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Sunday, 31 May 2009
When is a cliché not a cliché
 It is a while since I saw any Poems on the Underground on the underground. For those not in the know, Poems on the Underground is described on Wikipedia as:
a project to bring poetry to a wider audience by displaying various poems or stanzas on advertising boards across the London Underground rapid transit network.
A foreigner, probably an American, described it thus; no Englishman would use the term “rapid transit network”, least of all to describe the Tube. The poems appear sporadically, sometimes with themes. The last few I saw, on the Central Line, were translations of ancient Chinese poems, all of which seemed to go something like this:
A river rises
Perhaps they lost something in translation, but I was sorely tempted to scrawl underneath: © E. J. Thlibb, 1252. The Chinese are overrated if you ask me.
There have been some good ones, though. A few years ago I caught sight of this:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
The title and author surprised me: “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam” by Ernest Dowson (1867 to 1900). Well, to judge by his dates, he should know. But it is odd that he should give such a simple poem a long Latin title. I recognised the second verse, as most readers will: it is read aloud by Lee Remick in the film to which it also gives its title. “The Days of Wine and Roses”. The film is a harrowing study of alchoholism, starring that most versatile of actors, Jack Lemmon.
Is “days of wine and roses” a cliché? It is now, because of the film, but was it when Ernest Dowson, who sounds more like an accountant than a poet, first wrote it? And if it was, does it matter?
I like this poem’s second verse very much. Cliché or no cliché in the first line, the other three speak to me of life’s brevity and of the symmetry of darkness that bounds it far better than other images. Shakespeare’s stage, the brief candle, and even – Hugh would naturally disagree – Nabokov’s:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
are better written but they are written from the outside. Julian Barnes sees this flaw in the supposedly comforting idea of the medieval bird flying from darkness into a lighted hall then out again: it keeps on flying, and the reader is sees both the darkness and the hall. In contrast, Dowson’s reader sees only the path, because he is on it, and its beginning and end are not clear, as to an observer, but a mist and a dream.
Dowson came up with “Gone With the Wind” from a less successful poem, also with a long Latin title:
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Too many roses. He died of alcholism at thirty-two. Too much wine. Posted on 05/31/2009 10:01 AM by Mary Jackson
Comments
31 May 2009
 Ole Sandberg
Mr. Dowson must have started drinking at a very young age. Or he grew up in a fogbound part of the world. Or both. 31 May 2009
Mary Jackson Right, I think, on both counts. I'd not heard of him before I saw him on the Central Line, but I think that verse has something. 31 May 2009
dumbledoresarmy
On this day of Pentecost, since the subject of time, and change, and earthly beauty has arisen, I am going to quote from the person who is possibly my favourite modern Christian writer, David Bentley Hart; specifically, from his difficult and bracing "The Beauty of the Infinite". Here is Hart restating a small part of the theology of the Orthodox master, Gregory of Nyssa. 'According to Gregory, creation is in its every aspect a movement...for Gregory change is simply constitutive of created nature; creation is itself a conversion from the darkness of nonbeing toward the light of God... 'the created dies every moment, writes Gregory, to be reborn the next...if it ceased to change, it would cease to exist. Each person, he says, is a nation - someone new at every instant, from conception to death - and the whole of humanity is an unfolding 'series', a successive realization of the creative word (the first Adam) that God uttered in making humanity in his image... 'To be human is to be an "act", thoroughly dynamic...in transit, without center in oneself, borne away or driven toward what lies beyond. 'Desire is the energy of our movement, and so of our being. It may draw one toward the good...or toward evil...but in either case one moves, one changes, all is traversal. 'In each instant the soul departs from itself, in ecstasy or repetition, urged on by a longing for an elusive beauty...As that which moves, becomes, is reborn or repeated, human nature's perfection is nothing but this endless desire for beauty and more beauty, this hunger for God." And, a little later, reversing entirely the idea of the interval of light between eternities of darkness and nothingness, Hart (continuing to discuss Gregory's 'take' on Christian anthropology and theology), states: "The creature...is called to an endless attendance upon and successive growth within God's light...". 'the energy of desire drawing creation to God is not a recoil back from finitude toward an unexplicated and disinterested simplicity whose 'eyes' are forever averted from the play of being and its deficiencies, but answers - corresponds to - God's call to what he fashions for himself, and what is in itself nothing but an ontic ecstasy ex nihilo and in infinitum. 'The relationship, then, of our desire for beauty to the eternal source of beauty is not grounded in a prior identity, even though it subsists upon creation's participation in God; our desire does not subserve a return to the stillness of our proper being; it [our desire] *is* our being.' And a few pages further on: "We are music moved to music".
31 May 2009
Ole Sandberg
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am a Nabokov devotee, though not a very learned one. But Nabokov expressly attributes the crack about the crack of light between two eternities of darkness to common sense, and Nabokov didn't exactly hold common sense in very high regard. |