The self, (myself) laid bare to an open bed of flowers. Stalks drooping, depressed and sour. The roses bent and weighted within the wattle dead.
Space galore, the calendar suspends its days, echos (the vowels) float over her poems, the quiet stands around. Recurring, recurring, recurring (repeating) in the hours.
Let's go to town.
Ted Hughes was Poet Laureate of England from 1984 to 1998 when he died. He was born in Yorkshire in 1930 and grew up in a household haunted by the presence of his father's experiences in WWI. His father was one of a few British soldiers to survive the slaughter at Gallipoli. The book Ted Hughes - The Life of a Poet by Elaine Feinstein (WW Norton 2001) helps set the record straight about Hughe's life which was a tragic one. His first wife, Sylvia Plath, committed suicide after Hughes started an affair with another woman. (In so doing she gained the fame that had eluded her.) In America, embracing the onset of the feminist movement, Plath was sanctified, Hughes was vilified. Many critics bitterly attacked Hughes for Plaths death. He had two children with Plath. He also had a daughter with Assia Wevill that ended in tragedy, Wevill killed herself and her daughter. He was married a second time to Carol Orchard. Here is one of Hughe's most famous poems, The Jaguar.
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun. The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut. Fatigued with indolence, the tiger and lion lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor's coil is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw. But who runs like the rest past these arrives at a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized, as a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes on a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom - the eye satisfied to be blind in fire, by the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear - he spins from the bars, but there's no cage to him more than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: the world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.
The elixir of long life is made by the Carthusian Brotherhood depicted in the film Into Great Silence. The Order of Chartreuse was more than 500 years old when they received the alchemical recipe in 1605 of an already ancient manuscript. In the early 17th century very few people understood the use of herbs and plants in the treatment of illness. In 1737 an exhaustive study of the manuscript was undertaken, finally the complexities of the recipe were unraveled. In 1764 the monks adapted the recipe to what is now called Green Chartreuse. (The herb hyssop is one of the most obvious major constituents of the flavour.) Then in 1838 the distillers developed a sweeter and milder form of the original recipe and called it "yellow chartreuse." What little is known about the recipe is that 130 herbs, plants, roots, leaves and other vegetation are soaked in alcohol then distilled and mixed with honey and syrup before being put into large oaken casks. Besides the green and yellow chartreuse there is extra long ageing in oak casks of the Chartreuse VEP (Vieillissement Exceptionnellement Prolonge) versions which reach exceptional quality. Finally, an elixir version is available; a tonic at 142 proof.
I remember, as a child, seeing bottles of liquour, high up on shelves, in my parents and friends of my parents kitchens. If anyone commented on this, even indirectly, they were told is was there for medicinal purposes. Of course, it was a joke, justifying the fact that alcohol was kept in the house. Today, I wonder if there was some truth to the idea that alcohol was-is-could be valued primarily for its curative powers, or maybe even a great deal of truth in that idea?
Mead is a fermented alcoholic beverage made of water, honey and yeast. It's sometimes called "honey wine" although there were no grapes in mead originally. Sometimes fruit or spices are added to mead giving it a wide range of flavors. Sometimes it's very sweet, sometimes dry. Producers argue over the portion of water to honey, the ratio is frequently one-to- one or two- to- one. The Welsh word for mead, medd, translates as healing or medicinal. Other mead is made by adding spices and honey to white wine. Fruit and spices were preserved in mead for use in the winter. Imagine, an Anglo-Saxon having fruit in the winter time! Mead can be an aperitif, drunk during the meal or used as a dessert wine. A distillary in Florida started by a Polish refugee, produces the honey-water fermented mead.
Medicinal: tending or used to cure disease or relieve pain.
