poetry

Patti Smith Sings “The Tyger” and Reflects on William Blake’s Transcendent Legacy as a Guiding Sun in the Cosmos of Creativity

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“The eternal loom spins the immaculate word. The word forms the pulp and sinew of innocence… William Blake never let go of the loom’s golden skein… He was the loom’s loom, spinnin…

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees,” William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) wrote in his most beautiful letter — a soaring defense of the imagination. A genius both tragic and transcendent, Blake was among humanity’s deepest and farthest seers — of truth, of beauty, of the universe in a grain of sand, of the human condition in a fly. His poetry and art went on to influence generations of creators as varied as Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, who built his own singular sensibility upon a Blakean foundation, to Allen Ginsberg, who so cherished Blake that he recorded a strange and wonderful LP singing Blake’s Songs of Innocence with an electric orchestra.

Art by William Blake for a rare 1808 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost

But no artist in our time, and possibly none in all of time, has been a more spirited exponent of Blake’s enduring genius than Patti Smith.

Smith discovered Blake as a girl, after her mother purchased for her at a church bazaar a handsome 1927 edition of his Songs of Innocence, faithful to the 1789 original, which Blake printed and illuminated himself. Mesmerized by the exquisite marriage of text and image, the young Patti spent hours deciphering Blake’s calligraphy and absorbing every detail of his rich, sensitive illustrations. She returned to him again and again throughout her life, holding him up as consolation for the strife of struggling artists and eventually honoring him in a song. When her dear friend and mentor Allen Ginsberg fell mortally ill, she fetched a volume of Blake bound in blood-red leather from his library — a copy in which, she recalls, “each poem was deeply annotated in Allen’s hand, just as Blake had annotated Milton” — and read it by his dying bedside.

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“A Poem in October” by Dylan Thomas

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It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
   And the mussel pooled and the heron
           Priested shore
       The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
       Myself to set foot
           That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

   My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
   Above the farms and the white horses
           And I rose
       In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
       Over the border
           And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

   A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
   Blackbirds and the sun of October
           Summery
       On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
       To the rain wringing
           Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

   Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
   With its horns through mist and the castle
           Brown as owls
       But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
       There could I marvel
           My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

   It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
   Streamed again a wonder of summer
           With apples
       Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
       Through the parables
           Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

   And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
   These were the woods the river and sea
           Where a boy
       In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
       And the mystery
           Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

   And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
   Joy of the long dead child sang burning
           In the sun.
       It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
       O may my heart’s truth
           Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Dylan Thomas

Blackbird in Dun Laoghaire – a poem by Joseph O’Connor

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Blackbird in Dun Laoghaire was read by Joseph O’Connor at the funeral of his sister Sinéad O’Connor

There’s a blackbird in Dun Laoghaire
When I’m walking with my sons
Through the laneways
Called ‘The Metals’
By the train-tracks.

And he sings among the dandelions
And bottle-tops and stones,
Serenading purple ivy,
Weary tree-trunks.

And I have it in my head
That I can recognise his song,
Pick him out,
I mean distinct
From all his flock-mates.

Impossible, I know.
Heard one blackbird, heard them all.
But there are times
He whistles up a recollection.

There’s a blackbird in Dun Laoghaire –
And I’m suddenly a kid,
Asking where from here to Sandycove
My youngest sister hid.
I’m fourteen this Easter.
My job to mind her.
Good Friday on the pier –
And I suddenly can’t find her.

The sky like a bruise
By the lighthouse wall.
We were playing hide-and-seek.
Is she lost? Did she fall?
There’s a blackbird in Dun Laoghaire
And the terror’s like a wave
Breaking hard on a hull,
And the peoples’ faces grave

As Yeats on a banknote.
Stern as the mansions
Of Killiney in the distance,
As the pier’s granite stanchions,
And Howth is a drowned child
Slumped in Dublin Bay,
And my heart is a drum
And the breakers gull-grey.

The baths. It starts raining.
The People’s Park.
And my tears and the terns,
And the dogs’ bitter bark.
There’s a blackbird in Dun Laoghaire,
And I pray to him, then,
For God isn’t here,
In a sobbed Amen.

And she waves from the bandstand,
Her hair in damp strings,
And the blackbird arises
With a clatter of wings
From the shrubs by the teahouse,
Where old ladies dream
Of sailors and Kingstown
And Teddy’s ice-cream.

And we don’t say a word
But cling in the mizzle,
And the whistle of the bird
Getting lost in the drizzle.
Mercy weaves her nest
In the wildflowers and the leaves,
There are stranger things in heaven
Than a blackbird believes.

– Joseph O’Connor, 2010

Source: Blackbird in Dun Laoghaire – a poem by Joseph O’Connor

•Listen to RTE audio of Joseph reciting his poem