NIGHT MAIL BY W.H.AUDEN

Night Mail by W. H. Auden

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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Notes:

Night Mail by W. H. Auden has much meaning for me.

Link to a reading by Tom O'Bedlam, June 22, 2009.

Great pictures.  

 https://allpoetry.com/Night-Mail

or:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8_jmtbvzmY

(or https://youtu.be/b8_jmtbvzmY)

And followed by more on Auden:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29_hFm4kkdk

or see: https://soundcloud.com/anton-jarvis-206182017/night-mail-by-wh-auden

                                               

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THE ART OF LOSING BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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I first became acquainted with this poem when it was beautifully recited by my friend Judith Pownall Gerstein.   I believe Juju (as she was known) had in mind the decline of her beloved husband, Louis Gerstein,  better known as Mr. G. of Mr. G's wonderful grocery store.  

One Art is listed as a villanelle.  Here is an an article about that form -- the villanelle --  accompanying the above poem at:

   https://fourteenlines.blog/2020/03/26/the-art-of-losing-isnt-hard-to-master/ 

Villanelle’s are kissing cousins to sonnets.  Like sonnets they are highly structured poems with precise rhyming schemes and line arrangements, but with less emphasis on syllable count per line while always being 19 lines.  Villanelle’s have been around since the 1600’s but the most famous villanelles are from the 20th century, including;  Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl Love Story, W. H. Auden’s If I Could Tell You and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s The House On The Hill.  I have written a couple of villanelle’s in all their goofy complexity.  They are kind of fun because they take on a life of their own about half way through the writing process.  If you have never tried writing one, give it a go and let the rhyme and structure guide the process and see what your subconscious has been hiding from you. If you have written a villanelle and would like to share it, send it to Fourteenlines10@gmail.com and I’ll post it along with one of my own.

Elizabeth Bishop had the luxury of wealth throughout her lifetime and it afforded her the opportunity to go to Vassar, then travel the world, write poetry and paint. An independent woman of means, she often painted and wrote about subjects that were more aligned with the working class. Bishop understood strife and loss, both of her parents having died when she was very young.  She invested her time well in pursuit of her art, her poetry critically acclaimed, winning the Pulitzer in 1956.

We are adaptable as a species, if at a different rate and to a different extent as individuals. Change and loss is something that is integral to the human experience.  I was watching the movie A Little Chaos, and Kate Winslet’s pivotal moment in the film is when she addresses the King with  a metaphor, the wise rose, as a way of reminding the King about the beauty of his aging lovers. She give’s the King a rose and tells him the rose is oblivious to all the stages of its life, wilting, dropping its petals and forming a seed head to foster the next generation. She shifts the King’s perspective by saying it is only the gardener who tends the rose that morns its fading beauty.  Many of us are mourning the things we are losing or have lost.   Its good to remember loss is part of our nature too, and even faded  or remembered beauty is beautiful, as well.

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CROSS COUNTRY SKIING

 In the early 1970's I thought cross-country skiing would be fun, and got equipment for the whole family.  We didn't do it often because the snow had to be just right -- not often the case in the city! 

Here is my oil-painted recollection of how we looked as we glided past city apartment buildings after a fresh snowfall!  The original picture is very small - just 7"x10" -- and this is the way we were! 

                                                              

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THE GIANT PANDA ONLINE!

I was thrilled to find online the entire monograph of The Giant Panda by D. Dwight Davis.  

Indeed, I had purchased a few original monograph copies at high prices, and I am happy to have them.  But now I'm thrilled to be able to share this work more widely on my blog.  

The many illustrations I prepared (as Mrs. Edward Levin) along with other illustrators far more skilled than I, are beautifully presented here.   

Later I may discuss some of these illustrations -- but now you may see them here along with the text of this magisterial work -- long out of print and only rarely available in hard copy.  

https://archive.org/details/giantpandamorpho03davi/page/222/mode/1up  

                Copy of the same url: I was so excited to find it!

 https://archive.org/details/giantpandamorpho03davi/page/104/mode/2up

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