The second book of The
English Strain is entitled Bad Idea and
it is a re-working of the whole of Michael Drayton’s sequence Idea; that’s 64 poems by the way (with
the addition of its ‘Address to the Reader of these Sonnets’). I’ve been at it
since July 2018, one a week (more or less). Very nearly half way now.
I write a little on this project here, commenting on the
project at about a third of the way in.
As regular returnees to this blog will also know I am posting
one sonnet at a time, when they are finished (but the original rule was: only if I feel it appropriate in terms
of topicality. But by now, over 30 poems in, it feels like a necessary part of the process). But
temporarily; so there is only ever one at a time on the blog. Earlier in the week than is usual.
Unusually I worked on this poem last night and this morning,
partly because the idea (Idea) came to me, and partly because I have events later
this week (this has been hectic, with family goings-on and my knee giving way),
but here it is. Drayton’s poem is a pint-sized Poly Olbion – a history of Britain through its rivers. I
thought to emulate: the Dee is there, and Trent
(look out Alan Baker, I’m coming to get you!). But then I thought: turn it
inside out and do the rivers of the world. I do a Danish river (Drayton has the
Dane Law Lea, but then I’ve got the Lee in the equivalent line.) There’s lots
of holiday memories here, including the flooding of the Vltava
in 2002, very frightening. The title looks back to one of my Charlotte Smith
poems.
XXXII Cry Me a River
The Arno’s a low ditch,
where Petrarch once
perched, though the Øresund, with no brag,
slips past islands in style. That wide boulevard
of imperial dream, the Danube,
drifts from Buda
to Vienna.
This is Idea’s first history lesson,
not
Moggy’s lizardy lecture on concentration camps:
the Spree curls between
bullet-pocked mirrors,
the crystal Seine shimmers,
as his words slither on!
Idea sees Vltava’s
wine-bottle whirlpool flood-waters
swell with global deluge (and plastic furniture) while
Amstel brims at the Dam, where beer embitters the Brits.
The Lee moulds Cork
into little isles we British torched.
By the Mersey’s
empty mouth to the world,
Friday night Idea sits in her
sick and weeps.
18-19th February 2019
Poor old Drayton (and poor old ‘Idea’ I nearly had her: ‘collapsed
in her sick yells We didn’vote leave cum bach’) is largely out of print at
the moment, though I have found a ‘Poly-Olberon’ project online, (the whole
epic is online, which is refreshing), and his fine sonnet sequence ‘Idea’ is
available online, including the one I’ve just translated above; have a look at
both, the latter being:
Drayton, Michael. ‘Idea.’ in Arundell Esdaile, ed. Daniel’s Delia and Drayton’s Idea.
London: Chatto and Windus: 1908. 67-141; online at Luminarium: http://www.luminarium.org/editions/idea.htm
London: Chatto and Windus: 1908. 67-141; online at Luminarium: http://www.luminarium.org/editions/idea.htm
Although I am using
Tuley, Mark. ed. Elizabethan
Sonnet Cycles: Five Major Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles: by Samuel Daniel, Michael
Drayton, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. Crescent
Moon Publishing, Maidstone: Kent,
2010,
a careless book that even misses one sonnet out!
The English Strain is
complete. The latest instalment of it, Hap:
Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch is now available from Knives Forks
and Spoons here:
I write about my sonnets generally here,
and here
and see here
and here for more on my Petrarch
obsession, which ‘The English Strain’ project into motion.
There are more excerpts from The English Strain in the current Poetry Wales.
Links to a number of the published poems from Non Disclosure Agreement (the last part
of the proposed book of The English Strain)
may be accessed here:
