thine own meaning

Digging down for the meaning of the thing – my poem! - Edmund Gosse’s touchstone lines from the Tempest re-occur.  

An exhortation to self as much as anything, a piece to keep in mind, like a consequent line in the play on conscience – and where lies that? – I have it by heart. Imperfectly. I tend to confuse the plurals and must tamper with my variations to find the proper meaning, much as the piece incurs.

Finding the twin principles in my verse, and my Ariel, running through Hyde Park, I am at the Tempest again. Miranda to Caliban:

...I pitied thee.
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble
Like a thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them know…

Abenaki Land

This is Abenaki Land 

Fern bending to the banjo,
voice raised in Appalachian lament
claw-hammering, her songs belong to
backwoods streams, mountain track.

I saw her playing North Branch River,
our grey heads nodding in the dark
Fern Maddie in her element.

Stage centre with the house lights down
she looked more like the settlers
she has come from, more the woman
from Vermont, Fern sounded like

a native singer, crying songs
from the wild mountain forest,
crying songs out of the heart.

I was taken along to a folk evening in Corsham, not far, a show with three young women, including Fern Maddie, on tour. Good?  Yes, i'd say so.

The Great Khan

I find reported only words profound and direct from the Mongol Leader. And I am inclined to repeat them.  This from Basil Bunting’s Collected Poems. He notes:

A presumably exact version of Jengiz Khan’s correspondence with Chang Chun exists in Bretschneider’s Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources… &etc

 

Jengiz to Chang Chun: China
is fat, but I am lean
eating soldier’s food,
lacking learning.
In seven years
I brought most of the world under one law.
The Lords of Cathay
hesitate and fall.
Amidst these disorders
I distrust my talents.
To cross a river
boats and rudders,
to keep the empire in order
poets and sages,
but I have not found nine for a cabinet,
not three.
I have fasted and washed. Come

Chang: I am old
not wise nor virtuous,
nor likely to be much use.
My appearance is parched, my body weak.
I set out at once.

And to Liu Chung Lu, Jengiz:
Get an escort and a good cart,
and the girls can be sent on
separately if he insists.