Unforgettable nonsense: Mervyn Peake, ‘Lean Sideways on the Wind’

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Lean sideways on the wind, and if it bears
Your weight, you are a daughter of the Dawn —
If not, pick up your carcass, dry your tears,
Brush down your dress — for that sweet elfin horn

You thought you heard was from no fairyland —
Rather it flooded through the kitchen floor,
From where your Uncle Eustace and his band
Of flautists turn my cellar, more and more

Into a place of hollow and decay:
That is my theory, darling, anyway.

*****

Another one of Mervyn Peake‘s poems from ‘A Book of Nonsense’, collected by his widow Maeve Gilmore. He was casually proficient with iambic pentameter — there are several passages in Titus Groan, the first of his Gormenghast books, where several lines of iambics are unobtrusively buried in the text, to be noticed only by slow readers like myself. Asking Quill, my ChatGPT, about this, I get:

Yes—there is published criticism addressing exactly this. The most directly relevant piece I found is R. W. (Robert) Maslen’s “Mervyn Peake, the Poet of Gormenghast,” in Miracle Enough: Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake, edited by G. Peter Winnington (2013), pp. 127–138. Browse by Glasgow Author

You can read it free here: Mervyn Peake: The Poet of Gormenghast.

Maslen identifies three examples particularly relevant to your observation:

The final chapter: successive pentameters give the closing predictions an oracular quality, anticipating the sequel’s violence and upheaval.

The fight in the Hall of Spiders: the narration moves into iambic pentameter as the action takes on an epic character. Sepulchrave’s fragmented speech catches the same rhythm, associating his madness with Shakespearean tragedy.

Titus’s christening: the ritual text contains blank verse printed as prose—very much the unobtrusive insertion you describe.

*****

“Windy skirt” by Paula Satijn is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Unforgettable nonsense: Mervyn Peake, ‘I Cannot Give the Reasons’

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I cannot give the reasons,
I only sing the tunes:
the sadness of the seasons
the madness of the moons.

I cannot be didactic
or lucid, but I can
be quite obscure and practic-
ally marzipan

In gorgery and gushness
and all that’s squishified.
My voice has all the lushness
of what I can’t abide

And yet it has a beauty
most proud and terrible
denied to those whose duty
is to be cerebral.

Among the antlered mountains
I make my viscous way
and watch the sepia fountains
throw up their lime-green spray.

*****

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is now best known for his Gormenghast novels, but he was first known as a British artist, and his works are in the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives. His poetry is very varied, and much of it is nonsense on the surface but with interesting depth. Peake was born in China, joining the list of foreign-born British-educated novelists that includes Kipling, Tolkien and Ishiguro.

As is useful for artists, he seems to have had extremely strong visualisation and a photographic memory. Fifty years ago in British Columbia I met a woman (whose name I don’t recall) who had known Peake as a youth. Apparently he particularly liked Kipling’s novel ‘Stalky & Co’ and knew it by heart. He handed her the copy he carried and told her to choose a page: she gave him the page number, and he then recited it from the top down.

“Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake” by Eckhart Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, ‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’

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it doesn’t mean two shlubs like you and me
would be in Eden with them. God knows I
am partial to a slice of apple pie
and grew up filching off a neighbor’s tree
the peaches he intended for his nieces.
How many generations would the ruse
have lasted? Theologians float their theses,
but sin’s a firecracker with a fuse

that heaven’s ghostly glow can light as well
as any spark that fountained out of hell.
Can’t speak for you, though I suspect I do,
I’d grow so bored, I’d climb the wall with you:
A derring-duo, deathlessness-defying,
we’d sneak out into all that lively dying.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “If Eve and Adam Never Fell” continues a long tradition for me. For a reason unknown to me, I have written obsessively for decades about the fall from the garden of Eden, in fact by sheer volume of work it comes in third behind the Ramayana story and the 1947 Partition of India among my recurrent themes. “Subtle Anatomy,” for example, is one of my first ever published poems, way back in 1999:

Subtle Anatomy
by Amit Majmudar

An arm is the spine of an angel wing,
cracked at the elbow. Webbed for gliding once,
we could leap off of cliff or bridge or tower
and saw no problem with a leap of faith.
What happened to it? Ask the suicide.
After the battle in heaven, the good angels,
precursors to the Turks who shamed their captives,
carved and carted off those wings—atrocious—
a mound of wings more chilling than a mound
of skulls: in this case, the contributors
could watch the ground tumor swell. So you see
we have some angel in us, even if
it’s the bedeviled kind, stripped of its wings
like a drunk pilot, out of service.

Before Eve met the serpent, she was fleshier
than even Rubens’s palette could stomach
and spineless, literally. The serpent
dove in her through the nest-hole anus
until the scorpion-stinger coccyx
slurped in too, and she sheathed him whole.
He straightened her, the breath in a balloon,
into this human posture of rebellion,
this upright and bipedal challenge.
Settled, the serpent sent nerves everywhere,
claiming each inch of her with senses.
Not with an apple but an apple’s taste
the serpent ruined her, fossilizing
to the vertebral column. So you see
we have some devil in us too
and dead center at that
commanding everything.

previously published in The Journal of the AMA

*****

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things My Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026). His forthcoming book is a novel, Cervantes in Chains (Slant Books, 2027).

‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’ was first published in The Sonneteer

Illustration: RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light

G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Logical Vegetarian’

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You will find me drinking rum,
Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian.
You will find me drinking gin
In the lowest kind of inn,
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.

So I cleared the inn of wine,
And I tried to climb the sign,
And I tried to hail the constable as “Marion.”
But he said I couldn’t speak,
And he bowled me to the Beak
Because I was a Happy Vegetarian.

(…)

No more the milk of cows
Shall pollute my private house
Than the milk of the wild mares of the Barbarian;
I will stick to port and sherry,
For they are so very, very,
So very, very, very, Vegetarian.

*****

G.K. Chesterton was an English author with a good sense of humour and a good turn of phrase. He was a loudly committed Roman Catholic, and combined a selective love of the Old Testament with a strong antisemitic streak – illogical perhaps, but not unknown among Christians; and therefore I have omitted part of the poem because of content that detracts from the joy of the piece.

‘The Logical Vegetarian’ appeared first in The Flying Inn (1914), a satirical novel in which Chesterton railed against what he saw as dreary and oppressive modernity; and it was reprinted in Wine, Water, and Song.

Illustration: G.K. Chesterton by RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light

Bartolomeo Dotti, ‘Abortion in a Flask’, tr. John Gallas

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To Giacopo Grandis, doctor and anatomist

Dear Giacopo, this sad, obscene disaster,
forever motherless, and piped of breath,
if ever it was living, died too soon,
and goes untimely to the feast of death.
And are the Humours of its tiny tub
sweet milk, or tears? For sure, its mother’s womb,
its first and living globe, was made of flesh,
and not the glass that rounds it in this tomb.
The embryo is dead: long live the corse.
Its promised Immortality cut short,
it floats in blood, aborted, come to naught.
O Man! O Slab Professors! Learn perforce
that this is Woman’s flesh and blood: more sweet,
more frail than glass; less strong than aquavit.

*****

John Gallas writes: “The ‘Abortion’ poem by Bartolomeo Dotti (1651-1713) is part of a work in progress (a History of Italy in Poems – featuring not the Great Monuments but the lesser poets from the 1st poem in Italian up to a poet b.1935). If you ever want any more, there’s 84. At least 60 rhyme and bounce.”

VII
L’ABORTO NELL’AMPOLLA
A Giacopo Grandis, fisico e anatomico

     Questo, Giacopo mio, sconcio funesto
cui diè morto natale il sen materno,
se maturo nascea, moria ben presto,
e voi d’intempestivo il fèste eterno.
     Non so se dolce latte o pianto mesto
gli sia di quel cristal l’umore interno;
so ben che l’alvo suo fu come questo,
poi ch’utero da vetro io non discerno.
     Vive quasi per voi chi per sé langue;
embrïone morì, scheletro nacque,
fatto parto immortal d’aborto essangue.
     Uomo, impara! Insegnarti al Grandi piacque
che sia ventre di donna e maschio sangue
piú fral del vetro e men vital de l’acque.

There is a brief outline of Dotti’s turbulent life here.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  


Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Spring and Fall: To a Young Child’

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Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

*****

It’s just that time of year, isn’t it.

“leaving” by john curley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: Bill Bowler, ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man’

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Most of the time I’m zonked
maybe more often than I might want
here between high and dizzy
tired of looking busy
waiting to see what comes my way
9:11 comes twice a day

Look in the mirror: what do you see
a distinguished gentleman, what’s left of me
a formerly handsome young man,
gray hair, gray beard, wrinkles, laugh lines,
crow’s feet, bags… Why go on?

Grunting, groaning, ache all over,
Moving slowly, bent and stiff
No use trying to ignore
that throbbing, shooting pain
in my elbow, in my wrist,
there it goes again
in my ankle, in my hip

I’m occupying space,
not doing much at a steady pace,
treading water, riding it out
for Now, which is all we’ve got

Most of the time
in bed at nine
reading time
conk out by ten
sleep till eight
lounge in bed
get up late
and start again

No goal, no productivity,
drinking vodka, smoking weed,
writing verses, cooking dinner
anchovies, butter, cheese and cream
garlic, capers, medium heat

I don’t expect you youngsters here
to understand, but if you can,
my bladder’s shot, the plumbing leaks
an endless stream or more a trickle
with brief pauses in between
marking out my territory
or so it seems

It’s not what you expect to hear
but never fear!
Money’s not a problem
we have plenty
our friendly neighborhood ATM provides
an unlimited supply of twenties

*****

Bill Bowler writes: “Portrait of the Artist…” is one of a long series of poems called It Never Gets Old that I’ve been working on for a while. They’re all up on Bewildering Stories. The poems all explore from one angle or another the weird sensation of one’s parts wearing out, and one’s friends and loved ones disappearing one by one. Some of the titles are: “Death can be so inconvenient”, “At day’s end, nearing sunset”, “Circling the Drain”, “The Party’s Over”, “Poopie and PeePee”, “No One Seems Alarmed”, “Into the Bubble”, etc. I find that humor goes a long way in alleviating despair. (Смех сквозь слезы – laughter through tears)

“What I try to do in my verse is to use casual idiomatic vernacular, complete with slang, i.e., natural spoken speech, but to render the lines using meter and rhyme, so that the patterns are hardly noticed, though they hold the whole structure together. It has to sound natural even if it’s rhymed trimeter, which is fun to do. I’m fine with approximate rhyme, approximate rhythm (like mixed dactyls and trochees), and approximate meaning, but it has to be smooth. One forced rhyme blows the whole thing.”

Bill Bowler was born in New York City in 1950. He graduated from Columbia University in 1972 and received a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages & Literatures from the University of Michigan in 1981. He has a wry biography at https://www.bewilderingstories.com/bios/bowler_bio.html#biblio, with links to his poems and stories.

Photo: “KELLYS IN KCMO” by roberthuffstutter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Piet Hein, ‘Consolation Grook’, tr. Piet Hein

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Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
   compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
   the first one again.

*****

Piet Hein’s original Danish version, ‘Trøstegruk’ reads:
Den, som taber sin ene handske,
er heldig i forhold til dén,
der taber den ene,
kasserer den anden
. . . og finder den første igen.

Hein did his own translation into English (as he did with hundreds of his Grooks), and sacrificed word-for-word translation for the sake of keeping the rolling rhythm and the rhyme: the original’s word “lucky” has gone, the word “pain” is introduced to rhyme with “again”. I am glad to see a poet translating his own work, and keeping the versifying more important than the literal words. This is what poetry translation is all about, surely.

The poem has an interesting origin story: it was written right after Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, and was published in the newspaper Politiken’s daily short poem spot. While it passed German censorship as a light comment on the vicissitude of things, the Danish resistance movement (which Hein was active in) spread it as graffiti across the country, a coded message with losing one glove representing losing freedom, and throwing away the second glove representing giving up your patriotism, collaborating, which you will eventually come to regret.

‘Consolation Grook’ was the first Grook published by Piet Hein. He had a rich and varied life, with an academic background in science, art and philosophy; he was a script writer, an inventor, a furniture designer, a game creator; someone Niels Bohr would bounce ideas off, a friend of Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, and the puzzle creator Martin Gardner. Piet Hein was married four times, and before you think that his personal life would have been like his very civilised grooks, I suggest reading about his tendency to violence and the questions it raises about the death of his fourth wife, the Swedish actress Gerd Ericsson: https://pershmail.substack.com/p/piet-heins-problems

Illustration: by Piet Hein

Using form: James Joyce, ‘XXXVI’ from ‘Chamber Music’

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I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

*****
James Joyce is a fascinating author, from his novels dense with ideas, descriptions and wordplay, to his grotesque private love letters, normal short stories and formal verse. This poem is the last of the 36 in his 1907 collection ‘Chamber Music’, and the one that I come back to the most. Apart from the imagery, I am intrigued by the unnatural rhyming of the first and third lines, and not the second and fourth, in each stanza: the form is unsettling, and works very well with the inverted reality of dreams and with the discomfort of these particular emotions swirling through fear, loss and loneliness.

“James Joyce” by MEDIODESCOCIDO is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

John Gallas, ‘Blantyre Sonnet’

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My new clothes should eat the pilau – Persian proverb

Refused admission. Speel’s. On Friday night.
Apparently my clothes. Not smart enough.
Full they said. Departed in a huff.
Ate at Goldberg’s. Went back Monday night.
Same fat bouncer. Wore my Paul Smith suit.
Nothing said. Nice table by the bar.
Cocktails. Hognuts. Champagne. Caviar.
Alligator steaks. Took off my suit.
Arranged it on the chair like that and that.
Spooned the food inside it. Then the drink.
Waiters looked the other way. I think
I proved my point. Paid up and took my hat.
Tipped the bouncer. Bowed at Bwana Speel.
‘I think,’ I said, ‘the suit deserved the meal.’

*****

John Gallas writes: “It’s one of my favourite ‘Persian Proverb’ stories (the original is a merry little read, involving a guest at a Vizier’s house) and making the sonnet was therefore – the whole content being pre-provided – an exercise in style, form, rhyme etc., a challenge I very much like – which is why I do so much translating. I also happen to think that the ‘message’ (though I’m not that fond of poems with ‘messages’) applies increasingly to a world of judgement by appearances, influencers, and pre-packaged (but, alas, empty-packaged) ideas of social success. I don’t often get this ‘relevant’, but the applicability just came with the story, and that kind of proves it’s timeless/universal, and not my personal grouch.

‘Blantyre’: has an interesting history – I was asked to ‘Rep of Ireland-ify’ it for a Food Festival in Cork, were it went down (haha) well – so I entered it for the ‘Taste’ poetry competition last year … and it won! So I have 2 versions – I think the ‘Irish’ one is a bit more zippy, but whichever you prefer is ok with me – I’ve attached the ‘Abhar Blas’ (‘A Matter of Taste’) version.”

ábhar blas
(a matter of taste sonnet)

refused admission – Friday night – at ‘Gator –
apparently my blús – not smart enough –
FULL they said – departed in a huff –
ate at Porkys –
went back one week later –
same trom Bouncer – wore my Trixie Blout –
nothing said – nice table by the bar –
tapas – Boxty Raws – Moss-Roasted Gar,
Thomas Walk Champagne –
undressed – laid out
my suit – like someone in my seat – and piled
the food into its lap – poured in the drink –
Waiters looked the other way – I think
I proved my point – paid the damage – smiled –
tipped the Bouncer – thanked Cócaire O’Neill –
I guess – I said – the suit deserved the meal.

*****

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  

Illustration: ‘Blantyre Sonnet’ by RHL with ChatGPT-6 Astra Light. Not perfect, but I wasn’t going to waste time arguing about to collapse the clothes…