George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) spent most of his life in Stromness, Orkney, which he always called by its original Norse name of Hamnavoe. If you want to go to the Orkneys, either you fly to the small airport at Kirkwall from Aberdeen or Wick; or you take the ferry from Scrabster (just west of Thurso) to Stromness.
I have been to Orkney twice. The first time, I stayed in Stromness at the house of an old couple named the Linklaters. Dinner consisted of potatoes prepared two or three different ways. At that time, I met George Mackay Brown after I stepped outside from the local Stromness bookstore bearing several books by him.
Here is a poem about seven men who, years ago, went to the market in Hamnavoe and what happened to them.
Hamnavoe Market
They drove to the market with ringing pockets.
Folster found a girl Who put wounds on his face and throat. Small and diagonal, like red doves.
Johnston stood beside the barrel. All day he stood there. He awoke in a ditch, his mouth full of ashes.
Grieve bought a balloon and a goldfish. He swung through the air. He fired shotguns, tolled pennies, ate sweet fog from a stick.
Heddle was at the market also. I know nothing of his activities. He is and always was a quiet man.
Garson went three rounds with a negro boxer, And received thirty shillings, Much applause, and an eye loaded with thunder.
Where did they find Flett? They found him in a blazing circle, All flame and blood, a new Salvationist.
A gypsy saw in the hand of Halcro Great strolling herds, harvests, a proud woman. He wintered in the poorhouse.
They drove home from the Market under the stars Except for Johnston, Who lay in a ditch, his mouth full of dying fires.
One of my favorite French poems is Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre,” translated as “The Drunken Boat.” The reader gets a feeling of strangeness floating down the various waters of this world. My favorite line in the original French is:
Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend
My translation:
And, rapt, a pensive drowned body at times floats by
Here is “The Drunken Boat” in its entirety:
The Drunken Boat
As I was going down impassive Rivers, I no longer felt myself guided by haulers: Yelping redskins had taken them as targets And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.
I was indifferent to all crews, The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons When with my haulers this uproar stopped The Rivers let me go where I wanted.
Into the furious lashing of the tides More heedless than children’s brains the other winter I ran! And loosened Peninsulas Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub
The storm blessed my sea vigils Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves That are called eternal rollers of victims, Ten nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses!
Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children The green water penetrated my hull of fir And washed me of spots of blue wine And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook
And from then on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent, Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;
Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres, The bitter redness of love ferments!
I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts And the surf and the currents; I know the evening, And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!
I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors, Lighting up, with long violet clots, Resembling actors of very ancient dramas, The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!
I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea, The circulation of unknown saps, And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!
I followed during pregnant months the swell, Like hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs, Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys Could constrain the snout of the wheezing Oceans!
I struck against, you know, unbelievable Floridas Mingling with flowers panthers’ eyes and human Skin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins Under the horizon of the seas to greenish herds!
I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes! Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm, And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!
Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers! Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!
I should have liked to show children those sunfish Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish. —Foam of flowers rocked my drifting And ineffable winds winged me at times.
At times a martyr weary of poles and zones, The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll, Brought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers And I remained, like a woman on her knees…
Resembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels And droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes Drowned men sank backward to sleep!
Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves, Thrown by the storm into the birdless air I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued By the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats;
Free, smoking, topped with violet fog, I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall, Bearing, delicious jam for good poets Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure,
Who ran, spotted with small electric moons, A wild plank, escorted by black seahorses, When Julys beat down with blows of cudgels The ultramarine skies with burning funnels;
I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off The moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms, Eternal spinner of the blue immobility I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!
I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands Whose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer: —Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself, Million golden birds, o future Vigor? –
But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter. Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!
If I want a water of Europe, it is the black Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight A squatting child full of sadness releases A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.
No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves, Follow in the wake of the cotton boats, Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames, Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.
He was a British writer who spent little of his life in England. Lawrence Durrell was born in India and lived most of his life around Greece and the Greek Isles. In addition to being a novelist (especially the four novels of The Alexandria Quartet), Durrell was a great travel writer. I am currently reading his Sicilian Carousel (1977) in which he travels around Sicily in a tour bus and, wonder of wonders, makes it interesting. He was also a poet:
Delos
For Diana Gould
On charts they fall like lace, Islands consuming in a sea Born dense with its own blue: And like repairing mirrors holding up Small towns and trees and rivers To the still air, the lovely air: From the clear side of springing Time, In clement places where the windmills ride, Turning over grey springs in Mykonos, In shadows with a gesture of content.
The statues of the dead here Embark on sunlight, sealed Each in her model with the sightless eyes: The modest stones of Greeks, Who gravely interrupted death by pleasure. And in harbours softly fallen The liver-coloured sails – Sharp-featured brigantines with eyes – Ride in reception so like women: The pathetic faculty of girls To register and utter desire In the arms of men upon the new-mown waters, Follow the wind, with their long shining keels Aimed across Delos at a star.
As I am currently reading Lord Dunsany’s The Charwoman’s Shadow, I thought I would give you a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, who admired Dunsany’s fiction:
Fact and Fancy
How dull the wretch, whose philosophic mind Disdains the pleasures of fantastic kind; Whose prosy thoughts the joys of life exclude, And wreck the solace of the poet’s mood! Young Zeno, practis’d in the Stoic’s art, Rejects the language of the glowing heart; Dissolves sweet Nature to a mess of laws; Condemns th’ effect whilst looking for the cause; Freezes poor Ovid in an iced review, And sneers because his fables are untrue! In search of hope the hopeful zealot goes, But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! Stay! Vandal sophist, whose deep lore would blast The grateful legends of the storied past; Whose tongue in censure flays th’ embellish’d page, And scorns the comforts of a dreary age: Wouldst strip the foliage from the vital bough Till all men grow as wisely dull as thou? Happy the man whose fresh, untainted eye Discerns a Pantheon in the spangled sky; Finds sylphs and dryads in the waving trees, And spies soft Notus in the southern breeze For whom the stream a cheering carol sings, While reedy music by the fountain rings; To whom the waves a Nereid tale confide Till friendly presence fills the rising tide. Happy is he, who void of learning’s woes, Th’ ethereal life of bodied Nature knows; I scorn the sage that tells me it but seems, And flout his gravity in sunlight dreams!
He looks so young. But, even as a teen, Arthur Rimbaud was something of a devil. After a torrid relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud gave up poetry at the age of twenty and set up in East Africa as a trader. There, he dealt in coffee, guns, and whatever else could turn a profit. At the age of thirty-seven, he died of cancer.
His poetry still resonates, particularly in France, where it is no crime to be transgressive. Here is one of his simpler, less surrealistic poems. (If you want to read more by him, try his long poems “A Season in Hell” or “Illuminations.”)
Novel
I
We aren’t serious when we’re seventeen. —One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade, Noisy cafés with their shining lamps! We walk under the green linden trees of the park
The lindens smell good in the good June evenings! At times the air is so scented that we close our eyes. The wind laden with sounds—the town isn’t far— Has the smell of grapevines and beer . . .
II
—There you can see a very small patch Of dark blue, framed by a little branch, Pinned up by a naughty star, that melts In gentle quivers, small and very white . . .
Night in June! Seventeen years old! —We are overcome by it all The sap is champagne and goes to our head . . . We talked a lot and feel a kiss on our lips Trembling there like a small insect . . .
III
Our wild heart moves through novels like Robinson Crusoe, —When, in the light of a pale street lamp, A girl goes by attractive and charming Under the shadow of her father’s terrible collar . . .
And as she finds you incredibly naïve, While clicking her little boots, She turns abruptly and in a lively way . . . —Then cavatinas die on your lips . . .
IV
You are in love. Occupied until the month of August. You are in love. —Your sonnets make Her laugh. All your friends go off, you are ridiculous. —Then one evening the girl you worship deigned to write to you . . . !
—That evening, . . . —you return to the bright cafés, You ask for beer or lemonade . . . —We’re not serious when we are seventeen And when we have green linden trees in the park.
When one wakes up in the middle of the hour of the wolf, one is likely to think of one’s own death, which is waiting somewhere in the wings. British poet Philip Larkin wrote a great poem about that feeling:
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anasthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Here is perhaps my favorite poem about love, Sonnet #116 by William Shakespeare. There’s nothing there about “a summer’s day” or Moon or June, but it covers its subject admirably.
Sonnet #116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
I ran across this short poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) about Brahma, the creator of all things in the Hindu religion. He is depicted as having four faces, one facing in each of the directions.
Brahma
If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
For some background on “the sacred seven,” check out this website.
The sttory is that Coleridge’s most famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” was the result of an opium dream that was rudely interrupted by an inopportune caller from Porlock. Maybe we should thank this caller, because if the poet wrote it differently it might not be the frenetic classic that we have come to know.
Kubla Khan
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean; And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Tarnmoor 
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