Chanson de la plus haute tour

Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s’éprennent.

Je me suis dit: laisse,
Et qu’on ne te voie:
Et sans la promesse
De plus hautes joies.
Que rien ne t’arrête,
Auguste retraite.

J’ai tant fait patience
Qu’à jamais j’oublie;
Craintes et souffrances
Aux cieux sont parties.
Et la soif malsaine
Obscurcit mes veines.

Ainsi la prairie
A l’oubli livrée,
Grandie, et fleurie
D’encens et d’ivraies
Au bourdon farouche
De cent sales mouches.

Ah! Mille veuvages
De la si pauvre âme
Qui n’a que l’image
De la Notre-Dame!
Est-ce que l’on prie
La Vierge Marie?

Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s’éprennent!

 - Arthur Rimbaud

Too Few For Drums

                                   Shall they return to beatings of great bells
                                   In wild trainloads?
                                   A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
                                   May creep back, silent, to still village wells
                                   Up half-known roads.

                                          - Wilfred Owen

I have been asked about a book which I was reading: R. F. Delderfield's "Too Few For Drums"

Well, it was OK if you like that sort of thing. I finished it, which I couldn't manage when I tried the first of the Sharpe books. Delderfield apparently published non-fiction books on the Napoleonic Wars - although I don't believe I've ever seen any - and he certainly creates a believable milieu. The story is fairly formulaic as a small group of British infantrymen are cut off during the retreat to the lines of Torres Vedras and have to make their way back through enemy lines encountering all sorts of adventures and mishaps. The characters are stereotypical: callow officer, stolid countryman, shifty Cockney, fey (and also rather worldly) Welsh camp-follower etc.  Delderfield is mainly known as the author of the sort of family sagas they used to show on the BBC on Sunday evenings; A Horseman Riding By is the one that comes to mind. He did write another Napoleonic novel "Seven Men of Gascony", which is apparently told from a French perspective.

Fun fact, Delderfield also wrote the play on which the first of the Carry On films, "Carry On Sergeant", was based.

V

 I need to mark the death of Leeds born poet and translator Tony Harrison, a working class boy made good who kept his radical politics his whole life. 

Let's have a few lines from his most famous poem, which are sadly still as valid today as they were in 1985:

These Vs are all the versuses of life
from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,
East/West, male/female, and the ground
these Fixtures are fought out on’s Man, resigned
to hope from his future what his past never found.

The prospects for the present aren’t too grand
when a swastika with NF (National Front)’s
sprayed on a grave, to which another hand
has added, in a reddish colour, CUNTS.

There is going to be a reading of the whole poem on October 12th at Holbeck cemetery, site of his parents' vandalised grave which prompted the writing of the poem.

We Wear The Mask

 We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

       We wear the mask!

                  -Paul Laurence Dunbar

Accipiter nisus

 Poetry has been somewhat absent from the blog recently, so let's rectify that. The spark for this is a sparrowhawk who decided yesterday that my garden was the ideal place to eat his prey, a chaffinch I think. It's the circle of life.

It's a bit blurry, not to mention showing that the wargaming annexe could do with a coat of paint.

This is what Ted Hughes had to say about the visitor:

Slips from the eye-corner - overtaking
Your first thought.

Through your mulling gaze over haphazard earth
The sun’s cooled carbon wing
Whets the eyebeam.

Those eyes in their helmet
Still wired direct
To the nuclear core - they alone

Laser the lark-shaped hole
In the lark’s song.

We find the earth-tied spurs, among soft ashes.
And maybe we find him

Materialised by twilight and dew,
Still as a listener -

The warrior

Blue shoulder-cloak wrapped about him,
Leaning, hunched,
Among the oaks of the harp.

The Onion

The onion, now that’s something else.

Its innards don’t exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.

Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there’s only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.

At peace, of a peace,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there’s a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.

Nature’s rotundest tummy
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions’ secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.

        -   Wisława Szymborska

In another part of Spain

            There was a little girl,
            Who had a little curl,
            Right in the middle of her forehead.

            When she was good,
            She was very good indeed,
            But when she was bad she was horrid.

                       - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's possible that you are asking yourselves whether this Peninsular campaign hasn't been going on for rather a long while. It has, gentle readers, it has.

We fought through the conclusion of the latest battle between Spanish and French - Blake vs Marmont, but I still don't know where - over the last two Wednesday evenings. The first of those gave an excellent night's entertainment; the second didn't. Piquet, despite definitely being my rules of choice for Horse and Musket games, is a bit like Longfellow's little girl. Occasionally it is horrid.

Anyway, the Spanish duly lost, but did a reasonable amount of damage to Marmont's army. Elsewhere, Wellington has been trying to get to Sault, believing that he had inferior numbers. He did, but then a campaign card gave him the Old Guard, and then timely reinforcements to existing formations bolstered him even more. He was still too scared to take on the Iron Duke though and has attacked a nearby Spanish army instead. Will Wellington arrive in time to join the battle? I have no idea, because I clearly don't understand the campaign rules. 

I Can Still See You

 I can still see you: an Echo,

to be touched with Feeler-
Words, on the Parting-
Ridge.

Your face softly shies away,
when all at once there is
lamp-like brightness
in me, at the Point,
where most painfully one says Never.

                         - Paul Celan

It was out

                    "For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
                     And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

                     And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
                     As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
                     To and fro" - Francis Thompson

I have come to realise that my readers prefer not to have to wait too long for my guidance on the burning issues of the day. Well I hear you people, I hear you. It was out. And the moral? If you don't want to be stumped then don't go walkabout. The other one wasn't out; one doesn't have to know very much about cricket to understand that the crucial feature of a catch is that the ball doesn't touch the ground. The ball touched the ground, ergo it wasn't a catch. 

Here are The Duckworth Lewis Method and 'The End of the Over':

The quiet sense of something lost

 As in the winters left behind,

 Again our ancient games had place

-Tennyson, In Memoriam

How rude so'er the hand

 I like getting questions about blog postings, despite them usually being along the lines of "Why do you bother?" or "I suppose you think you're funny?". I am glad to say that I have received one which is marginally more constructive, an observant reader asking why I spelled 'gaily' as 'gayly' in the title of the previous post. Don't blame me, blame Sir Walter Scott. The quote comes from his narrative poem 'The Lady of the Lake'. I haven't read it - Scott is one of those authors who I firmly intend to read when the time is right, but as to when that time might be I can't say - but I have just been to a performance of Rossini's 'La donna del lago'.

The lady and, believe it or not, the lake

I'd never seen it before, and have read various theories as to why it isn't put on more often: either the staging and set requirements are too demanding or it's difficult to assemble the combination of voices needed seem to be the favourites. This production was a bit odd, but the music and singing was excellent and I enjoyed it thoroughly. 

The oddities included archaeologists and museums, neither of which appear to feature in Scott's original and no kilts or tartan, both of which certainly (*) did. The driver of the plot is the apparent real-life tendency of James V to wander around in disguise. He was, of course, the father of Mary Queen of Scots, but if you can guess 16th century from the pictures then you're doing better than me. The chap on the chair is the baddie, who bears the fine Scottish name of Rodrigo, and as whom John Irvin stole the show, brilliantly portraying the character's MacHeath-like psychopathic tendencies. The eponymous lady was wonderfully sung by Máire Flavin, whose Violetta for Opera North this autumn I am very much looking forward to.

* For 'certainly' read 'probably'; hard to know for sure without putting in the effort of actually reading it.

Return

Return often and take me,

beloved sensation, return and take me -
when the memory of the body awakens,
and old desire runs again through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.

​Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember...

                    - C. P Cavafy

​

Zolotoi Petushok

 I had been thinking for a while that one way of regaining my blogging mojo would be to revisit favourite themes from the past. The opportunity to do so was handed to me on a plate earlier today, when I returned home after my morning constitutional to find my spare bedroom on fire. The failure of smoke detectors to detect, well, smoke has featured here before in consideration of smouldering chariots, exploding laptop chargers and a number of others. However, damage was minimal and given that the whole episode would appear to be my fault, it's probably best to move swiftly on. Instead, I shall be looking to exploit the distinction of being the only wargames blog which reviews operas.

The plans of opera companies are fixed years in advance, and so it is entirely a coincidence that English Touring Opera are presenting Rimsky-Korsakov's 'The Golden Cockerel' at this time. The work is a satire on incompetence in war and on political corruption, first written in response to the debacle of the Russo-Japanese war and the resultant unrest in the streets, which Lenin referred to as 'the great dress rehearsal'. This could have been a 'cometh the hour, cometh the touring opera company' moment, in which art once again reflects and challenges real life. It isn't, and it doesn't, mainly because a focus on knock-about slapstick completely undermines any bite the anti-war message might have had. It is "all mirth and no matter", as Beatrice said. The director is also let down by a truly dreadful English translation of the libretto, whose sub-Gilbertian doggerel must have been really dated back the forties or fifties or whenever it was done. The original was based on a poem by Pushkin, who has presumably been turning in his grave for decades at the insult. 

Sadly, despite having a fairy tale at its heart it just never managed to become magical. Having said all that, the music was good, as were the performances, especially Paula Sides as the Queen of Shemakha and Alys Mererdid Roberts as the eponymous fowl. The design placed it in the pre- Great War court of Nicolas and Alexandra, complete with Tsarevitch (two actually) and Rasputin-like astrologer. The striking design on the curtain in place between acts was apparently inspired by the Rayonists, themselves active in Moscow and St Petersburg during that period. "What can you tell us about the Rayonists?" you ask, and "Not much." I reply. According to Wikipedia they could be considered to be Cubo-Futurists, so I suggest that's how you think of them. It also rather tantalising says that in 1913 they started to paint their faces and published a manifesto entitled "Why We Paint Our Faces". What it fails to include is any reference to the contents of said publication, which is sad because, who knows, if their argument had been convincing enough I may have reached for the maquillage myself. 

Snow...unceasing snow

“All Heaven and Earth

Flowered white obliterate...

Snow...unceasing snow”

- Hashin

Before the snow returned we managed to play some X-Wing. Playing it back-to-back with 'Jump Or Burn' was interesting rather than confusing. About the only things they have in common is that you use various lengths of cardboard when moving stuff, that they are good fun and they don't outstay their welcome.

The X-Wing ship/pilot combinations do seem unnecessarily complicated to me. My lack of knowledge of the films etc, means I can't be sure whether it's there to reflect the 'reality', or whether, just perhaps, it's there to prey on the gullibility of those who buy all those models, cards etc. Who can tell?  The rebels won both games we played, or possibly it was the Empire; once again, who can tell?

Other wargaming activity has been limited to putting a bit more paint on the not very recent castings and taking another photo that looks awfully similar to the previous ones posted here. About half way through I think.

Cast before the storm

"The rain set early in tonight,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

And did its best to vex the lake"

- Robert Browning

Work has stopped on the new items for the siege works. I cast up all the extra bits that I thought I needed, and then cast up some more, rather than leaving half empty bottles of resin mixture and having to throw them away.

However, they require spraying with primer outside, and a period of cold weather has now been followed by high wind and rain from storms Malik and Corrie, which have caused quite a lot of damage around here. They disrupted the roads, which is not uncommon; the railways, which happens from time to time; and, on the first occasion that I can remember, closed the Leeds Liverpool canal.

The Casa Epictetus has been unaffected so far, although I have to admit that the garden is still a complete mess following storm Arwen late last year. The normal protection offered by the high stone walls surrounding it was outflanked by all the energy coming in from the north-east rather than the more usual westerly direction. That's another thing which will preclude spraying the new castings until I clear a space.

Blizzard

Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down -
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes -
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there -
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

          - William Carlos Williams

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

             - Philip Larkin

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

                              - Matthew Arnold

Heat

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,

rend it to tatters. 

Fruit cannot drop

through this thick air - 

fruit cannot fall into heat

that presses up and blunts 

the points of pears 

and rounds the grapes. 

Cut the heat - plough through it, 

turning it on either side 

of your path.

   - Hilda Doolittle

PotCIIIPouri

 Well, here we are, April 11th, and there's a blizzard outside. On top of which the radio appears to have been hijacked by North Korea and is paying non-stop tribute to Kim Jong Phil, who has apparently left us at a tragically young age. 

Young people undertaking their Gold Award expedition

When I was last here it was for a book review. Trebian, over at Wargaming for Grown-ups, has now reviewed the same book, and it seems to have not gone down terribly well. I think our overall conclusions aren't that different - read the book, but make sure that it's someone else's copy - but for once I have been outintemperated (*). A suspiciously large part of his beef with the book seems to be that Dr Lewis hadn't read his (Graham Evans' aka Trebian's) book on Edgecote/Edgcote. I have read it and can confirm that it is a lot better than Dr Lewis' book, but if anyone genuinely thinks that 'Medieval Combat' is the worst book they've ever read then I can only suggest that they are not reading enough books.

According to obituaries that I have seen - not one of which, by the way, mentions the fact that he arranged the murder of Princess Diana - Baron Greenwich didn't have that problem, and in fact owned 11,000 books including many of poetry; so props to him. I am proud to say that this blog can exclusively reveal his favourite poem from among that large collection, one that befits both an old salt like him and this poignant moment in our nation's history:

There was a young sailor from Brighton

Who said to his girl "That's a tight one"

She exclaimed "Bless my soul

You're in the wrong hole

But there's plenty of room in the right one."

* This is definitely a word.