A couple of days ago, I came across this beautiful musical rendering by Lorena Mckennitt of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. I am not, generally a fan of musical renderings of poetry. However, Mckennitt’s singing of the poem moved me
Recently I enjoyed a meal with my friend Jeff, during which he quoted from Tennyson’s beautiful poem, “Tears, Idle Tears”. The poem resonates with me and is reproduced below:
“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.”
A couple of days ago, I joined a poetry session on Zoom. The theme of the readings was “the sea”. I read 2 poems, one of my own, and Matthew Arnold’s fine poem, Dover Beach, which has long been one of my favourites Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold | Poetry Foundation.
Looking out to sea in the company of an unnamed woman, Arnold is reminded of “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery”. “The sea of faith” was once a powerful force holding society together,
“… But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.”
Arnold sees love as the only way to deal with the decline of moral certitude and faith. Speaking to his lover who is looking out the window towards France with him, Arnold remarks,
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
After my reading there followed a discussion of Dover Beach. During the discussion someone mentioned that Anthony Hecht had written a parody of Arnold’s poem entitled The Dover Bitch. Being a curious soul I Googled Hecht’s poem https://poets.org/poem/dover-bitch.
In the poem Hecht imagines how Arnold’s lover felt as she was addressed on the subject of the decline of faith, whilst her mind was otherwise engaged
“Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck …”.
Hecht’s The Dover Bitch is certainly an amusing read, which is why I am sharing it here. I wonder will I ever be able to read Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach in quite the same way again!
Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail:
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew!
In quiet she reposes;
Ah, would that I did too!
Her mirth the world required;
She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be.
Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound.
But for peace her soul was yearning,
And now peace laps her round.
Her cabin’d, ample spirit,
It flutter’d and fail’d for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
The vasty hall of death.
K Morris - Poet 