He was one of the greatest writers of prose in the English language. Religio Medici and essay “Hydriotaphia, or Urn Buriall” are my favorites among his works. The following comes from Religio Medici:”:
We term sleep a death; and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. ’Tis indeed a part of life that best expresseth death; for every man truely lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself. Themistocles, therefore, that slew his Soldier in his sleep, was a merciful Executioner: ’tis a kind of punishment the mildness of no laws hath invented: I wonder the fancy of Lucan and Seneca did not discover it. It is that death by which we may be literally said to dye daily; a death which Adam dyed before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death: in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers, and an half adieu unto the World, and take my farewell in a Colloquy with GOD.
And here is a devout prayer he wrote:
An Evening Prayer
THOU whose nature cannot sleep, On my temples sentry keep; Guard me ’gainst those watchful foes, Whose eyes are open whilst mine close; Let no dreams my head infest, But such as Jacob’s temples blest. While I do rest, my soul advance; Make me to sleep a holy trance, That I may, my rest being wrought, Awake into some holy thought; And with as active vigour run My course, as doth the nimble sun. Sleep is a death. Oh, make me try By sleeping, what is it to die! And as gently lay my head On my grave, as now my bed. Howe’er I rest, great God, let me Awake again at last with Thee! And thus assured, behold I lie Securely, or to wake or die.
Born in Lithuania, Czeslaw Milosz had a chance to witness firsthand many of the horrors of the Twentieth Century. Milosz is perhaps my favorite Eastern European poet of the 20th century. In 1980, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is a poem of his entitled “At a Certain Age.”
At a Certain Age
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers. White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind Was too busy visiting sea after sea. We did not succeed in interesting the animals. Dogs, disappointed, expected an order, A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep. A person seemingly very close Did not care to hear of things long past. Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom. It would be humiliating to pay by the hour A man with a diploma, just for listening. Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what? That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble Yet later in our place an ugly toad Half-opens its thick eyelid And one sees clearly: “That’s me.”
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.
Tarnmoor 
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