I have been thinking of poems about sailors over the past few days, and posting a copy of Tennyson's 'Ulysses' seems like the natural way to mark the process. 

For me, the poem ultimately describes the social and psychological challenges of evading despair. When trying to avoid our own suffering, we often hurt those around us, as I think Ulysses does in this poem when he abandons his 'aged wife' and 'savage race;' he chooses to return to the ocean, and more importantly, into the wonderful unknown. He anticipates a rush of adrenaline, and a return to the adventures that occupied the twenty years that are partially depicted in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Ulysses' decision is a social challenge because he abdicates his responsibilities as a king, a father, and a husband; the monologue also suggests that he is rallying his sailors around him so that they can all continue the journey together--I wonder if anyone tries to remind them about the cyclops. Ulysses' decision is also a psychological challenge because his effort to revive his youthful mentality may very well fail. Is he still, as he promises, strong in will ?  The poem's final iambic line strikes such a powerful rhythm that is almost impossible not to believe him. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.


Tennyson, like us, may have found Ulysses' last line too seductive to find another ending.

Ulysses

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I just saw a person pour appetite suppressant into their coffee. Is Plato happy, distressed, or simply unimpressed? Explain your answer in haiku. 

This week, I had the privilege of staying at Rubber Repertory's Pilot Balloon Church-House. My partner, Karen Alvarado, was scheduled to come with me, but she had to go to NYC over the weekend for auditions. I missed her presence. But her absence compelled me to write a piece that tracks the contours of our feelings for each other.  I suspect I will post more about that in a few weeks. 

In the meantime, I wanted to share some images from a very small project I worked on while I was here. As a part of Rubber Repertory's  fundraising efforts, they offered their donors the opportunity to receive a piece of postcard art from the artists staying with them in Lawrence. The postcards presented a challenge, as straightforward writing felt inadequate for the medium--I write postcards all the time, and would never classify those as 'art.' So I experimented with a few new methods, so to speak, to earn my keep. The images below don't tell half the story, but I hope they will help me remember the work. 

The postcards I made were inspired by a handful of Mexican youths I saw on the metro near the Autonomous University in Mexico City; I watched them cut themselves with bottle glass and beg for pesos--but the passengers gave them nothing. 

Here's a partial list of materials: postcard, brother EM430 typewriter, milk of magnesia, club soda, soap, distilled vinegar, a memory of Mexico, a broomstick, a shower, a ceramic baking dish, absorbent paper, and a fourteen gauge needle that I brought back from Iraq. 

Many thanks to Rubber Repertory's Josh Meyer and Matt Hislope! I was lucky to have the opportunity to visit them in Lawrence! I am going to miss them, and the intensity of openness with which they listen to human experience. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins alliterated experience into a strange, powerful new form of verse. As in many of his other poems, he uses Pied Beauty to alienate nature from the familiarity of the senses. The patterns on trout turn to 'rose-moles all in stipple' while clouds mottle the sky like the spots on a cow. He hides the poem's central theme--the varieties of human appearance and behavior--beneath the fig leafs of humility and the mysteries of God. He never uses the words 'human,' yet he cuts nature with human typologies and contradictions. You and I are the most 'counter, original, spare, strange' creatures that he knows; we are alternately 'swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.' He could hold our fickleness against us, but he prefers to hold it a virtue and a grace. 'Praise him.'

I had heard this poem before, but it stumbled my way again at Rubber Repertory's Pilot Balloon Church-House, where it serves as their daily prayer. Many thanks to Josh and Matt for their hospitality! It's been a wonderful week in Kansas.

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.                                                    

                     W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)
                   "He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven"

This is one of my favorite Yeats' poems. He came to mind the other day while watching Harold Pinter's Betrayal, the film version with Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley. 

Irons and Kingsley play, respectively, a book agent and a book publisher. They reminisce about conversations concerning Yeats, but never actually manage to say anything meaningful about him, or his poetry. They merely decorate their lives with Yeats' name. The authors they publish, on the other hand, publish vain and literate autobiographical novels that sadden the two friends--they know they have not discovered a Yeats, just a few lads that can sell a book or two. The two friends have sold many, many books and they have read many more, but they sense they will not find a Yeats. Instead of finding a Yeats--or even earnestly searching for one, the two friends struggle half-hardheartedly over the love of a woman (Patricia Hodge). All three cast stones at one another--they wanted fire, but all they found were sparks. They live entrapped in bourgeois comforts and predictability. 

Well, anyhow. They never did say anything about Yeats. I suppose I might as well. "I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." The speaker has confessed his poverty--he also suffers from a poverty of words. All the rhymes depend upon pure repetition of entire words, rather than merely repeating sounds. Cloths, light, cloths, light; feet dreams, feet, dreams. He lays these few words before us--tread softly.