all their remains.

And not all the king’s men nor his horses
Will resurrect his corpus
For there’s no true spell in Connacht or hell
That’s able to raise a Cain.

– James Joyce

For Bloomsday, let us bypass the most famous day in literature and focus on its most famous night, Finnegans Wake, that endless onion of paronomasia and elusive allusions. “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” floats somewhere near the beginning of Joyce’s dream stream, and comes to us as Humpty Dumpty’s tale horribly water-warped.

Burnt Norton

I.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                                     But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                                     Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

II.
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The thrilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                                 Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

III.
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
Wtih slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

      Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movememnt; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

IV.
Time and the bell have buried the day,
the black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V.
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

      The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always-
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

– T. S. Eliot

Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 due, in no small part, to Four Quartets, a series of four poems that show him at his peak. As Helen Vendler writes in TIME for the magazine’s “100 People of the Century” feature, after Four Quartets “[Eliot] could no longer summon the intense concentration of heart, mind and imagination necessary to produce significant poetry, and he subsided into the versifier of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” The quartets were the last legs of his powers and “Burnt Norton”, the first quartet, is his zenith’s zenith.

Immediately, one realizes that “Burnt Norton” contains none of the cryptic warnings of “the Waste Land” or the stream-of-conscious patter of “Prufrock”. Here, Eliot is poet-philosopher meditating on time’s cyclical structure. He is clear and rhythmic and calm. Lewis Carroll’s rose garden appears briefly in the first section, but this is probably the least allusive of Eliot’s major works. Two of his most well known lines (semi-lines, really) nest here: “at the still point of the turning world” and “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality”. The whole thing is a gorgeous swirl of mysticism and spirituality.

Old Possum, by the way, is wildly uneven, but contains two of his best poems — “the Naming of Cats” and “Macavity”.

“maggie and milly and molly and may”

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

– E. E. Cummings

A certain sort of fun derives from unlocking the meaning behind Cummings’ (yes, capitalized) idiosyncratic use of punctuation. It’s best to view his typographic decisions as examples of impressionistic flourishes. In this poem, one trick is present, and that is the lack of space between word and punctuation mark. For me, it means a gaggle of giggling girls out-of-breath from dancing, jumping, running on the beach, but I think its real meaning is meant to stay ambiguous.

To a Chameleon

Hid by the august foliage and fruit
  of the grape-vine
  twine
     your anatomy
       round the pruned and polished stem,
          Chameleon.
          Fire laid upon
       an emerald as long as
     the Dark King’s massy
  one,
could not snap the spectrum up for food
  as you have done.

– Marianne Moore

The poem’s twist is the use of “twine” as a verb and not, as one first expects, a noun (as in “grape-vine twine”). One must look twice to uncover the sinuous syntax.

“And the days are not full enough”

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
  Not shaking the grass.

– Ezra Pound

Though I usually associate bombast with Pound’s work, this is the opposite: a hopeless little lyric laid out in clean language. The pause before the final line is such a little thing, but means so much.

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were they hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

– Wallace Stevens

Stevens excelled at titles and this one says a lot. Let’s take it bit by bit.

Tea places the scene in Asia. Tea leaves are endemic to that continent, and they relate to calmness and meditation which one associates with Eastern religions.

The palaz is a palace. It seems that Stevens is rejecting more popular religious beliefs, the hymns and anointments of Christianity, for instance, for a solipsistic approach to spirituality (“I was the world in which I walked…”) in which he builds his own spiritual structure.

Hoon sounds like a vaguely Eastern deity or philosopher, and there is the sense of Stevens tapping into the Tao as he navigates his noösphere (“and there I found myself truly and more strange”).

Sir Beelzebub

When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell
  Where Proserpine first fell,
Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea,
  (Rocking and shocking the barmaid).

Nobody comes to give him his rum but the
Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum
Enhances the chances to bless with a benison
Alfred Lord Tennyson crossing the bar laid
With cold vegetation from pale deputations
Of temperance workers (all signed In Memoriam)
Hoping with glory to trip up the Laureate’s feet,
  (Moving in classical metres)…

Like Balaclava, the lava came down from the
Roof, and the sea’s blue wooden gendarmerie
Took them in charge while Beelzebub roared for his rum.
  …None of them come!

– Edith Sitwell

With sonics as succulent as syllabub, “Sir Beelzebub” concludes Façade, Sitwell’s collection of sound poems, with the most coherent narration of the series: something to do with the Prince of Darkness’ sweet tooth. After a stuttering start, the poems erupts into a galloping meter, performs a few metrical tricks, and ends abruptly in the hammered four-note knock of its last line.

In her notes, Sitwell summarized the ideas behind “Sir Beelzebub” and its ilk:

The poems in Façade are abstract poems — that is, they are patterns in sound… My experiments in Façade consist of inquiries into the effect on rhythm and on speed of the use of rhymes, assonances, and dissonances, placed at the beginning and in the middle of lines, as well as at the end, and in the most elaborate patterns.

…The poems appeared strange, sometimes because of the heightened imagery and sometimes because, to quote a phrase of the scientist Henri Poincaré, ‘the accident of a rhyme can call forth a system.’

William Walton orchestrated the poems in the 1920s (to quite a stir — Noël Coward walked out on the debut performance). Listen to selections below:

A Jellyfish

Visible, invisible
  a fluctuating charm
an amber-tinctured amethyst
  inhabits it, your arm
approaches and it opens
  and it closes; you had meant
to catch it and it quivers;
  you abandon your intent.

– Marianne Moore

A pulsating and cerebral confection on an ethereal creature. The understated indentations, unusual for Moore, oscillate like a jellyfish.