The Raven puts up Three More Poems for View

                 The Raven puts up Three More Poems for View  

The Raven has been on WhatsApp with his mother, rather more than usual and maybe, he has said to her, rather more than he needs to be as far as his own happiness and sense of balance in life and progress through the world are concerned. ‘Maybe”, she has said, imperturbably (‘There’s nothing like sitting in the sun in Northern Queensland, surrounded by saltwater crocodiles and some of the most unbelievable spiders known to man, to make you imperturbable,’ she has said. ‘And a half way decent shiraz,’ he has replied. ‘Well, you know your father,’ she has said.  ‘You’re turning me into Seinfeld,’ he has said.)

‘Anyway’, she says now on what is, he calculates, the fourth Whats App session in the last two days. ‘I need to talk to you about my Funeral. I’ve realised I’m the one who’s going to have to organize it all. You know your father, he’ll have a troupe of those terrible women in suits and matching hats, I don’t want Any of THEM. And no Funeral Directors, or Mutes, or Black Horses tossing their Manes as they haul my hearse through the streets.’

‘Past the Grieving Populace?’ he replies.

‘Oh, yes, the Grieving Populace,’ she says. ‘We can have them - as many as you can find,’

Today’s topic, it transpires, after the call is over, has been the Choice of Music and Verse. As instructed he listens to Noel Coward on You Tube.

 ‘Not the 1938 version,’ she has said. ‘His voice got far too fruitywhen he got older. I want the one with Gertie Lawrence.’ Her own mother, she reminded him, had been like Gertie Lawrence.  ‘I always think of her when I hear it,’ she has said. ‘You know, it always makes me cry.’ Her mother singing in the kitchen at Krull Street, remembering the past.

‘And just the first verse, mind you,’ she added, just as he was about to hang up. ‘Remember - Someone’s going to have to be pretty snappy and turn it off before the second verse starts. It’s so moving, you know, the last line - Everyone, including the Corpse, will cry.’

He can see what she means, he thinks now, having found the right one, the light voiced one.  Everyone should listen, it’s perfect, here it is:

                 I’ll see you again

                 Whenever spring breaks through again

                 Time may lie heavy between

                 But what has been

                 Is past forgetting.

                 This sweet memory

                 Throughout my life will come to me

                 Though my world may go awry

                 In my heart will ever lie

                 Just the echo of a sigh            

Goodbye.

His eyes fill with tears And he finds himself longing for something, something ‘the Old Days’ might have provided, but maybe not – and that’s even sadder he thinks. God, he’s lonely; he thinks he might have been lonely all his life; he thinks he might have been born into the wrong end of the century, 24 years ago. Well, it’s too late now, he thinks. Sniffing he goes outside. Under the wind and the stars everything seems both possible and impossible at the same time.

 And it’s this that puts him in mind of one of the poems he would say was a Perfect Lyric:  In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas. It’s one of the poems that thanks to a very old-fashioned primary school teacher he has memorized: learned off by heart as the saying used to be.  And here it is, thank you, Mr Vasey, produced now without a book, under the wind and stars:

     In my craft or sullen art

     Exercised in the still night

     When only the moon rages

     And the lovers lie abed

     With all their grief in their arms

     I labour by singing light

     Not for ambition or bread

     Or the strut and trade of charms

     On the ivory stages

     But for the common wages

     Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon do I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the grief of the ages

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

     And having produced this out of  what Wallace Stevens, another of his favourite poets, calls the clear viol of (his) memory (in the text it is ‘her memory’ and there it really means the way the she of that poem IS remembered, by others, but he feels he can take the liberty)  he decides to go to bed, to put himself to sleep as if he were his own baby, and not to allow himself to dwell on the sad question -  Has he been lonely all his life? 

The next morning he checks his remembered version of In My Craft or Sullen Art against the actual text and finds, as always, that first he has added a syllable to line 13, with ‘do I write’ instead of ‘I write’ which candidly he thinks is an improvement and second he has made a mistake in the third last line, where it should be ‘griefs’ and not ‘grief’ of the ages – but he’s inclined to think his own version is better, though he might be alone on that.

He looks around; the day is clear but a wind is getting up, lifting the corners of the tarp he’s put down over the last lot of dried bricks. There is no one to talk to, not for miles; trees toss at the edge of the further paddocks; a cockatoo screams on the rising wind and now, increasingly alarmed by his own solitude and a sudden total sense of imprisonment inside his own thoughts, he makes a sudden decision to leave everything where it is for the moment, maybe for a week, maybe even weeks, because he’s got it all to the lock-up stage well ahead of plan, and get back into his normal life in town. As he packs the car a huge roaring wind comes through the high trees along the southern edge. It presents him with his second perfect poem for the day – a poem so fully self-contained, so vast and sufficient and at the same time balanced on so fine a point of single consciousness – the consciousness of the speaker – that it is, he feels, a poem about which there is absolutely nothing to say – a poem that speaks for itself, a poem that allows no other speaker in – it is Wallace Stevens’ five line masterpiece To the Roaring Wind. 

                           So here it is, then - the title and four lines of verse:

                                       To the Roaring Wind.

               What syllable are you seeking,

               Vocalissimus,

               In the distances of sleep?

               Speak it.

It would never be set as an unseen passage for unfortunate candidates, not only because it is so brief but, as suggested already, because it is so complete and self-contained, there’s no way in. All he could say, if he had to, was that one of the reasons he likes it so much is that he spent the first ten years of his life growing up in New Zealand, in Wellington, the windtossed city of the Antipodes, where the wind blew every day of his life and sang in his dreams,  the wind that bloweth where it listeth and on which, sometimes, you can almost think that you hear the voice of God.

               And as he drives away he thinks of Wellington dark under the flickering stormlight that comes on the wings of the southerlies as they cross the Strait, bringing the Antarctic with them 

               Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

              The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters    

               Of the petrel and the porpoise.

                                                   (East Coker, T.S. Eliot).

(In a way, he thinks, it should be enough for people not to write comments.

In a way it might be better all round if all students had to do was pay homage, to memorise and quote.)

                        ‘Fine words butter no Parsnips,’ Mr. Vasey would say.