1 00:00:01,030 --> 00:00:04,540 Hello, everyone. Wonderful to see you all here. 2 00:00:04,960 --> 00:00:09,780 My name is Nola Hudson. I'm the investment professor of English literature at New York State. 3 00:00:10,510 --> 00:00:15,430 And like you all, I've been listening sometimes in this public building. 4 00:00:16,530 --> 00:00:19,800 But more often in the strange convergence of private space. 5 00:00:19,810 --> 00:00:25,450 On Zoom to the mesmerising lectures on poetry given by our professor of poetry, Alice Oswald. 6 00:00:25,470 --> 00:00:30,780 So it's a great honour for me. It's one of the great pleasure to be introducing Alice's lecture this evening. 7 00:00:31,410 --> 00:00:39,630 The title of the lecture is Anonymous and Anonymous. Onomah is a name in Greek, so I guess that's unnamed and named. 8 00:00:40,530 --> 00:00:46,590 But if one didn't know that, I might think autonomous was the collective form and Anonymous was singular. 9 00:00:46,890 --> 00:00:53,790 And that might chime with the powerful impression that Alice Oswald's poetry gives us of utterance being a collective activity. 10 00:00:54,480 --> 00:00:59,900 Utterance is a kind of mutterings or muttering or whispering analysis, poetry. 11 00:01:00,120 --> 00:01:05,489 I feel that speaking comes from everywhere, seems to be going on all the time, swirling about connected things, 12 00:01:05,490 --> 00:01:10,020 growing and decaying and disintegrating with injunctions to listen or sing or say what you like. 13 00:01:10,830 --> 00:01:14,730 Joining up conscious and unconscious selves, sleeping and waking, living and dead. 14 00:01:15,210 --> 00:01:22,860 And here I'm thinking of the beautiful poem from the collection Falling away with telephone us slowly roused by the unutterable 15 00:01:22,860 --> 00:01:32,580 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. 16 00:01:33,480 --> 00:01:38,760 So in that phrase, Allison's given us snoring as the body's arguing. 17 00:01:38,910 --> 00:01:45,299 I really love that. Now, I doubt there's any snoring in Alice's lecture tonight, but I thought I'd mention talk bonus, 18 00:01:45,300 --> 00:01:51,900 because it seems to me like our collective sort of semi somnolent inadequacy before The Miracle of Sunrise, 19 00:01:52,380 --> 00:01:58,650 but also because he's described in that exquisite poem as being very nearly anonymous. 20 00:01:59,430 --> 00:02:02,610 So I'm sure you all is intrigued, desire to hear what Alice has to say. 21 00:02:02,610 --> 00:02:06,540 So please welcome our professor of poetry, Alice Oswald. Anonymous. 22 00:02:06,670 --> 00:02:23,050 Anonymous. Thank you so much, Lorna, for that very interesting introduction and thank you all for coming. 23 00:02:23,560 --> 00:02:34,710 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. 24 00:02:34,720 --> 00:02:40,300 So I shall embody that in my person and try to include both sides of the room. 25 00:02:41,560 --> 00:02:48,670 Ambitiously as ever, I'm hoping to support what I'm saying with a few slides and sounds. 26 00:02:49,900 --> 00:02:56,140 I'm supremely technological, so you'll have to excuse me if I shout for Rich at the back to come and help me. 27 00:02:58,620 --> 00:03:01,500 So anonymous and autonomous. 28 00:03:01,770 --> 00:03:10,550 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. 29 00:03:13,040 --> 00:03:19,430 There was a man of double date, sowed his garden full of seed when the seed began to grow. 30 00:03:20,150 --> 00:03:24,370 It was like a garden full of snow. When the snow began to melt. 31 00:03:24,850 --> 00:03:29,440 It was like a ship without a boat when the ship began to sail. 32 00:03:29,950 --> 00:03:36,740 It was like a bird without a tail. When the bird began to fly, it was like an eagle in the sky. 33 00:03:37,520 --> 00:03:41,270 When the sky began to roar, it was like a lion at my door. 34 00:03:42,260 --> 00:03:45,650 When the door began to crack, it was like a stick across my back. 35 00:03:46,130 --> 00:03:50,210 When my back began to smart, it was like a penknife in my heart. 36 00:03:51,080 --> 00:03:57,680 And when my heart began to bleed to his death and death and death, indeed. 37 00:04:01,100 --> 00:04:04,700 I don't normally allow people to see poems because I prefer them to hear them. 38 00:04:04,700 --> 00:04:10,570 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. 39 00:04:11,710 --> 00:04:16,660 So I'll now read it while you can see it, which is a very different experience and please notice how different it is. 40 00:04:18,040 --> 00:04:23,830 There was a man of Double D sowed his garden full of seed when the seed began to grow. 41 00:04:24,340 --> 00:04:32,680 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. 42 00:04:32,860 --> 00:04:38,590 It was like a bird without a tail. When the bird began to fly to us like an eagle in the sky. 43 00:04:39,130 --> 00:04:42,670 When the sky began to roll, it was like a lion at my door. 44 00:04:43,540 --> 00:04:46,600 When the door began to crack to us like a stick across my back. 45 00:04:47,170 --> 00:04:51,150 When my back began to smart. It was like a penknife in my heart. 46 00:04:52,280 --> 00:04:56,810 And when my heart began to bleed to death and death. 47 00:04:57,760 --> 00:05:12,400 And death, indeed. So this poem first appeared in written form in 1783, in a collection called Gamma Curtain's Garland. 48 00:05:13,830 --> 00:05:19,200 Gamma Curtain is the name of an old woman from the 16th century who lost her needle. 49 00:05:19,350 --> 00:05:23,340 And Lorna, who have just been speaking to it, is actually quite an expert on Gamma. 50 00:05:23,580 --> 00:05:27,090 And so if anybody wants to hear more about her, you can ask Lorna at the end. 51 00:05:27,870 --> 00:05:34,140 I think she's a generic woman like Mother Goose or the sibyl of Kwami or the needle watchers of I Knew Poetry. 52 00:05:35,290 --> 00:05:39,550 But this poem or something like it will have been passing from mouth to mouth. 53 00:05:39,820 --> 00:05:44,460 Long before 1783. It is anonymous. 54 00:05:45,360 --> 00:05:52,620 It's called a nursery rhyme. But I'm not going to use that name because the poem goes on growing beyond the nursery. 55 00:05:53,160 --> 00:05:57,360 It alters and ages alongside anyone who knows it. 56 00:05:57,930 --> 00:06:04,470 To call it anything at all is to slow down the language, which is clearly on its way somewhere. 57 00:06:05,040 --> 00:06:08,689 I don't know where. No. 58 00:06:08,690 --> 00:06:16,760 I don't know anything about this poem. It sprang alive in my childhood, and it has trailed its characters alongside me ever since. 59 00:06:17,270 --> 00:06:20,330 The double man with his world of simulacra, 60 00:06:21,050 --> 00:06:29,390 the sad gardener watching his garden produce only white snow blooms, the frightened crew of an unarmed ship, 61 00:06:30,140 --> 00:06:40,760 the rudderless bird, the magically animated diabolical stick, and the dark self who is all of a sudden stabbed to death. 62 00:06:43,090 --> 00:06:52,000 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. 63 00:06:52,930 --> 00:07:01,240 None of its characters has a name. They are just circumlocution moving around each other in a film of similarities. 64 00:07:03,170 --> 00:07:09,860 It reminds me of Mats. It has the same shaping impulse as a set of numbers to the power of two. 65 00:07:10,550 --> 00:07:18,410 It evolves practically like a fan, and yet it is not a thing, but an essence in perpetual flux. 66 00:07:18,980 --> 00:07:30,890 Like an angel. Anonymous. If it were not anonymous, I would be drawn to the possessive pronoun at line 12. 67 00:07:31,430 --> 00:07:36,190 Twist like a lion at my door. I or my. 68 00:07:36,490 --> 00:07:43,810 Whenever those words appear in a poem, they open a windpipe down to a lung and I can hear a breather there. 69 00:07:44,440 --> 00:07:51,700 And in the lines that follow, I hear the hiss of hard feeling twist like a stick across my back. 70 00:07:52,180 --> 00:07:56,340 It was like a penknife in my heart. Who's hot? 71 00:07:57,240 --> 00:08:03,450 What kind of character would speak like that in rhyme about her own murder? 72 00:08:07,580 --> 00:08:14,270 Gerta said that human reason is an immortal being engaged in turning chance into necessity. 73 00:08:15,650 --> 00:08:24,800 And I think he should have added that human imagination by restoring mystery to the language, turns necessity back into chance. 74 00:08:26,740 --> 00:08:31,030 Which is why it's essential not to know too much about this poet. 75 00:08:32,600 --> 00:08:38,120 I might infer that she is a mother since her poem is apparently a nursery rhyme. 76 00:08:38,960 --> 00:08:44,540 But in order to suffer the poem's suddenness, I need to avoid its biography. 77 00:08:45,760 --> 00:08:55,270 Otherwise I would just grow sentimental. Let me define sentimentality as pre-programmed sorrow. 78 00:08:56,020 --> 00:09:00,550 Yes, I will grow pre sorrowful thinking about the man who double crossed her, 79 00:09:00,820 --> 00:09:04,420 which is why his seed would grow nothing but coldness and meltwater water. 80 00:09:04,930 --> 00:09:12,310 And now she's obviously being beaten and a pen knife unsuitable blunt is being pushed through her flesh and ribs. 81 00:09:12,910 --> 00:09:20,650 And if I follow this pre sorrowful track, I can quickly turn the poem into a female catastrophe. 82 00:09:21,920 --> 00:09:26,060 And I will call all kinds of named women as witnesses. 83 00:09:27,220 --> 00:09:32,450 Sylvia Plath, rising with her red hair. Virginia Woolf. 84 00:09:33,500 --> 00:09:42,480 Gamma Gert. Desdemona, the dear Sappho in her agonies of jealousy, say, shown again destroyed by politicians. 85 00:09:42,810 --> 00:09:55,950 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. 86 00:09:58,110 --> 00:10:03,240 Is one of her poems or part of one of her poems. I. 87 00:10:03,630 --> 00:10:10,740 The great poet i. And had one. There I stood, shouting to God with my basket of offerings. 88 00:10:11,100 --> 00:10:14,880 When that man pushed me away, took over my building. 89 00:10:15,270 --> 00:10:24,180 And now gloom follows my days. The light goes out, the shadows creep close malicious rain smothers the sun. 90 00:10:24,630 --> 00:10:33,150 He wipes his spit wet hand on my musical mouth and the little carving of me lies hooded in the dust underfoot. 91 00:10:36,930 --> 00:10:40,610 I the great poet I and had one too. 92 00:10:41,580 --> 00:10:45,210 There I stood, shouting to God with my basket of offerings. 93 00:10:46,260 --> 00:10:49,560 When that man pushed me away, took over my building. 94 00:10:49,800 --> 00:10:53,850 And now gloom follows my days. The light goes out. 95 00:10:54,270 --> 00:10:58,950 The shadows creak. Close malicious rain smothers the sun. 96 00:10:59,670 --> 00:11:03,450 He waits his spit wet hand on my musical mouth. 97 00:11:04,230 --> 00:11:08,370 And the little carving of me lies hooded in the dust underfoot. 98 00:11:12,380 --> 00:11:14,750 I don't know whether it is the prickle of fear. 99 00:11:15,740 --> 00:11:24,020 Or the goose flesh of sentimentality, which passes through me when I read that 4000 year old name and how to honour. 100 00:11:27,730 --> 00:11:33,440 It is written in five symbols. And the fourth is a star and hat. 101 00:11:33,460 --> 00:11:39,820 Do not. I'm not. I don't know anything about cuneiform, but I did look that up on Wikipedia. 102 00:11:41,020 --> 00:11:42,700 High Priestess of the Moon. God. 103 00:11:43,760 --> 00:11:52,280 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. 104 00:11:52,610 --> 00:11:56,120 The wife of the moon. The Stargazer. The needle searcher. 105 00:11:57,200 --> 00:12:04,540 In parts of Aboriginal Australia, it's not even permitted to speak a word which sounds like a dead person's name. 106 00:12:05,730 --> 00:12:13,680 So the language alters at each bereavement becomes more circuitous, less autonomous. 107 00:12:15,680 --> 00:12:21,500 The fear is that the dead will turn up if you name them. And that is exactly what happens with and her donor. 108 00:12:22,370 --> 00:12:26,050 Here she is. Oh, yeah, she isn't. 109 00:12:31,580 --> 00:12:34,610 Nope. She's gone missing, but I will describe her. 110 00:12:37,580 --> 00:12:41,540 Here she is in my previous PowerPoint in Flouncy dress and conical hat. 111 00:12:42,380 --> 00:12:48,470 There's an alabaster disk which shows her leaning a little forwards with one eye staring ahead, 112 00:12:48,800 --> 00:12:55,190 one ear poking out through her crinkled hair, walking somewhere with a group of bald men. 113 00:12:58,230 --> 00:13:04,200 The disk I'm referring to is made of alabaster and it measures about 25 centimetres across. 114 00:13:04,740 --> 00:13:12,070 And it was discovered in 1927 when a team of archaeologists was digging in the sand at the site of the city of a. 115 00:13:13,340 --> 00:13:19,969 So it's got that procession on one side with this extraordinarily dignified, 116 00:13:19,970 --> 00:13:24,830 statuesque or the tall woman with crinkled hair who's obviously had one, too. 117 00:13:24,860 --> 00:13:33,799 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, 118 00:13:33,800 --> 00:13:44,750 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. 119 00:13:46,940 --> 00:13:53,360 So 4000 years ago in Cuneiform, a named female names the ungraspable. 120 00:13:58,320 --> 00:14:01,470 When the bird began to fly, it was like an eagle in the sky. 121 00:14:02,190 --> 00:14:06,060 When the sky began to roll to us. Like a lion at my door. 122 00:14:08,820 --> 00:14:16,560 As with an had one as inscription, the air here is being drawn into a relationship with a poet. 123 00:14:17,460 --> 00:14:24,240 But in this case, in the case of the man of double date, the connections are much more frantic and fragile. 124 00:14:25,480 --> 00:14:30,520 There is more crosswind in the manner of much more ambient noise. 125 00:14:31,420 --> 00:14:38,320 Not just the human is audible, but the eerie, almost animal voice of the language itself. 126 00:14:38,980 --> 00:14:46,600 The hiss or buzz of consonants, the howl of vowels, rhythms of footsteps or water. 127 00:14:47,170 --> 00:14:50,620 Crack of a stick. Ghosts of previous meanings. 128 00:14:50,980 --> 00:14:55,540 Roots and side shoots of words, rhymes, repetitions. 129 00:14:56,440 --> 00:15:02,200 All these have wills of their own, which pull the poem away from its narrative. 130 00:15:05,130 --> 00:15:08,790 The truth is, once you remove the name of the poet. 131 00:15:10,060 --> 00:15:15,250 You discover that every word is a name of something, however abstract. 132 00:15:15,670 --> 00:15:24,100 Every word invokes a character, even a tiny, servile conjunction such as the word and. 133 00:15:25,040 --> 00:15:29,060 Is the name of a kind of spectral hand, which holds two things together. 134 00:15:30,810 --> 00:15:36,990 And is an ancient relative of the word in and it slides between anyone side by side. 135 00:15:37,590 --> 00:15:48,299 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, 136 00:15:48,300 --> 00:15:52,740 but never quite reaching, so that when it appears the grass shivers. 137 00:15:53,130 --> 00:15:56,610 But always in different fields and. 138 00:16:00,030 --> 00:16:05,340 The notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins are full of his explorations into single words. 139 00:16:06,380 --> 00:16:10,610 Grind. Grind. Good grit, Groat. 140 00:16:11,000 --> 00:16:19,020 Great grit. Grief. He attends to the frictions of those etymologies, he says, 141 00:16:19,380 --> 00:16:27,570 wearing tribulation grief possibly connected grief with a sound as a two things rubbing together. 142 00:16:28,470 --> 00:16:37,350 Then he concludes, I believe these words to be onomatopoeic, good, common to them all represents a particular sound. 143 00:16:37,350 --> 00:16:42,730 In fact, he says. I think the onomatopoeic theory has not had a fair chance. 144 00:16:43,650 --> 00:16:47,490 Compare. Crack. Creak, croak. Creak. 145 00:16:47,940 --> 00:16:53,610 Crackle. US crackle. These must be onomatopoeic, he says. 146 00:16:54,990 --> 00:17:02,340 And I agree. So listen. Listen again, please, to this prime example of honour matter poetry. 147 00:17:03,760 --> 00:17:08,250 There was a man of double date, sowed his garden full of seed. 148 00:17:08,860 --> 00:17:11,980 And when my heart began to bleed to his death. 149 00:17:12,160 --> 00:17:21,640 And death. And death, indeed. I'd like to describe that poem as the sound envelope of its final word. 150 00:17:22,760 --> 00:17:28,190 Indeed is an amplifying word whose meaning doubles whatever it accompanies. 151 00:17:29,270 --> 00:17:36,200 Indeed is two times indeed. And you can hear that repetition still happening in seed and plead. 152 00:17:36,620 --> 00:17:40,820 Well, the closeness of deed and debt multiplies the double. 153 00:17:42,010 --> 00:17:47,380 Both dead and dead, expressed the letter D doubled, and D is already a dead sound. 154 00:17:47,650 --> 00:17:50,680 It thuds a heavy tread. It digs. 155 00:17:50,890 --> 00:17:57,430 It shudders. It belongs to spades and dirges and widows and shadows. 156 00:17:58,150 --> 00:18:08,620 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. 157 00:18:09,040 --> 00:18:16,029 Six petals ephemeral, a form of stopped water, but with no fertility indeed follows. 158 00:18:16,030 --> 00:18:21,550 Did seed bleed like an affirmation of all doubleness? 159 00:18:28,020 --> 00:18:30,690 There's a snowflake. Curiously like a flower. 160 00:18:33,640 --> 00:18:41,980 The Welsh word for such a stream of apparitions is difalco, which means guesswork and probably pronouncing it wrong. 161 00:18:43,670 --> 00:18:51,800 Anyone's welcome to correct me. Anyway, dissolute is one of the disciplines of Welsh poetry, either for religious or obscene reasons. 162 00:18:52,040 --> 00:18:58,250 The poet keeps withdrawing the object from view and the reader is made to chase a series of doubles, 163 00:18:58,850 --> 00:19:02,780 as in Deford Williams 14th century poem about the missed. 164 00:19:05,070 --> 00:19:13,590 Mist most similar to night long scrolls dripping sheets like lists of rains along the path. 165 00:19:14,550 --> 00:19:23,520 It was a rusting filter. The Black Earth's bird net lamp plus fields of crisscross tracks, sudden cesspool, 166 00:19:24,240 --> 00:19:29,780 close fitting grey gowns for the hills and the same cloth for every curve of the valley. 167 00:19:31,310 --> 00:19:35,140 What? Old walls around each eye. Great. 168 00:19:35,150 --> 00:19:37,610 Splurge on a ridge of plume. 169 00:19:37,610 --> 00:19:48,980 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. 170 00:19:51,830 --> 00:19:59,720 And again missed most similar tonight long scrolls dripping sheets like lists of rain along the path. 171 00:20:00,290 --> 00:20:08,990 It was a rusting filter, the black earth's burden at lamp plus fields of crossed tracks, sudden cesspool air, 172 00:20:09,380 --> 00:20:14,630 close fitting grey gowns for the hills and the same cloth for every curve of the valley. 173 00:20:15,560 --> 00:20:19,160 What old walls around each eye? Great. 174 00:20:19,160 --> 00:20:27,260 Splurge on the ridge earth plume thick, grey, white, grey wisps of fleece smoke coloured metal hood, 175 00:20:27,620 --> 00:20:33,320 the leaf plated wood drums under the blows of the rain shower, but also groves. 176 00:20:37,690 --> 00:20:45,550 Like a primitive eye. This poem seems to record the whole process of turning sensor data into recognition. 177 00:20:46,550 --> 00:20:48,780 It refuses prior knowledge. 178 00:20:49,340 --> 00:20:57,530 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, 179 00:20:57,950 --> 00:21:02,840 walks suddenly into mist and gets lost in his own description. 180 00:21:05,680 --> 00:21:09,579 Adulteress mist. So in brackets concealing. 181 00:21:09,580 --> 00:21:20,649 So nothing, nothing dark. Cloaking the land with towers of twisted ghosts, pitch blinders thick and hideous darkening the earth. 182 00:21:20,650 --> 00:21:32,350 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. 183 00:21:32,350 --> 00:21:37,990 If the ghost turns, all this creeping smoke comes down, streaking the stricken woods, 184 00:21:38,800 --> 00:21:47,830 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. 185 00:21:48,310 --> 00:22:01,580 Will the world. Will it never dry out? Devalue or guesswork is also what is happening in the manner of double digit. 186 00:22:03,510 --> 00:22:12,090 Like Daffy Duck. William, the poet, embarks on a story, but her protagonist vanishes in a mist of similarities. 187 00:22:14,030 --> 00:22:17,750 It was like a garden full of seed. It was like a penknife in my heart. 188 00:22:18,680 --> 00:22:25,410 Like. Like. Like. How can a writer get around this world? 189 00:22:25,610 --> 00:22:32,460 To arrive at an idea. Or is it that the word itself is already an idea? 190 00:22:33,740 --> 00:22:37,190 In its original form. Gaelic, it means double body. 191 00:22:38,390 --> 00:22:44,870 Like Ga in proto germanic is a prefix similar to the Latin con meaning with or together. 192 00:22:46,300 --> 00:22:52,180 Like. Like Laken and Lich are all words for body or corpse. 193 00:22:53,330 --> 00:23:02,330 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. 194 00:23:03,590 --> 00:23:07,460 When the seed began to grow towards the courts of a garden full of snow. 195 00:23:08,000 --> 00:23:11,540 When the snow began to melt. Twas the corpse of a ship without a boat. 196 00:23:12,200 --> 00:23:16,100 When the ship began to sail, it was the corpse of a bird without a tail. 197 00:23:18,380 --> 00:23:24,920 Seven corpses are carried through this nursery rhyme or mother rhyme or mourning song or corpse canning. 198 00:23:25,850 --> 00:23:32,450 It is, in fact, a like weak dirge like the folk song collected by John Aubrey in 1686, 199 00:23:32,750 --> 00:23:38,540 which describes the soul's journey through purgatory as if it were a sequel to The Man of Deed. 200 00:23:38,750 --> 00:23:48,200 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. 201 00:23:48,350 --> 00:23:51,560 Comes back to his like at his wake. 202 00:24:03,130 --> 00:24:52,350 I'll play you a bit of the like dirge. Is saying he has seen signs. 203 00:24:55,220 --> 00:24:58,250 Find sleep time. 204 00:24:58,250 --> 00:25:03,170 Come see me cry. 205 00:25:03,590 --> 00:25:12,050 Because I saw. When. 206 00:25:13,100 --> 00:25:16,580 And so we know I. 207 00:25:18,910 --> 00:25:33,260 We know. To break a trend the Congress passed the crisis by. 208 00:25:39,180 --> 00:25:44,160 When on a train I. 209 00:25:46,510 --> 00:26:00,440 He tried to make it more complex than last night dressing table. 210 00:26:00,730 --> 00:26:08,500 So I feel bad for the cast and I'm sure. 211 00:26:11,070 --> 00:26:19,240 It's a simple sit down and put them. 212 00:26:22,460 --> 00:26:30,780 Nice to see you guys. A lot to squeeze in up to, though. 213 00:26:31,070 --> 00:26:50,280 It gives them. So when I think the two they better be surprised to see that they. 214 00:26:53,470 --> 00:26:56,470 All the UI acts. I apologised. 215 00:27:00,480 --> 00:27:04,360 Uh. Right. 216 00:27:06,230 --> 00:27:10,820 Yes. An interesting interruption to that extraordinarily beautiful song I think about. 217 00:27:12,840 --> 00:27:18,390 About the sole going, a particular route across the moors and at particular places on that route. 218 00:27:19,140 --> 00:27:23,070 It's asked whether it has given people shoes or clothes or money. 219 00:27:23,880 --> 00:27:27,750 So I'll read. All this happens in many versions, but I'll read one. 220 00:27:28,800 --> 00:27:35,910 They say night this say night every night and all fire and fleet and candle light and Christ receive thyself. 221 00:27:36,990 --> 00:27:43,980 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. 222 00:27:44,980 --> 00:27:51,910 If ever they were ghost chosen and shown every night and all, sit them down and put them on and Christ received those. 223 00:27:51,910 --> 00:28:00,940 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. 224 00:28:01,880 --> 00:28:07,100 If ever they were gold, silver or gold. Every night and all a brigade red dope. 225 00:28:07,100 --> 00:28:09,680 Find foothold and Christ receive thy soul. 226 00:28:10,720 --> 00:28:18,310 From Break It Read When I Must Pass Every Night And All To Purgatory Fire thou comes at last and Christ received I so. 227 00:28:19,260 --> 00:28:26,430 If meat or drink never goes nine every night and all the fire will burn to the bare bone and Christ received those. 228 00:28:26,430 --> 00:28:33,780 So this a night, this a night every night in the fire and fleet and candlelight. 229 00:28:34,260 --> 00:28:44,220 And Christ received those. So. So that's the story of the word like, which comes so often in the mind of indeed. 230 00:28:47,020 --> 00:28:51,910 In the canon of anonymous literature, words are the major poets. 231 00:28:53,090 --> 00:28:56,690 Remembering the thoughts of the speakers across the centuries. 232 00:28:58,160 --> 00:29:04,220 If I say like a dead body is lifted up my throat, under the shade of my palate, 233 00:29:04,640 --> 00:29:12,470 and into a gathering of listeners, each of whom lowers the word gently into himself or herself. 234 00:29:13,890 --> 00:29:18,840 If I say garden, I hear someone digging a patch of ground in England. 235 00:29:19,320 --> 00:29:23,490 Then he's digging in a Jordan or garden in medieval France. 236 00:29:23,970 --> 00:29:27,600 Then with horse and horse, the gardeners get older. 237 00:29:28,050 --> 00:29:36,570 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. 238 00:29:36,900 --> 00:29:42,240 A wrinkled Neolithic hand is grasping branches to erect an enclosure. 239 00:29:42,960 --> 00:29:51,450 The word invokes these places so that I read it back with birdsong, shovels and the stocks and starts of insects. 240 00:29:54,810 --> 00:29:59,670 And yet, of course, the poem does not just say like and garden. 241 00:30:00,060 --> 00:30:03,090 It says Twas like a garden full of snow. 242 00:30:03,510 --> 00:30:08,040 Twas like a ship without a belt. Twas like a bird without a tail. 243 00:30:09,080 --> 00:30:12,680 If I persist with my task of removing all names, 244 00:30:13,010 --> 00:30:21,260 I have to let go of the words themselves and stand here at last with nothing but a repetition of sounds. 245 00:30:23,960 --> 00:30:30,440 It was like a garden. 246 00:30:32,240 --> 00:31:09,570 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. 247 00:31:12,630 --> 00:31:18,240 Thank you so much. That was man of Double D, spoken by pigeons with all the names taken out of it. 248 00:31:19,440 --> 00:31:22,530 I've talked about automatic poetry. That is an honour matter. 249 00:31:22,530 --> 00:31:29,250 Poetry. And I believe and I truly believe that's where poetry begins. 250 00:31:29,670 --> 00:31:37,260 It's those those sounds that you hear all around you which actually slowly materialise into language. 251 00:31:37,260 --> 00:31:41,400 But the sound comes infinitely far for the sense. 252 00:31:43,630 --> 00:31:47,860 I actually know a man who can drum the sound of a limping donkey on a table, 253 00:31:48,370 --> 00:31:56,130 and he learnt it from listening to the poetry of the no guy people, which is spoken limply to the accompaniment of the BA. 254 00:31:56,800 --> 00:32:04,480 They say that the drummer is a wounded instrument, punished by Genghis Khan because his favourite son was killed by a limping donkey. 255 00:32:05,380 --> 00:32:14,260 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. 256 00:32:14,680 --> 00:32:22,000 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. 257 00:32:22,690 --> 00:32:30,430 When the Khan heard the rhythm of the limping donkey trampling his child, he grabbed the instrument, poured molten lead into its throat. 258 00:32:30,880 --> 00:32:37,060 And to this day, the hole in a dumper is lined with lead, and its speech has a faltering rhythm. 259 00:32:38,780 --> 00:32:43,640 And. I have a bit of Denver music, but if it doesn't play, I won't. 260 00:32:44,520 --> 00:32:50,900 Battle. This is the friend of the friend who drums on the table. 261 00:32:56,120 --> 00:33:56,990 Limping, don't you? It is hardly surprising that Genghis Khan punished the instrument. 262 00:33:57,590 --> 00:34:00,260 What a very flippant way to tell someone their son has died. 263 00:34:03,340 --> 00:34:09,280 Osip Mandelstam, of course, said that the sound of pentameter was learned from the oscillations of tides. 264 00:34:10,490 --> 00:34:18,410 I prefer the uneven evenness of hex amateur, which reminds me of the call and response of two almost identical birds, 265 00:34:18,650 --> 00:34:27,510 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. 266 00:34:28,290 --> 00:34:33,810 I put my ear to a green alarm clock and first it spoke in simple tick tock. 267 00:34:34,380 --> 00:34:42,540 Then between each foot it doubled and tripled and quadrupled the rhythm until it produced not a series of regular ions, 268 00:34:42,810 --> 00:34:47,520 but an infinite chaotic interval between one long note and one short. 269 00:34:48,390 --> 00:34:52,380 Perhaps that was prose. Or perhaps it was a single poetic line. 270 00:34:52,590 --> 00:35:04,840 So long it has still not ended. The world is full of one off lines and chaotic repetitions, ready to be turned into prosody. 271 00:35:06,000 --> 00:35:14,730 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. 272 00:35:15,540 --> 00:35:18,600 They suddenly hurriedly surge clattering up. 273 00:35:19,380 --> 00:35:25,710 It's a strange anti-gravity collapse like a congregation standing up to pray without thinking. 274 00:35:27,520 --> 00:35:34,330 In winter, you hear the hinge of the wings creaking. In summer, the sound is more pattering, more fluttering. 275 00:35:34,600 --> 00:35:38,980 It's as if the tree has offered up its leaves and in a few more paces, it happens again. 276 00:35:39,340 --> 00:35:43,390 An exaltation. A jubilation mixed with terror. And then again. 277 00:35:43,570 --> 00:35:49,150 And then again. And then there is the opposite sound, the sound of sightedness. 278 00:35:49,810 --> 00:35:59,170 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. 279 00:36:00,160 --> 00:36:07,240 On a summer afternoon, I once had my attention drawn to the sound of a man clipping his toenails out of an upstairs window. 280 00:36:07,840 --> 00:36:11,500 Such a dry sound. I had mistaken it for an insect. 281 00:36:12,550 --> 00:36:15,880 And once I heard a hornet stuck in a stovepipe. 282 00:36:16,360 --> 00:36:19,570 A most beautiful, resonant, irregular rage. 283 00:36:22,440 --> 00:36:25,590 I'm very glad that Ben Johnson is not listening to me. 284 00:36:26,460 --> 00:36:29,550 At least I hope he's not sitting in this room. You never know in Oxford. 285 00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:37,560 But Ben Jonson said that female poets have no composition at all but a kind of turning and rhyming fall in what they write. 286 00:36:38,130 --> 00:36:43,590 Such poetry, he said, runs and slides and only makes a sound. 287 00:36:44,800 --> 00:36:46,210 There may be some truth in this, 288 00:36:46,690 --> 00:36:54,730 and it might explain why women have traditionally been in charge of lament since the aim of lament is to move beyond human language. 289 00:36:55,630 --> 00:37:04,390 But I say it would be a shame to add composition to the cadence of do or tides or birds, hornets, toenails, 290 00:37:04,630 --> 00:37:11,740 or any of those other beings which turn and rhyme and run and slide haphazardly and only make a sound. 291 00:37:12,250 --> 00:37:22,080 But what a sound. One of the characteristics of contemporary poetry is its continuous enchantment. 292 00:37:23,300 --> 00:37:29,990 To break a phrase across a line, censors its emotion and therefore increases its lucidity. 293 00:37:31,210 --> 00:37:35,650 Here is Louise Gluck. Here is not Lewis Clark. 294 00:37:45,230 --> 00:37:50,960 Here is Louise Gluck with formidable discipline, speaking on behalf of a hawthorn tree. 295 00:37:52,460 --> 00:37:57,980 Her line breaks interrupt phrases so they have to be spoken quickly, brightly, 296 00:37:58,250 --> 00:38:02,930 as if being read off the surface of the retina as leaves might speak, if they could. 297 00:38:03,530 --> 00:38:07,760 A language of optics without sentimentality or emphasis. 298 00:38:09,580 --> 00:38:14,780 The Hawthorn tree. Side by side, not hand in hand. 299 00:38:14,990 --> 00:38:19,310 I watch you walking in the summer garden. Things that can't move. 300 00:38:19,320 --> 00:38:22,820 Learn to see. I do not need to chase you through the garden. 301 00:38:23,330 --> 00:38:28,909 Human beings leave signs of feeling everywhere. Flowers scattered on the dirt path. 302 00:38:28,910 --> 00:38:33,590 All white and gold. Some lifted a little by the evening wind. 303 00:38:33,890 --> 00:38:40,370 I do not need to follow where you are now. Deep in a poisonous field to know the cause of your flight. 304 00:38:40,700 --> 00:38:46,520 Human passion or rage? For what else would you let drop all you have gathered? 305 00:38:51,530 --> 00:38:57,679 I would be surprised if this habit of steadiness and dissociation had nothing to do with the 306 00:38:57,680 --> 00:39:03,560 presence of motorways which have laid down a substrate of emotionless noise in the mind. 307 00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:06,710 A modern song line from which everything is measured. 308 00:39:07,520 --> 00:39:13,760 And even when you escape the motorway and sit reading in a library, the lighting system will be humming you the same message. 309 00:39:14,270 --> 00:39:20,540 Though it's true these days there are also dustbin lorries which crash down streets at dawn on a monday, 310 00:39:20,690 --> 00:39:25,920 bringing relief to the rational buzz of light bulbs when they interrupt your sleep. 311 00:39:26,120 --> 00:39:33,230 They seem huge and emotional, lifting and shaking the world free of rubbish, then beeping and pausing as they reverse. 312 00:39:33,620 --> 00:39:38,990 Then dustman like surgeons assistants run urgently but without panic to the next heap of boxes 313 00:39:39,260 --> 00:39:44,480 and start another slipping glass slide like the weekly fall of Lucifer into the underworld. 314 00:39:45,140 --> 00:39:51,920 No one has better described this kind of sound than Les Murray in his poem Words of the Glass Below US. 315 00:39:54,300 --> 00:39:59,940 In attacking a glass foundry yard that has shadowy and bright as an old painter's sweater stiffening with light. 316 00:40:00,510 --> 00:40:06,959 Another lorry chockablock with bottles gets the raised thumb and there hoists up a wave like flashbulbs feverish in a 317 00:40:06,960 --> 00:40:15,960 stadium before all mass nosedive and ditch colour showering to grit starry mutually becoming the crush could cut it. 318 00:40:20,650 --> 00:40:26,530 When the tunes of things surface in poems, they are not quite the same as they originally were. 319 00:40:27,950 --> 00:40:33,169 A poem might speak in the or of a wood pigeon, but it is not the same as a wood pigeon. 320 00:40:33,170 --> 00:40:38,810 It's only a likeness or a likeness or look of another bird singing in another world, 321 00:40:39,320 --> 00:40:45,230 just as a sparrow is a likeness of the abstract form of a sparrow which a painter might catch on canvas. 322 00:40:45,620 --> 00:40:51,050 For example, Fat a mutatis a Syrian painter says that he paints with his ears. 323 00:40:51,740 --> 00:40:53,719 Sometimes, he says, he paints not the sparrow, 324 00:40:53,720 --> 00:41:00,170 but the flutter of sparrows wings by a scatter of seeds in the snow before they snag on a goat's hair snare. 325 00:41:02,170 --> 00:41:06,160 This intriguing sentence comes from an essay by the Kurdish poet Jalan Haji. 326 00:41:06,250 --> 00:41:14,890 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. 327 00:41:15,790 --> 00:41:21,230 This is what Jalan Haji writes. Fateh al-Mukhtar says he paints with his ears. 328 00:41:21,250 --> 00:41:28,480 He sharpens them to hear the smallest sounds in nature and the voices of childhood that echo through the vast expanses of his memory. 329 00:41:28,870 --> 00:41:35,110 Those voices are me, he says. The wind blowing at three in the afternoon and the cats at the tree house in the willows 330 00:41:35,380 --> 00:41:39,709 between the liquorice stalks and thickets of cane over the violet crowns of the globe, 331 00:41:39,710 --> 00:41:44,110 thistle through the ears of Barney, the feeble voice of his grandmother Saliha, 332 00:41:44,320 --> 00:41:48,370 singing a song of his uncle's death, her back against a black stone wall. 333 00:41:48,550 --> 00:41:59,070 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. 334 00:42:00,610 --> 00:42:06,040 One sunny morning in spring, young Fattah went to find his aunt on the high slopes filled with olive trees. 335 00:42:06,550 --> 00:42:09,610 Her brother had kicked her, killing the son in her belly. 336 00:42:10,570 --> 00:42:15,820 He saw her by a distant rock near the river where she'd gone off alone to relieve her brimming pain. 337 00:42:16,300 --> 00:42:21,430 The purity of a mother's milk means it must be spilt somewhere where it will never be trodden on and sullied. 338 00:42:22,060 --> 00:42:26,740 Fatah listens. For a long time he listens out to the grief, 339 00:42:26,740 --> 00:42:34,960 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. 340 00:42:37,150 --> 00:42:44,490 Please pause for a moment to imagine that sound and how the grass in the painting might hear and remember it. 341 00:42:53,820 --> 00:42:58,020 Grasshoppers are among the most ancient anonymous poets. 342 00:42:59,310 --> 00:43:05,070 For 250 million years, they have been composing and passing on their antiphonal hymns. 343 00:43:05,310 --> 00:43:07,140 And yet they are still contemporary. 344 00:43:07,650 --> 00:43:14,850 Like many insects, they are living expressions of simile so analogous to grass that it's almost impossible to see them. 345 00:43:15,980 --> 00:43:23,660 When you walk through a field, it can seem as if the grass itself, the grass indeed has been doubled and then doubled again. 346 00:43:24,890 --> 00:43:27,590 Similarity is the favourite verse form of nature. 347 00:43:27,830 --> 00:43:34,460 And no doubt Homer learned his love of simile not just by listening to poets, but by listening to grasshoppers. 348 00:43:35,000 --> 00:43:40,760 Or perhaps they were cicadas. The Homeric word goes gets translated into both insects. 349 00:43:44,370 --> 00:43:48,540 A group of old men was sitting by the sky and gates no longer of fighting age, 350 00:43:48,540 --> 00:43:57,240 but excellent speakers like cicadas in a thicket, kneeling on the tips of trees send forth their flower like voices. 351 00:43:58,140 --> 00:44:06,660 These ancient Trojans were sitting hunched there on the turret, and when they saw Helen approaching, sent forth their winged voices. 352 00:44:10,240 --> 00:44:16,270 What an extraordinary laminated simile in which the voices of humans have wings. 353 00:44:16,510 --> 00:44:21,730 And the voices of insects are flower like. According to the lexicon, 354 00:44:21,910 --> 00:44:31,150 Larios is an adjective formed from a Lily Lidle and Scott suggests their voices are Lily Pale Richmond Latin or translates it as delicate. 355 00:44:31,480 --> 00:44:39,160 Robert Fagan's avoids the strangeness altogether, saying they were eloquent speakers still clear as cicadas settled on treetops, 356 00:44:39,430 --> 00:44:43,570 lifting their voices through the forest, rising softly, dying away. 357 00:44:44,580 --> 00:44:49,380 But none of these catches the Darwinian exactness of Homer, 358 00:44:50,040 --> 00:44:55,920 in which an old man can speak the same language as a cicada, speaking the same language as a lily. 359 00:44:56,900 --> 00:45:02,870 The likeness is full bodied. Cross-species, synaesthetic, ecological. 360 00:45:03,820 --> 00:45:08,710 It's like that. A mother's painting, his memory of sparrows eating seeds on the snow. 361 00:45:09,460 --> 00:45:12,460 Or like Thoreau describing the spring in Walden. 362 00:45:13,420 --> 00:45:18,370 Who says you find in the very sands and anticipation of the vegetable leaf? 363 00:45:19,000 --> 00:45:25,000 No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly and leaves it so labels with the idea inwardly. 364 00:45:25,450 --> 00:45:28,810 The atoms have already learnt this law and are pregnant by it. 365 00:45:29,260 --> 00:45:36,520 The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. 366 00:45:36,820 --> 00:45:40,960 Even ice, he says, begins with delicate crystal leaves. 367 00:45:41,230 --> 00:45:45,670 And the whole tree is itself but one leaf. 368 00:45:47,560 --> 00:45:57,580 He actually took that idea from Gerta, who discovered in a garden in Sicily that all plants are simply a leaf re expressing itself. 369 00:46:00,250 --> 00:46:05,650 With these images in my head. I spent much time a few years ago watching grasshoppers in a field in South Devon, 370 00:46:05,860 --> 00:46:10,750 and it was lovely to lie very still in long grass until I could be mistaken for a corpse. 371 00:46:11,290 --> 00:46:22,510 Gingerly, shakily. At last, a soft voiced Homeric speaker of lilies would climb a bowling grass flower and describe delicacy in a winged sound. 372 00:46:23,350 --> 00:46:31,420 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, 373 00:46:31,690 --> 00:46:41,170 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. 374 00:46:42,130 --> 00:46:49,870 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 375 00:46:49,870 --> 00:46:55,030 the whole orchestra and wrapping the severed limbs in black plastic like body bags. 376 00:46:55,390 --> 00:46:58,510 Like a massacre of poets. Of grasshoppers. Of wings. 377 00:46:58,510 --> 00:47:02,200 Of lilies. Of paleness. Of the leaf. Of the sun itself. 378 00:47:06,920 --> 00:47:10,250 I must speed up. I'm going to have to speak quickly. 379 00:47:10,790 --> 00:47:15,559 If there is one language for old men, cicadas and lilies, then there is another language for mourners, 380 00:47:15,560 --> 00:47:23,180 widows, winners, liars for shapeshifting, Cersei for murderous nightingales, swallows, seabirds and sirens, 381 00:47:23,390 --> 00:47:30,260 all of whom are not lyrae or essen but ligase, which means piercingly shrill, painfully clear, 382 00:47:30,500 --> 00:47:38,810 high sorrowful whistling knife, sharp, dark, personal, most often female, a little out of control and other ish. 383 00:47:39,500 --> 00:47:43,909 Each time the word ligase or one of its derivatives is used by Homer when he 384 00:47:43,910 --> 00:47:48,170 mentions the wind screaming in the rigging or the desolate cry of the lyre itself. 385 00:47:48,590 --> 00:47:57,890 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? 386 00:47:58,620 --> 00:48:05,000 Odysseus liquefied like a woman weeps, pouring herself over her dead husband, piercingly screaming. 387 00:48:06,370 --> 00:48:10,419 The shrillness of that widow, as with all keening traditions and by the way, 388 00:48:10,420 --> 00:48:18,160 which tradition is not a keening for the conversation of the ancestors is deliberately cross-species since the dead, 389 00:48:18,790 --> 00:48:24,630 like women, have no composition but run and slide and only make a sound. 390 00:48:25,670 --> 00:48:29,030 All speech becomes riddles and similes when it turns to the dead, 391 00:48:29,330 --> 00:48:37,190 whose presence demands that prior ways of seeing sentimental, photographic ways of seeing are replaced by guesswork. 392 00:48:38,270 --> 00:48:42,140 Why are the mountains? Black says an anonymous Byzantine folk song. 393 00:48:42,800 --> 00:48:46,520 Why are the mountains black? Why are they shrouded in cloud? 394 00:48:46,790 --> 00:48:51,139 Does the wind torment them or does the rain lash them? No, it's not. 395 00:48:51,140 --> 00:48:54,200 The wind torments them, nor the rain that lashes them. 396 00:48:54,560 --> 00:48:59,090 It is Karen, the US who passes by with his company of the Dead. 397 00:49:00,350 --> 00:49:02,120 And here's a lament from Epirus. 398 00:49:02,540 --> 00:49:12,050 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. 399 00:49:12,200 --> 00:49:16,070 Come back with the breeze. Come back as soon as you can to your home. 400 00:49:22,710 --> 00:49:29,060 As Metro. There was a man of deed, so his garden full of seed. 401 00:49:29,260 --> 00:49:35,710 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. 402 00:49:36,640 --> 00:49:40,090 When the ship began to sail, it was like a bird without a tail. 403 00:49:40,720 --> 00:49:46,630 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. 404 00:49:47,170 --> 00:49:51,430 When the door began to crack, it was like a stick across my back. When my back began to smile. 405 00:49:51,460 --> 00:49:55,150 It was like a penknife in my heart. And when my heart began to bleed. 406 00:49:55,360 --> 00:49:58,240 Twist. Death and death and death, indeed. 407 00:50:00,070 --> 00:50:09,340 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, 408 00:50:09,340 --> 00:50:13,360 shrill one, so that by the time you get to the end, you have to go back and read it again. 409 00:50:13,870 --> 00:50:23,500 Yes, sure enough. It starts by jumping from chance to chance like a grasshopper, just continuously here and now, and listening and escaping. 410 00:50:23,890 --> 00:50:28,870 But then the liar starts up at like 12, and with it comes a past and a person. 411 00:50:29,710 --> 00:50:34,200 The voice loses its lightness. It begins to smell of lungs and sorrows. 412 00:50:34,450 --> 00:50:40,210 It grows on us. It belongs to a mother, to a grandmother, to a ghost. 413 00:50:40,510 --> 00:50:50,590 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. 414 00:50:52,170 --> 00:50:57,149 William Blake, for example, in that same year, 1783, with the Help of Friends, 415 00:50:57,150 --> 00:51:04,140 he published his poetical sketches in an edition of 40 copies with his initials WB on the title page, 416 00:51:04,590 --> 00:51:09,180 a hemi autonomous book, lyrical, but not always in the shrill tone of the lyre. 417 00:51:10,230 --> 00:51:18,720 Blake's poetry inspired by nursery rhyme as well as by Milton, Dante, Shakespeare and Welsh poetry full of mad experimental enchantment. 418 00:51:19,020 --> 00:51:21,210 And sometimes, as in the following poem, 419 00:51:21,570 --> 00:51:31,380 Exploiting sadness by avoiding rhyme is bilingual in the language of sentiment and the dry leaping language of a grasshopper. 420 00:51:34,550 --> 00:51:39,820 So here's his poem to The Evening Star, which appeared at the same time as the man of the. 421 00:51:41,130 --> 00:51:44,370 The fair haired angel of the evening. Now, 422 00:51:44,370 --> 00:51:53,669 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 423 00:51:53,670 --> 00:52:02,550 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. 424 00:52:03,470 --> 00:52:13,400 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. 425 00:52:14,000 --> 00:52:17,990 Then the wolf rages wide Then the lion glares through the done forest. 426 00:52:18,290 --> 00:52:23,930 The fleeces of our flocks are covered with those sacred to protect them with thine influence. 427 00:52:26,320 --> 00:52:35,230 So Blake like and had one too. The first poet is watching the air and the first star to appear, which she called Inanna. 428 00:52:35,470 --> 00:52:39,100 He calls by a series of pseudonyms. It's a fair haired angel. 429 00:52:39,100 --> 00:52:45,010 A torch, a crown, a smile, a gap between curtains, a silver to a pair of eyes. 430 00:52:45,340 --> 00:52:49,960 By means of this guesswork, he is tracking the light of Venus, 431 00:52:50,110 --> 00:52:59,800 the double planet which the Greeks imagined was two different stars called Hesperides and Phosphorus, and his poem ShapeShift to catch it. 432 00:53:00,720 --> 00:53:10,230 Three times. It breaks the line on a quiet word the on and with as if striving towards a longer metre. 433 00:53:10,980 --> 00:53:18,440 But all the other lines have tight endings, light crown bared to eyes so that it's hard to find the rhythmical rule. 434 00:53:18,450 --> 00:53:26,790 And you get the impression of two poems superimposed on each other whose crossing point happens at lines four and five. 435 00:53:30,770 --> 00:53:34,970 Smile on our loves. And while they would cross the blue curtains of the sky. 436 00:53:35,000 --> 00:53:42,690 Scatter thy silver dew. And that couplet and the first line ends on there, which is really, really weird. 437 00:53:42,710 --> 00:53:53,030 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, 438 00:53:53,420 --> 00:53:56,330 which may be a scissor shaped shift of colours and sounds. 439 00:53:56,720 --> 00:54:03,950 It's like a James Turrell sky space in which you watch the dusk transform blue into silver in a frame of fractional moments. 440 00:54:06,300 --> 00:54:12,630 Well, to conclude, I was walking uphill at dusk yesterday, which was actually yesterday in January when I was writing this lecture. 441 00:54:13,050 --> 00:54:13,650 As usual, 442 00:54:13,650 --> 00:54:21,750 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, 443 00:54:21,750 --> 00:54:28,440 Look at that. I turned round and there was the new moon, accompanied by Hasbro's the evening star. 444 00:54:28,650 --> 00:54:34,890 Right behind my head, floating between houses like a pair of stigmatic eyes, both watching me. 445 00:54:35,670 --> 00:54:37,320 What's that one beside it, he said. 446 00:54:38,010 --> 00:54:45,810 I think it's Venus, I said, and a shiver went through me, which might have been fear, or it might have been sentimentality. 447 00:54:46,050 --> 00:54:49,710 Thinking of the history of love still embodied by that name. 448 00:54:50,040 --> 00:54:54,720 From Venus to Aphrodite to as dirty to Ishtar to Inanna. 449 00:54:55,020 --> 00:54:59,370 Five female deities of contradiction being carried by that planet. 450 00:54:59,370 --> 00:55:08,529 Of the dusk and the dawn. It is one of the great mysteries of perception that this tiny pinkish spark observed 451 00:55:08,530 --> 00:55:13,059 by Galileo as a solid with phases caused by the variable light of the sun, 452 00:55:13,060 --> 00:55:17,410 which it rotates, clouded and pockmarked through his narrow telescope. 453 00:55:17,740 --> 00:55:29,620 But undoubtedly actual stony and topographical, like a dead likeness of the earth, is also the character of a Sumerian myth about disappearance. 454 00:55:30,100 --> 00:55:34,540 Inanna, goddess of the evening star, who you can see here. 455 00:55:36,380 --> 00:55:43,310 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. 456 00:55:43,520 --> 00:55:47,270 And as she descended, she kept losing layers of protection one by one. 457 00:55:47,450 --> 00:55:51,200 Down to the last layer, which was the dead meat of her body. 458 00:55:51,410 --> 00:55:54,800 Her like or like left hanging on a hook. 459 00:55:55,640 --> 00:56:02,900 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 460 00:56:03,170 --> 00:56:08,000 through the matter of the human eye and see Venus appear again out of nowhere. 461 00:56:08,660 --> 00:56:11,780 The phenomenon itself equivocate. 462 00:56:13,110 --> 00:56:17,940 To catch the light falling 25 million miles in a series of present moments. 463 00:56:18,540 --> 00:56:22,590 You have not to know what it is. You have to see it by chance. 464 00:56:22,860 --> 00:56:26,550 By guesswork. By turning around suddenly in the street. 465 00:56:26,850 --> 00:56:31,440 And, if possible, speaking like this. Though. 466 00:56:31,440 --> 00:56:33,210 Fair haired angel of the evening. 467 00:56:34,160 --> 00:56:44,059 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 468 00:56:44,060 --> 00:56:53,240 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. 469 00:56:54,250 --> 00:57:01,150 Let thy west wind sleep on the lake speak silence with thy glimmering eyes and wash the dusk with silver. 470 00:57:02,100 --> 00:57:06,960 Soon. Full. Soon to start. Withdraw. Then the wolf rages wide. 471 00:57:07,380 --> 00:57:13,800 And then the lion glares through the Dun Forest. The fleeces of our flocks are covered with thy sacred. 472 00:57:13,800 --> 00:57:17,880 To protect them with thine influence. 473 00:57:20,350 --> 00:57:21,130 Thank you very much.