Month: October 2015

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines – Dylan Thomas – Analysis

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This poem by Dylan Thomas is not easy to master and is open to personal interpretation … my thoughts are in italics after each stanza …

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

… light only comes from darkness … light can only be recognised in terms of darkness … and the ‘heart pushes’ into new territory not like the sea which comes and goes to the same boundaries … the ‘waters of the heart’ can be equated to spiritual light … they are like ‘broken ghosts with glow-worms’ because such light is latent within the body as an abstraction … and so file through the flesh quite separate from the flesh that decks the bones …

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,

A candle in the thighs has sexual connotations as well as representing time … with time the seed of youth is burnt away as a candle burns and no seed is produced

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

… and with time wrinkled man unwrinkles in the stars … the ‘fruit of man’ – with light as bright as the stars … the fig an appropriate choice of fruit (it was under the fig tree that Buddha received enlightenment) .… and you could say that with time when the candle burns to the end instead of a wick we have the silver hairs of age

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

… light and awareness in general comes from within … and dawn may break unseen (‘behind the eyes’) … ‘blood’, the waters of the heart seeks enlightenment like a spreading sea … but from the sky comes light …the divining rod searching for water spouts… and then ‘a smile’ and oil – coming as a healing to the tears of the search …the rod and oil having religious connotations

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter’s robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

… night takes its toll … and any warmth is taken by ‘skinning gales’ … when daylight comes it meets the bone … spring will happen hopefully but it is now ‘hanging from the lids’ … this speaks to me of morning light encountering a dark depression in the body

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

… but light has a mystery to its work … subtle and beyond logic … ‘on tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain’… what a marvellous line … and light comes only when attempt at logic is abandoned … the secret of light comes through the hidden soil of the eye … as a plant would grow from that that’s hidden below the ground … and when spring is here ‘blood jumps in the sun’… an awakening … but what does dawn find ‘above the waste allotments’ no recognition, no response and in such areas dawn is ineffective … perhaps a plea for a response to light

Dylan Thomas

…  I’m sure further light will come when I re-read

Closure on the life of a terrorist

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Closure

don’t slam the door kid, when you leave your room
don’t slam the door tight when you enter the night
go quietly; go gently, as you enter the night
go gently as you vanish from sight

at that age when there is no age
and when the rolling of the years
matters only to another
and the inscription on the wall
is left for others to recall
and when they resurrect your name
will they relinquish certain blame?
let them shed their tears kid!

how can that have any meaning
is there meaning in a flower?
you knew exactly who you were kid!

don’t slam the door kid when you leave your room
don’t slam the door tight when you enter the night
go quietly; go gently, as you enter the night
go gently as you vanish from sight

Richard Scutter 15 October 2015

In memory of a twelve year old who reluctantly self-detonated before reaching his target in order to save the lives of others.

‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’

…  children are constantly being abused and the world is in a sorry state … in the above I wanted to consider this twelve year old and his actions … with certain ‘poetic licence’ because, of course, we will never know the mind of this young boy as he failed to carry out the treacherous demands put on him.

… looking to the positive …

… he didn’t kill innocent people.

… his family gets financial support.

… there is one less to look after in his family, more food to go round the table.

… and of course he exists to a quieter, better world, his new home – depending on your point of view, and hopefully he ‘didn’t slam the door when he left his room’ … and that he took something of beauty with him from his short existence.

Marginalia – Billy Collins – Analysis

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Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have manage to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Billy Collins

I do appreciate the annotations of others … especially in poetry where interpretation is so varied. Comments can be incisive, amusing as well as informative and appreciative.

Looking at this text …

S1 … we don’t like what is being said … we hate it … we want others to know it is a load of – … so anger may generate such a response

S2 … the text is studid, silly, child like … and you have to let the author know how silly and stupid he or she is … and a dismissive derisive word only takes a second to write

S3 … well students studying text need to expand and reinfore their new found learning … so this is quite justified of course

S4 … in agreement … the empty bleachers … they want you to know they are with you all the way  … but they are quite empty of their own thinking and probably they have only given a superfical read of your precious words

S5 and S6 … BC wants you to know that you should have annotated some book at some time in your life … and if not why not? … You can’t be that lazy!

S7 … it has happened all through history … and I love the lines … anonymous men catching a ride into the future /on a vessel more lasting than themselves. … so another reason – immortality

S8 … the great merit of annotations by the famous

S9 … this annotation takes the cake and the icing even though eggs are at issue … saying something entirely outside the text and about that one subject that is so important – love! – and at the same time giving an excuse for eating and reading with messy hands! – the line that’s remembered, the line that makes the poem perfect or should I say without stain!

So keep those comments flowing … it is so easy to do in today’s internet world. Those on Facebook and other social media are doing it everyday.

So why do we write in books? – well this is what I’ve just got to tell you – it’s all about self-expression and being heard … when you were in your young wet-concrete years I’m sure you were duly tempted … well, you don’t need to find a stick …  just use those fingers! … go on, my ear is waiting!  LoL