February 6th, 2008
There are worse things…
Today is the birthday of poet Fleur Adcock. In honour, The Writer’s Almanac reproduces her poem ‘Things’. It’s only a handful of lines, but captures more truth than most poets manage in pages.
“There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.”
February 6th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
“There are worse things”, not according to Gerard Manley Hopkins, has a similar but perhaps more terrifying bedside vision entirely devoid of such optimism.
NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing
Then lull then leave off. Fury had shrieked “No lingering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief”.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
Pretty dark eh?
February 6th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
LR, arghh! Flashback alert - you’ve taken me right back to Leaving Cert English class. I loved the alliteration in Hopkins “Oh rollrock high road roaring down”. As dark stuff goes though, he’s probably the king.
February 6th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Sinead, I *love* that poem. You rock for posting it and reminding me of the fact
February 11th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Good to see Fleur Adcock being noticed; I really like the small amount of hers that I have read, especially the one you quote, Sinéad, and the following:
Advice to a Discarded Lover
Think, now: if you have found a dead bird,
not only dead, not only fallen,
but full of maggots: what do you feel -
more pity or more revulsion?
Pity is for the moment of death,
and the moments after. It changes
when decay comes, with the creeping stench
and the wriggling, munching scavengers.
Returning later, though, you will see
a shape of clean bone, a few feathers,
an inoffensive symbol of what
once lived. Nothing to make you shudder.
It is clear then. But perhaps you find
the analogy I have chosen
for our dead affair rather gruesome -
too unpleasant a comparison.
It is not accidental. In you
I see maggots close to the surface.
You are eaten up by self-pity,
crawling with unlovable pathos.
If I were to touch you I should feel
against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin.
Do not ask me for charity now:
go away until your bones are clean.