Hardy or Owen?

[jisbell00]

Here we go:

The Voice, BY THOMAS HARDY

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.


Dulce et Decorum Est, BY WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

[Macavity]

I think I need to re-evaluate my antipathy to the present participle John!

The Owen poem is, of course, justifiably iconic. The Hardy was pleasant reading, though, to reference biography, he was not particularly thoughtful about his wife until after her death. Not sure 'wind oozing' is convincing.

Bw

Phil

[jisbell00]

So what would it be that's bothering you about the present participle, Phil? I agree, too much is a surfeit. I like the Hardy for its music, down to the closing stanza - it's my faovrite Hardy poem - but I agree, the Owen is hard to beat. They ended up contemporaries, for a span.

And bios rear their ugly head again! hard to avoid really, given the topic.

Cheers,
John

[Macavity]

Just the sound when clustered, or when it is used for 'liquidity', but the poem context is key!

Astonishing how Hardy achieved so much in prose and then wrote so beautifully in poetry!

[jisbell00]

Yup! Joyce wrote this: https://poets.org/poem/i-hear-army

Shakespeare wrote theater and lyrics, and Beckett wrote theater and novels. Those are who occurs to me.

Oh - Hugo wrote everything.

Cheers,
John

[Macavity]

What struck me with Hardy was his cut-off: there is no appreciation of this novel, I'll write poetry instead. Interesting there is no feel of age difference between him and Owen. Perhaps Owen lived a lifetime in those trenches or Hardy could key into his youth. I feel the Romantics had a young lad element.

I struggled through a Beckett novel and periodically failed to complete Ulysses. Love the Beckett plays and do enjoy reading Joyce's short stories.

Those softly dropping shells. Such horror humans devise for each other!

[jisbell00]

Wow, I didn't know that about him! he stopped writing novels? Wild. I agree, he and Owen connect in an odd way. Owen does not feel young, as you say. And yes about the Romantics - Coleridge and wordsworth lived longer but wrote little interesting stuff after the age the others were mostly dead.

Beckett's novels are heavy going, I agree, unlike his plays. Dialogue helps. Ulysses is great but also work. I like his short stories too.

Yup, humans have been doing awful things to humans since the dawn of time. I thought about this in my Messiah days.

Cheers,
John

[Macavity]

I don't know what your BBC access is like John, but a very informative program on Hardy can be found here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00139nw

Thoughts about his rhyme in this poem?

[jisbell00]

It doesn't bug me. I've gone over it and see it's all pretty predictable. I might say that the lack of surprise fits with the poem and gives it a certain air of inevitability. I don't feel that Hardy lazily took the first rhymes to hand, as one often does - more that he respected his initial vision and the poem wrote itself. More or less!

O h hey - the BBC link opens up! I'm used to the US and these things never working. But now, we're in Paris. Ho ho ho.

Cheers,
John

[Macavity]

I like first/fair and thin/thorn, but were/fair?

[jisbell00]

I think that was a rhyme for Hardy: if it wair true, I should have had to do thus and so forth! I think you get that through to maybe the 1940s?

I quite enjoy rhyming pain and again.

Cheers,
John

[Macavity]

Thanks for clearing that up John.

[jisbell00]

John

[Macavity]

I was wondering John, which musical elements of Hardy's poem particularly appeal to you?

Bw

Phil

[jisbell00]

Good question, Phil.

The rhythm. I just hear the whole thing sing, and I don't know anything else with this exact rhythmic structure.

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were.

Lovely. Fliss does this, opens language to song. Tennyson does it too, the mid-C19th put some thought into it, and some careful listening. I'd not noticed the appeal of the rhyme either, until you led me to explain it. I think they spent a lot of time on scansion. And then the last stanza's scanson is wild.

Cheers,
John

[Macavity]

Appreciated John. What is your scansion of L1?

[jisbell00]

Wo'man much missed', how you call' to me, call' to me,

four dactyls, I guess, but the first two complicated by the syntax. Woman much missed is I think very nice.

Say'ing that now' you are not' as you were'

again, four beats, three dactyls and a long stress? Then repeat:

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

Although L4 could be

But' as at first', when our day' was' fair'.

Unlike L2, I like to give those last three syllables three beats. Is it a bit like Hopkins's sprung rhythm? It feels a bit Anglo-Saxon to me.

Very singable in any case.

John

[Macavity]

Great. Very illuminating. I was struggling to scan L1.

Bw

Phil

[CalebPerry]

I like both poems.

Owen was my favorite poet for many years. He was a homosexual in the mold of Walt Whitman -- a man who wasn't just attracted to men, but who loved everything about men, who felt tenderness towards men. He remembered the boy in himself, and he could see the boy in other men. Going to war and fighting alongside the young men he loved, seeing them die (senselessly, as often happens in war), obviously focussed his poetry. I think by the time he died, he was an old man inside, deeply wise. You can see the wisdom in his eyes in the few pictures taken of him.

I really like that Hardy poem. I can hear the music in it. I may put it into my Favorite Poems file.

I agree that "oozing" is not the best choice of words. I would have chosen "whistling":

Wind whistling thin through the thorn from norward, ...

"OOzing" is what thick liquids do, not the thinnest thing on earth (air).

Here is an Owen poem in which he writes of the child:

To —

Three rompers run together, hand in hand.
The middle boy stops short, the others hurtle:
What bumps, what shrieks, what laughter turning turtle.
Love, racing between us two, has planned
A sudden mischief: shortly he will stand
And we shall shock. We cannot help but fall;
What matter? Why, it will not hurt at all,
Our youth is supple, and the world is sand.

Better our lips should bruise our eyes, than He,
Rude Love, out-run our breath; you pant, and I,
I cannot run much farther, mind that we
Both laugh with Love; and having tumbled, try
To go forever children, hand in hand.
The sea is rising ... and the world is sand.

Wilfred Owen

[jisbell00]

Yup. And thanks for the Owen poem.

Cheers,
John

[Macavity]

John, you have often paired an iconic poem with a lesser known one in this series, is there a particular strategy to this approach?

[jisbell00]

Nope Phil, pure coincidence. I have OTOH tried to find shorter poems most of the time, for all my candidates. I've been wanting each to put their best foot forward given those limitations.

BTW I just listened to Guinness read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I haven't read Eliot much at all for years; it's good to be reminded just how brilliant he is.

Cheers,
John

[Morpheus]

Dante as a cure for Thomas

I'm going to post another music video shortly for your amusement.

[jisbell00]

Yes, take one canto of the Comedy each morning for two years. Dante keeps it pretty simple!

Cheers,
John

Looking forward to the video.

[CalebPerry]

BTW I just listened to Guinness read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I haven't read Eliot much at all for years; it's good to be reminded just how brilliant he is.

In another thread, you agreed with me about gibberish poetry. I see Eliot as a purveyor of that, but I guess you disagree. At about the sixth or seventh strophe of Prufrock, my eyelids start to get heavy and I have to stop myself from falling forward in a deep sleep. Part way through The Waste Land, I have a similar response: "What does it mean, why am I bothering with it?"