Faust's famous clock quote
"Ah, Faustus, now hast thou but one bare hour to live
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!
Stand still, you ever moving spheres of heaven.
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
'O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!'
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come and Faustus must be damn'd'"
"Dr.Faust"--Play by Christopher Marlowe ,Shakespeare's contemporary playwright
Faustus who has entered into an irrevocable pact with the devil for exchange of his soul for all the black magic powers of the devil suddenly realizes he has just an hour to live, after which he will burn in hell for eternity."The clock quote" here is a favorite quote of University Professors. The lines do not boast of rich imagery such as you will find in Shakespeare's plays. But the lines are a powerful piece of dramatic speech such as one would expect in the Elizabethan drama and when spoken on the stage they truly touch your heart and strike a chord of sympathy for the chief protagonist who has by his vaulting ambition brought upon himself all this suffering .The doctor is asking that time be frozen and the sun not rise and give him time to repent and save his soul. If a tragedy is expected to bring about catharsis in the viewer, Faust's tragedy eminently qualifies to do this.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
Cloths of heaven
By W.B.Yeats
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Pretty sentimental and syrupy and full of hyperbole,isn't it ? But I love the last line :
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
The line is worth its weight in gold.
Those are pearls that were his eyes
I love these lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest ,airy and spirit-like .Of course it is the spirit Ariel who speaks them :
Of his bones are coral made
those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth change
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
The lines are airy because the situation they depict does not exist .Ariel is merely fooling his audience. He is not dead but is very much alive in another part of the island. But assuming that the person supposed to have been drowned is actually dead ,then he becomes a spirit just like Ariel and speaks the same airy lines . But a transformation from the real to the unreal will precede his attaining such a state of being. That is the transformation of nature into art-the sea-change he is talking about. Here of course we are not talking about art in the sense of an artifact,a man-made thing of beauty.His bones do not disintegrate into dust but become coral ,his eyes become pearls and everything of him becomes something rich and strange.
That is the way a "good" spirit speaks !
Palms are spiders hung in a web of light
Adil Jussawala's images are a treat to your visual imagination.
"Spiders infest the sky
They are palms,you say
Hung in a web of light"
(Nine Poems on arrival-Adil Jussawala)
This is almost painterly imagination. The poet has returned from a long exile abroad to Mumbai and the first thing he sees as soon as he comes out of the airport is the clusters of palm trees ,their fronds against the setting sun looking like spiders hung in a web of light. The spiders "infest" the sky -there are so many of the palm fronds in the western sky.
Another equally beautiful image is this:
"the garlands beheading the body
and everybody dressed in white
who are we ghosts of ?"
"Garlands beheading the body" probably mean that the heavy garlands have almost covered the head of the diseased .”Everybody dressed in white:who are we ghosts of ?” referring to the custom of the near and dear ones wearing white clothes in the funeral.
http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/ndex.php?obj_id=2773
Taking arms against a sea of troubles
"To be or not to be- that is the question
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them "
Shakespeare's Hamlet
The Hamletian dilemma stated here is not a profound philosophical statement but it appeals to you more in terms of the poetic beauty of the lines.In our younger days we were confused by the apparent inconsistency of "taking arms against a sea of troubles" The inconsistency is in using the "image within image" of "taking arms against a sea of troubles" but actually there are three images, each of them interacting with the other.-"Taking arms", "against a sea of troubles","a sea of troubles".
By way of elaboration we may state it this way :the individual takes arms against troubles and by opposing them ends them. Troubles are the soldiers of the opposing army .The soldiers gathered in the battlefield look like a sea. The three images are ;1)the individual takes arms like a warrior 2) he takes arms against troubles and 3)the troubles look like a sea.
A radio with guts and a behind in the air
It is one of the "situational' poems of Charles Buckovwski -A radio with guts .The drunken poet throws his playing radio through the window and watches it playing on the roof through the window.
Here is a delightful description of a "woman downstairs" that stands out :
"there was a woman downstairs who worked in
the garden in her bathing suit,
she really dug with that trowel
and she put her behind up in the air
and I used to sit in the window
and watch the sun shine all over that thing
while the music played."
The mischief of the poem is at once delicious and human.Look at the elements 'the sunshine','the woman's behind up in the air',"the radio playing on the roof"- a combination of the visual and auditory elements-make for a perfect evening with the liquor sloshing in the poet's mind.
"Watch the sun shine all over that thing"-that thing is not the woman's behind but the radio playing on the roof !
Forgetting has a shape in the kingdom of transformation
For Hans Carossa
By Rilke
"Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kindgdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles; and though
we are rarely the center of the circle,
it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve."
(Translation by Stephen Mitchell)
First ,when I saw the poem I thought Rilke was being merely clever .With usages like "losing too is still ours" I thought Rilke was out of form.In the second line Rilke got back to his original form. So I think. Forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation sounded so much like an epigrammatic saying. But actually it comes out as a poetic image if you look at it closely.Reality is built by consciousness which works only by remembering .Things exist only if your mind perceives them. Forgetting things is consciousness not recognising reality which means that forgetting has no shape or feel but in the world of constant flux when matter remains the same but only transforms into other matter or energy forgetting does not mean things losing their shape or form .The forgetting of things continues to circle around us although we may not be the at the centre of the circle . We are not the centrifuges in which energy flows from the centre to the perimeter but the curve remains around us impinging on us.
The day wavers
"Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks."
-Octavia Paz
I am intrigued by the image "the circular afternoon" .How is the afternoon circular ?This is how i have understood. Just imagine your consciousness standing on the edge of the afternoon as you stand on the seashore and look at the circular curve of the sea. At the beginning is the morning which the consciousness now perceives in a dim line and at the end the evening ,when the day wavers between staying and going. The day wavers because it loves its own transparency. There is a reluctance to go because the beauty of the day is so captivating and cannot be sacrificed for the inky darkness of the night.
I love the use of a spatial image for describing an essentially temporal object.
The corpse they planted last year
We looked at Eliot's poetry with wide-eyed wonderment in our undergrad days.To begin with it was too complex for a guy to take the trouble of going through the stanzas and make meaning out of them.The allusions were far too many ,requiring a continuous looking-up and an updated biblio. But for all that we loved those musical lines and the nasty surprises they gave us.:
Madam Sosostris ,the famous clairvoyante ,had a bad cold
Nevertheless ,is known to be the wisest woman in the world.
Delicious irony. Just imagine that after 30 years I still remember those lines from The Waste Land .In those days I had a sneaking suspicion that the lines were the poet's attempts to sound clever ,a desire to show off scholarship. By the way , who was Madam Sosostris ? How would I know ? Of course she was a famous clairvointe .Did such a person exist in real life ? There was no way of knowing unless one read the footnotes.Heck,who will read footnotes?
Stetson,you who were with me at Mylae,
That corpse you planted last year ,
Did it sprout ?Will it bloom this year ?
Sorry,I am quoting these lines from memory.There could be inaccuracies.It does not really matter.The lines are a throw-back to the Vietnam era but they painfully remind you of the corpses that were planted a few years ago in Iraq .One is assured that history repeats itself ;only the the geographic location of the scene changes.
Just thought I would let you know,fucker
8Count"-
A poem by Charles Bukowvski
from my bed
I watch
3 birds
on a telephone
wire.
one flies
off.
then
another.
one is left,
then
it too
is gone.
my typewriter is
tombstone
still.
and I am
reduced to bird
watching.
just thought I'd
let you
know,
fucker.
A very matter-of-fact style. The irony is what stands out. The only important image-"my typewriter is tombstone" brings out the frustrating creative block that the poet is experiencing.The birds leaving the telephone wire one by one -a repetitive activity recalls the classical story that never ends-one sparrow picks up the grain,then another and so on and the story goes on till late into the night. The writer's block is humourously turned into a subject for a poem : "just thought I would let you know,fucker"
