September Dawn


Milly Jourdain


The blue dark of my windows fades away
And over all a flood of colder light
Is softly spreading,
Till through the mist I see the dull red leaves.

The pure, chill air of dawn blows on my face,
And in the room the sheets grow white again.

A robin's song drops in the quiet air
So sad and fresh and incomplete.


The Sea Fog


Milly Jourdain


The fields below me are sodden and gray and the fog has blurred the line of the hills.

I sit by the hedge and think that every year the darkness will grow closer around me.

The fog has crept up and all is a sea of whiteness;
My face is wet with its gentle touch, and I can only see a few steps in front of me on the road.

[originally posted on my real blog in December 2011] A soupcon of Milly Jourdain: Because I have to play Christmas carols for hours and hours tomorrow, I may have no available fingers for typing a blog post. So I'll give you the next two Milly poems. As the only living experts on her oeuvre, what do you think?

Beacon Hill

Milly Jourdain

I hear the deep sea sounding through the pines,

I breathe the wash of air, all cold and clear

And know the peace that lives among the stones

With nothing near.

And then I try to see my little life,

The huge and quiet earth around me spread,

And blue hills far away, that make me feel

Without a dread.

The freshness of this scene is with me still

--In Memory's freshness that can never wane--

And all the music of the many pines

I hear again.

A Phantom Sea

Milly Jourdain

We saw from dull suburban streets

A sudden space of light--

A level line of misty hills

And shiny spots of white.

O how it made me long to feel

The sea was really there

The sharp wind blowing on my face

And sea-sounds in the air!

The hills are like my shadowed life

Where only I can sea

The waves and white sailed ships that float

On its immensity.

Dovedale

Milly Jourdain

There comes to me remembrance like a song,

Of slopes and rocks covered with thin brown grass,

And starred with scabious; there with eager hands

Grasping the slippery tufts of weeds, I climbed

To pick the bright red leaves of fading sorrel:

Then down I lay upon a sun-warmed rock,

And heard the shadowed river sing below.

From a Road

Milly Jourdain

Across the green valley the great hill raises its worn head through the pattern of fields which lie on its warm sides, brown in the summer sun.

Above the line of dark green hedges, beech copses straggle to the top: rooks fly over it and little white clouds.

The short grass is warm and the air is very clear.

For a moment I think I am walking on the hill, stooping and touching the ground with my hands.

But the trailing smell of honeysuckle from the hedge is blown to me, and I know that I cannot stir from the road.

"With Unbeclouded Eyes."

Milly Jourdain

On these September days of softer light,

When reddened leaves are dropping from the walls,

And in the distant sky are sounds of birds,

And all is wet with dew--

Then I perceive a little of that land,

That land which human voices sometimes fill

With sudden sound; or in the hush of spring,

Or on some summer morning's early peace,

I hear its distant murmur.

And although I strive so hard to hear and see,

All, all is gone like fragments of a dream

Leaving behind a trail of coloured mist

And dim forgetfulness.

A poem such as this one is a reason for wading through the swath of Milly Jourdain's mediocre efforts. Admittedly, stanza 2 is a letdown, but stanza 1's "Then I perceive a little of that land, / That land which human voices sometimes fill / With sudden sound" is beautiful. I love the delicate repetitions, the line break between"sometimes fill" and "With sudden sound," the odd yet bracing focus on "land" rather than its details.

First new post of a new school week:

Insomnia, followed by a 5:30 alarm and strong coffee. Boys up and out, almost eagerly. Tom unloading a laundry basket, cleaning ashes out of the woodstove, brewing the strong coffee, listening sardonically to NPR, and now quietly cutting photo mats. Me: reading the poems of Milly Jourdain; resulting mood-ring-like response: hopelessness punctuated by positive thinking. As Melville says: "Well, boys, here's the ark!"

Today's activities include drinking more coffee; hauling a few 50-pound bags of feed out of the car, heaving them onto my shoulders, and lugging them gingerly over black ice to their destinations; copying out some of Wordsworth's Prelude because I'm dutiful; copying out several as-yet-unchosen Plath poems because I lay awake on the couch last night thinking about her dramatic control of the lyric; reading Moby-Dick because I'm actually in the mood for it; writing a few words of my Milton lecture; waiting for paying work to arrive in the mail; feeling guilty because it hasn't arrived even though I have no reason to feel guilty; watering houseplants; laundering sheets; writing a poem.

Here's today's Milly Jourdain poem, which is not at all like the poem I plan to write:

The Blackbird's Song

Milly Jourdain

Among the mists of dawn the blackbird sings

Of rivers running through the fields

And all the fresh young smell of growing things.

He tells of primroses in copses bare

Or clustered on the lonely banks

Breathing a finer fragrance in the air;

Of lilac blossom falling on the ground,

Of little winds and heavenly rain,

And summer nights whose breathing is a sound.

And when the light is spreading down below

He flies away from listeners,

Whose hearts he touched with what they do not know.

I plan to write a poem more like this one:

from The Pleasant Life in Newfoundland (1628)

Robert Hayman

To a worthy Friend, who often objects [to] the coldnesse of the Winter in Newfound-Land, and may serve for all those who have the like conceit.

You say that you would live in Newfound-land,

Did not this one thing your conceit withstand;

You feare the Winters cold, sharp, piercing ayre.

They love it best, that have once wintered there.

Winter is there, short, wholesome, constant, cleare,

Not thicke, unwholesome, shuffling, as 'tis here.

One of my favorite things about this poem is the variety of spellings of Newfoundland: in other sections it appears as "New-found-land" and, best of all, "Newfoundland-land." And if you follow the link to Hayman's biography, you can also read his "Reasons for the taking of Tobacco," which is an odd little discussion about the fine upstanding people who "drinke" it.

I want to mention Thomas's comment on Wordsworth, which appears after my October 14, 2010, post on my main blog. I think he's really on to something there, and it's a point I touched on in my Milton memoir but that is far more evident in The Prelude than in Paradise Lost. Thomas writes: "The diffuse narrative drag interrupted by the magic of certain moments of beauty perhaps echoes the lived experience of our lives--lots of slog punctuated by events that our memories can't quite shake. But maybe we don't want to re-experience that dynamic in poetry itself--we want just those luminous moments without the prose." I think this sentence is a beautiful rendering of a question that continues to haunt my reading and writing life, and I wonder what you think about this conundrum.

And yes, I have managed to come around to Milly Jourdain--whom you might call my private symbol for slog punctuated by luminosity. I haven't copied out a poem from her collection since July, and here's what she's given me to work with today. Slog or luminosity: what label would you paste onto it? (P.S. I have no idea what those dots in the poem indicate, but they do appear in her book as I've typed them here.)

A Wish

Milly Jourdain

The fog had soaked the field all day

And drops of wet hung on the trees;

Then from the west a sounding breeze

Blew all the quiet fog away.

. . . . . . .

To stand once more upon the crest

And see the earth below me lie

All dim with mist, and watch the sky

Red, as the sun drops in the west.

And in the gleam of dying light

To stretch my hands out to the rain,

And never more be touched with pain

By footsteps in the road at night.

And when I've felt again the best,

And seen the earth grow dark and chill,

To turn my footsteps down the hill

And leave it all in cold and rest.

I haven't copied out a Milly Jourdain poem for you since May, mostly because I've been getting tired of poor Milly. She somehow hasn't seemed to suit my impatience and my worked-up energies; and even when I'm gloomy, I don't seem to get gloomy in the way she does. Altogether, for the past few months, I've been been anything but Milly's alter ego . . . which, I do understand, is hardly fair to her. One thing about literature: I'm always looking for myself in it--explanation number 1 for why I never became a scholar.

So, with an attempt at a fresh start with Milly, I offer you, forthwith, today's poem:

Shadows

Milly Jourdain

Along the winding lane I often walk

Touching the trees--letting the grasses slip

Between my fingers. Seeing bluebells shine

Among the fading primroses. Beyond

The open fields sweet with the smell of spring

Look thro' the gate. And further far away

The fields and hedges lose themselves in mist

And yet it's all a dream. Each long day brings

The perfect images of vanished things.

There are many, many deft and lovely words, rhythms, and images in this brief poem, but the ending is terrible, so altogether it just adds to my confusion--not only about Milly's qualities as a poet but about the definition of poetry, the meaning of poetry--by which I don't mean "What's this poem about?" but "What does it mean to have expressed these feelings?" I don't, at all, want to write poems like this; but at the same time I want the eye that sees this world. Judging the value of a poem is so very confusing, and I am glad, once again, that I have resigned from the Beloit Poetry Journal's editorial board.