We both went our seprate ways
I wish on the brightest star that i could find out where u are
I wish u could understand how i feel
Life is unfair for some of us,
yet we still have to face it with courage.
Life is really challenging,
with many obstacles to pass.
Whether you fail or success,
it all depends on you.
*SANDRA'S__BLOG*
*click on the 'alone' to navigate'*
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
From The Triumph of Love
by Geoffrey Hill
I
Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp.
XIII
Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?
Who can now tell what was taken, or where,
or how, or whether it was received
how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over-
laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around,
rotted down with leafmould, accepted
as civic concrete, reinforceable
base cinderblocks
tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up
with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge
committed in absentia to solemn elevation,
Trauermusik, musique funebre, funeral
music, for male and female
voices ringingly a cappella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting,
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?
XIV
As to bad faith, Malebranche might argue
it rests with inattention. Stupidity
is not admissible. However, the status
of apprehension remains at issue.
Some qualities are best
left unrecognized. Needless to say,
unrecognized is not
unacknowledged.
Unnamed is not nameless.
XVII
If the gospel is heard, all else follows:
the scattering, the diaspora,
the shtetlach, ash pits, pits of indigo dye.
Penitence can be spoken of, it is said,
but is itself beyond words;
even broken speech presumes. Those Christian Jews
of the first Church, huddled sabbath-survivors,
keepers of the word; silent, inside twenty years,
doubly outcast: even so I would remember
the scattering, the diaspora.
We do not know the saints.
His mercy is greater even than his wisdom.
If the gospel is heard, all else follows.
We shall rise again, clutching our wounds.
XXXV
Even now, I tell myself, there is a language
to which I might speak and which
would rightly hear me;
responding with eloquence; in its turn,
negotiating sense without insult
given or injury taken.
Familiar to those who already know it
elsewhere as justice,
it is met also in the form of silence.
XXIX
Rancorous, narcissistic old sod what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead. Too bad. So how
much more does he have of injury time?
XL
For wordly, read worldly; for in equity, inequity;
for religious read religiose; for distinction
detestation. Take accessible to mean
acceptable, accommodating, openly servile.
Is that right, Missis, or is that right? I don't
care what I say, do I?
XLI
For iconic priesthood, read worldly pique and ambition.
Change insightfully caring to pruriently intrusive.
Delete chastened and humbled. Insert humiliated.
Interpret slain in the spirit as browbeaten to exhaustion.
For hardness of heart read costly dislike of cant.
XLII
Excuse me excuse me I did not
say the pain is lifting. I said the pain is in
the lifting. No please forget it.
XLIII
This is quite dreadful he's become obsessed.
There you go, there you go narrow it down to obsession!
LI
Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,
it is for me increasingly a terrain
seen in cross-section igneous, sedimentary,
conglomerate, metamorphic rock- strata, in which particular grace,
individual love, decency, endurance, are traceable across the faults.
LII
Admittedly at times this moral landscape to my exasperated ear emits
archaic burrings like a small, high-fenced electricity sub-station of uncertain age
in a field corner where the flies gather and old horses shake their sides.
LXVI
Christ has risen yet again to their ritual supplication. It seems weird
that the comedy never self-destructs.
Actually it is strengthened if attenuation is strength. (Donne said as much of gold. Come back, Donne, I forgive you; and lovely Herbert.)
But what strange guild is this that practises daily
synchronized genuflection and takes pride in hazing my Jewish wife? If Christ
be not risen, Christians are petty temple-schismatics, justly
cast out of the law.
Worse things have befallen Israel. But since he is risen, he is risen even for these
high-handed underlings of self- worship who, as by obedience,
proclaim him risen indeed.
LXVII
Instruct me further in your travail, blind interpreter. Suppose I cannot
unearth what it was they buried research is not anamnesis. Nor is this a primer
of innocence exactly. Did the centurion see nothing irregular before the abnormal light seared his eyeballs? Why do I take as my gift a wounded and wounding introspection? The rule is clear enough last alleluias forte, followed by indifferent coffee and fellowship.
LXIX
What choice do you have? These are false questions.
Fear is your absolute, yet in each feature infinitely variable, Manichean beyond dispute, for you alone, the skeletal maple, a loose wire
tapping the wind.
LXX
Active virtue: that which shall contain its own passion in the public weal do you follow? or can you at least take the drift of the thing? The struggle
for a noble vernacular this did not end with Petrarch. But where is it?
Where has it got us? Does it stop, in our case, with Dryden, or, perhaps,
Milton's political sonnets? the cherished stock hacked into ransom and ruin; the voices of distinction, far back, indistinct.
Still, I'm convinced that shaping, voicing, are types of civic action.
Or, slightly to refashion this, that Wordsworth's two
Prefaces stand with his great tract on the Convention of Cintra, witnessing to the praesidium in the sacred name of things betrayed. Intrinsic value I am somewhat less sure of. It seems implicate with active virtue but I cannot say how, precisely. Partaking of both fact and recognition, it must be, therefore, in effect, at once agent and predicate imponderables brought home to the brute mass and detail of the world; there, by some, to be pondered.
XCVI
Ignorant, assured, there comes to us a voice Unchallengeable of the foundations,
distinct authority devoted to indistinction. With what proximity to justice stands the record of mischance, heroic hit-or-miss, the air so full of flak and tracer, legend says, you pray to live unnoticed. Mr Ives took Emersonian self-reliance the whole way on that. Melville, half-immolated, rebuilt the pyre. Hoist, some time later, stumbled on dharma. What can I say?— At worst and best a blind ennoblement, flood-water, hunched, shouldering at the weir, the hatred that is in the nature of love.
CXVIII
By default, as it so happens, here we have good and bad angels caught burning
themselves characteristic antiphons; and here the true and the false
shepherds discovered already deep into their hollow debate. Is that all? No, add spinners of fine calumny, confectioners of sugared malice; add those who find sincerity in heartless weeping. Add the pained, painful clowns, brinksmen of perdition. Sidney: best realizer and arguer of music, that ‘divine striker upon the senses’, steady my music to your Augustinian grace-notes, with your high craft of fret. I am glad to have learned how it goes with you and with Italianate-
Hebraic Milton your voices pitched exactly— somewhere—between Laus Deo and defiance.
CXIX
And yes bugger you, MacSikker et al., I do mourn and resent your desolation of learning Scientia that enabled, if it did not secure, forms of understanding, far from despicable, and furthest now, as they are most despised. By understanding I understand diligence and attention, appropriately understood as actuated self-knowledge, a daily acknowledgement of what is owed the dead.
CXX
As with the Gospels, which it is allowed to resemble, in Measure for Measure moral uplift is not the issue. Scrupulosity, diffidence, shrill spirituality, conviction, free expression, come off as poorly as deceit or lust. The ethical motiv is so we may hazard opportunism, redemptive and redeemed;
case-hardened on case-law, casuistry's own redemption; the general temper
a caustic equity.
CXXI
So what is faith if it is not inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns are breast-high, head-high, the days lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder.
Light is this instant, far-seeing into itself, its own signature on things that recognize salvation. I am an old man, a child, the horizon is Traherne’s country.
CXLVII
To go so far with the elaborately-
vested Angel of Naked Truth and where are we, finally? Don't say that we are nowhere finally. And nowhere are you nowhere are you any more more
cryptic than a schoolyard truce. Cry Kings, Cross, or Crosses, cry Pax, cry Pax, but to be healed. But to be healed, and die!
CXLVIII
Obnoxious means, far back within itself, easily wounded. But vulnerable, proud
anger is, I find, a related self of covetousness. I came late to seeing that. Actually, I had to be shown it. What I saw was rough, and still pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more. Pride is our crux be angry, but not proud where that means vainglorious. Take Leopardi's words or to be accurate BV's English cast of them when he found Tasso's poor scratch of a memorial barely showing among the cold slabs of defunct pomp. It seemed a sad and angry consolation. So Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem I ask you: what are poems for? They are to console us
with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch. Let us commit that to our dust. What ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad and angry consolation. What is
the poem? What figures? Say, a sad and angry consolation. That's
beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry consolation.
CXLIX
Obstinate old man senex sapiens, it is not. Is he still writing? What is he writing now? He has just written I find it hard to forgive myself. We are immortal. Where
was I?
CL
Sun-blazed, over Romsley, the livid rain-scarp.
no one is perfect.
[5:36 AM]