P was so kind as to send me the collected poetry of W.H. Auden (less the few poems that he repudiated as being insincere, later in life) for a birthday present. I find it grippingly readable and sometimes very affecting, and bearing a lot of resemblance to the sort of thing i'd like to be able to do:
Sometimes we see astonishingly clearly,
The out-there-when we are already in,
Now that is not what we are here-for really.All its to-do is bound to reoccur;
is nothing there-fore that we need to say;
How then to make its compromise referTo what could not be otherwise instead,
And has its being as its own to-be,
The once-for-all that is not seen or said?
Under the influence of Auden, I wrote a reasonably long poetic letter to Thoreau. I could bang on at it for a while longer, but sometimes it's better just to finish these things and send them. Perhaps i'll one day reach some optimistic conclusions.
A Short Letter to Henry David Thoreau
A sensible measured decision
becomes an inviolable standard;
It's not clear from the documentation
how to get out when one's stranded.Somhow you avoided becoming branded
a cynical tout of subversion;
today not even the naive are candid;
the canon of public speech has become recursion.Never a big fan of the establishment,
you called for "Civil Disobedience"
and tax refusal; "Government
is at best but an expedient"."What is it but a tradition,
though a recent one, endeavoring to
transmit itself unimpaired to posterity,
but each instant losing some of its integrity?"I don't think that much of your poetry,
to be honest, but I hear this piece
helped inspire Mahatma Gandhi
to 'Satyagraha'; resist in peace,work hard, seek equal representation;
"Law will never make men free;"
you dictated, "it is men
who have got to make the law free,""That government is best which governs not at all",
doesn't bankroll the new downtowns,
bunker its embassies, respond to heaven's call
or declare war on abstract nouns.We investigate the space around
us, looking for the world, for all
that are unsatisfied with what we've found;
unable correctly to make or hear the call.We are vulnerable in numbers,
it takes practise to stay of sound
mind, and our effort to share endangers
the profit to be found in rallying round.Lewis Mumford saw a lot coming;
he thought that Marx had it all figured
out, saw the structure's future becoming,
the tend to collectivisation that he triggered.He says that at each shift, a successor machine
helps a system that's not of its essence
to prosper; to automate mental routine,
to oppress people and to compel acquiescence.I hear often, "the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate
intensity"; our laws have become science fiction,
the sum of our customs extortionate.Most people scurry and scrap, a few become fat
off the land; the rest suffer retaliatory eviction
from public space; cut out of a silly spat
that is quite indifferent to ex-urban dereliction,Suburban isolation, post-industrial flatlining,
collapsing infrastructure, tit-for-tat
planning; oh, please forgive me for whining;
if we can fix this, if only we can see that.One may still visit Walden Pond; your shack
is painfully reconstructed; a fence
keeps the wanderer on a predefined track,
within two hundred yards the suburbs start to condense."Let everyone make known what kind of government
would command their respect,
and that will be one step toward obtaining it."
Sir, with the greatest of my respect,I am your servant.
