Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Sejanus (1603), The Alchemist (1610), Catiline his Conspiracy (1611), Bartholomew Fair (1614)

Ben Jonson, portrait by Abraham van Blyenberch

[Image taken from the splendid website of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/essays/jonsons_images_essay/1/ . This is the painting in the National Portrait Gallery. Though unsigned, there's little doubt of the artist or the sitter; it was immediately much copied. It apparently belonged to George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, and it probably shows Jonson in about 1618.] 

Sejanus (1603) 

I have always favoured Ben Jonson’s writing - he is of course abundantly entertaining, but there is something else too, a sort of rugged justice in the grain of his writing, so it's a something I can also find in a poem, even in a panegyric addressed to some obscure noble. ("Favoured" means that I think I approve of Ben Jonson, rather aside from any particular thing that happens when I read him.) 

In spite of this I had never happened to read some of his masterpieces. Sejanus deserves to be called one of these, and is an astonishing play.

It begins in a way that is familiar from Shakespeare, with a discussion of “the times” by two minor characters. We hardly anticipate, however, that both these minor characters will meet their violent deaths during the course of the play; there is a sort of impersonal savagery about what we are to witness, which reaches its climax, perhaps, in the accounts of Sejanus’ and his family’s deaths (the daughter raped before execution).

In the first scene, too, the words have a restrained intensity that produces many powerful lines:

Like snails on painted walls

                                         sell to gaping suitors

The empty smoke, that flies about the palace

                               Alas! these things

Deserve no note, conferred with other vile

And filthier flatteries, that corrupt the times ...

Compared with the tedious bombast of contemporary satires, I appreciate Jonson’s reliance on syntax to suggest that he is never overstating his case, at the same time giving it full force.

The more significant difference from Shakespeare is that Jonson’s play never becomes a play of character. We aren't interested in Silius or Sabinus as personalities, only as mere humans inhabiting a world where power forces humans into desperate shapes.

The dialogue between Lepidus and Arruntius in Act IV Scene 6 is another instance of this characteristic strength; but the soliloquy of Arruntius that precedes it is weak. It is when people are quietly discussing, not emoting, that the play comes impressively to life.

When, in Shakespeare, the major character arrives on stage, we feel an intensification of drama. Not here. Sejanus is in fact uninteresting, except as a political fact (Jonson is driven to some weak expedients, such as vacuous vying with the gods, in order to give Sejanus anything sufficiently time-consuming to say). Macro is interesting for what others quite rightly fear about him. But the feeble comedy of Act V Scene 3 is wholly unfitting; Jonson is driven to it because Macro in private life is a cipher. When Macro and Sejanus are in camera (of course, covertly spied on) in Act V Scene 6, there is no revelation of character; Sejanus swallows Macro’s bait, and that’s that. 

Tiberius, it’s true, has a certain fascination - but on analysis this fascination refers to the play of his supreme power - and his eccentric but deadly way of exercising it. Accounts by others of his gross voluptuousness are persuasive, but Jonson makes no attempt to present this or any other personal trait to us in Tiberius’s own words. Those words are purely manipulative; they're weapons, self-revelation is the last thing they're intended for.

All of which might lead you to conclude that Sejanus is neither dramatic nor humane - in fact it is both. Act III Scene 1 - the accusation of Silius - is perhaps the greatest scene; Afer is repellently brilliant. The terror that ensues is a moving spectacle; so is the dreadful end of Sejanus, which seems in fact not a revenge for the terror but merely a continuation of it; this evil is not contained in an individual but in a social climate.

With the overall humanity goes a certain cool judgment - this no doubt is one effect of Jonson’s experiment in sticking accurately to history. Despite the somewhat over-insistent commentary of Arruntius and his anti-Sejanus colleagues, we are in fact fair-minded: we don’t altogether believe in Cordus’ innocence of intention, for example. We also reserve some of the warmth we might usually accord to unfortunate young nobles when their names happen to be Caligula and Nero. Given a free rein, they will be no different from their persecutors. 

The Shakespeare play that is most similar to Sejanus (and very likely influenced by it) is Coriolanus. But masterpiece as that is, I cannot feel that it vanquishes Sejanus in every particular. It dramatises, with marvellous insight, the interplay of political situations with an individual’s temperament. Jonson could not do anything requiring such sensibility. But Shakespeare’s Rome and its people are a sort of timeless Anyplace. The Rome of Sejanus has a specific condition - and it could conceivably be altered. In that respect Sejanus is the more truly political work.  

(2001)

The Alchemist (1610)

Coleridge singled out the plot of The Alchemist as some kind of perfection. But if we are thinking of the plot of a Shakespeare play, then The Alchemist  has no plot at all; i.e. there seems to be no character-expressed-through-action and accordingly none of that particular kind of dramatic momentum. Lovewit’s arrival is in no respect a consequence of the first four acts, for example. Jonson really has too much else on his mind – and so does everyone else – to develop a story out of the threats (internal and external) to Face and Subtle’s establishment.

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Face and Subtle are rogues of a common sort, and certainly not the worst of rogues, but they are shown in a very harsh light: in the scenes when they’re not performing a role for someone else they are concentrating solely on their business and their gains, as busy as market traders who, if they ever do get a breathing space, will use it first to tot up their winnings.

When Surly’s apparent ignorance of English presents them with an opportunity (like a psychoanalyst’s test) to verbalize without any immediate end in view, what they say turns out to be very coarse fare.

(Face)                                             Don,

Your scurvy, yellow, Madrid face is welcome.   (4.3.30-31)

But even in this scene they are hard at work trying to decide just how to make maximum capital from the Don, so they throw these witticisms out to each other with only half a mind on them.

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Huge visions of the world’s learning pass through this nasty little shop: Classical, Christian, Arabic, Indian, Faerie, French and Spanish. All are thoroughly illusory, but the director has to make them do something to us, even while we can feel how irrelevant they really are to what we’re seeing. If the learning starts to sound like just rhubarb, the play stops working.

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Lovewit’s age is important in re-establishing a sense of order and kindness in the final scenes of the play. Face claims (to Subtle) that he actually sent for Lovewit (5.4.129), but that’s untrue (see 5.4.89-90, as well as Face’s manifest confusion when Dol announces Lovewit’s arrival). Subtle and Dol probably don’t believe Face’s claim either, but their position is now untenable; if they remain to bring down Face, they must give up their chance of escape. (It’s important to Face that Lovewit does not meet the other older personage in the play, Subtle – if he did, he might have a rather less rosy idea of his amusing servant.)

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The action of The Alchemist takes place on 1st November 1610, presumably more or less exactly when it was first performed. This can be worked out from Ananias’ time references and from Dame Pliant’s age (for details, see Ian Donaldson’s interesting essay "Clockwork Comedy: Time and The Alchemist").  

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One of the things that Face and Subtle are talking about in front of the Spanish gentleman is Dame Pliant. From the moment that Drugger mentions the “rich young widow” (2.6.30) – and adds promisingly, “but nineteen at the most”, Face and Subtle evince the usual behaviour of men at work; they think about sex every six minutes.

At the end of this scene they agree to draw lots to decide which of them will have the widow. Dol must be kept out of it, they both agree.

They repeat the terms of the agreement in 4.2.3ff, just before Dame Pliant first appears. Face is very taken with her, and tries to get Subtle to give up his claim (for a consideration). Subtle rejects his suggestion and threatens to tell Dol if Face goes it alone. It would be a clear breach of their “venter tripartite” (1.1.135), which requires them to share all things in common, apparently including Dol herself.

But, confronted with the disguised Surly, Face has a new idea (4.3.63ff.); why not give Dame Pliant to the Spanish gentleman? As he pragmatically observes, she’s not a virgin anyway and it’s only one man the more, whichever of them draws her in the end. Subtle, apparently somewhat repulsed by the thought of damaged goods, re-opens the question of giving her up to Face for a consideration, but Face rejects the proposal and bullyingly threatens to tell Dol himself. Subtle seems to be scared of this, but a moment later Face changes his mind and agrees to take the widow anyway, and they shake on it. Face’s bullying still rankles, though, and at the end of the scene Subtle takes pleasure in creating the opportunity to “make the widow a punk, so much the sooner, / To be reveng’d on this impetuous Face” (4.3.102-03).

Later, when it turns out that Dame Pliant has not been debauched by Surly after all, Subtle tries to renege on this (4.7.102ff) and to put himself in the frame again. Again (though the situation is now precisely opposite), Face threatens Subtle with Dol and seems to get his own way. But in the event it’s Subtle who tells all to Dol, in order to turn her against Face (see 5.4.70). By that time, however, Face is already employing Subtle to assist unwittingly in the marriage of Lovewit to Dame Pliant, and he will very shortly be bringing the curtain down on the triple alliance.

It’s unclear to me why Face feels he can threaten Subtle with Dol on two separate occasions when in both cases he is at least as likely, or more likely, to earn Dol’s enmity. Presumably the general idea is that Subtle is afraid of making trouble with Dol while Face establishes his dominance by seeming not to care. But exactly how seriously the two are discussing all this is open to question; they may be merely passing the time with agreeably squalid chatter.

[Pinter includes a similar discussion towards the end of The Homecoming, with the dim young Joey playing Subtle to Lenny's Face.]

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One of Jonson’s editors, in the early nineteenth century, was William Gifford, the violently partial editor of the Anti-Jacobin and the Quarterly Review, notorious to admirers of Wordsworth or Keats. Championing Jonson, against the insinuations of the bardolators who considered Jonson an enemy of their hero and an author to be depreciated at every opportunity, momentarily takes on a political dimension: it meant standing up for conservative common sense in the face of liberal enthusiasm. Gifford is naturally a diligent seeker-out of prejudice in others and is an entertaining editor. His best insight is that Surly’s “this ferret” (2.3.80) alludes to Face’s red eyes (this is Face in his guise as Lungs, who has bleared eyes from all the smoke).

(2006)

Catiline his Conspiracy (1611)

If Gifford is correctly informed, then Catiline, though not well-thought of when first staged in 1611, was played frequently in the years following, and was successfully revived after the Restoration.

But Catiline now is a play that’s dead in the water. It is modestly rewarding when read, and especially when all hope of dramatic interest has been surrendered, but it compares badly with Sejanus (which has much more interesting power shifts) and its stagecraft is to our eyes unspeakably crude by comparison with Shakespeare’s Roman plays. I suppose, though this is probably fantasy, that Jonson’s apparent inability to learn from Shakespeare’s triumphs must be deliberate and pointed. What’s certain is that Jonson had utterly different ends in view.

Jonson found in his books that Catiline conspired evilly, but he never thought it necessary to think of Catiline’s motives: an insane lust for power, or for evil itself, was sufficient. And all the conspirators are differentiated only by their strength of commitment. Cethegus, disagreeably reminiscent of Corporal Jones, is probably meant to be terrifying when he says:

Slaughter bestrid the streets, and stretched himself

To seem more huge; whilst to his stained thighs

The gore he drew flowed up, and carried down

Whole heaps of limbs and bodies through his arch.  (1.1)

But it’s soon apparent that Cethegus is such a one-dimensional character (and so utterly null in effect) that he is at best comic; but in as much as he is funny, the impact of the conspiracy is weakened. His bluster eventually ends with:

(Cicero) –Take him to the due

Death that he hath deserved, and let it be

Said, he was once.

Cethegus. A beast, or what is worse,

A slave, Cethegus. Let that be the name

For all that’s base hereafter; that would let

This worm pronounce on him, and not have trampled

His body into – Ha! art thou not moved?

Cicero. Justice is never angry. (5.6)

We are made to feel that the conspirators are not only evil but ridiculous, that they presented no threat. This isn't so much history written by the victors as history written by the press office of a police state, i.e. indifferent to whether anyone believes it. Cicero’s spy network is held up for particular praise, and his triumph is recognition on the civil list.

For the most part Catiline consists of impressive rhetoric, which such poor attempts at other entertainment as are supplied by Fulvia and Cethegus tend to get in the way of. Cicero’s rhetoric is reportage from his own works and is unshakably principled. Catiline’s (in default of motive or the documentation of victory) is blustering invocation of sheer evil. Catiline is admitted as dying heroically, but Jonson hasn’t supplied us with anything in his character to base this heroism on, so the praise of his opponents looks merely polite. Catiline is indeed ambitious, as Macbeth is, but his ambition has no other emotions to contend with, and we haven’t even a very concrete idea of what he is ambitious for (as e.g. Sir Epicure).

What Jonson’s intentions really were, I’m still not sure. James’ government must have highly approved the sentiments of the piece. Jonson seems to have become thoroughly interested in producing an exhaustive and accurate account from his sources – this accuracy, of course, being a matter of representing details rather than of the critical interpretation those sources so patently require. But it seems bizarre to suppose that so great an author, at the very apogee of his career, aimed at nothing more than propaganda or edification.

(2006)

Bartholomew Fair (1614)

This is another play I have spent 25 years not reading. Comparing my long-held idea of the play with what I have now read, there is no great disparity. It is a comfortable play, popular in the eighteenth century and probably in the nineteenth too, at least among readers. But although in many useful senses a “sheer entertainment” (it is also a play about an entertainment), one can’t help reflecting on its date – it comes just after the last of Shakespeare’s plays, and is possibly Jonson’s last great play. The influence of Act IV of the Winter’s Tale is discernible. Bartholomew Fair is so good-natured that even its Puritans, not to speak of its pimps and cutpurses, are not villains. Zeal-of-the-Land Busy is granted a gluttonous energy that Jonson must have enjoyed. From the author of Volpone this is a little disquieting. One senses a grateful slackening of the moral reins; a subsidence into the easy conclusion that human life in general is a joyous, bustling, well-meaning thing. This is of course consonant with Jonson’s values elsewhere, but it presents those values in their least confrontational form. 

The Induction to the play bears reading only once; it shows Jonson’s intention of embodying the vastness of the Fair’s riches, by first amazing us with a list of everything he has missed out.

The First Act supplies us with a long, finely choreographed, sequence that introduces the major characters. The conversation of Jonson’s gallants, Quarlous and Winwife, deserves praise. This is reminiscent of Epicoene and anticipates the interest of Restoration drama - Jonson avoids the tiresomeness of “straight” characters - their wit and cynicism keep them lively.

 

Nothing is monstrous. Waspe’s furious tetchiness leads no-one to doubt his essential normality (humanity? fitness for business? reasonableness?) - and Waspe can be other than mere bad-temper. When he slips out of the stocks and departs “For this once, sir”, we recognize a normal sense of humour. Busy, as suggested above, is sufficiently humanized by being discovered “fast by the teeth in the cold turkey-pie in the cupboard, with a great white loaf on his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right”. 

Adam Overdo, who begins Act 2, is a more literary creation. His unworldly mildness, oddly linked to a love of Horace with which Jonson must have identified, is nevertheless a significant clue to the galaxy in which the author’s imagination now moves.

From this point the pace of the play more or less matches the real time of its events - two hours, say, to cover a visit to the fair which might in reality be supposed to take four or five. This has the effect of identifying the play with the fair, and our entertainment with the characters’ entertainment. (Indeed, Mrs Littlewit’s retirement in search of a toilet - in fact, a empty bottle - lasts for some seventeen pages, which might be thought rather lengthy.) The slow-paced dramatic time allows for some interesting effects. For example, people can be shown waiting for time to pass, as when Winwife and Quarlous arrive early, or Edgeworth and Quarlous sit through a nonsensical drunken quarrel for the chance to rob Waspe of the license. Quarlous and the Littlewits, at different times, can show themselves uneasy about time passing. A similar impatience gathers in the preparations for the puppet show, which in turn proceeds with none of the abbreviation that we sense in The Mousetrap or Pyramus and Thisbe. In short, Jonson interests himself in the process of time moving at sixty minutes an hour.  (The puppet show proves quite capable of accommodating a real dispute with Busy. Its chief business is to tell the tale of Hero and Leander in the unlikely mode represented by exchanges such as:

You whoremaster knave. [They fight].

Thou art a whoremaster.

Whoremasters all. etc

A fair is licensed time for dawdling - and both licenses and dawdling are significant themes of the play. The Watch are embodiments of both, in marked contrast to police in other situations. They have little knowledge of clocktime, and though they are loving subjects, they take exception to being called obedient. They enforce placing people in the stocks, but are uncertain if their authority really extends to this. The word “discretion” inevitably arises. Perhaps the malefactors should remain in the stocks for an hour or so. In truth the Watch’s main object is to enjoy the fair themselves and allow it to proceed, as far as possible, without the disturbance of real action (each action that they do being itself an action within the fair, an entertainment rather than a stubborn deed). The “enormities” detected - in many cases all too “justly” - by Adam Overdo are, we are persuaded, insignificant. The apparatus of law and order is comically present but operates in a displaced manner, finding nothing unpardonable to operate upon.

It would be heavy-handed to describe Cokes as incapable of distinguishing the world of the Fair from reality, when all give themselves up to a certain (licensed) lack of distinction. It is axiomatic that goods sold at a fair are all trash (“stale bread, rotten eggs, musty ginger and dead honey”). But as Cokes says sadly of Waspe, “He does not understand”. Cokes’ credulity at any rate allows him to enter into the puppet show with envious fullness (“Well, we have seen it, and thou hast felt it, whatsoever thou sayest.”)

For us, the concept of a Fair is incomplete without children. It is pleasing that the Boys of the Fair at least make one brief appearance, mischievously trailing Cokes around. It’s clear from Waspe’s remarks that some of Coke’s purchases (his “toys”) are primarily suited to children. Perhaps Jonson intended that some of the unspecified crowds of people crossing the stage should also be children. 

(2002)

specimens of the literature of Sweden: bottle of shampoo

This is an everyday shampoo. "Swedish hair-care tradition from Dalarna", says the bottle. The county of Dalarna, romantically rural but not too remote from Stockholm, has desirable connotations and is often thought of as the home of folksong; a sort of hyperreal heart of the Swedish nation, as exemplified by the painted wooden horses (dalahästar) that you find in airport souvenir shops, or the idyllic domestic paintings by Carl Larsson that you find on calendars. Here these idyllic connotations are helped along by the fanciful floral design on that very traditional Swedish shade of grey-blue. In Sweden there is, or is imagined to be, a continuity between nineteenth century folk art and tasteful modernist design: in the UK the discontiuity is felt to be stark. This sense of integration with the folk-past has very profound implications for Swedish life and for its economy. It is one of the main stories that Sweden sells to the world. It sells it to its own people too.


The claim is literally accurate. This shampoo is made by CCS in Borlänge, a town in SE Dalarna, also the home of our good friends Bo and Gunilla. Borlänge does not have much to do with the hyperreal Dalarna of legend. It is a down-to-earth working town that expanded towards the end of the nineteenth century because it was on the new railway line and a natural goods depot for important industrial concerns in the neighbourhood. With over 40,000 inhabitants Borlänge actually makes it onto the list of the 30 biggest cities in Sweden; in other words, it is merely ordinarily beautiful.

"Wackra" is a re-spelling of "Vackra", which means "beautiful". The Swedes, like the Brits, are very intrigued by exotic letters in their alphabet. Just as in English-speaking parts of the world letters like X and Z have a particular frisson which makes them attractive to youth culture and branding, in Sweden a certain magic attaches to the letters C and W. These days Swedish girl's names are very commonly spelled with a C; thus our cousin Monica and her daughter Annica. (As expatriates we are more nostalgically conservative, so my own sister is Annika). The letter C is considered smart, modern, and glitzy. W is a rather different matter, because it once appeared frequently in old-style Swedish names  (e.g. Wizelius) and also in spellings before the language was standardized; hence its appropriateness to the folky connotations of this product.

Of course for a product like mainstream shampoo you want to balance folky localism with the reassuring cleanliness of international modernity. So on this bottle we find a couple of decorative English words too: "Shampoo" (in contrast to the standard Swedish spelling of "schampo"), and the unexpected preposition "by" ("BY CCS") - this tagline is something of a brand staple and is used on other CCS ranges.  ("Shampoo" ultimately derives from a Hindi word meaning "press":  it originally referred to massage, but around 1860 became transferred to applying soap to the hair.)

On the rear of the bottle you can see the "swan symbol". This is an ecolabel, but it does not mean that the product is what we wholefood-shoppers would think of as "kosher", i.e. green or organic.  (A "green" shampoo would not contain sodium laureth sulfate.) What it does mean, approximately, is that the product is "best of breed" in terms of environmental stewardship, e.g. responsibly minimizing energy and waste in the product life cycle. Manufacturers wishing to display the swan symbol are inspected each year by a state-owned team of eco-inspectors and assessed against standards that are constantly being tightened up. The team maintain numerous standards relevant to different product ranges.

The swan symbol seems like a good idea inasmuch as it encourages continuous improvement in mainstream industry. The downside is, if you want to know what particular criteria were met by this particular bottle of shampoo, then you'll be looking a long time.

The concept was proposed by the Nordic Council of Ministers in 1989, but its ideas are not binding on member governments and at first Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden were the only signatories. That, apparently, is why the swan has only four wing-feathers. Denmark joined up in 1992. You can read more about it here:

http://www.svanen.se/Om-Svanen/Om-oss/Fragor--Svar/20-fragor-om-Svanen/

The Nordic Council was founded after WW2. Some of its intended functions were in effect obviated by EU/EEA membership, especially when Sweden and Finland joined the EU after the end of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless it remains an important forum. There is speculation that Scotland will join the Nordic Council if it declares independence from the UK.




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CCS point out that Wackra contains no parabens, silicones or mineral oils.

Ingredienser / Ingredients: (with my Google-researched annotations)

(Cosmetic ingredient lists are written in a standardized international language, mostly chemist's or botanist's Latin. Words from living languages are avoided where possible. English is nevertheless influential - e.g. "Sodium" where other languages (such as Swedish) would have "Natrium". )

Aqua (water)
Sodium Laureth Sulfate (aka SLES, detergent used to soften and lather; it is considered less irritant than the related Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS); but is frequently flagged as a health concern, now usually because of potential contamination by the carcinogen 1,4 dioxane, which is a by-product of the ethoxylation process used to produce SLES (but not SLS). The ingredients of SLES, chiefly lauryl aclohol, may come from coconut oil or may come from petroleum; but it doesn't make any difference to the end product, which is emphatically a synthetic.)
Sodium Chloride (salt, used to thicken shampoo)
Capryl/Capramidopropyl Betaine (hair conditioning agent - anti-static and surfactant)
Glycerin (aka glycerol, used for smoothness and lubrication)
Coco-Glucoside (surfactant, foaming agent, conditioner, emulsifier; used to reduce the irritant qualities of SLES)
Glyceryl Oleate (water-in-oil emulsifier)
Sodium Benzoate (natural preservative to increase shelf life)
Behenamidopropyl Dimethylamine (surfactant)
Lactic Acid (relaxes and smooths hair making it more manageable)
Parfum (perfume)

[The best discussion of SLS / SLES that I've seen is here:
http://cincovidas.com/is-sodium-lauryl-sulfate-from-coconut-safer-than-regular-sls/

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Above, an advert for the Wackra range. The text says:

We wanted to realize a dream. To make something like we were ourselves. Just Swedish raw materials and clean water. Developed to suit our Nordic skins. Our Swedish skincare tradition from Dalarna. It became Wackra by CCS. 

I'm not sure what to make of the claim about Swedish raw materials. Could this refer to using Capramidopropyl Betaine, which can be derived from goats' or cows' milk, rather than the more usual Cocamidopropyl Betaine, which is derived from coconut oil?

The image invokes matter-of-fact Carl Larsson-style nudity, as in his painting of the model writing postcards:

[Studying the CCS company website, I get the feeling that the Wackra range, introduced in 2010, may have already been phased out. Things change pretty fast in the haircare market.]

Anne Righter: Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962)

Anne Righter (née Bobbyann Roesen, later Anne Barton, 1933 - 2013) is mainly remembered for this book, her first.

When I bought it recently (from Oxfam, because it was the cheapest book in the shop), I imagined hopefully that it would talk about the conception of the play that was shared by Shakespeare, his fellow-actors, and their audiences. Of course that conception could only be discovered by inference. But Righter sticks to a narrower and more directly accessible topic, Shakespeare's use of the play-image within the plays themselves. And, after all, this rigorous concentration does lead to interesting results. The principal one of which, is that Shakespeare's play-references grow to a sort of apotheosis of positivity around 1600, with the chorus speeches of Henry V* and the troupe of players in Hamlet, before then turning negative in character (the poor player who struts and frets). The negativity being especially apparent in Troilus and Timon.
Righter concludes that after 1600 Shakespeare experienced a growing disillusion with the stage; so her book is in effect a late contribution to the Victorian notion of Shakespeare's "dark period". But she links this observation to the history of the Elizabethan drama as a whole. After a long period of development from medieval drama, involving both disintegration and reintegration, a certain high point of naturalistic drama was attained (above all in Shakespeare), then something curdled and then came the transformation into masque which is echoed in certain ways by the elimination of naturalistic illusion in Shakespeare's last plays.

*To be accurate about this, Righter suggests that the Chorus's self-deprecating references to the "Wooden O" etc might mark the beginning of Shakespeare's disillusion with the stage. But I see the speeches as really glorying in the incredible things the stage can do, albeit by recruiting the audience's imagination.


*

When Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play was published Anne Righter was only 29. The book had started out as her PhD thesis, and it shows. The promise of the opening pages (she begins in Elsinore) is misleading: the book isn't a triumph of style. She went from play to play jotting down self-referential quotes, and then bolted them together into a sort of continuous narrative by using connective sentences like this:

Even more interesting than the straightforward imitations of Seneca or Plautus are those experimental plays of the second half of the sixteenth century... [in which comedy and tragedy are mixed] (p.50)

Stevenson does not seem to have been the only dramatist of the mid sixteenth century who found this particular kind of play metaphor attractive... (p. 62)

And even within a single sentence, she has a tendency to make her point several times over. For example, someone in Terence stops a narrative in its tracks:

There's no need to breathe a syllable of it. I have no wish for it to be as in the comedies, where everybody gets to know everything.

Righter comments:

The remark cleverly obviates the necessity for a dull, repetitive explanation of something already known to the audience. (p. 61)

She's also strongly addicted to the "serves to"  mode of commentary. This is a cliché of literary criticism and scholarship that became ridiculously popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and is still seen today. I'm taking these examples from Anne Righter's Shakespeare and The Idea of The Play (1962), but any university library would yield tens of thousands of examples.

The comparison made between life and the theatre serves, in this instance, to define the depth and realism of the play world itself. (p. 60)

Like the valedictory remark of Subtle Shift, his comment serves to recognize the contrived, somewhat artificial nature of the action now terminated. (p. 68)

Used within the confines of a play, the metaphor served not only to dignify the theatre but also to bridge the space between the stage and the more permanent realm inhabited by the spectators. (p. 76)

Used within the 'reality' of the play itself, they also serve to remind the audience that elements of illusion are present in ordinary life, and that between the world and the stage there exists a complicated interplay of resemblance that is part of the perfection and nobility of the drama itself as a form. (p. 78)

Part of my objection to this kind of commentary is that it's too knowing; the scholar-critic takes it for granted that s/he knows why the author has done something. Perhaps this appearance of knowingness is not entirely intended. Maybe "serves to" does not necessarily imply insight into authorial intention. But that's how it strikes me.

And then I think that the insight is a bit awry. I mean, just how many times do you need to remind an audience of the connection between play and world? On the contrary, isn't it one of the amazing things about drama that it's so intuitive? That "make-believe" is something that a young child just "gets" without any help whatever?

*

If there be one pleasure, exclusive of the objects of actual sensual indulgence, which is more general than another among the human race, it is the relish for personification, which at last is methodized into the dramatic art. The love of the chase may perhaps be as natural to the masculine sex, but when the taste of the females is taken into consideration, the weight of numbers leans to the love of mimic representation in an overwhelming ratio. The very first amusement of children is to get up a scene, to represent to the best of their skill papa and mamma, the coachman and his horses; and even He, formidable with the birchen sceptre, is mimicked in the exercise-ground by the urchins of whom he is the terror in the schoolroom. We do not know if the witty gentleman, to whom we are indebted for a history of monkeys, ever thought of tracing the connexion betwixt us and our cousin the orang-outang in our mutual love of imitation.

(From Sir Walter Scott's review-essay on the Life of Kemble: Kelly's Reminiscences.)

*

Ultimately I think Righter's presentation of the history of 16th C drama in relation to the growth of the self-contained play presents too neat a picture, but even if it weren't too neat it's limiting. She can't account for the excellence of e.g. Mankind, Ane Satyre of the Thre Estatys, or The Play of the Wether, because in this context she presents them as helplessly transitional. She didn't have time to be interested in what the plays are about. Even though I'm hugely impressed by the number of plays she read for this book, I do sometimes wonder if the right word is not "read" but "scanned".

Viewing drama through this single topic of the play metaphor is like viewing different houses through their letterboxes. That intense but narrow focus, too, would tell us something, e.g. about the floor tiles. And I certainly learnt some interesting things. Here are two more of them:

1. Shakespeare's glorifications of the stage are almost unique in his time. Also the way he refers to the stage, both when glorifying and when disparaging, are very generalized (as of someone conscious of writing for all time). In contrast, many of his contemporaries make slily specific references to actual London theatres and actors, which Shakespeare doesn't.* Clearly this is connected with his avoidance of the city-comedy genre. Shakespeare does indeed write specifically of London life, above all in the low-life scenes of Henry IV, but in a way these are exceptions that prove the rule. Because in Henry IV and the other history plays London is distanced and abstracted by being portrayed in a historical context. One way or another Shakespeare had an instinct that the locus of his self-contained plays needed to be kept distinct from the actual locus of the performances: whether by setting them in exotic locations or in distant times or both.

In that respect modern-dress performances of Shakespeare are un-Shakespearian in spirit.

* Some of the theatrical chatter in Hamlet ( e.g.about the children's companies and the sample clown-phrases)  looks like it might be aimed at very specific London targets. Though even here there's a reluctance to make the topical allusion quite definite.

2. Considering that Righter 's book aims to tell, from its narrow-focus perspective, the story of the development of sixteenth-century drama, the almost total absence of Marlowe from its account is remarkable. Marlowe apparently wasn't very interested in using the play metaphor, which I think tells us something about him as an artist. In the end the play metaphor depends on a sort of consensus between author and audience that I think was alien to Marlowe's approach. His amoral soul-dramas don't care to acknowledge that consensus.

Anne Righter, c. 1965

(Image from the website of Trinity College Cambridge, http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=1406)

These notes on Shakespeare: full list

Leaving the cottage

(poem still in progress)

LEAVING THE COTTAGE

1

The grass lies on the land - 

     that set of keys.

Dumb as a bunch of keys, the grass is.

    It’s you who know!

Do you know what you know?
   Take this clutch of grass

and potter back and forth,

  letting out your prisoners.

2

This blue morning is also over Syria;

    this sky is too high for

that kind of division.

   A dove clears its bowels as it

takes off into the air.

   So many have engraved

their messages on the blue stone:

    everyone is writing on the cover, and

yet the pages are blank.

3

This, that the grass unlocks

    when you twist it,

is thronging, like a street when it

    darkens with people. A forest has grown up.

Now it’s so dense with over-writing that,

   as I tell my daughter,

it’s becoming more difficult to walk.

   So now, the walk must begin.

4

Clearing out of the cottage, they showed

    me my wooden tractor,

with its shiny wooden nose and stone-hard

                                           rubber tyres.

Of course I don’t remember anything,

    but oh my clattering comrade. Have we sat apart

for half a century, and endured the

    silence? Morfar bought you

for me, Snub-nose, that forgotten spring.

   It wobbles, the rear axle needs tightening.

5

Purity is so brittle, it is soon in

                              half a dozen splinters,

and then you cut yourself. Karin, you know this.

It is an eternal radiance

                         that is rimmed by filth,

a bridal crown hacked from a bleeding wood.

Oh, leave purity behind you! It isn’t too late

                       for your vows to be emptied

and for your honour to be thrown aside.

    Come! It is an eternal teardrop.

6

The day of sun developed; the wooden church

                                                  spires,

the faint sighs of cloud

                           in a clear blue sky,

the chorus of trees waiting to begin

                           the concert.

Where does the sea find its home?

Where does the beetle in the waste pit that I fill up now with
the sandy soil beneath the young trees, where does it find

                                       its home?

Where do the racing insects of a day

return, but to now and its noise,

like the squeaking of a railway carriage?

7

They’re taking down my tent, because rain is

                                     forecast,

but back in England it’s a heatwave,

       50 in Dubai, while in Cambodia

the rainy season begins with thunder

                                  and floods.

The skin of the planet prickles with

                                     weather,

and for now it’s a matter of the right taxis,

                                 the right hotels.

Time prickles with weather. The fir

                              tree in Sjögren’s

stands with head bowed, digesting

    its weather food. Time and its

                                      migrations

resemble the noticeboard in a faded

                                       town.

This last summer, in 2013,
   I'm in the tent,
because Annika's in the outhouse.
And Miranda comes two days before we go.

The first day, Pelle comes and inspects the tent.
It's an honour; he's so wild now.

Two years ago, he was still a kitten,
playing fiercely with the mats in the cottage,
    but now we hardly see him.

Still the same fierce beauty. A small cat,
grey as a ghost, except for a white ring on his tail.

He belongs to Anny. We're on the edge
of his large, vague and definite territory.

He hunts continually. He's a part of the land
  and will think nothing of our absence.

8

“What car is like a chair?” we asked each other

                                   mechanically,

    dropping with sleep on the M23. There was

                               a crater in the glade,

    the sunset shone into the tree-trunks.

This was by the cemetery.  Dad and I crossed

                                              the road

    to stand at the edge of that longer

                             clubmoss forest

             that never ceases

                    to be worked on.

        Already there’s a new view of it.

9

26^th July, we walked the terraces of

         Radstock in veils of silver rain

and came on to IKEA later, our clothes still damp,

    and nursed the hot white mugs with the

                                            maroon tags

of the “London Tea Company”. The soft

                        rain drew itself up

and fell hard in Clandown by the

                              scrapyard,

but beneath the cypresses, were dry

      coarse semi-circles.

The ants, who build dust under the buried stones,

                                   come forth blinking

into the IKEA restaurant, where is

                 the huge photo of Kungsholmen

and the islands beyond, the land where

                        they seem to knit together.

10

Every evening at sunset or close to

                                       sunset

the painted skies of August

                      display for our walk,

    after another day of computing,

but ever more restless, these

                       twilight butterflies

who mark the sun’s gaze as it begins

       to slide away from northern lands.

The summer, still there, begins to detach

     itself, the night horizon is clouded.

Rains nourish the swelling berries and the

                                  shining ceps.

So much I can remember of Augusts, and

                                                 even

        one chanterelle September.

It isn’t time that hurries by, but me.

[read at Swindon Nov 2014]

11

The grey of dawn,

    broader bands

segregate the lonely

    summer stuga

the empty home

    the bolt, again and again

the fabric sealing night;

    frames of a disintegrating

film, the tear-filled

    pitch of that roof.

      In that film, a hosepipe

directed against a wall to fake rain.

The blue stripe of bank holiday

blue, again and again, and that place

              washing off, like a suntan.

12

Maria’s gold toenails

    slate Bench hoodie

the ceaselessly trembling

    tassels of her arabic scarf

the black scalloped shadows

    of rippled white sand

Maria’s gigantic hand muscles

   from working the clenchers

   all the way round by the river

the sandals getting scuffed

        gold toenails

the miles and the sun

    brand-name forgotten

left behind in that shop

                      in Taunton

and a large tea

    and candy crush maria

walk on gold

13

This boy I’ve never met will turn the strange key.

    Nobody says goodbye. Johan,

Kjell’s boy, will keep it alive –

Now  that I’m turning my back,

    feeling with my foot for the rung,

my whole world turns: the

    birch and you and you and you. The whole

                                                              world.

So I went up. With the wasps’ nest.

We’re going to lock ourselves in.

I’m looking back out of the loft,

You’re down there, but you’re all up here.

The skis, your skis Mum,

    sawn-off child ones,

the sticks with

    leather hand loops

and stiff leather

    tilted rings,

along with the

birch-bark plaited

        basket,

and an army camp-bed,
army hat Dad brought home from Malaria.

Take them,

bring them down the

                  ladder,

take photographs of

us. Explain how to

turn the key once more.

Lay them out on the

lawn, your treasures,

to pack in the car

    and take south, where

a dealer seemed to be interested,
or put them on eBay. 

14

In steady rain, the sodden sedge, the pine splashing heavy cone-water

tangled reed and alder black. The skies emptying,

      the mossy stream, granite boulders, swollen – The light low, skyline shivering

bog-cotton bending, the brown mother and calf, step splay-footed

deep into forest marshes, the clouds pissing light from the day

and the angry wind, and the ants on their break in the misty needlestacks.

[read at Swindon Nov 2014]

15

Maybe I’ll join a botanical society

    and do good work with like-minded people.

Then I won’t write poems any more.

    I won’t bother with that difficult

                   unwelcome business where
       you make something and it just proves

                                   to everyone

that we’re not like-minded at all.

    Poetry is the constant reminder

that without it we could not even

                     imagine each other.

[read at Swindon Nov 2014]

16

What did the summer contain?

    It wasn’t only the pine-scent, wasn’t only

the meadowsides flowing like a bright flag.

    At the river you picked up a handful of

not only red river-gravel but all

    those one-syllable words: air, and love...

(What dumb signposts they are! We who are tired

    of kicking up and down the same old road –

well, we have left some dents on them.)

    But, what was it?

Where the grass rippled up a bank,

    where we danced a mazurka and the

                         sun became a golden berry –

what worm of no syllables

    lay wreathed and smiling in its gut?


[read at Swindon Feb 2015]

17

I’ll number every hour of summers past

and every cast I’ll praise that never took a fish –

The others were praised enough, as we sat round the table

and spat out the pike’s forked bones
                                        and took more potatoes.

I liked to gut and behead, to strip

      out the swim-bladder with a knife-point

and to grub off the shekels of her flanks

      in a mound, to salt and clean,

and to bury all that work in the ground.

But I never liked the convulsive leaps,

    the panicking of her tail,

the fury of the priest by the silent lake.


[read at Swindon Feb 2015]

18

Evening along Mar Azul, biking in October.

Look at these blocks spotted with a few

                       stray lights, one-off constellation.

Does anyone know any more who’s home?

    We can walk and message, stay in touch

                                                24 hours

or arrange that wedding while hiking in

                                            the Picos.

Eventually a great blackout comes. Eventually

    we move through the forests of this

                          great secret house,

felling them as quick as they can grow

    because if there is no engraving there is certainly

                                                                 no staying
in timberless Mesopotamia.

19

The arts of imaging – descriptive words,

    photos and musical scenes,

I would need them all, to begin to reveal

    this morning in October sand,

so how can I think you will take a

                                      single step

into the place I want to share with you

-- one single step, to the smell of warmth

and a summer insect? A place I can’t

                           even go myself?

Go to the cities and the halls, search

               a hundred thousand results –

you’ve excelled, to even meet this poem, to

    be so distracted as to wander this far

away from your own life. It’s all going up.

    Doesn’t your own life need your attention?
                          You’ll do better to raise your head.

20

What’s the use of translating,

    to say e.g. a “Scotch Argus” fluttered

beside e.g. a “Scots Pine”? Not very Jämtländsk, that!

I’m trying to keep a foreignness around my memories.

    I’m trying to be sure you’ll never penetrate.

Only that one rock, only that certain shape

    and the cast of its drift in the sea of moss.

Only the voice of my grandmother, twenty years      

                                                  ago.

Only that rock with the line of ants and the

                                          wild strawberries ---

and a scraping on one flat face, feel it?

A shallow mysterious track

    zigzagging and then ending in a loop.

                                                             MP

21

You can’t understand. There’s a

                 peaceable remark in the

                                    boreal forest,

and the remark is space all around –

           -- all round me – kind of big country.

Climbing an elk-shooting platform,

          well, that’s another thing.

The hunters splashed the “fell-storm

      -hat” with their pissing, it nodded.

The forest is a slot machine,

      maximum payout £70.

The big green leaves splashed by

                         the astonishing waterfall,

and it was truly raining then, up towards the fells

a few years ago. We got waffles

                        later in the shop,

and I was so happy being with Mum and Dad

    that I forgot the remark, until now.

“Exploring Nature’s playground” says the

                       Peter Storm t-shirt.

Yes Peter you had that about right. There

          are several isotopes,

a thousand maybe – most are so

    long, we only know them by their

                     preambles.

The mottle clouds of today are desperate!

22

I went once in the snow. From the moment

                                you breathed it you breathed

the prolonged continuity of that subzero.

It was the beginning of April, the birch-forests

    all black sweeps, the zigzag frozen

river.  And the pylons looked like wheelchairs

                                      outside a hospital.

23

    Something like the forest sea

The beautiful simplicity of their

                                      heads,

whose rounded, knobbly thoughts

    are entirely of them, of the life

that excludes me. The shape of a head

    is a history, as plastic as an infant's

to the simple, subcutaneous, unanalysable

patterns of the nation, the thing that

    shapes us into stereotype. The child

      sleeping on the train, gawky-limbed,

already has the national expression,

    though Mum is Chinese. Is it the

Swedish words that shape the face?

    Perhaps – not how you pronounce them

but what you have to say, who you

             have to be,

the way anyone can live here, and

            the skiing, they,

wild strawberries and

    the factories by the lake, totalities,

                                       toilet paper...

[Read at Swindon, Jan 16, 2017]

24

[   W O O D

M A G I C  ]

The whole wailing body of the nyckelharpa
is spruce that is still being sawn at.
Sun glitters on the river of Joel Böhlén
in the music, but the shade of the woods
drips in the chilly summer evening,
but the music spools without comment
in the sawing hands of the old men,
but the mushrooms bloom on the needle earth.

25

Shell    Gazprom    Murmansk   Putin   Sarin

26

Attachment loyalty sentiment frozen

nostalgia return no return emptiness

guilt and postured guilt, regret and

                                    insincerity.

Emptiness of a teeming forest, deeper

                                             in –

if I was writing this in the forest!

Fake, flounder, blankness, indifference,

dead grass, bond and bonding

    with the last empty never-satisfied

wave of the evening close in

    a wood where you’ve never been,

though you’re still there, terrified of

it, night closes, a chocolatey

      night from the wrong climate

and you fidget on the happy fringe of

      a real life, histrionic performance

hide everything from the moss,

    the fringeing pines and dark

strawy waving of defiance flags.

27

Daylight sees in all the gaps.

    The walls and the door are all

                 thin deal, a box of light;

I could pilot it up into the midnight

                                      pallor

       I feel I could hover

high over the woods, high over the houses,

    the whole hydroelectric valley

28

Moving out again. Last bags in

                                 the falling rain,

photos at the foot of the stairs,

     then posting the key.

Hyacinth. Shrug past the shadow

     of the forgotten cypress

to the van, with a high heart.

Semichorus of hyenas!

We run we walk we run

We’re out of here.

29

It’s here you

      wash bleach and

                        splash

with tap and soap and mop;

you scrub, rub and dab

    swab and drub

       the boards into

                     brightness

ship shelves into shape

where river weir and water

          gush and dash.

30

When I broke the mirror,

                    its gold frame

lay in the winter trees

          showing its legs.

But you know, you know –

    ain’t that how it is?

I sat with Granny,

    overhearing the life outside.

The wind was already blowing,

    most of the seats were taken.

A kind of pearlescent roar

             clouded the horizon.

I saw in the fair distance
   some battle of the heavens
cumulus congestus
   Those men, Granny said,
and we went to church.

31

    “Why didn’t you say?”

I looked over the quarter,

    and I saw them lying down.

My grandmother lay down with the

     cello in her arms.

She was among the first –

    a dog moaned softly and lay down in its

                                   basket,

a child stopped in her tracks.

The crowd began to sag in the middle

    and everyone who stopped

            pausing to snuff the sweet air

    they all plunged, all of the now,

and were strewn like bottles across the

                                       square,

    restless in the wind. Just empty bottles.

                I sat on a bench and brooded.

                                   Inside me

the pines stirred,

    a light moved across my pillow –

cool on my forehead, my mother’s hand.

I opened my eyes

    and I asked again:

              “Why did you hide?

Why couldn’t you say?

Was it wrong?”

32

The gang of children shriek down the

     hot slope, oblivious to tree-roots,

socializing, learning to be socialized,

    to stand up, know, and share.

Nature is only a background for the other’s

                   sticky hand, the punch-up,

the whisper.

                   But suppose a child never

    did learn to be socialized.

Suppose that nature became the foreground.

33

Nothing to see,

    why should I ever learn?

Nothing to say,

    why should I ever listen?

Nothing to show,

    to impose yourself

on where my life grows

    so why would I go

out on the roads, to

    no music, no downloads?

The leaves lie on the land.
They say: I AWAIT YOUR URGENT REPLY.

Which of us would buy
     the bloody double album

34

Suddenly one person

    sprints on ahead

with a puff of outrage –

    flares for a moment

and is resubmerged

    in the throng.

After long search

    for the seven wonders

I came to a rainsoaked valley

    of Karrimor shoes –

a jumble of discounted

    plum/slate 8.5

                     9

Maybe you need another

                        size?

No, I don’t need any size!

A lift less ordinary --

           no, not that either.

I will drown in the

    rainsoaked trench

I’ll rub my face

    on the cement alley

I’ll be the Everly Brothers

    under wet leaves

where the fungus lightning

flashes in the black

    roots of Niflheim

where the bootlace

                  fungus

holds all breath

         and song

in its poisoned

         clutch

35

I’ve never been to Sweden.

We galumphed in

     wellingtons across the

   bog, wellingtons wobbling

        on the foot,

           spacious Tretorn

           wellingtons, kaviar on

               limpa, kaffe under the

                                    birches.

36

All I can say in

   writing is a filtered version

of what I truly feel.

And this, I don’t even know it,

   but I have to find it out.

-- and always, the writing

    tries to say more

but it is clogged

         though for all I know

it’s less clogged than me

     but I don’t think so.

A foulness of breath

    comes from me

The eye can’t lie

and even the mind can’t lie.

It’s the mouth that lies.

Honesty, the life of

       congruence,

starts with words.

37

    You.

You now, with cherry

       tomatoes lettuce cucumber.

Every forkful entirely you,

every scrape of the plate.

    Who are you? Yes,

        that’s still a mystery.

There’ll never be another

                such as you.

You are a unique

     creation of your own soul.

One flower continually fading,

Projection of a rippling bud,
     a rose in the parchment,
     tinfoil roller behind electric bulbs,
One warm opponent.

How does it all flow back into the vanity case,
those silks?

Your feral look, your home village?
What heavy metal
     in your bones is never renewed?

[Read at Swindon, Jan 16th 2017]

38

I'm writing this in the Guildhall Library
and here in the midst of it, instantly
springs up a face of black degraded with age and vegetation.
And I go inside the black cliff of my subject,
my hidden life.
But not with ease, and not by habit.
It is as unfamiliar as a new dream.

Those times we meet up and it all goes wrong
and we are repelled, and are enemies stuck together
against each other for the length of a whole day out,
the weary length of beating against each other,
impossible to understand or be understood,
then in that despairing blankness I glimpse
the terrible strange extent of your soul
and I see too
via your despairing perceptions
the crazy strange offence
of my own soul,
familiar yet unfamiliar too.

And I see it's a coal-black prison
whose cells are cluttered with projects
that explain away its own fears and longings.
These obstacles, these wretched artworks,
incomplete as they are,
have settled themselves into the walls and floors,
and when I wished to tidy up
the warders dissuaded me. They said Brother,
the prisoner does this.
A broom is no good.
It's a stump-grinder you're wanting.
It's a colonoscopy plus.


38

Titta Grå is the Iago
   in a folk-tale from Närke.

She's so wicked that
   even the Devil is appalled.

But why didn't the pair,
   the loving couple of 36 years,

why didn't they compare notes?
Why didn't they question

  her poisonous words
before they destroyed each other?

What the tale doesn't say
   about Titta Grå

is: she lives within us.


39

But what I am quite good at, first thing,
is talking to servants.

At the cottage my parents were my servants.
I could groan to them about waking up
and gratify them with sundry responses,
nods or shakes of the head,
to questions of crispbread, tea etc.
Leave the filmjölk out, I'm using it.

Or later I'd find
something to tell them
out of my book
or the back of the Havre Fras.

I have agonized so long
about how I'm missing the cottage.


40

A blue flashbulb ahead and
the thunder explodes in the sky.

   All round the hissing of rain
sweeps over the tree-tops and deluge

   steadily splashes the roundabouts of west Swindon.
fork lightning splitting the sky;

in a conservatory,
   chick in an eggshell,

cracking zigzag. Smell the electricity,
    this is almost real! And because it is almost real,
I'm Havisham thinking of the Fjällstation in '98;
   thinking of the scribbled windows of '93...
and my surroundings die again:

   the rain dribbling on,

feebler claps, an old pony
  and the new fresh earth.


41

A Thai meal
  at the pavilion.
Walking home on the
"new road", so on the
cut we can look for
dream-stones.
No dreams any more
But there are no last
years any more.
Look at the vast
slopes across the river.
We didn't go there often,
& the last time we did,
it was to see what
Kjell had told us,
the view of our cottage
mysteriously alone
the rest of
the village converted
back into forest.
Thus things simplify,
as when the exhausted Walter Scott
stopped composing The
Siege of Malta and
merely wrote it.


41a

open. kaffepannan. The door scrolls
parish register, dass. Toyota
sunbeam. Shut.

&ire vatten                         ()   87      född
step in the roads of amniosis,
                                    frill of birchenträumer

42

Honeyberry.

Once in a year of
plenty and
possibility
we found two
fruits by
the path in the
wood
In other years only
leaves Thus was it

43

Imagine you
crumple the newspaper
into a faggot and light
one end. The cones and
shavings loosely
loaded, the cavity
must have airflow
The warm smoke
drawn to the rear
hatch, and you hope
that then a scrap of wind will catch it
and suck it all up the chimney.
You hope but you never know.
You hope, with reasonable certainty,
that the warm smoke
straightens and is
drawn straight up,
like stair-rods pinging,
drawn up by a mangle.
the incineration of sinners,
savoury to a householder.

44

Elimination state

And the mist darkened over the mountains
that separate land from land.

On the terraces, where private ownership
shatters into a checkerboard.

But out in the flatlands,
the emperors and a
repressive religion.

Rank pine plantations
in millions of hectares.

And cousins who once
spoke in the same valley dialect

now lived under different regimes
and fought as their medias
thought they should.

You know all this. But do the mountains
even exist here in the yellow stars
where Max is plowing & the lacy plants
frond the surface of a pool
and they kiss not greedily but wetly, sexual people,
clothes wrinkling on the rock,
not knowing  yet where this is going.



45

The organs are packed into a body
the same way that rock is packed into a stone.

The adrenals control the liver's
interactions with the thyroid;
The amygdalae shriek at the adrenals from a peppered cliff

The fowl's hot body as it beaked the man away
though its wings and legs were broken
by a narrowboat's propeller.

The sea wrinkles, breathing in and out.
then the clouded sun dips and elevates the country into its night.

It proves a blustery, spitting night
collected in passionate runnels,
seizing the junctions of the city.

But it's simple as a stone is:
the body's function, to love and to seek for love.




46.

Birch. Is it many, or one?

But whether it's one or many,
it's part of a greater many.

A greater birch-park.

Communes with her lovers in spring;
with her children in autumn.

See the leaves light; the bark still lighter;
mirrors of other birches.

But what is single then?



47.


One season the vole population exploded.

Owls fed their broods on voles.

The parents attacked us, they were strike-owls.

We sat in the kitchen at dusk and the windows darkened
when owls flew noiselessly
                  through the garden, feeding.


48.

Som ni vill har det.

By the dead falls is a summer theatre.

Hard to define the seriousness of this audience,
but it isn't academic, it comes from somewhere else.

The meaning comes from the gnat-chorusses in the vast space of the open valley.

We say, in fact, that we're having it. In this season we're simply shepherds,
and no-one needs to think of going back.

We're Shakespeare's shepherds, a little leisured and a little educated.
Everyone is welcome.

But the stolidity is always there.


49.

A man is carving himself into a wooden scene
while the snow falls outside.

In the carving it's summer.
The man stands up with his tools,

His wife and daughter are making peppercakes;
he converts them into flying birds

on the heavenly up-swell of cinnamon and cloves.


50.

Warm in the shade of garden trees.

How lucky we are!

We walk down the road
to the restaurant by the Thai pavilion.

We can go that far.
I buzz around with the camera.

Things are not as they were,
yet they remain good.

But for you Mum
the strain of that goodness
has grown with the years.
Even for you Dad,
though you don't admit it.

I'm saying all this in hindsight -
at the time I found ways of not hearing.

Now that it's "those" and not "these"...
From those times and those woods
a different animal emerges.


51.


Not exactly in the wilds,
but the hire-car parked
on the forest track,
with prästkrage up to its bumpers,
would do as well.

We Thermos'd overlooking a
glistening stream on the way up.
Now we parked in the same spot.
The sun had shifted to a red gold.

The trip to Strömsund was the
final slender outline
of a senescent summer tree.

Almost like the sapling.


52


But it wouldn't have been the same,
  with your spirit out of it.

Even now you preserved it, even though
 for years you hadn't been happy here.

As soon as you got there
 you started smoking again,  out on the bron in the midsummer air.

Stress? Boredom?

Was it only with me you  picked currants
under the trees,
moving in the swish of grasses,
troubling the elk-hounds in their cage?

Making your garden where hardly anything could grow

Counting the bellfowers

But even now you preserved

When we converged, that last summer,
you wouldn't let us plunder the kitchen sofa

and the linen cupboard. That was
the nearest I came to understanding your religion.

Something had to be handed on;
some sort of household shrine.

Your Mum seemed very present then. Something passed down from the original owner, whose name I never learnt. Why? Because it unified our forty summers. Because it healed them. We couldn't.


53.

blunt love of bed


54.

The forests dance.

On a tree-lined ridge,
the pines barely clothing the rock,
where pines abut the vertical crag,
the forests dance
as we watch from a moving car,
our oil supplying the rhythm.

But go in and there's stillness,
and the fear of something not moving, yet.