{"id":164309,"date":"2023-05-16T12:42:41","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T16:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164309"},"modified":"2023-05-16T12:42:27","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T16:42:27","slug":"primrose-for-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/05\/16\/primrose-for-x\/","title":{"rendered":"Primrose for X"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

London buses moving. Licensed under CCO 2.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

William Blake once wrote to a friend that he conversed with the Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill. Today his words saying as much are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll where the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox since the poet\u2019s times, and today still do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately called <\/em>Himmelschl\u00fcsselchen). For herbalists it is a sedative, pain reliever, and salve. It keeps depression at bay. The primrose is the flower of youth, love, lust and sweetness, rebirth and poetry. Eating one can manifest fairies. In Albion it is among the first blooms of spring. The \u201crathe Primrose\u201d is the opening flower Milton notes to strew upon the \u201claureate hearse\u201d of Lycidas.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cPrimrose for X\u201d opens with Fanny Howe \u201ctracking Blake on Primrose Hill\u201d and twelve quatrains later ends with her on a high-speed train that \u201craced away from London \/ and Blake\u2019s theophanies.\u201d What she finds in the lyric interim are no golden pillars of Jerusalem or celebrity sets. No St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral, Shard, or Wharf highlight the skyline as they do for visitors in relief on the metal panoramic sign at 66.7 meters high. Here the \u201cunsteady skyline\u201d is \u201clike a graph that measures \/ markets, snails and heartbeats\u201d\u2014one of many instances in Fanny Howe\u2019s poetry of her in-dwelling similization of the world around us, as if these comparative truths always existed as air to breathe. Meanings break free with snails and \u201cshucked\u201d at the end of the line that contrasts the brain with the \u201cslippery\u201d heart that also slips across the stanza. And how the vital heart monitor beats with the little line\u2019s cadence \u201cHow am I still here \/ at every thump?\u201d\u2014the question posed to herself or Thou of her own life\u2019s longevity answered by the steady pulse of spirit-touched heart, along with doubt\u2019s silence.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cEvery word must come from my acts direct,\u201d Howe writes of poetry\u2019s impossible task in \u201cPhilophany,\u201d an earlier poem in her most recent collection, <\/em>Love and I. \u201cPrimrose for X\u201d comes toward the end of the book before two final poetic sequences. The placement of individual poem-to-poem sequences through the whole takes on the shape of neumatic notation, rhythm pitched to love\u2019s life. Here lines move within snail-paced thought, the measure of attention where, as Buber describes it, \u201clove comes to pass.\u201d Here lines move in a spark with the restless \u201cI,\u201d who finds the X subjects of love\u2019s gift among the poor immigrant women in Victoria, impoverished children, \u201cdrugged and dirty and crushed\u201d boys of Kentish Town, and the victims of a father\u2019s violence, half-allegorized by a machete. Catherine Sophia Boucher Blake belongs here, too, in the hidden vision\u2014she who learned the secrets and practice of her husband\u2019s illuminations and signed the Parish Register as bride with an \u201cX.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Blake loved quatrains as much as the fourteen-syllable line. \u201cPrimrose for X\u201d is only one of three poems in <\/em>Love and I written in consistent quatrains, and the longest of the three. Its symmetry doesn\u2019t follow any set metrical or syllabic pattern like the iambic tetrameter of Blake\u2019s \u201cLondon.\u201d Instead each quatrain\u2019s short line-to-line syllabic variation counters the overall symmetry, unsteady rhythm bound to beating image and thought and the needs of the heart. Only one stanza is composed entirely of trimetric lines, in the alien description of the \u201cboys hunched,\u201d as if to heighten the nightmarish fairy-tale quality of \u201cWhat is created by humans \/ is almost always alien.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The phantoms of the last stanza emerge out of the violent \u201cgrievous years\u201d as the poet speeds away in the darkness toward the unseen Channel and the children of The First Church. Phantoms or theophanies. The ninth-century Irish theologian and poet John Scotus Eriugena defined the latter in his <\/em>Periphyseon as \u201cdivine radiance,\u201d \u201cself-manifestation of God,\u201d \u201ctraces of the Truth,\u201d \u201cclouds of heaven,\u201d \u201cbrightness,\u201d \u201cdivine manifestations \u2026 which take their names from the eternal causes of which they are the images.\u201d Man-made causes\u2014\u201cmachete or his father\u2019s hand\u201d\u2014or eternal causes. That \u201cevery visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany, that is, a divine apparition.\u201d These are the indecipherable forms of love Howe\u2019s words track and bring into impossible light\u2014her poetry philophanies.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Jeffrey Yang<\/em><\/p>\n

I was tracking Blake on Primrose Hill
\none damp summer night.
\nBundles of white chestnut flared
\nunder the streetlights.<\/p>\n

London\u2019s unsteady skyline
\nwas not a reassuring one
\nbut like a graph that measures
\nmarkets, snails and heartbeats.<\/p>\n

When one brain was weary
\none heart was not.
\nThe brain can be shucked
\nwhen all the air is gone but the heart<\/p>\n

is slippery and needs a touch of
\nspirit to nourish it.
\nHow am I still here
\nat every thump?<\/p>\n

The heart has its needs
\nand feelings sewn like threads
\ninto branches and seasons
\nthat we pencil as trees.<\/p>\n

The Irish women with brass-capped hair
\nand tight mouths
\nand a Muslim woman with five girls and one boy
\nare all sadly clad at Victoria.<\/p>\n

In poverty some screaming brats
\nare fat, and some are starved
\ninto silence on their father\u2019s laps.
\nNo father might be worse than that.<\/p>\n

What is created by humans
\nis almost always alien.
\nThe hissing buses and trains
\nin Kentish Town, boys hunched<\/p>\n

in bunches on the lock
\ndrugged and dirty and crushed
\ntheir eyes like lizards veiled
\nand blind in retreat while<\/p>\n

a man with a machete
\ncut a fellow down, blood
\nall over his hands. Proud
\nof being a killing kind of man.<\/p>\n

Machete or his father\u2019s hand: which one
\ncaused this crime?
\nThe aughts were grievous years
\nfor boys and men.<\/p>\n

Crowds of phantoms covered
\nKent\u2019s fields as the Eurostar
\nraced away from London
\nand Blake\u2019s theophanies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied at Stanford University. <\/em><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections<\/em> Line and Light;<\/em> Hey, Marfa;<\/em> Vanishing-Line;<\/em> and<\/em> An Aquarium.<\/p>\n

A shorter version of\u00a0Yang\u2019s piece on Fanny Howe\u2019s \u201cPrimrose for X\u201d will appear in the forthcoming anthology<\/em>\u00a0Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems, which will be published in January 2024 by Graywolf<\/span> Press. \u201cPrimrose for X\u201d is reprinted from <\/em>Love and I with permission of Graywolf Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen one brain was weary \/ one heart was not.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2369,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68562],"tags":[68609,2011,67827,1050,187,4035],"class_list":["post-164309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","tag-being-in-love","tag-fanny-howe","tag-featured","tag-london","tag-poverty","tag-william-blake"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPrimrose for X by Fanny Howe<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 16, 2023 \u2013 \u201cWhen one brain was weary \/ one heart was not.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/05\/16\/primrose-for-x\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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