Old age hath yet his honour and his toil

Oh, yet we trust

from here

From In Memoriam (Alfred Lord Tennyson)


Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
         Will be the final end of ill,
         To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
         That not one life shall be destroy'd,
         Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
         That not a moth with vain desire
         Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
         I can but trust that good shall fall
         At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
         An infant crying in the night:
         An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

Dark House

Tennyson wrote In Memoriam to his very dear friend Arthur Hallam who died suddenly.  Modern readers might see their deep friendship as 'gay',  but it seems clear enough that it was a 'romantic friendship'  Whatever.  It was love.  This poem below is just one from In Memoriam.


DARK house, by which once more I stand
    Here in the long unlovely street,
    Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more—      
    Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
    And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
    The noise of life begins again,      
    And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

*        *        *        *        *

O days and hours, your work is this,
    To hold me from my proper place,
    A little while from his embrace,      
For fuller gain of after bliss:

That out of distance might ensue
    Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
    And unto meeting when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,      

For every grain of sand that runs,
    And every span of shade that steals,
    And every kiss of toothèd wheels,
And all the courses of the suns.

The speck that bare the King

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

   Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.


[Then there's this, and this]

Wonder where he is now?

.... and what he looks like.

Ah. "Old age hath yet his honour and his toil."

Morte D'Arthur

There drew he forth the brand Excalibur,
And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon,
Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth
And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt:
For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks,
Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth work
Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long
That both his eyes were dazzled, as he stood,
This way and that dividing the swift mind,
In act to throw: but at the last it seem'd
Better to leave Excalibur conceal'd
There in the many-knotted water-flags,
That whistled stiff and dry about the marge.
So strode he back slow to the wounded King.

Ordinary Blokes in Speedos

Not ripped, not gymmed out of their minds, not stuffed full of steroids. Just ordinary guys. Like you or me.  Mates.  Fond of each other and not afraid to touch each other.

That which we are we are
One equal temper of heroic hearts
made weak by time and fate

Odorous Cedar

The Lady of Shallot, by John William Waterhouse

O for a chamber in an eastern tower
Spacious and empty, roofed in odorous cedar;
A window to the ocean, lest of the stormy world
Too deep seclusion make me forgetful.

George Santayana

In Memoriam

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote In Memoriam A.H.H. for his very dear friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and a student at Trinity College. who died suddenly from a cerebral haemorrhage.   It is hard for us now to see their love as anything but homosexual, yet at the time, these intense, non-sexual friendships between two men were regarded as quite normal and perfectly "wholesome".   We hadn't yet had the psychiatrists and hate-mongers destroy any chance of non-sexual male2male love prospering.  Love doesn't have to be about fucking. But most straight men are too afraid of being thought 'mos to be really close to another man.  The saddest consequence of the long, vicious and futile crusade against homosexuality:  the tragic collateral damage -- straight male intimacy

The poem is very long, and very moving.  And whether Tennyson was having sex with Hallam or not is irrelevant.  This was the deepest and sincerest love.  Read the poem for yourself, and see.  For my friend who died, whom I loved, this canto, canto V, seems perfectly apposite.

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

 

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

A use in measured language lies;

The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

 

In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,

Like coarsest clothes against the cold:

But that large grief which these enfold

Is given in outline and no more.

I miss him so much.

That which we are, we are

Tennyson. From Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus)

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

O yes. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Old fashioned sentiments and values. But still true. Never give up. Never.

Bread of Heaven

It's been a while, dudes. My mother got serious pneumonia, and since she's 88 and bed-ridden, we all worried that it might be the end of her. So I dropped everything and flew to Cape Town to see her before she died. Fortunately, she rallied. And though there's plenty wrong with her health -- she's old, after all -- she's still alive. All the same, I get the feeling that this will be the last time I see her. Parting was very hard.

On Friday night, two days after I got back to Melbourne, I disgraced myself on the train home. I was listening to Bread of Heaven, the hymn they sing when the Wales rugby team plays a rugby team from another country. Well, it's hard even when nothing is wrong with my life to listen to hymns and anthems unmoved, but right now there is so much happening. So of course I started to weep. I compounded my grief by listening to Hallelujah, and then the first movement of the Beethoven Moonlight sonata. I'd been hiding from my grief till then. But it was no good. I thought of my mother. I thought of my sister, poor beloved sister, whose life is such a mess. I remember friends who have died -- three in the last year -- each one of them horribly, in pain. I thought of a good -- even a dear friend -- whom I quarrelled with fatally just a few days before. I thought of someone I know who I reamed out -- deservedly! -- but who is himself suffering great loss. I'm sorry, mate. I shouldn't have.

So... I cried. In front of a woman whom I often meet and talk to on the train and a handsome bloke with kind eyes and a real smile who watched me perplexed, unable to respond to something so outlandish as male grief.

Have you noticed how each grief makes you connect and remember all other griefs? Not like happiness. Each happy occasion is unique. My lady and I were talking about it and she said it's not fair or right that humans feel such pain. How are we supposed to bear our loss? When someone we love is taken from us, what do we do? How do we keep going? We were talking about a specific person, someone whom we knew as a toddler years ago in Brundall in Norfolk, the same age as my younger son, who died, inexplicably, a year ago. His mother cannot come to terms with her grief. How do you do that, come to live with the death of a child? How? I remember just a few short months ago when my younger son was in hospital with a mysterious disease, in the neural ward, while we sat next to him, numb with horror and shock, waiting, waiting for him to get better. If he had died....

Love, and those you love. It seems that there is an end to everything. And it came to pass, it says in the Bible. Kai egeneto. Nothing lasts. That's good and bad, isn't it?

But it does last. Memory lasts, and love. I still remember and love my father. I remember my friend who died. No matter what happened to our friendship, I loved him. And my children, each one of them, and my lady: they are there for me, they love me, they forgive me my sins.


In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.

The bells would ring to call her
In valleys miles away:
"Come all to church, good people;
Good people, come and pray."
But here my love would stay.

And I would turn and answer
Among the springing thyme,
"Oh, peal upon our wedding,
And we will hear the chime,
And come to church in time."

But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strown,
My love rose up so early
And stole out unbeknown
And went to church alone.

They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me.

The bells they sound on Bredon
And still the steeples hum.
"Come all to church, good people,"--
Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;
I hear you, I will come.

Indeed. Of course, A E Housman's love was male, his best friend, who was unable (or unwilling) to return his love, and in the end emigrated to Canada. 'Her' was a fiction, to satisfy the obscene passions of Victorian moral rectitude. Like me, Housman didn't have the consolation of religion. A formidable classical scholar, he knew that Rome and Greece didn't regard us queers as loathsome pariahs. He couldn't forgive the church its homophobia.

What I know as a certainty is that it is love that carries us through the griefs. Omnia vincit amor. Love conquers all. The Romans were thinking of sexual love I think, and that's all very well. But I'm thinking of the less glamorous kind of love, the love between friends and family, the kind of love that lasts long after sexual love and desire have withered to dust. Omnia vincit amor. They knew something, those Romans, more than they realised. How do we survive? I asked above. Well, we do. One step in front of the other. With the help of those who love us.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Tennyson. Very Victorian sentiments. Yet there is more than the obvious kind of courage. The obvious kind is bravery. But there is another, more profound, more valuable, much less glamorous. And that is the kind of courage you need to face despair. There aren't poems about keeping going day after day, about keeping a smile pasted on your face, day after day, about getting up before dawn to do your job because there are ppl who depend on you and bills to pay.

It's love, dearly beloveds. Agape or philia, if not eros (so untrustworthy, so false a friend, the good God Eros). Love and courage. Then... we can move mountains.

I shall end with a quote from the Book of Common Prayer, not because I am a Christian (I am not) but because it always comforted me when I used to take Communion, and because I think at their apexes, all the great religious thinkers commune with the divinity in a way which emphasizes the godhead not the doctrine, whether they are Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Sufi mystics or the Dalai Lama.

The Peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Peace of God, which passeth all understanding.

There is another quote from the Book of Common Prayer, which I find apposite:

From all blindness of heart, from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.

What amazing sentiments. And how few Christians apply or follow them.

I have wronged others. May they forgive me. Forgiveness, even more than love, is a two-way street. If you do not forgive others how can you possibly expect them to forgive you?. And without them we are as nothing, and our grief and loss destroy us.

Till next time.