Yes, me too, and I had to look up habergeon and alamandines. I loved this after getting the whole picture:

The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled
With sanguine alamandines and rainy pearl:

Great poem.

The three before this one were well grouped for contrast. Though, I am certain that the opposite end of the moo is not the mile. The Emily Dickinson one was quite elusive in meaning, but I what I understood it to mean is that what we say can mean so much more than we realize. Cowper's Tame Hare was a hard one for me to understand and I think that I am still missing the meaning, though I really liked it. It is one that really grows on you with each reading.

It is nice to have the whole picture when reading a poem and sometimes the meaning of words is obscure and clouds the poem's meaning. But this also contributes to making poetry interesting.

"what I understood it to mean is that what we say can mean so much more than we realize" ... I think this is so, but Dickinson's use of 'mortal' and 'divine' in the first line suggests more somehow ..

Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.

On meanings, BTW, I cannot claim to have known that a trochilus is a hummingbird, although I did know it was a small bird because I have heard of this strange phenomenon where a bird will behave in this manner and the crocodile will co-operate.

I suspect that Beddoes had other meanings to his poem, some symbolism perhaps. Apparently Beddoes was obsessed with death and afterlife, so I suppose one might observe that the hummingbird is flying in and out of the jaws of death and doing so for its benefit (yummy leeches) and the crocodile's benefit (parasite removal). I couldn't guess what this might have meant in Beddoes mind.

I'm going to skip Wordsworth until I can find a printed text and go on to Sylvia Plath.

Crossing the Water

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies,
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

Sylvia Plath

I can imagine them walking about the English countryside wearing twede and hats and tall boots and stopping to lean on a fence rail and smoke a pipe while looking out over the landscape and discussing poetry.

Crossing the Water in an interesting poem. The introduction is black, the word is used four times, and shapeless. The next stanza introduces light, at first maybe offering hope, but then 'dark advice' steals that away. Next, the darkness is back with coldness and fear. And finally, stars open and there is beauty, but beauty of a dangerous kind. I love the ending: This is the silence of astounded souls.

I know that Silvia Plath was a depressive and this fact gets in the way of her poetry for me.

I can't really contemplate this poem without being aware of her sadness.

Yes, Sylvia Plath poetry clearly conveys her sadness but I guess this sadness may have moved her to write poetry and inspire her creativity. 'Crossing the Water' strikes me as an accurate and very imaginative account of crossing a lake at nightfall in a small boat, a rowboat if her reference to 'oar' is taken literally. Once the sun drops down below the tree line, there is a blackness, everything, the people, the trees, the water, even the fish. I picture her in the boat with someone else who is rowing (Ted Hughes?) and she is composing this poem in her mind. I like her 'cold worlds' phrase, perhaps the round drops from the oars catching the little remaining light. And as they reach the other side, lilies in the shallow water with enough ripple to catch reflection from early starlight. And her closing lines are intriguing and broaden out the poem's meanings beyond a lake crossing.

Well, on to Wordsworth. I'm doing something different here. After some casting about I found a text of this poem but it is a different version than what Hughes and Heaney included in the RattleBag. So I decided to insert this text, partly to save typing it, but also because I think its interesting to compare the different texts. I've also included a bit of background on this text. I think one or two folks out there might shed more light on the texts and background ...

My only comment is when walking in the mountains I think it is a definitive moment when you reach 'the top', however you define it, and then head down. The adventure seems to be in the climb, upward and more upward, with objectives ever higher and energy driven by these objectives and the inherent risk of pursuing them but at some point you must make a decision that you have reached 'the top' and its an important moment and a happy/sad one.

Crossing the Alps

Yet still in me with those soft luxuries
Mixed something of stem mood, an under-thirst
Of vigour seldom utterly allayed.
And from that source how different a sadness
Would issue, let one incident make known.
When from the Vallais we had turned, and clomb
Along the Simplon's steep and rugged road,
Following a band of muleteers, we reached
A halting-place, where all together took
Their noon-tide meal. Hastily rose our guide,
Leaving us at the board; awhile we lingered,
Then paced the beaten downward way that led
Right to a rough stream's edge, and there broke off;
The only track now visible was one
That from the torrent's further brink held forth
Conspicuous invitation to ascend
A lofty mountain. After brief delay
Crossing the unbridged stream, that road we took,
And clomb with eagerness, till anxious fears
Intruded, for we failed to overtake
Our comrades gone before. By fortunate chance,
While every moment added doubt to doubt,
A peasant met us, from whose mouth we learned
That to the spot which had perplexed us first
We must descend, and there should find the road,
Which in the stony channel of the stream
Lay a few steps, and then along its banks;
And, that our future course, all plain to sight,
Was downwards, with the current of that stream.
Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant's lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this,—'that we had crossed the Alps'.

Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say—
"I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
Under such banners militant, the soul
Seeks for no trophies, struggles for no spoils
That may attest her prowess, blest in thoughts
That are their own perfection and reward,
Strong in herself and in beatitude
That hides her, like the mighty flood of Nile
Poured from his fount of Abyssinian clouds
To fertilise the whole Egyptian plain.

The melancholy slackening that ensued
Upon those tidings by the peasant given
Was soon dislodged. Downwards we hurried fast,
And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

William Wordsworth

The Prelude
or, Growth of a Poet's Mind
an Autobiographical Poem
Composed 1799-1805.—Published 1850

The Poem
________________________________________


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The following Poem was commenced in the beginning of the year 1799, and completed in the summer of 1805.

The design and occasion of the work are described by the Author in his Preface to the Excursion, first published in 1814, where he thus speaks:
"Several years ago, when the Author retired to his native mountains with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such an employment.

"As subsidiary to this preparation, he undertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them.

"That work, addressed to a dear friend, most distinguished for his knowledge and genius, and to whom the author's intellect is deeply indebted, has been long finished; and the result of the investigation which gave rise to it, was a determination to compose a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society, and to be entitled 'The Recluse;' as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.

"The preparatory poem is biographical, and conducts the history of the Author's mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself; and the two works have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the Ante-chapel has to the body of a Gothic Church. Continuing this allusion, he may be permitted to add, that his minor pieces, which have been long before the public, when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by the attentive reader to have such connection with the main work as may give them claim to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices."

http://www.Gutenberg.org

Crossing the AlpsI have read this through a few times and probably will a few more. I am sure I am missing much of the meaning here.

Giselle said:



What I understood this poem to mean is that you do not make this decision at all, but rather, you recognize it. Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds, The way we might have hoped to go is not the direction we should be headed. And, that our future course, all plain to sight,
Was downwards, with the current of that stream. We have moments of clarity and our entire life's journey, the direction we are going and the way in which we have come, take on a new meaning. At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost; and then: "I recognise thy glory:" .... Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Our destiny takes turns that can be sad or difficult, but later celebrated.

Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
Under such banners militant, the soul
Seeks for no trophies, struggles for no spoils

On reading the poem a couple more times I think you may be right about the decision (or not) to follow the upward trail. Really that decision was made for them because their objective is to cross the Alps and to join up with their comrades not to climb ever higher. So its really a matter of recognizing this, and not a decision at all. The 'destiny' reference in the second verse I'm not too sure about. He does link it to 'heart and home' but also to 'infinitude'.

As to the meaning of the poem, from what I can understand, The Prelude is about the journey and development of the poet's mind. Presumably this journey in the Alps is a proxy, illustration or analogy for his mind's journey in which 'crossing of the Alps' is perhaps a watershed moment.

"The preparatory poem is biographical, and conducts the history of the Author's mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself;"

This might be what he is talking about when he says in the second verse:

But to my conscious soul I now can say—
"I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

and also the closing lines:

Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

Here are the last 'C poems' in one final gulp ...

Crystals Like Blood

I remember how, long ago, I found
Crystals like blood in a broken stone.

I picked up a broken chunk of bed-rock
And turned it this way and that,
I was heavier than one would have expected
From its size. One face was caked
With brown limestone. But the rest
Was a hard greenish-grey quartz-like stone
Faintly dappled with darker shadows,
And in this quartz ran veins and beads
Of bright magenta.

And I remember how later on I saw
How mercury is extracted from cinnabar
- The double ring of iron piledrivers
Like the multiple legs of a fantastically symmetrical spider
Rising and falling in monotonous precision,
Marching round in an endless circle
And pounding up and down with a tireless, thunderous force,
While, beyond, another conveyor drew the crumbled ore
From the bottom and raised it to an opening high
In the side of a gigantic grey-white kiln.

So I remember how mercury is got
When I contrast my living memory of you
And your dear body rotting here in the clay
- And feel once again released in me
The bright torrents of felicity, naturalness, and faith
My treadmill memory draws from you yet.

Hugh Macdiarmid



Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.

Philip Larkin

Thanks, giselle, for the C's. I was lukewarm to these last three, Chrysals Like Blood maybe a little warmer. I'll start the D's on the D thread.

The last 3 C poems didn't do a lot for me either, but I did look up Phillip Larkin on Wiki because I have read some of his work before and his poems do figure prominently in the RattleBag including an upcoming D poem ...

"His poems are marked by what Andrew Motion calls a very English, glum accuracy about emotions, places, and relationships, and what Donald Davie described as lowered sights and diminished expectations. Eric Homberger called him "the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket"—Larkin himself said that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth"

Sounds like a bit of a sad sack .. I thought this excerpt from another of his poems was interesting if a little grim:

"Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get."

from "The Life with a Hole in it"

I looked up the rest of this poem and it is very grim. I'm interested in looking at the one of his in the D's now.