Friday, December 31, 2010

Hollywood Versifier: Soviet Edition

The greatest New Year's film of all time is a 1975 Russian movie called The Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Bath!


So maybe this post should be Mosfilm Versifier?





The movie is a romantic comedy, I guess: there are mistaken identities and drunken misunderstandings, a lopsided love triangle, witty one-liners and lots and lots of music. So it's part of a long tradition that goes back to Shakespeare and then stretching way back at least to Aristophanes.

But the plot and characters are utterly and unmistakably Soviet: specifically, mid-seventies Moscow and St. Petersburg Soviet. The entire plot of the film is centered around the fact that in the '50s all of the skyscrapers were huge, hulking, identical monoliths that architects call the Brutalist School. 

The story goes like this: on New Year's Eve a guy gets drunk with some buddies in a Moscow public bath, they go to the airport to see one of them off, and the wrong guy gets on the plane to St. Petersburg. Dead drunk, he gives a cab the address, goes to what he thinks is his building and his apartment, uses his key to get in, and falls asleep on the couch. Unbeknownst to him, the owner of the St. Petersburg apartment is a lovely woman waiting for her fiancée to arrive. And it goes on from there.

It's completely implausible even for the USSR, but it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief when the lock makers all work in the same factory, the architects all go to the same Party meetings and the city planners are working from identical blueprints. 

Basically, the film is It's a Wonderful Life for people my age in Eastern Europe. It's just not the New Year without it, so every station (all four of them!) play it at least twice that night. It's got drama, heartbreak, sarcasm, hilarity, showers with clothes on, songs performed by the characters and lots and lots of poetry.

We're not talking greeting card verse, either: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmadulina. It's like a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie with lyrics provided by Robert Frost, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich. And it's what introduced me to the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: a broad, stereotypical writer, almost a parody of a contemporary poet. He's egotistical, self-aggrandizing, always scheming for the next speaking gig or international edition of his work.


Look at this pretentious douchebag here...
He's also insanely talented, a provocateur with real depth along with real mastery of his craft. Unfortunately, he tends to auto-translate, the raging egomaniac. So most of the translations are terrible, which I think might account for why he's not as well known to English-speaking audiences as some of his contemporaries with better translators.

But this is the song from the opening credits, in a clumsy and barely passable translation. There's a lot of nuance missing, but it gives the basic gist of things.


"Here is what..."
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, trans. Albert C. Todd

To B. Akhmadulina

Here is what is happening to me:
my old friend doesn't come to visit,
and in idle vanity
come various folk, not those who should.
And he
      goes about somewhere not with those he should
and he understands that too,
and our dischord is not cleared up,
and both of us suffer from this.
Here is what is happening to me:
Not the right girl at all comes to visit,
she puts her hands on my shoulders
and steals me from another.
And that one--
              tell me for God's sake,
on whose shoulders does she put her hands?
That one
        from whom I was stolen
in vengeance also will begin to steal.
She won't respond immediately this way,
but will live in a struggle with herself
and unaware will select
someone superfluous for her.
Oh, how many nervous
                    and unhealthy,
unnecessary involvements,
                         unnecessary friendships!
Something rabidly desperate in me!
Oh, somebody,
             come,
                  break up
the conjunction
               of people alien to one another
and the estrangement
                    of souls that are kindred.






You've definitely got the love triangle, some of the torture and torment and confusion. But you're missing the touches, words like "осатаненность" ("Satan" is the root word) instead of "rabidly desperate" and even simple things like "Oh, anyone come" versus "Oh, someone come." But maybe it's possible to catch some of the meaning from the music in the above video.

So although it's kind of sad to have such a buffoon as my favorite Russian poet, there's something both accessible and hidden in his work that catches me. You could do better, but you could do a lot worse, too. I think that might be the story of my life in literature, actually.

__________________________

On that note, this ends my big experiment — sorry to finish with a fair-to-poor translation, but I figured in true Eliotic tradition I'd finish with a whimper.

The blog started on a whim and continued through many a whining, resentful night, but it's been really gratifying to have your participation. I've done what I could to keep myself entertained, hopefully it wasn't too annoying or at least not impossible to ignore when it was. Thanks for coming along for the ride, it's been great to have your votes, comments, poems, ideas.

I'll have wrap-up and off-color commentary tomorrow, but for now, Happy Old Year 2010, Happy New Year 2011! 

And always remember: "I'm not your flowerpot."


Thursday, December 30, 2010

Hollywood Versifier: Barbaric YAAAAAAAAWP!


I knew this day would come eventually. I dreaded it, I put it out of my mind, but here it is. Nothing for it but to play the man, keep my head held high and face the consequences.


I have a Dead Poets Society tattoo. 



What? What's that you say? You didn't realize there is an official logo for the inspirational 1987 film featuring Robin Williams and an all-star cast of up-and-coming teen movie heartthrobs?

This is because you have a life and responsibilities and normal interests that don't require you to view DVDs in slow-motion to take screen captures of still frames. Heck, try a Google Image search for it - no dice. That's how hardcore this is: the INTERNET doesn't even know about it.

In a few frames of the film, when the boys open up the book of poetry their teacher Mr. Keating gave them from his school days, there's an inscription and sketch on the frontispiece.

That is how utterly devoted to that film I am.

I watched the film for the first time when I was seven or eight years old. I probably couldn't understand half of what the movie was talking about. And it changed my frakking life. Stupid Peter Weir, I hate you and your stupid face!








This is what education is all about, right? It's inspiring and dramatic and unexpected, no marking up papers or writing lesson plans or grade-grubbing here. Just get the shy kid in front of the class, embarrass him sufficiently and pray that in your provocation he comes up with something half-way decent enough to keep you from being sued for causing mental anguish.


It's all about truth, man, truth that hits you like this! That's right, exclamation points! More of them! To prove how TRUE this s&%t is! 




O Me! O Life!
Walt Whitman

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;

Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
      
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;

That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.





I'll admit, the histrionics are mostly my trying to cover up the mortification at how important this stuff is to me. There aren't many movies that you can say changed your life. But in very real, very sad ways I seem to have patterned my life choices after this saccharine tear-jerker: the tattoo wasn't my only dumb DPS-inspired mistake. 


I got an undergraduate degree in English. After the department chair gave a tour de force lecture on Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos I saluted by standing on my desk. I started the local chapter of the aforementioned society: on Friday nights we'd go to a deserted playground, maybe have an upperclassman buy us a bottle of cheap wine and read a bunch of silly verses by ourselves or long-dead white dudes. And get this, you ready? Just like Neil, Robert Sean Leonard's impossibly earnest thespian, I played Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream


And the most horrific part of all is that I'm not ashamed. 


Gauche and hokey as it all sounds, it's been a pretty good obsession to fan the flames of. It's given me some pretty awesome friends and a passion for books to a point that's not good for me. Not to mention this blog...


So of course I want to become a teacher. It's all freshly polished apples and ovations at keynote addresses and "Stand and Deliver." Or it could be more like this.






Man, I love when Harold Bloom gets a good shellacking. English isn't unique, either:  there's a ton of these little YouTube movies out there about Political Science, Film, Business, Music. There's even counter-counter-films all about how awesome getting a Ph.D. is. 


I think pouring cold water on somebody's dreams is kind of like "the kick" in Inception. It's unpleasant, but you need it to get you anywhere. Plus it's a good way to figure out whether things around you are real or a fantasy. 


It's not all entirely unpleasant, either. You've got humor, for sure: "Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice."







And you've got grisly, gory tales of weird death and madness! Here's one ripped straight from a less-remembered scene of the movie.






The Ballad Of William Bloat
Raymond Calvert


 In a mean abode on the Shankill Road
 Lived a man named William Bloat;
 And he had a wife, the curse of his life,
 Who always got his goat.
 'Til one day at dawn, with her nightdress on
 He slit her pretty throat.

 With a razor gash he settled her hash
 Oh never was crime so quick
 But the steady drip on the pillowslip
 Of her lifeblood made him sick.
 And the pool of gore on the bedroom floor
 Grew clotted and cold and thick.

 Now he was right glad he had done as he had
 As his wife lay there so still
 But a sudden awe of the mighty law
 Filled his heart with an icy chill.
 So to finish the fun so well begun
 He resolved himself to kill.

 He took the sheet from his wife's cold feet
 And twisted it into a rope
 And he hanged himself from the pantry shelf,
 'Twas an easy end, let's hope.
 In the face of death with his latest breath
 He said "to hell with the Pope."

 Now the strangest turn in this whole concern
 Is only just beginning.
 He went to Hell, but his wife got well
 And is still alive and sinning.
 For the razor blade was Dublin made
 But the sheet was Belfast linen.





Mmm-mm good: blood-soaked horror in iambic pentameter, things only lit geeks could love.


And isn't that what it's all about, having some fun times and deep conversations with nerds just like you as we slowly crawl towards our end?


The tradition goes that you have to intone this Thoreau quote at the start of the meeting: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.”


Adults of sound mind don't talk like this, and for good reason. It's infantile, hopelessly naive and on the nose. In fact, even the most high-minded study of literature is kind of an infantile hobby, concerned with telling and reinterpreting stories that never happened or puzzling over why somebody made those weird sounds they did.


But you have to distract Baby with something so he doesn't put his finger in the electrical socket. Reading and writing are as good a distraction as any and better than most. Oscar Wilde said, "To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honor." My only regret is that I have but one life to ruin for poetry.


Day... SEIZED!

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Sodomy, Apocalypse, Salt and Incest (In That Order)

I figure it's about time for a funny one. It's long but gripping. Sad at the end.


As best I can figure out, George Finckel was a cellist and music professor at Bennington College at the same time Howard Nemerov taught there. Beyond that, I haven't the slightest. 


The very ribald Old Testament gets a great Borscht Belt treatment here. To get the full effect, first read Genesis 19  and then imagine the whole thing being related to you by Jerry Stiller or a middle-aged Jerry Lewis. Any Jerry will do, really. Except maybe Tom and Jerry, which would be weird but amusing.


And what is the DEAL with pillars of salt?!




Lot Later
Howard Nemerov

Vaudeville for George Finckel


     I
It seems now far off and foolish, a memory
Torn at the hem from the fabric of a dream
In drunken sleep, but why was I the one?
God knows, there were no fifty righteous, nor
Ten righteous, in town just at that very moment,
Gone south for the winter, maybe. And moreover,
I wouldn't have been one of the ten or fifty
Or whatever, if there had been. Abraham
Stood up to him, but not for me-more likely
For the principle of the thing. I've always been
Honest enough for this world, and respected
In this town-but to be taken by the hair
Like that and lifted into that insane story,
Then to be dropped when it was done with me ...
I tell you, I felt used.
In the first place,
I never knew the two of them were angels:
No wings, no radiance. I thought they might be students
Going from town to town, seeing the country.
I said "Come in the house, we'll have a drink-,
Some supper, why not stay the night?" They did.
The only oddity was they didn't bother
With evening prayers, and that made me suspect
They might be Somebody. But in my home town
It doesn't take much; before I thought it out
People were coming round beating the door:
"Who you got in the house, let's have a party."
It was a pretty nice town in those days,
With always something going on, a dance
Or a big drunk with free women, or boys
For those who wanted boys, in the good weather
We used to play strip poker in the yard.
But just then, when I looked at those young gents,
I had a notion it was riot this time,
And shouted through the door, "Go home, we're tired."
Nobody went. But all these drunks began
To pound the door and throw rocks at the windows
And make suggestions as to what they might do
When they got hold of the two pretty young men.
Matters were getting fairly desperate
By this time, and I said to those outside,
" Look, I got here my two daughters, virgins
Who never been there yet. I send them out.
Only my guests should have a peaceful night."
That's how serious the situation was.
Of course it wasn't the truth about the kids,
Who were both married, and, as a matter of fact,
Not much better than whores, and both the husbands
Knocking their horns against the chandeliers
Of my own house-but still, it's what I said.
It got a big laugh out there, and remarks,
Till the two young men gave me a nice smile
And stretched out one hand each, and suddenly
It got pitch dark outside, people began
Bumping into each other and swearing; then
They cleared away and everything was quiet.
So one young man opens his mouth, he says,
"You've got till sunrise, take the wife and kids
And the kids' husbands, and go. Go up to the hills."
The other says, "The Lord hath sent us to
Destroy this place" and so forth and so forth.
You can imagine how I felt. I said,
"Now look, now after all. . ." and my wife said,
"Give me a few days till I pack our things,"
And one of them looked at his watch and said,
"It's orders, lady, sorry, you've got till dawn."
I said, "Respectfully, gentlemen, but who
Lives in the hills? I've got to go, so why
Shouldn't I go to Zoar, which is a nice
Town with a country club which doesn't exclude
Jews?" "So go to Zoar if you want," they said.
"Whatever you do, you shouldn't look back here."
We argued all night long. First this, then that.
My son-in-laws got into the act: "You're kidding,
Things of this nature simply do not happen
To people like us." The pair of them said, "We'll stay.
Only deed us the house and furniture,"
"I wouldn't deed you a dead fish," I said,
"Besides, I'm going to take the girls along."
"So take," they said, "they weren't such a bargain."
The two visitors all this time said nothing,
They might as well not have been there. But I
Believed what I was told, and this, I think,
Makes all the difference-between life and death,
I mean-to feel sincerely that there's truth
In something, even if it's God knows what.
My poor old woman felt it too, that night,
She only couldn't hold it to the end.
The girls just packed their biggest pocketbooks
With candy and perfume; they'd be at home
Most anywhere, even in a hill.
                                                At last
I knelt down and I spoke to my God as follows:
"Dear Sir," I said, "I do not understand 
Why you are doing this to my community,
And I do not understand why, doing it,
You let me out. There's only this one thing,
So help me, that with ail my faults I do
Believe you are able to do whatever you say
You plan to do. Myself, I don't belong
In any operation on this scale.
I've always been known here as a nice fellow,
Which is low enough to be or want to be:
Respectfully I ask to be let go
To live out my declining years at peace
In Zoar with my wife and the two kids
Such as they are, A small house will do.
Only I shouldn't be part of history."
Of course no one answered. One of them said:
"If you're about through, please get on Your feet,
It's time to go." My daughters' gorgeous husbands
Were drinking on the porch before we left.

     II 
My relative Abraham saw it happen: the whole
Outfit went up in smoke, he said. One minute
There was the town, with banks and bars and grills
And the new sewage disposal plant, all looking
(he said) terribly innocent in the first light;
Then it ignited. It went. All those old pals
Gone up, or maybe down. I am his nephew,
Maybe you know, he had troubles himself,
With the maid, and his own son. That's neither here
Nor there. We'd been forbidden to look, of course,
But equally of course my old girl had to look.
She turned around, and in one minute there
She was, a road sign or a mileage marker.
By this time, though, I knew that what we were in
Was very big, and I told the kids Come on.
We didn't stop to cry, even. Also
We never went to Zoar. I began to think
How real estate was high, how I'd been told
To go up in the hills, and how I'd always
Wanted to live in the country, a gentleman
Like Abraham, maybe, and have my flocks
Or whatever you call them-herds. Well, I found out.
A cave, we lived in, a real cave, out of rock.
I envied those burns my son-in-laws, until
I remembered they were dead. And the two girls,
My nutsy kids, getting the odd idea
That the whole human race had been destroyed
Except for its, conceived-this word I love,
Conceived-the notion that they should be known
In carnal union by their poppa. Me.
Poor dear old Dad. Most any man might dream
About his daughters; darling and stupid chicks
As these ones were, I'd dreamed, even in daytime,
Such brilliant dreams. But they? They bought some booze,
Having remembered to bring money along,
Something I never thought of, considering
I was in the hand of God, and got me boiled.
And then-I'm told-on two successive nights
Arrived on my plain stone couch and-what shall I say?
Had me? I was completely gone at the time,
And have no recollection. But there they were,
The pair of them, at the next moon, knocked up,
And properly, and by their Dad. The kids
Turned out to be boys, Moab and Ben-Ammi
By name. I have been given to understand
On competent authority that they will father
A couple of peoples known as Moabites
And Ammonites, distinguished chiefly by
Heathenish ways and ignorance of the Law.
And I did this? Or this was done to me,
A foolish man who lived in the grand dream
One instant, at the fuse of miracle and
The flare of light, a man no better than most,
Who loves the Lord and does not know His ways,
Neither permitted the pleasure of his sins
Nor punished for them, and whose aging daughters
Bring him his supper nights, and clean the cave.














Tuesday, December 28, 2010

My Bad

Regrets
Matt Quarterman

People in movies and often in real life
are fond of saying things along the lines of,
“I have no regrets. If I had to do it all over again
there’s nothing that I would do differently.”
There’s a promise there, a life completely lived,
promises completely fulfilled, secrets perfectly kept.
But it can never happen.
There’s always an opportunity that’s missed,
a hand that’s raised in anger unexpectedly,
a slip of the tongue, a cruel wit
that you just can’t bite down.
It’s a bluff, really —
nobody could live that well.




I've got a few more posts up my sleeve but this is probably the last original poem I'll post this year. It's not the best or the worst, it's not much of anything, really. I like it because it began spontaneously but I'm still writing it. 


I also like it because it speaks to all the things I screw up. I know there are poems I'll kick myself for not including, topics I didn't expound on, matters of form or diction I would love to get a chance to rant about. 


I've been pretty lazy in most of my posts, including a paragraph or two but letting somebody else do the heavy lifting. I could have made this more than it was, but I didn't. I had casual video games to play and "30 Rock" episodes to rewatch and Facebook to obsessively refresh. That's time you don't get back.


Nietzche talks about eternal recurrence, not an idea that everything happens again and again a lá "Groundhog Day." But the thought that given everything from the Big Bang onwards, everything happened as it did, so if it happened again, everything would happen again. As Byrne and Eno named their recent album, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today."


So I guess if I started all over again, you'd get the same grab bag of opinions, emotions and sloth just as it exists now. I'm not sure if this is comforting or alarming. But there you have it: my mea culpa for botching the whole thing up. Hope it's been as regrettable for you as it has been for me.

Today's Lesson

As an apologia for my rambling on, here's a poem I think is a pretty gracious response to a typical school situation, especially considering some of the responses from profs I've had in my academic career.




For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop
David Wagoner

I've watched his eyelids sag, spring open
   Vaguely and gradually go sliding
      Shut again, fly up
With a kind of drunken surprise, then wobble
   Peacefully together to send him
      Home from one school early. Soon his lashes
Flutter in REM sleep. I suppose he's dreaming
   What all of us kings and poets and peasants
      Have dreamed: of not making the grade,
Of draining the inexhaustible horn cup
   Of the cerebral cortex where ganglions
      Are ganging up on us with more connections
Than atoms in heaven, but coming up once more
   Empty. I see a clear stillness
      Settle over his face, a calming of the surface
Of water when the wind dies. Somewhere
   Down there, he's taking another course
      Whose resonance (let's hope) resembles
The muttered thunder, the gutter bowling, the lightning
   Of minor minions of Thor, the groans and gurgling
      Of feral lovers and preliterate Mowglis, the songs
Of shamans whistled through bird bones. A worried neighbor
   Gives him the elbow, and he shudders
      Awake, recollects himself, brings back
His hands from aboriginal outposts,
   Takes in new light, reorganizes his shoes,
      Stands up in them at the buzzer, barely recalls
His books and notebooks, meets my eyes
   And wonders what to say and whether to say it,
      Then keeps it to himself as today's lesson.




We're coming right up to the end of this year-long experiment, I'm so excited I think I'm developing senioritis. I've already made plans of all the things I'll do when I'm not writing a blog. It's been real, it's been fun, it's been real fun, but I think I'm ready to move on. (Or at least not flagellate myself if I don't post every single day.)


So my sympathies to you, my imaginary school-children: it's been a long year. But summer is  coming, it's right around the corner, it's practically here!


Monday, December 27, 2010

How Swift, How Secretly

A lot of people in my age bracket know bits of this poem because of a certain painfully earnest tear-jerker of a film called "Dead Poets Society." (Stay tuned for more on that subject.)




To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Robert Herrick

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.


The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
   The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
   And nearer he's to setting.


That age is best which is the first,
   When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
   Times still succeed the former.


Then be not coy, but use your time,
   And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
   You may forever tarry.




To me it sounds a lot like a fratboy douchebucket minoring in Philosophy trying to get laid at a weekend kegger. It's not a bad point: your jiggly bits tend to get rusty, so may as well use them while they're still under manufacturer's warranty. But the combo of sex and death is just enough on the nose to make me suspicious — this guy can't just let his points stand for themselves, he's got to scare you into bumping uglies with him.


I'm also not convinced that, "That age is best which is the first," without even quibbling over whether he means young adulthood, teenage, infancy or fetushood. When youth and blood are warmer is a pretty miserable time for a lot of people. I'm not convinced the ladies being less coy would do all that much to alleviate it.


Of course, it's a common poetic conceit, and may not be meant to be taken literally. Here's another for comparison.




To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart;
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
   But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
   Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.




Again not great, but any poem that can spark an immortal line like, "Had we but worlds enough and time" can't be ignored. And it's a cool poem because it sets this up:




You, Andrew Marvell
Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun  
And here upon earth’s noonward height  
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:


To feel creep up the curving east  
The earthy chill of dusk and slow  
Upon those under lands the vast  
And ever climbing shadow grow


And strange at Ecbatan the trees  
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange  
The flooding dark about their knees  
The mountains over Persia change


And now at Kermanshah the gate  
Dark empty and the withered grass  
And through the twilight now the late  
Few travelers in the westward pass


And Baghdad darken and the bridge  
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on


And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone  
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown


And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls  
And loom and slowly disappear  
The sails above the shadowy hulls


And Spain go under and the shore  
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more  
The low pale light across that land


Nor now the long light on the sea:


And here face downward in the sun  
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on ...  





There's exotic geography and a creeping sense of slow and beautiful doom. I first heard of this because a sci-fi author wrote a novel called "Strange at Ecbatan the Trees" and the weird loveliness of the phrase haunted me. I still think this is the work of a master poet: the end of day and start of night, the Old World atlas of places with their glorious histories behind them, the intimations of mortality.


There's only one song that could possibly spring to mind to follow that up, definitely in my five favorite Dylan songs, maybe even top ten songs of all time. (Ignore the terrible lip-synching and just listen to the pedal steel.)