A Retrospective Appraisal of Hollace M. Metzger’s 3VOΓVE.

By Rehan Qayoom.

Preamble

It‘s a crazy book and I didn‘t mean to write it.1

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write.‖2

When, sick of Muse, our follies we deplore, And promise our best Friends to ryme no more;

We wake next morning in a raging Fit,

And call for Pen and Ink to show our Wit.3

Two lovers sat on a park bench [overlooking the sea], with their bodies touching each other,

1

1 Graves, Robert. To Patricia Cunningham. Grevel Lindop. ‗A Crazy Book: Robert Graves & The White

Goddess'. PN Review, (September/October 1997). 27-29. 2 Sidney, Sir Philip. ‗Astrophel & Stella‘, 1591, 1598. The Complete Poetical Works. 3 volumes, (Cambridge

University Press). 3 Pope, Alexander. ‗The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated‘. The Poems of Alexander Pope.

(Routledge, 1963). 641, 642.

holding hands in the moonlight [at dusk, gazing at the sky].

There was silence between them. So profound was their love for each other, they needed no words to express it. And so they sat in silence, on a park bench [overlooking the

sea], with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight [at dusk, gazing at the sky].

Finally she spoke. ―Do you love me, John?‖ she asked. ―You know I love you,

darling,‖ he replied. ―I love you more than tongue can tell. You are the light of my life, my sun, moon and stars. You are my everything. Without you I have no reason for being.‖

Again there was silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench [overlooking the sea],

their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight [at dusk, gazing at the sky]. Once more she spoke. ―How much do you love me?‖ she asked. He answered: ―How much do I love

you? Count the stars in the sky. Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon. Number

the grains of sand on the sea shore. Impossible, you say‖. "Yes and it is just as impossible for me to say how much I love you."

―My love for you is higher than the heavens, deeper than Hades, and broader

than the Earth. It has no limits, no bounds. Everything must have an ending except my love

for you.‖ There was more silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench [overlooking the sea]

with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight [at dusk, gazing at the sky].

Once more her voice was heard. ―Kiss me, John‖ she implored. And leaning over, he pressed his lips warmly to hers in fervent osculation.4

Rene Magritte. 'The Lovers: ii‘, (1928).

2

4 Johnson, Samuel L. ‗Lovers on a Park Bench‘. With modifications by Metzger.

Reviews are arguably more about the reviewer than about the work reviewed as love poems

are more about the feelings of the poet towards the beloved. I am thinking of Auden‘s

caution that:

The girl whose boyfriend starts writing her love poems should be on her guard, perhaps he

really does love her, but one thing is certain: while he was writing his poems he was not thinking of her but of his own feelings about her.5

Such seems to be the case here as well but it is (the) I/eye mirroring the art/heart:

In Wilde's fable Narcissus looks at his image in the water, but does not know that the water

sees only its own image in his eyes.6

I do not believe there is any such thing as taking a false turn in life. All is relevant in poetry

of such level and calibre. Though one's paths may twist and double back. In poetry that

much is true which is relevant emotionally and I know my poetical opinions are rather

(b)anal:

Observe the eloquent pleasure of speech for whatever was spoken It seemed to aver what was already in my heart

7

3VOΓVE is an epochal re-presentation of the alchemical bridging of science and/with

theology (theogeny, even). It is a symbolic transcendence of the honeybee, the queen bee, no

less, the Muse Goddess for whom the mills turn, for whom the coffee berries crackle, whose

coughing at intervals reveals that she could be my smoking companion. It is the honey for

which ‗I am all mouth.‘8 Her/its holy otherness is in the integral aspect of an impish Belle

Dame Sans Merci that hath yours truly in an aesthetic-ecstatic death-thrall of love's wonder:

A tongue known as neither yours nor mine, split by virtuoso and willingly combined,

it drips syllabic honey from a hollow hive

where only bees would ever before sting,

where not a soul could eʼr learn to sing

and I could neʼer imagine to fly freely from.

(‗Hands‘).

the changed cells gathered

and my hair was damp on my neck and I prayed to be disturbed

and hurricanoes whirled and hissed,

my nose itched, my eyes hurt,

3

5 Auden, W. H. ‗Squares & Oblongs‘. (1948). The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose 2 1939 - 1948.

(Faber & Faber, 2002). 346. 6 Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. (Hamish Hamilton, 1987). 294. 7 Ghalib, Mirza Assadullah Khan. Divan e Ghalib. 8 Plath, Sylvia. ‗Poem for a Birthday: Who‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1981).

and then there was this.9

Pulses of snow poured over the treelines

Red fires burn in my forests

Moons explode

Little catastrophes happen all over I am writing, writing

(Stephen Watts. ‗Short Poem ii‘).

What can a word-robbed and time-torn poet say before such grandeur but be racked

speechless in every limb as the revelation-burdened and child-rendered Jeremiah and be dead,

impacted, shattered but in a positive, life-giving revival, rejuvenated and imbibed with new

vigour for was ever anyone more in accord with Wilde's statement than ye poet?

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a

mimicry, their passions a quotation.10

But these quotations emerged from the immediate emotional response to the poems (which is

probably not a good idea to record) and I hope to God there is a connection somewhere that I

hit upon but perhaps it won't carry beyond my meagre brain. An increasing fear because I‘ve

developed a sort of word amnesia, a dumbness that internalises everything and brings nothing

out, that offers nothing and no thing that proliferates and paints everything as black or

colourless with the colours appearing in between:

The gap between my feelings and my skill Was so immense, I wonder I went on.11

A fear expressed by the Urdu poet Parveen Shakir in ‗Soliloquy‘:

The people around me

Seem to speak

A totally alien tongue That Wavelength

Whereby I was connected to them

Has entered another dimension Either my language has become obsolete

Or their definitions have changed

Their grammars do not contain The glossaries of the paths

Upon which my words take me

I am dumb to the sanctity of words and cannot hold converse

But with the solitude of walls or my own shadow I am terrified of the moment

When I will entirely dissolve and disappear into myself

Having forgotten that Frequency

4

9 Shapcott, Jo. ‗Composition‘. Of Mutability, (Faber & Faber, 2010). 51. 10 Wilde, Oscar. De Profundis. (1905). 11 Betjeman, Sir John. ‗Summoned By Bells‘. Collected Poems, (John Murray, 2006).

Upon which I used to soliloquise

And am left repeating to myself "May day, May day"12

As days fade into quiet, clock‘s hands fall with sunsets

and time ticks its insistent

metronome for no orchestra;

Have I already reached an unknown

state of de-sensitivity and deafness,

I've yet to read Love's lips

from any land's shifting contour -

('Where Sound Resides').

The only other fear I have is dying alone and nobody knowing of a rotting corpse and the

disappearance of loved ones while that corpse lives. The words on the paper detritus left

behind washed away like sandcastles by the tide. The doctors have not yet invented a

syndrome for it and in this state of mind all I can offer are some immediate thoughts that I

know make no sense to anyone but to myself, for myself, the me that is the not me:

But in truth the oracle is dumb. He utters nothing but a few sophisms sheltered from

5

12 Shakir, Parveen. Mah e Tamam, (Murad Publications, 2002). Translated by the author, May 2007.

correction by their curt ambiguity, or a few peasants' remedies made to sound imposing.13

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;14

Metzger‘s paintings and photo-art demand healthy periods of time. Her works (whether

created through the medium of a stylus, pen, paintbrush, or a knife) caress the contours of the

soul and depict places that cannot be expressed in words, going beyond the mere physical so

that now one actually feels like running away/out of oneself and now it feels like she is the

only person in the world who loves and knows what it is to love and to be loved.15 The choice

assembling of words in the poetry reads like patterns on an artist‘s canvas: there is at times,

quite a brilliant symmetry and always strong elements of structure, design and intricate verbal

and metrical technique, reflecting the cosmos in a state of flux: the transformations of life

itself in order to submit to the law of variation and change rather like the tide rolling in and

rolling back out again:

Every word can be analysed minutely – from the point of view of vowel and consonant

shades, values, coolnesses, warmths, assonances and dissonances. Technically, I suppose the

visual appearance and sound of words, taken alone, may be much like the mechanics of music

… or the color and texture in a painting.16

It is said that ‗She who leaves a trail of glitter behind, is never forgotten‘:

I never signed

the painting I sent to you because I thought

you‘d know who it was from.

I just didn‘t want to dictate which way it was hung.

6

13 Bacon, Francis. Temporis Partus Masculus [The Masculine Birth of Time], (1605). Translated by Benjamin

Farrington. In The Philosophy of Francis Bacon. (Chicago, 1964). 14 Eliot, T. S. ‗Four Quartets: Little Gidding‘. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, (Faber & Faber, 1963). 15 From the chest to the navel is the place to remain silent about. How can one describe it in plain words.

And beyond that place lies the rose-bud,

even whose mention makes the tongue falter.

Mir, Mir Taqi. 'Mu 'amilat-i Ishq' [‗Transactions of Love‘]. Kulliyat e Mir. Translated by C. M. Naim. 16 Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, (2000).

I never told you

about the glitter left on your face after you kissed me

because when you went on stage,

I wanted everyone to know

that you were a star.17

The physicality and eroticism in the poems in 3VOΓVE are difficult to match to any other

poet (after Neruda). For example (several can be given) in the simile of:

I could balance

a dance

between two left feet under a Möbius Strip-ping

of shoulders swaying.

(‗Fete de la Musique‘).

pull me back,

closer, and taste my sweat from

your lingering finger

that you used to push my spine

nearer this time.18

Or in the lifting of a finger to the mouth ‗still tasting salt on my skin‘ (‗Central Station

00:38‘), the rhythm of the hips swaying with the ocean described in ‗Raining Fire‘ and that:19

The sidewalks are lined with coupled figures

I know will be doing

more than flirting tonight.20

Up, and down,

kissing me softly.

Up, and down, rotating gently.

Up, and down,

exploring me entirely. Up, and down,

"Oh, my ……. God!"21

The hairs you grew above your lip that grate me to

7

17 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Confessions to an Intangible Lover‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 123. 18 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Teach Me to Tango‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 87. 19 Metzger, Hollace M. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 58. 20 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Raining Fire‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 179, 180. 21 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Hospitality‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 26.

a ubiquitous

and pleasurable rouge. The rose before you –

(‗The Rose Before You‘).

Or the ingenious use of the double entendre, aside the synonyms and homophones all which

seem to be her forte:

You, the night, the magic,

the frankincense,

the lost religion,

the rose suspended tightly between my thighs,

and your eyes –

your gaze, penetrating days' suspended mornings

while the city's electric fusion

followed a divinity's hand

planning new mountains into a realm beyond it.

(‗You, The Night, The‘).22

Metzger‘s imagery of the rose can also be seen to reflect the short story ‗The Nightingale &

the Rose‘ by Oscar Wilde.23 There is a verse of the Urdu poet Mir which I love, he says:

I asked "How long is the life of a rose"?

The petal heard it and burst into a smile24

Now we shall select out of the creations of God a delicate creation, that is to say, a rose, and

we shall set out the external and internal wonders by virtue of which it is admitted that it is

beyond human power to create its match. We shall then prove that the wonders and

excellences of the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘ not only match the wonders of the rose, but also exceed them. The reason why I select this illustration is that on one occasion I saw in a vision that I

was holding in my hand the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘ inscribed on a leaf and it was so beautiful and

attractive that it appeared that the paper on which it was inscribed was loaded with soft red roses which were beyond count. When I recited any verse of the Sura‘, many of the roses flew

upwards emitting an attractive sound. Those roses were very large, delicate, beautiful, fresh,

and fragrant; and by their ascending upwards the heart and brain were perfumed, overpowered, and drawn away from the world and its contents, on account of the matchless

delights of the roses. From this vision, I gathered that the rose has a spiritual relationship with

the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘ and that is why I have selected this illustration. I shall first set out as an

8

22 The Babylonian Mystery who ground between her thighs

The crown of thorns

Hughes, Ted. ‗Possession‘. Collected Poems, (Faber, & Faber, 2003). 23 Wilde, Oscar. The Happy Prince & Other Tales, (1888). 24 Mir, Mir Taqi. Kulliyat e Mir.

illustration the wonders, external and internal, that are found in the rose and shall then

describe as a contrast the external and internal wonders of the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘ so that a just reader should appreciate that the qualities, external and internal, that are found in the rose by

virtue of which it is impossible to create its match, are found in the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘ to a higher

degree. Thus, I would also fulfil the indication that was conveyed to me in my vision.

It will be admitted without hesitation that a rose, like other creations of God, possesses such qualities that a person has not the power to create its match. These qualities

are of a dual nature. First, those that are manifested in its appearance. They are that its colour

is most attractive, and its smell pleases the heart, and its body is soft, fresh, delicate and clean. Secondly, there are the inner qualities with which it is invested by God, that is to say, the

qualities that are inherent in it. These are that it pleases and strengthens the heart, upholds all

the faculties and spirits, operates as a laxative, and strengthens the stomach, liver, kidneys, arteries, the womb, and lungs. It is very helpful in a coma and in weakness of the heart, and is

useful in many other physical ailments.

On account of these dual qualities, it is believed that the rose is so perfect that it is not

possible for any human being to make a flower which should be attractive in colour and in fragrance, and should be fresh and soft and delicate and clear like the rose and in addition

should possess all those qualities that are possessed by the rose. If it is asked why is it

believed that human power is not able to create its match and why is it not possible that a person should be able to produce in an artificial flower all the qualities, external and internal,

that are found in the rose, the answer is that this has been proved in practice, and that no

philosopher or physician has been able to compound any medicines, or to devise a recipe, that would produce a flower possessing the appearance and qualities of the rose.

It should now be understood that these elements of matchlessness are to be found in

the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha, and indeed in the briefest portions of The Holy Quran. First observe its

external form and appreciate its colourful diction and beautiful exposition and sequence and other qualities which are essential for a good composition and which manifest themselves

throughout the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘, a manifestation that cannot be exceeded and which is free from

every type of coarseness and wildness of idiom. Every phrase is most eloquent, every form of expression has its proper place, and every type of quality which enhances the beauty of its

composition is found in it. The highest grade of eloquence that can be imagined is found in it

in perfection and all that is needed to make its meaning clear is present. With all these good

qualities, it is filled with the fragrance of truth and there is no exaggeration in it, which might have the slightest trace of falsehood. Its colourfulness is not like that of the poets which

smacks of falsehood and is full of idle boasts. As the compositions of poets reek of falsehood

and vain verbiage, this composition is full of the delicate fragrance. From the point of view of its internal qualities, the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘ comprises remedies

for great spiritual illnesses, and makes provision for the perfection of intellectual power and

the power of action. It reforms great disorders and sets forth great insights and fine points which have been hidden from the eyes of thinkers and philosophers. The heart of a seeker is

strengthened by its perusal and is healed of the ills of doubt and suspicion and error. Many

high verities and fine realities which are needed for the perfection of the soul are furnished by

its contents. Obviously, these excellences are such that they cannot be combined in the writing or speech of any human being. This impossibility is not mere inference, but is

obvious. God Almighty has manifested the perfection of its external and internal qualities by

setting out, in eloquent words, the fine points and high insights at the time of their need and in accordance with the requirements of truth. He has carried both sides, the external and the

internal, to the highest degrees of perfection. First, it sets out those necessary high insights the

signs of which had disappeared from previous teachings, and no thinker or philosopher had set them forth. These have not been set out without need and in vain, but they have been set

out at a time when they were absolutely necessary for the reform of the conditions of the age

9

and without their being set out the age would have faced ruin and destruction. They have not

been set out imperfectly or incompletely, and are perfect in themselves. The wisdom of a wise person cannot cite a religious verity which has been left out of them. Nor is there any doubt

which troubles the mind of a worshipper of falsehood that has not been set at rest. To express

all these verities and fine points, of which there was great need, at the highest level of

eloquence, is a great undertaking which is obviously above the capacity of human faculties. Humankind is so bereft of merit that it is not possible to express truthfully average

matters, which are not connected with high verities, in colourful and eloquent words, adhering

all the time to truth and accuracy of statement. For instance, it is impossible for a shopkeeper, who is a high-grade poet and writer, to carry on conversing with diverse types of customers

eloquently and in colourful words, confining to whatever is appropriate on every occasion. To

speak less where economy of words is needed and hold forth at length, where long speeches are appropriate. When a discussion should ensue with the customer, to adopt a method which

should support the thesis. Or take the case of a magistrate whose duty it is to take down

and to put questions and to record answers which are appropriate for the investigation of the

matter in dispute, and to set down legal arguments accurately according to the law, and to set forth the facts in their proper order and to record his opinion and the reasons in support

thereof accurately. He would find it impossible to do all this at a level of eloquence which it

would not be possible for another human being to exceed. The case of human compositions is such that without vain, unnecessary and irrelevant matters, their authors cannot take a step

and cannot set out anything without falsehood and idle statements. If they make an attempt it

is defective like a picture which if it depicts a nose, it leaves out ears and if it depicts ears, it leaves out eyes. If truth is adhered to, eloquence has to be sacrificed, and if eloquence has to

be pursued, falsehood and idle statements are piled up like an onion which is all leaves

and has no substance.

Thus, sane reason determines that it is impossible to set out average matters in colourful and eloquent words while adhering to truth and the requirements of the occasion.

Then it is easy to understand that to set out high insights according to the requirements of

truth in colourful and eloquent language, better than which cannot be imagined, is a supernatural task which is beyond human power and is as impossible of achievement as it is

impossible to create a flower which should completely resemble a rose in its external and

internal qualities. Experience testifies and sane nature accepts that in ordinary matters it

becomes impossible for a person to set forth something which is necessary and true, whether it relates to a matter of buying and selling or relates to judicial procedure, and it is desired to

perform this task in the best manner, in the most appropriate and suitable language at the

highest degree of eloquence. Then how is it possible for a human being to set forth in a writing truthfully and accurately insights and high verities according to need, comprising

Divine truths, without omitting anything that is needed for the reform of the times and for

conclusive argument and for repelling the objections of opponents while observing all the rules of debate and discussion, and comprising all necessary arguments, proofs of teachings,

and the requisite questions and answers? The difficulties would be multiplied a hundredfold

beyond those that we have set out in the first case, and yet it would be necessary that the

beauty of the composition should be matchless and peerless, and that it should not be possible to express the subject matter in more eloquent language.

These are the qualities which are found in the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘ and in The Holy Quran,

which are in accord with the qualities of matchlessness of a rose. But another great quality is found in the ‗Sura‘ Fatiha‘ and The Holy Quran, which is peculiar to them, and that is that to

read them with attention and sincerity purifies the heart, and removes the veils of darkness,

and expands the mind, and drawing the seeker after truth to God, manifests such lights and effects which are found only in those who are close to God and which cannot be acquired by

any other means. We have given proof in this book of this spiritual effect, and if a seeker after

10

truth should so desire we can satisfy and furnish fresh proof.25

Both ‗Rondine‘ and ‗Purple‘ (Transcriptions of Time, 146, 178) reminisce a boy and a very

beautiful girl over coffee once in Borders talking so kindly and lovingly to each other – Kind

intelligent voices and as they talked their hands played seductively. They seemed to be

deeply in love with each other. The girl was passively seduced:

I watch a pubescent

boy and girl make love with their hands,

beside me.

Do they know

What they‘re doing?

Metzger has written about ‗Twitch‘ elsewheres but it seems as if everything she has ever

transcribed is poetry. The only other poet I know of who can claim that (and does) is Tony

Harrison:

Poetry is all I write, whether for books, or readings, or for the National Theatre, or for the

opera house and concert hall, or even for TV.26

11

25 Ahmad, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam. Barahin e Ahmadiyya iii [Arguments in Support of 'The Holy Quran' & the

Prophethood of the Holy Prophet Muhammad 5 .402 - 395 .[ملسو هيلع هللا ىلص volumes, (Safir e Hind Press 1880, 1882,

Riyadh e Hind 1884, Anwar Ahmadiyya Machine Press, 1905). 26 Harrison, Tony in Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 1: Tony Harrison, (Bloodaxe, 1991). 9.

The poetry becomes new every time it is read. The word-choice so apt as if every word were

to rhyme with the next, the entire poem becoming wholly constructed in this way like an

ornament of natural pearls. For example the fascinating line ‗dreaming of life above me…‘ in

one of her most famous poems ‗Underneath Parisian Streets‘ in which she repeatedly

questions what is not noticed:

If I conceal my ruddy stripes,

the stars in my eyes and hide my blueness,

if I stand straight, pretending

my heart‘s still burning, will your city notice?27

Parts of this poem also seem to echo Plath:

I may be skin and bone, I may be Japanese.28

It is an incredible pounding rain-charm of a poem which invokes (to my mind) hours spent in

steamy cafés on rainy days:

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say this poet lies,

Such heavenly touches nere toucht earthly faces.29

...but you are the music While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled,30

‗Fugue‘ (Transcriptions of Time, 208) resurrects the power of Ted Hughes‘ famous poem:

He loved her and she loved him

His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to

He had no other appetite

She bit him she gnawed him she sucked She wanted him complete inside her

Safe and sure forever and ever

12

27 Metzger, Hollace. M. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 199. 28 Plath, Sylvia. ‗Lady Lazarus‘, (BBC, 30th October 1962), Plath Reads Plath, (Credo Records, 1975). 29 Shakespeare, William. 'Sonnet xvii'. Shakespeare's Sonnets, (Thomas Thorpe, 1609). 30 Eliot, T. S. 'Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages'. 1941. Collected Poems 1909 - 1962, (Faber & Faber, 1963).

Their little cries fluttered into the curtains31

‗Freedom‘ reveals Metzger at her best and most profound as when she professes the concept

of love and speaks of the mechanics of the heart, at her truest when describing emotion. If

poetry is anything to go by (being the form of art most able to reflect our strangest and truest

feelings and emotions) it is such as she can send. Brave enough to set off to another country

purely to live for art's sake and go on creating it in the face of the utmost and succeed at

doing it as well. Breathing God‘s fresh air and drinking water:32

You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.33

Arundhati Roy says that ‗The people who are privileged are also the ones who are the most

hopeless, and they most easily decide that there is no hope … but the point is that the

alternative and the hope is not going to come from the people who design the system and

profit from the system in first place; it is going to come from the people who have been left

out of it and they are going to say enough; you cannot have our bauxite, you cannot have our

rivers, you cannot have our mountains, manage with what you‘ve got and when that begins to

unfold; there will be a domino effect and people will have to find different ways of

managing‘:

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the

unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what

is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To

never look away. And never, never, to forget.34

Like the Jewish olive in the Talmud, Metzger gives her best when being crushed and

collapsing under the burden of her foliage:

I was in the winter of my life- and the men I met along the road were my only summer. At

night I fell asleep with visions of myself dancing and laughing and crying with them. Three

years down the line of being on an endless world tour and my memories of them were the only things that sustained me, and my only real happy times. I was a singer, not a very

13

31 Hughes, Ted. ‗Lovesong‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 2003). 32 You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-You-Are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid

to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other,

because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness." You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing,

and you're terrified somebody's going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somalia. It's wherever you go.

Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

Breakfast at Tiffany's. (Paramount Pictures, 1961). 33 Eliot, T. S. ‗Four Quartets: East Coker‘. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, (Faber & Faber, 1963). 34 Roy, Arundhati. The Cost of Living, (1999).

popular one, who once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet- but upon an unfortunate

series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again- sparkling and broken. But I really didn‘t mind because I

knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true

freedom is.

When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I had been living- they asked me why. But there‘s no use in talking to people who have a home, they

have no idea what its like to seek safety in other people, for home to be wherever you lie your

head. I was always an unusual girl, my mother told me that I had a chameleon soul. No

moral compass pointing me due north, no fixed personality. Just an inner indecisiveness that

was as wide and as wavering as the ocean. And if I said that I didn‘t plan for it to turn out this way I‘d be lying- because I was born to be the other woman. I belonged to no one- who

belonged to everyone, who had nothing- who wanted everything with a fire for every

experience and an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn‘t even talk

about- and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me. Every night I used to pray that I‘d find my people- and finally I did- on the open

road. We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make

our lives into a work of art. LIVE FAST. DIE YOUNG. BE WILD. AND HAVE FUN.

I believe in the country America used to be. I believe in the person I want to

become I believe in the freedom of the open road.35

Metzger‘s verse is pure, true and timeless as one can ever be. It is at once a place-less

universe (created by a great polymath) and in all places universally and the Throne of every

heart that she remotely touches (even without touching), upon which love rests. The lovers

serving but as the Pedestal for her ‗With naked foot stalking in my chamber.‘36 If there is no

love there is no existence, not in the scientific sense for the question of existence is not a

scientific one but an ontological one and always has been:

To one whose smile's precipitately versed

Though Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first

(My comic version of a verse of Pope

It's only trivial she won't mind I hope) Blue-stockinged one of all pervasive power

There for her poet in his lonely hour

Could I convey a little sense of time? Time which is always constant like my rhyme

Is now, a neat one here a half one there

Palatable impenetrable, hitch-itched air Your moon hides its face behind a veil of cloud

Your trees know where we went and what we did

There is a battle between love and duty

Words fail before your ever-blinding beauty Blue is the colour of the day when dawn

So many times, I, out of habit, yawn How shall I tell you at this time of day?

14

35 Rey, Lana Del. ‗Ride‘. Born to Die – The Paradise Edition, (2012). 36 Wyatt, Sir Thomas. ‗They flee from me that sometime did me seek‘. The Complete Poems, (Penguin

Classics, 1978). 116.

I've not said everything I wished to say We cease to love because we cease to give But go on living for we have to live Another Time - Another time, my dear

Not now no baby, no not here My Muse like Pope's is my best friend, not wife Eases me through this long Disease, my Life She sums it all up in a verse; a line

Fills an ocean in my glass of wine Drinking and thinking go hand in hand Drink and think and you will understand Time has revived her for my heart again Replugged and soignéd for my poet's pen And when I‘m gone they‘ll say ―Alas‖ ―Alack!‖

―He died of a massive heart attack‖

The religious/spiritual world view is one which is anthropocentric. The Sufi idea of the

universe being God's will/desire, His Passion corroborated through the Hadith [Traditional

Saying] of Muhammad ملسو هيلع هللا ىلص 'God says ‗I was a hidden treasure, so I desired to be known,

therefore I created the creation and made Myself known to them so that they came to know

Me‘. He speaks to the Perfect Man/Woman, known in Buddhism as the Nirmanakaya and

says (also narrated in numerous authentic Ahadith) 'Were it not for thee I would not have

created the celestial spheres'.

Dew is the alchemical symbol of the mind of God emanating spiritual forces that work on the

conscience at night. One wishes Metzger dawns tipped with heavy rose-dew:

How happy is the blameless Vestal‘s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;37

It is said it is impossible to feel close, both spiritually and mentally to those one hasn't

touched or been touched by physically. I know otherwise and am happy to remain in the dark

of others that is my sunshine: her love, her smiles. I read ‗Il Redentore‘ (Transcriptions of

Time, 76) and exclaimed:

In amaze

Lost I gaze! Can our eyes

Reach thy size!

May my lays Swell with praise,

Worthy thee!

Worthy me!

Muse, inspire

15

37 Pope, Alexander. ‗Eloisa to Abelard‘. 1717. The Poems of Alexander Pope, (Routledge, 1963). 257.

All thy fire!38

For it is here and in her world that dreams are forged and housed/pushed (in) to one ground-

shattering, universal, bitter reality depicted in my favourite Graham Greene novel - Far more

a record of hate than of love:

'People go on loving God, don't they, all their lives without seeing Him?'

'That's not our kind of love'.

'I sometimes don't believe there is any other kind'.39

And is not the only freedom for which it is worth dying, the freedom to risk failure

continually for the sake of a Pamina of whom we have only seen a picture?40

Point being, that love is a negative and destructive emotion eating away at the heart and takes

over the body and soul and yet we all need love. It is one of the greatest bitter-sweet41

(this

word was early coined by Sappho) mysteries of life that Hell and Paradise occupy the same

space. Muhammad ملسو هيلع هللا ىلص once said that the expanse of Paradise is spread out upon the entire

creation of Allah. He was asked as to where, then, Hell would be and he replied that it

occupied the same space but that people did not know it! What an incredible and time-

defying understanding of dimensions at a time when people could not have conceived of such

a thing and Judgement Day has been described as a continual court in session. Something of

this is touched upon in ‗Just the Right Volume‘ (Transcriptions of Time, 170):

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!42

The very things that the beloved is hated for are the very same things one loves her for:

… in the selfsame point that our Soul is made sensual, in the selfsame point is the

City of God ordained to Him from without beginning; into which seat He cometh, and

never shall remove. For God is never out of the soul: in which He dwelleth blissfully without end.43

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful – a faery‘s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light,

16

38 Pope, Alexander. ‗Verses on Gulliver‘s Travels – I: To Quinbus Flestrin, the Man-Mountain A Lilliputian

Ode‘. 1727. The Poems of Alexander Pope, (Routledge, 1963). 481. 39 Greene, Graham. The End of the Affair, (1951). 40 Auden, W. H. ‗Vocation & Society‘. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose 2 1939 – 1948 (Faber &

Faber, 202). 182. 41 Sappho. ‗Fragment 40‘. 42 Khayyám, Omar. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. (1859, 1868, 1872,

1879, 1889). 43 Julian of Norwich. A Revelation of Love, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

And her eyes were wild.44

Mawlana Rumi says: 'Life is too short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love

truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Life may not be

the party we hoped for, but while we're at it, dance...' I too have my journals as Metzger

mentions hers in ‗My Religion‘ (Transcriptions of Time, 143) assuring of the sad immortality

of the heart. For I too await (its) resurrection as it is written in the Bhagavad Gita ‗I am

become death. Mighty destroyer of worlds, out to destroy. All these (armies) you see. I

have already destroyed. You are only an instrument, O Arjuna. I am the soul which abides at

the heart of all things. I am beginning, middle and end‘.

Water is the fundamental and indispensable part of the miraculous system of relationships on

which life on Earth depends. Water metaphors all those relationships of creativity. Though

the age be against it the poets, artists and musicians have throughout time, healed and

connected the sickness of spirit to the world of nature, that is the raison d'être:

My élan vital, timeless, true

Precambrian remembrancer, alphabetic osmosis

Water also plays a fundamental role in symbolising the Divine Mercy:45

The 4 rivers of

Paradise (the 2 inflowing and the 2 out-flowing seen by the Muhammad ملسو هيلع هللا ىلص during his

Night Journey) are thought to correspond to 4 rivers on Earth.46

The river Thames flowing

through the heart of London is described as a sacred river.47

Its banks are little Earthly

Paradises.

As I think of her this day 'With fairest flowers / While summer lasts and I live here,'48

I think

of water. Like water, Metzger always unifies opposites into entire harmonies of sublime

redemptive love. It is what she does and what she is. Rumi (again) says ‗Let the beauty of

what you love become what you do‘. And again I drift off into monologues in a language of

my own making/comprehension so I shall leave it at this significant point in time in time for

time about time.

Metzger is above/beyond/without time and above/beyond/without space and

above/beyond/without boundaries. Her art is free from boundaries of colour, race, creed,

religion, body, sex, culture, mass-media and what it tells us. It is upon that horizon that she is

revealed in all her glory. She is truly at a level the prophets and mystics experienced and

knew all about such as I can only grasp at in the dark or glimpse in dreams but through/in her

work, art and life. If there is any such thing as love or beauty in the world it is in this and

comes out from her raw and throbbing pervading the world, time and what is done. She gives

reason to life after all contradicting what is hammered into one daily though quite contrary to

expectation in a good way as ‗It's all poetry to me'. She teaches otherwise, that we are worth

17

44 Keats, John. The Complete Poems, (Penguin Classics, 1973, 1977, 1988). 45 See the forthcoming essay ‗A Vision of the Spiral Castle‘ by the author for further iconological detail. 46 These are the tributaries of the river in Paradise from The Holy Bible: Genesis 2. 47 Ackroyd, Peter. Thames: Sacred River, (2007). 48 Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline.

what we give, not what we own:

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the

things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.49

Love, like water channels its own paths which often take us by surprise and when strong

enough breaks all barriers that are placed before it.50 Bertrand Russell wrote to Lady

Constance Malleson 'You fill my heart and mind so full that it is very difficult to find room

for anything else.' They were forbidden to write to each other when Russell was imprisoned

in 1918 but she used her agony column in The Times as a means and he wrote to her in

French which the warders thought was part of his research. In one letter he wrote 'Dans

l'amour, la terreur, cesse parce que la solitude n'existe plus. Il est difficile de trouver un

amour réciproque si intime qu'il fasse cesser la solitude, mais il est possible. Tu l'as fait pour

moi. Je ne sais pas si je l'ai fait pour toi ...'51

T. S. Eliot, in the iconic essay on Dante wrote that:

The love of man and woman, is only explained and made reasonable by the higher love or

else is simply the coupling of animals.52

What I would say is that there is rather a lot of sex in 3VOLVE, which is just as

well. Humans are sexual beings. We complete ourselves by making love. Such persons can

appear who love one for oneself alone. To whom alone one can best whisper sweet nothings.

Falling in love is the only time one sees the world without oneself at the centre of

significance, with another startling at its heart:

Only love Can justify the art in verse

Only love can release from the knots of the ego. Otherwise it isn't easy to be ruthless, strong,

confident and daring, to pour one's heart out and potentially break another's heart ... to

confess love for someone ...why? Because one doesn't have to deal with the tears, to deal

with those eyes that stare you straight in the face that beg you to stop, it is easy to hide the

embarrassment when the other doesn't say ―I love you too‖, to escape the guilt, escape the

betrayal, the love:

Many days I lived with the belief

that you'd be here beside me. It's habitual, sorry.

Tonight, I know

18

49 The Holy Bible. 2 Corinthians 4: 18, (King James Authorised Version, 1611). 50 See Metzger‘s ‗Oberon‘ in Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 86, with ‗Ascending Dingle‘ in 3VOΓVE. 51 [‗In love, terror ceases because loneliness no longer exists. It is difficult to find a mutual love so intimate that

it can banish solitude, but it is possible. You have done it for me. I don‘t know if I have done it for you ...‘]

Seymour-Jones, Caroline. Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, (2001). 52 Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays 1917 - 1932, (1932).

you never will be.

Life has simply phased and you, my Love, have faded.

We will never board that train

going north. I will never meet

your parents. I will never row the same boat

across Loch Lommond.

I will never go and I will never hear

that song again.

Here I am. But, you're gone.53

Something of this is also depicted in her poem 'You Are the One' (Transcriptions of Time,

67). Just as Neruda says:

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,

tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,

tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.54

Lessons learnt from 3VOΓVE: To shun dependence - To always be a giver - To keep giving

without expectation for the temporary abode of this world has nothing to offer – Not to seek

recognition and it will come, when you stop seeking all that was keeping away is suddenly

granted - Do not seek love just give it freely - Do not think that love can offer anything, it is

mostly a source of pain, love is only a bliss when shared as a gift from the Divine power of

Complete Being –

To meet you is not easy – all is easy, then.

The difficulty is, it is not difficult55

Mneh-duh, I am a-verse to these flow-of-thought comments (I loathe them). But as I do I

catch myself smile at the sunshine that bursts in the heart(s), of all those who love and know

love and are ready to flow with it wherever it goes, to follow Ariadne‘s thread to whatever

length it takes to mend aright (as also stated by E. E. Cummings in the poem beginning‗[i

carry your heart with me(i carry it in]‘):56

19

53 Metzger, Hollace. M. ‗Here I Am‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 64. 54 Neruda, Pablo. ‗Sonneto xvii‘. Cien sonetos de amor, (1959). 55 Ghalib, Mirza Assadullah Khan. Divan e Ghalib. 56 And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest. I

will go; and where thou lodgest. I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:

The Holy Bible. Ruth 1: 16.

Simon Peter said unto him, Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered him, whither I go, thou canst not

follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.

The Holy Bible. John 13: 26.

X – Y – Z

Generations dangling from a rope that gives

and gives

and gives

and gives and gives

and gives

and gives and gives

and gives

such seedy succulent Hope!

(‗Brooklyn Fools‘).

With Metzger the riddle of whether or not the Muse exists is re-solved. She is the one who

breathes inspiration into the soul (through inhalations and exhalations) and brings the words

alive through simple metaphors and explanations of a real, living, breathing being. A Galatea

to Pygmalion, a word made flesh, a living myth. She is the ‗Eternal Story‘.57 Love is joined

by an axis of semi-magical power. Through love come the renewed assurances of wisdom.

For the troubadours (Arabic word meaning Lute-player) poetry was the pudding that proved

the validity of one's love: a divine gift, which it still is and not a feat of individual triumph.

They worshiped the one who inspired their songs. The fluid transparency of truth, of the

celestial luminosity is in the pudding. The proof of the pudding is in the eating (‗First String

Bikini‘):58

Was I never your beloved

20

57 Unfettered, pure

love that was real.

I will never forget you,

as you have composed

one bar, one enduring note

in my life‘s song. You are there forever.

Thank You.

When the symphony

finally collaborates,

when the woodwinds

meet the strings in time,

they will know

that I was yours,

that you were mine.

They‘ll play our song and cry

of joy, of effort, of pain,

our rhythm, our rhyme- beautiful hymns of love,

our poetry,

our Eternal Story.

Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Eternal Story‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 23. 58 See the Brian Hyland novelty song ‗Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini‘ (Kapp Records, 1960).

Castalia?

Were you never my muse?59

She shares in the visions and offers inspiration to live and to write through the vessel of her

divine wisdom. In and through her we learn why Rumi wrote that 'Whoever looked upon a

truly beautiful woman saw God.' With her we find ourselves lying down in green pastures;

and being led beside quiet waters!60

For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the head

With all such reading as was never read:

For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, Goddess, and about it:

So spins the silkworm small its slender store,

And labours till it clouds itself all o'er.61

The poetry will speak for itself as I am somewhat apprehensive of expounding in prose, and

being too clear.‘

(‗Author‘s Note‘).

As if the concern of poetry were to cover its own tracks. When a deliberate attempt to reveal

all has been made … the result is discursive autobiography – illuminating enough but not an x-ray.62

The poems in 3VOΓVE are little-big word-ceremonies that can 'patch the havoc'.63

Instead of

exposing (worse: sulking over) the failures of the past, supplanting them an Utopian vision of

little meaning and constructing fake props, as has been the trend in much of contemporary

literature during the first decade of this century, Metzger fashions us a new transparent and

affirmative gesture towards re-visioning promise of a new powerful form of literature

offering itself as a model of the future. But who could claim this position? Who indeed? It

demands a seizure/cessation of the (self-conscious) awareness of 3VOΓVE as a work of

poetry. We are led from a world of degeneracy leading to separation into a world of

connection, we are taken back to be shown the essential holistic nature of life and the arts.

Otherwise those who ‗arrogantly claim to be transcendent philosophers, Molière‘s, Cupid‘s,

Shakespeare‘s, even prophets of our time‘ have also been rebuked in The Holy Quran in a

similar vein.

21

59 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Metronome‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 37:

Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the

clock stops does time come to life.

Faulkner, William. The Sound & the Fury, (1929). 60 See ‗With You‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 55. 61 Pope, Alexander. 'The Dunciad' iv. 1744. The Poems of Alexander Pope, (Routledge, 1963). 780. 62 Hughes, Ted. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, (Faber & Faber, 1994). 63 Which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,

What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

Plath, Sylvia. ‗Conversation Among the Ruins‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1981).

In this sense Metzger is not a poet because she speaks the truth, about the poetry of beauty,

about the poetry of truth:

And We created not the heaven and the Earth and all that is between them in vain.

If at all We had wished to find a pastime, We would surely have found it in what is

within us.

Nay, We hurl the truth at falsehood and it crushes it and lo, it vanishes. And woe unto you for that which you spin out.

64

There is a reference about the true and sacred/secret doctrine of Trinity and what it must have

meant in its original form:

When the 2 loves meet—each functioning as the masculine and feminine dynamic—they give

birth to a strong communion and intense affinity between the Creator and the creation. The blazing flames of Divine love set ablaze the tinder dry firewood of human love, giving birth

to a third phenomenon known as the Holy Spirit.

That is why this love-laden spirit, again figuratively speaking, is like an offspring to

the Divine spirit, the author of this love. Since Holy Spirit is born in the human heart as a result of the union of the 2 souls, we can say that it is like a son to both. This indeed is the

Holy Trinity which is the necessary accompaniment of love at this level and which the impure

of heart have misconstrued polytheistically. They have tried to equate a minuscule particle of mere possibility which is so self-negating and unreal, with the Supreme Self-Existent God.65

As per Pope‘s instruction Metzger has drunk deep from the fountain of gnosis, becoming an

ocean surging with love and emotion. Emotions that move within one‘s blood-beats, so that

one cannot decide on the language to use to convey them:

Ah Love! Could you and I with Him conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits – and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart‘s Desire!66

The tides of such oceans were once gentle, tame and meek: 'That now are wild, and do not

once remember,'67 and Love is revolvingly resolved as it evolves and is reinvented:

A little Learning is a dang‘rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:68

Hell, I am in France – the birthing place of the troubadour – and although I am a female poet

with a technical education, I will attest to a stubborn belief that I was going to succor and suckle this life, this temporarily-bottled and fizzy experience in it, until the champagne ran

22

64 The Holy Quran. al-Anbiya [The Prophets]. 17-19. 65 Ahmad, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam. Taudhih e Maram [Elucidation of Objectives], (Riyadh e Hind, 1891. English: 1971, 2004. Alternative Translation, 1966). 19, 20. 66 Khayyám, Omar. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. (1859, 1868, 1872,

1879, 1889). 67 Wyatt, Sir Thomas. ‗They flee from me that sometime did me seek‘. The Complete Poems, (Penguin

Classics, 1978). 116. 68 Pope, Alexander. ‗An Essay on Criticism‘. 1711. The Poems of Alexander Pope, (Routledge, 1963). 151.

dry and the bubbles went to my head.

(‗Author‘s Note‘).

69

..when we became very specific about his own poetry, he seemed to shy away from

it. For example, you recall his poem 'Vision and Prayer'? It's the poem that's based upon the

diamond shape and the hourglass. It begins with a single syllable and it rises to nine syllables

and then goes back again to a single syllable - that's all very metaphoric and symbolic. Nine represents the number of birth, and so on... then in reverse, there would be the hourglass,

starting with nine, going to one and then branching out to nine again.

...as a result of the rhyme scheme and the line scheme, he had seventeen lines to every stanza. The diamond was seventeen lines and the hourglass was seventeen lines. But

unfortunately, there was one stanza that had eighteen lines and another stanza that had

sixteen, and I knew that something had gone wrong. So I looked up the original copy of the poem, and as it appeared in the book, and as it appeared a bit earlier in some magazine -

maybe it was Horizon. And I couldn't find any other version than the one I had, which

showed these two limp stanzas - or at least, two inadequate stanzas. In a fairly sober moment

- and in my opinion, all moments with Dylan were sober and not the reverse - I said "Dylan, do something about this. Can you tell me what's missing here?" And he began to look at it,

and looked at it and looked at it, and he says "I can't remember. I just can't

remember. There's nothing I can do about it." So there you are – I went to the horse's mouth, and I couldn't get the thing straightened up.70

Our auctor is already dancing with the stars, up there at the place where the wings of angels

burn, with the voice of God that comes whispering with the winnowing winds – Her poetic

voice is charged with an intense and terrific heat and passion (and the feeling of being

possessed by it) to the utmost ‗- passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an

experience of the supernatural.‘71 It is this truth both beautiful and terrible that is revealed to

those who plummet these deeps ‗And they sold him for a paltry price of a few Dirhams, and

they were not keen to profit from him.‘72

23

69 Sylvia did not want anyone to have power over her. She wanted to be in full control of her own destiny and,

perhaps tragically, the destiny of others.

For years I wondered what was her curious power, her ability to attract all kinds of people to her and to use them for her own ends, often with their knowledge. I think it was that people liked watching and being

with someone who enjoyed life as much as Sylvia seemed to enjoy it. She squeezed all the juice from the

orange, or, to change the figure, drained the cup to the leaves, the very dregs.

Lameyer, Gordon quoted in Winder, Elizabeth Pain, Parties Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer

1953. (HarperCollin, 2013).

Is anyone happy? No, not unless they are living in a dream or in an artifice that they or someone else made.

For a time I was lulled in the arms of a blind optimism with breasts full of champagne and nipples full of

caviar. I thought she was true, and that the true was the beautiful. But the true is the ugly mixed up

everywhere, like a peck of dirt scattered through your life. The true is that there is no security, no artifice to

stop the unsavory changes, the rat unrace, the death unwish—the winged chariot, the horns and motors, the Devil in the clock.

Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. (2000). 70 Edwards, Colin. Dylan Remembered 2: 1935 - 1953, (Seren, 2004). 222. 71 Hughes, Ted. Tales from Ovid, (Faber, & Faber, 1997). 72 The Holy Quran. Joseph: 21.

Humans have an irrepressible need (overriding every other impulse) not just to exist but to

thrive. The Great Shaykh ibn al-'Arabi says 'The movement which is the existence of the

universe is the movement of love.‘73 Sir Muhammad Iqbal writes:

It is not merely by receiving and intellectually shaping the impressions, but mainly by

molding the stimuli to ideal ends and purposes that the total self of man realizes itself as one

of the greatest energies of nature. In great action alone the self of man becomes united with

God without losing its own identity, and transcends the limits of space and time. Action is the highest form of contemplation.74

‗―Like" and "like" and "like" - but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it on the

oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left

outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our

consolation.75

I know only:

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 'They called me the hyacinth girl.'

- Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer.76

'Phonetic' echoes Lawrence's 'Figs'. By the fig covering Adam's nakedness. By the moment in

the rose-garden (the laughter echoing the ecstasy) sacred to Diana and her priestesses and to

Mary, the lily, the lily (re-)turning to Eve's tears at the banishment, turning again to Mary's

tears at the crucifixion, back to the lilies strewn before the Lord upon the Second Coming:

The silver is white, red is the gold The robes they lay in fold.

24

73 Ibn al-‗Arabi, Shaykh Muhyiddin. Fusûs al-Hikam [The Bezels of Wisdom]. Translated by R. W. J. Austin.

(Paulist Press). 1980. 74 Iqbal, Sir Muhammad. 'Self in the Light of Relativity'. Crescent, (1925). 75 Woolf, Virginia. The Waves, (Hogarth Press, 1931). 76 Eliot, T. S. ‗The Waste Land: The Burial of the Dead'. 1922. Collected Poems 1909 - 1962, (Faber &

Faber, 1963).

The bailey beareth the bell away

The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.

These poems call to each other through the precise clairvoyant and subtle harmony of their

mathematics (design). Their inner schemata (energies) hardly disturbed by all the outer

upheavals of life, as if to say with Frost:

Your head so much concerned with outer,

Mine with inner, weather.77

These currents are explored in the earlier poems (‗Apollo & Daphne‘ and ‗Comparing You to

Bernini‘) where the prosody is heavily mythologised.78 The myths (outlined and elaborated in

the ‗Author‘s Note‘) become expressive of the story of her own esoteric journey:

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.79

These symbols gradually become invisible to those conditioned to discount myth (but for the

diligent the notes reveal otherwise: they are only subdued) and fulfil and move to accomplish

metamorphoses of the alchemy of (true) love and happiness:

Me, Iʼve never separated lust,

any feeling really, and divine love

and I will never find reason

to begin the practice of blind, un-divine and incomplete faith.

(‗Comparing You to Bernini‘).

'Return to You' reflects those rare moments when one thinks souls reflect each other and is

granted strength in the face of fate's laughter, to make lemonade out of the lemons life throws

at one. Life seems to fit into neat little boxes during those Keatsian paradisiacal moments for

which one is thankful from the deepest, pure, untrammelled recesses of the heart (which

many have convinced one to believe do not exist except at those rare and fleeting moments

which soon fly away in the blinking of an eye as birds flee from their nests at dawn).

Metzger lets us have a glimpse of the slice of the fruit of the life she lives but offers us the

juice. Yet having said that I am still unsure whether those last poems from ‗Ink Stains and

What Remains‘ or more appropriately from ‗Malik‘ onwards could not be regarded as the

beginning of a new book.

25

77 Frost, Robert. ‗Tree at My Window‘. The Poetry of Robert Frost, (1969). 78 ‗Comparing You to Bernini‘ is partly inspired by the animation film Katedra by Tomasz Baginski, (2007).

See also ‗Animation‘ from Metzger‘s earlier book Why the Willow working subconsciously to repair the sick

Earth, to feed and strengthen its damaged and threatened nucleus (humanity) and bring it to a safe delivery.

Moving from Blake‘s ‗The Sick Rose‘ through Burns‘ ‗Red, Red Rose‘. 79 Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven & Hell.

i. Only (One) God. ii. Only (One) Love. iii. Only (One) Hollace

‗I Went so Willingly‘80 by John Trudell with which this book is prefaced is a powerful and

moving poem. The tone has something of Empson's 'Just a Smack at Auden'81. The questions

that have no answers and sometimes answers people do not like – There are those lines from

‗Tomato Ketchup‘ by Parveen Shakir:

Every Tom, Dick and Harry claimed

She had slept with him From dawn to dusk

Every unemployed hack-writer in the city

Bumbled around her Even those

Who had jobs to go to

Would leave their tatty files and worn-out wives

And let her play in their hands (Oblivious of electricity bills, children's school fees and the wife's medicine

For these were concerns

Of the lesser mortals) All day long

All evening

So late into the night,82

Incensed talk would ensue on literature and philosophy When hunger struck

They'd all chip in and order

Bread and boiled pulse from the shack round the corner Great dignitaries would then be offered tea

At her expense

Stupid gullible girl She fell for it

Perhaps also because

Those responsible for her bread and butter

Always served her Kafka for tea With Neruda biscuits

She survived

Their drooling Compliments But how long for

One day or other she would've had to escape this panther prowl and these flattering

Connoisseurs of art She had been nibbled away alive by

In their symposiums

They still drool at her name

Except they can no longer eat her For in death they have relegated her

26

80 Trudell, John. Tribal Voice, (1983). 81 Empson, William. The Complete Poems of William Empson, (Penguin, 2000). 82 Byron, George Gordon Lord. ‗So, We‘ll Go No More A Roving‘. The Works of Lord Byron, (Wordsworth,

1994). 100.

To the status of Tomato Ketchup!83

Times move too fast. There was once a black coat of beauteous memory which Ted Hughes

wrote a poem about,84 it reappeared in the black coat one scintillatingly descended down the

school canteen steps wearing, wrapping it about her person. Now it is a classic black one with

funky pink and purple spotty lining:

Truth or lies I don‘t know I only know you & this that whenever I‘m returning from you my hand becomes frozen and I walk zigzaggedly exactly like now when the pen doesn‘t fit well

in my hand and the word like a thread winds about the feet of my lines85

I should defy someone to find poetry in my life such as it is in sunny London. Rumi said that

'A shadow cannot ignore the sun that all day creates and moves it':

Ask me how to And I will point to

The moon.

Ask me about the moon

And I will show you All that I have written.86

One may see the beauty of Allah Almighty in the moon but that is not enough for a lover,

who wishes that the beloved not just peep from the moon but descend into the heart, manifesting their self to the eye of one's gnosis, to apply a balm to the wounded heart and

become the cure to the torment for that is the only cure but sometimes it happens that the

lover of this true beloved does not even see the manifestation in the moon. Nothing can be seen in the moon except cheese. It seems that the beloved veils themself from the lover and is

careful not to be seen while the lover wishes that if only he could see a silhouette of the

beloved reflected in the moon …

Then I perceived the waves of the ocean reflecting the moon and I moved towards it and the reflection of the moon moved further away from me. I proceeded towards it all the

more and it moved away from me at the same pace and a pain arose in my heart. So I said

sometimes this is exactly how a seeker is treated. One desires to meet Allah Almighty but one‘s efforts face futility, one‘s prayers, offerings, worship, sighs produce no results because

Allah Almighty is testing their endurance and the seeker finds all efforts frustrated. Many

who are soft-hearted lose hope and many who are strong persevere until they achieve their desires but these days are of much tribulation and the heart of a seeker withers all the more

and the patience is destroyed. This scene of the moon's reflection running away from one can

best be seen from a boat which though it wades on for miles on end the reflection of the moon

always keeps running away. This is how now and then one's efforts towards Allah Almighty are futile and Allah

Almighty moves away as much as one moves towards Him and at such a time there is no way

way around this dilemma except that one seek of the Mercy of Allah Almighty and desire His

27

83 Shakir, Parveen. Mah e Tamam, (Murad Publications, 2002). Translated by the author, May 2007. Also Sarstedt, Peter. ‗Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?‘ (1969) And ‗Le Tourbillon‘, Jules et Jim, (Les Films

du Carrosse/ SEDIF, 1962). 84 Hughes, Ted. ‗Black Coat‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 2003). 85 Karbassi, Ziba. ‗I Have Poured Myself To The Wind‘. From ‘Collage Poems’, (Exiled Writers Ink, 2009).

29. 86 Metzger, Hollace M. ‘20 Questions‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 158.

Grace so that he put an end to this chain of trials and Grace him with His union.87

Keats uses the symbol of nectar-wine to suggest the intensity of Endymion‘s feelings towards

the moon:

Enchantress! tell me by this soft embrace,

By the most soft completion of thy face,

Those lips, O slippery blisses, twinkling eyes

And by these tenderest, milky sovereignties -

These tenderest - and by the nectar-wine,

The passion – 'O doved Ida the divine!88

'Nobody else is at this parc alone.' Story of my life:

Perhaps this writing is a form of escape from social situations. Perhaps remaining busy is an

acceptable retreat that will not be frowned upon. But it is. It is not what the others are doing.

('Etoile Filant').

I am smitten by shades and shadows and exist like a shadow, secretly. Gradually, as the

years go by I forget what it is to embrace love, how it feels to touch love at which (according

to Plato) one became a poet.89 I no longer wish to go to events where there is nobody I

know. Even when I read my poetry everyone is coupled, eating each other's mouths to the

tune of my poetry and that of others. Art (mine) suffers being rendered that much poorer as a

result. Metzger explores the history of ‗Main‘ (pronounced thus in Urdu to mean I/me):

It is a simple retrospective of Man‘s evolved habitual use of the hand, with an appended

philosophical hypothesis I have developed which foreshadows the decline of interpersonal relationships caused by the physical repetition of pushing objects (buttons, keys, etc.) away

when alone, also the apish sense of interpersonal communication and relationship

development sharing this information gives.

(‗Author‘s Note‘).

This is something she has also explored in her art:

With a regular brush one experiences sensations of pulling and pushing. The knife is only a

pushing motion, its paint needs to be allowed on the canvas in different speeds, but mostly in

a regular stroke, like drafting with an architect‘s flat-tip pen which takes practice to evenly distribute. What this does is allow more precision and control, for me.90

28

87 Ahmad, Hazrat al-Hajj Mirza Bashiruddin Mahmud – Khalifatul Masih II. Kalam e Mahmud. 88 Keats, John. ‗Endymion‘. 1818. The Complete Poems, (Penguin Classics, 1973, 1977, 1988). 89 Every heart sings a song, incomplete until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a

song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

Plato. Symposium. 90 Metzger, Hollace, M. ‗Time is a Willow‘. Eternal Story, (MiDEA, 2011). 144.

I read Metzger‘s words (which are now my lifelines) and those words in ‗To Say ‗Je t‘aime‘

scare me now ‗This is what makes leaving things behind easy for me. I just leave.‘ Just when

I had begun remembering the verses from Mir wherein he says:

For years the beloved did not even turn to look at us

Though we seemed throughout to be there to be beheld So that we were petrified at our own love Mir

And always stood standing by the door like a wall91

So that I know not:

Why words so flowing, thoughts so free,

Stop, or turn nonsense, at one glance of Thee?

Thee, drest in Fancy‘s airy beam, Absent I follow thro‘ th‘ extended Dream;

Now, now I seize, I clasp thy charms,

And now you burst (ah cruel!) from my arms,

And swiftly shoot along the Mall, Or softly glide by the Canal,

Now, shown by Cynthia‘s silver Ray,

And now, on rolling Waters snatch‘d away.92

Pope seems to have answered his own question in the last verse as Cynthia is a lunar queen.

One can only speak for oneself –

Be the first, tonight

who looks upon the full moon without jealousy

of how it completes me

without you.

('Be The First').

‗Where Sound Resides‘ is a sacred and timeless soul-dance danced around the sacrificial fires

of yore for as long as forever, it is the bee dance. All the connect ions are there ‗Those who

dance are considered insane by those who can‘t hear the music‘.93

My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

29

91 Mir, Mir Taqi. Kulliyat e Mir. 92 Pope, Alexander. ‗The First Ode of the Fourth Book of Horace‘. The Poems of Alexander Pope, (Routledge,

1963). 674. 93 Carlin, George. Brain Droppings, (1997).

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.94

Metzger proves to be the great polymath as well as the great beauty of her age, in mind body

and spirit, to know that (through her) is to know wonder. At the very least ‗Where Sound

Resides‘ teaches one to accept a decentring of subjectivity and a dispersal of the

diversification of identity, it presents a very weak idea of agency by affirming the necessity

of you in addition to and inescapable from I (both words which Metzger uses freely and

openly in her work with all their connotations).

So many of the poems in 3VOΓVE merit quoting in full. ‗To Love Again‘ is one of those

poems:

To Love...

To... Love again...

To love two but never three -

To love a past and what the future could be.

To Love...

You...

rarely me - What was promised

and, again,

will never be.

As is ‗While Watching You Sleep‘ –

everybody loved him,

carried a piece of him with them

but nobody would claim

to befriend him, to love him so tenderly

as they all will,

one day, when he

is no longer with us

‗Boxing‘ in Why the Willow references the Jeff Buckley song ‗Jewel Box‘95 but ‗The

Inevitable‘ morbidly reminds of ‗Forget Her‘96 which is another Buckley song (circuitous to

the frightening but lovely and loving ‗To Say ‗Je t‘aime‘:

Star crossed child‘s love on the bands of wedding gold

30

94 Eliot, T. S. 'Four Quartets: Burnt Norton'. Collected Poems 1909 - 1962, (Faber & Faber, 1963). 95 Buckley, Jeff. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, (Columbia, 1998). 96 Buckley, Jeff. ‗Forget Her‘. Grace: Legacy Edition, (Columbia, 2004).

Silver studs of promise hide in the red crushed velvet folds.

Inaction, intention, like emeralds I stole. My speech of custom gold.

I think I ought to know.

Although ‗The Price to Pay‘ references the Bob Dylan song ‗Seven Curses‘ it is also

reminiscent of Blake's 'The Garden of Love' and suddenly reminds of Mir's verse in Urdu

along the same lines:

One hears that the City of Love

Is surrounded by an overcrowding of tombs97

Mir expresses similar thoughts throughout his poetic corpus, for ‗Time only knows the price

we have to pay;‘98- For ‗Wedding‘ see:

And with them will be spouses modest of gaze and with beautiful rounded eye-pupils.

As though they were protected eggs with their glossy shine well cared for.99

The Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad asks in the poem ‗Let Us Believe in the Beginning of a

Cold Season‘:

Who is this walking eternity‘s highway

Towards the moment of fusion? She who winds her watch With childhood‘s logic of subtractions and reductions?

She for whom the dawn is not heralded

With rooster‘s crow, but by breakfast‘s aroma?

She who wears love‘s crown And is withering in the folds of her wedding dress?

For 'Love: Start to Finish, To Begin Again – IV: Business':

My fingertips are holding onto the cracks in our foundation,

and I know that I should let go,

but I can't.100

Okay, 'Don't Explain' just check out Celine‘s playful imitation of Nina Simone in Before

Sunset, one of my favourite films. ‗If I Could‘ emphasises that:

When the words have gone away There is nothing left to say.101

Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight,

Their fluid Bodies half dissolv‘d in Light. Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,

31

97 Mir, Mir Taqi. Kulliyat e Mir. 98 Auden, W. H. ‗If I Could Tell You‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber 1976, 1991). 99 The Holy Quran. as-Saffat [The Rows]: 49, 50. 100 Nash, Kate. ‗Foundations‘. Made of Bricks, (2007). 101 Duffy, Carol Ann. ‗Alphabet for Auden‘. New Selected Poems: 1984 – 2004, (Picador, 2004). 6.

Thin glitt‘ring Textures of the filmy Dew;

Dipt in the richest Tinctures of the Skies, Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dies,

Where ev‘ry Beam new transient Colours flings,

Colours that change whene'er they wave their Wings.102

Years foll‘wing Years, steal something ev‘ry day,

At last they steal us from our selves away;

In one our Frolicks, one Amusements end, In one a Mistress drops, in one a Friend:

This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time,

What will it leave me, if it snatch my Rhime? If ev‘ry Wheel of that unweary‘d Mill

That turn‘d ten thousand Verses, now stands still?

But after all, what would you have me do?

When out of twenty I can please not two;103

Only the purified may touch it.

A revelation from the Lord of the worlds.

Is it this Discourse that you pass off? And do you make denial the business of your livelihood?104

My writings have a habit of deleting themselves once written as here, as always. That is one

reason to explain why I produce so little. Works such as mine are usually assisted by

knowledgeable intellectuals or eased by a wife/partner/collaborator/companion. I, no more

able to sound either knowledgeable nor an intellectual (though I am often (mis)taken for a

professor and far too often for a poet/writer for comfort) have to go it alone with help from

not one person which is why my projects are always on-going and take lifetimes to complete:

Don't ask of the lonely troubled labours of incessant chiselling

To turn day out of night is to unearth a brook of milk105

What remains was once passed off as ―A load of shit‖106:

Beneath your feet's a poet, then a pit.

Poetry supporter, if you're here to find How poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT

find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.107

I would not dare approach certain books such as The White Goddess for a long time for fear

of their leading me to the bed of death because of the burden of their revelation upon my

weak soul and feeble body:

32

102 Pope, Alexander. ‗The Rape of the Lock‘. The Poems of Alexander Pope, (Routledge, 1963). 224. 103 Pope, Alexander. ‗The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated by Mr. Pope‘. The Poems of

Alexander Pope, (Routledge, 1963). 652. 104 The Holy Quran. al-Waqiah [The Happening]. 80 – 83. 105 Ghalib, Mirza Assadullah Khan. Divan e Ghalib. 106 Sweeney, Matthew. Morley College, Waterloo. 2000. 107 Harrison, Tony. ‗V‘. Collected Poems, (Penguin, 2007). 279.

And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of

blood falling down to the ground.108

I guess it‘s time

for me to finally see

the Acropolis, Athens‘s temple.

I avoided it for years,

together with Florence, because I feared

I would never leave.

Perhaps, this time, I won‘t.

109

Keith Sagar writes that the following passage constitutes Ted Hughes‘ fullest (from several

attempts to sum up Shakespeare‘s myth, his ‗Tragic Equation‘) and clearest description of the

myth of the Muse. Significantly, I had already highlighted this passage in the book before I

had read Sagar‘s observation:

This ‗exploding‘ of the immensely rich and faithful act of rejecting the Goddess into this two-

phase narrative is simply a way of dramatizing the two possibilities of the single event.

That single ‗double‘ event is the fundamental human challenge: confronting the Goddess phase of Divine Love, the Goddess of Complete Being, the ego‘s extreme

alternatives are either to reject her and attempt to live an independent, rational, secular life or

to abnegate the ego and embrace her love with ‗total, unconditional love‘, which means to become a saint, a holy idiot, possessed by the Divine Love. The inevitability of the tragic idea

which Shakespeare projects with such ‗divine‘ completeness is that there is no escape from

one choice or the other. Man will always choose the former, simply because once he is free of a natural, creaturely awareness of the divine indulgence which permits him to exist at all,

he wants to live his own life, and he has never invented a society of saints that was tolerable.

In other worlds, always, one way or another, he rejects the Goddess. This is the first

phase of the tragedy. Then follows his correction: his ‗madness‘ against the Goddess, the Puritan crime (the fallen Sophia‘s ‗intellectual‘ depravity) which leads directly to his own

tragic self-destruction, from which he can escape only after the destruction of his ego - being

reborn through the Flower rebirth, becoming a holy idiot, renouncing his secular independence, and surrendering once again to the Goddess. From the human point of view,

obviously the whole business is monstrous: tragic on a cosmic scale, where the only

easements are in the possibilities of a temporary blessing from the Goddess (an erotic fracture in the carapace of the tragic hero) or of becoming a saint. There is a third possibility, in some

degree of self-anaesthesia, some kind of living death. But man has no more choice in the

basic arrangement than the blue-green algae.110

It is death

Lives, the Life-in-Death, an antevasin

When the tongues of flame are in-folded111

33

108 The Holy Bible. Luke 22: 44. (King James Authorised Version, 1611). 109 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Dreaming While Awake‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 83. 110 Hughes, Ted. Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being, (Faber & Faber 1992, revised & corrected

1993). 392, 393. 111 T. S. Eliot. ‗Four Quartets: Little Gidding‘. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, (Faber & Faber, 1963).

The fire and the rose are in symbiosis as one:

The Iliads of this world invariably beget their Odysseys, just as Shakespeare needs his

comedies as light relief to prevent him falling completely into the pit. But these things exist by way of psychic release and are by no means permanent solutions or paths into the future.

After writing his 5th Symphony, Beethoven needed his 6th to provide some kind of relief

from his madness. But don't let them tell you that it is any more than a temporary relief from

the pressure which, no sooner than it abates, will return again with a vengeance. In our culture, however, "Negative Energy" is not something that receives a good

press. One need only look at all the self-help organisations and groups for whom Negative

Energy is something to be avoided like the plague. They talk in terms of people needing to have 'positive goals' in life, for having 'positive goals' enables you to harness your 'positive

energy'. Of course, they do not question these 'positive' goals, because, if they did, they would

have nothing to sell you to enable you to reach them. However, I would hazard a guess that they are, by and large, goals for getting ahead in this society, and where is the creativity in

that?

Most people will continue to choose the positive over the negative, because that's

how the world resolves itself in their minds. Artists too - when they are 'off-duty'. But you can't create works of art in this way. Flux, chaos, indeterminacy, despair, the Abyss, etc. is the

ground from which creativity arises, all negative things which offer the artist no positive

bearings in the world around and within them, still less a bolt-hole in which to retreat from all its potential confusion. If challenging work is to be created in art, it is always against a

background of chaos and by courtesy of the Negative Energy which arises out of that chaos.112

Graves elaborates upon this somewhat in his discussion of the rivalry between the Goddess in

her aspect as the Domestic Goddess and that of the Muse in The White Goddess:

You‘re the shadow behind every door I open a shaft of sunlight striking dust from musted hands:

we are the light inside the silver sided mirror

our faces merge in contemplation

we touch our netted palms to one reflection, then turn aside and walk these jaded streets alone.

(Victoria Mosley. ‗Silver sided mirror‘).

Similarly ‗Songe Lucide de ce Matin‘ takes silent days to ingest before speaking in echoes

guised as the silver side of mirrors, in the words of the poet John Siddique to 'reject

literatures that only find their way into the world through privilege and connections, which

contains the death of the soul in its syllables.' The use of rhyme in this poem is something

quite extraordinary in its naturalness (identity with artillery with artistry with reality, nature

with nowhere with desire with fire with pleasure). Things are taken as they ask to be taken as

in ‗Chanel No. 5‘, the writing writes itself, unintentionally. For this as much as for much

more, Metzger will be remembered throughout history as one of the greatest artists of our

time:

Because of its complex nature,

it could have been anywhere... or nowhere.

34

112 Livermore, Richard. ‗Negative Energy‘, (Ol’ Chanty - Chanticleer Magazine, 12th January 2013).

The sensation, as an intimate dream of desire

with another, fills the body in a cooling fire –

During my sojourn through this poem I was reminded not only of 'I Should Have Known‘ by

Parveen Shakir but of ‗Sakura‘ (Transciptions of Time, 149).113 Metzger‘s note on the

imagery of ‗Our Lady‘s looming sea serpent‘ is well worth a read:

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees

the dawn before the rest of the world.114

The ecstasy of this poem is reminiscent of Jo Shapcott's 'Piss Flower' and it also echoes lines

from ‗A Lover to a Beloved!‘ by Faiz:

The other thing is also sorcery for the heart knows

There is no turning no desert no spell

Veiled in which my months can pass

If the path of life runs with your thoughts - All is well If you do not turn round to look it doesn‘t matter115

But there is a particular kind of silence which falls after a life like Coleridge‘s and perhaps it should be observed.

It is an expectant and companionable silence, I think; the silence before the questions

begin, and the reckonings are made. It is like the silence in a concert hall when a symphony

has just been played. The music has ended, but it hasn‘t in any conceivable way finished. This is the peculiar music of biography, haunting and uniquely life-like for a moment,

but always incomplete and unsatisfactory and sending out many echoes into the future.116

35

113 We met

When the snows were melting from the mountain-tops

When the cherry-tree's first buds were in bloom

The entire park heralded the coming of spring with its sweet fragrance

The nightingale had just begun to sing

We strolled

Arm in arm In cherry blossom-strewn streets

Catching at butterflies and glow-worms until

The rain came to join us

Like a dear friend

The day the first leaf fell from the trees

I bent down to pick it up

Turned around

Saw you were gone!

Now I collect my tears in broken leaf-images

I should have known our time together

Was to last

As long as spring did.

Shakir, Parveen. Mah e Tamam, (Murad Publications, 2002). Translated by the author, May 2007. 114 Wilde, Oscar. ‗The Critic as Artist‘. Intentions, (1891). 115 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed. Nuskhaha e Wafa, (Karwan). Translated by the author. About Time, (2011, revised &

updated 2012). 116 Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, (1998).

Your face, hidden, can only

be defined inside my imagination as I do not know you when

you do not speak, are silent.

(‗Becomes Us‘).

Your journals from this time were destroyed. When you have been silenced, I feel nothing.

When I cannot hear your voice, you are invisible, as if you had never existed at all. Other people cannot conjure you up for me and other people cannot conjure up how places looked

for you. And so you are truly dead, snuffed out and unreachable. Time is no longer playful,

but a slamming door. There is no way through, no way back. My voyeuristic tourism was empty because I had nothing to be voyeuristic about. My textual tourism hit an empty page.

If I do not know your thoughts, how can I know anything at all about this place, about you?

The year is simply 2003 and I am staying in a modernised old forge by the sea in Ireland. It is

remote and there is a pier, the same pier you walked along, the same pier we both sailed from to Inishboffin and drank beer in Day‘s Hotel. I cannot slip between time. I remain frozen in

the present. Your resounding silence gags me. I cannot reach you and I am left with a second

rate visit to Yate‘s Tower, the beech tree in Coole Park where poets carved their initials into the trunk. I am left alone with my solitary thoughts and experiences. How can anything mean

anything at all if it is not informed by other things, by other people?

There is no haunting in these ruins. Just an amputation, a silence.117

Silence can sometimes create time to breathe so one may inhale the bare solid, unchanging

essentials of nature, the trees the landscape as capstones to connect. It is such a silence which

Metzger justifies in ‗One if by Land. Two if by sea‘. Incidentally she forgets to mention

Heaney as a major Irish writer in the note to this wonderful prose piece! Also, the Influence

of Shakespeare‘s famous Hamlet soliloquy is obviously behind the poem ‗To Be‘.

Without silence one is left with little time to reflect in a doing, going, hungry world packed

with unanswered and, probably, unanswerable questions. Dickens writes of Ireland's crown

jewels, its Muse-maids with the nut brown hair that are invoked and evoked in many an Irish

ditty:

She has the neatest little foot, and the softest little voice, and the pleasantest little smile, and

the tidiest little curls, and the brightest little eyes, and the quietest little manner, and is, in

short, altogether one of the most engaging of all little women, dead or alive. She is a

condensation of all the domestic virtues, - a pocket edition of the young man‘s best companion, -118

There is an old Irish triad:

It is death to mock a poet

It is death to love a poet

It is death to be a poet

36

117 Crowther, Gail. ‗Sylvia Plath: The Playfulness of Time‘. Plath Profiles 1, (Indiana Northwest, 2008). 36. 118 Dickens, Charles. Sketches of Young Couples, (1840).

Silence is also one of Metzger‘s major themes. There are 52 silences in 3VOΓVE.119 Silence

can be black as well as golden for:

Silence and poetry have their own reserves.

The numbered creatures flourish less and less.

A language near extinction best preserves

the deepest grammar of our nothingness.120

There is the poem by Byron, poignant and touching in which he says:

The dew of the morning Sunk chill on my brow-

If felt like the warning

Of what I feel now.

Thy vows are all broken, And light is thy fame:

I hear thy name spoken,

And share in its shame. They name thee before me,

A knell to mine ear;

A shudder comes o'er me-

Why wert thou so dear? They know not I knew thee,

Who knew thee too well:-

Long, long shall I rue thee, Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met-

In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

If I should meet thee

After long years, How should I greet thee?-

With silence and tears.121

The poem ‗Surfacing‘ also references Byron‘s ‗She Walks in Beauty‘. There is a kind of

silence described by Pope:

'Tis not possible to express the least part of the joy, your return gives me, time only, and experience, will convince you how very sincere it is – I excessively long to meet you; to say

so much, so very much to you, that I believe I shall say nothing.122

37

119 See ‗‘Or(l)age‘, ‗Ne Pas Reveiller‘, ‗The Silent Feminist Regime‘ and notes to these poems for the

significance of silence. 120 Harrison, Tony. ‗Art & Extinction: t‘Ark‘. Collected Poems, (Penguin, 2007). 211. 121 Byron, George Gordon Lord. The Works of Lord Byron, (Wordsworth, 1994). 52. 122 Pope, Alexander. To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 1718. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope i. 5

volumes, (Oxford, 1956). 505.

Col-lab-oration

‗L‘invitation au Voyage‘ and ‗Do Not Ask‘ are poems that offer such a Thought-Fox123 of an

abundance of vowels. A panther-prowl-me of close-staying comprehension. The clear

soothing light of the moon contradistincting the burning heat and blinding light of the sun and

one is reminded of George Mackay Brown's maxim ‗Prose is for the sun and the day - poetry

is for the moon and the stars and night.' There is a story in Rumi's masterpiece The Masnavi

in which a teenager has a night of soul-anguish though he drunkenly lounge against a rock

'Displaying his dildo‘124 and ‗Wanking at the sun‘125 from Auden's perspective or as in/from

what John Hoppner thought of Blake, to "Represent a man sitting on the moon, and pissing

the sun out –"126

I see the

Sad Young Man on a Train

outside, masturbating under

a flashing orange streetlamp.127

Marcel Duchamp. ‗Nu (esquisse), jeune homme triste dans un train‘, (1912).

Bastard Masturbating a glitter,

He wants to be loved.128

38

123 Hughes, Ted. ‗The Thought-Fox‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 2003). 124 Auden, W. H. ‗In Praise of Limestone‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991). 125 Clark, Thekla. Wystan & Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden & Chester Kallman, (1995). 126 Bentley Jr, G. E. Blake Records. (Yale, Second Revised Edition, 2004). 127 Metzger, Hollace, M. ‗Central Station 00:38‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 59. 128 Plath, Sylvia. ‗Death & Co.‘ Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1981). The possible background of these

images in Plath‘s poem have been commented upon by David Holbrook in Sylvia Plath: Poetry & Existence,

(The Athlone Press, 1976).

Pope and Swift had an unnatural delight in ideas physically impure, such as every other

tongue utters with unwillingness, and of which every ear shrinks from the mention.129

Since Freud it has been easier to deduce this. In his theory of the anal complex, excrement is

associated with money as it is in the satires of such as Swift and Pope. Fleet Ditch in which

the dunces dive in Pope‘s ‗The Dunciad‘ was an open sewer running into the Thames and

was also a key area of the book trade allowing Pope the use of scatological imagery on a

grand scale to damn his opponents. The bookseller Edmund Curll derives a weird fetishist‘s

kick from having his prayers granted special attention by Cloacina, goddess of the sewers

(just after the hilarious pissing contest):

Renew‘d by ordure‘s sympathetic force,

As oil‘d with magic juices for the course, Vig‘rous he rises; from th‘effluvia strong

Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along;

First he relates, how sinking to the chin,

Smit with his mien, the Mud-nymphs suck‘d him in: How young Lutetia, softer than the down,

Nigrina black, and Merdamante brown,

Vy‘d for his love in jetty bow‘rs below, As Hylas fair was ravish‘d long ago.

Then sung, how shown him by the Nut-brown maids

A branch of Styx here rises from the Shades,

That tinctur‘d as it runs with Lethe‘s streams, And wafting Vapours from the Land of Dreams,130

Merdamante translates from the French as shit-loving – ‗It‘s always the filthy thing that

attracts our fuck: and the filthier it is, the more voluptuous it flows. There isn‘t a blemish that

doesn‘t find its admirer‘ writes the Marquis de Sade.131 Freud (rather humorously) passes

comment on the homily ‗Inter urinas et faeces nascimur‘ in A Case of Hysteria.132 Yeats

wrote:

'A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole

39

129 Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the Poets, (1781). Also Jonathan Swift‘s poem ‗The Lady‘s Dressing Room‘.

The Complete Poems, (Penguin, 1983). 448. 130 Pope, Alexander. ‗The Dunciad‘. 1743. The Poems of Alexander Pope, (Routledge, 1963). 739, 748. 131 De Sade, Marquis Donatien Alphonse François. Les 120 journées de Sodome. (1785). 132 Freud, Sigmund. Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud viii, (The Hogarth Press, 1953). Also:

The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the

genitals—

Freud, Sigmund. ‗On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love‘, 1921.

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud xi, (The Hogarth Press, 1953).

That has not been rent.'133

I asked "What would you be for me?"

"The Night-mare Life-in-Death" said she:

The Night Mare is one of the cruellest aspects of the White Goddess. Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts or the branches of enormous hollow yews,

are built of carefully chosen twigs, lined with white horse-hair and the plumage of prophetic

birds and littered with the jaw-bones and entrails of poets. Solomon's wit is bitterly succinct: 'The horse-leech's two daughters: Give and Give.‘

The horse-leech is a small fresh-water animal akin to the medicinal leech, with thirty teeth in

its jaws. When a beast goes down to a stream to drink, the leech swims into its mouth and

fastens on the soft flesh at the back of its throat. It then sucks blood until completely distended, driving the beast frantic, and as a type of relentless greed gives its name to the

Alukah, who is the Canaanite Lamia, or Succuba, or Vampire. The two daughters of Alukah

are insatiable, like Alukah herself: and their names are Sheol and the Womb, or Death and Life. Solomon says, in other words: 'Women are greedy of children; they suck the vigour of

their menfolk, like the Vampire; they are sexually insatiable; they resemble the horse-leech of

the pond which plagues horses. And to what purpose are men born of women? Only in the

end to die. The grave and woman are equally insatiable.'134

‗There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion‘.135 Rumi says:

Do not build much For I intend to have you in ruins

If you build 200 houses in a manner that the bees do;

I shall make you as homeless as a fly

If you are the mount Qaf in stability I shall make you whirl like a millstone

The eternal, infinite, perpetuity of the Muse is no concern of the poet who sees merely her

fickleness. The poet will not be tomorrow, so:

Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vildest wormes to dwell:136

Visions of the Black Goddess are not unique but a norm in creative types of people. She is

the same Dark Lady invoked by the poets. The words chosen to describe her in prose are

symmetrical to those in which the poets have done throughout the ages: MY Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne,

Currall is farre more red, then her lips red,

If snow be white, why then her brests are dun:

If haires be wiers, black wiers grow on her head:

40

133 Yeats, William Butler. ‗Words for Music Perhaps: Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop‘. The Collected Works

of W. B. Yeats: The Poems, (1983, 1989, 1996). 134 Graves, Robert. The White Goddess, (Faber & Faber 1948, 1952, 1961). 135 Bacon, Francis. Essayes or Counsels, Civill & Morall, (1597, 1612, 1625). 136 Shakespeare, William. ‗Sonnet lxxi‘. Shakespeare's Sonnets, (Thomas Thorpe, 1609).

I have Seene Roses damaskt, red and white,

But no such Roses see I in her cheekes, I love to heare her speake, yet well I know,

That Musicke hath a farre more pleasing sound:

I graunt I never saw a goddesse goe,

My Mistres when shee walkes treads on the groun d.137

My thoughts and my discourse as mad mens are,

At randon from the truth vainely exprest. For I have sworne thee faire,and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell,as darke as night.138

Keats' Belle Dame sans Merci is the same 'toothless mastiff bitch' of Coleridge's

‗Christabel‘.139 The ‗damsel with a dulcimer‘ he envisioned in 'Kubla Khan' is described

more faithfully than ever before in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner':

Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy,

The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,

Who thicks mans' blood with cold.140

Coleridge's prose account of the composition of 'Kubla Khan' is solid proof of the verity of

the dictations she inspires and by far one of the best. Her acts have also been recorded by

other prose writers – Here is another good example:

Such a relation does the Dark Interpreter, whom immediately the reader will learn to know as

an intruder into my dreams, bear to my own mind. He is originally a mere reflex of my inner nature. I do not always know him in these cases as my own parhelion. What he says,

generally, is but that which I have said in daylight, and in meditation deep enough to

sculpture itself on my heart. But sometimes, as his face alters, his words alter, and they do not always seem such as I have used, or could use. No man can account for all things that

occur in dreams. Generally I believe this - that he is a faithful representative of myself; but he

also is at times subject to the action of the good Phantasus, who rules in dreams.141

How compatible this reflex of De Quincey's inner nature with a personification of feelings of

loneliness and uncertainty in the spiritual sense. W. H. Auden wrote ‗For instance, to build

modern church buildings like an air-port … flooded with cheerful light, a complete

falsification of what we really feel; our hearts are not cheerful, and our heads are not clear.‘

What he writes in another place, I think, explains what he means by this:

We have become obscene night worshipers who, having discovered that we cannot live

exactly as we will deny the possibility of willing anything and are content masochistically to

41

137 Shakespeare, William. 'Sonnet cxxx'. Shakespeare's Sonnets, (Thomas Thorpe, 1609). 138 Shakespeare, William. 'Sonnet cxlvii'. Shakespeare's Sonnets, (Thomas Thorpe, 1609). 139 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poems, (Penguin Classics, 1997). 140 See John Livingston Lowes‘ The Road to Xanadu, (Constable, 1927, revised 1951) for an exhaustive

commentary on both these poems. 141 de Quicey, Thomas. Suspiria de Profundis, (1845).

be lived, a denial that betrays not only us but our daemon itself.142

Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad – Khalifatul Masih IV cites numerous examples of how such

experiences have a role to play in the scheme of things by having created epochal changes in

the world in the field of technological advancement, for example, in his magnum opus

Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth. He suggests that such visions may be akin to the

experience of the phenomena of revelation in the world of religion.

I will yet recognise El Shaddai, al-Jabbar [the Subduing Compeller], al-Qahhar [the Crusher]

42

142 Auden, W. H. 'Jacob & the Angel', December 1939. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose ii 1939 –

1948, (Faber & Faber, 202). 38.

the Barrier God of blocks and stones (and grow to like Him):

I do want people to know what I think, and too many of them do these days, but these secrets

– between me and the canvas – are those for me and the time I spent alone with it. Nobody will ever know them as, even when I am asked what it all means, my words fail me and my

mind, clear in its depths, is surfaced with brackish, sometimes unsightly waters that are either

unoccupied or un-navigable.143

Then, I met people who question the life

out of living,

who question an embrace

rather than feeling it, who analyze a cloud

so much and fear

the approach of a storm that they cannot

contemplate what wind

moves it, where it could be going or,

more importantly, the

shadow it casts

at their own feet and how it can

make half a building

appear lifeless, asleep.144 These waters that blend with bracken and become a slimy grey blur are the fosses where

Caractacus fought Rome. They appear in Milton‘s Paradise Lost as ‗The black tartareous

cold Infernal dregs‘145 via Genesis146 (the Plain of Shinar) and Isaiah147 ‗wherein a black

bituminous gurge / Boiles out from under ground, the mouth of Hell;‘148 where the Devil

abides. It is a sea so thick, viscous and sticky that ships were believed to coagulate in its

quagmires. From it spring legendary tales of ghost ships. It is bridged by the Sword Bridge

which appears as the Bridge of Sirat in Islamic iconology (via the various Traditions of

Muhammad ملسو هيلع هللا ىلص). To fall into this sea is to fall into it for good. Except (like the

Coleridgean death-fires of the Ignis Fatuus) a lightning-flash of associations set the ‗reliques

43

143 Metzger, Hollace M. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009), 10. 144 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Watching Clouds Pass over Glass‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009), 202. 145 Milton, John. Paradise Lost. viii: 238, (1674). 146 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they

dwelt there.

The Holy Bible. Genesis 11: 2, (Authorized King James Version, 1611).

147 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I

will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:

The Holy Bible. Isaiah 11: 14, (Authorized King James Version, 1611). 148 Milton, John. Paradise Lost. xii: 41, 42, (1674).

of sensation‘149 free in order to unify them so that out of chaos springs the poetry of allusion.

This is what is termed as inspiration or revelation in religion. Anything other than this

merely denotes the final stage of responses to a work of art when emotion has spent itself,

and carries no emotive implicitness.

Being actually inexpressible, revelation begins where (the potentialities/possibilities of)

human language ends. Poetry is either in a no-man's-land between the 2 states or (the purest

poetry is) a sort of revelation in itself. Transpiring as suddenly as the fall of Icarus and as if

from nowhere in all its silent and numb negation stares the daemon lover to a harrowing

mental sound of sibilance: whose sentiments and emotions are unreciprocated, or impossible

to match or satisfy:

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,150

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,151

… and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.152 ... now ready to welcome

Death, but rejoicing in a new love,

A new peace, having heard the solemn Music strike and seen the statue move

To forgive our illusion.153

‗And lo, the Beast looked upon the face of Beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And

from that day, it was as one dead.‘154 Sex is also death. For at the very moment conception

occurs the spermatozoa's tail is lopped off by the enclosing, enveloping womb so it can no

longer swim. Thus Eros and Thanatos are conjoined. The French for orgasm is petit mort!

As such, Metzger‘s poetry is always composed on an edge, in excelsis, amplified, feeling

44

149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. (1817). 150 Eliot, T, S. ‗Four Quartets: Burnt Norton‘. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, (Faber & Faber, 1963). 151 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 'Kubla Khan'. 1816. The Complete Poems, (Penguin Classics, 1997). 152 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Sonnets From the Portugese: xliii, (1850). 153 Auden, W. H. 'The Sea & The Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest'. 1944. Collected

Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991). 154 Added by producer Merian C. Cooper to the 1933 film King Kong.

every little thing – unafraid to risk falling, even if it meant death:

She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.155

Every love poem, for instance, is hung with trophies of lovers gone, and among these may be some very peculiar objects indeed. The lovely lady of the present may number among her

predecessors an overshot waterwheel.156

The height of the joy, the moment when the world can improve no further, is both the end of joy and the beginning of melancholy.157

Also ‗The Ballad of Reading Gaol‘ by Oscar Wilde and Marina Warner‘s treatment of King

Kong in Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time – The 1994 Reith Lectures (1994), No

Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, & Making Mock (1998) and Signs & Wonders: Essays

on Literature & Culture (2003), where she draws parallels with Shakespeare‘s Caliban in The

Tempest. Also the story of Beauty and the Beast, Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

(1831), Edward Scissorhands, (1990), ‗When Lucy Met Tumnus‘ by Emma Hammond as

well as numerous mythological stories:

Maryam Hashemi. ‗Demon love‘, (2012).

45

155 Keats, John. ‗Ode on Melancholy‘, 1819. The Complete Poems, (Penguin Classics, 1973, 1977, 1988). 156 Auden, W. H. The Dyers Hand, (1962). 60. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose 4, (Princeton,

2001). 157 Brass, Daniel. ―Bursting Joy‘s Grape‖ in Keats‘ Odes‘. And Never Know the Joy: Sex & the Erotic in

English Poetry, (Rodopi B. V., 2006).

But the really reckless were fetched

By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper: "I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;

That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;

There are only the various envies, all of them sad."158

More terrible this time than the God Whimpering more bloody-minded but more God-like. It

is the same whimper of the Kadosh, the mysterious and terrifying other of God called the

Black Goddess who is sometimes the Sacred Feminine and sometimes known as the Divine

Male. It has been called the mysterium terrible et fascinans.159 The limestone harmony of

poetic impossibility in the Valéryian sense (who said that 'The impossibility of defining the

relation together with the impossibility of denying it constitutes the essence of the poetic

line') which vanishes away just as it is caught (and can sometimes give poetry its frivolous

tone):

Then, when the moon settled its battle

against the sun's inevitable victory,

(‗L‘invitation au Voyage‘).

*

So much of Auden‘s ‗In Praise of Limestone‘ reverberates to me daily and yet nothing comes

or goes:

Yet nothing passes

But envelopes between these places,

Snatched at the gate and panting read indoors, And first spring flowers arriving smashed,

There is no change of place:

No one will ever know For what conversion brilliant capital is waiting,

What ugly feast may village band be celebrating;

For no one goes

Further than railhead or the ends of piers, Will neither go nor send his son

Further through foothills than the rotting stack

Where gaitered gamekeeper with dog and gun Will shout "Turn back".160

Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do;

This or that or what you will is all the same to me; But all the things that I begin I leave before I'm through, —

There's little use in anything as far as I can see.

Love has gone and left me, — and the neighbours knock and borrow,

46

158 Auden, W. H. ‗In Praise of Limestone‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991). 159 Otto, Rudolph. Das Heilige - Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum

Rationalen, (1917). 160 Auden, W. H. ‗No Change of Place‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991).

And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

There's this little street and this little house.161

I've been battling with myself to find the words to express the deeply concentrated and

intense feelings these poems arouse in me, sometimes under the duvet by the light of my

phone, notating responses to psychologies of grief. Coleridge speaks of the 'willing

suspension of disbelief'162 and although this is true of a lot of poetry because the magic and

enchantment of words is a factual reality (and it also justifies his own poems such as 'Kubla

Khan' and 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'), such verse can only possess either feet or head

it cannot possess both:

The vases crack, the ladies die, The Oracles are wrong:163

Or can be ... As opposed to which there is a kind of poetry (this kind) that can be

described through the symbol of a tree:

Dost thou not see how Allah sets forth the comparison of a good word to a good tree whose

root is firm and whose every branch reaches high into heaven.164

‗The plant form which corresponds most closely to the perfect human being is the tree.‘165 In

this sense such poetry is in itself beauty and because it is truth in itself (the beauty of the true

and the truth of beauty). Such verse is not devoid of enchantment but the words themselves

awake and begin to speak out (as here and everywhere else in Metzger‘s life and work). They

metamorphose into the matter of one's life-blood:

Allah is the light of the heavens and the Earth. The similitude of His light is as a glowing

niche, wherein is a lamp. The lamp is in a crystal globe. The globe is bright as it were a

glittering star lamp lit from a blessed olive tree neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would well nigh blaze forth even though fire touched it not. Light upon light! Allah guides to

His light whosoever He wills. And Allah sets forth parables for people, and Allah knows all

things completely. Glowing forth from houses for which Allah ordained that they be exalted and that His

name be commemorated in them. Glorify Him therein in the mornings and the evenings.166

Had there not been this flaming wine

The vigorous tumult of revellers alone

Would have been enough to set the taverns ablaze167

Metzger is unashamed of using the word love more than any other poet I can name.

Educating (to) the convolutions of the heart within the space of a few words, sometimes just

47

161 Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Collected Poems, (HarperCollins, 1956). 36. 162 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. (1817). 163 Auden, W. H. ‗Five Songs: ii‘ Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991). 164 The Holy Quran. Abraham: 25. 165 Hirtenstein, Stephen. The Unlimited Mercifier, (Anqa, 1999). 138. 166 The Holy Quran. al-Nur [The Light]: 36, 27. 167 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed. Nuskhaha e Wafa, (Karwan). Translated by the author.

one small word. She can be uniquely whimsical, perspicacious, meticulously flamboyant and

yet never preaches or argue in Daedalian or difficult abstractions. Her meanings and

intentions are brought alive throughout and through-in the rhythms of words. I vowed long

ago to deal with poetry and not the life in my own writing but sometimes it is so compelling a

story that it is hard not to get involved (I can only say that those who are regularly wheeled

out to pass comment upon such things are generally unreliable witnesses):

There is so strong a consonance in the English language between story and history that no one

seemed able or willing to distinguish one from the other.168

I do believe Metzger is deserving of the ultimate of love, respect and loyalty for contributions

to the world of all the poems as for ‗The Land of Do‘, (Transcriptions of Time, 138),

‗Important‘ (Eternal Story, 66) and ‗Definition of Do‘ - Anyone who is unwilling to give her

that is (in my humble vouch) undeserving of her. Alas, as Pascal said:

Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. On le sent en mille choses. C'est le cœur

qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voilà ce que c'est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur.169

For me the definition of do is one tagged by a not as in Thomas Moore's 'Did Not'. Another

favourite I have to keep coming back to:

And how reliable can any truth be that is got

By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?170

Sometimes, in fact, when a poem has been assiduously refined and refined under the white blaze of inspiration, its final draft becomes so perfect in its ambivalence as to make the poet

humorously doubt whether the insertion of a simple 'not' will perhaps improve it.171

The internet is a very powerful tool. It creates a false sense of reality and a delusion of

escapism and intimacy in people who are not intimate - Indeed, who don't even know each

other at all - It is lethal for teenagers. They are at an age when they are incapable of

understanding that such a being with someone (emailing, chatting, even texting) does not

amount to a relationship and because of the mental nutrition this gives in the form of violent

sexual fantasies even most adults refuse to or become incapable of accepting this fact. None

of it amounts to a relationship unless of course, you decide to meet very early on and

quickly. Otherwise things develop that prevent you from meeting each other. Something of

this is in '@ La Terrasse'.

The unrealistic is devoid of spirit-soul, mere Achilles' heels of words like lies like robbery

like war like murder. Not only does mankind possess wisdom more than any other living

creature but also greed, avarice, Mammon-worship, and love of power. Reality consists of

48

168 Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, (2004). 169 Pascal, Blaise. Pensées, (1669). 170 Auden, W. H. ‗The Quest: xiv‘ Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991). 171 Graves, Robert. ‗Oxford Addresses on Poetry: The Dedicated Poet‘. Collected Writings on Poetry.

(Carcanet, 1995). 318.

that which is sensed, 'proved upon our pulses‘172 and ‗not standing upon external testimony,

but carried alive into the heart by passion;'173 as such, I also fear that the Word falls upon deaf

ears except to those who open doors for ladies, wear dark glasses, affect a black cassock.

They are those who are the chosen initiates because they choose to commit themselves to the

price we have, in the final instance, to pay. These days love is measured too as Eliot says 'I

have measured out my life in coffee spoons;'174 but that 'love is not love'175 as Shakespeare

says. I suppose the difference lies in where one is physically. Rumi says:

When I am with you, we stay up all night, when you're not here, I can't get to sleep God be praised for these 2 insomnias and the difference between them!

Auden was most proud of Caliban‘s speech to the audience in his ‗The Sea & the Mirror: A

Commentary on Shakespeare‘s The Tempest‘. He told a producer who proposed cutting it for

a BBC radio production ‗If I were to be faced with the problem of cutting, I would cut out

everything except this section.‘176 In it, occurs what I think is one of the most accurate

depictions of the poet‘s inaccessibility ‗to Porlock‘177 the Muse to whom the poet is also the

intruder, trespasser, and gate-crasher, a third person:

At Him and at Him only does she draw the line, not because there are any limits to her

sympathy but precisely because there are none. All along and only too well she has known what would happen if, by any careless

mischance – of conscious malice she never dreamed till now - He should ever manage to get

in. She foresaw what He would do to the conversation, lying in wait for its vision of private love or public justice to warm to an Egyptian brilliance and then with some fishlike odour or

bruit insolite snatching the visionaries back tongue-tied and blushing to the here and now; she

foresaw what He would do to the arrangements, breaking, by a refusal to keep in step, the

excellent order of the dancing ring, and ruining supper by knocking over the loaded appetising tray; worst of all, she foresaw, she dreaded, what He would end up doing to her,

that, not content with upsetting her guests, with spoiling their fun, His progress from outrage

to outrage would not relent before the gross climax of His making, horror unspeakable, a pass at her virgin self.178

Woman must always be on top. Who can refuse her if she materialize into a shark or an

unmade bed? She has been known to shape-shift herself into many innumerable beings

including sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid

and even a witch:

Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee

As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been in maistrie hym above.

49

172 Keats, John. To John Hamilton Reynolds, 3rd May 1818. The Letters of John Keats i. 2 volumes, (1958). 173 Wordsworth, William. ‗Preface to the Lyrical Ballads‘. Lyrical Ballads, (1801, 1802). 174 Eliot, T. S. ‗The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‘. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, (Faber & Faber, 1963). 175 Shakespeare, William. 'Sonnet cxvi'. Shakespeare's Sonnets, (Thomas Thorpe, 1609). 176 Auden, W. H. To Frederick Bradnum, 16th January 1960, (BBC Written Archives). 177 Verb occurring in Bruno’s Dream by Iris Murdoch, (1969). 178 Auden, W. H. 'The Sea & The Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest'. 1944. Collected

Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991).

This is youre mooste desir, thogh ye me kille.179

Sophie Neveu and Professor Langdon are in a garden of Earthly delights a la Bosch in The

Da Vinci Code film. She puts out a candle by putting her thumb and index finger into her

mouth and catching the flame between them. Then handles a syringe with a needle in it

which a junkie has left behind "Did it never occur to you that could be dangerous?" Asks

Professor Langdon. "No" she replies.180

I do think we channel our ideas and thoughts based on impressions we receive via books,

media and the un/Regal company we keep. For example I was reading about the fascinating

natural phenomena of Fata Morgana in Marina Warner's book Phantasmagoria: Spirit

Visions, Metaphors, & Media into the Twenty-first Century. Her fascinating chapter on these

castles in the clouds and I thought of the verse from The Holy Quran:

But the deeds of those who disbelieve are like a mirage in a desert. One who thirsts imagines

it to be water, when he comes up to it he finds it to be nothing and finds Allah near him Who

pays him his account in full and Allah is swift in reckoning.181

The Buddha said 'All that we are is all that we have thought'. Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr ibn

Qayyim al-Jawziyya wrote 'This world is like a shadow. If you try to catch it, you will never

be able to do so. If you turn your back towards it, it has no choice but to follow you‘. David

Dimbleby visited the town of Dunwich in A Picture of Britain and told of the scientific

phenomena of Fata Morgana, in Britain & the Sea at Bosham (church bells heard ringing

from the bottom of the sea at low tide in both places). See also the poem 'Lightenings: viii'

by Seamus Heaney. As in Dunwich, bells can also be heard rising from the sunken cathedral

of Ys, the subject of Debussy‘s prelude for piano 'La cathédrale engloutie'. A village lies

hidden beneath the Chew Valley Reservoir in Somerset which has not been seen for

decades, local legend says the old clock tower reappears when the waters get too low.

The poem ‗My Love‘ and its contextual note direct that there is a whole school of thought

against contextualizing the revelations (Word of God) but I think one has to contextualize

these things to some extent. The Jews would burn incense before the Ark of the

50

179 Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales: Tale of the Wyf of Bathe. 180 Elizabeth Winder writes that Sylvia Plath had a habit of ‗licking the air with her tongue‘ and Ann Burnside

Love recounts her having eaten an entire bowl of caviar meant for a table of people. Keith Sagar recalls a

dinner of friends at the Box Tree Restaurant in Ilkley:

All four of the men ordered t–bone steaks. They were the largest I had ever seen. Only Ted managed

to finish his. The rest of us managed about half. Ted turned to Leonard: ‗Are you not going to eat that,

Leonard?‘ ‗No‘. ‗Pass it over‘. Ted devoured it, then did the same with David‘s leavings and mine. I

was reminded of a favourite saying of Ted‘s: ‗The lady’s leavings are the dog’s dainties‘.

Sagar, Keith. ‗Ted Hughes, Gaudete, Cave Birds, & the 1975 Ilkley Literature Festival‘.

She really is extraordinarily greedy. I‘ve seen her eat a bowl of pasta that was meant for ten people.

She just starts at one end, and picks away while she‘s doing other things until it‘s all gone.

Sarah Johnson about Nigella Lawson in Gilly Smith. Nigella Lawson: A Biography, (2005). 181 The Holy Quran. al-Nur [The Light]. 40.

Covenant/The Holy of Holies ever since the time of Noah so as to create a smoke depicting

the veil that covers the throne of God which also appears in The Holy Quran (al-Najm [The

Star]: 17) in the description of the Night Journey of the Prophet.182

The green cushions and Divans in Paradise in Baroque, Christian art are also Green in The

Holy Quran although both these religious traditions are poles apart but the perpetuum mobile

persists:

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?183

‗Les Escaliers de Montmartre‘ sings and reminds of:

See how the clouds twist | over in the twilight,

See how the gale is | ruffling up the lake; Lie still for ever | on this little peninsula,

Heart beat and heart beat | steady till we wake.184

Larkin's lines are so true:

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.185

Regarding ‗The Lingerie Shop's Tears‘ – Love is what will remain of us, long after the end.

Metzger never uses the L word in vain and it is never unmeant/clichéd. For me, in me, it has

never yet failed even once to create love whenever I read it or hear her say it. It is really

stupid to say that Metzger is just a pretty face. My spellchecker strikes in red Hollace

suggesting alcohol. Now that is an idea! I shall drink deep: They tied me up last night with his

will:

I shouldn‘t bear the butting din of love

51

182 And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any

more for man‘s sake; for the imagination of man‘s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

The Holy Bible. Genesis 8: 21. (Authorised King James Version, 1611). 183 Eliot, T. S. ‗The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‘. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, (Faber & Faber, 1963). 184 Betjeman, Sir John. ‗Sir John Piers: The Attempt‘. Collected Poems, (John Murray, 2006). 185 Larkin, Philip. ‗An Arundel Tomb‘. The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, (Faber & Faber, 2012).

If I were skittled by puffed enamours.

I think - though of course I am all for free love, advanced schools, & so on - someone might

do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for

instance. It seems to me that bending someone to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or

neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what's more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn't. And I suspect that

means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. It's like

rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There's no way of quietly enjoying rugby football.186

Luv's not Times foole, though rosie lips and cheeks Within his bending sickles compasse come,

Love alters not with his breef houres and weekes,

But beares it out even to the edge of doome:

If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.187

‗Return to the Labyrinth (Find Me)‘ denotes the best-preserved (example of the) thirteenth

century medieval labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral, no doubt echoing of an earlier pagan

symbol. When it is open to pilgrims, many walk it on their knees in love and trust. New York

can feel like a labyrinth with its creeping walls, as can the subways of London or the shadows

of neon-lit corners of Keats' 'dark Soho,'188

Sometimes Metzger is found (to have) lodged in rock-clefts or the branches of enormous

hollow yews, built with carefully chosen twigs:

Sometimes,

there is a child outside playing alone

in the courtyard,

singing, running, inventing things.

His mother says

he was born too early

and I know I was born too late.

Maybe, together,

we will live for today.189

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a

boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before

52

186 Larkin, Philip. To Monica Jones, 1st November1951. Letters to Monica, (Faber & Faber, 2010). 67.

Metzger says ‗I think the physical/nagging experience … also originates from a similar place as rugby. It is

temporary and on the clock.‘ 187 Shakespeare, William. 'Sonnet cxvi'. Shakespeare's Sonnets, (Thomas Thorpe, 1609). 188 Keats, John. The Complete Poems, (Penguin Classics, 1973, 1977, 1988). 189 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Dilution‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 125.

me.190

A lost person is the last person wanting to be unfound:

Love was the word they never said aloud

As something that a picture can't return.191

And yet:

Love answers all the ogress' grave questions

Offering even as counter-question (a salve), itself in a frisson192

Parveen Shakir says in ‗To a Victorian‘:

Just come suddenly

One day From nowhere in particular

Take me

In your arms Turn a perfect circle!193

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren‘t there

Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem

Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.194

‗In Their Next Life‘ and ‗Breathless‘ have also made true the beautiful woman who ‗cannot

breathe‘:

Between the Yea and the Nay the spirits take their flight beyond matter, and the necks detach

themselves from their bodies.195

So go on, go on, come on leave me breathless Tempt me, tease me, until I can't deny

This lovin' feeling

Make me long for your kiss Go on, go on, yeah

Come on

And if there's tomorrow And all we have is here and now

I'm happy just to have you

53

190 Newton, Sir Isaac. In Sir David Brewster. Memoirs of the Life, Writings, & Discoveries of Sir Isaac

Newton ii, (1855). 191 Auden, W. H. ‗The Prophets‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991). 192 See note 5 to ‗Smoke & Mirrors‘ by the author. 193 Shakir, Parveen. Mah e Tamam, (Murad Publications, 2002). Translated by the author, 4th July 2011. 194 Ashberry, John. 'Paradoxes & Oxymorons'. Collected Poems 1956-87, (Carcanet, 2010). 195 Ibn al-‗Arabi, Shaykh Muhyiddin, Ruh al-Quds [Sufis of Andalusia]. Translated with introduction & notes

by Ralph Austin. (1971). 23.

You're all the love I need somehow

It‘s like a dream Although I'm not asleep

And I never want to wake up

Don't lose it

Don't leave it196

Breath: The ‘Elixir’ Of Poetry197

Oxygen is the component of air that makes breath possible.

Although it is only one fifth part of air itself, it is that crucial part that makes life

possible.

The poet begins the creative process from the body and the senses, from touching and

from looking. It is the concentration on the breath that takes the poet to a new level of perception,

sharpening sight and hearing. Without this ‗elixir‘ of the breath, poetry is exactly like air

without oxygen: the living word and energy of poetry is born from the metamorphosis of words that travel along the line of breath.

The ‗born‘ poet knows this and so knows how to recreate the word, turning it into a

vector of energy : no longer merchandise but ‗happening‘, a force capable of lifting off the page and carrying us away.

Language that is rooted in breath knows how to instil the pulse of rhythm into poetry.

Or in other words, the pulse of the senses will be infused within language by the poet. This is

how poetry becomes a music of the body, how it gradually transforms both the poet and the surrounding world to create a life of its own.

54

196 The Corrs. ‗Breathless‘. In Blue, (2000). 197

Breath Poetry: Elixir Poetry

Oxygen is the component of air that makes breathing possible and although it is only one fifth of air, it is the

crucial one fifth that makes life possible.

The poet starts the process of creativity from the body and the senses, touching and watching. There is a concentration on breathing that leads the poet to a new consciousness and awareness which heightens the

senses of sight and sound. Poetry without this elixir is exactly like air without oxygen but living words need

this elixir which makes the words metamorphose with the born poet being the elixir poet who achieves the

highest level of sublimity. The poet can reconstruct the word so that it bears warmth, energy and ecstasy and

is a happening not just a commodity and this word is capable of distancing itself from the sheet of paper,

rising up and taking someone‘s hand. Language which possesses closeness to breath will instill warmth,

pulse and beat into the poetry itself or to express it another way, the pulse of the senses will be internalised

in the language by the poet. In this way, poetry becomes the music of the body, the poet‘s movement and

senses, gradually working with the poet, observing and creating a life of its own.

The poetry of breath retains the energy inside the language and suddenly in a leap of the senses, will

explode the energy. In breath poetry, words do not die in language but develop into another word as if one

word is an open womb for another. The words continuously enjoy each other as if they are ‗coming‘ in love- making in the supreme emotions of pain, joy, hatred, love, caring, desiring, yearning, vulnerability, madness

and revenge. For an instant, the poet cannot breathe and it is in that moment that transcendence occurs when

the senses are crystallised into that feeling and a few words are released. The rest is what an expert poet can

add.

Karbassi, Ziba, 1997. (Exiled Ink! Winter, 2006). 35.

The poetry of breath withholds and accumulates energy within language. And then

suddenly it is set off in a leap of the senses. Words fixed in language don‘t lose their life essence but give birth to one another, as if each word were the open womb of the next. Words

that continually and sensually love one another, giving birth to the great emotions: grief, joy,

hatred, love, affection, desire, obsession, vulnerability, folly, revenge. For a split second the

poet is left breathless: it is in that split second that perception is crystallised around one sensation and, as in a chemical reaction, releases the word.

It is then up to the poet as an expert technician to do the rest.198

*

I look as at a picture merely. But it is amusing to look for somebody one knows in a crowd even if one does not want him. It takes off the terrible oppressiveness of being surrounded by

a throng and having no point of junction with it through a single individual.199

But soft, what light forth yonder window breakes? It is the East, and Juliet is the Sunne,

Arise faire S nne, and kill the envious Moone

That is alreadie sicke and pale with griefe: That thou her maid, art far more faire than she.

Be not her maide since she is envious,

Her vestall liverie is but pale and greene, And none but fooles doe weare it, cast it off.

She speakes, but she sayes nothing. What of that?

Her eye discourseth, I will answere it.

I am too bold, tis not to me she speakes, Two of the fairest starres in all the skies,

Having some busines, doe entreat her eyes

To twinckle in their spheares till they returne. The brightnes of her cheekes would shame those stars:

As day-light doth a Lampe, her eyes in heaven,

Would through the airie region streame so bright,

That birdes would sing, and thinke it were not night. Oh now she leanes her cheekes upon her hand,

I would I were the glove to that same hand,

That I might kisse that cheeke.200

There are incredible photographs of Metzger at windows, looking in, looking out, up, down,

Looking Down to See Up:

Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She

sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She

sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out.201

These images also pummel their way into her poetry crept upon by the darkness of the poetry

as in ‗From Your Closed Window‘ in 3VOΓVE. Curious as to how these images always

55

198 Italics added. 199 Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. (1886). 200 Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent & Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo & Juliet. 201 Joyce, James. Ulysses.

come back:

The only time you saw me,

so beautifully, was when this window was open and you found

a silhouette, not an expression.

(‗Rough Draft‘).

Me. Iʼm seated – Still,

by an open door, an open window

(‗Full Sky, Temporal and Clearing‘).202

A pattern emerges and floats about my head through this beautiful poetry. Nothing ever

happens here - As Alan Bennett said 'Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.'203

At least, I know that mine is, and that which happens to other people. And there is the Larkin

line 'Something like nothing, happens anywhere'.204 Holding onto the past like a man who is

ready for the grave or looking for a way to escape the pain of the present by holding onto the

past. The Persian poet Mehdi Akhavān-Sāles wrote ‗The garden of leaflessness: who dares to

say that it isn‘t beautiful‘.

The view from my own window has never been too pleasant - Except from the window of my

childhood. Now I look out for want of reaching out to grasp onto something, anything, if I

cannot look out I am bemused, dismayed, it feels like being shut in a box. I look at the

aeroplanes in the sky, think of the vastness of God‘s Earth and all the people living in it.

Thousands being transposed to all corners of ‗the great Globe it selfe,‘205 so many countries.

The age which I share with the great and good of my time. Those I love. Those gone, those

yet to come and take our places sharing the same heavenly canopy. Here are some earlier

examples from Metzger‘s work:

Couples walk past me,

I fade into windows

reflecting moonlight from a moon I cannot even see.206

You‘re still sleeping. I look out the window

above your open lips,

your praying hands,

and I see Gods and Goddesses

protecting a new city

that doesn‘t know

56

202 Particularly ‗Fete de la Musique‘, 203 Bennett, Alan. Writing Home, (Faber & Faber, 1994). 204 Larkin, Philip. ‗I Remember, I Remember‘. The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, (Faber & Faber, 2012). 205 Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 206 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Here I Am‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 64, 65.

where to go.207

I hope, when I go,

you will open

your window

(the one you opened to let me in)

so that the dust

left on your floor from my jacket

catches the imprint

left from the undersides

of my thighs

as I last packed

my things before whispering

―Goodbye.‖208

I want to suspend your soul

in that burning bottle,

out my window in the night, above pavement

carrying heavy hearts home

under moonlight

even they cannot lift their eyes to see.209

Little bird, what news have you from

my Love's window panes?

When he called out her name210

I am the voice

the blind man heard

singing through an unseen,

opened window.211

The ballerina spins,

my opened window welcomes your hand,

your soul.212

Also her need for windows in ‗Timeless‘, in ‗Expired Citizen‘ and in ‗Watching Clouds Pass

57

207 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Dreaming While Awake‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 83. 208 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗La Ville Rose‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 107. 209 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Bottled Soul‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 117. 210 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Rondine‘. Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 147. 211 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Awake in ‗ing‘. Why the Willow, (MiDEA, 2010). 10. 212 Metzger, Hollace M. ‗Once Was‘. Why the Willow, (MiDEA, 2010). 24.

over Glass‘, she searches for open windows to let her soul through as in ‗Big Love‘ and

opens every window herself from without and within (see especially ‗Fete de la Musique‘,

‗Songe Lucide de ce Matins‘ and the notes to these poems). The beautiful poem ‗Windows‘

itself ciphers all these linkages. My windows stay curtained for days on end to blot out the

unbearable beauty of daylight and the sun for:

Sad Memory brings the light

Of other days around me

(Thomas Moore. ‗Oft in the Stilly Night‘).

"Enough!"

This will be the last.

I have come to an end.

There are no more words. If you happen to see

a word somewhere from me,

take it gently home. Maybe you keep special memories

in a pretty pink box.

My word would like it there.

I like to think my word would be treasured - when measured

against other words would be

prized. I would like this to be the last thought.

Lie down here now, to get up later

awake in a different place. A place

where there are no words - not because you have lost them

but because they are not needed.

If you see her give her my last words: "I will see you there."213

The Muse’s Shadow

That our dreaming wills may seem to escape This dead calm, wander instead

On knife edges, on black and white squares,

Across moss, baize, velvet, boards, Over cracks and hillocks, in mazes

Of string and penitent cones,

Down granite ramps and damp passages, Through gates that will not relatch

And doors marked Private, pursued by Moors

58

213 Wilson, Morney. ‗The Last‘. I Am The Blast From Your Past, (2007).

And watched by latent robbers,

To hostile villages at the heads of fjords, To dark chateaux where wind sobs

In the pine-trees and telephones ring,

Inviting trouble, to a room,

Lit by one weak bulb, where our Double sits Writing and does not look up.214

I can't say "Nobody's ever written a poem for me" now. I feel like my own double peering

over my shoulder as Ted Hughes looked back with hindsight towards his younger self as one

does:

(I can't read the name at this distance) But he's sipping the first claret he ever tasted, I know that

And chewing his first Gruyère. He will spend the rest of his life

Trying to recapture the marvel – Separately or combined

Of that wine that cheese and this moment.215

And as I do I find that:

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,

Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers;

I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides and of their bridal cakes.

I write of youth, of love, and have access

By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness; I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece,

Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris.

I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write How roses first came red, and lilies white;

I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing

The court of Mab, and of the fairy king.216

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you?217

The ‗Third Person‘ whom Metzger likes to cipher can also sometimes become the literary

critic as in Obaidullah Aleem‘s scathing article ‗Third Person‘:

59

214 Auden, W. H. ‗Horae Canonicae: Nones‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1976, 1991). 215 Hughes, Ted. ‗Paris 1954‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 2003). 216 Herrick, Robert. ‗The Argument of his Book‘. Hesperides, (1648). 217 Eliot, T. S. 'The Waste Land: What the Thunder Said'. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, (Faber & Faber,

1963).

Our apparatniks will continue making

the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for it that artists,

chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.218

My poetry, the necessity to be open and somewhat free

has dredged a hole in the Earth.

(‗Love Letter‘).

The work of art, in this case, of poetry must go on; regardless, we must go on lighting our

little candles in the big wind. There is no other way. The flame is oblivious to itself burning

when giving light to the world around though at times it may feel like one is crying out in the

wilderness:

The world goes on and on and on in bleak infinitude What‘s then the harm if I express my woes a little?

Seems like no one here has ever heard of loyalty

Could I be blamed if the cynic in me shows a little? The moon awakens your memories; the moonlight thinks I love her

It shines in all its splendour when my anguish grows a little

That long awaited moment came fortuitously and went

Our soul became a fireball, the body froze a little Although somehow I will manage to relate this saga

Factually I‘ll hide a little and expose a little

Still, the validity of art is in the communicating of it. We exist only in relation to others. It is

a grave sin to deprive the world of that; poetry is that much poorer:

Gaze and create. If art can‘t cope

it‘s just another form of dope, and leaves the Gorgon in control

of all the freedoms of the soul.219

Harrison says something really interesting about the channelling of poetry elsewhere that if

one were to give someone their blood one couldn‘t just give it to them, it had to go through

certain channels. The pain of art and creativity are ends to those means:

Suffering has been a great teacher, cultivating and culturing our conduct. It develops and

refines sensibilities, teaches humility and in more than one way, prepares humans to be able

to turn to God. It awakens the need for search and exploration and creates that necessity which is the mother of all inventions. Remove suffering as a causative factor in developing

man's potential and the wheel of progress would turn back a hundred thousand times. Man

may try his hand at altering the plan of things, but frustration would be all he will achieve. Thus, the question of apportioning blame for the existence of suffering upon the Creator

should not arise. Suffering, to play its subtle creative role in the scheme of things, is indeed a

60

218 Auden, W. H. ‗Moon Landing‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber 1976, 1991). 219 Harrison, Tony. ‗The Gaze of the Gorgon‘. Collected Film Poetry, (Faber & Faber, 2007). 160.

blessing in disguise.

The secret of all scientific investigation and discovery lies in a constant quest for the relief of pain and discomfort. The motivation behind scientific exploration and discovery is

based less on a desire to gain luxuries than on a need to escape pain. Luxury itself is, after all,

a further extension of the same tendency to move away from a state of discomfort to a state of

comparative ease.220

Sometimes, I wish Metzger would look up in the sense of looking forward to redressing these

wrongs and express herself in this form. This is where I think the poem ‗Tomb‘ fails though

as a poem it does work for a time on a certain level. This tone also comes out in Why the

Willow but the willow branch is also a Buddhist symbol of compassion as Metzger herself

has pointed out, giving a beautiful image of a woman whose tears also mirror the beauty of

the world surrounding her.221 It is of serious concern if this tone persists as it does

persistently, for example, in some of Plath‘s late poetry:

Pool in which images Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous

Wringing of hands, this dark Ceiling without a star.222

For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.

There is no hope, it is given up.223

Thankfully, Metzger understands this and points to the positivity of this aspect when she

points out that silence and death (in her poetry) usually refer to Neruda‘s ‗Poema XV‘ which

nevertheless ends upon this notable positivity:

Me gustas cuando callas porque estas como ausente. Distante y dolorosa como si hubieras muerto.

Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan.

Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto.224

The satirist/humourist Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi writes ‗The secret of Aga‘s age remained

concealed. But in the days we got acquainted – He was passing through that perplexing vale

of life wherein youngsters smirked away regarding him an oldster, and the elderly neglected

him thinking him to be yesterday‘s lad. Those whom Aga considered his age fellows referred

to him under their breaths as their young uncle! Well, whatever his age but I suppose he was

from among those who are never young. Whenever he‘d sit to relate tales of his long gone

youth the boys would readily laud them as quixotic. They were wrong, for not only his tales

but his youth was completely fictitious. Nonetheless this supposition is not an improbable

fancy because people do skip stages in their lives.‘

61

220 Ahmad, Hazrat Mirza Tahir – Khalifatul Masih IV. Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth, (Islam International Publications Ltd, 1998). 221 Metzger, Hollace, M. ‗Mirror of Water‘, Transcriptions of Time, (MiDEA, 2009). 103. Also One World

Café Presents Hollace M. Metzger: Of Memory, Space & Place, (1 June 2010). 222 Plath, Sylvia. ‗Child‘ Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1981). 223 Plath, Sylvia. ‗Berck-Plage‘. Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber, 1981). 224 Neruda, Pablo. ‗Poema XV‘. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, (1924).

‗For example, one doesn‘t like to entertain the thought that Shaykh Saadi was once a

child, Hali turned old pre-puberty, Mahjul Afadi was (on an emotional level) born and dead

imperfect, Shibli waged a crusade against there being an average lifespan and argued that

love is nature‘s gift and not the prisoner of age or youth [Iqbal says]:

Love is a gift from the Divine ignorant of age An infidel relies upon the sabre but a believing crusader even fights unarmed225

And Akhtar Sheerani basked in continual youth all his life and passed away in the act.‘

‗This does not mean to censure Akhtar Sheerani or to oppose Aga, for even today

Aga‘s words critiquing Tagore yet reverberate in my ears ‗Like it or loath it – But a young

Maulwi and an old poet doesn‘t warm the cockles of my heart‘. There is a discussion at the

end of Peter O' Toole's autobiography (himself an actor and writer in a class of his own). The

discussion is between himself and a chum concerning the size of childhood, when does it

end? ―Oh Early.‖ Replies his friend ―Pre-puberty, that's about the size of it‖.226

On that note, John Pudney (and others who met him over the years) wondered whether W. H.

Auden had any youth at all.227 I reckon this was due to his natural, genuine and sincere

personality and because of his refusal to mask his true identity and to portray himself as he

was, others would pity him for never having grown up in the first place and he quoted them

in a poem ―It‘s such a pity Wystan never grows up.‖228 Perhaps because he was so highly

regarded, people couldn‘t imagine him as ever having been a child.

Repeated reading and/or listening to 'Shadow of Belief' finally resolves the semblance of

Bernini‘s Ecstacy of St Teresa and the following passage from Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad,

so controversial it is never translated or included in his books to this day (even though it is a

common experience among all mystics, experienced by many including Rumi, Attar, Rhazes

and Abu Hanifa). Regarding the body as God's cathedral he writes:

Mary-like the soul of Jesus was infused in me and in an allegorical sense I was impregnated and after many months of a period not exceeding 10 months after this revelation

... I was dispensed from Mary into Jesus hence I came to be the Son of Mary.229

Similarly it is written in the Bible ‗My little children, of whom I suffer with birth-pangs again

until Christ be formed in you.‘230 Such experiences are found in saints throughout world

religions. As in Revelations of Divine Love (referenced above) of St Juliana of Norwich and

the Book of Margery Kempe. Similarly, there is the divine command to eat the book in the

‗Book of Revelation‘ (whose author might well have been John the Baptist, the language and

style are virtually identical, opined by Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad – Khalifatul Masih IV), St.

62

225 Iqbal, Sir Muhammad. Kulliyat e Iqbal, (Lahore, 1990). 226 O‘ Toole, Peter Seamus. Loitering With Intent: The Child, (Macmillian, 1992). 227 Pudney, John. Home & Away: An Autobiographical Gambit, (1960). 228 Auden, W. H. ‗Letter to Lord Byron: iv. Letters From Iceland, (Faber & Faber, 1937, revised 1967). The

Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose 1 1926 - 1938, (Faber & Faber, 1996). 328. 229 Ahmad, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam. Kashti e Nuh [The Ark of Noah], (Ziyaul Islam, 1902), Barahin e

Ahmadiyya v. Ruhani Khazain: xxi. (Islam International Publications Limited, 2012). 369. 230 The Holy Bible. Galatians 4: 19.

Bernard (who was also miraculously cured by the Lactation of the Virgin Mary)231

cries out

from joy of such a Divine union in Cantica Canticorum:

This is the essence of vicegerency and of the breathing of the Spirit of God into a person and

equipping oneself with divine attributes.

That is to say, as Adam was created without the intervention of means, in the same

way the spirit is breathed into a spiritual Adam without the intervention of any visible means.232

… and the rest of it. ‗In a City Without Clubs‘ recreates a somewhat similar scene and

attitude to one depicted by Rochester:

Whilst I, my pleasure to pursue,

Whole nights am taking in The lusty juice of grapes, take you

The juice of lusty men.233

‗Paris, Encore‘ reminds of the line in King Lear ‗Prithee, nuncle, tell me whether a madman

be a gentleman or a yeoman?‘234 As well as the inimitable line from an ode of Horace ‗carpe

diem, quam minimum credula postero.‘ Imitated most sentimentally in one of the rare happy

poems per se by Herrick 'To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time‘:

I am quite perplexed in a world of doubts and fancies – there is nothing stable in the world – uproar‘s your only musick, …

235

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for

ever.236

Francis Bacon said ‘Begin what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have

only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake‘:

Far art thou wandered now in search of health

And milder breezes,--melancholy lot!

But thou art with us, with us in the past, The present, with us in the times to come.

There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,

No languor, no dejection, no dismay, No absence scarcely can there be, for those

63

231 See Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth & Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976, Oxford Unniversity

Press, 2013) for discussion on the iconography of the Virgin‘s Milk. 232 Ahmad, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam. Barahin e Ahmadiyya iv [Arguments in Support of 'The Holy Quran' & the

Prophethood of the Holy Prophet]. 5 volumes, (Safir e Hind Press 1880, 1882, Riyadh e Hind 1884, Anwar

Ahmadiyya Machine Press, 1905). 233 Rochester, Lord John Wilmot. The Complete Works, (Penguin Classics, 1994). 234 Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear, (1608). Revisions added to Mr. William Shakespeares

Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, (Edward Blount & William Isaac Jaggard, 1623). 235 Keats, John. To George & Tom Keats, 13th – 19th January 1818. The Letters of John Keats 1814 - 1821. 2

volumes, (1958). 236 Keats, John. To Charles Brown, 28th September 1820. The Letters of John Keats 1814 - 1821. 2 volumes,

(1958).

Who love as we do. Speed thee well!

(William Wordsworth. ‗The Prelude‘).

Wordsworth is referred to in ‗L|ines‘ and the note to ‗One if by Land, Two if by Sea‘. His

haunting Lucy Poems are my own favourite, particularly ‗A slumber did my spirit seal‘. By

this stage 3VOΓVE has reached a state akin to the Leigh Hunt poem ‗Jenny Kissed Me‘.

In ‗Fly, Move, Through‘ Metzger says ‗There are cycles in life.‘ These cyclical

transformations (another one of Metzger‘s abiding themes) bend back against themselves in

her poetry, to take shape/form in a death-denial and folding (in) of time thus

overrunning/overturning death/oblivion through transfiguration.237 Also by ciphering the

Pythagorian or Ovidian mythologies of metamorphoses in text and through her art in general,

poetry being the one art which can reflect our strongest feelings.

The last lines of the book from the poem ‗Merci‘ reflect the ultimate reality, which is that of

returning to the beloved, Muhammad‘s ملسو هيلع هللا ىلص last words were ‗To the ultimate beloved‘ and

the Quranic invocation at a time of loss is that of ‗We belong to Allah and return to Him‘.

By the testimony of the Flight of Time.

Surely humankind is at a loss. 238

You are desire and peace.

You are passion and belief. You are what you are in the absence of me.

And you will never be those things

with me for as long as I remain

safely in this cyclical silence. Oh, how I do return to you.

(‗Return To You‘).239

Traces in time is, in the end, what everything comes down to.

© Rehan Qayoom, 2012, 2013.

64

237 Metzger says ‗yes, i also believe in these cycles (the seven year ones and the three month ones; interest /

love) - just be happy the bed is lonely rather than left, that it may be colder than that 'before'-time‘:

it is noticed

and known

as the days pass. 238 The Holy Quran. al-Asr [The Fading Day]: 2, 3. 239 tunnel of eternity from you from me

of passage, of birth

to beginning to ending

porthole by way

of night into day

(21st September 2012).

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