Martin Seymour-Smith’s poems are a gift to the reader’s intelligence and senses. The pugilist he once was (not by chance did he fight during his army years in the Bantamweight category) dares us to enter his poetic world, a world that began in his youth at fourteen with superb poems that carry the philosophical and existential seed of all his later literary work.
At Zenda we offer five poems from A Trace of Meaning (El Desvelo), by Martin Seymour-Smith.
***
BOY AFTER THE STORM
I know that before a storm my hands
are assassins: they pursue time
and forge a pattern of hatred
through the flowers, they fashion
the gathered clouds that are my crime.
It is their fury, what your heart defends,
that causes this wind to rise and defile.
The storm descends from the Towers
and then you cling to me, frightened:
for my fears of dying vanish
as if the sun had never shone
because we had built our story on that sun,
gazing our future in those hours—
our ghostly child made only of storm:
We shall not wake him, he sleeps now.
I see stretched through the flowers
still spiderwebs; the sun gleams on the roof
of the tall towers, dampened by the storm.
But let us not wake him: those storms show
that his dream across our years will be enough.
***
DESPAIR
I found it fluttering, beautiful
on the edge of my despair,
which, like a light, hung over the night
illuminating it.
It was a bird, listless
like that moment, and my eyes
longed for its relentless horizon,
toward which, chirping like a bird,
it flew. Would I dare tomorrow
to show it the light toward the sea?
Even against the sky that embraces me,
it would darkly flee from me.
***
THE WINTER FOR WILLIAM
Winter for William, who lives on a distant
island of placid skies tethered to the sun,
will be gentler than it is for us:
fading away as the warm rooftops defy
the frost that falls. But his eyes will fill
when, departing from these docks where the cold lingers,
the ship’s siren howls its final farewell;
And he will also see the birds
flee swiftly from the threatening snow.
These are the tears the horizon
creates in a child’s eyes; he feels the wind
and pulls at his sleeve, crying:
Leave the island? No, no!
Melancholy will not open its ports
to fix the movement of his heart.
But the ship and the birds will depart,
and England will seem more distant,
and he will feel it as cold as stone and rain,
through the hiss of the sea and the fog.
The sea is furious, out of its mind.
We, exiles in our homeland,
remembering his toys and games
in gardens warmer and greener than these,
will marvel at the memory of the sun
for the sake of one who has no cold.
We will stroll in a dream that was ours before, in these bitter seasons
of heavy and aging snow; passing the winters
as warm as William’s.
***
TO MY WIFE IN THE HOSPITAL
You asked me, “Do you still love me?”
Cold, I could only say, lips pressed
“of course.”
I wish you had asked about the silence in the house,
this desperate music
this drizzle in the garden.
Two elderly people
who once loved so much
that a god decreed
that they should die at the same time
and become a tree.
Why can’t we be that tree,
still alive,
looking at a past
that not even the greatest disaster could erase:
that old tree in the valley in Umbria
where the sun shines
and thunder stirs? We gaze at it for a long time.
Do you remember? Yet we did not
take the long, hot road to it.
Would we ever be able to uproot it
by approaching? Either way it stood
too far away, truly, we confess.
***
RACHMANINOV
Horrified, Rachmaninov laid his hands to his head
upon discovering his first symphony
unbearable
and at the end of the first movement
fled.
He spent the night on a tram
that rolled back and forth.
It was so striking
that his mind collapsed
yet it is well known
how he was hypnotized
and returned triumphant
to compose the Second Concerto.
Now I am Rachmaninov:
I have seen the brightness in the darkness
and the darkness in the brightness,
I have dragged my battered mind through the terms,
I have recovered in the serenity
of a stubborn Russian gaze,
I have rediscovered victorious musical paths.
Huddled in my skins I threaten
with whistling digits
the ecstatically silent audience
trained in the spirit of adulterous tea rooms.
How to discern my true melody?
Leave the man you were about to fault,
and come to my dressing room.
Even if it is a melancholy exile
I am more than what I offer in bed.
Let’s play at the Island of the Dead
and while you repeat the perfect truth
of how undervalued my Preludes are
I will raise my horrified hands to my head.
—————————————
Author: Martin Seymour-Smith. Title: A Trace of Meaning. Translation: Imanol Gómez Martín. Publisher: El Desvelo. Availability: All Your Books.
BIO
Martin Seymour-Smith (1928-1998) was an English polymath who wrote more than 40 books, best known for his notable biographies of writers such as Rudyard Kipling or Thomas Hardy, among others, in which he portrayed both their humane figure (sometimes exposing the subject’s ridiculous side) and their literary grandeur. In his obituary in the New York Times, Sarah Lyall writes that Seymour-Smith was a staunch defender of his biographees, as in the case of Hardy, whom he defends against the attacks of Henry James by gifting to the author of The Turn of the Screw and A Portrait of a Lady some of his most acclaimed works, with the literary line: “The biography that cemented Seymour-Smith in that field was the magnificent study of Robert Graves titled ‘Robert Graves: His Life and Work,’ which became the definitive and decisive book on the author of world-renowned works such as The Greek Myths or I, Claudius, among others.” That biography was highly praised by Stephen Spender, who said of it: “It is such an extraordinarily lively book that I can hardly believe in another miracle. It seems Graves will appear in the room.”
Seymour-Smith contributed to the creation of The White Goddess, and his wife, Janet de Glanville, a brilliant yet unstable intellectual with deep knowledge of Greco-Roman culture, played a vital role in compiling and interpreting The Greek Myths. Yet, despite the long friendship they maintained with Robert Graves (and the difficult relationship with Laura Riding, the woman Graves captivated), that fact was not enough to make Seymour-Smith’s poetry influenced by Graves. He did acknowledge the influence of Robert Browning, the 19th-century poet. However, the theme of The White Goddess remained central for the poet, and it appears reflected in several poems across his more than fifty years of poetry, in the three dimensions of the Goddess: maiden, mother and witch. In that poetic and vital relationship there should be an alliance between the young poet and the goddess-muse. The muse is not a normal woman. This is noted, according to Miranda Seymour (a writer with no relation to Martin Seymour-Smith, despite sharing a name with one of the writer’s daughters) in “Ten Poems More” by Robert Graves, where the personal muse is easily identified by her integrity, her cruelty, her persuasion and condemnation. Paradoxically, the best poems, the true ones, are not dedicated to her but to ordinary women, or if addressed to the Muse, it is from the particular woman who embodies her.
From left to right, William Graves, Robert Graves, Martin and his wife at the bullfights.