The Garden of the Seasons: April Flowers -- Our Pilgrimages and Chaucer's

In April we are raking it in. That blanket of last year's dried, brown leaves, I mean, the remnant of which you see hanging about the daffodils in the top photo, and crocuses in the second photo, and in pretty much all of the other photos as well. 
          And this is how the ground looks after I've already done the wide-rake heavy volume removal, to clear enough space around, and leaves off, the early round of bulbs. So we can see them. These places, and everywhere else in the garden will need a second round of small-rake leaf removal when the other ground covers and flowering plants begin showing up in force. 
            I can't remember a poem about spring raking. Spring planting, maybe -- that's for farmers, and for vegetable gardening. Almost all vegetable plants are annuals, at least in northern climates. Maybe this humble, yet labor- and time-taking ritual has yet to receive its proper attention. Most everyone associates leaf raking with the season in which they do it: autumn. But those of us growing more flowering plants than lawn (none in our case) know better. Yes, we rake in autumn as well, clearing walks and a car park area. But spring raking is our version of spring cleaning. Not for the faint of heart.               
               So while I rake I'm thinking about April poems. 
               The really big one is the first one, by one of the inventors of English poetry, the diplomat and courtier Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Middle English epic exploration of the various ranks of English society in his time is called "The Canterbury Tales." The organizing principle (and hook) of this immense achievement is the vernal pilgrimage his host of characters is making to the holy shrine of the tomb of Thomas a Beckett in Canterbury. Here are the first 18 lines:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye,

So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially, from every shires ende

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. 

We were assigned to memorize these lines in my freshman year, giving them the Middle English pronunciation. Most of these words are close, or even identical, to their modern form. But we all need 'editorial' help to understand all the words. Quizzing myself today, here's what I remember:

line 1, "shoures soote" is 'soft showers,' the adjective following the noun in French fashion.  

2. 'droghte' is drought. Our professor pointed out there is no drought in March; the poet is pointing to a wintry 'spiritual drought'; an arid heart. 'roote,' though pronounced differently is our root. Spring rain, that is, pierces our heart to the root. 

3. 'veyne' is vine. 'swich licour' is 'such liquid.' It's neat to see where our word 'liquor' comes from. 
4. 'vertu' is virtue, meaning strength or power. 'flour' means 'flower' here; an interesting connection to what we make bread from.

5. 'Zephirus' is the wind, the west wind (I believe) that brings mild spring weather. 'eek' is 'also'. 'swete breeth' are our words, spelling and sound slightly altered.

6. 'inspired' is 'breathed in'; again good to see the root of our modern word. 'holt and heeth' is wood and field (the latter word is 'heath' for us).  

7. 'croppes' is our 'crops,' meaning new plants here; 'yonge sonne' is simply 'young sun.'

8. 'Ram' signifies the month of April; astrologers pick this right up. 'The sun has run halfway through April.'

9. 'smale foweles' are small birds (fowls); 'maken melodyes' is a lovely phrase for 'singing.'

10. The line means 'that sleep all night with open eye,' apparently a bit of folklore.

11. This line means 'so Nature pierces them in their hearts'; interestingly 'corage' means heart.
12. All the words are close to modern equivalents; 'goon' is 'go.'
13. 'Palmers' are pilgrims, because Crusaders carried them. 'straunge strondes' is 'strange shores'; we have 'strand,' British for shoreline, from the latter word. 
14. The Middle English here translates to   
'distant shrines, known in various lands.' 
15. We have 'shires ende,' words still used, but Americans no longer say 'shire' for county.
16. The old spelling of England, land of Engles, or Angles (or maybe angels). 'wende' sounds to me like 'wind their way.'
17. Old spellings for words we still use.
18. 'hem' is 'them' (where did 'th' come from?). 'holpen' is 'helped,' what martyrs do when you pray to them. Interesting that 'seeke' is 'sick.' How different this language sounds when spoken.

Enough words more pics below. The bottom photo shows hyacinths in the process of unfolding their petals.

 

The Garden of History: From Shakespeare's Plays to Cable News: Portrait of the Tyrant

In his new book, "Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics," Stephen Greenblatt writes that in "Richard III," the history play about the last of England's pre-Tudor monarchs, Shakespeare develops the personality features "of the aspiring tyrant."

            Here are those features: "the limitless self-regard, the law-breaking, the pleasure in inflicting pain, the compulsive desire to dominate. He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency."

                Does this remind you of anyone?

                Greenblatt's book makes no overt reference to contemporary politics and its leading 'characters' -- not a single word. But here is his further discussion of the psychology and behavior of the tyrant Richard III, the man who would be king:

                 "He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only is scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning."

           Winning? What's that about winning? 

            Is there anything more we need to know about this 'winning' personality? Yes, there is:                 
            "He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince in pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power."

               This is all very convincing, very comprehensive -- and somehow strangely familiar. I wonder why that it is.Yet there is more. 

               "His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him..."

                 Stephen Greenblatt's intriguing biography of Shakespeare ("Will of the World") -- the world's best known writer, and yet a man of whose personal life, habits, opinions, politics, comings and goings so little detail is known that a gang of pseudo-scholars has arisen to disprove his existence -- gave me my first living portrait of what a relatively quiet man with a very loud genius may have been like.  

                   His new book, "Tyrant," might have been called "Will of the Real World," when that adjective (as in 'real politic') has the meaning cynics and dirty fighters have always attributed to it.

                  Richard III was not the only one of his Shakespeare's characters that the word tyrant applies too. Another king who becomes a tyrant, Macbeth, begins his play as a hero. He's not a gangster don, or, like Richard, a twisted psycho with a grudge against existence. He has both depth and imagination and the physical courage that recommends him to the king he serves, poor Duncan. 

               But there is an inward twist that turns Macbeth to the way of the tyrant: "driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence."   

               This, too, has a familiar ring, doesn't it? The bullying, misogyny, and vulnerability to taunts, in particular.  
               As is this observation on Macbeth's complaining about his bad dreams and constant anxiety: "the tyrant's course of behavior is fueled by a pathological narcissism. The lives of others do not matter..."
               Macbeth's erratic behavior soon draws attention to his guilty conscience, a problem our author tells us is "recurrent and almost inescapable in tyrannies: observers, particularly those with privileged access, see clearly that the leader is mentally unstable."
               Insecurity, over-confidence and murderous rage may seem "strange bedfellows" but they coexist in the tyrant's psychology because all personal and institutional restraints are gone. In another telling observation, Greenblatt notes "The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent."
                Personally, I try to keep a rein on my crazed impulses until at least after that first cup of coffee. Some other people, apparently, find that hard to do. 
                But who would choose, or seek, to become a tyrant? In Macbeth's famous "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy, one of the most quoted passages in Shakespeare, the playwright is not describing the human condition, Greenblatt argues, but the tyrant's condition. In the tyrant's own words: "[Life] is a tale told/ by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing." 
               Didn't we hear a few of those tales in the 2016 campaign? Haven't we been hearing them ever since?
               This book finds outbreaks of tyranny in other plays, including some of the greatest. Lear's blind narcissism leads to the destruction of his realm. The temptation of absolutist power leads to Caesar's death and civil war in Rome. Coriolanus's autocratic longings destroy the career of a hero who had once saved Rome. 
                Shakespeare undoubtedly saw a lot of tyrannical tendencies in his own Elizabethan and Jacobean times. He probed "the ways that communities disintegrate," Greenblatt tells us, "and he deftly sketched the kind of person who surges up in troubled times to appeal to the basest instincts and to draw upon the deepest anxieties of his contemporaries."
                Hmmm, what would that kind of person would be like today?. Methinks I spy the like. 
               The only comfort I can find in this timely book's analysis of the kind of moral monster who 'surges up in troubled times' is the author's final summary of the career of the tyrant:  

"Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage."
                It's the scope of the potential wreckage that keeps me awake. 

The Garden of Verse: The Last Man Prophesies the End of the World, Henry David Thoreau Speaks for the Wild, and Other Thoughts on April

           

The theme for this month's issue of Verse-Virtual is "your best poem." This is like being asked to name your favorite child, so we crafty poets, knowing how to read between the lines, came up with various ways to play with this idea without ever committing to a clear answer to this question. Sort of like a witness responding to the Mueller investigation. 

So here is the 'note' I wrote introducing my two linked-poems in the April issue:

 "I'm copping out on the difficult task of offering an unambiguous selection of 'my best poem,' a voluntary theme for this issue. Long ago, writing poems before I published any, I produced a poem with a favorite title: "The Last Man." It was an image befitting my youthful central themes of solitude and estrangement, a perceived alienation from most of my fellow humans inhabiting both tiny rural hamlets and big cities. I'd sampled both. I don't have that poem any more. Instead, I've tried updating that loner stance through imagining the condition of a solitary, de-gendered survivor in a world ravaged by the climate apocalypse toward which we are stumbling, eyes wide-blinded. 
          I then attempted to rhyme these notions against a vision of "the last man" both to know from experience and to prophesy in behalf of the American wild, Henry David Thoreau."

Here's an excerpt from the first poem, titled "The Last Man":

He cleans his shoes with dusty walks,

fills his lungs with every hour's darkling spite,

hides in his bed of unwashed rags

lest anyone (but who?) observes that his

sheets have stood up and left,

giving up on him

as he has given up

            on so many things

his ineptitude

his car sobs in the night

his stars pick his pocket

he follows the eyes of yesteryear's teenagers

in imaginary streetcars

hours so late that no one notices where they go,

or where he goes,

or where shee/ goes

            without him

 



A here's an excerpt from the poem about Thoreau, titled "The Last True Man," which I should better describe as a prose-poem:

He knew railroad men and lawyers, local farmers, doctors
with their bad news
and perhaps not the last, but one of the finest exemplars of the last generation
of Penobscot hunters and fishers, the newspaper-reading Polis,
who butchered before him the carcass of the moose he had killed,
sickening Henry  
while winning the white nature-lover's respect for his native mastery of the wild.
He knew scientists, botanists, zoologists to whom he served up
a new species of fish, which they neglected to name
for him.
He corresponded with European naturalists
on the life and death of forests, pioneering the science of forest succession

You can find these poems at: http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2019-april.html

And find the issue's full contents at 
http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html