César Vallejo - It’s Very Severe To Suffer

stridemagazine.co.uk/2006/Oct 2006/avallejoReviewMacEochaidh.htm
It’s Very Severe To Suffer


With Vallejo's verse you enter an internal, private space.
The reader is immersed in a mind struggling with its own terms, symbols and
meaning. The external is immediately the internal, as in poem 'LXXVII' from Trilce: -

     May this rain  never dry up.   //// rain rain.  / oh e: old man  raina poura
     Unless it  were now given me
     to fall for it, or unless they would bury me
     drenched in the water


//  rain / Edward Thomas    ...     / ~ and Joyce the snow falling .  on the living, and on the dead. /

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks  /
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.  /
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:  / beatitudes blessed are the
But here I pray that none whom once I loved  /
Is dying to-night or lying still awake  /
Solitary, listening to the rain,   /
Either in pain or thus in sympathy /
Helpless among the living and the dead,  /
Like a cold water among broken reeds, /
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,  /
Like me who have no love which this wild rain  /
Has not dissolved except the love of death,   /
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.  
} // Auden in praise of limestone.  but it is this, this.* 

/it all.  my

// think of these last lines but forget fr Edw Thms.  thinking was Auden " and cannot, _ _ _ _, disappoint."

Auden re landscape of limestone.  love only as (unchanging, unforgiving, unyielding ~ impassive)

yes, would conflate,  bcs Modern British Poetry 1996 first paper evenings in library Edward Thomas notes in notebook.  second paper weekend in Modesto all In Praise of Limestone.   

 * and further echo:   ?  "but it was this, this ~crime ~ among the living
I'm trying to remember something. 

...... Pinsky angels braiding (Privilege of Being).  Hass but I remember so much. Meditation at Lagunitas.  no. it is not these.  this, this keening among the living /really thought for a moment it was Pinsky./  //ahhhhhhh!  come on, that it took me this long.  maybe my most my. fr dupont, corkboard upstairs in cafe club? 1995? (w gabi, miles?) Menagerie  this, this miracle among the animals
 menagerie giraffe weeping   SO NEAR TO WAKING: MENAGERIE  -  allyacker.blogspot.com/2007/02/menagerie.html:
One morning you awaken too early and the animals are there sleeping peacefully
all around you. The hyena. The giraffe with his head cocked petulantly
on the lap of the hyena. And you wonder if they've been here all of your life,
dozing in the wake of a thousand moons, a thousand crimes
that you didn't have stomach enough to commit --

although it would mean this, this miracle among the souls of animals.
And you. You with sheen before your eyes that so blinds you from their fine-ness.
Finesse, they say, is a matter of competence

without ego. Hold me like flowers in the moon,
says the giraffe. You're not sure whether he's speaking to the hyena or to you
so you pretend not to hear him. This pretense goes on and on for years

until you have convinced yourself that the giraffe and the hyena
are not really there at all. Your denial is so complete
it is like an announcement to the world.

.. one night you hear .. nside of you say,
Phfaww! Action. Action is the only thing of any consequence!
It is the first voice in all the world, and it breaks the eggshell
of quiet. The sound shatters the sheen from your eyes
with astonishing effortlessness.

Suddenly there is a giraffe weeping like a flower in the moon.
You gather the giraffe like a bouquet of your own neglect. And you rock it.
You rock it . 





 -

 Vallejo.  Thomas.  rain.  cannot, _ _ _ _, disappoint.    ...limestone. 


... and Gerard Manley Hopkins  no worst there is none cliffs of sheer fall hold them cheap they who n'er hung there


an extract from the  moving prose poem, 'I Am Going to Speak of Hope':
I do not suffer this pain as César Vallejo. I do not hurt now as an artist, as a man or even as a mere living being. I do not suffer this pain as a Catholic, as a Muslim, nor as an atheist. Today I simply suffer. Were my name not César Vallejo, I would suffer this same pain. Were I not an artist I would suffer it. Were I not a man or even a living being, I would still suffer it. Were I not Catholic, atheist, Muslim, I would still suffer it. Today I suffer from deep down. Today I simply suffer.


'Alfonso, You are Looking at Me, I See':  
     and I still suffer, but you will no more, brother, never again!


the ultimate fall in Vallejo work, the fall that haunts a major corpus of his work, is that of
Republican Spain. This defeat of an ideal, a bid for Utopia, provides a platform for so much of Vallejo's most agonised and complex verse.
if night falls, 
if the sky fits inside two earthly limbos;
if there's noise in the sound of doors,
if I'm late,
if you see no one, if you are frightened
by the tipless pencils /hm/, if mother
Spain falls - it's a mere saying -
go out, children of the world, go look for her!
  [from 'Spain, Let This Cup Pass from Me']


//// still to fully read:
stridemagazine.co.uk/2006/Oct 2006/avallejoReviewMacEochaidh.htm
It’s Very Severe To Suffer
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