lit-bee-blog1

[lit-bee-blog1]

Japanese Jellyfish

Drinking Sencha in Suttsu town I looked up with a huge frown The waiter was wearing a ball gown Waltzing away through the funny old town.

A jellyfish partnered his tango that night The two of them gave me the most dreadful fright I’d honestly never seen such a sight But they sang to the stars that shone so bright.

“Jealous cat” said the waiter, waltzing away He came back with my bill in a year and a day Married the jellyfish far away

(But I haven’t drunk Sencha tea since that day)

©Lit-Bee 2014

Image Credit: British Pathé

[lit-bee-blog1]

Cwm Bach

Out there, on the mountain I’m watching and waiting, watching and waiting, waiting watching, frozen and dying, frozen and dying, dying frozen Quiet birds, songs all sung out watching and waiting, waiting and watching. Sheep wake, dark skies spill into valleys drunk with midnight. Mrs Nettles of Cwm Bach cuddles the kettle, orange spout plastic, river running fast now Her morning of crocheted girlhood runs off to Bryn valley where Ivor sleeps, socks on dreaming of lottery cards and sheep-dip, dogs streaking in the corner of ‘Million Pound Draw…’ Cwm Bach drowsily greets her, eyes on pillows, sucky on pillows, toffees in jars, heirlooms Of families from the valleys, of girls muslin gowned May Day, boys line up boots shiny. Ivor sits apple cheeked, hands strong from the ewes leaping drystone, whistling 'Bach, Bach, Bach, hei, hei, hei, bach!’ The tunnel runs, like a line of Californian gold through the hedges from Cwm Bach to Bryn Kisses exchanging, darkness ploughing panting, secrets in the milk stone, child in the child.

 CC Lit-Bee 2015

[lit-bee-blog1]

Beast is Back

The light looms black, the beast is back.

Look down the tunnel. No light. The beast is back.

I fed him well: old romances, broken childhood, cidery teens

Flared jeans; the beast is back.

I took him with me on a lead once; he bit. ( what a shit )

Don’t remember the night before; he saw what I saw.

Remembered it all, says we both had a ball…

So now he’s the know all.

I’d put a gun to his head but he wouldn’t be dead; I would instead.

The beast is back. There in the ashtray, a dog end ( let’s pretend )

There on the track

A pinpoint of black

The beast is back.

CC Lit-Bee  2016

[lit-bee-blog1]

Mountain Boy

Bowl of mist, crag savage, the child moves into 

Movement the mountain emerges in his 

Eyes, watering windy, howling winds sing to his songs 

Language emerging as urban boy meets mountain 

For a few days only 

Soul searches free from fumes 

Bowl of mist breakfast morning 

Nourished 

No KFC, no burger van, no TV dinner 

The silent mountain smiles, feeding effervescent wisps of love 

Wrapped in heather, gorse for supper, rain in cups 

Held in tiny hands, warming for the gleaming

She will travel back to the city with him

She will sing with him forever

His children knowing the story of those days

School trip 

Mountain Boy

CC lit-bee 2013

[lit-bee-blog1]

Enigma

She sweeps the planet having been A spirit, lightly slipping seen By none of mortal birth, ‘tis true And yet, her shadow follows you.

Her gown of light, now swathed in thorns She walks alone amongst the throngs; Passing all yet meeting none For her song is silent sung.

You turn forever, never seeing What is the nature of her being. Is she a shadow, far from sight That guides you in the deep of night?

Is she the venture, never taken The love your heart has never shaken? In your dreams, she will awaken Dreams of longing, so forsaken.

Her spirit pure, was lowly sown In simple fields of truth; So harken to the words she speaks, Listen to the breath she breathes.

Forever, wandering in the meads; A lonely spirits song. Revealing unto none

Thus, forever moving on.

CC Lit-Bee 2012

[lit-bee-blog1]

Tzar Time, Russia Time

Revolting voices sing up the dead and Stalin whispers in the cold night of occupation ~

He stalks the museum on Kaseorg ~ a name scratched by a lost tooth picked up and bloodied

interrogated in the vodka palace downtown

The Red Cross letter drops like the A-bomb and reveals you standing in the ruins of my father’s past

( unable to voice)

Tzar time, Russia time

and your bitter bitter bitter bitter words

CC Lit-Bee 2015

[lit-bee-blog1]

‘Pretty’ by Stevie Smith

Written in 1966, ‘Pretty’ is a post-modernist poem comprising nine stanzas of blank verse, each stanza is a quatrain.  I shall focus on each individual stanza, analysing them individually and also as a whole.  I shall also look briefly at the poem in it’s historical context.

   Smith’s use of repetition in this poem seems mild, complacent almost, with a definite simplistic quality until the climactic final two stanzas where the word ‘pretty’ implodes almost, and we discover a certain disgust and anger at the naiveté of mankind -  The voice of the speaker wanders through the poem, judging all the time and restricting and thereby reducing everything to a single point - the word ‘pretty’.

   Interestingly, the poem begins with a ‘fall’ then the speaker wanders through nature as the observer in a seeming state of blissful ignorance to it’s inner truth’s.  Judgements as to degree’s of ‘prettiness’ or not are made continually,  then the voice changes and, in the final two stanza’s, in first person - the poem speaks directly to the reader. This has a Biblical quality.

    The poem is striking for the repetitive use throughout of the title word ‘pretty’. Smith has taken a word in everyday use and holds it up to magnify, disorientate and question us, the reader, causing us to reflect on the use of language.  I believe that this is perhaps the single most important feature of the poem.

  In the opening stanza, Smith asks why it is that the word pretty is so ‘underrated’.  She then moves into an almost childlike, reflection on a leaf and how ‘pretty’ it’s fall from the tree is. This is perhaps setting the scene for the sense of ‘disconnectedness’ that the speaker has from the realities of life.  A child might hold a leaf and, without the full panoply of the english language to express feelings for it, comment that it is ‘pretty’, whilst feeling all the while that it is quite something else. By repetition of the word throughout, Smith limits us, just as a child’s vocabulary limits their ability for true expression.

The speaker then reflects on a pool of water becoming ‘pretty’ after the rain. A slightly more ominous tone is adopted at the carnivorous pike that ‘stalks’.

    In the second stanza, the pike continues to stalk his prey. This is a commentary on how there is, at first, escape before the prey succumbs, just as the leaf has, to the inevitability of the natural world.

    The move from the second to the third stanza has a shift, as Smith moves us into it by capitalising the word ‘And’ to begin her reflection on the water rat as not being pretty. She glances back at what has happened in the water; the triumph of the Pike pursuing it’s prey and decides that this is not what ‘pretty’ is.

   In the third stanza, she speaks of the Otter having no choice in habitat. Again, this is an allusion to the inevitability of the natural world, coupled with deliberate ignorance at nature’s cruelty, for the water rat cannot close it’s nostrils.

        In the fourth stanza, hunting is once again predominant, as the owl moves over the water, seeking its prey. However, the tone changes as Smith speaks of the frost coming from the ground, intimating that as this is where all things come from, it is ‘pretty’, emphasising in the final line that ‘it could not be prettier’.

In the fifth stanza, She then glances back, as in stanza three and decides that ‘Yes, it could be prettier’. The poem then moves from the storybook quality of the word ‘pretty’ perceiving the animals and for the first time Smith uses a word that has many meanings, but for the purpose of this essay, I shall use it’s connotation as meaning ‘uneasy’.

The eye that has watched the animals, commenting on how ‘pretty’ they and their actions are, and to what degree, suddenly becomes self-conscious. ‘the eye abashes.’

      It cannot see enough and so, it moves upwards to the sky, taking the field with it as it does so, becoming free from the constraints of the world below; it chooses to ignore and shift it’s perception.

   The sixth stanza finds the focus moved from the world below to the world above, as though the poet has taken the entire scene and tilted it upwards to escape the reality of what is happening below.  The final two lines comment on how easy this may seem but how extraordinary both this action is, and how extraordinary it is to be so ‘pretty.’ Here, the word’ pretty’ becomes a force of escape from the mundane. Not liking what is changing below, the gaze shifts upwards and takes it’s ‘world’ with it.

   The seventh stanza speaks of the carelessness of nature, it’s indifference to Mankind. At this point in the poem, the word ‘pretty’ has assumed some power, as though a child-like voice has definite ideas about what is and is not ‘pretty’ From the animal world and the world of predator and prey, the poem moves into a comment on the difference between the animal world and that of nature which are one and the same to the outsider - the eye of the human, and how indifferent to their gaze nature really is.

  There is a change in voice in the final two stanza’s, as Smith alludes to people coming into the world of nature, cloaking it with their misguided perceptions and then moving on, like  a thief who having glanced at something, steals it by having done so. An exclamation mark now punctuates her sense of how easy it is to watch a scene, comment on it with  mundane word’s yet be unable to grasp what goes on beneath the surface, perhaps by choice.

‘Now a person can come along like a thief - pretty!- Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel.’ The word ‘pinching’ is interesting here, as it is this is another word for theft. The watching eye has wandered along ‘stealing’ as it moved, unable to let the realities simply be.

So, by the eighth stanza the eye deliberately rejects the truth, having looked only for prettiness in the natural world.  Now the idea of using words to describe nature seems shallow and cruel, as the world of Man is compared to the easy natural world of nature and the animals and scenes that exist within their own laws.

‘Lick the icicle broken from the bank, and still say nothing at all, only cry pretty.’

Here, Smith seems to be saying that we break the ice, we steal the ice to experience something of the natural world, but have to ‘break’ it to do so, thereby ruining it. Unable to appreciate the realities of nature whilst holding its beauty, the imperfect eye of Man can only move to its inevitable death, and perhaps here Smith is making an allusion to how language evolves and thereby enables freedom and existentialism. Just as words ‘die’ and others take their place in common use, she seems to speak directly to the wanderer in the woods as she warns that soon they will not even be able to cry the word ‘pretty’.  It is an angry stanza, speaking as it does in the final two lines of deliverance from humanity being ‘the prettiest thing of all. ‘

        Pretty is an unusual poem. Smith keeps us emphatically within the word from one stanza to another, as she shows us why it is that this quite mundane word is important. She shows it’s versatility throughout the poem simply by the fact that she holds onto the word so utterly; it’s playfulness, by the way in which she cleverly brings us into the world of the childlike, where animals are taken as being ‘pretty’ because their true nature is not only never understood - there is an implication of the darker aspects of the word - that true knowledge of it would spoil perhaps the misconceptions that we have about reality. The message is ‘do not take things at face value’.

     I have looked at the individual stanzas that comprise this poem and also at the allusions to Man’s imperfect view of the world.  Stevie Smith has taken us on a journey in this poem, and has questioned the perhaps mundane eye that looks at nature at being ‘cute’ or ‘pretty’ lulling us into a  sense of false security until, in the final two stanza’s, she turns angrily on the idea of ‘prettiness’, asserting that the voice that speaks pretty will cry pretty and then be annihilated; thereby unable to cry at all.

  Interestingly, this poem was written at the height of the “Swinging Sixtie’s’ - A time where looking ‘pretty’ was considered more important in mainstream culture than ever before.

‘Pretty’ could be considered as a commentary on certain value changes that occurred in the 20th century, resulting in a certain superficiality.

CC Lit-Bee 2016

[lit-bee-blog1]

You were gone too soon that it made me think you weren’t even real but just a fragment of my wildest dreams

you had the choice to stay, but you didn’t (via caraphernelily)

[lit-bee-blog1]

The Flea

In his poem ‘The Flea’, Donne makes use of a metaphysical conceit to argue that, having both been bitten by the same flea, he and his object of desire should now have sex. He asserts that, as their blood has already been innocently sucked by the flea and mingled within its body,  nature  has’ joined’ them, the suggestion being that formal sex is the natural progression. There is a notable lack of punctuation, suggesting the urgency with which the narrator is pursuing his line of reasoning

 In the opening stanza, the narrator asks his love object to note how innocent the non monogamous flea’s action of hopping from one to the other and sucking blood is. He also comments that the flea, unlike a man, foregoes wooing before taking its pleasure. The eighth and ninth lines allude to pregnancy. The flea is ‘pregnant’ with their blood - is figuratively, the container of their microcosmic child. This may allude also to his swollen lust. There is an interesting use of pro-nouns in this stanza, suggesting a movement towards union in the progression: me / line 2 - thee/3 we /9.

 The second stanza suggests that the love object wants to kill the flea and the narrator begs her to spare the flea. In the final three lines, the narration changes and we hear the voice of the metaphor, pleading for its life.  

In the final stanza, the metaphor has been ‘killed’ and the two move from their figurative selves into reality.

 The poem is structured much like an elegy with three stanzas, each consisting of nine lines and the complex metrical scheme is based on aa/bb/cc/ddd.

 We know that Donne was a minister in the Anglican Church but was also a man known to possess carnal lusts for life and experience. His writing clothes this carnality by the use of complex symbolism, such as the flea being a ‘Temple of Love’ (stanza 2/line4)

  He makes use of the word ‘cloistered’ (stanza 2/line 6) A cloister is usually associated with nuns and virginity and yet ‘The Flea’ could be considered a poem illumining how deceit is used to ‘rob’ virginity with artful words and forceful rhetoric.

  However, the closing stanza could also be read as a metaphor for the Crucifixion. The blood on the nail is purple, the colour of royalty. Christ wore a purple cloak on the way to his death. So, in the final stanza, we have moved from the death of the innocent flea.

  Yet, once murdered, the act of killing something innocent, a creature who symbolically brought union between opposites, leads to the loss or death of those involved. Namely, the poem ends.

The poem is perhaps a comment on the deceit inherent in seduction, the passivity of the love object with no voice can be read as a commentary on the lack of power women had in this era.

CC Lit-Bee 2017

[lit-bee-blog1]

Was Lady MacBeth a compulsive hand washer? Do we care?

Lit-Bee