"In Praise of Limestone"

W.H. Auden's poem "In Praise of Limestone" was one of the poems we read this week in our class (Modern British Literature). The poem appeared in our reading schedule at the same time I happened to be working with Plaster of Paris to make a mold of a Roman theater mask so I could hang it on the brick wall in my garden above the cobalt glazed ceramic birdbath. The original mask is heavy and also might disappear if hung outside, so I am attempting to make a duplicate with a plaster cast. I forgot how messy plaster can be, although I have been living in its dust for the last few weeks.

The last few weeks my house has been covered with dust in my apartment from builders who were replacing our roof. Before they could complete the roof, it rained heavily and ended up raining into our apartment and ruining much of the ceiling. The work continued inside the house with sheets of plastic covering everything in several rooms, but the sheet rock and plaster dust still managed to escape and leave a thick layer of fine white dust on everything in the house so I'm still working on excavating the rooms. The workers even left all the sheets and mess for an entire weekend where we had no room to move except a small area in one room to sleep on the floor! Boy, can I relate to this poem!! I have slept, ate and drank the dust of limestone or similar compound for a while now. So, while I am enjoying the results of our new roof and ceiling, rediscovering my space and belongings, and shaping new forms of creativity with the very limestone dust he speaks about, I thought I would take some time as Auden did, to praise the Limestone.

I couldn't help to think of the area around Naples that he visited while writing his poem and all the landscape and ruins that surround the area. The past and the present are embedded in the landscape and I found some images of the limestone features included below:

Italian Car in Ischia: This little lime-colored car would be fun to drive around in to see all the sites/sights...


Herculaneum Fresco: An example of pigment in limestone which retains its color over time.

Herculaneum - Painted Columns: Similar pigmentation used in limestone as well as the walls which have been layered over the centuries.


A Pompei couple: Dressed up in "the best" for their portrait, the baker and his wife want to be remembered as literate and elegant.



Plaster cast of a Pompei citizen caught in "the worst" destruction at the time of Mt. Vesuvius' eruption:

Neptune, Triton with various sea creatures/Tiled Womens' Bath which contains no water, but still retains "an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:"


View from Ischia:

Sometimes the best interpretation of a poem is how we interact with it, whether by interacting with the text mentally or through hands-on experience. Limestone and water seem to mix well, but Auden says it so beautifully in the last lines of his poem:

Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

"In Memory of Sigmund Freud"

W. H. Auden writes about Sigmund Freud in his poem "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" and first asks: "When there are so many we shall have to mourn, / when grief has been made so public, and exposed / to the critique of a whole epoch / the frailty of our conscience and anguish," and in the next stanza, "of whom shall we speak?"

Sigmund Freud, "an important Jew who died in exile," who gave back to humanity "while as they lie in the grass of our neglect, / so many long-forgotten objects / revealed by his undiscouraged shining" and which "are returned to us and made precious again; / games we thought we must drop as we grew up, / little noises we dared not laugh at, / faces we made when no one was looking." Auden goes on to say "But he wishes us more than this. To be free / is often to be lonely. He would unite / the unequal moieties fractured / by our own well-meaning sense of justice, "...

Auden speaks of our fractured inner lives as "exiles who long for the future" and in the next stanza he continues the stream of thought: "that lives in our power, they too would rejoice / if allowed to serve enlightenment like him / even to bear our cry of 'Judas', / as he did and all must bear who serve it."

We live now "in a world he changed / simply by looking back with no false regrets; / all he did was to remember / like the old and be honest like children." and we are now "able to approach the Future as a friend / without a wardrobe of excuses, without / a set mask of rectitude or an / embarrassing over-familiar gesture."

The accomplishments Freud made by developing scientific methods of psychoanalysis through talk therapy between a patient and analyst, through dream analysis and free association, entering the subconscious realm where he descended and embraced humanity on its deepest level with love rather than hate helped restore life in a broken world. He also taught by example which was one of the best accomplishments of all.

“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.” ― Sigmund Freud

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” ― Sigmund Freud

"A Splash Quite Unnoticed"

W.H. Auden wrote about the fall of Icarus in his poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts" about the apathy with which individuals view human suffering. The poem was written after his visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1938 and is about the painting of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus". Auden uses juxtaposition, enjambment and flow-of-thought technique to contrast the Old Master's technique of depicting casual daily life with the contradicting tragedy of Icarus drowning.

The same painting was written about later in a poem by an American modern poet, Williams Carlos Williams, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." The use of enjambment in Williams' poem helps to create a spiraling sense of urgency and disorder to the flow-of-thought technique. The broken lines also force our eyes to spiral to the next line, to digress from the sky to the landscape and to the sea where Icarus fell in the painting, surprisingly almost insignificantly.

In each of their poems the poet and the artist are using similar techniques.



In another poem by Stevie Smith, "Not Waving But Drowning," the indifference of humanity to recognize the suffering of others is brought to the reader's attention with the technique of parallel writing, where the narrator and the subject are juxtaposed to draw the reader in and identify with the subject who has drowned.

In Stevie Smith's poem there is no painting, but the psychological imagery and auditory impression of the dead moaning are impressed upon the reader in a vivid way.

Imagine "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Reading T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" brings many images to mind. His poem is rich with descriptions that create emotions, a sense of setting and descriptions that reveal the character J. Alfred Prufrock who dares to disturb the universe to step out and ask a question. Although the poem is abstract, he makes some references which create images of an aging man in pursuit of life and love, although he doesn't seem quite sure how to go about it and seems to wonder if it is too late. The poem's use of fragmentation and allusions to other works such as Dante's Inferno are similar to techniques used in his poem "The Wasteland," although the references were more recent works. His stream of consciousness was also similar, yet the transitions were more evident and his poem seemed more modern in its technique. He seems to be evolving, yet not quite solving the riddle, but answering the question with his own questions of a man's place in the universe.

I couldn't help wondering how others might imagine the protagonist Prufrock, so I looked online and found some interesting artwork with images of him:









There will be time "for revisions and decisions which a minute will reverse."

Edith Sitwell and "The Beekeeper"

Edith Sitwell's poem "The Beekeeper" was set to music by Priaulx Rainier as "The Bee Oracles," as mentioned in her biography on the link to Wikipedia. I like that her work included her love for landscaping and an interest in bees, as well as her notorious reading of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene as she toured the United States with her brothers and did poetry readings.

Although I didn't find a recording of Priaulx Rainier's "The Bee Oracles," her stringed trios were famous for their representation of nature in her sounds. The recording found on Youtube mentions that a BBC Invitation Concert in 1967 presented four works, including the first performance of the String Trio and the Suite for solo cello. In 1976 the BBC recorded and broadcast the complete chamber music, including her largest chamber work "The Bee Oracles."

Sitwell's interest in the distinction between poetry and music, applied to abstract performances is also something that I appreciate about her work as well, and that her flat was a meeting place for young writers which she befriended and helped with their work and publishing.