A Blog A Week, Honoring Each Week One Chosen Famous Poet , Second Week, ROBERT BRIDGES.
(1.)
The Evening Darkens Over
---- BY ROBERT BRIDGES
The evening darkens over
After a day so bright
The wind capt waves discover
That wild will be the night.
There’s sound of distant thunder.
The latest sea-birds hover
Along the cliff’s sheer height;
As in the memory wander
Last flutterings of delight,
White wings lost on the white.
There’s not a ship in sight;
And as the sun goes under
Thick clouds conspire to cover
The moon that should rise yonder.
Thou art alone, fond lover.
*********
(2.)
I Love all Beauteous Things
---- BY ROBERT BRIDGES
I love all beauteous things,
I seek and adore them;
God hath no better praise,
And man in his hasty days
Is honoured for them.
I too will something make
And joy in the making;
Altho’ to-morrow it seem
Like the empty words of a dream
Remembered on waking.
**********
(3.)
To Catullus
----- BY ROBERT BRIDGES
Would that you were alive today, Catullus!
Truth ’tis, there is a filthy skunk amongst us,
A rank musk-idiot, the filthiest skunk,
Of no least sorry use on earth, but only
Fit in fancy to justify the outlay
Of your most horrible vocabulary.
My Muse, all innocent as Eve in Eden,
Would yet wear any skins of old pollution
Rather than celebrate the name detested.
Ev’n now might he rejoice at our attention,
Guess'd he this little ode were aiming at him.
O! were you but alive again, Catullus!
For see, not one among the bards of our time
With their flimsy tackle was out to strike him;
Not those two pretty Laureates of England,
Not Alfred Tennyson nor Alfred Austin.
**********
(4.)
London Snow
---- BY ROBERT BRIDGES
When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
All night it fell, and when full inches seven
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;
And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness
Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:
The eye marvelled—marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;
The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;
No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,
And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.
Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,
They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze
Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;
Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;
Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder,
‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’
With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,
Following along the white deserted way,
A country company long dispersed asunder:
When now already the sun, in pale display
Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below
His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.
For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;
And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,
Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:
But even for them awhile no cares encumber
Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,
The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber
At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken
*********************
Bio:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-bridges
Robert Bridges
1844–1930
Side headshot of poet Robert Bridges.
Unknown author, public domain
A Victorian who, by choice, remained apart from the aesthetic movements of his day, Robert Bridges was a classicist. His experimentation with 18th-century classical forms culminated in The Testament of Beauty, generally acknowledged as his masterpiece. He succeeded Alfred Austin as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1913 and was active in the Society for Pure English, which was founded largely through his efforts. He had an important friendship and correspondence with Gerard Manley Hopkins; his edition of Hopkins's poems is considered a major contribution to English literature.
Bridges spent his early childhood in a house overlooking the anchoring ground of the British fleet in Walmer, Kent, England. His father's death in 1853 and his mother's remarriage a year later precipitated a move to Rochdale, where his stepfather was the vicar. Bridges attended Eton College from 1854 to 1863, where he met the poet Digby Mackworth Dolben and Lionel Muirhead, a lifelong friend. His acquaintance with Hopkins began at Corpus Christi College. Bridges had at one point intended to enter the religious life in the Church of England, but instead chose to become a physician and began his study of medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1869. He received his degree in 1874 and worked at St. Bartholomew's and other hospitals until 1882, when he retired from practice after a bout with pneumonia and chose to devote himself to literature.
After his illness and a trip to Italy with Muirhead, Bridges moved with his mother to Yattendon in Berkshire, where he met and married Monica Waterhouse, daughter of the famous architect Alfred A. Waterhouse. Their children included the poet Elizabeth Daryush. It was during his residence in Yattendon, from 1882 to 1904, that Bridges wrote most of his best-known lyrics as well as eight plays and two masques, all in verse. In 1902 Bridges' wife Monica and daughter Margaret became seriously ill, and Bridges decided to move from Yattendon to a healthier climate. The family lived in several temporary homes, spent a year in Switzerland, and finally settled again in England at Chilswell House, which Bridges had designed and which was built on Boar's Hill overlooking Oxford University. Bridges lived there until his death in 1930.
The events of the first World War, including the wounding of his son, Edward, had a sobering effect on Bridges' poetry. He composed fiercely patriotic poems and letters, and in 1915 edited a volume of prose and poetry, The Spirit of Man, intended to appeal to readers living in war times. Bridges cofounded the Society for Pure English (SPE) in 1913; the group's intention was to establish "a sounder ideal of the purity of our language." Its work was interrupted by the war, but resumed in 1919 and continued until 1948, 18 years after Bridges' death. His work for the SPE led to Bridges' only trip to the United States in 1924, during which he increased interest in the group among American scholars.
Bridges began a long philosophical poem entitled The Testament of Beauty on Christmas Day, 1924, with 14 lines of what he referred to as "loose Alexandrines." He set the piece aside until 1926, when the death of his daughter Margaret prompted him to resume work as a way to ease his grief. The Testament of Beauty was published in October 1929, one day after his 85th birthday and six months before his death.
************
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bridges
Robert Bridges
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the American critic, editor and writer, see Robert Bridges (critic).
Robert Bridges
Robert Bridges.jpg
Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom
In office
25 July 1913 – 21 April 1930
Monarch George V
Preceded by Alfred Austin
Succeeded by John Masefield
Personal details
Born Robert Seymour Bridges
23 October 1844
Walmer, Kent, England
Died 21 April 1930 (aged 85)
Boars Hill, Berkshire, England
Nationality British
Alma mater Corpus Christi College, Oxford
St Bartholomew's Hospital
Occupation Writer
Awards Poet Laureate
Robert Seymour Bridges OM (23 October 1844 – 21 April 1930) was an English poet who was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. A doctor by training, he achieved literary fame only late in life. His poems reflect a deep Christian faith, and he is the author of many well-known hymns. It was through Bridges' efforts that Gerard Manley Hopkins achieved posthumous fame.
"The Evening Darkens Over"
The evening darkens over
After a day so bright,
The windcapt waves discover
That wild will be the night.
There's sound of distant thunder.
The latest sea-birds hover
Along the cliff's sheer height;
As in the memory wander
Last flutterings of delight,
White wings lost on the white.
There's not a ship in sight;
And as the sun goes under,
Thick clouds conspire to cover
The moon that should rise yonder.
Thou art alone, fond lover.
Bridges was born at Walmer, Kent, in England, the son of John Thomas Bridges (died 1853) and his wife Harriett Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Sir Robert Affleck, 4th Baronet. He was the fourth son and eighth child. After his father's death his mother married again, in 1854, to John Edward Nassau Molesworth, vicar of Rochdale, and the family moved there.[1]
Bridges was educated at Eton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.[2] He went on to study medicine in London at St Bartholomew's Hospital, intending to practise until the age of forty and then retire to write poetry. He practised as a casualty physician at his teaching hospital (where he made a series of highly critical remarks about the Victorian medical establishment) and subsequently as a full physician to the Great (later Royal) Northern Hospital. He was also a physician to the Hospital for Sick Children.
Lung disease forced Bridges to retire in 1882, and from that point on he devoted himself to writing and literary research. However, Bridges' literary work started long before his retirement, his first collection of poems having been published in 1873. In 1884 he married Mary Monica Waterhouse, daughter of the architect Alfred Waterhouse R.A., and spent the rest of his life in rural seclusion, first at Yattendon, then at Boars Hill, Berkshire (close to Oxford), where he died.
He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1900. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1913, the only medical graduate to have held the office.
He was the father of poet Elizabeth Daryush and of the cabinet secretary Edward Bridges.
Memorial to Robert Bridges and Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges, in St Nicholas-at-Wade, Kent
Literary work
As a poet Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision and delicacy yet strength of expression. It embodies a distinct theory of prosody. Bridges' faith underpinned much of his work.[3]
In the book Milton's Prosody, he took an empirical approach to examining Milton's use of blank verse, and developed the controversial theory that Milton's practice was essentially syllabic. He considered free verse to be too limiting, and explained his position in the essay "Humdrum and Harum-Scarum". His own efforts to "free" verse resulted in the poems he called "Neo-Miltonic Syllabics", which were collected in New Verse (1925). The metre of these poems was based on syllables rather than accents, and he used the principle again in the long philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty (1929), for which he was appointed to the Order of Merit in that year.[4] His best-known poems, however, are to be found in the two earlier volumes of Shorter Poems (1890, 1894). He also wrote verse plays, with limited success, and literary criticism, including a study of the work of John Keats.
"Melancholia"
The sickness of desire, that in dark days
Looks on the imagination of despair,
Forgetteth man, and stinteth God his praise;
Nor but in sleep findeth a cure for care.
Incertainty that once gave scope to dream
Of laughing enterprise and glory untold,
Is now a blackness that no stars redeem,
A wall of terror in a night of cold.
Fool! thou that hast impossibly desired
And now impatiently despairest, see
How nought is changed: Joy's wisdom is attired
Splended for others' eyes if not for thee:
Not love or beauty or youth from earth is fled:
If they delite thee not, 'tis thou art dead.
Bridges' poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers. His best work is to be found in his Shorter Poems (1890), and a complete edition (to date) of his Poetical Works (6 vols.) was published in 1898–1905.
Despite being made poet laureate in 1913, Bridges was never a very well-known poet and only achieved his great popularity shortly before his death with The Testament of Beauty. However, his verse evoked response in many great British composers of the time. Among those to set his poems to music were Hubert Parry, Gustav Holst and later Gerald Finzi.[5]
During the First World War, Bridges joined the group of writers assembled by Charles Masterman as part of Britain's War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House.[6]
At Oxford, Bridges befriended Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is now considered a superior poet but who owes his present fame to Bridges' efforts in arranging the posthumous publication (1918) of his verse.
Bridges received advice from the young phonetician David Abercrombie on the reformed spelling system he was devising for the publication of his collected essays (later published in seven volumes by Oxford University Press, with the help of the distinguished typographer Stanley Morison, who designed the new letters). Thus Robert Bridges contributed to phonetics and he was also a founder member of the Society for Pure English.[7]
Hymnody
Bridges made an important contribution to hymnody with the publication in 1899 of his Yattendon Hymnal, which he created specifically for musical reasons. This collection of hymns, although not a financial success, became a bridge between the Victorian hymnody of the last half of the 19th century and the modern hymnody of the early 20th century.
Bridges wrote and also translated historic hymns, and many of these were included in Songs of Syon (1904) and the later English Hymnal (1906). Several of Bridges' hymns and translations are still in use today:
"Thee will I love, my God and King"
"Happy are they that love God"
"Rejoice, O land, in God thy might"
The Baptist Hymn Book, University Press, Oxford 1962
"Ah, Holy Jesus" (Johann Heermann, 1630)
"All my hope on God is founded" (Joachim Neander, c. 1680)
"Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (Martin Jahn, 1661)
"O Gladsome Light" (Phos Hilaron)
"O Sacred Head, sore wounded" (Paulus Gerhardt, 1656)
"O Splendour of God's Glory Bright" (Ambrose, 4th century)
"When morning gilds the skies" (stanza 3; Katholisches Gesangbuch, 1744)
Major works
Dates given are of first publication and significant revisions.
Poetry collections
The Growth of Love (1876; 1889; 1898), a sequence of (24; 79; 69) sonnets
Prometheus the Firegiver: A Mask in the Greek Manner (1883)
Eros and Psyche: A Narrative Poem in Twelve Measures (1885; 1894), a story from the Latin of Apuleius
Shorter Poems, Books I–IV (1890)
Shorter Poems, Books I–V (1894)
New Poems (1899)
Demeter: A Mask (1905), performed in 1904 at the opening of the Somerville College Library
Ibant Obscuri: An Experiment in the Classical Hexameter (1916), with reprint of summary of Stone's Prosody, accompanied by 'later observations & modifications'
October and Other Poems (1920)
The Tapestry: Poems (1925), in neo-Miltonic syllabics
New Verse (1926), includes verse of The Tapestry
The Testament of Beauty (1929)
Verse drama
Nero (1885), an historical tragedy; called The First Part of Nero subsequent to the publication of Nero: Part II
The Feast of Bacchus (1889); partly translated from the Heauton-Timoroumenos of Terence
Achilles in Scyros (1890), a drama in a mixed manner
Palicio (1890), a romantic drama in five acts in the Elizabethan manner
The Return of Ulysses (1890), a drama in five acts in a mixed manner
The Christian Captives (1890), a tragedy in five acts in a mixed manner; on the same subject as Calderón's El Principe Constante
The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy in three acts; founded on Calderón's El secreto á voces and on Lope de Vega's El Perro del hortelano
Nero, Part II (1894)
Prose
Milton's Prosody, With a Chapter on Accentual Verse (1893; 1901; 1921), based on essays published in 1887 and 1889
Keats (1895)
Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal (1899)
The Spirit of Man (1916)
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918), edited with notes by R.B.
The Necessity of Poetry (1918)
Collected Essays, Papers, Etc. (1927–36
*************
My Two Tribute Poems
(1.)
Pity, We Keep Much Of Our Lives Deeply Hidden
What can anybody truly know of me, real me
The truth that we keep hidden in heart's secret place
Beautiful flower gardens we just cannot grow
The sad aching memories we cannot erase
Treasured delight rejoicing in falling snow?
Pity, we keep much of our lives deeply hidden.
Much of it, things we were taught to be forbidden.
What can anybody truly know of me, my ink
Constant worries we poets always fret over
Will this deep, heartfelt offering be accepted
Could I much better describe that field of clover
Did magic fly forth or was it intercepted?
Pity, we keep much of our lives deeply hidden.
Much of it, things we were taught to be forbidden.
What can anybody truly know of me, my verse
That my youth was wild and so full of sad mistakes
That Love so often stabbed an innocent heart
Woe-some fact, that I rarely ever hit the brakes
Or the many times my life was blasted apart?
Pity, we keep much of our lives deeply hidden.
Much of it, things we were taught to be forbidden.
What can anybody truly know of me, my mind
Can they feel the oft intense depths of poems thus cast
Or with intuition, cipher unwritten words
Know I truly seek to ink poetry that lasts
Or hear singing from life's invisible songbirds?
Pity, we keep much of our lives deeply hidden.
Much of it, things we were taught to be forbidden.
What can anybody truly know of me, my heart
The magnificent times it felt true love was found
Romance that cheered and soothed an aching soul
Or will they come to see that by chains I am bound
And my all, scarred by pains from life's heavy toll?
Pity, we keep much of our lives deeply hidden.
Much of it, things we were taught to be forbidden.
Robert J. Lindley,
Rhyme,
( Born from life that was in wild-youth carelessly lived )
Note:
Can one present anything but heart's truest truth???
And still be a honorable and true poet???
**********
(2.)
Thoughts, Back When I Left Childhood In The Ancient Dust
Decades ago I stepped forth leaving childhood behind
Right into a world wherein for survival fight is a must
Leading onto pathetic pathways were the end is a bind
Like a bright shiny penny deep coated with green rust
But as happens, somehow that first couple decades I lived on
With those hidden cancers firmly entrenched in flesh and bone!
Well golly, you may say, same bull-hockey exists for us all.
And in innocent blindness, beg we for that promised fall!
I feel that life and this evil world 'oft promises too much
Hold on, perhaps truth is my jaded past sorely interferes
If greater wisdom was ever gained I would not think such
But that my sad-cast summation is laced with epic fears
My deep scars and forever aches this life forever hold firm
And my desperate disease tis born from that unholy germ!
Well golly, you may say, same bull-hockey exists for us all.
And in innocent blindness, beg we for that promised fall!
My friends, 'tis not that I cry my woes in a false foolish sense
As my great blindness may just be a heart that accepts not Fate
That I should perhaps wash my old brain repeatedly and then rinse
For built up anger and loss -too oft leads to staggering hate
And I splash poetic ink, doing so out of blinded rage
While I foolishly bemoan my lot and my advancing age!
Well golly, you may say, same bull-hockey exists for us all.
And in innocent blindness, beg we for that promised fall!
Robert J. Lindley,
Rhyme,
( Born from life that was in wild-youth carelessly lived )