On Shaping Poetry: Audre Lorde

Cover of Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde
Crossing Press, 1984
via Wikimedia Commons, Fair use

The American professor/essayist/poet/feminist Audre Lorde's useful advice about 'finding' a poem:

I was revising too much instead of writing new poems.

[...] poetry is not Play-Doh. You can’t take a poem and keep reforming it. It is itself, and you have to know how to cut it. And if there’s something else you want to say, that’s fine.

From an interview with Adrienne Rich, 1979, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (audiobook, narrated by Robin Eller). Read in 2019.

March 2022 in Books: What I'll Be Reading

BECAUSE of the literary tour around the world begun last year, I'd been reading Ukrainian books when the country was invaded on February 24th.

In the family's translated copy of Nikolai Gogol short stories, I have finished "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" and begun reading "The Nose."

Portrait of Nikolai Gogol (early 1840s)
by Otto Friedrich Theodor von Möller
via Wikimedia Commons

Even as a sheltered Berliner in peacetime Germany, it hurts the soul to read the jaunty, satirical prose — framed in imperial Russia; with its tin soldier figures, small-town drama, and tempests in a teapot. Because his tales are harshly real at times, but at other times far away from harsher realities even of Gogol's time.

(That said, since I was also a reader who did not want to read pandemic literature during Covid, but others enjoyed 'the hair of the dog' as an approach to handling times of duress, your mileage may vary.)

I am often thinking before reaching for the book of the decimated 21st century apartment buildings, dead Ukrainians and Russians, and fleeing civilians of 150 years later.

"Picket Ural Cossacks" (1813)
by Korneev E. M. (1782 – 1839)
via Wikimedia Commons

But, to paraphrase the Bible, the wars are always with us. In Berlin, I live in what used to be a village that was practically annihilated during the Seven Years' War. Gogol would certainly have known war at least at a distance — like the heard roll of cannon thunder.

The beautiful depictions of landscapes, people, and other vignettes in his prose are a little, but very little, comfort. Here is a passage from "St. John's Eve," another Gogol story I haven't read entirely yet, which illustrates his style:

As I now recall it,—my old mother was alive then,—in the long winter evenings when the frost was crackling out of doors, and had so sealed up hermetically the narrow panes of our cottage, she used to sit before the hackling-comb, drawing out a long thread in her hand, rocking the cradle with her foot, and humming a song, which I seem to hear even now.

Or

The sky is red only on one side, and it is already growing dark. It grows colder in the fields. It gets dusky and more dusky, and at last quite dark. At last! With heart almost bursting from his bosom, he set out on his way, and cautiously descended through the dense woods into the deep hollow called the Bear's ravine.

Nightingale
by A. Weitzel, 2013 (attr.)
via Wikimedia Commons

Or, from "A May Night"

The nightingales of the Ukraine are singing, and it seems as though the moon itself were listening to their song. The village sleeps as though under a magic spell; the cottages shine in the moonlight against the darkness of the woods behind them. The songs grow silent, and all is still. 

Which reminds me indirectly of Thomas Hardy's consoling poem "The Darkling Thrush" (1900), about another songbird:

So little cause for carolings
  Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
  Afar or nigh around.
That I could think there trembled through
  His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
  And I was unaware.

*

(Off topic, I haven't even gotten far into "The Nose" yet. But also based on the internal evidence of "Ivan Fedorovich Chponka and His Aunt", I have already decided that the author is not the Feminist of the Century.)

It also turns out that Gogol influenced Sholem Aleichem, another Ukrainian prose author whose work is sitting on my desk.

***

Emma Graham-Harrison, foreign correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, noted via Twitter on March 4th:

"We aged a hundred years and this descended/

In just one hour, as at a stroke."

Only realised today that the great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova was born in Ukraine and had Ukrainian roots.

Her poem on the outbreak of WWI, "In Memoriam" seems apt 

https://poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/in-memoriam-july-19-1914/

***

Aside from Ukrainian works, the Jimmy Carter biography His Very Best, Canadian author Esi Edugyan's historical Half Blood Blues, Vincent Sheehan's Louis XIV and Omar el Akkad's What Strange Paradise are a few of the half-read books I'm working on.

Valentine's Day: Do Poets' and Novelists' Arrows Hit, or Miss?

[Disclaimer: As a Valentine's Day skeptic, I am also purposely publishing this blog post two days early in sign of protest.]

In my Canadian high school, an English teacher asked us to bring in and discuss a poem that expressed to us what love is. I failed in that attempt because it was hard to find anything that did, even though in the end a Shakespeare sonnet was what came closest. As a teenager, to me there were three pieces of literature that came to mind:

War and Peace. For some reason the later scenes with [spoiler alert: please drag your cursor over the white spaces if you don't mind the spoiler] Pierre and Natasha represented to me what true love was all about. Everyday, boring happiness where you're a little starry-eyed about each other even in your forties; a type of relationship whose harmony makes it livable and comfortable for others (children, friends, relatives) to be around you.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

⁠If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
⁠I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

The Scarlet Pimpernel. Even as a teenager I knew that the book was soap opera in its depictions of relationships and human psychology. But this scene was still moving and while it felt over-the-top as a scenario, held a kernel of possible emotional truth:

Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love, and as soon as her light footsteps had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade there, where her tiny hand had rested last.

***

In the intervening years, I've read other poems that were felt to be romantic classics — amongst others — by the Victorians. For example:

Wordsworth's She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.

A Violet by a mossy stone
⁠Half-hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
⁠Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her Grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

I think a poem that idealizes a woman's life being largely unappreciated and ending in early death, is a strange choice as a love poem. Wordsworth's other poems are also infantilizing (Note: which is not to say that I don't appreciate Wordsworth in general):

A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles

*

As a 36-year-old, here's my latest take:

In the end, the Corinthians in the Bible give perhaps the best nudge toward how to love when you have the chance, platonic or romantic:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

"1 Corinthians" in: The King James Bible. Oxford: 1769 (Wikisource)

As a teenager I'd probably think this idea of 'love' is to be soft-spoken and ingratiating, and find it vomitous. But now I think I understand. It's encouragement to keep fighting the battle not to make ourselves feel better by depreciating others, or by getting hung up on silly arguments.

And, to drop Shakespeare's idea of a constant love that had convinced me as a teenager, I think love needs to keep changing, adapting, growing, stretching and improving the older we grow and the more challenges we find.

*

Lastly Charles Baudelaire's "L'Harmonie du soir" comes to mind, especially the elegiac but heartwarming final line "Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!" ('Your memory, in me, glows like a church monstrance.')

***

Sources:

"Sonnet 116" in: Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Edward Bliss Reed, ed. Yale University Press: 1923. (Wikisource)

Orczy, Baroness Emmuska. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Ch. XVI. (Wikisource)
[Edited to add - Feb. 13th: As a strange historical footnote, apparently The Scarlet Pimpernel's central narrative, adopted into a 1940s anti-fascist propaganda film, inspired Raoul Wallenberg.]

Wordsworth, William. Poems, Vol. I. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown (1815) (Wikisource) and "She was a Phantom of delight"

(I hate when people do this self-referential thing, but will do it anyway: For Baudelaire's poem, please see my blog post)

In the Bleak Midwinter, in a Nutshell

Christina Rossetti, one of the clan of Pre-Raphaelites, wrote a religious poem that has since been set to music by Gustav Holst and others, and turned into a Christmas hymn.

I've not entirely been a fan of her writing style, which in the first verse of this poem has a kind of literally lapidary Cubist quality even if she was writing decades earlier, in the 19th century. But it is undoubtedly also moving.

From Pre-Raphaelitism and the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (1905)
Likely by William Holman Hunt, via Wikimedia Commons

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.

Night
by Edward Burne-Jones
via Wikimedia Commons

Our God, Heav’n cannot hold him
Nor earth sustain;
Heav’n and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty
Jesus Christ.

[...]

What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give him,
Give my heart.

***

To me, an element of William Blake's mysticism tinges the second verse: having an idea of religion in which there is always a conflict or a wrangling for a central role, the Tyger and the Lamb. Maybe inspired by Paradise Lost?

I see this portrait of conflict as projecting a personal struggle with faith, or with the world. Seen as an 'objective' reader of the poem: why, in a Christian cosmology, can't a loving God coexist with heaven and earth?

It's also unclear why Jesus would expect gifts; but that might be just my opinion, influenced by my Black Friday season anti-consumerism.

*

'Pre-Raphaelite window
in Highfield United Reform Church, Rock Ferry'
In the Pre-Raphaelite style.
via Wikimedia Commons

The King's College Choir at Cambridge recorded a rather fine version of Holst's musical setting in 2005, and it is available on YouTube.

In the Bleak Midwinter (1872) [Wikipedia]

An Epigraph from Pope

Alexander Pope (1668-1745)

'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

(from "An Essay on Criticism"
in The Major Works, Pat Rogers, ed.
Oxford University Press, 2008
p. 19)

Keats's Charactery

John Keats was notoriously young, twenty-five years old when he died of tuberculosis in Rome, and at that time he was not basking in the venerable twilight of an acknowledged poetic master. He was, to some contemporaries, an upstart, and his readers partly ridiculed him.

I think it makes sense that the work he did influenced him to foreboding and a preoccupation with death, because besides writing poetry he also worked as a surgeon. His poem "When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be" I remember from Grade 12 English Literature class as a time-overleaping twin to John Milton's earlier 17th-century sonnet "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"; and it is a prime example of the poet's foreboding strain.

"Portrait of Keats, listening to a nightingale on Hampstead Heath"
Joseph Severn (ca. 1845)
via Wikimedia Commons

"When I have Fears" is from the year 1818; Keats likely had not developed tuberculosis yet, and he died years later in 1821. That said, Keats's brother had already been ill, offering reasonable grounds for Keats to feel a semi-medieval fascination with Death.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.-*

(I wonder what the last two-and-a-half-lines mean. Might they mean that death is so all-devouring that even we forget even the warmest desires in life, when its warning shadow overcasts our consciousness?)

* From: "When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be" on Wikipedia
further information from "John Keats" and "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"

A Found Poem: Idyll in Southern Spain

Fachada de la Real Colegiata de San Hipólito
by Amoluc (?), via Wikimedia Commons
License: CC BY-SA 3.0

***

Poems can, at times, happen at unexpected places; and despite the tradition of Lieder and more subtle presences of literature in music, it was a surprise when I first leafed through our edition of the Chants d'Espagne by Isaac Albéniz to see the epigraph above "Córdoba."

En el silencio de la noche, que interrumpe el
susurro de las brises aromadas por los
jazmines, suenan las guzlas acompañando las

Serenatas y difundiendo en el aire melodías
ardientes y notas tan dulces como los
balanceos de las palmas en los altos cielos.

Roughly translated: In the stillness of the night, interrupted by the whisper of the breezes scented by jasmine, the gusles* resound, accompanying the serenades and diffusing into the air ardent melodies and notes as soft as the waving of the palms in the high skies.

(German-language Wikipedia: "Gusle")

(Note: In our G. Henle edition, the English translation is rendered so it is the musical notes that are 'in celestial heights' — or, as I put it, 'in the high skies' — and not the swaying palms. But I prefer to persist in my interpretation as it is!)

A Toast To Winter: Part IV, Shelley Twice

After looking in the Lighthouse's archives, I find that a 2009 post here in fact expresses insights into Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode To The West Wind" that are far better than anything I could muster today. The Ode does feel like a fall poem rather than a winter poem, too, given the impressions of movement and the falling leaves, etc. But like the graves between the spring or summer flowers in a churchyard, Winter is a dark presence that pervades the poem.

Here are excerpts of the Ode, then. I am presenting them without further commentary. In them, the poet addresses the West Wind, 'thou,' as if it were a human being.

O, thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth,

***

Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear!

***

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

***

"Prometheus Unbound; a lyrical drama in four acts with other poems/Ode to the West Wind" (Wikisource)
The Ode was first published in 1820.

A Toast To Winter, Part III: Coleridge

According to the vague information imparted by the high school English Literature course that I have mentioned many times before, and by scraps of independent reading since, Samuel Taylor Coleridge stood with William Wordsworth like the twin pillars of Gibraltar at the brink not of the Atlantic Ocean, but of the Romantic Movement. Returning their attention to the working man and his plight, their poems were expressed in simple language. They must have been unbearably shocking after the lofty vocabulary, the yoked heroic couplets, and the encyclopaedias' worth of classical allusions that peppered poems before this time.

***

Frost at Midnight

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[. . .]

On the St. Ann's River Below Quebec
Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872)
via Wikimedia Commons

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

*

Source: Frost at Midnight (Wikipedia)

Poem written February 1798.

Frost at Midnight (Wikisource)

A Toast To Winter: Part II, Shakespeare's Winter Sonnet

For years I have wanted to write about this poem, but it has come so freshly to mind every year and the different lines have had such different meanings — and have faded in and out of focus in relation to each other, some sometimes more distinct in my mind than others — that it seemed important to wait until the right moment. Or, perhaps, to write about it repeatedly from various perspectives.

First I encountered it in school; and in university when walking past the trees on campus when they had lost their leaf, looked blackened like the embers in the poem, and a wintry sun was sinking behind the buildings, I would think of it often. It also presented, retrospectively, a metaphor for the wasteland I felt I had passed through before I reached university.

But then it also had half a sacred aspect to me, with its choirs and the thought of eternity, and I pictured a ruined abbey or a church in the background of the scenery — even though I generally don't read Shakespeare for descriptions of scenery.

At any rate I felt that it is a poem that will likely reveal its meaning even more to me the older I am — even if the arc of Shakespeare's sonnets still seems to me to be a rather whiny paean to ego, adorned undeservedly with some beautiful verses, and more obsessed with (the narrator's own, and vicariously the narrator's through those of his love objects) youth and beauty, and by the grovelling fear of death, than ennobled by true love of another. That said, I am clearly forming a very harsh judgment and I haven't read any proper critics who have presented the sonnet cycle in a similar light.

***

'Ruins of the Oybin (Dreamer)'
Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1835
Oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum
Via Wikimedia Commons

***

SONNET LXXIII
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
  This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
  To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

*******

Source:
Wikipedia: "Sonnet 73"

A Toast To Winter: Part I, Matthias Claudius

The days have become so short now, and as grey as if dredged up from the seabed on a hazy northern morning, and at -6°C so cold by the measure of early German winters, that one solution to the chill fog that invades the mind too might seem to be to dive into summer literature. But instead I will try the cure by 'hair of the dog,' and mention books and poems and plays that celebrate, or at least describe, winter.

FIRST, a poem. Matthias Claudius is a German poet whose subjects take him through the everyday of a time span that seems broader, because I think it is still so relatable, than the swathe of the 18th and 19th century (1740 to 1815) that he personally knew. Transformed into songs, like Der Mond ist aufgegangen and, in the realm of the classics, 'Death and the Maiden,' his verse made him familiar even in my Canadian-German household in the 1990s.

To illustrate the poem I have chosen here, a figure of Winter would be far more appropriate, gnarled and foreboding or gleefully hard as described. But instead I have chosen some rather more tame and cheerful pictures by Ludwig Richter.

***


Ein Lied hinterm Ofen zu singen

Der Winter ist ein rechter Mann,
    Kernfest und auf die Dauer;
Sein Fleisch fühlt sich wie Eisen an,
    Und scheut nicht süß noch sauer.
War je ein Mann gesund, ist er's;
    Er krankt und kränkelt nimmer,
Weiß nichts von Nachtschweiß noch Vapeurs,
    Und schläft im kalten Zimmer.
Er zieht sein Hemd im Freien an,
    Und läßt's vorher nicht wärmen;
Und spottet über Fluß im Zahn
    Und Kolik in Gedärmen.
Aus Blumen und aus Vogelsang
    Weiß er sich nichts zu machen,
Haßt warmen Drang und warmen Klang
    Und alle warme Sachen.
Doch wenn die Füchse bellen sehr,
    Wenn's Holz im Ofen knittert,
Und um den Ofen Knecht und Herr
    Die Hände reibt und zittert;
Wenn Stein und Bein vor Frost zerbricht
    Und Teich' und Seen krachen;
Das klingt ihm gut, das haßt er nicht,
    Denn will er sich tot lachen. –
Sein Schloß von Eis liegt ganz hinaus
    Beim Nordpol an dem Strande;
Doch hat er auch ein Sommerhaus
    Im lieben Schweizerlande.
Da ist er denn bald dort bald hier,
    Gut Regiment zu führen.
Und wenn er durchzieht, stehen wir
    Und sehn ihn an und frieren.

*

A spur-of-the-moment translation by me. (The last verse is pure guesswork.)

A Song
to be sung behind the stove

Winter is an honest man,
Sound as a nut and long enduring;
His flesh feels firm as iron
And fears not sweet nor sour.

If ever a man was well, he is;
He falls sick or sickens never,
Night sweats or vapors knows he not,
And sleeps in a chilly chamber.

He pulls his shirt on in the open
And lets it not be warmed before;
And jeers at seepages of teeth
And colic of the bowels.

For flowers and the song of birds
He has no use whatever,
Hates warm throngs and hates warm tones
And hates warm things altogether.

Yet when the foxes bark in force,
The logs in the stove are crackling
And around the stove the man and master
Rub their hands and shiver;

When stone and bone crack in the frost
And ponds and lakes do shatter;
It pleases his ear, he hates it not,
For he wants to die of laughing.

His ice palace lies far away
At the North Pole near the shore;
And yet he has a summer house
In dear old Switzerland.

There he is — now there, now here —
To mount his regime well.
And when he passes through, we stand
And look at him and freeze.

***

Sources:
Wikipedia: "Matthias Claudius" (English language)
Spiegel Online: Project Gutenberg: "Matthias Claudius: Der Wandsbecker Bote - Kapitel 164" (German language)

The poem was written in 1782 — "Ein Lied hinterm Ofen zu singen" (September 18, 2013) on the blog "Gedichtauswahl begründet"

Illustration of Der alte Turmhahn by Eduard Mörike
Adrian Ludwig Richter, 1855
Via Wikimedia Commons

Auszug der Sennen
Adrian Ludwig Richter, 1827
Oil on canvas
Via Wikimedia Commons

Matthias Claudius: Der Wandsbecker Bote
Lead pencil sketch by Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803-1884), Winter landscape with snowman and sleigh
via Wikimedia Commons

Burns's Shelterless Mouse

'To a Mouse' is one of my favourite poems, which I came across during school. Robert Burns wrote it in 1785, after he indeed met by putting athwart a nest of mice amid agricultural pursuits, according to his brother. He writes it from the point of view of marauding man, with a half-affectionate disrespect that is already in the first lines. I am guessing from a knowledge of English rather than of Scots, but he is naming the mouse 'little, sleek, cowering and timorous.'

Its Scots Wikipedia entry is worth citing here:

'To a Mouse' (Scots: Tae a Moose) is a Scots poem written bi Robert Burns in 1785 that wis includit in the Kilmarnock Volume, his first settin furth o musradry.

*

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion

Has broken Nature's social union,

An' justifies that ill opinion,

                               Which makes thee startle,

Northumberland Bestiary: folio 33.
Between 1250 and 1260.
via Wikimedia Commons

***

WEE, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

To the Now-Arrived, Cold Wintertide

A poem by Johannes Rist (with translations interlarded):

Auf die nunmehr angekommene kalte Winterszeit

Der Winter hat sich angefangen,
Der Schnee bedeckt das ganze Land,
Der Sommer ist hinweggegangen,
Der Wald hat sich in Reif verwandt.

Winter has itself begun, the snow bedecks the land entire; the summer has traversed away, the woods turned over into rime.

Die Wiesen sind von Frost versehret
Die Felder glänzen wie Metall,
Die Blumen sind in Eis verkehret,
Die Flüsse stehn wie harter Stahl.

The pastures are by frost consumed, the fields are glistening as if metal; the flow'rs into ice apostate, the rivers stand like hardy

An Early 19th-Century Pastorale

"Landscape of a Couple Alone at Sunset," (19th cent.) by Cornelis Lieste (1817-61)
Oil on panel, 60 × 79 cm, in the Collectie Rademakers
From Wikimedia Commons

Keats (1795-1821)
English poet.

TO GEORGE AND THOMAS KEATS.

[Southampton,] Tuesday Morn [April 15, 1817].

My dear Brothers—I am safe at Southampton—after having ridden three stages outside and the rest in for it began to be very cold. I did not know the Names of any of the Towns I passed through—all I can tell you is that sometimes I saw dusty Hedges—sometimes Ponds—then nothing—then a little Wood with trees look you like Launce's Sister* "as white as a Lily and as small as a Wand"—then came houses which died away into a few straggling Barns—then came hedge trees aforesaid again. As the Lamplight crept along the following things were discovered

Autumn, a Season and an Harmonie

CROWN'D with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf,
While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain,
Comes jovial on

*

broad and brown, below,
Extensive harvests hang the heavy head.

*

till the ruffled air
Falls from its poise, and gives the breeze to blow.
Rent is the fleecy mantle of the sky;
The clouds fly different; and the sudden sun
By its effulgent glide gilds the' illumined field,
And black by fits the shadows sweep along

*

[Illustration: Autumn (1573) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo,
In the Musée du Louvre; via Wikimedia Commons]

The Lady of Shalott

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

There was an earlier version of this poem, from 1833; this one is the one I've seen in anthologies and school textbooks. It tells the story of Elaine, who in Arthurian legend was in love with Sir Lancelot; since this affection was not requited she died and went floating in a barge down the river to Camelot, where the court of Arthur discovered her. The tale is screwed up — it's fairly sick to parade one's corpse in front of a love interest, and the likelihood that the barge would arrow neatly to its destination is physically doubtful as Anne of Green Gables would discover — but I like the setting and atmosphere very much and particularly Tennyson's power of singling out words that give strong and concise pictures of their real or imaginary originals.

Tennyson interprets the tale gently to symbolize the vagueness of an inward-looking or confined life, where one looks at life through the lens of art, books, or some other medium; and is better fitted by nature or nurture to go on daydreaming than to struggle with life or to bear a contact with harsh realities when and if it comes. Whether he meant it to refer to poets like himself, or other artists, or whether he was applying it to broader social isolation, is unclear to me.

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Picture: This in my view garish (but it was in my English Literature textbook, so the associations are there) painting by William Holman Hunt is "The Lady of Shalott," in the medium of oil on canvas, painted in 1905. It is housed in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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To A Daffodil

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850
English poet

I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

1804.

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In honour of the arrival of spring, much belated this year but obviously welcome.

*

From: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, William Michael Rossetti, Ed. (London: Ward, Lock & Co.)

Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil

by John Keats
Written: 1818
The Burial of Phocion, Nicolas Poussin (1648) [Wikimedia Commons]

[Considering the extreme length of this blog post I have foregone the typical fact-checking and appending of numerous links. Please forgive the omission.]

Against the background of the Plague, one of Giovanni Boccaccio's narrators in his Decameron chooses to impart to an audience of lords and fellow ladies the following cheerful tale :

LISABETTA'S brothers slay her lover, who appeareth to her in a dream and showeth her where he is buried, whereupon she privily disinterreth his head and setteth it in a pot of basil. Thereover making moan a great while every day, her brothers take it from her and she for grief dieth a little thereafterward

Even when expanded beyond the synopsis as Filomena tells it, the story is (in my opinion) irritatingly slight in spite of its tragedy. If the driving force behind the brothers' actions were a Greek god on an arbitrary rampage the tale would be far more sensible, and instead they appear to be merely a random act of psychotic violence which in the recounting appeals only to the commonest greed for sensation.

Admittedly one can nevertheless think of possible purposes to the tale. For instance, it might reflect the patriarchal excesses of medieval and Renaissance society, in which family means not protective affection but possessive tyranny. Or it can be a lament for the cruelty of the world toward star-crossed lovers in the Romeo and Juliet tradition. Or it could be an unsympathetic cautionary tale as to what happens when a young maiden has an affair outside the bonds of marriage and thereby thumbs her nose at the gods of expediency, i.e. the idols at whose altar society worships.

Either way, grave doubts as to its romanticness arise at the point where Lisabetta disinters Lorenzo and employs her knife to saw off the man's head for safekeeping. But it wavers back from time to time during the subsequent dubious step-by-step guide to tending a beloved gentleman's cranium:

taking a great and goodly pot, of those wherein they plant marjoram or sweet basil, she set the head therein, folded in a fair linen cloth, and covered it with earth, in which she planted sundry heads of right fair basil of Salerno; nor did she ever water these with other water than that of her tears or rose or orange-flower water. Moreover she took wont to sit still near the pot and to gaze amorously upon it with all her desire, as upon that which held her Lorenzo hid; and after she had a great while looked thereon, she would bend over it and fall to weeping so sore and so long that her tears bathed all the basil, which, by dint of long and assiduous tending, as well as by reason of the fatness of the earth, proceeding from the rotting head that was therein, waxed passing fair and very sweet of savour.

It isn't different in principle from Cinderella (Aschenputtel) watering her mother's grave with her tears in the Grimm fairy tale, but infinitely more disturbing. Which, considering that even over a century after Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, Leonardo da Vinci haunted cemeteries to dig up corpses for anatomical studies, and the peculiar ideas of criminal justice prevalent in those days, and altogether the pervasive mingling of death and life (vide the plague, which Boccaccio describes so pithily in the Decameron's introduction), probably fits into the times.

***
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, William Holman Hunt, 1868 [Wikimedia Commons]

Whatever the merits of the plot may be, it captured the imaginations of John Keats in the first quarter of the 19th century, and of Hans Christian Andersen and (in the painterly realm) the Pre-Raphaelites in the second and third quarters.

Keats's take on the matter is unapologetically soppy, a paean to the dewy-eyed love of youth. [Disclaimer: I skim the poem whenever reading it, so this treatment of it may lack depth.]

Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love's eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.

The second verse is fortunately improved by little touching details:

With every morn their love grew tenderer,
With every eve deeper and tenderer still;
He might not in house, field, or garden stir,
But her full shape would all his seeing fill;
And his continual voice was pleasanter
To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill;
Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,
She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.

Though the unkind mind might suggest that Isabella must be as big as a whale to fill all her beloved's seeing. A picture of bucolic bliss, as exists only in the minds of those who read Christopher Marlowe idylls of shepherds and shepherdesses unironically, is drawn at length. After the early hesitancy is surmounted the two of them become lovers and

his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme.

(At which point the reader may have difficulties keeping a straight face.) But then the maiden's brothers destroy their lover's paradise, in what a description of their trade might suggest is an allegory to the destruction of nature and rural harmony by the Industrial Revolution.

With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver'd loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip;—with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.

This and the next verses could certainly be considered as a point on a line that leads from William Wilberforce and the Luddites through socialism and Charles Dickens to, let's say, Emile Zola's Germinal. In the disdain of filthy lucre and trade these verses are very suggestive, too, of the impecunious artist (and of snobbery).

In Keats's version of events the brothers' pride of caste leads them to abhor the thought that their subordinate should be their sister's beloved, and besides Lorenzo is an impediment to marrying her off to a rich aristocrat.

So the two brothers and their murder'd man
Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream
Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan
Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
The brothers' faces in the ford did seem,
Lorenzo's flush with love.—They pass'd the water
Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.

After the deed is done, they considerately tell Isabella that her soulmate has sailed away to foreign lands.

In the mid days of autumn, on their eves
The breath of Winter comes from far away,
And the sick west continually bereaves
Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
Of death among the bushes and the leaves,
To make all bare before he dares to stray
From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
By gradual decay from beauty fell,

pining. Her brothers feel twinges of conscience as she becomes pathetically ill, but they go on lying to her. But the truth is revealed to her by Lorenzo's spirit through a dream. Among other things he remarks,

thy paleness makes me glad;
Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel
A greater love through all my essence steal.

It may satisfy someone's artistic vision, but if a beloved wanted me to waste away and die amid great mental suffering, the first thing I would do once I've crossed the Styx is sock him in the chin.

There are lines here and there which tend to support the timid suspicion that Keats's verse is at times exceedingly feeble. Witness this fine specimen of rhyme, which describes Isabella's visit to the forest where Lorenzo was killed after she had seen the vision:

she took with her an aged nurse,
And went into that dismal forest-hearse.

Or, when the visit proves sadly successful,

At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
And Isabella did not stamp and rave.

Which is about as climactic (in my view) as "The Star-Spangled Banner" when the lyrics go "and the flag was . . . still there!" Keats then follows in Boccaccio's footsteps in elucidating proper grooming procedures for the skull of a defunct lover:

She calm'd its wild hair with a golden comb,
And all around each eye's sepulchral cell
Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
She drench'd away:—and still she comb'd, and kept
Sighing all day—and still she kiss'd, and wept.

Whereupon she

withers, like a palm
Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm.

But the basil plant is doing well. The brothers, intent on ruining this questionable idyll too, kidnap it for further examination, and though "the thing was vile with green and livid spot" recognize in the skull the beneficiary of their homicidal activities, and decide privily to go into everlasting banishment.

And so she [Isabella] pined, and so she died forlorn,
Imploring for her Basil to the last.
No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
In pity of her love, so overcast.
And a sad ditty of this story born
From mouth to mouth through all the country pass'd:
Still is the burthen sung—"O cruelty,
To steal my Basil-pot away from me!"

* * *

Though Oscar Wilde or Edgar Allan Poe might appear to be fine candidates to give the story their own twist, given their macabre streaks and appreciation for Italy in bygone and undercivilized times, it was Hans Christian Andersen who took up the lance. Fittingly he sentimentalized it a great deal, and wrote it from the comparatively cuddly perspective of a rose-elf, in the eponymous tale "Elf of the Rose."

This elf wanders along the leaves of the roses, of which the veins serve as roads, so minuscule is his stature, and lives and flits between the flower buds. But once he is weary from his travels and the roses are shut against him before the impending night, so he turns to a honeysuckle arbour and sees a young pair of lovers who are bidding each other farewell. The lady gives the gentleman a rose and after a spot of kissing they part. The latter is pleased with his present, but the brother of the lady is not pleased with his dalliance, so

he drew out a sharp knife, and while the other was kissing the rose, the wicked man stabbed him to death; then he cut off his head, and buried it with the body in the soft earth under the linden-tree.

(On the plus side, the knife wasn't blunt or serrated, and the lady doesn't have to do the decapitating of the corpse later. I wonder, though, if linden trees have knobbly, shallow roots or a tap root, because if the former it would have been a major pain in the neck to bury a body right under one.) Meanwhile the elf has fallen onto a dead linden leaf which fell onto the assassin's head, and hitches a ride home in an understandably disconsolate frame of mind.

The brother visits his sister's bedroom to cackle evilly, the leaf falls out of his head, and during the night the elf serenades the unlucky woman with a recounting of her beloved's demise. As promised, she also finds the crumpled leaf on her bed to prove that the story was no dream. During the day the elf hangs out in a rosebush in her room, and the next night the lady sneaks out and finds the corpse. She takes home the skull and a little jasmine plant that has bloomed nearby, and plants them both in a generously proportioned flowerpot.

Her grief makes the elf too miserable, so he lives out of doors again and pays her regular visits. As in Keats's poem, the lady wilts away as the flora thrives, and as not in Keats's poem the homicidal brother grumbles at her. At long last,

one day she sat and leaned her head against the flower-pot, and the little elf of the rose found her asleep. Then he seated himself by her ear, talked to her of that evening in the arbor, of the sweet perfume of the rose, and the loves of the elves. Sweetly she dreamed, and while she dreamt, her life passed away calmly and gently, and her spirit was with him whom she loved, in heaven.

(At which point I will admit that despite the smothering sentimentality of the words a certain teariness threatens.) Her surviving relative is happy to inherit the jasmine and brings it to his room. The elf follows it and whispers the story of the man's misdeeds to the flower-spirits, who say that it's old news considering whose skull they're growing out of, so the tiny avenger discontentedly goes on to see the bees, who promise to kill the killer. As it turns out the jasmine had appointed itself as the horticultural hangman anyway, and that night the sentence is executed as the spirits give the murderer nightmares and poison him with their infinitesimal spears. The bees and the elf rush in the next morning to find their prey dead.

But the punishment is not complete enough. As people come into the room to gawk, the insects flock around the jasmine pot, and sting a man who lifts it in the hand, so that it crashes to the floor and reveals the skull.

And the queen bee hummed in the air, and sang of the revenge of the flowers, and of the elf of the rose and said that behind the smallest leaf dwells One, who can discover evil deeds, and punish them also.

[Cf. the similarly uplifting Grimm tale of murder inevitably revealed, "Die klare Sonne bringt's an den Tag."]

And, if all goes as intended, a young and overly literate child will go to bed trembling in his little boots, resolving never to stab people and cut off their heads and hide them under linden trees because otherwise our benevolent God (through his self-appointed earthly minions) will hound him to the gates of Hades.
From the Botanical Magazine (1787), Vol. I [Wikimedia Commons]
The End.

(To be fair, I first read the story at the age of nine or ten and wasn't too affected by it, theologically or otherwise, except in finding it gloomily fascinating.)

* * *

The Decamerone of Giovanni Boccacio [Gutenberg.org]
An e-text of John Payne's translation, which had originally been published in 1886.

Keats: Poems Published in 1820 [Gutenberg.org]
A volume of verse with a handy hyperlink to "The Pot of Basil" in the table of contents.

Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen [Gutenberg.org]
A translation of many of Andersen's tales by an unknown person.

Beowulf

By Unknown
First recorded: Late 10th/early 11th century

One of the problems of this blog is that I am "reviewing" works that are mostly so established in the literary canon, and whose worth is so entirely evident, that the praise seems presumption. But it's one thing to recognize the merits of a work and another to enjoy them, and it is the latter with which I am principally concerned.

Whether the old English epic "Beowulf" is well-known enough outside of literature courses to be in no need of trumpeting may, however, be questionable, despite the recent films and Seamus Heaney's fine translation. Its origins are obscure, reaching back to 1000 AD or even earlier, and though the consensus appears to be that the manuscript that remains to us was written by two monks, it is unknown whether it may not be rooted in an even hoarier tale that was passed on by Anglo-Saxon storytellers for centuries before it was finally transcribed and infused with Christian propaganda.

When we read excerpts of Beowulf in my high school English Literature class, my excellent teacher devoted a lot of time to giving us a conception of what life was like for the Anglo-Saxons. It was not a pleasant life, "nasty, short and brutish" as Thomas Hobbes put it, and overshadowed by the savagery and inexorable tedium of war, indigence, and hostile nature. The society was organized into clans which were led by cynnings, or ring-lords, and which formed alliances or enmities against each other as they saw fit. They lived in dark houses in a gloomy climate, and the untamed bogs and long winters as well as the uncertain seas made attempts at travelling into a fearsome ordeal. Beowulf itself testifies to the extent to which they mystified their environment; the bogs and the seas are peopled by all manner of outlandish monsters, and the whole is governed by the intangible and incalculable whims of wyrd, or fate.

Beowulf is in its way deeply preoccupied with fighting against the misery of the Anglo-Saxon world. It is too earthy and narrow in scope to be a convincing religious tract, in my point of view, but much like the Bible it records the history of a region's peoples and aims to distract its audience from the trials and imperfections of sublunary existence. Despite the loneliness that pervades the poem, it is obsessed with a sense of community. The kings and queens are set on pedestals as hazily perfect beings; the loyalty of the armed men to each other and to their leaders is implicitly extolled; the names and exploits of ancestors and distant acquaintances are summoned; and the dining-hall Heorot, a central setting of the tale, is a meeting-place not only for the Danes but also for visitors like the Geats [N.B.: pronounced "yats" according to my second-year English professor] under Beowulf. My high school teacher emphasized the exiled status of the first villain of the tale (the monster Grendel), his misery, and his resentment against "civilized" mankind. To be cast out from society was worse than death; the wild melancholy of that situation is also captured in the old poem "The Wanderer."

At any rate, the tale begins when the Danish king Hrothgar builds a mighty feasting-hall, named Heorot. At first all goes well, but then Grendel catches wind of its existence and, driven by his hatred of mankind, he prowls around at night and kills the men who frequent it, a couple at a time. Months pass, and from a place of rejoicing the hall has turned into a horrible abode of death. The news of these depredations eventually reaches the distant shores of Geatland (present-day Sweden, I think) and as a result Beowulf, a man of great courage and prowess, sails over with a company of men to provide assistance. The warrior is gratefully received and soon afterward fights singly with Grendel, who is immune to swords. With his bare hands Beowulf tears off the monster's arm and the monster betakes himself, bleeding copiously, to die pathetically in the depths of the swamp whence he came.

Grendel's mother is not pleased with these developments and comes marauding not long afterwards. But Beowulf, who evidently has the lung capacity of a zeppelin, dives down into the swamp and kills her with a magic sword he just happens to find there. Despite its implausibility, the mental images I have of this battle — the murky and mysterious and morbid waters, sunken treasures, hideous plants and monsters, and finally the fierce wrath of the ghastly and vengeful female — are deeply impressive. The third battle in the tale transpires when Beowulf has become king of Geatland, and he must fight a dragon that is laying waste to the countryside. He takes his followers with him, but, pursuant to the philosophy that "when the going gets tough, the tough get going," they run like the wind, with the sole exception of the comically nomered Wiglaf. The dragon and Beowulf both die and the tale ends with the grand obsequies of the defunct king.

The tale is told in typical Anglo-Saxon verse. Each line has four beats, which means that there are four syllables that are naturally emphasized, and this practice conveys a drumlike rhythm. There is no rhyming, but there is a lot of alliteration. The language is in my view rather pretentious and pompous, windbaggish to be precise, but I do like the kennings, which are essentially compound nouns that poetically describe objects, like "roof-tree" and "swan-road." I think it would be darnedly difficult to remember the whole poem, which is a couple thousand lines long and not precisely streamlined where the narrative is concerned, but it seems as if the ancient bards, or scops, managed it. Its tone is relaxed and rambling, as if the storyteller couldn't bear to end it and to leave the world in it. That world doesn't appeal to me and I find Beowulf a priggish ass, but it is undeniable that the tale is still weirdly compelling and likable.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Resources for the Study of Beowulf [Greenehamlet.com]
An introduction and links to all sorts of online Beowulf texts and background reading.

Beowulf [Georgetown.edu]
A transcription of the original Anglo-Saxon text.

New York Times Film Reviews:
Beowulf & Grendel (2005), Beowulf (2007)

"Beowulf and Fate Meet in a Modern Poet's Lens" [New York Times]
A nice review of Seamus Heaney's translation by Richard Eder, from February 2000.

Ballade des Pendus

Even the experience of studying a poem for school or university often fails to dilute its potency, and such was the case for me with François Villon's "Ballade des pendus," or "Ballad of the Hanged." (In Georges Pompidou's Anthologie de la Poésie française, which I have at hand, it is entitled, "L'Epitaphe Villon.") Though I may have analyzed the structure and extracted themes, the poem was, and is, still painful and striking to read. At the time I came across a recording where someone (Louis Jouvet?) recites it in a mournful, aged and broken tone, like what I imagine the literary "mendicants' whine" must be, and it deepened the impression. Anyway, while it is not precisely uplifting, the theme of death and the afterlife is timely given that today is Pentecost Sunday.

* * *

Villon is one of the interesting villains of French literature. [N.B. I'm taking the following information from an eminently readable article on Villon available here.] Born in Paris, 1431, he lost his father at an early age, and thereafter his name and education were bestowed upon him by the canon Guillaume de Villon. In university, though intended to study theology, he became enmeshed not only in the turbulent politics of that setting but also, apparently, in the circle of the criminal "Coquillards," who marauded certain regions of France in that day. In 1455 he fatally wounded a priest, presumably of similarly dubious piety, in some dispute, and fled Paris only to return when his friends procured two royal pardons on his behalf. Upon his return he alternately dabbled in burglary, to some effect, and poetized, principally for an ethically undemanding audience of adolescent criminals. In 1457 he was established in Charles of Orleans's court, writing milder verses in honour of his host's newly-born daughter and then writing less mild verses in dishonour of his host's poetic pen-pal, the latter of which caused his swift ejection.

Long story short, he spent a couple of years being in fair or foul favour with divers authorities and writing reams of ballads, one of which was often the consequence of the other. Then at last he returned to Paris, professing much remorse likewise expressed in the form of ballads, which did not prevent him from dabbling in burglary again, albeit more modestly. The upshot of this lifestyle was that he was condemned to be hanged at the approximate age of thirty-two, after a brawl in which he ironically appears to have been an innocent bystander. Whilst thus imprisoned he wrote the "Ballade des pendus." Then, in a surprising act of mercy, the court commuted his sentence to ten years' banishment. He wrote two final poems, went out into the countryside in the midst of winter in early 1463, and was never heard from again as far as posterity is concerned.

The ballad is spoken by gibbeted corpses to passersby, describing in graphic detail the decay of the hung bodies, which seems to metaphorically express the poet's profound feeling of debasement, and pleading for pity. At least the sense that I have is that the narrators are metaphorically tugging at strangers' clothes, to force them to look at them and recognize that they are also humans, as they repeatedly invoke the doctrine that we are all sinners and all in need of divine mercy. The refrain is "Pray to God that He might absolve us all."

The idea that the society of Villon's time would manifest consideration toward dead, convicted criminals may seem implausible given the judiciary system before the Enlightenment. But one of the more gruesome tales of the Grimm brothers, "Die beiden Wanderer," indicates that a superstitious respect was accorded to the gibbet and its occupants; the dew that falls on hanged men restores the sight of a tailor whose eyes had been gouged out (by a psychopathic cobbler who didn't like the cut of his jib). Of course this tale was published much later, in the 19th century, so it is unlikely that it would faithfully depict the situation in France five hundred years earlier. In the ballad itself, the narrators' fear of laughter, harassment and mockery is not promising.

* * *

Frères humains qui après nous vivez,
N'ayez les coeurs contre nous endurcis,
Car, si pitié de nous pauvres avez,
Dieu en aura plus tôt de vous mercis.
Vous nous voyez ci attachés cinq, six:
Quant à la chair que trop avons nourrie,
Elle est piéça dévorée et pourrie,
Et nous, les os, devenons cendre et poudre.
De notre mal personne ne s'en rie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

Si frères vous clamons, pas n'en devez
Avoir dédain, quoique fûmes occis
Par justice. Toutefois, vous savez
Que tous hommes n'ont pas bon sens rassis;
Excusez-nous, puisque sommes transis,
Envers le fils de la Vierge Marie,
Que sa grâce ne soit pour nous tarie,
Nous préservant de l'infernale foudre.
Nous sommes morts, âme ne nous harie,
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

La pluie nous a débués et lavés,
Et le soleil desséchés et noircis;
Pies, corbeaux, nous ont les yeux cavés,
Et arraché la barbe et les sourcils.
Jamais nul temps nous ne sommes assis;
Puis çà, puis là, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charrie,
Plus becquetés d'oiseaux que dés à coudre.
Ne soyez donc de notre confrérie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

Prince Jésus, qui sur tous a maistrie,
Garde qu'enfer n'ait de nous seigneurie:
A lui n'ayons que faire ni que soudre
Hommes, ici n'a point de moquerie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

* * *

Here is what Pompidou has to say on the subject of Villon:

Le XVe siècle est un siècle triste. Comme toutes les civilisations à leur déclin, le Moyen Age s'attarde désespérément à ce qui fit sa grandeur ou son charme, et qui va mourir. De l'homme du Moyen Age, la poésie nous fournit deux types exemplaires. [. . .] Si Charles d'Orléans a toutes les grâces du Moyen Age, Villon en incarne les angoisses et les remords. Plus qu'une banale préfiguration des poètes maudits, cet étudiant bourgeois devenu bandit exprime la grande terreur du peuple médiéval en proie à la misère et à la maladie, angoissé par la mort et l'audelà, réconforté par les plaisirs élémentaires de la table et du lit et, parfois, par l'espérance. Il a peu écrit et encore y a-t-il dans son oeuvre beaucoup de vers inutiles. Mais les quelques centaines de vers qui comptent [. . .] suffisent à faire de lui l'un des grands parmi les grands, avant et avec Baudelaire, celui qui a su le mieux parler de la mort.

In English: "The fifteenth century is a sorrowful century. Like all civilizations at their decline, the Middle Ages linger desperately at that which constituted their greatness or their charm, and which will perish. Of the man of the Middle Ages, poetry furnishes us with two exemplary types. [. . .] If Charles of Orleans possesses all the graces of the Middle Ages, Villon incarnates its anguish and remorse. More than a banal prefiguration of the accursed poets, this bourgeois student turned bandit expresses the great terror of the medieval people — preyed on by misery and maladies, anguished by death and the beyond, comforted by the elementary pleasures of the table and the bed and, at times, by hope. He wrote little and in his work there are many useless verses still. But the several hundreds of verses which count [. . .] suffice to make of him one of the great ones among the great, before and with Baudelaire — he who knew best how to speak of death."

Source: Anthologie de la Poésie française, Georges Pompidou, ed. (Hachette: 1961), pp. 22-23

* * *

François Villon [Poesies.net]
Collected works of Villon (French)

"Ballade des Pendus" [Textatelier Hess von Biberstein]
The French text of the poem, followed by a German, Basle-region dialect, and English translation, and then a biography of the poet.