You probably have.  We are going to begin re-=posting soon, we have been going so long.

I thought about The Windhover, but although the opening of Deutschland is longer, I thought it easier to understand at first encounter.

Indeed not, Andy. It's a surprising poem, isn't it. Almost as if it comes straight from Feuerbach or some other 'Young Hegelian'. I wonder if he read them? The only other poem of Hardy's that I can think of at the moment that expresses any similar hope for the future is The Darkling Thrush.

(And I wonder if Derek Mahon had the opening of The Graveyard of Dead Creeds somewhere in the back of his mind when he wrote A Disused Shed in County Wexford?)

'The Darkling thrush' - I like that one.

my love is building a building
around you,a frail slippery
house,a strong fragile house
(beginning at the singular beginning

of your smile)a skilful uncouth
prison,a precise clumsy
prison(building thatandthis into Thus,
Around the reckless magic of your mouth)

my love is building a magic,a discrete
tower of magic and(as i guess)

when Farmer Death(whom fairies hate)shall

crumble the mouth-flower fleet
He'll not my tower,
                           laborious, casual

where the surrounded smile
                                        hangs

                                                 breathless

e e cummings (1923)

I have no idea what to say really, except that I have listened to and enjoyed these latest three poems.

The last two verses in the Authorised Version are:

Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.
But thou hast utterly rejected us: thou art very wroth against us.

The Donne is far more telling.  However the passage you quote versifies almost my favourite scriptural passage, and I find the versification makes it too, well, trite

(Thy mercies) are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. 3.23.  I don't find that superficial optimism - life is uncertain, we don't know we will be safe every morning, it is only when we realise that we cannot cling on to safety that we can realise the wonder of life, when we do have mercies in the morning, they come as a gift.

Or something like that.

Right quartet ('The Dry Salvages'), wrong section. Here's the contrived mess I was thinking of:


Where is there an end to it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable -
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.


The effect of increasing struggling-and-giving-up with '-otionless' rhymes is unintentionally comic, then embarrassing. 'Oceanless', anyone? By half-way through I don't understand why he didn't scrap the whole section; surely the only point of using a strict extended rhyme scheme is to show off your virtuosity as a poet, not your inadequacies.

Just want to chime in and say I've observed that composers from all periods have done some of their most remarkable work in treating the Lamentations text. I think in particular the interpolation of Hebrew letters in the course of the 'poem' has inspired formal ideas like no other. Is there any evidence of same in 20th-C treatments of this material? Seems the discussion here has not touched upon this.