After Dunbar

I'm reprinting below a poem I wrote some years ago, published (and still available) in my 2010 collection: The floorshow at the Mad Yak Café (Red Squirrel Press).

I've always been very fond of Dunbar's poetry. To me he's the most accessible of the post-Chaucerian Scottish Makars. The range of subjects he covered is very wide, and I find him very readable. Some of his relatives held lands at Biel, near Dunbar, and it's been suggested that he took a surname from the place he came from - William of Dunbar.

The poem which follows came after reading one of Dunbar's most famous poems. It's important to say that this is not a 'translation' from Dunbar's Scots into modern English, nor is it a 'version' of the the original poem - it's very different, and goes off in different directions. It reflects on Dunbar's times - what you could and could not do in winter - but it also contains my own feelings and experiences, as an original poem should.

It's appropriate to the time of year, so here it is:

The Low Point
(after ‘A Meditatioun in Wyntir’, by William Dunbar, c 1460- c 1520)

“Dirk and drublie days” right enough,
but the heavens are not always sable –
some days there are true skies, and a wind
shifted from Siberia, to seek unfurnished skin.

Today the longer dark hours are filled
with entertainments then curtailed. It’s hard
to imagine what true darkness meant
for plays, poems, music – summer pursuits all.

Scratching by candle, each scrivener wrought
on quires of deckled paper, by goosequill and gallol,
words of wisdom, terms of love and learning,
some meters of beauty to catch future’s eye.

Warring motives lay on from every side.
Despair’s the easy one now, so much bad news
in these cold times, suggest the one
begets the other. Patience dismissed,

and fortune damned – predestiny leaves no room
for innocent actions. We may as well be doomed
as blessed, and with an equal chance. Causality
is on a winter break, along with warmth and light.

Slyly, with some pretence of favour, chilly whispers
question why I carry forward a life that soon
I’ll leave behind, with loves and friendships
broken links, unconnected leads and empty ears.

The forgetfulness of age is a brotherly service,
for remembrance of ourselves in youth
would give us pain – the way we were,
the things we did, the chances missed.

And death to come is final leveller;
low or high, we similarly stoop to enter
the same one-way system, a singularity,
the dimming doorway to a hall of nothing.

But yet, four minutes today, five tomorrow,
the nights imperceptibly shorten, and at some point
I’ll know times have changed, that summer pleasures
lie ahead, and will return. The ball rolls round.

Copyright © Colin Will, 2010

The burial of the Count of Orgaz

I wrote this haibun for a prompt from the Eyemouth Writers' Group. I don't think I'll publish it - it shares some elements with one in The Book of Ways - but here it is anyway.

The burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586

‘A very parfit gentil knight’, by all accounts, and a generous donor to the church, the death of the old Count caused much lamentation in Toledo. Fortunately, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, later to be known as El Greco, - the Greek – had settled in the city and had begun to paint there. He was commissioned to record the death of the Count, and he produced what is undoubtedly his masterpiece, then and still displayed in the church of Santo Tomé. The painting is in the shape of an arch. In the lower half we are in the realm of humanity. Portraits of the local nobles form a long line of mourners, rendered in recognisable detail. At the centre of the lower half is the body of the Count, and on either side of him Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine, descended from Heaven as a mark of special favour, to bury the Count. They are very colourfully dressed in religious vestments, a contrast to the more sombre phalanx of local dignitaries.

It is the upper half of the painting, however, which astonishes and mystifies me. Never having been a Christian, I am often confused by paintings of religious themes depicting specifically Christian iconic elements, which may be obvious or well-known to those having grown up in the faith, but about which I know nothing. The top half of the painting is a depiction of Heaven, with Christ in Majesty above all, surrounded by the winged angels and the remainder of the heavenly host. Mary is in a central position, holding open a funnel-shaped fold in the fundament. At the lower end of the funnel an unformed figure, looking like a swaddled baby, is being helped into the narrow passage by an angel. This, we were told, was how the soul was often depicted in medieval and Renaissance paintings. It looked, and was obviously meant to look, like an inverted birth canal, through which the Count’s soul would ascend into Heaven. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last time, the imagery baffles me.

It’s some years since we visited Toledo, that wonderful city set high on red rocks above a bend in the Rio Tajo, but I’ve never forgotten it, and El Greco’s masterpiece springs to mind whenever I think of it. It was raining when we arrived, and the colours were El Greco’s colours – deep greens, blues and greys. By the time we left in the afternoon the sun had come out, and the city was bathed in light. From the cliffs overlooking the plain, we watched a pair of vultures circling, a new tick in my bird book, a reminder of mortality.

an art pilgrimage -

in a hot Spanish autumn

a cool oasis

Copyright © Colin Will 2014

08/12/2014