Poetry has many connections: words with words, rhymes with rhymes, stanzas with stanzas and award-winning poets with dynamite. Beg pardon?
Well, it’s like this. I have a poetry-loving friend who lives near Redhill, County of Surrey, UK. More specifically, he lives just a stone’s throw away from a quarry where in 1867 dynamite was first publicly demonstrated. The inventor was Alfred Nobel from Sweden, and he later used his money and influence to establish the Nobel Prize.
While Nobel (1833-1896) was a chemist, engineer, businessman and, most memorably, philanthropist, he was also a scholar, fluent in Russian, French, English and German. Above all, he loved poetry. And that’s the subject of today’s column. Connections. Thank you for your patience.
The first Nobel Prizes were bestowed in 1901 and since then have been awarded in various languages and disciplines. The first English-language writer to win a Nobel for Literature was Rudyard Kipling in 1907. And since then the distinguished list of poets, novelists and dramatists has included the likes of George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Eugene O’Neill and T.S. Eliot plus other members of literary Nobelity named Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. And, oh yes, Bob Dylan.
Several of the honorees have already been celebrated in these columns, and shortly we will offer our appreciation for three Nobel poets who deserve to be better known. But first, let’s enjoy some verse from Ernest Hemingway. Really? His Nobel citation salutes “his powerful style-forming mastery of modern narration, as most recently evinced in “The Old Man and the Sea.” But we may remember that his very first book, published in Paris, was called “Three Stories and Ten Poems.” So, for the moment, put aside “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sun Also Rises” and enjoy this spirited piece.
I like Canadians.
They are so unlike Americans.
They go home at night.
Their cigarettes don’t smell bad.
Their hats fit.
They really believe that they won the war.
They don’t believe in Literature.
They think Art has been exaggerated.
But they are wonderful on ice skates.
A few of them are very rich.
But when they are rich they buy more horses
Than motor cars.
Chicago calls Toronto a puritan town.
But both boxing and horse-racing are illegal
In Chicago.
Nobody works on Sunday.
Nobody.
That doesn’t make me mad.
If you kill somebody with a motor car in Ontario
You are liable to go to jail.
So it isn’t done.
There have been over 500 people killed by motor cars
In Chicago
So far this year.
It is hard to get rich in Canada.
But it is easy to make money.
There are too many tea rooms.
But, then, there are no cabarets.
If you tip a waiter a quarter
He says “Thank you.”
Instead of calling the bouncer.
They let women stand up in the street cars.
Even if they are good-looking.
They are all in a hurry to get home to supper
And their radio sets.
They are a fine people.
I like them.
* * *
For curiosity, here’s a poem that could have been written today, composed by a 1953 Nobel Prize winner famed for his resonant oratory and rich prose. It’s about a pandemic and is called “The Influenza.” How timely. Here are excerpts.
And now Europa groans aloud,
And ‘neath the heavy thunder-cloud
Hushed is both song and dance;
The germs of illness wend their way
To westward each succeeding day
And enter merry France.
In Calais port the illness stays,
As did the French in former days,
To threaten Freedom’s isle;
But now no Nelson could o’erthrow
This cruel, unconquerable foe,
Nor save us from its guile.
Yet Father Neptune strove right well
To moderate this plague of Hell,
And thwart it in its course;
And though it passed the streak of brine
And penetrated this thin line,
It came with broken force.
For though it ravaged far and wide
Both village, town and countryside,
Its power to kill was o’er;
And with the favouring winds of Spring
(Blest is the time of which I sing)
It left our native shore.
God shield our Empire from the might
Of war or famine, plague or blight
And all the power of Hell,
And keep it ever in the hands
Of those who fought ‘gainst other lands,
Who fought and conquered well.
The author, if you haven’t already guessed? A young chap named Winston Churchill. It was published in 1940 though written much earlier.
* * *
As promised, we would like to share with you an introduction to three Nobel Literature Prize poets who should be better known to all of us. The first is the finest poet ever to come from the Caribbean, Derek Walcott.
Walcott (1930-2017) was born and raised on St Lucia, where he was known as Sir Derek Walcott. He was noted for works that explore the Caribbean cultural experience, and fittingly, his Nobel Prize was awarded four days before the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Indies. In this poem, the speaker views a schooner that reminds him of Odysseus and his fabled voyage home.
That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
or home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband’s
longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name
in every gull’s outcry.
This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility
will never finish and has been the same
for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore
now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,
since Troy sighed its last flame,
and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough
from whose groundswell the great hexameters come
to the conclusions of exhausted surf.
The classics can console. But not enough.
To which I add a quote from Walcott that I really like: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”
* * *
When Louise Glück (1943 – ) won her Nobel Prize in 2020, the judges cited “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Often her poems offer botanical symbolism, nowhere more effectively than in her poem, “The Wild Iris,” spoken in the voice of a flower who has often gone through a life/death experience and can offer a hopeful antidote to grief.
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
Ms. Glück is currently a “Professor in the Practice of Poetry” at Yale, where her students hail her as an engaged and invaluable mentor.
* * *
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was born into a farming family in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He grew up as a country boy, attended the local primary school and then moved away, as he said, from “the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education.” Ultimately he was to teach at both Harvard and Oxford.
Reflecting his birth and his background, his poetry could sometimes be truly down-to-earth as in this fine piece he called “Digging.”
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
* * *
In closing, here is a poem that never won its author a Nobel Prize, or perhaps never had to. The poet was Alfred Nobel himself.
You say I am a riddle – it may be
For all of us are riddles unexplained.
Begun in pain, in deeper torture ended,
This breathing clay what business has it here?
Some petty wants to chain us to the Earth,
Some lofty thoughts to lift us to the spheres,
And cheat us with that semblance of a soul
To dream of Immortality, till Time
O’er empty visions draws the closing veil,
And a new life begins – the life of worms,
Those hungry plunderers of the human breast.
For this Hope dwindles as we fathom Truth:
Forgotten to forget – and is that all?
To-day a man, with power to act and feel,
A mirror of the Universe, wherein
Creation’s centred rays combine to form
The focus of Intelligence; to-day
A heart so deeply loving that it seems
As if that band uniting soul to soul,
Were but Religion in a brighter form;
To-day all this – to-morrow a cold corpse,
A something worse than clay which stinks and rots.
Kind hands may strew their flowers,
kind eyes may drop
A tear of pity o’er the buried dust;
But worms will feed long after friends are gone,
And, after all, what matters love of theirs
When all of us, that was, is at an end.
* * *
VIDEO. In 2016 Bob Dylan was honored with a Nobel Prize for “creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” He chose not to attend the ceremony, but he wrote an acceptance speech which was delivered by the American ambassador. This video presents excerpts.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS
