Month: August 2015

The Clear Air of October – Robert Bly – Analysis

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A different poem for a contrast … a bit like an abstract compared to a landscape painting …

The Clear Air of October

I can see outside the gold wings without birds
flying around, and the wells of cold water
without water standing eighty feet up in the air,
I can feel the crickets’ singing carrying them into the sky.

I know these cold shadows are falling for hundreds of miles,
crossing lawns in tiny towns, and doors of Catholic churches;
I know the horse of darkness is riding fast to the east,
carrying a thin man with no coat.

and I know the sun is sinking down great stairs,
like an executioner with a great blade walking into a cellar,
and the gold animals, the lions, and the zebras, and the pheasants,
are waiting at the head of the stairs with robbers’ eyes.

Robert Bly (1926 –

A modern contemporary American poet with a liking for Minnesota and according to The Norton Anthology …

… his poetry can be thought of as mystical imagery and …

… Bly’s favourite source is the German mystic Jakob Boehme. The epigraph from Boehme at beginning of Bly’s second book … The Light around the Body … declares “for according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in this world … since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages.”

Perhaps he is using a second language in the above poem?

How does the title relate to the images created by the words?

Why do the animals have robbers’ eyes?

I think an answer to the last question provides the key to unlocking meaning behind the poem.

Footnote …
Here is a link with more information on Robert Bly from Wikipedia 

The Divine Comedy – Looking into Heaven – Clive James

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Heaven (The Divine Comedy)
Canto 31 – lines 1 – 33

The form, then, of the saintly host of Christ
Was shown to me as being a white rose,
A perfect rose which, with His own blood, Christ
Has made His bride. But also there are those –
The other host – who, flying, see and sing
The glory of the Lord who holds their love
And goodness that has made them everything
They are, and there they are, at large above.
Just like a swarm of bees that first will dive
Into the flowers and then go back to turn
Their toil to nectar, treasure of the hive,
These ones I watched, for I was here to learn –
Descend headlong into the mighty flower
Of many petals, and then reascend
To where the love abides in all its power
Forever, and then, flying without end,
They swoop again, their faces living flame,
Their wings of gold, and for the rest, so white
Our fresh snow couldn’t hope to seem the same.
When they again went back down from the height
Into the bloom, they gave it, tier on tier,
The peace and order they had gained from how
They fanned their sides with wings. …

Translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy by Clive James

My interpretation of the above lines –

The form, then, of the saintly host of Christ
Was shown to me as being a white rose,
A perfect rose which, with His own blood, Christ
Has made His bride.

The host of Christ – a host is someone who presents … someone who invites and entertains … a master of ceremonies … and in the religious context the host of Christ is the consecrated bread … and the consecrated bread is the gift of Christ as the body of Christ created with his own blood – Dante represents this as a perfect white rose – it has to be white no other colour could represent Christ and it has to be perfect.

Christ has made this His Bride … the Bride of Christ gifted for the marriage of His Church through the consecrated bread (body)and wine (blood)… the words from the Anglican Communion Service define this union (marriage) – ‘We who are many are one body in Christ, for we all share in the one bread’ – the gift of life for all’. This marriage is a continual marriage as the world expands in population.

But also there are those –
The other host – who, flying, see and sing
The glory of the Lord who holds their love
And goodness that has made them everything
They are, and there they are, at large above.

Who are these ‘other hosts’ … my interpretation is that they are those that have been transformed to such an extent through the marriage of Christ that they themselves have become totally ‘Christ-like’ spiritually – and everything that they are comes from the Lord, they are flying and singing the glory of the Lord – angels also comes to mind, and they are at large –very much an active force.

Just like a swarm of bees that first will dive
Into the flowers and then go back to turn
Their toil to nectar, treasure of the hive,
These ones I watched, for I was here to learn –
Descend headlong into the mighty flower
Of many petals, and then reascend
To where the love abides in all its power
Forever, and then, flying without end,
They swoop again, their faces living flame,
Their wings of gold, and for the rest, so white
Our fresh snow couldn’t hope to seem the same.

The ‘other hosts’ are in a hive of activity being equated to the action of bees diving into the Christ-Host – the white rose – creating nectar, the treasure found in the gift of Christ and the treasure that they create returning that to the Lord (where love abides in all its power). The image of faces of living flame, wings of gold, and bodies beyond the white of snow try to give a physical representation to the spiritual transformation that has occurred – a living perfection of nature – and a nature that is dynamic and busy.

When they again went back down from the height
Into the bloom, they gave it, tier on tier,
The peace and order they had gained from how
They fanned their sides with wings.

Bees actually fan their wings when they come into the hive to control temperature. This is interesting for the implication is that the Christ-Host is supported by other hosts which give peace and order – supported by those that have become fully Christ-like.

This seems to portray Heaven and the Body of Christ not as an afternoon Sunday nap but a busy active expanding evolution.

Revolution (in the way we view creation)

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Revolution

James Ussher (1) calculated the starting point.
About 4004 years before the birth of Christ,
apparently at 9:00am on a Monday morning
in late October.

Thomas Guy (2) then annotated his holy bibles
enforcing this fact within the Church and for
years the populace believed his added words.
Then Darwin learnt that truth lies in geometry
and that a circle has no start or finish.

But if you believe in the ‘Big Bang’ theory
then everything is gradually losing energy.
Being in my latter years this is understandable,
my circulation not being what it once was.

However, we do have plenty of time up our sleeves
for our best scientists have predicted it will take
several billion years before the Sun expands and
drags the Earth within its heated arms.

So there may come a day when everything stops.
Perhaps at 11:15pm on a Saturday in September –
after the late night news.

T S Eliot plaque East Coker church

in my beginning is my end … in my end is my beginning
T. S. Eliot’s Memorial Plaque – East Coker Church, Somerset

Footnotes
1 James Ussher (4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656) was the Irish Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between1625 and 1656. He was a prolific scholar and church leader, famous for his chronology that sought to establish the time and date of the creation.
2 Thomas Guy (1644–1724) was a British bookseller, speculator and official publisher of bibles and from his wealth became the de facto founder of Guys Hospital in London.

It is unbelievable that the populace believed in such things for so many years. I wonder if the same is true for something in life today!

William Blake – Looking at his philosophy

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Looking at the philosophy of William Blake (1757 – 1827) Engraver/Artist/Poet

Main works include – Poetical Sketches 1783, Songs of Innocence and Experience 1794, Prophetic Poems Milton and Jerusalem 1804-20.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

From ‘Auguries of Innocence’

The following text is taken from the discussion of his work in Nortons Anthology –

Blake’s mythical starting point is not a transcendent God but the ‘Universal Man’ who is himself God and incorporates the cosmos – defined in his work as ‘The Human Form Divine’ – and this is given the name ‘Albion’. In his myth the fall of man is not a break from God but the falling apart of people into division – the breaking up of ‘Universal Man’.

One of four major divisions or powers (called Zoas) is the imaginative power (called Urthona) and is known as Los in the fallen world. In addition to Urthona there are 3 lower states –
Beulah (easy, relaxed innocence, without clash of ‘contraries’)
 Generation (human experience, suffering, conflicting contraries)
Ulro (Hell, bleak rationality, tyranny, static negation, isolated self-hood)

The World cycles towards redemption through these states … the redeemer is the human imagination … culminating in an apocalypse … the return to the ‘undivided condition’.

He did not know it but shared the view of a number of contemporary German philosophers – the malaise of modern culture is essentially a mode of physical disintegration and the resultant alienation from oneself, one’s world and one’s fellow human beings, and that recovery relies in the process or reintegration.

He does not cancel the fallen world but transforms it by imaginative vision. The reunion of ‘Albion’ recovers a lost vision of nature where all individuals are united as one and can feel at home.

In terms of the puritanical, threatening and joyless religion of his day he emphasised a contrary position based on – desires, energy, abundance, act and freedom – in stark contrast to reason, restraint, passivity and prohibition.

In his work ‘the marriage of Heaven and Hell’ he reversed the traditional values. This work is deliberately outrageous, and at times a comic onslaught against a timidly conventional and self-righteous society.