1. 'Landscape' by Robert Gray
A walk over sandhills by the sea, turning inland, then wading through dead grass and along railway tracks in the heat of noon, hearing the immense quiet of the bush that dilates on the light hammering sound of a bell-miner.
'Landscape' is an early poem by Robert Gray and is (I assume) about the north coast of New South Wales where he grew up. He has said 'the landscape you like is the landscape in which your senses first open, the landscape you’re born into… That’s why Wordsworth is right: it’s the landscape of childhood that captures, that influences you for the rest of your life'. I have recently been reading Gray's collected poems, Cumulus. A Sydney Review of Books article on this book discusses his debt to Wordsworth, and the influence of Asian poetry, evident in Gray's translations of haiku and his own short imagist poems.
2. 'Landscape' by Charles Baudelaire
A dream of gardens, bluish horizons, water weeping in alabaster basins, birds singing and lovers kissing.
In 'Paysage', one of the Tableaux Parisiens in Les Fleures du Mal (1857), Baudelaire pictures a bedroom where he could look out over the city and gaze at the night sky, at least until winter comes with its dreary snows - then he would shut out the world and live in this perfect imaginary landscape. There are many translations of course, including one by John Ashbery who sadly died earlier this month. Ashbery actually wrote his own poem with the title 'Landscape', included in his early collection The Tennis Court Oath. I have to admit I would struggle to explain what it's about - it certainly has nothing to do with scenic description. You can hear Ashbery read it in a recording accessible via Ubuweb.
Georges Antoine Rochegross, Tableaux Parisiens illustration, 1917
Source: Brown University
3. 'Landscape' by Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle
Olive trees, wild roses, flowering laburnum and a shepherd at rest; in the distance, fields of ripe wheat, paths through terebinth trees, woods, hills and a sparkling sea.
Another idyllic landscape is evoked in one of Leconte de Lisle's Poèmes antiques (1852). It is the only one of the poems in this list that mentions an actual location, Agrigento, which is in Sicily, where Theocritus lived and set his Idylls. I was going to include here a poem by another Parnassian writer, Paul Verlaine. However, as I explained in an earlier post, 'Landscape' is C.F. Macintyre's own title for a poem Verlaine called ‘Dans l’interminable ennui de la plaine’.
4. 'Landscape' by Federico García Lorca
A field of olive trees and above it a foundering sky of dark rain where the grey air ripples.
This beautiful short poem deserves quoting in full, at least in Spanish where there are no copyright issues. It was written when Lorca was twenty-three and published in Poem of the Deep Song, a book inspired by Andalusian gypsy music. It suggests both an actual 'motionless sunset' that Lorca witnessed and an imaginary landscape inspired by the music of the siguiriya. 'To me,' he wrote, 'the gypsy siguiriya had always evoked (I am an incurable lyricist) an endless road, a road without crossroads, ending at the pulsing fountain of the child Poetry.'
El campo
de olivos
se abre y se cierra
como un abanico.
Sobre el olivar
hay un cielo hundido
y una lluvia oscura
de luceros fríos.
Tiembla junco y penumbra
a la orilla del río.
Se riza el aire gris.
Los olivos,
están cargados
de gritos.
Una bandada
de pájaros cautivos,
que mueven sus larguísimas
colas en lo sombrío
5. 'Landscape' by Georg Trakl
Shepherds return to an autumn village: a horse rears up, a doe feeezes at the edge of the forest and yellow blossoms bend over the blue countenance of a pond.
The poem appeared posthumously in Sebastian in Traum (1915), Trakl having died of an overdose in a hospital in Cracow, exhausted after tending to soldiers wounded at the battle of Grodek. Ludwig Wittgenstein, also serving on the Eastern front, had come to Cracow to see him but arrived just a few days too late. Robert Bly mentions those yellow flowers in an essay on 'The Silence of Georg Trakl': 'The German language has a word for deliberately keeping silence, which English does not have. Trakl uses this word “schweigen” often. When he says “the flowers/Bend without words over the blue pond”, we realise that the flowers have a voice, and that Trakl hears it. They keep their silence in the poems.'
6. 'Landscape' by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann
A soot-covered tree, a wrecked car, defunct shoes in leafless shrubs, a fly-tipped sofa, a pair of stockings in a bough, a rusty bicycle frame.
This is a vision of the edgelands - the kind of modern landscape George Shaw has been painting recently. Brinkman was not much older than Trakl when he died in London in 1975, the victim of a hit-and-run driver. His posthumously published Rom Blicke expanded the form of his writing beyond poems like this one to include photographs and documents. In this book landscape was 'portrayed in a radically disillusionary way: as space where human life is shaped by capitalism, stupidity and egoism' (Monika Schmitz-Emans, in an essay 'The Book as Landscape').
7. 'Landscape' by John Hewitt
Not a 'fine view': for a countryman, a sequence of signs and underpinning this, good corn, summer grazing for sheep free of scab and fallow acres waiting for the lint.
Carol Rumens selected this as a poem of the week in The Guardian a couple of years ago. She notes that lint is another word for flax, once the most significant crop in Northern Ireland, where Hewitt lived (a bar in Belfast is named after him). The poem is an admonition to the reader, 'to understand any beautiful landscape in its utilitarian and social dimensions: to learn the names of places and people, and to value their language, as this poem, modestly, undemonstratively, has valued it.'
8. 'Landscape' by Dorothy Parker
A field of white lace, birch trees leaping and bending, hills of green and purple, breezes running fingers through the grass.
But this idyll is flat and grey 'because a lad a mile away / has little need of me.' I've always liked the idea of Dorothy Parker but found a lot of her writing, like this, not really to my taste. I include it here though to acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that all the names above are male. Perhaps this is not only a reflection of the limitations of my reading - maybe women writers have generally been too creativity to write a poem and end up calling it, simply, 'Landscape.'
These then are some 'Landscapes', written by poets from Australia, France, Réunion, Spain, Austria, Germany, Northern Ireland and America. And for Some Landscapes, this is actually the 999th entry I have written and posted. Over the years this blog has covered, like these eight poems, the rural and the urban, the pastoral and the post-pastoral, closely observed topography and places that could only be explored in a dream.
Tomorrow I have a special announcement to coincide with my 1,000th post.
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