{"id":594,"date":"2014-10-01T13:46:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-01T13:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olioweb.me.uk\/wordpress_marcus\/?p=594"},"modified":"2024-08-19T16:39:15","modified_gmt":"2024-08-19T16:39:15","slug":"poem-of-the-month-october-2014-similarities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/?p=594","title":{"rendered":"Poem of the Month, October 2014: Similarities"},"content":{"rendered":"

SIMILARITIES<\/strong><\/p>\n

(thoughts on a great poet)<\/em><\/p>\n

Written in the Thalys bar,<\/em>
\n Bruges-Paris, 5 August 14.<\/em><\/p>\n

Guido Gezelle, the Breughel
\nof Kortrijk and Brugge, where he preached,
\nthe Flemish Hopkins he much admired
\nand in many ways resembles,
\ncommanded my curiosity and respect
\nfrom the moment I noticed his statue
\noutside that station in Flanders
\nwhen my journey from Paris was done.
\nActually, I was hoping for some fun
\nwith a girl I had met in London
\nbefore my divorce case had begun.<\/p>\n

It was clear from that statue by the station
\n(the one in Bruges is the spitting image)
\nthat this man was not to be confused
\nwith Cavalcanti and the Girls<\/em>,
\na book I peeked at as a boy in Sarratt,
\ntoo young to understand or to enjoy,
\nand that he had a heavier cross to bear
\nthan other poets of his generation.
\nHis broad brow was furrowed with care
\nand the book in his hand was the missal,
\nwhich he grasped with a delicate air.<\/p>\n

(I’m returning to Paris to see my grandchild
\nwith the woman I met when she was twenty
\nwho lived a bus ride from Kortrijk station).<\/p>\n

Gezelle, Gezelle, Gezelle, Gezelle!<\/em> The train
\ngallops through fields past distant villages
\nno-one has ever heard of or painted in song.
\nI suppose they have their kermesses too.
\nNot much that English pictorial art can muster
\ncompares with Breughel’s scenes of country life,
\na feeling for nature accurately echoed in poems
\ndescribing the vanishing farming world
\nof tumbledown homesteads and creaking stables.
\nBarnes, in his Dorset dialect, comes close to this
\nbut is overshadowed by Hardy.<\/p>\n

World poets! Who are they? And how do they get
\nthe P.R. men, the advertising behind them?
\nDo they teach us anything we do not know?
\nHave they got something better than God to show?
\nDo they guide us to where we dare not go?<\/p>\n

As life historians are Dickens and Tolstoy ‘greater’
\nthan our almost defrocked priest who wrote
\na love poem, The Rose<\/em>, to a student in his class,
\nthat easily stands up to Burns? Who reads Chaucer
\nin the original? In less than one hundred years
\nGezelle suffered Chaucer’s fate. ‘Dutch’ you say,
\n‘has produced nothing that can be called great.
\nIt sounds like barking dogs. It’s a big mistake.’<\/p>\n

The train rolls on relentlessly, the pylons stretch
\nacross the horizon, while I drink my tea.
\nThe villages I see from here, half way to Paris,
\nmust boast old houses with ‘crooked doors
\nknocked out of balance by history and war.’<\/p>\n

Who am I scribbling these messages for,
\nif not Miltiades the Greek of Sint-Andries,
\non the transient windowpane of travel?
\nOur utterly opposing views of verse
\nmake Milton memorable – or else the curse
\nof English language, left for ever worse.<\/p>\n

Wouldn’t I love to be translated after death
\nby an unpublished girl I know of twenty-one
\ninto an unintelligible West Flemish dialect
\nspoken by nineteenth century country bumpkins
\nin village caf\u00e9s with crucifixes over the bar –
\nParis, London and Brussels far away, forgotten
\nand disconnected by the Eurostar.<\/p>\n

Pushkin in Russian is heavenly, I am told.
\nGezelle’s Flemish is worth its weight in gold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SIMILARITIES (thoughts on a great poet) Written in the Thalys bar, Bruges-Paris, 5 August 14. Guido Gezelle, the Breughel of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all","category-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.olioweb.me.uk\/marcus\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}