Threnody for Four Voices

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THRENODY FOR FOUR VOICES

J.C. IRESON ———————————————

Belfast Lapwing

THRENODY FOR FOUR VOICES

J.C. IRESON

Belfast LAPWING

First Published by Lapwing Publications c/o 1, Ballysillan Drive Belfast BT14 8HQ Lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry Copyright Š J. Clifford Ireson 2013 All rights reserved The author has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Since before 1632 The Greig sept of the MacGregor Clan Has been printing and binding books

All Lapwing Publications are Hand-printed and Hand-bound in Belfast Set in Aldine 721 BT at the Winepress

ISBN 978-1-909252-18-9

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Threnody: for Four Voices was previously published by Peter Russell, Fairwarp, Sussex, 1961.

It was also published in Trilogy: Poems 1941- 2009 Belfast, Lapwing 2009.

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THRENODY FOR FOUR VOICES

GIRL MOTHER FRIEND CHORUS

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J.C.Ireson

GIRL Out of the circles of his own song falling The lark at evening plummets from the sky Down to the running grass. So dropped my joy.

Heart, hope, imagination, everything That set me flying over circumstance Fell, and left me, as evening leaves the fields When the spiralling magician in mid-song Has gone: silence, furled flowers, grey repose.

Grief put its sigil on the memory.

I turned from light into the formless grey, I turned from light towards the glittering dark.

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Threnody for Four Voices

CHORUS Was it a day of heat, The sun upon the wall The day he died?

Or did the blizzard beat With blast of bugles on the pall When the sleek cars went winding up the hill?

We are never loud in grief.

The dead man, the fallen leaf, Draw the authentic, murmurous Plaint of patent pity from us.

We are never loud in grief.

The sorrow-anthem underneath The fretting tide of life is ours.

Sea-like and old and cavernous It runs, a muted commentary Sent from a dismal promontory That faces into rain and cloud and dark.

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J.C.Ireson

MOTHER I am the one who grieves most, I Most regret and little understand This Scythian will of life which planned Fusion between create and die.

Others knew him. She through the higher Planes of illusion drew him far above Life, a being cast of human love, The tender stuff of her desire.

She’ll live altered; she’ll survive Moulded to herself, smooth, healed. But I, I or part of this obscure self die And change, husk-empty yet alive.

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Threnody for Four Voices

CHORUS Tired material rises tier on tier From bone to azure; azure back to bone By the neat universal chemistry Desperately turns, to the long monotone Of the immutable change-force, endlessly Sighing with a wind’s sound round the sphere.

Do not begrudge the luxury of a tear, The shedding of the lucid globe That is the prime of entity, The round, salt sorrow-thing itself.

Out of an obscure world of storm, Behind the eyes, behind the form Of things of the ordinary day, Caught in the chance-suspended play, It springs and falls and falling yields A swift reflected world, trees, fields, Buildings and the cloud-troubled sky One twinkling instant from the eye That weeps it and is smashed, changed, gone.

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J.C.Ireson

FRIEND Tears you say? These are globules of convention.

Sent from the eye they span two spheres, Spirit and sense. They are the eye’s invention, Essences of your past, your fears, Not his. Grief, which is the enemy of life So abets death that out of loss You come flaccid, inert, the tensed spiral strife Uncoiled, time loose, time waste, time dross.

Loss, regret, change, lead you the eternal dance, The full past beckoning endlessly, And the archetypal urge to permanence Force you the proud way remorselessly.

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Threnody for Four Voices

GIRL But there’s a richness in the fanged regret Whose venom sours every sense I have.

Time brings nothing now but desperate flowers Fluttering on the edge of winter storms.

Yet like a heavy dream the past comes swirling In radiant arabesques up to the day He died. That day I saw the trees striving And the superstructures of the street swept By the unending wind. I heard the swell Of traffic, voices, and a bell knelling An unkept moment of religious things Long past. Afterwards there was no telling In the silent flickering of the past My rich world of five senses heatlessly Burns. If I could explode the noiseless whirl Of memory I’d bring a blast of power That would blow a fragmentary world In clangour round me. But the tenderest times I’ve known have dropped into a still white void And now no violence of the mind can free them.

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J.C.Ireson

CHORUS How did he die? Before we mourn Tell us the story.

There’s nothing for the dead that fall Without some glory.

Nothing from us if his stone Rises like most: Grief of two women and a friend And then the vague host.

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Threnody for Four Voices

MOTHER Friends? You heard this friend reply.

Did the torn authentic cry Run into the soundless zone Leaving grief and crier alone?

If they mourn it’s abstractly, Not with bone and blood like me.

This last parturition goes Far beyond the vivid throes, Far beyond the tide of pain That cast him first upon the plain Day-world, separate yet fused, I the substance that he used For growth and growing’s mystery.

With each wave of being he Passed minutely from my sight Until the closing of the night.

Now I feel him closed once more In the primal simple law Of the pre-birth, yet emptily, Dream enfolded desperately In flesh, so our two lives appear Sphere on intersecting sphere: His the red and real, and mine A shadow-glass and opaline.

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J.C.Ireson

FRIEND Still what I’ve said remains. Your grief is all Nostalgia for your own past where he lives.

The artificial rise and fall Of life like fireworks in the dark is plain.

Up, puff, scatter, starfalls, down, and with a rain Of fire lose it as it dies and dissipates.

Yet your fears ring true. Friendship never can Help you or him, since all life waits, Passive in its becoming, for the friend, The outside power to shape a simpler end For lives ravelled in the dual being.

And the friend breeds solitude. Judges not friends.

Eyes judging, jealous, seeing Each amoeba movement magnified And measuring each with a rod of pride.

Perhaps there’s a reality that friends Extract? Hand, help, a depth of tolerance, A synthesis of hours that ends With this thin residue that’s all we save, As powerless as your eyes upon the grave.

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Threnody for Four Voices

GIRL With him the sprawling plunge and drift From ebb to ebb of this sea-lift Of time, this element, Would ease and let me live a time In a real firmament.

Globes of sense, cloud and chrysolite Conjured for me from the sight Of his magician face; A crystal universe of joy, An absolute of place.

Life gathered to a fountain crest, Sky-striven, poised, uneasy rest Of forced conglomerate drops Before the straining curve recoils.

The heedless wonder stops With his ghost. Common things before Had shaped an ideal order for Our chaos. Music blared From unctuous trumpets in a dance And stylised couples flared In the bland rhythmic lovers’ whirl Would, by his touch and eyes, unfurl For me the mental flight To latitudes of no known sky And the warm isles of light; 16

J.C.Ireson

Evenings filled with the shouting bells, The winter’s flashing wind that tells Of absent summers seen, The faces of the roses and The ancient surge of green.

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Threnody for Four Voices

CHORUS Sense to sense the illusion flows By innate suggestion.

Where the couple in Eden goes Goes life without question.

But, once the shrouded shape of death Points the elective finger, To inspirit an extinct breath Renders vain the singer – Vain unless the ragged voice Of the chorus raises A paeon to a proven choice And mouths formless praises.

If this life proved an obscure steel And fell by obscure danger, The prodigal crowd could not feel Pangs for such a stranger Who never triumphed, or never fought Noisily in the van of thought.

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J.C.Ireson

GIRL What do these things matter now to me?

In every glance I give are twenty years Of life, all heedless until now when he Revealed me first myself, my sex, my fears Of the wide lift and onset of the tide.

His sovereignty was in being, not in deeds Excrescent to the soaring flower decried By people raised above the primal needs.

If I could ever see the volant cloud Of all the new dead spiralling away, Such million millions of the protean crowd Dying could not wear my hope into decay.

One death diminishes me a universe, One outbreathed spirit draws the primeval moan.

Nightly I navigate a journey worse Than death’s crossing; out in the vast alone.

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Threnody for Four Voices

FRIEND She is exact, she, rooted in the real.

You’d want explosions at the heart of life, Cities rubbled and the ectoplasmic dead Swaying upon the air before you’d move.

As soon set the trees grieving for the leaves They lose as the eyes of shoppers weeping For the dead that are carried through the streets.

Live the neon life of bars, Stare the graded social stares, Fence away the awkward stars, Still the snake strikes unawares.

Lace the artificial world In laws too practical to lose, Keep a stiff umbrella furled And tread the street in fragile shoes.

When the natural change of death is on And undulations in the sensory world The only elixir of personal being Is the sensuous world-sense left behind And the harsh hierarchies of the human mind?

How far the lifting of the mask for she?

Found in this cumbered realm a brief entelechy.

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J.C.Ireson

CHORUS Choral boredom, hydromel, Frangipane and oxymel, Paradise and Christian Hell, The acts of men themselves foretell Eternity for ill or well, Merit, merit weaves the spell.

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Threnody for Four Voices

MOTHER I shall not doubt the force of human love.

These instinct-pangs were formed with the lava’s rage And the primeval substances that move With the power of the earth’s first age.

Hidden the flow of the determined stream.

Lust links to the essential ball of earth Love that dreams the free, gratuitous dream.

Alien appears each birth.

Out of lust and love the third reality Falls now into an absence. So I crave, For afterwards, a human certainty That clears the relics of the grave.

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J.C.Ireson

FRIEND No. Where your son has gone are no assessing angels, No perverted martyrs knowing one crooked way, No druidical slaughter of the chance-grown flesh Nor the spider-brooding of the Saved all day each day.

As for what he was, there is no need to answer In the easy stylized terms. There are no proper means Of recording what human beings are. You know The events of some, the deeds; but oblivion leans Sneeringly over the best recorded spans. I think It’s easier to measure the deaths a man contrives Through the crude burgeoning of self than how far hazard Or studied act radiates life through kindred lives.

Take small thoughts with you to the highest tops of mountains.

Rocket your breakfast-chat and headaches out among The nearest dust of stars. Will you humanise new things?

It’s true that thought, out of a sentient globe, has flung A unique radius. Still our brief trajectory Flares in a circumambient night. Inchoate always, We shift back into history and then into myth.

Fix as you can this centaur-thing of strictly numbered days.

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Threnody for Four Voices

GIRL A corresponding sunlight warms The country of projected forms.

Yet such a place is beamed upon By mind and not the igneous sun.

In such a place can only be A tenuous mortality.

And here the etheric people prove A strong ascending force of love.

This is the principle of change, Unseen, ungrasped, but no more strange Than the wave upon the shore.

Here I shall find my love once more And, in that place where he has gone, Comfort for this ephemeron.

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J.C.Ireson

CHORUS Prove it, prove it. We prize the quizzical eye.

Can you measure the weight of the soul, The clouds of spiritual force that roll Into a probed and valued sky?

Can you envisage self freed from the bone?

Can you dissect an angel’s flesh, Or justify in strict hard terms a mesh Of tissue subtler than your own?

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Threnody for Four Voices

FRIEND Are we so clever that the sun Must never more naĂŻvely run In the legendary blue?

It’s safe to hold the empiric law That peters out in greater awe Than fables and more true.

The inexact and lucent myth Illuminates the monolith Crystallised of hard belief And turns the angled will to know Towards the dissolving shape and show And the still sense beneath.

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J.C.Ireson

MOTHER Your paradises are all cold Heaven falls if I cannot hold Hope of a world that brings untold Lost children to their mother’s fold.

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Threnody for Four Voices

GIRL Everything is pitiless here, His silent globe of being near As the near transparent air, Cutting the contours of my chair, Glinting across the graven trees, Turning the park to porphyries.

Sweet Medusa, mine alone, Turning the moving earth to stone.

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J.C.Ireson

CHORUS Behind the quiet window-glass they go, Lips, voices, gestures, processed into mime, The subtle action of one personal show Fades into a mnemonic pantomime.

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Threnody for Four Voices

FRIEND Human concepts joined to disagree: The common chord is inconsistency.

Mind devours mind and, on the rhythmic stage, Mind changes mind as growth creeps towards age.

Precious the elixir, the brain too often caught In the embarrassed interplay of self and thought.

You make a telescope and pry Into the fleet receding sky, And number up to dizzy heights The finds of astronomic nights.

Yet somewhere somewhere breathes a woman That makes you scarcely more than human.

Your thought inventories the skies ?

She’ll melt your thought between her thighs.

The chorus changes to the various winds.

Girl and Mother veer towards truth with minds That wind like tendrils through the stops towards light.

All creeds deviate from the primal flight.

This man dies. Our own veil draws aside.

He leaves no sort of permanence outside A diminishing tide-pull on a neighbouring heart.

Perhaps in the useless practice of an art He could have found a relative prestige.

Deeds are a set, ambiguous vestige.

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J.C.Ireson

I don’t forget the visions of the past, Nor yet the dextrous hands that shake and cast The shrewdest images to sting the sense.

All vibration slows to somnolence, And so the wave of immortality Breaks against a wall of mutability.

And acts that seem the strongest structured tower End with the fossils or a tongue’s first power.

There is the preservation of the stone, The book, the myth, the opalescent bone.

No special radiance flashes from this star Out where the fleeting constellations are.

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Threnody for Four Voices

MOTHER Count man the greatest insect of them all, A species, brief, heroic to no end, A larger mayfly helpless to forfend, The day-span making him impractical?

No. I’ll die believing to the end he lives, Risk the negating void, the entombing space, The pall of absence on a dying face, Rather than fade in daily negatives.

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J.C.Ireson

FRIEND These negatives do not encompass life.

They follow from the processes of change That crystallize the first amorphous thrust Into the linear terms of human sense.

Would you congratulate the diamond Or carp at the obscure pressures of the earth That formed it out of darkness? You can see, No hand can ever hope to set a line About the edge of lives that, while they run In the experimental curve of space, Daily touch the still, invisible sphere, Fluid among the common obstacles.

Do you complain of those who, posing questions, Answer them all with inconsistency?

The questions are the urge out of the frame, The categories, and the answers are Religious fragments. Let us dream, I say, That we arise in beauty from the dead, And go an unmeasured way in spiritual worlds.

This is greater comfort than the thought That blood and limb and mind and upgrown bone Return in a tidy circuit to the source As sweet as an administrative dream.

One thing seems sure, that you are bound by laws That govern every victory themselves.

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Threnody for Four Voices

When you come through, hatched by essential light, Mothlike in some ethereal chamber, still The web will hang above you, still some light Shine out of an archetypal heaven, Still the aspiring plant-force drive you on, Remembering the anxious germ of life Sown on a spot inside a spray of fire, An obscure arm of a spiral galaxy.

Such change, you said, will then be no more strange Than the finite earthly panorama, No more strange than the sad light of windows That daily plays upon your private drama, No more than if you saw a blaze of butterflies Or fountains striving to the abstract sky.

But can this world have all the brightest dyes?

And does the circling corresponding sphere Fling its widest circles through our time, And the longest undulations disappear, Waking deep echoes between sense and sense, Boxing prime movement into rhythmic dance Here in this stray outpost of existence?

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J.C.Ireson

GIRL This precarious meeting-point will change For nothing can be settled on this sphere.

If these things are a rising from below, Such movement started will not falter here.

Here the simple value of one life Bursts in me with the elemental cry, Driving the jewels of light above the trees, Threatening the ancient thunder of the sky.

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Threnody for Four Voices

FRIEND You would have the violons Take up the theme of tears Each time that you remember him.

There is much music that has long been tuned To the broken pattern of the world.

Dreamy dreamy Daniel, Rivers flowing by, Crowds in the street and Dragons in the sky.

Through every thought and chord of death Runs the obstinate tremolo of life.

Death expands the personal globe.

The wink and spurt of every day Bring the darkness rushing round the flame, But draw its incandescence higher.

Thought is the first Promethean fire.

The sense that shrinks before the fragile forms of being Accompanies the calculating mind That measures the indifferent, noxious force And parallels the surge and spate Canalised between trim banks In the conventional mind.

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J.C.Ireson

Carnal-lipped, root-thrusting, leaf-exploding life Life flesh, life spirit, Life sucking at the plodding earth And soaring idealwards in a flash of green, Life suicidal, flowering Into a world of individuation, Flinging itself like the prodigal tide Of soldiers in vast wars, Forcing its will in pride and burgeoning And in the glyceric play of love.

Life breaking like the moving wave In a million droplets of illusion, Running through years with regular, deceptive glide, Checking the heat of sense, The rebel mane of hair Visibly whitening in the wind; Life vulgar, life exquisite, Doubting itself in the sad brain of many, Life to be transcended, Unlikely to be ended Within the compass of this smudge of being That paradoxically reflects Stars, faces and the light idea.

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Threnody for Four Voices

Say then that this friend Has ridden the upward current of the surge Towards the spiritual sphere; That here the contradictory forces of the self Have worked upon him, And the burning tender rays of love Have angelized him for a human term.

Little enough to say?

Few have in fact said more.

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J.C.Ireson

CHORUS Still shines the orb of beauty, Still glides the cloudy car.

Dark still are the fields where shining Star still looks to trembling star.

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Threnody for Four Voices

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L A P W I N G PUB L I C A T I O N S

J.C. IRESON

J.C. Ireson is Emeritus Professor, University of Hull (French).

Formerly Professor of French, University of Sheffield Other publications include: Victor Hugo.

A Companion to his Poetry (Oxford Clarendon Press) Lamartine.

A Revaluation (University of Hull) Imagination in French Romantic Poetry (University of Hull) Trilogy, Poems 1941-2009 (Lapwing Belfast 2009) The Silken Ladder (Lapwing Belfast 2012)

The Lapwing is a bird, in Irish lore - so it has been written indicative of hope.

Printed by Kestrel Print Hand-bound at the Winepress, Ireland

ISBN 978-1-909252-18-9

ÂŁ10.00