Notes Toward a Supreme Ghazal

Ms Hacker likes to write in the ghazal form.
She does something every night in the ghazal form.

I've never attempted this mode of Arabic verse,
But I should try something light in the ghazal form.

It might also be a medium for invective:
Do poets vent their spite in the ghazal form?

It's mystifying to me, really, how anyone
Could seem to take delight in the ghazal form.

The anticlimactic repetition ending each couplet
Makes it difficult to excite in the ghazal form.

Hard to imagine Michael Longley or Seamus Heaney
Remembering the potato blight in the ghazal form.

Even a mind of the caliber of Albert Einstein
Would sound less than bright in the ghazal form.

Yet some American poets can make good verse
About war-torn countries' plight in the ghazal form.

O dylan of darkspeech, fight!  Let your words take flight!
Show your poetic might in the ghazal form!

Bard of Avon Calling

I need to re-purchase a copy of Hamlet. The Pelican Shakespeare version of the famous play has these bizarre editorial emendations, "Lamort" instead of "Lamound," "heated visage" instead of "tristful visage," and so on. It's like reading the New American Bible version of the Bard of Avon.

Existence or its opposite? That's what I am asking myself.
Whether it be more or less dignified to put up with
The barbs and darts of brash Luck, or to use weapons
Against distress's oceans, to stop them from happening.

Too tired to translate the whole soliloquy into the NAB idiom.

Heschel III

Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home. Weary, sobbing, the soul, after wandering through a world festered with aimlessness, falsehoods and absurdities, seeks a moment in which to gather up its scattered life, in which to divest itself of enforced pretensions and camouflage, in which to simplify complexities, in which to call for help without being a coward. Such a home is prayer. Continuity, perseverance, intimacy, authenticity, earnestness are its attributes. For the soul, home is where prayer is.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, “On Prayer,” from Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, ed. Susannah Heschel (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996), p. 258

More from Heschel

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of knowledge.

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When in doubt, we raise questions; when in wonder, we do not even know how to ask a question.

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There is no answer in the world to man's radical wonder.  Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.

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We must keep our own amazement, our own eagerness alive.  And if we ever fail in our quest for insight, it is not because it cannot be found, but because we do not know how to live, or how to beware of the mind's narcissistic tendency to fall in love with its own reflection ...

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What is subtle speculation worth without the pristine insight into the sacredness of life, an insight which we try to translate into philosophy's rational terms, into religion's ways of living, into art's forms and visions?

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Souls that are focused and do not falter at first sight, falling back on words and ready-made notions with which the memory is replete, can behold the mountains as if they were gestures of exaltation.

*

from Man Is Not Alone:  A Philosophy of Religion, pp. 11-15, passim

Abraham Joshua Heschel

It is the sense of the sublime that we have to regard as the root of man's creative activities in art, thought and noble living.  Just as no flora has ever fully displayed the hidden vitality of the earth, so has no work of art ever brought to expression the depth of the unutterable, in the sight of which the souls of saints, poets and philosophers live.

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Only those who live on borrowed words believe in their gift of expression.  A sensitive person knows that the intrinsic, the most essential, is never expressed.

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[from Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (Noonday, 1979), p. 4]

From Tennyson's In Memoriam

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Noël

A poem by Anne Porter.

Christmas (I and II)

by George Herbert (1953-1633)

All after pleasures as I rid one day, My horse and I, both tir’d, bodie and minde, With full crie of affections, quite astray, I took up in the next inne I could finde, There when I came, whom found I but my deare, My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief Of pleasures brought me to him, readie there To be all passengers most sweet relief? O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light, Wrapt in nights mantle, stole into a manger; Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right, To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger: Furnish & deck my soul, that thou mayst have A better lodging then a rack or grave.

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be? My God, no hymn for thee? My soul ’s a shepherd too; a flock it feeds Of thoughts, and words, and deeds. The pasture is thy word: the streams, thy grace Enriching all the place. Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers Out-sing the day-light houres. Then we will chide the sunne for letting night Take up his place and right: We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should Himself the candle hold. I will go searching, till I finde a sunne Shall stay, till we have done; A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly, As frost-nipt sunnes look sadly. Then we will sing, shine all our own day, And one another pay: His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine, Till ev’n his beams sing, and my musick shine.

The Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ

by Christopher Smart (1722-71)

Where is this stupendous stranger,
Swains of Solyma, advise?
Lead me to my Master’s manger,
Show me where my Saviour lies.

O Most Mighty! O MOST HOLY!
Far beyond the seraph’s thought,
Art thou then so mean and lowly
As unheeded prophets taught?

O the magnitude of meekness!
Worth from worth immortal sprung;
O the strength of infant weakness,
If eternal is so young!

If so young and thus eternal,
Michael tune the shepherd’s reed,
Where the scenes are ever vernal,
And the loves be Love indeed!

See the God blasphem’d and doubted
In the schools of Greece and Rome;
See the pow’rs of darkness routed,
Taken at their utmost gloom.

Nature’s decorations glisten
Far above their usual trim;
Birds on box and laurels listen,
As so near the cherubs hymn.

Boreas now no longer winters
On the desolated coast;
Oaks no more are riv’n in splinters
By the whirlwind and his host.

Spinks and ouzels sing sublimely,
“We too have a Saviour born”;
Whiter blossoms burst untimely
On the blest Mosaic thorn.

God all-bounteous, all-creative,
Whom no ills from good dissuade,
Is incarnate, and a native
Of the very world He made.

New Prince, New Pomp

by Robert Southwell (1561-95)


Behold, a seely tender babe
      In freezing winter night
In homely manger trembling lies,—
      Alas, a piteous sight!


The inns are full, no man will yield
      This little pilgrim bed,
But forced he is with seely beasts
      In crib to shroud his head.


Despise him not for lying there,
      First, what he is enquire,
An orient pearl is often found
      In depth of dirty mire.


Weigh not his crib, his wooden dish,
      Nor beasts that by him feed;
Weigh not his mother's poor attire
      Nor Joseph's simple weed.


This stable is a prince's court,
      This crib his chair of state,
The beasts are parcel of his pomp,
      The wooden dish his plate.


The persons in that poor attire
      His royal liveries wear;
The prince himself is come from heaven—
      This pomp is prizëd there.


With joy approach, O Christian wight,
      Do homage to thy king;
And highly prize his humble pomp
      Which he from heaven doth bring.

Christus Natus Est

by Countee Cullen (1903-46)


In Bethlehem
On Christmas morn,
The lowly gem
Of love was born.
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

Bright in her crown
Of fiery star,
Judea’s town
Shone from afar:
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

While beasts in stall
On bended knee,
Did carol all
Most joyously:
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

For bird and beast
He did not come,
But for the least
Of mortal scum.
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

Who lies in ditch?
Who begs his bread?
Who has no stitch
For back or head?
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

Who wakes to weep,
Lies down to mourn?
Who in his sleep
Withdraws from scorn?
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

Ye outraged dust
On field and plain,
To feed the lust
Of madmen slain:
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

The manger still
Outshines the throne;
Christ must and will
Come to his own.
Hosannah! Christus natus est.