a gallimaufry

High Windows, by Philip Larkin

(Photograph of Philip Larkin found here)

To be absolutely honest, I was a bit disappointed when I first read this. Although I knew of Larkin’s reputation and had read a few of his more famous poems, I didn’t really know his work and was expecting great things. I loved some of the poems in this collection (‘The Trees’, ‘Solar’, ‘To the Sea’, for instance), but others struck me as just a bit – banal. It took me a little while to appreciate him.

By way of example, here is one of the less-famous poems, an ekphrastic piece (I love the word ekphrastic!) inspired by one of those Dutch Old Master genre paintings. You can hear Larkin reading it out himself here.

The Card-Players

Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.

Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!

I initially found the crude humour – ooh look, rude names! – childish. There are bodily functions: pissing, belching, snoring, farting and gobbing. There is mud and ale. But there is something more than basic physicality too. The rafters are ‘ham-hung’, evoking meaty buttocks (hams), yet garlanded with croaked-out scraps of songs ‘about love’, aspiring to something more transcendent. The ‘lamplit cave’, in which the four card-players booze away, holds the ‘secret, bestial peace’ of their existence. Outside, however, are gales and ‘starlessness’, fresh rain falling and, most beautifully of all, ‘wet century-wide trees’ clashing above the tavern. Human existence, in the tavern, is brutish, but beyond and all around lies a wild and pitiless world. ‘Rain, wind and fire!’ – there is a glory in it and even in the sottish defiance of the drunken men (Jan van Hogespeuw pisses ‘at’ the dark, as if taunting it).

(Adriaen Brouwer, Kaartspelers en Brassers [Card Players and Drinkers], oil on panel, seventeenth century; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; found here)

I cannot find a painting which actually resembles the one in ‘The Card Players’ in every detail. (Does that mean it’s not truly ekphrastic?) There was of course a genre of Flemish and Dutch painting showing interior scenes, and a subgenre of that showing taverns. Artists like David Teniers the Younger and Adriaen Brouwer tended to show the interior of the tavern and not the countryside without, which Larkin includes in his vision. Perhaps Larkin imagined the picture in his poem, combining works he had seen.

To me, his poem works like those pictures. Teniers and Brouwer turned commonplace, even ugly scenes, into fit subjects for art through their perceptiveness and skilful brushwork. Larkin describes a vulgar scene similar to theirs and similarly turns it into art.

(Aert van der Neer, Moonlit Landscape with Bridge, oil on panel, probably between 1648 and 1650; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; found here)

The rest of the collection High Windows echoes the juxtaposition of human degradation and natural beauty in ‘The Card Players’. ‘The Trees’ and ‘Solar’ are joyful celebrations of life. On the other hand, lighted rooms, in hotels, hospitals and homes, evoke loneliness and isolation with great power. Buildings are usually dreary and functional. ‘Going, Going’ laments the loss of countryside to urban encroachment and pollution. (Though I think poems like ‘Going, Going’ and ‘Posterity’ remain a bit one-note, the language unallusive.)

‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, however, is beautiful because the way he describes the empty hotel – without guests, it has no meaning – brilliantly suggests loneliness and death, a spirit-fled corpse. This is done through the specific details of light and dark, silence, ash, ‘shoeless’ corridors, lack of home, ‘Night comes on’.

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

In ‘Sad Steps’ the poet himself, like Jan van Hogespeuw, has a nocturnal piss on a stormy night. He draws the curtain to see ‘the wind-picked sky’. For him, unlike Jan, ‘There’s something laughable’ about the night scene and about the way humans have projected romantic notions onto moonlit skies. He feels that:

The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

is a reminder of his lost youth. In the titular poem, he imagines looking through other, ‘high windows’ to the endless nothingness beyond.

So, I am converted to Philip Larkin after all.

 

‘Out in the dark’, by Edward Thomas

Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when a lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;

And I and star and wind and deer
Are in the dark together,—near,
Yet far,—and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

(Edward Thomas, from Collected Poems, Oxford University Press)

Today is a terrible day. Thinking of everyone in Ukraine.

 

Halloween, by John Burnside

This is the first poem in John Burnside’s 1994 collection, The Myth of the Twin. I have recently started reading it, having had it all these years, because of my new book arrangement. (Here we see why some of us benefit from having physical, paper books instead of digital books; I had quite forgotten I owned it until I picked it up.) It’s a lovely collection, and this poem is obviously fitted for this time of year.

I have peeled back the bark from the tree
to smell its ghost,
and walked the boundaries of ice and bone
where the parish returns to itself
in a flurry of snow;

I have learned to observe the winters:
the apples that fall for days
in abandoned yards,
the fernwork of ice and water
sealing me up with the dead
in misted rooms

as I come to define my place:
barn owls hunting in pairs along the hedge,
the smell of frost on the linen, the smell of leaves
and the whiteness that breeds in the flaked
leaf mould, like the first elusive threads
of unmade souls.

The village is over there, in a pool of bells,
and beyond that nothing,
or only the other versions of myself,
familiar and strange, and swaddled in their time
as I am, standing out beneath the moon
or stooping to a clutch of twigs and straw
to breathe a little life into the fire.

To me, the poem has a sort of smudgy quality, like old black-and-white photographs that are faded and sometimes over-exposed. It speaks to traditions, it doesn’t feel modern, and I wonder if the ‘I’ of the poem is a ghost ‘version of myself’, walking the place that they haunt but aware of other selves, other times, other villages that are peopled or abandoned. Anyway, I like it very much and I hope you do too.

(The photograph is of Tyneham, the village in Dorset that the villagers were forced to leave during the Second World War and never permitted to return to; found in the Dorset Echo, here. It doesn’t quite have the right atmosphere for the poem, but almost...)

 

catching up

Oh dear! Where did the time go? I am almost embarrassed to come back here after so long. How are you all? Did you enjoy the summer?

I have mainly been having a lovely time. International travelling rules were relaxed just in time for me to pop over to the UK in August to see my family. I fell upon the charity bookshops of Ipswich with joy and managed a small but respectable haul (I am limited by what I can carry back on the Eurostar and my suitcase also held the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings which is possibly the heaviest three-volume set ever published, my arms are now six inches longer).

Here is my swag, rounded out with a few books I filched from my mother’s box of books to go to Oxfam:

But! Not a single work by Storm Jameson! It seems my dreams of second-hand bookshops stuffed with her books are indeed dreams with no basis in reality. Bother.

I have mentioned before that I decided to rearrange the majority of my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. Dear friends, do not do this. In theory it was a wonderful plan which would reveal very clearly the development of (mainly) English literature; in practice it is difficult to sustain because you have to keep checking publication dates every time you want to shelve a book (so you don’t bother and shove books in where there’s space and then everything becomes even more chaotic) – quite apart from what to do about books published many years after they were written, collected works, etc. I had known that it would take longer to find any book I wanted but I thought this would yield pleasant rambles through my books as I sought a particular volume. In fact it’s just annoying. But I am too lazy to re-organise everything again.

Anyway, an unexpected drawback of scattering slender volumes of modern verse among novels is that you can’t really see them any more. So, when we redecorated my daughter’s bedroom and a small bookcase became surplus to requirements, I stole it for them. It’s right beside the door to the kitchen and already I’m reading more poetry than I’ve done for years. Hurrah!

At the moment I am having a Brontë fest. I reread Jane Eyre – it’s so good! And then I read Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg, which was fun and led me back to Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. It was abandoned half-read a couple of years ago but I am now fully absorbed in it. It is too unwieldy for the bus, so I am also rereading Wuthering Heights and loving it all over again.

And now, although I ought to be preparing a four-hour English lesson on answering the telephone and takng a message (four hours! I know! my lucky, lucky students), I will leave you with a quick list of books I’ve read recently that I recommend to you!

• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox. (Whenever I clap eyes on the spine of this novel, in my head I hear a voice saying ‘The absolute BOOK!’ with exactly the emphasis of a Georgette Heyer heroine gasping ‘You absolute SWINE!’) This is a novel which is always changing, never quite what it seems – characters move through different worlds and we move through different genres. A mash-up of Ruth Rendell, The Shadow of the Wind and Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, streaked with darkness and splendidly evocative, it is an enjoyable read slightly let down, I felt, by the neat ending.
• The Trick is to Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I’ve had this book for twenty-five years and finally its moment arrived and it was worth it. In it Joy Stone, a drama teacher, chronicles her struggle with grief and mental breakdown; this sounds grim but it is clever and witty and hopeful as well as sad. I want to read more of her work now.
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, by T.H. White. Darker and crueller than The Sword in the Stone, this is an excoriation of the chivalric code with which Arthur’s court has become associated. White depicts it as either violent or ridiculous and the novel lurches between these two extremes. I found it uncomfortable to read, I think that’s the point. Soon: The Ill-Made Knight.

Happy October, everyone!

 

'Earl Cassilis's Lady', by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Meeting her on the heath at the day’s end,
After one look and one sigh, he said,
Did a spine prick you from the goosefeather bed?
Were the rings too heavy on your hand?
Were you unhappy, that you had to go?
No.

Was it the music that called you down the stair,
Or the hot ginger that they gave you then?
Was it for pleasure that you followed them
Putting off your slippers at the door
To dance barefoot and blood-foot in the snow?
No.

What then? What glamoured you? No glamour at all;
Only that I remembered I was young
And had put myself into a song.
How could time bear witness that I was tall,
Silken, and made for love, if I did not so?
I do not know.

(From, Sylvia Townsend Warner: Selected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Manchester: Carcanet)

According to Wikipedia, the ballad of ‘The Gypsy Laddy’ became associated with Jean Hamilton, the first wife of John Kennedy, Sixth Earl of Cassilis (pronounced Cassels). There was no particular reason for this, though it must be said that the Earls of Cassilis did tend to lead exciting lives. (You can read ‘The Gypsy Laddy’ here.)

When I first read the poem I didn’t know this background; the use of ‘glamoured’ suggested to me that the lady had run away with the fairies. It’s a variation on STW’s perennial theme of escaping women, whether wives or spinsters. I love it, down to the very tone of the conversation the two of them are having.

(Arthur Rackham, illustration for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; found here)

'Winter Moon', by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Tycho, a mountain in the moon
Has long ago put out his fires –
Or so astronomers avow –
And dark the crater, and cold, yet now
About my hand, about the quires
Where this night through my hand has strewn
Words unavailing, frustrate phrases,
Tycho’s malignant bale-fire blazes.

A licking frost, a lambent chill,
It lights the unkindled sacrifice
And plays about me to benumb.
The words I wait for will not come,
And cowering down, as under ice
Dumb water cowers, my lost thought still
Shows me a tree upon the wold,
That stands, and cracks its heart for cold.

(From, Sylvia Townsend Warner: Selected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Manchester: Carcanet)

I like the sounds and the rhythms of this poem very much. The poet identifies the cold, extinct volcano with her lack of inspiration and through that discovers the ‘tree upon the wold’ and writes her poem...

And here is a close-up photo of Tycho, found on this page (which has lots more information about it):

Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited and with poems by Theodora Goss

(Edmund Dulac, Circe, the Enchantress, 1911; from here)

Following on from yesterday’s post about some of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s fantastical stories, a quick look at some of her fantastical poetry.

In last year’s Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week I wrote about the Selected Poems published by Carcanet; they also publish STW’s New Collected Poems. However, I have a little book of poems called Voices from Fairyland and it brings together some of STW’s fantastical poems with works by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew. It’s a collection that works really well together because of the shared theme, and it has good introductions by Theodora Goss. (It’s published in the US by Aqueduct Press but if you’re in the UK you can obtain it with a little ingenuity.)

When I first proposed Voices from Fairyland as a title for this anthology, I meant that Coleridge, Mew, and Warner were writers who had heard voices from fairyland, calling to them as Mew’s changeling hears the fairies calling.[...] But now I think that these poets are the ones calling from fairyland: from a strange, dangerous, and enchanted country. They are calling to us with voices that I am not certain we can understand, because we have not yet learned to understand the fantastical in poetry.

Goss discusses how STW uses fantastical poetry, based on stories we already know, to give voices to those who cannot usually speak and whose voices in those stories are silent: the wife, the child, the lesbian.

How do you speak when speech becomes impossible? The figure for such impossible speech is Echo, who speaks although she cannot. She speaks through repetition and revision. She speaks by saying what others have said, with a different meaning [...]

In this way she can write about a desire that cannot be spoken, a woman’s love for a woman. And she can question whether the way we live our lives, with our mortgages and our three square meals, is sufficient. For example, ‘The Sleeping Beauty woke’, tips the happy ending right over:

The Sleeping Beauty woke:
The spit began to turn,
The woodmen cleared the brake,
The gardener mowed the lawn.
Woe’s me! And must one kiss
Revoke the silent house, the birdsong wilderness?

There is a yearning, in this and other poems, for something beyond the mundane (fairyland?). It can be reached in silence, in wilderness, in dreams, in desire. In the next poem, the poet is called by a voice from this place beyond, this fairyland, and responds:

In the Cotswolds

All day the rain
Fell on the wheat
And dripped from the gable
On to the stone;
And all day long
I sat alone
Save for the dog
Who slept at my feet.

Slept – till a-sudden
He roused in fear,
And snuffed at the door,
And would not be quelled.
I opened – and there
An old crone I beheld,
And round about her
The dusk drew near.

Something she said –
But her voice was hollow,
And chill was the hand
She laid on mine.
Her words were a riddle
I could not untwine;
And when she turned onward
I knew I must follow.

I felt the watery
Stubble souse
My ankles, and round me
Saw corn-shocks blurred.
And faint and fainter
Yet I heard
The dog bark on
In the empty house.

The disquiet of this poem has sunk into its very structure. There is a rhyme scheme – lines 2 and 8 rhyme with each other and 4 and 6 rhyme with each other. But the rhyme is so unusual and the first so delayed that you almost don’t hear it, although you expect it and want it. So there is a sense of waiting and unease to it, which reflects the waiting in the house and then the arrival of the mysterious, icy crone with her alluring riddle. The flatness of the monosyllables of the first stanza is like the raindrops falling, and there seems to be a hard music of ‘o’ and ‘d’ to the rest of the poem as the rain continues to fall and the poet to walk. We end with an empty house, not silent as Sleeping Beauty’s (that dog barking!); the poet wasn’t happy there but the journey on which s/he has set forth with the crone is unsettling in every possible meaning of the word.

sylvia townsend warner reading week 2020, join in, all the best people are!

Cunningly timing my announcement for the later part of January and thus after everyone has already made lots of resolutions and reading plans for the year, I am delighted to tell you that once again I intend to spend the first week in July reading and writing about the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner and I invite you to join me!

As an added lure, a new selection of her short stories has just been published, Of Cats and Elfins, by Handheld Press. The Guardian reviews it briefly here. According to Handheld Press’s website (from which you can order a copy), it brings together four of STW’s Elfin stories that were not published in The Kingdom of Elfin with the collection The Cat’s Cradle Book. It is putting my vow to buy no more books under considerable strain just days after I made it.

Here is a link to my introductory post to last year’s reading week, with a list of her books. And here is a round-up of everyone’s reviews from last year’s reading week, and here are all my STW posts. Here is a link to the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, which is packed with information about her.

Readers, you have plenty of time to track down one of STW’s books and read it. Last year, many people* wept bitter tears over missing the Reading Week. Don’t let that be you this year! If you have never read her before, this is your moment!  And if you have – well, it’s a FACT that no one has ever disliked anything she ever wrote, so treat yourself to some more time with one of her lovely books.

STW wrote novels and stories that are witty, melancholic, waspish, fantastical and beautiful, and she was also a formidable poet. She wrote about cats, fairies, nuns, revolutionaries, aristocrats and stifled women. Her fans include Sarah Waters and Neil Gaiman. She is the antidote to all that is plodding, dull or hypocritical. She deserves to be wider read, and you deserve to have her in your life. Joining in Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week this year is thus a win–win situation for all concerned!

* Actually, no one.

brian wildsmith

One of my very favourite childhood books (admittedly, I have a lot of favourite childhood books) is a picture book called Blue Bird, which my parents gave me for my birthday when I was five. The story is a simplified version of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird and is wonderful, but what makes this book special is the beautiful, beautiful pictures. I loved it so much I devoted not one but two Puffin Club bookplates to it.

(Illustration of one of the secret rooms in the Palace of the Night, from Blue Bird, OUP 1976; from here)

(Madam Berlingot, from Blue Bird, from here)

(The Fairy Bérylune, from Blue Bird, from here)

If you are a child of the 1970s like me, you will almost certainly have recognised the unique style of the illustrations even if you don’t remember the name of the artist. He was Brian Wildsmith, and although he died in 2016 today is his birthday and he would have been ninety years old. Tamsin Rosewell (@autumnrosewell) and James Mayhew (@mrjamesmayhew) are organising a Twitter celebration (#wildsmith90) so I thought I’d add something here, as a tribute to one of the greats of illustration. I have drawn on his Wikipedia entry as well as other sites and interviews to which I’ve linked.

Brian Wildsmith was born in 1930 in Penistone, West Riding. He went to school in Sheffield and at seventeen, determined not to follow his father down the mines, studied at the Barnsley School of Art, from where he won a scholarship to the Slade in London. During his time there (1949–52) he was something of an outsider, unable to afford oils and canvas so spending his lunchtimes drawing and studying the Old Masters in the National Gallery. In 1955, after his National Service (he taught music at the Royal Military School of Music), he got married, started teaching art at Selhurst High School and began designing book jackets for John Murray and drawing line illustrations for publishers including Faber and Faber and Oxford University Press.

(Brian Wildsmith at work; photograph from his obituary in the Guardian by Julia Eccleshare)

Wildsmith was foremost a painter and loved colour, and it was his great good fortune that the 1960s saw enormous improvements in colour-printing technology. His other piece of great good fortune was Mabel George, of Oxford University Press, who gave him his first chance to illustrate a children’s book in colour. Mabel George was a brilliant editor who took over the children’s department of OUP in 1956 and also launched the careers of Charles Keeping and Victor Ambrus as well as many writers. As an experiment, she commissioned Wildsmith to illustrate the Arabian Nights (1961). The TLS review savaged it:

‘We now descend to the lowest depths with Brian Wildsmith's vicious attack on the Arabian Nights [...] these pointless scribbles, which do duty for drawings, wander aimlessly about the page[...]’

Mabel responded magnificently:

‘Take no notice, Brian. We make up our own minds here. We’re now going to do an ABC.’

Brian Wildsmith’s ABC went on to win the Kate Greenaway Award in 1962 and his career was made. (I learnt about Mabel George, who was a truly impressive person, here.)

But according to this lovely interview he gave to Joanna Carey in the Guardian, that horrible review remained engraved on Wildsmith’s heart for ever.

(Illustration from Fishes, OUP 1968; from here)

In 1971, Wildsmith and his family – he had four children – emigrated to France with a grand piano and settled in a house in an olive grove in the south. The Blue Bird, my beloved picture book, was published in 1976. It sprang from an invitation Wildsmith received from George Cukor two years earlier: Cukor was going to film Maeterlinck’s play in the first ever US/Soviet co-production in cinema: would Wildsmith like to design the sets and costumes? I had never even heard of this film which apparently was a flop; a pity, but still it gave rise to this marvellous book.

Wildsmith was prolific: he published 82 books, mainly with OUP. Many of them he wrote himself, despite initial reservations which he expressed to Mabel George. In an interview for the Independent, he told Susie Mesure:

‘I said, “But Mabel, my English is terrible. I always got terrible marks at school.” But she said, “Brian, I have editors with inkpots full of full stops and commas. It’s ideas that count and you’ve got them.” And it took off from there.’

I have a couple of other books he illustrated, which I also love very much:

(Illustration of Mother Goose from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, OUP 1964; from here)

(Illustration from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, from here)

(Illustration from The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, OUP 1963; from here)

Looking at his pictures on the internets, I recognise others that we must have borrowed from the library:

(Birds, OUP 1967; from here)

(The Lazy Bear, OUP 1973; from here)

His use of colour is striking; it can be bold or subtle, but he’s also acutely aware of pattern and uses patchwork a lot in his pictures of houses and landscapes. The colours can be very intense but are often balanced by large areas of white space. You can see the influence of 1960s psychedelia in some of his work too. The other very striking element is the texture of his pictures. They are very painterly, and again vary from thickly laid swirls and dabs to delicate washes and splashes, given extra clarity by the pencil drawing beneath, embellished with waxy strokes of pastel or layers of collate. When you look at his pictures, they are alive and joyful.

As they sing, he is big in Japan, where a museum dedicated to his work was opened in 1994 and in 1996 he illustrated Katie and the Dream Eater, written by Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamodo of the Japanese Imperial Family. But he is not so big in the UK and many of his books remain out of print; perhaps today’s celebration will go some way to rectifying that.

(Illustration from Wild Animals, OUP 1967; from here)

In the Guardian interview with Carey, Wildsmith said this, which seems a good note to end on:

‘Children are all-important, and so is art ... Art is food for the soul. And books are a child's first encounter with art so I felt it was a way I could make a contribution to the world. A drop in the ocean maybe, but picture books offered a chance to communicate the importance of things such as kindness, compassion, friendship, beauty.’

(from The Lion and the Rat, OUP 1963; found here)

EDITED TO ADD: fellow Wildsmith fans, there is a new website devoted to his work here! His son has also set up a Twitter account, @brian_wildsmith, and you can see all the pictures posted by readers in celebration of his birthday if you follow the hashtag #wildsmith90. Joy!

A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day, by John Donne

(Aert van der Neer, Landscape with a mill in the moonlight, oil on canvas; found here)

’Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
         The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
         Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
                The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th’ hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar’d with me, who am their Epitaph.

 

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
         For I am every dead thing,
         In whom Love wrought new Alchimie.
                For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse;
He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

 

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have;
         I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
         Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
                Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaosses, when we did show
Care to ought else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

 

But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
         Were I a man, that I were one,
         I needs must know; I should preferre,
                If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; All, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

 

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne
         At this time to the Goat is runne
         To fetch new lust, and give it you,
                Enjoy your summer all;
Since shee enjoys her long nights festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

(From Donne: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson, OUP 1929)

(Ferdinand Keller, Böcklin’s Tomb, 1901–1902; oil on canvas; found here)