POETS Day! Skipwith Cannéll’s “Nocturnes”

Illustrated by Rene Sears

Birmingham may have gone out over its skis and declared a POETS Day pre-emptively. We don’t have snowplows, our shovels are sewing scissor-esque in that they’re solely for burying kin, and nobody can find the other glove. An inch of snow will paralyze us. The schools shut down and no one can get to work except liquor store owners who’ll do three Christmases and a mid-week Valantine’s Day worth of business in twelve hours. There’s a prediction of one to two inches by tomorrow morning.

I got the closing notice for my youngest’s school yesterday. My eldest’s sent an email this morning (I’m writing this on Thursday night) with an ominous pair of sentences about on-line assignments to follow (Mwu-hah-hah!). I can’t blame them for being overly cautious after the flash blizzard (three inches) of 2012 left teachers and students (not mine) stranded overnight. Rare snows put us in a bind, but I’ve been at home through more dire warnings that didn’t pan out as expected than I can count, leaving a city of day drinking dog walkers.

Nobody in my neck of the woods needs a POETS Day plan. We can’t Piss Off Early even though Tomorrow’s Saturday, because we’ll already be home. Good luck to the rest of you and your Northern ways. Fake a cough, maybe?

Whatever you gotta do, get out and have fun. But take time for a little verse first.

***

I’m pretty sure we all had the same initial thought, but this week’s featured poem was published in 1914 and the World War I biplane made by Sopwith and named the Camel due to an aerodynamic hump over the guns in the original design, wasn’t introduced until 1917. The similarity had no effect on Cannéll’s poetry; no resentment at being teased or bravado from a name evoking brief air superiority for a three year period before rapid development of technology tempered by the pressures of war led to predictable obsolescence.

I went down a rabbit hole reading about the Sopwith Camel. It was a dangerous little plane in a novice’s hand. Apparently, the weight was disproportionately forward, causing all sorts of unexpected pulls and veers to torment an inexperienced pilot. But manned by those with the experience to tame its idiosyncrasies, the plane became a highly maneuverable killing machine. There wasn’t much room in between for error. The joke in the RAF was that it always led to a cross, be it a “wooden cross, The Red Cross, or the Victoria’s Cross.” Pilots flying the Sopwith Camel were credited with shooting down 1,294 enemy aircraft in WWI, “more than any other Allied fighter in the conflict,” according to Wikipedia.

Most probably know it as the alter ego of World War I Flying Ace Snoopy’s doghouse, transformed into a Sopwith Camel to duel with the Red Baron over the skies of wherever Peanuts takes place. I found this controversial opinion at Peanuts Wiki:

“When Snoopy is flying and fighting, it can often be seen that there are bullets in his plane. This could imply that the Red Baron is not imaginary, since he really shoots the plane. However, it is most likely that the bullets are part of Snoopy’s imagination as well.”

“Most likely” is cowardice on the part of Peanuts Wiki, probably in fear of alienating the large Parisian contingent of Schultz fandom. Sadly, the debate will rage on. “Che sera, sera,” to quote Marlowe.

Cannéll’s “Nocturnes” is the poet’s only contribution to the Ezra Pound edited collection, Des Imagistes. It is my least favorite poem included in my favorite anthology. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t fit. I think a little knowledge of Ezra Pound’s enthusiasm for novelties, most especially novelties who are people and write, helps explain the poem’s presence.

Pound promoted incessantly. Ideas and artistic causes? Yes, but those came and went. It was in promoting people that you saw energy and zeal combine with commitment. He kept a starving Joyce family in winter clothes, raised money to feed them, and helped midwife the publication of Ulysses. His patronage by committee scheme to get Eliot out of banking was pretty clever. “Have just discovered another Amur’kn. Vurry Amur’k’n, with, I think, the seeds of grace,” he wrote to Alice Corbin Henderson of Robert Frost in March of 1913, with promises to forward his work. That same month he recommended Frost to Harriet Monroe. If Pound liked you, he’d do his damnedest to make you a literary success.

A quick look tells me that Cannéll had a pretty good career as both a poet and editor. He was briefly married to Kitty Cannéll, who kept the last name after their divorce for alliterative reasons. She was a character. A dance and fashion correspondent out of Paris, Kitty travelled in braggable circles. Hemingway based A Farewell to Arms’s Helen Ferguson on her and, it’s debated, Frances Clyne in The Sun Also Rises as well. Skipwith was good friends with fellow Philadelphian William Carlos Williams.

Researching Skipwith Cannéll shows how promiscuously people copy/paste. At least four websites boast the same opening paragraph containing the sentence “His surname is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable.” I have no idea who deserves attribution for that quote any more than I know why that sentence was necessary in the first place. Who was saying CANN-ell? Findagrave.com was one of the few that didn’t seem a plagiarism. It said of him simply, “He was a poet and much of his early work can be found in the little literary magazines of the early 1900s. During World War I, he served in the Medical Corp and later in the Corp of Intelligence Police.”

Pound met Cannéll in 1913 and set about finding him a place to live and introducing him to Yeats. As Pound projects go, Skipwith wasn’t as smashing a success as Joyce or HD, but he wasn’t the biggest promotional disappointment of Pound’s career either (See Mussolini, Benito).

Imagism was meant to be new and precise, “To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” As I think you’ll see in this poem, Cannéll’s word choices – image choices, too – cause you to pause and encourage distractions. Either they were poorly chosen, or he expressed relationships between them poorly. I don’t think he got across to the reader what he intended to get across.

The poem is divided into six free verse stanzas of varying lengths, each introduced with a Roman numeral. I’m only letting you know this because the line breaks are irregular and the possibility you might think the stanza numbered “I” began with a single word line of only the pronoun “I.” I’m pedantic sometimes.

Nocturnes
Skipwith Cannéll (1887–1957)

I
Thy feet,
That are like little, silver birds,
Thou hast set upon pleasant ways;
Therefore I will follow thee,
Thou Dove of the Golden Eyes,
Upon any path will I follow thee,
For the light of thy beauty
Shines before me like a torch.

“Thy,” “Thou,” “thee.” This isn’t the greatest sin. The book opens with Richard Aldington’s “Choricos” and that’s got a thou in it, but Imagism was a break from Victorian adornments. “Choricos” heralds the break. I understand that there are mindsets and language that often attend art forms that seem ridiculous if encountered in the wild. People don’t suddenly bounce into song, but if you’re writing a musical, you press on as if they do. Vestigial pronouns pop up in poetry, but here we have five of them, three leading a line.

II
Thy feet are white
Upon the foam of the sea;
Hold me fast, thou bright Swan,
Lest I stumble,
And into deep waters.
III
Long have I been
But the Singer beneath thy Casement,
And now I am weary.
I am sick with longing,
O my Belovéd;
Therefore bear me with thee
Swiftly
Upon our road.

We have “feet,” “pleasant ways,” “path,” and “upon our road” with “silver birds,” “dove,” and “swan.” Are we walking or flying? If we’re walking, why birds? And then, “foam of the sea” and “deep waters.” What is being conveyed and how? Why grounded wet birds?

IV
With the net of thy hair
Thou hast fished in the sea,
And a strange fish
Hast thou caught in thy net;
For thy hair,
Belovéd,
Holdeth my heart
Within its web of gold.
Fish and spiders. Why not?

V
I am weary with love, and thy lips
Are night-born poppies.
Give me therefore thy lips
That I may know sleep.

VI
I am weary with longing,
I am faint with love;
For upon my head has the moonlight
Fallen
As a sword.

My wife said Cannéll’s “trying too hard to be deep.” He’s exuberant without focus. Pound cut swaths out of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land.” He took a knife to Ulyssess. No idea what stayed his hand here.

Before the publication of Des Imagistes, “Nocturnes” was published in the August, 1913 issue of Poetry, doubtless at Pound’s suggestion as foreign correspondent for the magazine. With it is published “Nocturne Triste,” a prose poem companion also by Cannéll.

Nocturne Triste

The Iridescence of sunrise over the ocean gleams on the wings of a fly; and on the cheeks of a girl blooms the delicate flush of a peach: but the fly hovers above the refuse of the world, and at the heart of the peach gnaws a worm.

The night wind is cold like the fingers of death, the sky purple like a cup of Tyrian poison, the gleam of the moon white like the flesh of a leper, and the sea dark like the wings of a bat.

My Beloved looks at me, and her eyes are hard and cold, her slender fingers cold and limp, and her parted lips turning from mine bring forth no word.

I was annoyed by “Nocturnes” years before learning of the existence of “Nocturne Triste.” I tried to give the new poem an unbiased look, but was bothered in the first sentence. “Iridescence” doesn’t act. It’s an effect. It can’t gleam on the wings of a fly. Sunlight might cause the wings to become iridescent, but there is no transitive capable iridescence. As far as I’ve read, leper skin is red, not white. I’m giving a pass to Tyrian poison being purple, but I’d recommend rephrasing if I were asked.

In both poems, there’s passion – or a pose of passion – and energy, but he fails at the basics. There’s no cohesion and imprecise language is distracting. I don’t much like either. “Nocturnes” doesn’t fit Des Imagistes. The rest of the book’s pretty good, which makes “Nocturnes” seem worse still.