Читать книгу Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind - Jonathan Bate - Страница 8

2.

composing

‘Compose yourself’: that is what we sometimes say to ourselves when we are stressed or flustered. Calm down, take things moment by moment, organize your thoughts. The word ‘compose’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘putting things together’. That is to say, creating order. Poets, like those who write music, are composers. They take emotions and ideas and words and put them into harmonious, melodious order. There is no better example of this process than the special form of poetry known as the sonnet. It is a form that has certain rules – though great poets always know how to bend the rules. You need fourteen lines, a regular five-beat rhythm, a pattern of rhymes and perhaps a twist in the tale. The name is derived from the Italian word ‘sonetto’, a little song. When we read a great sonnet, our appreciation of the poet’s ordering of thoughts – about love or beauty or sorrow or time or almost anything – can help us to compose ourselves.

You can take this to a deeper level. As science writer Philip Ball argues, ‘our brains are attuned to finding regularities in the world’ – and they respond to patterns ‘aesthetically’. Try looking at one of the sonnets that follow as if it were a kind of visual or musical pattern. Maybe take a pencil and circle the alternating rhymes. Or speak it out loud and see if you can hear a regularity of rhythm. When we find a pattern – whether it is in the regular coil of a snail’s shell, the ‘fearful symmetry’ of Blake’s tiger, or the movements of a poem – our brain gets a kind of rush, which Ball calls ‘the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing universal harmonies’.

Paradoxically, a poem can give us just this kind of brain-rush in the very same moment that it encourages us to slow down our thought processes or to be still and observe the world around us. Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ is especially soothing and reflective. In July 1802 he and his sister Dorothy were crossing the bridge in a coach on the way to France early on a cloudless summer morning, when the city was still sleeping and bathed in golden light: ‘Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep’. It invites the reader to read the sonnet slowly, meditatively, pausing with each reflection: ‘The beauty of the morning: silent, bare, / Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie’.

Similarly, R. S. Thomas, in his ‘Bright Field’, which keeps to the fourteen lines but relaxes the rules for stressed syllables and rhyme, urges us to remember that life should not be rushed. Hurrying is an illusory quest for ‘a receding future’, which is an unhealthy as ‘hankering after / an imagined past’. We must make time for ‘turning aside’.

Upon Westminster Bridge

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no; it is an ever-fixèd mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art –

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priest-like task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –

No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

John Keats

Open Winter

Where slanting banks are always with the sun

The daisy is in blossom even now;

And where warm patches by the hedges run

The cottager when coming home from plough

Brings home a cowslip root in flower to set.

Thus ere the Christmas goes the spring is met

Setting up little tents about the fields

In sheltered spots. – Primroses when they get

Behind the wood’s old roots, where ivy shields

Their crimpled, curdled leaves, will shine and hide.

Cart ruts and horses’ footings scarcely yield

A slur for boys, just crizzled and that’s all.

Frost shoots his needles by the small dyke side,

And snow in scarce a feather’s seen to fall.

John Clare

Sonnets from the Portuguese 22

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,

Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,

Until the lengthening wings break into fire

At either curvèd point, – what bitter wrong

Can the earth do to us, that we should not long

Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,

The angels would press on us, and aspire

To drop some golden orb of perfect song

Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay

Rather on earth, Belovèd, – where the unfit

Contrarious moods of men recoil away

And isolate pure spirits, and permit

A place to stand and love in for a day,

With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint

Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,

Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,

Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.

Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint

Purification in the old Law did save,

And such as yet once more I trust to have

Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;

Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight

Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined

So clear as in no face with more delight.

But Oh! as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

John Milton

Remembering his wife, written when blind

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare

One day I wrote her name upon the strand

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washèd it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

‘Vain man,’ said she, ‘that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.’

‘Not so,’ (quod I) ‘let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.’

Edmund Spenser

When I have fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love – then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

John Keats

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the

pearl of great price, the one field that had

treasure in it. I realise now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas