The Living Dead

Honouring our poetic ancestors

The Golden Journey to Samarkand 
By James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915)

Prologue

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,—

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall towards the West:

And there the world's first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.

II
And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than the Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;

When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells.

When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.

I decided to revisit the lovely James Elroy Flecker this week. I love his poetry for being so musical, so visual and so romantic all at once.

I particularly love those first four lines of this one, describing what poets do. Oh yes, I'll wear that!

And, in a week of sad and horrible things happening around the world even more than usual, some of them in regions not so far from Samarkand, I feel a need for the peace Flecker arrives at. Here, the end of the world is far past — no longer catastrophic, but a way of leaving all our earthly troubles behind.

I also featured Flecker in February last year, so rather than repeat everything I already said, here is the link to that post.

The Living Dead

Honouring our poetic ancestors

Yasmin 
A Ghazel

By James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915)

How splendid in the morning glows the lily: with what grace he throws

His supplication to the rose: do roses nod the head, Yasmin?

But when the silver dove descends I find the little flower of friends

Whose very name that sweetly ends I say when I have said, Yasmin.

The morning light is clear and cold: I dare not in that light behold

A whiter light, a deeper gold, a glory too far shed, Yasmin.

But when the deep red eye of day is level with the lone highway,

And some to Meccah turn to pray, and I toward thy bed, Yasmin;

Or when the wind beneath the moon is drifting like a soul aswoon,

And harping planets talk love's tune with milky wings outspread, Yasmin,

Shower down thy love, O burning bright! For one night or the other night
Will come the Gardener in white, and gathered flowers are dead, Yasmin.

My regular Friday post, 'I Wish I'd Written This' deals with 20th and 21st century poets, specifically those alive from 1939 on, which is my birth year. I figure, if they've been alive in my lifetime, they're contemporary enough even if no longer with us. Now I'm going to alternate 'I Wish I'd Written This' with 'The Living Dead', poetry from further past — in which the words are still vibrant with life even though all their authors have passed away.

In my spiritual tradition — and no doubt many others — it is customary to honour the ancestors, which may be one's spiritual as well as genetic ancestors. I like to think that the poets of the past  — the unknown as well as the famous — are our spiritual ancestors as we make poems today.

James Elroy Flecker, a fairly recent poet, had a sense of this kind of legacy. Perhaps his most famous poem is one called To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence; and another very famous piece, the Prologue to The Golden Journey to Samarkand (often quoted as if it were the whole poem) addresses the raison d'etre of poets.

But this week Susan, in her Mid-Week Motif, has us writing of love, and my very favourite Flecker poem is this beautiful and impassioned love poem, in one of my favourite forms, the ghazal (which he spells ghazel).

You can learn more about Flecker at the link on his name, above, and find more of his poems at PoemHunter (where there are misprints in this one: e.g. it gives 'deep red eye of day' as 'deep red light of day' and 'glows the lily' as 'grows the lily' — but believe me, I've got it right. I was brought up on Flecker.).

His Collected Poems is available at Amazon, and there is a Kindle edition. Google will also find you copies of this and his other books from various sources, often second-hand bookstores.

When he died aged 30, people compared his premature loss to that of Keats. I don't think Flecker was anywhere near so great a poet as Keats, but he was a very beautiful, sensual poet who used language in a distinctively musical way. I think his work is uneven, but his best poems are gorgeous, with immediate emotional impact. Their words still speak to me as if they were freshly written.