Sherry Chandler

“The sea is calm tonight”

Matthew Arnold was born on Christmas Eve, 1822, but the fact didn’t seem able to rescue him from his high Victorian mournfulness. Not a poet to make one feel all warm and sentimental. I picked the poem below for no better reason than it is NOT “Dover Beach,” and being about birds, it gives me a chance to link to Harry’s Advent Calendar of Birds, where you will find some lovely photographs, including this one of the spotted nightjar. It reminds me of the whippoorwills that used to sing on my parents’ doorstep. That’s how far back in the country we lived. My brother used to joke that we lived so far back in the sticks, we had to pipe in daylight.

Rebecca has some lovely Courier & Ives-ish photos of the 30-inch snowfall on Droop Mountain that should put sleighbells into your head.

Speaking of which, here’s my favorite version of “Jingle Bells.”

Oh — and here’s the poem, and just in case you wonder what the poem’s on about, the story is here. Ovid’s version is here, scroll down. And no reference to Matthew Arnlod is complete without a link to “The Dover Bitch:”

Philomela

HARK! ah, the nightingale—
The tawny-throated!
Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark!—what pain!
O wanderer from a Grecian shore,
Still, after many years, in distant lands,
Still nourishing in thy bewilder’d brain
That wild, unquench’d, deep-sunken, oldworld pain—
Say, will it never heal?
And can this fragrant lawn
With its cool trees, and night,
And the sweet, tranquil Thames,
And moonshine, and the dew,
To thy rack’d heart and brain
Afford no balm?

Dost thou to-night behold,
Here, through the moonlight on this English grass,
The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?
Dost thou again peruse
With hot cheeks and sear’d eyes
The too clear web, and thy dumb sister’s shame?
Dost thou once more assay
Thy flight, and feel come over thee,
Poor fugitive, the feathery change
Once more, and once more seem to make resound
With love and hate, triumph and agony,
Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale?
Listen, Eugenia—
How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Again—thou hearest?
Eternal passion!
Eternal pain!

— Matthew Arnold, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 1962

Do I get points for having Willie Nelson, Matthew Arnold, and Ovid all in one post?

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Via Morris Book Shop, the most literate cities in the U.S. Lexington/Fayette County rank # 15. But hey! We’re ahead of NYC.

Cat with Charlie Resnick and Ovid

From John Harvey, Cold in Hand (Harcourt, 2008):

. . . he went into the kitchen and stood for a moment staring into an almost-empty cupboard. Time to restock. The smallest cat nudged against him, and he picked it up and felt the soft fur of its head against his neck, the quick beat of its heart against his hand.

What would Lynn say, he wondered. Jack it in or carry on?

He though about poor blood Ovid, mired now in bird shit, stranded and alone.

Later that evening, curtains partly drawn, glass of good Scotch at his side, he put the first of the Bessie Smith CDs on to play. Bessie’s voice was full and raw and strengthened, it seemed, by adversity. “After You’ve Gone,” “Empty Bed Blues,” and Resnick’s especial favourite, “Cold in Hand,” the young Louis Armstrong’s muted cornet shadowing her phrase for phrase and note for note.

Cold in hand.

How had Ovid put it? Freezing his balls off in Constanta. Something about snow?

One drift succeeds another here.
The north wind hardens it, making it eternal;
It spreads in drifts through all the bitter year.

Bitter. That wasn’t going to be him. Old and bitter. He smiled. . .

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A little bonus cat blogging: yesterday reading the Orwell Diaries for Christmas Day, 1938, I learned a new term. “Cat-ice” is ice forming a thin shell from under which the water has receded. Just in case you ever need to know that.

Orwell got 4 eggs on Christmas 1938. A big event, if you happen to be following the diaries.