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Denny Bradbury Books

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Tag Archives: passing of time

Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by dennybradburybooks in Misc

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De:versify, life and death, Lord Tennyson, passing of time, the sea

Sandbar

Sandbar

“Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.”

Written in 1889, Tennyson speaks of his own impending death, which happened a few years after the poem was written. Within the poem, the image of the sea is used to represent the ‘barrier’ between life and death just as Denny Bradbury does in her poem ‘Broken in Time’ from her new collection of poetry “De:versify” when she writes of how the power of the sea ultimately breaks everything down to mere grains of sand:

“Sea reclaims its own
Pulling earth to drown
Sea reclaims its own
Shore has nowhere to turn.

Large boulders line the beach
Into pebbles given time
Then broken down to grains of sand
And silt and dust withal….”

Both Denny Bradbury and Tennyson draw reference to the vast natural power of the sea, with the ever-present danger to the men who cross it keeping the line between life and death always visible:

“….. However we perceive us to be
We will be brought down by time
We will be pounded and rounded
Until we are sand
Then we’ll hear only the sea” ~ ‘Broken in Time’

Tennyson talks of “crossing the bar” – a metaphor to describe moving over from life to death through the description of a physical bar of sand in shallow water.  He sets the poem at the end of the day, as if to represent a late stage in life and his reference to his own “moving on” means his description of evening can be seen to be illustrating old age. The sky darkens from ‘sunset’ to ‘twilight’ through to ‘dark’ and this notion of the passing of time is also echoed in the rhythm of the poem – each verse made of four lines of varying syllables.  Tennyson talks of the tide that ‘turns again home’:

“…But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home….”

Denny Bradbury does something similar in her poem “So Grey the Sea” where she talks of coming full circle and returning home, despite all the life experiences that one goes through:

“So grey the sea
All white the foam
I journey forth
To come back home…”

As I Walked Out One Evening – W.H.Auden

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by dennybradburybooks in Misc

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Anglo-American poet, De:versify, narrator, passing of time, W.H.Auden

Evening

Evening

“As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror?
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on”.

Wystan Hugh Auden (February 1907- September 1973) was an Anglo-American poet, who was born in England and was later an American citizen. He is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and his work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, the way he tackles moral and political issues and the way it is varied in tone, content and form. The central themes to his poems are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals and the relationship between individual human beings and the impersonal world of nature, just as Denny Bradbury does in her poem ‘Summer Cold’ from her new collection ‘De:versify’:

“Summer cold reflects your thoughts:
Dark and dank and all of nought-
Save that the sun will never shine
While he refuses to be thine.
Dreary days and colder nights,
Clouds hiding all the glorious light
That you know is there above….”

In Auden’s poem, he relates the nature of time to the human condition, with there being three different speakers throughout the poem: the lovers, the clocks of time and the narrator himself. Each speaker has a different attitude towards time – the voice of the lovers sees time as something that can be conquered and ignored when necessary; the clocks show time to be a ruling force that exists to keep people in line and the narrator talks of how time – and love – is a constant flow that brings about both change and opportunity and that it is something that nobody can control:

…’Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’….
Denny Bradbury refers to this theme of an everlasting love in her eight line poem, ‘Forever and More’:
“Say love is forever,
And we shall not part.
Say love is our destiny,
Our meeting of hearts.
When trouble leaps in,
We shall be like glue-
You joined to me, and me
Bound to you.”

And also draws on the theme of time combined with love in her poem ‘My Gift to You’:

“…Oh! Love is summer, it is spring –
But love is winter too.
Be happy in the tide of life:
My love, my gift to you.”

Like Auden, Denny looks at the way love relates to the passing of time and in Auden’s poem he is ultimately showing that despite the three different views of time and the nature of time, it is not something that one can escape from – as the lovers hoped – or as controlling as the clocks would show it to be but rather it is a constant and consistent force, full of possibilities, that shows that everything is always in transition.

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