Windmills

I recently stumbled across a movie that I hadn't seen in years:  Foreign Correspondent, which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  Although it was originally released in August of 1940, when the war had already begun, it has an atmosphere that is similar to (though lightened up by Hollywood) the pre-war Eric Ambler novels of that time:  Background to Danger, A Coffin for Dimitrios, and Cause for Alarm.

It is entertaining, witty, and -- to borrow a word from my previous post -- charming.  I will risk being found out as a curmudgeon by saying:  "They don't make movies like that anymore!"  Well, they don't.

One of its best scenes takes place outside and inside a clattering windmill located on a wide, windy plain, beneath a louring sky, in the Dutch countryside (i.e., in a studio in California).  Why do I bring this up? Because I highly recommend both the scene and the movie.  And because it provides a segue (however tenuous) to two poems about windmills by Arthur Symons, one of Ernest Dowson's fellow Decadent poets.

Robert Burford (1791-1861)

"View of Chelsea Hospital from the South Bank at Battersea" (1812)

           The Windmill

The day is enough for delight;
Why, as I lie on the grass,
And watch the clouds as they pass,
Do I reason of wrong and right?

Only to be, and the breath
I take is all that I need,
Were I but as the flower and weed
That live without thought of death.

But death and right and wrong,
As the windmill turns on the hill
Turn like a burden still
That I cannot cast out of my song.

Arthur Symons, Knave of Hearts (1913).

Symons wrote "The Windmill" in 1906 at the age of 41.  Thus, it does not have the youthful melancholy and the free-floating romantic longing that one finds in the typical poems of the Nineties.  The century had turned.  The moment had passed.  And Symons was three years away from a severe mental breakdown.

John Samuel Raven, "A Sussex Mill" (1858)

On the other hand, the following poem does have a classic Decadent feel to it, and not merely because it was written in 1897, and not merely because of its theme of lost love and lacerating memory.

                              A Tune

A foolish rhythm turns in my idle head
As a windmill turns in the wind on an empty sky.
Why is it when love, which men call deathless, is dead,
That memory, men call fugitive, will not die?
Is love not dead? yet I hear that tune if I lie
Dreaming awake in the night on my lonely bed,
And an old thought turns with the old tune in my head
As a windmill turns in the wind on an empty sky.

Arthur Symons, Images of Good and Evil (1899).

The character of the Nineties is, I think, evident in the sound and rhythm of the poem.  For instance:  "And an old thought turns with the old tune in my head/As a windmill turns in the wind on an empty sky."  Note that the final line is a repetition of the second line.  These sorts of repetitions are a typical feature of Nineties poetry:  the Decadents were fond of repeating words, phrases, and lines within a poem in order to create a sonorous, dreamlike flow.

And this is wonderful:  "Dreaming awake in the night on my lonely bed."  A line such as this could almost be viewed as a parody of the Decadent worldview.  "Dreaming awake"!  But, as I have noted before, I can't help myself:  I have a genuine, wholly unironic fondness for the poets of the Nineties.

John Linnell, "The Windmill" (1844)

"All Poetry Is In A Sense Love-Poetry"

John Clare and Edward Thomas were both inveterate ramblers of the countryside.  Hence, it is not surprising that their poetic paths sometimes cross.

                         Stone Pit

The passing traveller with wonder sees
A deep and ancient stone pit full of trees
So deep and very deep the place has been
The church might stand within and not be seen
The passing stranger oft with wonder stops
And thinks he een could walk upon their tops
And often stoops to see the busy crow
And stands above and sees the eggs below
And while the wild horse gives his head a toss
The squirrel dances up and runs across
The boy that stands and kills the black nosed bee
Dares down as soon as magpies nests are found
And wonders when he climbs the highest tree
To find it reaches scarce above the ground

John Clare, Major Works (edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell) (Oxford University Press 2004).  Spelling (e.g., "een" in line 6) and punctuation (or the lack thereof) are as they appear in Clare's original handwritten manuscript.

John Linnell, "Windsor Forest" (1834)

        The Hollow Wood

Out in the sun the goldfinch flits
Along the thistle-tops, flits and twits
Above the hollow wood
Where birds swim like fish --
Fish that laugh and shriek --
To and fro, far below
In the pale hollow wood.

Lichen, ivy, and moss
Keep evergreen the trees
That stand half-flayed and dying,
And the dead trees on their knees
In dog's-mercury and moss:
And the bright twit of the goldfinch drops
Down there as he flits on thistle-tops.

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

"Where birds swim like fish" is especially nice.

John Linnell, "Reapers, Noonday Rest" (1865)

In the course of a discussion of Clare's poetry, Thomas wrote this about poetry in general:

"It is the utterance of the human spirit when it is in touch with a world to which the affairs of 'this world' are parochial.  Hence the strangeness and thrill and painful delight of poetry at all times, and the deep response to it of youth and of love; and because love is wild, strange, and full of astonishment, is one reason why poetry deals so much in love, and why all poetry is in a sense love-poetry."

Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on  the Poets (1910), pages 86-87.

I have previously posted Clare's poem "Love lives beyond the tomb," together with a fine commentary on it by Thomas.

John Linnell, "Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load" (1853)

Perspective, Part Seven: "What's Little June To A Great Broken World . . . What's The Broken World To June"?

The following poem was written by Charlotte Mew when the enormity of the First World War had begun to sink in, particularly after the First and Second Battles of Ypres in the autumn of 1914 and the spring of 1915.  The first six lines are a moving evocation of the "grief" and "dread" of that time. But the final two lines turn the poem into something else entirely -- without minimizing that grief and dread.

                              June, 1915

Who thinks of June's first rose to-day?
        Only some child, perhaps, with shining eyes and rough bright hair will
                     reach it down
In a green sunny lane, to us almost as far away
        As are the fearless stars from these veiled lamps of town.
What's little June to a great broken world with eyes gone dim
From too much looking on the face of grief, the face of dread?
        Or what's the broken world to June and him
Of the small eager hand, the shining eyes, the rough bright head?

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).  The second line is a single line, but does not appear as such due to margin limitations.

The phrases "What's little June to a great broken world" and "what's the broken world to June" are marvelous in and of themselves.  But the transformation that takes place during the movement from the first phrase to the second and onward to the close of the poem is remarkable.

John Linnell, "The Windmill" (1844)

As I have noted before, Thomas Hardy was a great admirer of Charlotte Mew's poetry.  He, along with John Masefield and Walter de la Mare, took the initiative to obtain a Civil List Pension for her due to her lack of financial resources.  After learning that she had been awarded the Pension, she wrote a letter to Hardy thanking him for his efforts.  The letter reads, in part:

"It seems so generous -- unreasonable -- when -- from head to feet . . . I know myself to be unworthy of it.  I owe it to the amazing kindness of friends to most of whom I am practically a stranger -- and to the weight of great names -- with yours coming first.  I am told that I ought to be proud that you should have spoken for me -- indeed I ought -- But pride -- in that sense -- with me (I hope you will understand) -- is a sort of surprise and confusion -- a humbling but a touching thing.  What I do feel is gratitude and entire unworthiness.  And you will believe that I thank you from my heart."

Letter from Charlotte Mew to Thomas Hardy (January 1, 1924), in Betty Falkenberg, "A Letter from Charlotte Mew," PN Review, Volume 32, Number 3 (2006).

John Linnell, "Reapers, Noonday Rest" (1865)

There are interesting parallels between the final two lines of Mew's "June, 1915" and Hardy's "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'."  Hardy's poem was first published in January of 1916.  However, it was written (according to the date appended to it by Hardy) in 1915.  Thus, Mew and Hardy were thinking similar thoughts, and putting them to paper, in the same dispiriting year.  And both of them were able to pull off a difficult-to-achieve trick:  placing things into a timeless perspective without slighting the ghastliness of what was currently taking place, and without abandoning empathy for those who were immediately affected by that ghastliness.

  In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'

                        I
Only a man harrowing clods
     In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
     Half asleep as they stalk.

                        II
Only thin smoke without flame
     From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
     Though Dynasties pass.

                        III
Yonder a maid and her wight
     Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
     Ere their story die.

          1915.

Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917).

John Linnell, "Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load" (1853)