Siegfried Sassoon, 'A 1940 Memory'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Cross-post from war_poetry:

A 1940 Memory

One afternoon of war's worst troubles,
Disconsolate on autumn stubbles,
I marked what rarely rambles by —
A Clouded Yellow butterfly.

From those appalled and personal throes
Time will dissolve the pain, one knows;
And days when direful news was heard
Be indistinct, unreal, and blurred.

Yet, every walk I pass that way,
A sunless mid-September day
Will faithfully recur, and I
Stalk that slow loitering butterfly.

by Siegfried Sassoon

Elegy: In Coherent Light, by Anne Stevenson

[hhimring]

Elegy: In Coherent Light
In memory of two English poets, Matt Simpson and Michael Murphy, d. 2009

Teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap—
Sparrows are plying their chisels in the summer ivy,
Chipping the seconds spark by spark out of the hours.
I read in each whistling chip the sun’s holography.
My brain’s a film, I’m made of timed exposures,
And pounding my ears and eyes with waves of light—
These animate flakes, these pictures I call sight.

But now you’re out of the picture, no one can keep
Coherent sightings of you, except in language.
All the warm rhetoric is wrong. Death isn’t sleep.
Faith in eternal love is love’s indulgence.
I prize what you wrote and meet you in what I write.
We still keep house in a living tenement of words.
Pull down their walls of ivy, and you kill the birds.

Notes:
*coherent adj. 4. Physics. (of two or more waves) having the same frequency and the same phase or fixed phase difference: coherent light. Collins Dictionary of the English Language.

holography n. the practice of exposing a film to light reflected from an object or objects and to a beam of coherent light; when the patterns on the film are illuminated by the coherent light a three dimensional image (a hologram) is produced. Ibid.

“Every bit of a hologram contains information about the whole scene. So you can snip it into pieces, and [in each piece] see the original scene.” the Observer, 15 May 1966, quoted in Oxford English Dictionary.

Anne Stevenson (died September 14, 2020)

Source: Poetry (July/August 2010)