'Past Imperfect' - Poem by Donald Black | 'Time: Rhyme & Reason' - Essay by Stuart McKinlay

‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ by Rembrandt (1635)

Time: Rhyme & Reason

Part One: The Poem

From: Stuart McKinlay

To: Neil McKinlay

Fri, 21 May 2021

A Royal Mail package containing Holding Fast and three copies of Layman (as requested) has been making its passage to you for the past week and must have Madagascar abaft the port beam by now. Included is three or four exquisitely illustrated greetings cards bearing muted pastel scenes of The Trossachs, purchased whimsically at the Café Circa and Scottish Antiques & Arts Centre in Doune. It’s the kind of place that mellows one towards almost buying an ancient edition of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám... The moving finger writes, and, having writ moves on... etc, an irresistible echo of grief and loss, and obeisance to the hand of fate, whether an invention or a mellifluous embellishment of a persuasive legend. The stanzas carry in the mind so easily almost everyone can recite a few: your father’s favourite was: A Book of Verses beneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness - / And Wilderness is Paradise enow!

* * *

From: Neil McKinlay

To: Stuart McKinlay, 

cc: F. MacFhionnlaigh

Fri, 21 May 2021

Was the Rubáiyat not at one time your most favourite pub restaurant in Glasgow, Stuart? Whereas dad quoted from it, you ate and drank in it!

* * *

From: Donald Black
To: Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh
21 Apr 2021

Hi Fearghas,

Cowane Street Writers tonight on the theme "Time". 

Attached my contributions. -- Donald

* * *

From: Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh 

To: Neil McKinlay, Stuart McKinlay

Fri, 21 May 2021

Recent exchange with Donald Black re a poem he wrote with theme (“Time”) set by the Stirling poetry writing group (Cowane Street Writers) he is part of. He sent his resultant poem (‘Past Imperfect’) to me for feedback. I am sure he won’t mind you two reading it, under the circumstances. He quotes the Rubaiyat in it -- F

Past Imperfect
(Poem by Donald Black 21/4/2021) 

The past is gone.
Recalled or not, it shapes.
Yet, once recalled
into the now, it darts
instantly into the past again
and lurks and works
its dark and magic arts.

“The Moving Finger writes and,
having writ, moves on;
nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” *

Still, fickle memory may take her pen
and subtly over-write, or sign
a different course.
Time’s arrow, speeding towards its mark
bows to that external force
as Newton’s law of motion
says it must.
Rewritten, the past rewrites
the future. The thrust
of throbbing fate is thwarted
And the hope of glory crumbles
into dust. 

* Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam tr. Edward FitzGerald 

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Time: Rhyme & Reason

Part Two: The Reaction

From: Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh

To: Donald Black

Apr 25, 2021

Donald,

Thanks for this. A good “poem”. I appreciate the overall form and the pacing footfall rhythm of the rhymes.

I have been reading it daily since it arrived. I flatter myself that I “follow” it. Until, that is, the final words:

“And the hope of glory crumbles
into dust.”

I have been chewing at that on each reading, determined to unlock it, but fear I am still failing.

One train of thought I had was to associate it with the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, “MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN”, which (appropriately enough given my own perplexity) no-one could understand but the eventual divinely inspired Daniel. Essentially, my surmised connection here was that at that moment any “hope of glory” harboured by Belshazzar (whose knees knocked together) “crumbles to dust”.

A second attempt to fathom your sentence was based on a poetic misappropriation in my own mind. I confused FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with Coleridge’s fragmentary Kubla Khan poem:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

My drift of thought in this case being that at the fatal moment a knock on the door put paid to Coleridge’s fully conceived but only partially written masterpiece, his “hope of (poetic) glory crumbled into dust”. But then I realised of course my literary history was seriously deficient....

Coming back again to your enigmatic words, I began in a third trajectory to wonder if there was a subvertion of high doctrinaire Calvinism going on here. The latter system’s dogma of “double predestination” of course giving rise to a helpless fatalism — an existential beartrap able to be wondrously escaped from if the time-traveller can go back and un-set the trap. OK, so any predetermined “damnation” is thus eluded, but also any predetermined “glory” —

“Rewritten, the past rewrites
the future. The thrust
of throbbing fate is thwarted
And the hope of glory crumbles
into dust.”

All three of my musings are no doubt well missing the “mark” (of “Time’s speeding arrow”), so please forgive my mental torpor, but I will send off these half-baked thoughts now lest you begin wondering whether I even received, let alone read, your fine poem.

Fearghas

* * *

From: Donald Black
To: Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh
25 Apr 2021

Hi Fearghas,

I'm chuckling at your musings on the final line. I'll come back later but you know how some people talk about a poem "writing itself"? Well that's what happened here. That line came to me intact, as if from somewhere else, so I wrote it down without knowing what I meant by it. It wasn't the last line I wrote, but the line I had to get the poem to arrive at. I think it's deeper than a train of thought although it doesn't feel like a non-sequitur, so I'm as puzzled as you are. I'm familiar with your 3 references, so they're probably in there somewhere. I don't think my CSW companions had any more of a clue than I had.

Donald

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Time: Rhyme & Reason

Part Three: Walter Scott joins the cut & thrust

From: Stuart McKinlay

To: Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh

26 May 2021

If I can comment, ‘umbly, I see the poem visually as a twirling candelabrum with a flickering flame: It seems time is a spiral entwined with a vortex, spinning to the sound of a fairground ride - with a dramatic denouement in the historic present.

This made me wonder why I can’t “do” poetry. I started by consulting my pal Walter Scott and ended up in a lockdown-funk cul-de-sac, which doesn’t really explain anything: the premise “I’m no good at poetry” isn’t answered as I swan around in circles about a couple of books I’m reading just now and any analysis or hope of glory crumbles into dust. I chucked my haverings in the bin, as it were, as another example of the meanderings of a listless mind.

But then, I thought perhaps there is some relevance in its very irrelevance. Keats and Yeats are in this mess with me, tho’ I don’t get as far as Keats’ Romantic relevance or his “negative capability”, which is completely relevant here:

“…& once again it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare posessed [sic] so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

He mentioned this in a letter to his brothers in 1817 and never repeated it (according to a book I’ll mention), “although it has since become a watchword in Romantic literary studies”. Well, this is the first I’d heard of it, or of Yeats’ occultist shenanigans with the Golden Dawn; the very deficiency of knowledge I cite for my uselessness with poetry. Like me, edit it by wastepaper basket.

When Keats and Yeats don’t rhyme

I’m no good at poetry and I can prove it. The crux of the thing is you have to think two streams of thought simultaneously, the way forward mapped by knowledge, the delivery couched with exquisite insight.

My invisible friend Walter Scott, with whom I discuss this and that on a bench by the Tweed, shows how to do it and how not to do it. He is probably one of the worst popular writers in English, and he knows it. When he was praised for his novels, he was embarrassed and recommended admirers read instead “Mrs Shelley”, this when Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus was rising to the top of the best-sellers chart in 1818; but Walter was still writing furiously, dragging histories from memory and warping them into the weft of adventure. His is a mind of creative conflict, scrawling without punctuation, leaving the dots and commas to his printer.

“The misfortune of writing fast is that one cannot at the same time write concisely,” 

he says, perhaps an excuse for careless prolificacy. He can make the facts ding to suit, confiding in his journal:

“Many a clever boy is flogged into a dunce and many an original composition corrected into mediocrity.” 

He’s always in a fine taking of doublethink, or internal ambiguity (auld Scotch Tory, champion of Scottish causes, reeking of sentimental regret in Old Mortality, you can hear in him the same lame claim so often heard today: “I’m a proud Scot, but…”)

Even Robert Louis Stevenson is brusque on Walter’s work, saying he lacks the application needed for seamless continuity:

“He conjured up the magic with delight, but had hardly patience to describe it.” 

Exactly, but it is possible to love him as a novelist for all his faults, in fact, because of his failings he is personable, friendly and accessible as a flawed friend who knows his limitations and is relieved when he manages to get something profitable, to the point, and that pleases him, down on paper:

“I think there is a demon who seats himself on the feather of my quill when I begin to write, and leads it astray from the purpose” - The Fortunes of Nigel 

– and at least he is pleased with his poetry.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel was published in 1805 to prolific praise, and Walter, now in his mid-thirties is an international celebrity, with the public clamouring for more of the same. He has a notion to write Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, with Constable, his publisher, offering 1000 guineas for the copyright of the work unseen. He writes a galloping poetic narrative of duplicity and disaster and loves it: 

“Oh man, I had many a grand gallop among these bracs when I was thinking of Marmion.” 

Henry Morley in his introduction to A Public Domain edition writes: 

He is riding his charger at full speed up and down the sands of Portobello within spray of the wave, while his mind was at work on such lines as –

They close, in clouds of smoke and dust,
With sword-sway and lance’s thrust;
And such a yell was there,
Of sudden and portentous birth,
As if men fought in upper earth,
And fiends in upper air.

Simply typing that stanza sends a frisson through me, and immediately calls to mind:

“Oh, life and death were in the shout, Recoil and rally, charge and rout, And triumph and despair…”

I can see and feel there the hoofbeat of the couplets, the same thunderous, ground-shaking battle of life and death Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh captures with taut suspense in The Axe:

he came at you
poised in your saddle
like an eagle on a crag
like a crouching lion

he came at you
with lance and shield and helmet and plume
and horse and armour and thunder and sweat
and impetus and dust and invective and death

he came at you

but instantly
with an agile movement
with a neat sudden movement
with a precisely executed movement
with an elegant energetic movement
on which our entire history hinged

the steel of your axe
blazed in the sun
and like a blur the blow fell
splitting helmet
and skull

displaying
an errant Goliath
red on green field

but your axe was broken, O King
And another we have yet to find.

The beauty of this is not only in the taut construction and emotional tension, in breathless expectation, but in the subject of de Bohun and Bruce, a matter of recognisable history. It conjures an age of chivalry Walter understood all too well with Ivanhoe; but I wrestle with this demesne when I try to enter the world of John Keats: La Belle Dame sans Merci is beguiling and mystifying. Of course, everyone uses the phrase “palely loitering” as casual coinage now, but in its place in a ballad it becomes up-close and personal:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

This is the sort of thing I think I understand, but then find I don’t, and set about repairing the miscomprehension only to find I don’t understand the thing at all. I was reading what I wanted to read, superficially reconstructing it according to inadequate knowledge, rather than seeing what is there. Why “palely”?, what does it matter if sedge has withered? Or if no birds sing. Yet it is putting a chill in the air, the draining face, a tragic story in the making.

Lucasta Miller in Keats – A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph acknowledges the popular interpretation with a literary shrug of inevitability: 

“Its protagonist is a medieval ‘knight-at-arms’ who has loved and lost a supernatural femme fatale; she feeds him, tells him she loves him, and lulls him maternally to sleep, only to abandon him to an eternity of loneliness on a cold hillside.” 

It is possibly allegorical biography: Keats was abandoned by his mother as a child of eight: she disappeared with her lover, and the poem has been unravelled, according to passing fashion, she says, in strands of Freudian psycho-biography, a mode of interpretation particularly popular the 1920s. She doesn’t endorse it. She says: 

“An over-excited critic could go looking for Freudian subtexts in La Belle Dame sans Merci, and soon descend into parody by finding submerged erotica all over it.”

She focuses on the functioning of Keats’ vocabulary, particularly on this “adverbial colour-word”, “palely”. You can see the cold fate in his face: “palely”, rather than “paly”, she says, and the extra syllable in the centre is vital: 

“The doubling of the l literally makes you linger over ‘palely’ if you read it out loud, drawing out the sense of languor and postponement.” 

This is a nicety of poetry I can sense but can’t initiate.

Coleridge has a hand in this imbroglio, too: 

“The knight-at-arms, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, is magnetically drawn into a situation he cannot control, in which his will or volition is unseated.” 

In short, 

“He goes on to dream a dream that becomes a nightmare, in which the belle dame’s former conquests line up to tell him he is doomed.”

This has the making of a tabloid sensation as he reworks an old ballad into a lustrous tale, but Keats was always in a hurry, “restless and rootless” – he wrote Ode to a Nightingale in one spring morning – making up memorable phrases as he rushed along, delivering quotable lines in his outpourings: “tender is the night” (Ode to a Nightingale), “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (Endymion), and neologisms, “surgy”, “palely”, “soother”.

But, I’m losing myself in raptures and straying from my first point: of knowledge mapping the way forward. It seems a common matter that poets often find themselves in a spell and must not stop while the Muse has them in transports: It is an in-the-moment energy that drives the composition as the writer hangs on grimly hoping not to be thrown before the end is achieved. If it isn’t at that moment, it is gone. All that’s left is the hard work of repair. Even Walter Scott says Marmion’s reception gave him “such a heeze he almost lost his footing”. Keats was influenced by Virgil and Shakespeare (it says here) and like Walter his head was replete with knowledge that poured out, his style unfettered by blank spots or dizziness and unhindered by halts and hesitations: the mind was fully armed.

It is as well, too, to have regard for the warning against extravagant poetic temptations satirised by E T A Hoffmann in The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1821) – my edition is translated from German by Anthea Bell. It has the familiar construction of the unknowing bungler:

Ah, rustling forests, whispering rivers
In whose deep waters sweet feeling yet quivers,
Share the Lament!
Say where she went!
Lovely sweet Kitty, Kitty so cheerful! [etc, etc]

“As you see, gentle reader, a good poet doesn’t actually have to be in a rustling forest, or beside a whispering river: deep water quivering with sweet feeling will still flow his way, and he will see what he likes and he can sing about it as he likes. Should anyone be lost in wonder and admiration at the sublime merit of the above lines, let me modestly point out that I was in a state of ecstasy, in amorous frenzy, and everyone knows that a person in a feverish grip of passion, even if he could scarcely rhyme moon with June and dove with love in the usual way, if, as I say, he normally couldn’t just hit upon these not entirely uncommon rhymes however hard he tried, yet in the grip of passion poetry will suddenly come over him and he is bound to spout the most excellent of lines. We owe much great poetry to this onset of ecstasy in prosaic natures.”

But, I don’t really know all of this, not really, any more than I understand in less elevated prose form the joke of Ulysses with Dedalus and Bloom strolling around Dublin “in reasonable command of themselves” (Terry Eagleton: How to Read Literature) , and while it seems to me very little is happening, others know there “is a deep Homeric sub-plot at play”. Thus, I am nervous of not having the “whole picture” of relevant obscurities in mind, and can never be at ease with perhaps uninformed perceptions when the motion is transmuted into poetry.

The poets have got it up top all right before they start, of course, which probably explains why some of us can only admire On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer from afar. For example, I know his “peak in Darien” reference only because the phrase “wild surmise” is often quoted by Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster; but here is the original:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Stout stuff, but Lucasta Miller (again) underlines the perils of an uneven education:

“Since Tennyson pickily pointed it out in the nineteenth century, it’s been a crux of Keats criticism that it was not in fact Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, but his contemporary Balboa who, in 1513, led the first party across Panama, where Darien is situated, to cast the first European eyes on the Pacific.” 

Academic debate rumbles about the source of this misapprehension, and even Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer is libelled. But there is something else going on:

“Just as interesting,” she says, and this is the stuff of heroes, “is what Keats does here with the sonnet’s iambic pentameters. He flexes the rhythm to represent a moment of astonished acceleration in the syncopated, hypermetric line ‘He stared at the Pacific – and all his men…’ which contains a break and a hurried beat too many. The final line, ‘Silent upon the peak of Darien,’ has the right number of syllables, but works against the metrical rhythm as the English word ‘silent’ is naturally emphasised on the first not on the second syllable. The upshot is the sonnet does not feel ‘finished’. It is as if we’re brought up short to contemplate an endlessly unfolding expanse that is continuing to unfurl beyond the poem’s end.”

The nuts and bolts, the engine within. I feel that if you don’t know this, then you don’t know nothin’, even if, I believe, one could be in worse company than the supposedly benighted Bertie’s, but one throws in the t.

I have even sometimes confused the name Keats with Yeats, a scandalous admission. I’m soundly corrected by W B Yeats – Poems selected by Seamus Heaney, given to me by Catriona McKinlay. Heaney says: 

“Yeats’ radical devotion to the potential and otherness of a specific Irish reality should never be underestimated.” 

He delves deeply into a man of “fantasies” and “convictions”, his desire “to sweeten Ireland’s wrong”. I feel sure, but I must check with Fearghas, that Yeats never wanted to write in English at all, but in the vocabulary of his soul, Irish Gaelic. Heaney writes:

“In fact, his imagined Ireland represented not only a regenerative breakaway from the imperium of Britain but also from the magisterium of orthodox Christianity.”:

Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body’s laid asleep.

For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind;
Yet he who treds in measured ways
May surely barter gaze for gaze.

(“To Ireland in the Coming Times”)

I’m not sure I truly understand that, but I feel its force deeply. It leaves you gazing around with a wild surmise. Before this, I had known only the line quoted by my father from The Lake Isle of Innesfree: “I will arise now, and go to Innesfree.” Not because he was going there, but as an earnest of going anywhere; and who does not know something, at least the third line, of his The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And there it is again, a trick of the eye, the thing you see but don’t see. Visual rhyme. Or not? We have imagery here and hyperbole there, but what exactly is assonance? You can see “mind” and “wind” up there, and I’m not sure, but “falconer” and “everywhere” and others if you peer keenly, “cannot hold” has the cadence of “is drowned”, but not quite in syllabic sympathy, perhaps for abrupt emphasis. Tch, y’see, I’m shooting at shadows.

But… even so, The Wild Swans At Coole, perhaps the least pugnacious of his musings, shot from dusty page to cinematic stardom. Just a couple of words from the first stanza are often reprised to magnificent effect on a telly near you:

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

Willie Russell uses this to munificent purpose in his 1983 screenplay of Educating Rita, starring Michael Caine as Professor Frank Bryant, and Julie Walters as Rita:

Rita: What does assonance mean?
Prof: What?
R: Don’t laugh at me.
P: Er, no. Erm, assonance, it’s a form of rhyme.
R: Erm, what’s an example?
P: Do you know Yeats?
R: The wine lodge?
P: No, WB Yeats, the poet.
R: No.
P: Well, in his poem The Wild Swans At Coole, Yeats rhymes the word “swan” with the word “stone”. You see? That’s an example of assonance.
R: Ooh, yeah, means getting the rhyme wrong.

P: I’ve never thought of it like that.

Stuart McKinlay (May 2021)

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