As a pilot for a series, Ciaran O’Driscoll talks about his poem The Spelling of Autumn, and John Davies talks about his poem Reading Moby Dick. In passing, they also refer to poems by T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Jennings, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and W.S Merwin.
Poems discussed by Ciaran and John in this pilot episode including their own drafts.
The Spelling of Autumn
by Ciaran O'Driscoll
When I said that it was Autumn
I could sense the soft departure
of my deity and calling
as they left me to the wasteland.
This occurred as I was moving
from the failure of my harvest
in ’25, though pausing
to admire the elegant spelling
of Autumn and its bonding
of m and n that made
a tacit kind of music.
“What a lovely word,” I mumbled
to myself as I was sitting
vocationless and godless
at my computer screen.
‘The rest of this existence
may flounder into nothing,
but the graceful spelling of Autumn
has what it takes to stay.’Reading Moby Dick
by John Davies
He’s reminded of the boy he was
riding his mother’s garden fork
embedded in the turf near the rose bed
as a harpooneer ready to strike a whale.
The garden was his sea, all around
white horses reared and bucked
as he steadied for his throw
lurching on his storm-tossed mount
The iron spline his foothold
in the ocean against his prey
the great Leviathan.
In a distant window a curtain twitched
and all the boy’s bravado and pretence
dissolved into a stupid game
much like the industry he now knows
turned whales into light. Song at the Beginning of Autumn by Elizabeth Jennings Now watch this Autumn that arrives In smells. All looks like Summer still; Colours are quite unchanged, the air On green and white serenely thrives. Heavy the trees with growth and full The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere. Proust who collected time within A child’s cake would understand The ambiguity of this – Summer still raging while a thin Column of smoke stirs from the land Proving that Autumn gropes for us. But every season is a kind Of rich nostalgia. We give names – Autumn and Summer, Winter, Spring – As though to unfasten from the mind Our moods and give them outward forms. We want the certain, solid thing. But I am carried back against My will into a childhood where Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke; I lean against my window fenced From evocations in the air. When I said Autumn, Autumn broke. From Collected Poems 1953-1985, Carcanet, 1987. P21.
Harm’s Way
by W. S. Merwin
How did someone come at last to the word for patience
and know that it was the right word or patience
the sounds had come such a distance from the will to give pain
which that person kept like a word for patience
the word came on in its own time like a star
at such a distance from either pain or patience
it echoed someone in a mirror who threatened with fire
an immortal with no bounds of hatred or patience
the syllables were uttered out of the sound of fire
but in silence they become the word for patience
it is not what the hawk hangs on or the hushed fox
waits with who do not need a word for patience
passing through the sound of another’s pain
it brings with it something of that pain or patience
but how did whoever first came to it convey
to anyone else that it was the word for patience
they must have arrived at other words by then
to be able to use something from pain for patience
there is no such word in the ages of the leaves
in the days of the grass there is no name for patience
many must have traveled the whole way without knowing
that what they wanted was the word for patience
it is as far from patience as William is from me
and yet known to be patience the word for patience
Recently received by email from Paris Review (published in Issue no. 143 Summer 1997) With acknowledgements.
