Poems of the Week: Fire

I looked back to see what my subjects had been at this time in the previous years. Last year, I concentrated on failed plots, because November the Fifth is a day on which the British celebrate the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Roman Catholic terrorists attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. The year before, my topic was gardens, because here in northern California my garden was on its last legs for the year.

This year, I am watching on television the fires destroying southern California, so I thought I would see how the poets have treated fire.

Fire is regarded in a number of different ways. In the positive sense, the discovery and control of fire is regarded as one of the critical steps in the appearance of civilization. One of the first novels to describe this point of view was by a Belgian author, J. H. Rosny-Aîné, (the word Aîné here means the elder of two), which was the nom-de-plume of Joseph-Henri Boex (1856 – 1940). He began using the name J. H. Rosny writing jointly with his younger brother, Seraphin Justin, but in 1908 they separated their writing, and Joseph-Henri added the qualifier Aîné. He is to French-language science fiction what H. G. Wells or Olaf Stapledon are to English-language science fiction. After Jules Verne, he is, without a doubt, the second most important figure in the history of modern French science fiction. It has been said that Rosny, who was a member of the distinguished Goncourt literary academy, was also the first writer to straddle the line between mainstream and science fiction literature, even though his genre fiction was unjustly, but not unsurprisingly, neglected by literary scholars. The book that describes fire is La Guerre du Feu, which was published in 1911 (another source says 1909). It was translated by H. Talbott and published in the United States in 1967 as The Quest for Fire: A Novel of Prehistoric Times. In 1981 Jean-Jacques Annaud made it into a film; the French title was La Guerre du Feu; but in The U.S. and Britain the title was The Quest for Fire.

Fire was important at first for warmth and for cooking; but relatively soon it was also used for firing pottery, and then for making glass. Next, it made it possible to extract metals from their ores, leading first to what was called the Bronze Age; and then, as the temperatures that could be achieved got higher, the Iron Age. The ability of the smith to fabricate metal weapons is the reason that the early religions usually had a god who was a smith – Hephaestus for the Greeks, Vulcan for the Romans and Thor for the Norse. These were also the gods of fire.

However, to the primitives, fire under control was beneficial, but they were also aware of the damage it could cause: forest fires of course, but also the eruption of volcanoes. Fire was also a weapon of war, and the burning down of the homes of ones opponents has a long history.

The Bible has many references to fire, and to furnaces: and I will not quote these today. Perhaps the best known is from Daniel, Chapter 3, where three emissaries sent by the Jews to the court of Nebuchadnezzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to bow down before the golden idol set up by the king, and are thrown into a ‘burning fiery furnace’. However, the three are seen to be walking unharmed within the furnace, together with a fourth: “the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” Nebuchadnezzar calls for the three men to come forth from the furnace, and they are seen to have been untouched by the fire.

However, the vision of Hell is generally associated with fire, and here is John Milton (1608- 1674), in Paradise Lost:

                          Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great furnace flam’d; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe.

Alfred Edward Housman (1859 – 1936) in Hell Gate has this to say:

     Ill as yet the eye could see
The eternal masonry,
But beneath it on the dark
To and fro there stirred a spark.
And again the somber guide
Knew my question and replied:
"At hell gate the damned in turn
Pace for sentinel and burn."

     Dully at the leaden sky
Staring, and with idle eye
Measuring the listless plain,
I began to think again.
Many things I thought of then,
Battle, and the loves of men,
Cities entered, oceans crossed,
Knowledge gained and virtue lost,
Cureless folly done and said,
And the lovely way that led
To the slimepit and the mire
And the everlasting fire.
And against a smolder dun
And a dawn without a sun
Did the nearing bastion loom,
And across the gate of gloom
Still one saw the sentry go,
Trim and burning, to and fro,
One for women to admire
In his finery of fire.

However, in contrast there is the concept of the ‘sacred flame’. The most general account of this relates to the role of goddess Vesta (Roman) or Hestia (Greek). Vesta was a goddess of fire, but fire in the sense of its use for domestic purposes or in religious ceremonies. Her priestesses were the Vestals; originally there were two, but Servius increased the number to six. They were chosen by lot from patrician families, and entered the college at ages between six and ten; they remained there for thirty years. For the first ten years they were being instructed in their duties; for the next ten years they exercised those duties; and for the final ten years they instructed the new girls. They took vows of absolute chastity, and the punishments for breaking these vows were extremely severe. However, over the course of eleven centuries only twenty Vestals broke their vows and were punished. After they had completed their thirty years service, they were allowed to marry, but few did; they generally preferred to maintain the privileges associated with their position. Perhaps their most important duty was ensuring that the sacred fire did not go out.

In the poet’s concept, the inspiration that leads to the work is often thought of as ‘kissing the sacred fire” – here is a fragment from James Weldon Johnson (1871 – 1938):

O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrels’ lyre?

James Johnson was an impressive and multitalented man. Over the course of his sixty-seven years, he was the first African American admitted to the Florida bar since the end of Reconstruction; the co-composer (with his brother John Rosamond) of Lift Every Voice and Sing, the song that would later become known as the 'Negro National Anthem'; field secretary in the NAACP; journalist; publisher; diplomat; educator; translator; librettist; anthologist; and English professor; in addition to being a well-known poet and novelist and one of the prime movers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), in The Dunciad (IV, 649) had this to say on the subject of religion’s sacred fires:

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire Chaos! is restor’d:
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all.

But Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805) takes a considerably more robust view in Ode to Joy:

Joy, thou spark from Heav’n immortal,
Daughter of Elysium!
Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing
Goddess, to thy shrine we come.

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) has this great opening to King Henry the Fifth:

O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention, --
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Another view of fire derives from its metallurgical uses, and in particular its use as a method of testing the purity of gold: a phrase like “tested in the fire” originally meant determining the purity of a person. However, in military usage the phrase has been modified to “testing under fire”. John Donne (1571 – 1631), in His Parting From Her looks at the different ways of testing someone in terms of the four ‘elements’ air, fire, water, and earth:

I will not look upon the quick’ning sun,
But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;
The air shall note her soft, the fire most pure;
Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure.

John Addington Symonds (1840 – 1893) in The Days That Are to Be has perhaps a similar concept of the ‘testing by fire’:

     These things shall be, -- a loftier race
Than ere the world hath known shall rise
     With flame of freedom in their souls,
And light of knowledge in their eyes.

     They shall be gentle, brave, and strong
To spill no drop of blood, but dare
     All that may plant man's lordship firm
On earth and fire, and sea, and air.

Another view of fire is its power: and again this relates to the poet. Stephen Spender (1909 – 1995) said this:

I think continually of those who were truly great –
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Of course, the poet who used this image best was William Blake (1757 – 1827). We have used his poems several times before, and I don’t want to use them again at length; but you may remember this from the Preface to Milton:

Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire,
Bring me my spear – O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

And this:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

Here is a small poem that I have not used here before:

The look of love alarms
Because ‘tis fill’d with fire;
But the look of soft deceit
Shall win the lovers hire.

Bayard Taylor (1825 – 1878), Bedouin Song:

From the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry:
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book Unfold!

The pain of burning appears in a number of poems, and this is echoed in the various forms of torture and execution involving burning. Towards the end of King Lear, William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) has the old king, on being awakened from a deep sleep, say to Cordelia:

You do wrong to take me out o’the grave: -
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

A week or two ago I quoted Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963), and in The Marrow (1964) II: he has the following:

Brooding on God, I may become a man.
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

Delmore Schwartz (1913 – 1966) now seems to be best known for his influence on the singer Lou Reed; this is from a poem For Rhoda (1938). Rhoda is described as his ‘first love’ – he met her at school, and his affection for her lasted until 1929 or so. However, he included poems directed to her in his first collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, published in 1938.

Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), Four Quartets. Little Gidding. IV , written in 1942:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
     We only live, only suspire
     Consumed by either fire or fire.

This poem ends:

And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Recently, I quoted a fragment from an odd poem, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, by Anne Sexton (1928 – 1974), and here is a little again:

Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.

I was going to talk about the appalling punishment of burning at the stake; this was principally used as a punishment for witchcraft. However, I suppose most people think of the Spanish Inquisition in this context. In 1478 Pope Sixtus IV authorized the Spanish Inquisition. The first Spanish inquisitors, operating in Seville, proved so severe that Sixtus IV had to interfere. But the Spanish crown now had in its possession a weapon too precious to give up, and the efforts of the pope to limit the powers of the Inquisition were without avail. In 1483 he was induced to authorize the naming by the Spanish government of a grand inquisitor for Castile, and during the same year Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia were placed under the power of the Inquisition. The first grand inquisitor was the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, who has become the symbol of the inquisitor who uses torture and confiscation to terrorize his victims. The number of burnings at the stake during his tenure has been exaggerated, but it was probably about 2,000. (This last section is from the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

The most famous single example of burning at the stake was Jeanne d’Arc, who was burned at the stake for witchcraft by the English on May 30th, 1431, having been handed over by the Burgundians, who captured her at Compiègne. The then new king of France, Charles of Orléans, made no attempt to rescue her or ransom her. At the time of her death she was almost nineteen years old.

But enough of that. The ‘flash of fire’ that one can see in the flight of some birds has excited poets: I have hummingbirds on my deck, and see their red flash several times each day. However, both Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889) and Robert Traill Spence Lowell (1917 – 1977) use the kingfisher as their examples.

Hopkins’s poem is As Kingfishers Catch Fire. It was written in 1877, around about the time he was ordained as a Jesuit priest. Here it is:

As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
     As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
     Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
     Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
     Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
     Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
     Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
     To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Lowell’s poem is Colloquy in Black Rock; it appeared in his collection Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). Lowell refused military induction in 1943, and in October was sentenced to a year and a day for violating the Selective Services Act. That extra day is because a sentence over one year meant that in the eyes of the law he was a felon. The first five months were served at a detention center in New York and federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, and then was paroled in Black Rock, Connecticut, near Bridgeport. The mudflats there were called Black Mud. There was a large local Hungarian population, who attended St. Stephen’s Catholic Church. St. Stephen was Hungary’s first king and patron saint. The first Christian martyr was also called Stephen, who died by stoning. This poem will be our first poem of this week.

My second poem of the week is by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 – 1909); it is called Itylus, and it was published in 1864. In Greek mythology, Aedon was a daughter of Pandareus of Ephesus. According to Homer, she was the wife of Zethus, the king of Thebes. She had only two children and envied her sister-in-law, Niobe, who had many. She planned to murder Niobe's eldest son in his sleep, but by mistake killed her own son, Itylus, who was sharing his room. Zeus took pity on Aedon in her grief and changed her into a nightingale; her song was a lament for her dead son.

My last topic this week is the end of the world. What else is there? This is what Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) has to say about that, in his poem Fire and Ice:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

The Kraken is a fabulous Scandinavian sea monster perhaps imagined on the basis of chance sightings of giant squids. The British Science Fiction writer John Wyndham (1903 – 1969) wrote a book called The Kraken Wakes (1953), quoting a legend identifying this with what is sometimes called the Midgard serpent. In Norse mythology, the serpent Jormungand is one of the three children of the god Loki and his wife, the giantess Angrboda . The gods were well aware that this monster was growing fast and that it would one day bring much evil upon gods and men. So Odin deemed it advisable to render it harmless. He threw the serpent in the ocean that surrounds the earth, but the monster had grown to such an enormous size that it easily spans the entire world, hence the name Midgard Serpent. It lies deep in the ocean where it bites itself in its tail, and all mankind is caught within his coils. At the destruction of the universe, Jormungand and Thor will kill each other.

This is clearly the monster that appears in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's (1809 – 1892) poem, The Kraken:

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

However, before the world ends, I have two totally tasteless poems about fire to end the week. The first is by Harry Graham (1874 – 1936); it appeared in his collection Ruthless Rhymes (1901), as Tender-Heartedness:

Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.

And, finally, our third poem of the week will be a poem we have used before, from Hilaire Belloc (1873 – 1953); Matilda; Who Told Lies and was Burned to Death.

I can’t end this piece without mentioning one of my favorite musicians, Johnny Cash, who died on September 12th. One of the songs that he wrote, and performed for many years is exactly on our theme of this week: Ring of Fire. In his memory, here is a brief fragment of the lyrics:

Love Is A Burning Thing
And It Makes A Fiery Ring
Bound By Wild Desire
I Fell Into A Ring Of Fire

CHORUS:
I Fell Into A Burning Ring Of Fire
I Went Down, Down, Down
And The Flames Went Higher

And It Burns, Burns, Burns
The Ring Of Fire
The Ring Of Fire.