Bee-loud glade

Today, I spent a few wonderful hours with my friend Kathy who has recently become a bee keeper. Her land is a-buzz - both with bees and with blooms. Happy bees, happy blooms.  I brought with me Carol Ann Duffy's volume of wondrous poetry entitled The Bees.  I discovered Duffy while living in Ireland - she was being interviewed on the radio and she read a few poems. I was hooked.   I read very, very little poetry written after 1950. I think many "poets" think that writing prose in short lines is the same as writing poetry.  Wrong, very wrong.  Each word should be thoughtfully, consciously formed and perfect in its relationship one to the other. And the words should render not only meaning and imagery but we need to smell them, touch them and hear them - let them buzz among the blooms.


Virgils' Bees

Bless air's gift of sweetness, honey
from the bees, inspired by clover,
marigold, eucalyptus, thyme,
the hundred perfumes of the wind.
Bless the beekeeper

                              who chooses for her hives
a site near water, violet beds, no yew,
no echo. Let the light lilt, leak, green
or gold, pigment for queens,
and joy be inexplicable but there
in harmony of willowherb and stream,
of summer heat and breeze, 

                                         each bee's body
at its brilliant flower, lover-stunned,
strumming on fragrance, smitten.

                                                 For this,
let gardens grow, where beelines end,
sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

Robert Duncan - Poet

The Wampum Snake by Mark Catesby circa 1740 Minneapolis Institute of Arts

 

The Wampum Snake by Mark Catesby circa 1740

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I never know when Ella will make herself known to me  - whisper in my ear or take my hand and lead me toward a new discovery. Today was an Ella day. While at work at the college library I decided to take a moment and look at the new book shelf. My eye immediately went to matching volumes by the California poet Robert Duncan who was born in Oakland in 1919.  I knew immediately that there would be an Ella connection.  He was raised by theosophical Hermeticists who undoubtedly knew Ella. Duncan mentions Ella when he is describing his Bakersfield high school English teacher, Edna Keogh - an Irishwoman who knew Ella. This is what Duncan says of Ella:

"She [Keogh] had had a link among her friends [in Berkeley] in a gaunt, beautiful, touched, old woman, Ella Young, whom I in turn as a student in Berkeley once heard tell of those Irish circles, of poets who practiced magic, of women who saw into what was beyond the common sense, of that folk who dwelt upon the margins of fairy."

Duncan discusses his life as a poet and his words remind me of Ella's own words. Kindred spirits, indeed.

"In my conversion to Poetry I was to find anew the world of Romance that I had known in earliest childhood in fairy tale and daydream."

Here is an excerpt from Duncan's poem Ode for Dick Brown...

III

Restore, restore the mystery to the land

and to the hearts of men restore

the mystery. In memory, bright Mnemosyne's

rich tapestry of voices, revelations,

and persisting scenes, the luminous

reasonable and mysterious oak thrives.

The source of our lives makes each man sacred…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Wampum Snake, above, I came across while helping a student. Days like today, thanks to Ella, I remember why I am here. 

Robert Duncan:  The Collected Early Poems and Plays. Edited by Peter Quartermain.

Robert Duncan: The H.D. Book. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman.

The Blessings of Spring

Joyous as Spring she came,

Anemonies like flame

Broidered the way:

Gauze flylets on the wing

Were there for cherishing,

And little birds to sing

Aubade and roundelay.

Excerpt from The Shadowed Wood 

Smoke of Myrrh (1950) by Ella Young


Photograph © Denise Sallee 2011

Sara Bard Field

Ella Young's close circle of friends, or as she would say "comrades," in California were as eclectic and as interesting as her circle had been in Ireland. They shared a vision, often expressed in poetry or in paintings, of a world deeply connected to the power, the beauty, the creation and the destruction of nature. They called each other by secret, magical names. They honored the turning of the great wheel with rituals on the wind-swept sands of the beach and in the leaf-shadowed twilight of the redwood forests.

Sara Bard Field (1882-1974) was one such comrade - a courageous and passionate woman whose home in Los Gatos she shared not only with her husband, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, but with the cultural "movers and shakers" of the San Francisco and Monterey areas. The great photographer, Ansel Adams, sought Sara out for questions of spiritual importance even as he sought out Ella's advice in his quest to be a poet.

Palo Corona 

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

So here is a poem by Sara Bard Field written after the tragic death of her son, Albert.

The Windy Hour

I walked a little while alone
Upon a wind-wrapped hill
And suddenly, as by command,
My soul grew listening-still.

Listening like the deaf and dumb
Who hear with haunted eyes
Fearful of learning life, half-true
And learning life, half-lies.

And this is what was softly said
Upon a wind-wrapped hill:
"Tomorrow shall you, like your soul,
Lie motionless and still.

Lie motionless and old and numb - 
Closed your ears and eyes
For death shall make an end of truth
For you - and end of lies. 

"For death shall make an end of truth
Save the one truth of sleep;
No ear need hear that silencing
No eye need watch it creep."

The Jumping Off Point

I've been thinking about a life of risk taking, of starting over, of wanting so badly the new, the different…


Have I been jumping forward all these years only to have landed where I began so long ago?

Ella Young and Romance

Jaufre Rudel dies in the arms of Hodierna of Tripoli (MS of troubadour songs, 13C North Italian, Bib. Nat. Française)

Somehow I missed Valentine' Day…but endeavor to carry on the theme of love and romantic gestures. I came across a poem by Ella from her volume of poems The Rose of Heaven - published in Dublin in 1920. As with many of her poems I find myself on an adventure as I research the names and places she mentions.  First, here is the poem - my gift, from Ella.

Rudel takes leave of the Countess of Tripoli

You are so beautiful, and yet the light
Ebbs fast and faster as I lie:
Outside 'tis noonday burning white
In that long-wished-for Southern sky.

I have no words now - I that made
So many songs for you.  All's done.
I have reached to you: my life essayed.
Naught further, Lady of the Sun.

Bend down and kiss me, let your hair 
Shut out the darkness for a space:
It may be death itself will spare
This Dream in which I see your face. 

So,  who are these people? Are they real? Imaginary?

My research led me to one Jaufre Rudel - a Provincial troubadour of the early mid-twelfth century and a Prince. The legend has it that Jaufre went on a Crusade after hearing about the great beauty and intelligence of the Countess of Tripoli - Hodierna. It is said that Jaufre was deathly ill when he reached Tripoli ( a small duchy north of Palestine) and the Countess came to him - permitting him to die in her arms. Ah, love and death - so painfully entwined. 

Others have written poems in honor of Juafre's quest and his death - but none, I feel, as perfect in its simplicity as Ella's creation.  

Reading about Jaufre Rudel reminded me of a favorite novel - A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay.  Kay's fantasy brings to life this age of romance, courtly love, and troubadours. 

Sometimes the road is rocky...

                                                                                               


I feel that I am slowly emerging from a very rocky beginning to this new year. Nothing traumatic for which I am grateful - but long, dragging, stressful days of finalizing financial affairs for my elder parents so we no longer have to worry about how to afford their remaining years in care. It took its toll on me - body and soul - but it is done now. I am regrouping. Yet again. As always.

I've given myself permission to think once more of the new novel waiting for my return, "pen in hand,"  and even a few visual pieces I long to create.

Then, this evening, I opened a book of Celtic literature to a stanza from AE's The Twilight of Earth. It was the perfect stanza for me to read and I thank you, dear Ella, for bringing these words into my world.

The power is ours to make or mar
        Our fate as on the earliest morn,
The Darkness and the Radiance are
        Creatures within the spirit born.
Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might
Forget how we imagined light.


Photograph © Denise Sallee 2012