On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness

The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls

Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just

Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,

Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,

And I don't feel so well myself.

- Arthur Guiterman

Written on the Wall at Chang’s Hermitage

It is Spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echoes
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating, adrift.

- Tu Fu

The Latest Decalogue

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipp'd, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

- Arthur Hugh Clough


The Latest Decalogue is a savage denunciation of the hypocrisy of this world and of the developing capitalist ethos (Clough wrote and lived at a time when revolutions in Europe, such as the 1848 Revolution in France were expanding the notions of freedom, developments from which Britain was largely insulated). It is written in quick-flowing iambic tetrameter with rhyming couplets, a good metre for humorous satire - Clough, as well as his philosophical individuality, was also a great experimenter with metre, often writing in styles hardly used in English, such as hexameter. This tetrameter forces streams of thought over two lines and the spread allows a sort of mid-rhyme to develop inside sentences, enhancing the comic effect.

There are slightly different versions of this poem: the one discussed here is the manuscript version held by Harvard University.

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would tax himself to worship two?
God's image nowhere shalt thou see,
Save haply in the currency:

The irony of the word "tax" reinforces the political satire of this opening, and emphasises, from the very start, both the demands of organised religion - and its lack of credibility - and the love of Victorian society for money. A common refrain at this time was that England was "God's own country" and it is possible Clough is playing with that idea as well as the importance the country places on finance. The use of "haply" in the fourth line is particularly savage. It does not mean "happily", but "perhaps".

It was archaic even in Clough's time, and therefore hints at ancient honour, while impugning the selfish, destructive mores of his own day.

Swear not at all; since for thy curse
Thine enemy is not the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will help to keep the world thy friend:

Here Clough notes the fact that religion in Britain is not spiritual, but has been deprived of whatever personal meaning it may have had, being replaced instead with societal approval and keeping up appearances. "At church on Sunday to attend" pointedly refers to a once a week attendance: sufficient to appear holy, without involving a genuine commitment. It has long been a view of the Church that it is against "the world": here it is shown to be an essential element of its fabric.

Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom promotion may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:

Family relationships are shown to be cynical in nature and the structure of preferment and ambition class-based and exclusive. The second couplet here is brutal in its dissection of simultaneous outward sanctimony and lack of concern or care for the poor and sick. Mid-Victorian England was becoming a country of slum cities, as families flocked to the new towns and cities looking for factory work. The Ten Commandments are here quoted in their King James version - the direct quotation sharpens the comparison with the selfish world the narrator lives in.

Adultery it is not fit
Or safe, for women, to commit:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When 'tis so lucrative to cheat:

Clough here reveals his modernity, highlighting the hypocrisy of Victorian sexual morality, which often turned a blind eye to male infidelity, but was harsh on women suspected of the same. "Safe" most likely refers to the treatment a woman would receive from her family, rather than the physical consequences of extra-martial sex. Think of the treatment of Tess in Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Clough also posits two sins against each other: stealing and cheating - while noting in passing that cheating is not in the Ten Commandments as such, he gives his view powerfully that people can make a good living from cheating people.

False witness not to bear be strict;
And cautious, ere you contradict.
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Sanctions the keenest competition.

In this conclusion, the reader is advised to lie carefully, in case you are caught. One thinks of Mark Twain's dictum that telling the truth means never having to remember anything! The subtle final couplet suggests that it may well be seen as wrong to want other people's goods; however, it is perfectly acceptable to fight tooth and nail to secure more goods for yourself. Selfishness is the theme of this poem and selfishness concludes it.

It might be a worthwhile exercise to analyse the rhyme choices in more depth - "strive" and "alive" make an excellent, mutually reinforcing pairing, for example, as does "attend" and "friend", which emphasises the public nature of Victorian morality.

Remember that this poem is not some twenty-first century stereotypical rehashing of all the things we hate about the Victorians: it was written by a man who was there, and who was, in some ways, a victim of it. The powerful, angry voice that emerges from this poem calls for a return to real values, though by conflating Biblical and selfish morality so closely, it does not recommend a return to the traditional European Christian values. The ones the narrator approves of can be seen simply by inverting his criticisms.

- Lawrence George

Hypocrite

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.


- Walt Whitman

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops.

Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

- Maya Angelou

Empire

Egypt's might is tumbled down

Down a-down the deeps of though;

Greece is fallen and Troy town,

Glorious Rome hath lost her crown,

Venice' pride is nought.

But the dreams their children dreamed

Fleeting, unsubstantial, vain,

Shadowy as the shadows seemed,

Airy nothing, as they deemed,

These remain.

- Mary Coleridge

Invictus

Money

I was led into captivity by the bitch business

Not in love but in what seemed a physical necessity

And now I cannot even watch the spring

The itch for subsistence and having become responsibility.

Money the she-devil comes to us under many veils

Tactful at first, calling herself beauty

Tear away this disguise, she proposes paternal solitude

Assuming the dishonest face of duty.

Suddenly you are in bed with a screeching tear-sheet

This is money at last without her night-dress

Clutching you against her fallen udders and sharp bones

In an unscrupulous and deserved embrace.

- C.H Sisson

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

- Those dying generations - at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

Form and content work productively against each other in the first stanza of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, one of the great Irish emigration poems. Yeats is telling us that he must abandon the perishable domain of human love, sexuality; death and reproduction for some more enduring kingdom, one less carnal and fugitive. Yet even though the opening demonstrative already places this perishable domain at arm’s length (‘That’ rather than ‘This’), the imagery which portrays it is tender and mutedily sensuous. And this grants the natural, human world of the dying generations a grace and preciousness which makes it hard to abandon. Yeats is refusing to make things easy for himself by setting up a convenient straw target of the fleshly world he is leaving behind. Instead, he pays homage to what he is repudiating. He does this, too, by rather courteously suggesting that the fault is his own and not that of the dying generations — that the place is unfit for ‘old men’ like himself, a self-deprecatory phrase which one can imagine costing this youth-obsessed poet a fair amount of amour propre. We suspect that he believes that the profane realm of the dying generations is pretty degenerate anyway, but he is in elegiac mood, and thus tactful enough not to say so outright.

Instead, in a charmingly diplomatic gesture, he discreetly tucks the phrase ‘Those dying generations’ as a kind of warning aside into his otherwise alluring portrait of the young, the birds and the fish. The punctuation of the first five lines of the stanza has the effect of placing all these items on the same level. This suggests an equation between the erotic young and the birds and mackerel, which is scarcely much of a compliment to the former. Once again, then, there is a delicately muted criticism: human beings are really just as helplessly caught up in an endless biological cycle as salmon, which may be one good reason to sail off to Byzantium. Even so, Byzantium does not sound all that appealing an alternative, at least at this point in the poem. That rather too contrivedly imposing line ‘Monuments of unageing intellect’, with its plodding stresses and surplus of solemnity; is perhaps intended to sound faintly rebarbative, in order to throw a final flattering light on the sensuality being left behind. There is also, perhaps, a slightly schoolmasterish feel to the admonition ‘all neglect’, as though a spot of finger-wagging is going on here. But the poem gets away with it.

Yeats is not the kind of writer who explores nature in Keatsian or Hopkinsian detail. There is nothing lavish, profuse or sensuously detailed about the birds in the trees, the salmon-falls and the mackerel-crowded seas. ‘Fish, flesh, or fowl’ sounds more like a grocer’s terminology than a poet’s. ‘Mackerel-crowded’ is a fine stroke, and ‘mackerel’ (if the pun may be forgiven) a splendidly mouth-filling word; but ‘the young in one another’s arms’ and ‘birds in the trees’ are deliberately bare and notational. It is as though Yeats is just touching them in on his poetic canvas, without the least intent to lend them complex, convincing life. They are little more than emblems, like (for the most part) the swan in ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’.

Yet the poem’s achievement is to create the effect of lavishness and profuseness from these few meagre, economical items, an effect which would have taken Gerard Manley Hopkins at least another dozen lines. The stanza generates a cornucopian sense of abundance out of the sparsest of materials. And whereas one feels that Hopkins might have been carried away by this potentially inexhaustible fertility, Yeats remains rigorously in control, as the orderly syntax suggests. By about line 4, we are growing a little anxious: what are all these bits and pieces adding up to? Then, suddenly, a main verb (‘commend’) locks authoritatively into place in the next line, to bind these various elements together and lend them some overall thrust and coherence.

It is as though the chain of brief phrases, with its rapid, cumulative buildup, generates a sense of mounting excitement, one those young lovers might find familiar. Its grammatical open-endedness suggests that this copious piling of life-form upon life-form could in principle go on forever, creating just the sense of exuberance and prodigality that the verse is after. But that clinching main verb, not to speak of the beautifully intricate rhyme scheme, is on hand to assure us that everything is under control. It is as though Yeats’s breathing-in, in preparation for the delayed arrival of the main verb, has been deep enough to allow him to voice one brief phrase after another (‘the salmon- falls, the mackerel-crowded seas. . .‘) without things getting out of hand. So the intellect is not just in Byzantium, to be encountered on disembarking, but is already unobtrusively at work in the present. The exclamatory excitement of the lines, with their staccato rhythms, hint at the possibility of an ecstatic loss of control in the face of these fleshly delights, without ever corning remotely close to it.

- Terry Eagleton

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

- William Yeats

to grasp is to lose

Plucking chrysanthemums along the East fence;

Gazing in silence at the southern hills;

The birds flying home in pairs

Through the soft mountain air of dusk—

In these things there is a deep meaning,

But when we are about to express it,

We suddenly forget the words.

- T'ao Ch'ien

The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.

- Goethe

Waste

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

- Thomas Gray

The lines illustrate the pathos that some bright people are held back by their obscure origins from attaining worldly fame. But the elegance of the verse dignifies this dire situation in a way which makes us feel reluctant to see it altered. By comparing it to a natural condition, it also makes it seem as though it could not in fact be altered. Intellectually ambitious farm laborers presumably object to the poverty which holds them back; but gems do not mind being in caves, and flowers prefer not to be plucked. The imagery is askew to the argument it is meant to underpin. 'Blush,' carries a resonance of virginity, and so a suggestion that renunciation is desirable, including perhaps the kind of sacrifice force upon talented people from modest social backgrounds.

- Terry Eagleton

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs,

And stare as long as sheep and cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

- W. H. Davies

smoke

the light of our cigarettes

went and came in the gloom:

it was dark in the little room.

dark, and then, in the dark,

sudden, a flash, a glow,

and a hand and a ring i know.

and then, through the dark, a flush

ruddy and vague, the grace

(a rose!) of her lyric face

- Arthur Symons

Ambiguity

When my love swears that she is made of truth

I do believe her, though I know she lies…

- William Shakespeare

Night

The night has a thousand eyes,

And the day but one;

Yet the light of the bright world dies

With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one;

Yet the light of a whole life dies

When love is done.

- Francis Bourdillion