Hello, everyone. Wonderful to see you all here.
My name is Nola Hudson. I'm the investment professor of English literature at New York State.
And like you all, I've been listening sometimes in this public building.
But more often in the strange convergence of private space.
On Zoom to the mesmerising lectures on poetry given by our professor of poetry, Alice Oswald.
So it's a great honour for me. It's one of the great pleasure to be introducing Alice's lecture this evening.
The title of the lecture is Anonymous and Anonymous. Onomah is a name in Greek, so I guess that's unnamed and named.
But if one didn't know that, I might think autonomous was the collective form and Anonymous was singular.
And that might chime with the powerful impression that Alice Oswald's poetry gives us of utterance being a collective activity.
Utterance is a kind of mutterings or muttering or whispering analysis, poetry.
I feel that speaking comes from everywhere, seems to be going on all the time, swirling about connected things,
growing and decaying and disintegrating with injunctions to listen or sing or say what you like.
Joining up conscious and unconscious selves, sleeping and waking, living and dead.
And here I'm thinking of the beautiful poem from the collection Falling away with telephone us slowly roused by the unutterable
beauty of the dawn first comes to our hearing as a voice goes on arguing in its sleep like a fire going to and corrosive be firm.
So in that phrase, Allison's given us snoring as the body's arguing.
I really love that. Now, I doubt there's any snoring in Alice's lecture tonight, but I thought I'd mention talk bonus,
because it seems to me like our collective sort of semi somnolent inadequacy before The Miracle of Sunrise,
but also because he's described in that exquisite poem as being very nearly anonymous.
So I'm sure you all is intrigued, desire to hear what Alice has to say.
So please welcome our professor of poetry, Alice Oswald. Anonymous.
Anonymous. Thank you so much, Lorna, for that very interesting introduction and thank you all for coming.
I'm very amused by this too, and curiosity fro room because my lecture actually is quite a lot about kind of saying things in two directions at once.
So I shall embody that in my person and try to include both sides of the room.
Ambitiously as ever, I'm hoping to support what I'm saying with a few slides and sounds.
I'm supremely technological, so you'll have to excuse me if I shout for Rich at the back to come and help me.
So anonymous and autonomous.
I will start with a poem and wherever I read poems today because this lecture is all about doubleness, I will read them twice it.
There was a man of double date, sowed his garden full of seed when the seed began to grow.
It was like a garden full of snow. When the snow began to melt.
It was like a ship without a boat when the ship began to sail.
It was like a bird without a tail. When the bird began to fly, it was like an eagle in the sky.
When the sky began to roar, it was like a lion at my door.
When the door began to crack, it was like a stick across my back.
When my back began to smart, it was like a penknife in my heart.
And when my heart began to bleed to his death and death and death, indeed.
I don't normally allow people to see poems because I prefer them to hear them.
But I thought as I'm going to go on and on about this poem today, I would be kind and allow you to read it as well.
So I'll now read it while you can see it, which is a very different experience and please notice how different it is.
There was a man of Double D sowed his garden full of seed when the seed began to grow.
It was like a garden full of snow. When the snow began to melt, it was like a ship without about when the ship began to sail.
It was like a bird without a tail. When the bird began to fly to us like an eagle in the sky.
When the sky began to roll, it was like a lion at my door.
When the door began to crack to us like a stick across my back.
When my back began to smart. It was like a penknife in my heart.
And when my heart began to bleed to death and death.
And death, indeed. So this poem first appeared in written form in 1783, in a collection called Gamma Curtain's Garland.
Gamma Curtain is the name of an old woman from the 16th century who lost her needle.
And Lorna, who have just been speaking to it, is actually quite an expert on Gamma.
And so if anybody wants to hear more about her, you can ask Lorna at the end.
I think she's a generic woman like Mother Goose or the sibyl of Kwami or the needle watchers of I Knew Poetry.
But this poem or something like it will have been passing from mouth to mouth.
Long before 1783. It is anonymous.
It's called a nursery rhyme. But I'm not going to use that name because the poem goes on growing beyond the nursery.
It alters and ages alongside anyone who knows it.
To call it anything at all is to slow down the language, which is clearly on its way somewhere.
I don't know where. No.
I don't know anything about this poem. It sprang alive in my childhood, and it has trailed its characters alongside me ever since.
The double man with his world of simulacra,
the sad gardener watching his garden produce only white snow blooms, the frightened crew of an unarmed ship,
the rudderless bird, the magically animated diabolical stick, and the dark self who is all of a sudden stabbed to death.
All of a sudden, it's about as much as I can say about this passing by a poem which is not known enough to warrant a name.
None of its characters has a name. They are just circumlocution moving around each other in a film of similarities.
It reminds me of Mats. It has the same shaping impulse as a set of numbers to the power of two.
It evolves practically like a fan, and yet it is not a thing, but an essence in perpetual flux.
Like an angel. Anonymous. If it were not anonymous, I would be drawn to the possessive pronoun at line 12.
Twist like a lion at my door. I or my.
Whenever those words appear in a poem, they open a windpipe down to a lung and I can hear a breather there.
And in the lines that follow, I hear the hiss of hard feeling twist like a stick across my back.
It was like a penknife in my heart. Who's hot?
What kind of character would speak like that in rhyme about her own murder?
Gerta said that human reason is an immortal being engaged in turning chance into necessity.
And I think he should have added that human imagination by restoring mystery to the language, turns necessity back into chance.
Which is why it's essential not to know too much about this poet.
I might infer that she is a mother since her poem is apparently a nursery rhyme.
But in order to suffer the poem's suddenness, I need to avoid its biography.
Otherwise I would just grow sentimental. Let me define sentimentality as pre-programmed sorrow.
Yes, I will grow pre sorrowful thinking about the man who double crossed her,
which is why his seed would grow nothing but coldness and meltwater water.
And now she's obviously being beaten and a pen knife unsuitable blunt is being pushed through her flesh and ribs.
And if I follow this pre sorrowful track, I can quickly turn the poem into a female catastrophe.
And I will call all kinds of named women as witnesses.
Sylvia Plath, rising with her red hair. Virginia Woolf.
Gamma Gert. Desdemona, the dear Sappho in her agonies of jealousy, say, shown again destroyed by politicians.
Even from the corner of my ear, I can hear the first known named poet and heroine who is composing poems a thousand years before Homer.
Is one of her poems or part of one of her poems. I.
The great poet i. And had one. There I stood, shouting to God with my basket of offerings.
When that man pushed me away, took over my building.
And now gloom follows my days. The light goes out, the shadows creep close malicious rain smothers the sun.
He wipes his spit wet hand on my musical mouth and the little carving of me lies hooded in the dust underfoot.
I the great poet I and had one too.
There I stood, shouting to God with my basket of offerings.
When that man pushed me away, took over my building.
And now gloom follows my days. The light goes out.
The shadows creak. Close malicious rain smothers the sun.
He waits his spit wet hand on my musical mouth.
And the little carving of me lies hooded in the dust underfoot.
I don't know whether it is the prickle of fear.
Or the goose flesh of sentimentality, which passes through me when I read that 4000 year old name and how to honour.
It is written in five symbols. And the fourth is a star and hat.
Do not. I'm not. I don't know anything about cuneiform, but I did look that up on Wikipedia.
High Priestess of the Moon. God.
In many cultures it is taboo to name the dead who get referred to obliquely as that old woman or the one who lived here before the last one.
The wife of the moon. The Stargazer. The needle searcher.
In parts of Aboriginal Australia, it's not even permitted to speak a word which sounds like a dead person's name.
So the language alters at each bereavement becomes more circuitous, less autonomous.
The fear is that the dead will turn up if you name them. And that is exactly what happens with and her donor.
Here she is. Oh, yeah, she isn't.
Nope. She's gone missing, but I will describe her.
Here she is in my previous PowerPoint in Flouncy dress and conical hat.
There's an alabaster disk which shows her leaning a little forwards with one eye staring ahead,
one ear poking out through her crinkled hair, walking somewhere with a group of bald men.
The disk I'm referring to is made of alabaster and it measures about 25 centimetres across.
And it was discovered in 1927 when a team of archaeologists was digging in the sand at the site of the city of a.
So it's got that procession on one side with this extraordinarily dignified,
statuesque or the tall woman with crinkled hair who's obviously had one, too.
And on the other side, under the procession, there's an inscription which says, and heroine, a true lady of the moon, God, wife of the moon,
God, daughter of Sargon in the temple of Inanna of Earth, an altar you built and you named it altar of an which is the air.
So 4000 years ago in Cuneiform, a named female names the ungraspable.
When the bird began to fly, it was like an eagle in the sky.
When the sky began to roll to us. Like a lion at my door.
As with an had one as inscription, the air here is being drawn into a relationship with a poet.
But in this case, in the case of the man of double date, the connections are much more frantic and fragile.
There is more crosswind in the manner of much more ambient noise.
Not just the human is audible, but the eerie, almost animal voice of the language itself.
The hiss or buzz of consonants, the howl of vowels, rhythms of footsteps or water.
Crack of a stick. Ghosts of previous meanings.
Roots and side shoots of words, rhymes, repetitions.
All these have wills of their own, which pull the poem away from its narrative.
The truth is, once you remove the name of the poet.
You discover that every word is a name of something, however abstract.
Every word invokes a character, even a tiny, servile conjunction such as the word and.
Is the name of a kind of spectral hand, which holds two things together.
And is an ancient relative of the word in and it slides between anyone side by side.
You come across it in crowds, but also on heaths and moorland and is in its essence wind like implying motion towards or against two things,
but never quite reaching, so that when it appears the grass shivers.
But always in different fields and.
The notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins are full of his explorations into single words.
Grind. Grind. Good grit, Groat.
Great grit. Grief. He attends to the frictions of those etymologies, he says,
wearing tribulation grief possibly connected grief with a sound as a two things rubbing together.
Then he concludes, I believe these words to be onomatopoeic, good, common to them all represents a particular sound.
In fact, he says. I think the onomatopoeic theory has not had a fair chance.
Compare. Crack. Creak, croak. Creak.
Crackle. US crackle. These must be onomatopoeic, he says.
And I agree. So listen. Listen again, please, to this prime example of honour matter poetry.
There was a man of double date, sowed his garden full of seed.
And when my heart began to bleed to his death.
And death. And death, indeed. I'd like to describe that poem as the sound envelope of its final word.
Indeed is an amplifying word whose meaning doubles whatever it accompanies.
Indeed is two times indeed. And you can hear that repetition still happening in seed and plead.
Well, the closeness of deed and debt multiplies the double.
Both dead and dead, expressed the letter D doubled, and D is already a dead sound.
It thuds a heavy tread. It digs.
It shudders. It belongs to spades and dirges and widows and shadows.
And so it goes on. Everything in this poem is followed by a double snow, follows crow as if a snowflake were a flower's ghost.
Six petals ephemeral, a form of stopped water, but with no fertility indeed follows.
Did seed bleed like an affirmation of all doubleness?
There's a snowflake. Curiously like a flower.
The Welsh word for such a stream of apparitions is difalco, which means guesswork and probably pronouncing it wrong.
Anyone's welcome to correct me. Anyway, dissolute is one of the disciplines of Welsh poetry, either for religious or obscene reasons.
The poet keeps withdrawing the object from view and the reader is made to chase a series of doubles,
as in Deford Williams 14th century poem about the missed.
Mist most similar to night long scrolls dripping sheets like lists of rains along the path.
It was a rusting filter. The Black Earth's bird net lamp plus fields of crisscross tracks, sudden cesspool,
close fitting grey gowns for the hills and the same cloth for every curve of the valley.
What? Old walls around each eye. Great.
Splurge on a ridge of plume.
Thick, grey, white, grey wisp of fleece smoke coloured meadow hood the leaf plated wood drums under the blows of the rain shower, but also grows.
And again missed most similar tonight long scrolls dripping sheets like lists of rain along the path.
It was a rusting filter, the black earth's burden at lamp plus fields of crossed tracks, sudden cesspool air,
close fitting grey gowns for the hills and the same cloth for every curve of the valley.
What old walls around each eye? Great.
Splurge on the ridge earth plume thick, grey, white, grey wisps of fleece smoke coloured metal hood,
the leaf plated wood drums under the blows of the rain shower, but also groves.
Like a primitive eye. This poem seems to record the whole process of turning sensor data into recognition.
It refuses prior knowledge.
While the poor poet who is trying to write a love poem and who cheerfully set out across the moors on a Thursday to visit a new girlfriend,
walks suddenly into mist and gets lost in his own description.
Adulteress mist. So in brackets concealing.
So nothing, nothing dark. Cloaking the land with towers of twisted ghosts, pitch blinders thick and hideous darkening the earth.
Today's days, the poet close weave of thick and costly can break stretching away like unravelled rope, a cobweb a French repurchase haunted headland.
If the ghost turns, all this creeping smoke comes down, streaking the stricken woods,
a lightless fog where the dogs bark and old women collect its drips in bottles With all the grassy armour of the earth gone grey.
Will the world. Will it never dry out? Devalue or guesswork is also what is happening in the manner of double digit.
Like Daffy Duck. William, the poet, embarks on a story, but her protagonist vanishes in a mist of similarities.
It was like a garden full of seed. It was like a penknife in my heart.
Like. Like. Like. How can a writer get around this world?
To arrive at an idea. Or is it that the word itself is already an idea?
In its original form. Gaelic, it means double body.
Like Ga in proto germanic is a prefix similar to the Latin con meaning with or together.
Like. Like Laken and Lich are all words for body or corpse.
The poem has a much less nursery voice when you hear those ancient voices muttering under it as if a mother was singing her baby to sleep like this.
When the seed began to grow towards the courts of a garden full of snow.
When the snow began to melt. Twas the corpse of a ship without a boat.
When the ship began to sail, it was the corpse of a bird without a tail.
Seven corpses are carried through this nursery rhyme or mother rhyme or mourning song or corpse canning.
It is, in fact, a like weak dirge like the folk song collected by John Aubrey in 1686,
which describes the soul's journey through purgatory as if it were a sequel to The Man of Deed.
And just like that poem, the like weak dirge reveals life to be folded over and lived through twice since every deed a person does come back.
Comes back to his like at his wake.
I'll play you a bit of the like dirge. Is saying he has seen signs.
Find sleep time.
Come see me cry.
Because I saw. When.
And so we know I.
We know. To break a trend the Congress passed the crisis by.
When on a train I.
He tried to make it more complex than last night dressing table.
So I feel bad for the cast and I'm sure.
It's a simple sit down and put them.
Nice to see you guys. A lot to squeeze in up to, though.
It gives them. So when I think the two they better be surprised to see that they.
All the UI acts. I apologised.
Uh. Right.
Yes. An interesting interruption to that extraordinarily beautiful song I think about.
About the sole going, a particular route across the moors and at particular places on that route.
It's asked whether it has given people shoes or clothes or money.
So I'll read. All this happens in many versions, but I'll read one.
They say night this say night every night and all fire and fleet and candle light and Christ receive thyself.
When though from hence a way out past every night at all to winning more that comes to at last and Christ received those so.
If ever they were ghost chosen and shown every night and all, sit them down and put them on and Christ received those.
So. If Hosein and Shoen though now gave none every night and all the winnings show quickly to the bare bone and Christ received I so.
If ever they were gold, silver or gold. Every night and all a brigade red dope.
Find foothold and Christ receive thy soul.
From Break It Read When I Must Pass Every Night And All To Purgatory Fire thou comes at last and Christ received I so.
If meat or drink never goes nine every night and all the fire will burn to the bare bone and Christ received those.
So this a night, this a night every night in the fire and fleet and candlelight.
And Christ received those. So. So that's the story of the word like, which comes so often in the mind of indeed.
In the canon of anonymous literature, words are the major poets.
Remembering the thoughts of the speakers across the centuries.
If I say like a dead body is lifted up my throat, under the shade of my palate,
and into a gathering of listeners, each of whom lowers the word gently into himself or herself.
If I say garden, I hear someone digging a patch of ground in England.
Then he's digging in a Jordan or garden in medieval France.
Then with horse and horse, the gardeners get older.
I see a man who might be Laertes hacking at a bramble in a Greek orchard and beyond him pulling up the Indo-European root of the word.
A wrinkled Neolithic hand is grasping branches to erect an enclosure.
The word invokes these places so that I read it back with birdsong, shovels and the stocks and starts of insects.
And yet, of course, the poem does not just say like and garden.
It says Twas like a garden full of snow.
Twas like a ship without a belt. Twas like a bird without a tail.
If I persist with my task of removing all names,
I have to let go of the words themselves and stand here at last with nothing but a repetition of sounds.
It was like a garden.
It was like a shift. I took a. Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee.
Thank you so much. That was man of Double D, spoken by pigeons with all the names taken out of it.
I've talked about automatic poetry. That is an honour matter.
Poetry. And I believe and I truly believe that's where poetry begins.
It's those those sounds that you hear all around you which actually slowly materialise into language.
But the sound comes infinitely far for the sense.
I actually know a man who can drum the sound of a limping donkey on a table,
and he learnt it from listening to the poetry of the no guy people, which is spoken limply to the accompaniment of the BA.
They say that the drummer is a wounded instrument, punished by Genghis Khan because his favourite son was killed by a limping donkey.
Nobody wanted to tell the Khan what had happened. At last, a musician called Chequebook without speaking a word, played the whole story on his dobra.
How the boy was charged by a herd of donkeys. He shot the first one in the leg, but it kept running through him to the ground and trampled him.
When the Khan heard the rhythm of the limping donkey trampling his child, he grabbed the instrument, poured molten lead into its throat.
And to this day, the hole in a dumper is lined with lead, and its speech has a faltering rhythm.
And. I have a bit of Denver music, but if it doesn't play, I won't.
Battle. This is the friend of the friend who drums on the table.
Limping, don't you? It is hardly surprising that Genghis Khan punished the instrument.
What a very flippant way to tell someone their son has died.
Osip Mandelstam, of course, said that the sound of pentameter was learned from the oscillations of tides.
I prefer the uneven evenness of hex amateur, which reminds me of the call and response of two almost identical birds,
three notes, each with differing syncopations. But there is a yet final rhythm I once heard as a child, which no poem has ever matched.
I put my ear to a green alarm clock and first it spoke in simple tick tock.
Then between each foot it doubled and tripled and quadrupled the rhythm until it produced not a series of regular ions,
but an infinite chaotic interval between one long note and one short.
Perhaps that was prose. Or perhaps it was a single poetic line.
So long it has still not ended. The world is full of one off lines and chaotic repetitions, ready to be turned into prosody.
One of my favourites is the half rhythmical shock of walking through woodland at night when every tree gives off an applause of frightened birds.
They suddenly hurriedly surge clattering up.
It's a strange anti-gravity collapse like a congregation standing up to pray without thinking.
In winter, you hear the hinge of the wings creaking. In summer, the sound is more pattering, more fluttering.
It's as if the tree has offered up its leaves and in a few more paces, it happens again.
An exaltation. A jubilation mixed with terror. And then again.
And then again. And then there is the opposite sound, the sound of sightedness.
When do ads fractional weights to a field but instead of the stress of birds collapsing upwards, you hear the release of vapour ascending downwards.
On a summer afternoon, I once had my attention drawn to the sound of a man clipping his toenails out of an upstairs window.
Such a dry sound. I had mistaken it for an insect.
And once I heard a hornet stuck in a stovepipe.
A most beautiful, resonant, irregular rage.
I'm very glad that Ben Johnson is not listening to me.
At least I hope he's not sitting in this room. You never know in Oxford.
But Ben Jonson said that female poets have no composition at all but a kind of turning and rhyming fall in what they write.
Such poetry, he said, runs and slides and only makes a sound.
There may be some truth in this,
and it might explain why women have traditionally been in charge of lament since the aim of lament is to move beyond human language.
But I say it would be a shame to add composition to the cadence of do or tides or birds, hornets, toenails,
or any of those other beings which turn and rhyme and run and slide haphazardly and only make a sound.
But what a sound. One of the characteristics of contemporary poetry is its continuous enchantment.
To break a phrase across a line, censors its emotion and therefore increases its lucidity.
Here is Louise Gluck. Here is not Lewis Clark.
Here is Louise Gluck with formidable discipline, speaking on behalf of a hawthorn tree.
Her line breaks interrupt phrases so they have to be spoken quickly, brightly,
as if being read off the surface of the retina as leaves might speak, if they could.
A language of optics without sentimentality or emphasis.
The Hawthorn tree. Side by side, not hand in hand.
I watch you walking in the summer garden. Things that can't move.
Learn to see. I do not need to chase you through the garden.
Human beings leave signs of feeling everywhere. Flowers scattered on the dirt path.
All white and gold. Some lifted a little by the evening wind.
I do not need to follow where you are now. Deep in a poisonous field to know the cause of your flight.
Human passion or rage? For what else would you let drop all you have gathered?
I would be surprised if this habit of steadiness and dissociation had nothing to do with the
presence of motorways which have laid down a substrate of emotionless noise in the mind.
A modern song line from which everything is measured.
And even when you escape the motorway and sit reading in a library, the lighting system will be humming you the same message.
Though it's true these days there are also dustbin lorries which crash down streets at dawn on a monday,
bringing relief to the rational buzz of light bulbs when they interrupt your sleep.
They seem huge and emotional, lifting and shaking the world free of rubbish, then beeping and pausing as they reverse.
Then dustman like surgeons assistants run urgently but without panic to the next heap of boxes
and start another slipping glass slide like the weekly fall of Lucifer into the underworld.
No one has better described this kind of sound than Les Murray in his poem Words of the Glass Below US.
In attacking a glass foundry yard that has shadowy and bright as an old painter's sweater stiffening with light.
Another lorry chockablock with bottles gets the raised thumb and there hoists up a wave like flashbulbs feverish in a
stadium before all mass nosedive and ditch colour showering to grit starry mutually becoming the crush could cut it.
When the tunes of things surface in poems, they are not quite the same as they originally were.
A poem might speak in the or of a wood pigeon, but it is not the same as a wood pigeon.
It's only a likeness or a likeness or look of another bird singing in another world,
just as a sparrow is a likeness of the abstract form of a sparrow which a painter might catch on canvas.
For example, Fat a mutatis a Syrian painter says that he paints with his ears.
Sometimes, he says, he paints not the sparrow,
but the flutter of sparrows wings by a scatter of seeds in the snow before they snag on a goat's hair snare.
This intriguing sentence comes from an essay by the Kurdish poet Jalan Haji.
For many years he's been studying the work of Fateh Ali Juarez, and he's particularly poetically delighted by the artist's engagement with sound.
This is what Jalan Haji writes. Fateh al-Mukhtar says he paints with his ears.
He sharpens them to hear the smallest sounds in nature and the voices of childhood that echo through the vast expanses of his memory.
Those voices are me, he says. The wind blowing at three in the afternoon and the cats at the tree house in the willows
between the liquorice stalks and thickets of cane over the violet crowns of the globe,
thistle through the ears of Barney, the feeble voice of his grandmother Saliha,
singing a song of his uncle's death, her back against a black stone wall.
Shielding her eyes from the sun. And at the end of a long list of sounds which appear in this painter's paintings, Joann records this one.
One sunny morning in spring, young Fattah went to find his aunt on the high slopes filled with olive trees.
Her brother had kicked her, killing the son in her belly.
He saw her by a distant rock near the river where she'd gone off alone to relieve her brimming pain.
The purity of a mother's milk means it must be spilt somewhere where it will never be trodden on and sullied.
Fatah listens. For a long time he listens out to the grief,
which is aunties ringing from her breast behind the rock to the softness which warm jets of milk and tears pour out over the grass.
Please pause for a moment to imagine that sound and how the grass in the painting might hear and remember it.
Grasshoppers are among the most ancient anonymous poets.
For 250 million years, they have been composing and passing on their antiphonal hymns.
And yet they are still contemporary.
Like many insects, they are living expressions of simile so analogous to grass that it's almost impossible to see them.
When you walk through a field, it can seem as if the grass itself, the grass indeed has been doubled and then doubled again.
Similarity is the favourite verse form of nature.
And no doubt Homer learned his love of simile not just by listening to poets, but by listening to grasshoppers.
Or perhaps they were cicadas. The Homeric word goes gets translated into both insects.
A group of old men was sitting by the sky and gates no longer of fighting age,
but excellent speakers like cicadas in a thicket, kneeling on the tips of trees send forth their flower like voices.
These ancient Trojans were sitting hunched there on the turret, and when they saw Helen approaching, sent forth their winged voices.
What an extraordinary laminated simile in which the voices of humans have wings.
And the voices of insects are flower like. According to the lexicon,
Larios is an adjective formed from a Lily Lidle and Scott suggests their voices are Lily Pale Richmond Latin or translates it as delicate.
Robert Fagan's avoids the strangeness altogether, saying they were eloquent speakers still clear as cicadas settled on treetops,
lifting their voices through the forest, rising softly, dying away.
But none of these catches the Darwinian exactness of Homer,
in which an old man can speak the same language as a cicada, speaking the same language as a lily.
The likeness is full bodied. Cross-species, synaesthetic, ecological.
It's like that. A mother's painting, his memory of sparrows eating seeds on the snow.
Or like Thoreau describing the spring in Walden.
Who says you find in the very sands and anticipation of the vegetable leaf?
No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly and leaves it so labels with the idea inwardly.
The atoms have already learnt this law and are pregnant by it.
The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves.
Even ice, he says, begins with delicate crystal leaves.
And the whole tree is itself but one leaf.
He actually took that idea from Gerta, who discovered in a garden in Sicily that all plants are simply a leaf re expressing itself.
With these images in my head. I spent much time a few years ago watching grasshoppers in a field in South Devon,
and it was lovely to lie very still in long grass until I could be mistaken for a corpse.
Gingerly, shakily. At last, a soft voiced Homeric speaker of lilies would climb a bowling grass flower and describe delicacy in a winged sound.
If I lifted my head to get a closer look, instantly the grass flower catapulted the grass look alike together with the winged flower of its voice,
and my eyes and ears floated about in the same order of being looking for a landing until sure enough, the grass lily flying voice started up again.
After a couple of weeks of these similarities, I came out one morning to find the silage makers with a flours and binders were assassinating
the whole orchestra and wrapping the severed limbs in black plastic like body bags.
Like a massacre of poets. Of grasshoppers. Of wings.
Of lilies. Of paleness. Of the leaf. Of the sun itself.
I must speed up. I'm going to have to speak quickly.
If there is one language for old men, cicadas and lilies, then there is another language for mourners,
widows, winners, liars for shapeshifting, Cersei for murderous nightingales, swallows, seabirds and sirens,
all of whom are not lyrae or essen but ligase, which means piercingly shrill, painfully clear,
high sorrowful whistling knife, sharp, dark, personal, most often female, a little out of control and other ish.
Each time the word ligase or one of its derivatives is used by Homer when he
mentions the wind screaming in the rigging or the desolate cry of the lyre itself.
How can he not remember the scream of the widow in Odyssey Book eight, which itself remembers the keening of all the women in the Iliad and beyond?
Odysseus liquefied like a woman weeps, pouring herself over her dead husband, piercingly screaming.
The shrillness of that widow, as with all keening traditions and by the way,
which tradition is not a keening for the conversation of the ancestors is deliberately cross-species since the dead,
like women, have no composition but run and slide and only make a sound.
All speech becomes riddles and similes when it turns to the dead,
whose presence demands that prior ways of seeing sentimental, photographic ways of seeing are replaced by guesswork.
Why are the mountains? Black says an anonymous Byzantine folk song.
Why are the mountains black? Why are they shrouded in cloud?
Does the wind torment them or does the rain lash them? No, it's not.
The wind torments them, nor the rain that lashes them.
It is Karen, the US who passes by with his company of the Dead.
And here's a lament from Epirus.
Epirus, in which a metaphor is mystically connected to metamorphosis or Metro become a cloud, become a piece of mist, and come with the wind.
Come back with the breeze. Come back as soon as you can to your home.
As Metro. There was a man of deed, so his garden full of seed.
When the seed began to grow, it was like a garden full of snow. When the snow began to melt, it was like a ship without a belt.
When the ship began to sail, it was like a bird without a tail.
When the bird began to fly, it was like an eagle in the sky. When the sky began to roar, it was like a lion at my door.
When the door began to crack, it was like a stick across my back. When my back began to smile.
It was like a penknife in my heart. And when my heart began to bleed.
Twist. Death and death and death, indeed.
The mystery of that poem, which I sincerely hope I haven't solved, is all to do with the way it alters from a pale lily like voice to a dark,
shrill one, so that by the time you get to the end, you have to go back and read it again.
Yes, sure enough. It starts by jumping from chance to chance like a grasshopper, just continuously here and now, and listening and escaping.
But then the liar starts up at like 12, and with it comes a past and a person.
The voice loses its lightness. It begins to smell of lungs and sorrows.
It grows on us. It belongs to a mother, to a grandmother, to a ghost.
Its date is 1783. And when I say that, I hear suddenly the rustle of other publications named and dated voices all beginning to speak at once.
William Blake, for example, in that same year, 1783, with the Help of Friends,
he published his poetical sketches in an edition of 40 copies with his initials WB on the title page,
a hemi autonomous book, lyrical, but not always in the shrill tone of the lyre.
Blake's poetry inspired by nursery rhyme as well as by Milton, Dante, Shakespeare and Welsh poetry full of mad experimental enchantment.
And sometimes, as in the following poem,
Exploiting sadness by avoiding rhyme is bilingual in the language of sentiment and the dry leaping language of a grasshopper.
So here's his poem to The Evening Star, which appeared at the same time as the man of the.
The fair haired angel of the evening. Now,
while the sun rests on the mountain's light Thy bright torch of love Thy radiant crown put on and smile upon our evening bed Smile on our
loves And while stout draws the blue curtains of the sky Scatter thy silver do on every flower that shuts its sweet eyes in timely sleep.
Let thy west wind sleep on the lake speak silence with thy glimmering eyes and wash the dusk with silver Soon full, soon to start withdraw.
Then the wolf rages wide Then the lion glares through the done forest.
The fleeces of our flocks are covered with those sacred to protect them with thine influence.
So Blake like and had one too. The first poet is watching the air and the first star to appear, which she called Inanna.
He calls by a series of pseudonyms. It's a fair haired angel.
A torch, a crown, a smile, a gap between curtains, a silver to a pair of eyes.
By means of this guesswork, he is tracking the light of Venus,
the double planet which the Greeks imagined was two different stars called Hesperides and Phosphorus, and his poem ShapeShift to catch it.
Three times. It breaks the line on a quiet word the on and with as if striving towards a longer metre.
But all the other lines have tight endings, light crown bared to eyes so that it's hard to find the rhythmical rule.
And you get the impression of two poems superimposed on each other whose crossing point happens at lines four and five.
Smile on our loves. And while they would cross the blue curtains of the sky.
Scatter thy silver dew. And that couplet and the first line ends on there, which is really, really weird.
I don't know any other poem that ends a line on the in that couplet the and Silva conceal their rhyme under louder words blue sky I do,
which may be a scissor shaped shift of colours and sounds.
It's like a James Turrell sky space in which you watch the dusk transform blue into silver in a frame of fractional moments.
Well, to conclude, I was walking uphill at dusk yesterday, which was actually yesterday in January when I was writing this lecture.
As usual,
I was watching the pavement in front of my feet when an old man walking downhill towards me suddenly lifted his crutch in the air and shouted,
Look at that. I turned round and there was the new moon, accompanied by Hasbro's the evening star.
Right behind my head, floating between houses like a pair of stigmatic eyes, both watching me.
What's that one beside it, he said.
I think it's Venus, I said, and a shiver went through me, which might have been fear, or it might have been sentimentality.
Thinking of the history of love still embodied by that name.
From Venus to Aphrodite to as dirty to Ishtar to Inanna.
Five female deities of contradiction being carried by that planet.
Of the dusk and the dawn. It is one of the great mysteries of perception that this tiny pinkish spark observed
by Galileo as a solid with phases caused by the variable light of the sun,
which it rotates, clouded and pockmarked through his narrow telescope.
But undoubtedly actual stony and topographical, like a dead likeness of the earth, is also the character of a Sumerian myth about disappearance.
Inanna, goddess of the evening star, who you can see here.
And when you say the name Inanna, you summon her story into the room, how she went down to the underworld to attend a funeral.
And as she descended, she kept losing layers of protection one by one.
Down to the last layer, which was the dead meat of her body.
Her like or like left hanging on a hook.
Two flies followed her and brought her back to life. And there is something in that sequence which describes what it's like to look up
through the matter of the human eye and see Venus appear again out of nowhere.
The phenomenon itself equivocate.
To catch the light falling 25 million miles in a series of present moments.
You have not to know what it is. You have to see it by chance.
By guesswork. By turning around suddenly in the street.
And, if possible, speaking like this. Though.
Fair haired angel of the evening.
Now While the sun rests on the mountain's light Thy bright torch of love Thy radiant crown put on and smile upon our evening bed Smile on our
loves And while thou draws the blue curtains of the sky Scatter thy silver to on every flower that shuts its sweet eyes in timely sleep.
Let thy west wind sleep on the lake speak silence with thy glimmering eyes and wash the dusk with silver.
Soon. Full. Soon to start. Withdraw. Then the wolf rages wide.
And then the lion glares through the Dun Forest. The fleeces of our flocks are covered with thy sacred.
To protect them with thine influence.
Thank you very much.