The Aunt’s Stories: Degeneration – Part 5

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Colombo, Moonemalle Inheritance, Old Place

The engagement took place, and I went down to Colombo for the occasion. My mother had earlier indicated a softening of attitude in that she had told Iris she would come, and had indeed invited Tara and Nimal to come up together to stay at the Old Place after the engagement, but as it turned out she failed to put in an appearance. To me the illness that she pleaded did not seem grave enough to warrant her absence. I could not forget either that the more she and Michael had discussed the matter during his visit, the less likely it seemed that either of them would countenance the marriage.

In Colombo however, Michael and Nimal seemed to be as close as they had been in the past. On the night before the engagement Michael had organized a sort of stag party which seemed to have been a very successful event. Nimal scarcely made it to and through the next evening, though it only fleetingly crossed my mind that that might have been deliberate. Iris, who told me that Michael had been quite difficult at the start, was relieved. His demeanour that evening was impeccably enthusiastic.

Nevertheless I still harboured my suspicions. My mother had always seemed to me the most determined member of our family, and during his visit it had struck me how very much like her Michael was. However, it was not for me to upset things when everyone else seemed content. Besides I was not myself yet entirely satisfied about the marriage. At the same time, as I got to know Nimal better, I grew quite fond of him, so that it was not entirely out of selfish consideration for the family that I welcomed what seemed a solution to the problem.

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Poets and their visions 7 – Browning

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Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, Elizabeth Barrett, Men and Women, My Last Duchess, New Lankan Review, poems, Poetry, Richard de Zoysa, Robert Browning, Sonali Deraniyagala, The New Lankan Review, The Ring and the Book, Yasmine Gooneratne

Browning was long twinned with Tennyson as the other great Victorian poet, which is understandable given both his range and his talent. His popularity was also perhaps assisted by his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, which was in itself a romance with public appeal, while the fact that she was a distinguished poet herself added to his prestige. The very different romantic appeal of Tennyson marrying the sister of his adored best friend was not in those days the stuff of which romance was made.

Yet there can be no question at all about him being in Tennyson’s league, and even in Victorian times he was much less accessible. His great epic, The Ring and the Book, was not widely read then, and is almost unreadable now. Its elaborate plot, and the subtle characterization, based on an old Italian tale of intrigue, has little resonance in the modern world.

Poets and their visions 6 – Tennyson

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Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, George Gordon Lord Byron, Harold Bloom, Lyrical Ballads, Mariana, or the Madness, poems, Poet Laureate, Poetry, Romantic period, The Idylls of the King, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Wolcott Ballestier

The Romantic period of English poetry in effect ended with Byron’s death in 1824. Coleridge and Southey lived on for several years, the latter as Poet Laureate until 1843. He was succeeded by Wordsworth, who died in 1850 when he was 80. This was more than 50 years after he and Coleridge had revolutionized poetry with the Lyrical Ballads of 1798.

However hardly anything he wrote in the latter half of his life was memorable and by the 40s a new generation was emerging. They could not but acknowledge the achievements of the older Romantics but, as Robert Browning put it in the Lost Leader, they also registered their disappointment.

Browning however was not the dominant poet of his age. That position belongs emphatically to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who at the age of just over 40, succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate. Though he was not the first choice, his selection was eminently suitable, for he seemed to capture both the spirit of the Victorian Age, and its emotional predilections. This was established, in fact in 1950, with In Memoriam, an elegy for his great friend Arthur Hallam, who died young, and it strikingly conveyed the angst of a period in which old certainties about religion were fading away. Darwin’s discoveries about evolution shed doubts on what had long been thought of as the Gospel Truths of the Bible (including the Old Testament), while textual analysis of even the New Testament suggested that Jesus was not necessarily a divine being who had provided clear and convincing revelations to Man about God.

The Aunt’s Stories: Degeneration – Part 4

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Colombo, Moonemalle Inheritance, Old Place

Michael’s return had been eagerly awaited by everyone, the engagement having even been postponed until after he got back. He had been a great favourite at the Old Place too, which he had visited frequently during his school holidays, to spend some time with my mother and myself. He had usually come by himself, but occasionally he had brought the odd friend along, and a few years before he left for England he had wanted to bring Nimal. My mother had made some sort of an excuse and Michael had never repeated the proposal. I do not think however that that had any bearing on the fact that the visits had tailed off towards the end. As he grew up, we could not expect him to be quite as fond of the older generation as he had been before. Nevertheless, it was the earlier times we remembered when we thought of him; and he himself had written that he intended to come to spend a few days with us upon his return.

Not even for Michael though would my mother agree to go to Colombo. Obviously this was primarily because she did not want to meet Nimal in his present situation, but I also suspect that there was some sort of residual resentment against Michael for having initiated the attachment in the first place. Certainly when I told her that Michael had in a letter to me referred to the engagement with disbelief, she had simply sniffled and remarked with asperity, ‘What does he expect when he brings him into his own house and treats him like an equal?’

Poets and their visions 5 – Keats

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Autumn, Homer, Isabella, John Keats, Lamia, lyric and elegy together, Negative Capability, Ode on Melancholy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poems, Poetry, The Eve of St. Agnes, The Grecian Urn

Keats was just 25 when he died, in 1821, but there is no argument whatsoever about his reputation. The work he produced in his few years of poetic effusion is almost universally considered outstanding.

It is easy to understand why, if one considers only the great Odes on which largely his reputation rests. There is a unity of tone in all of them, but the subject matter that rouses his melancholia differs widely. The Grecian Urn is an inanimate object, of beauty, but also of animation, which allows a characteristic perception

 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

The Aunt’s Stories: Degeneration – Part 3

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Colombo, Moonemalle, Old Place, The Moonemalle Inheritance

I suspect that my mother’s cheerfulness in telling me the old story was because it functioned as a sort of revenge, that permitted her to place in a satisfactory perspective the acquaintance amongst the younger generation that called it to mind. Certainly more than once she drew my attention to the fact that Michael always took the initiative in the relationship, with Nimal obligingly following his lead.

Such patronising indulgence was not to be traced in the tone and the words she used with reference to the relationship after Iris’s letter of confirmation. As I mentioned, though previously it was a detached sort of interest I had felt rather than any form of pride, now I found myself sharing her attitude. The trouble was that it was not simply an isolated issue of different generations having different views about differences in status. If that had been the case I would have had no excuse to intrude my own feelings, if indeed I had had any adverse ones then, upon what was solely the concern of Tara and Nimal and possibly her parents. But as it was, the Old Place was involved. Tara had further responsibilities than simply to herself, and these she appeared to have ignored completely in her present course of action.

Poets and their visions 4 – Shelley

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Adonais, George Gordon Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poems, Poetry, The Masque of Anarchy, The Skylark, The West Wind, Vanity of Human Wishes, When the Lamp is shattered

Shelley, four years younger than Byron and nearly four years older than Keats, seems somehow sandwiched between them. He does not command the admiration, indeed adulation, that either of them does, and indeed there was a time when his work was belittled in Sri Lanka, when the Leavis-Ludowyke determination to find moral relevance in all writing held sway.

The simplicity of his Odes seemed then to indicate a less substantial vision than that of Keats, whose six great Odes are charged with philosophical as well as emotional intensity. But if Shelley’s aspirations were more basic, they are conveyed with a inspirational power that only the most jaundiced can resist. And if the ideas are not subtle, they are no less thoughtful, as these two different stanzas from The Skylark indicate.

Mirrored Images – 14

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1983, A J Canagaratna, A Prosperous Spring, A. JESURASA, Big Match, In Memory of the Anonymous Dead, Mirrored Images: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Poetry, poems, Poetry, SUNANDA MAHENDRA, Yasmine Gooneratne

SUNANDA MAHENDRA

 

A Prosperous Spring

 

This is the winter’s end when days pass ever so slow

the new grass and the tender leaves yet to open their eyes.

Gentle rains blending with the softest snow

fall intermittently on the earth.

This is the end of winter which enlivens

this London park.

 

Like smoke balls

dark patches

linger in the blue skies

giant, gaunt trees sans leaves

with linear patterns on them

soothe the spirit when you watch.

 

Not stopping to see

I walk across the park.

 

It’s said spring will dawn in a few days time

this time it’s going to be a prosperous one

they say

I feel lonely and cannot abide the time.

Do come and join me my love

 

they say this time it’s going to be

a prosperous spring

 

Sharp, green tender shoots burst forth

splitting the trees

heads slightly raised.

Is it the spring for which they yearn?

The groves amidst the park, do they too await the spring?

This time round, will it be

a prosperous spring?

The Aunt’s Stories: Degeneration – Part 2

Tags

Colombo, Moonemalle, Moonemalle Inheritance, Old Place, The Moonemalle Inheritance

On the next day even this straw had to be discarded, for there was a letter from Iris confirming that there was an engagement; and though this was still unofficial, and meant to be kept so for some time yet, Iris’s letter concluded with an eulogy of her son-in-law to be, which made it clear that she certainly was not to be counted upon in this crisis.

On reflection, I suppose my original assumption that Tara needed an excuse indicates that from the first I myself thought the match unsuitable; and I must confess that my reasons for this were not too different from those of my mother. Though I am only two years older than Iris, the fact that I have lived all my life at the Old Place, while she married early and went to Colombo, has contributed to my feelings about family being much more akin to those of my mother than to hers. Of course I am sufficiently of my own generation to realize, unlike my mother, that my prejudices cannot be objectively justified. But that in no way diminished the strength of my conviction that it would not be fitting for Nimal to end up as the master of Old Place.