Monthly Archives: June 2023

Week 557: A Shropshire Lad, by John Betjeman

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Whatever one thinks of John Betjeman, and I do feel that he may have been a little overpraised as part of an understandable backlash against the obscurantist excesses of modernism, you have to admit that he wrote the kind of poems that no one else wrote, and that is always a good start. Indeed, I would be hard put myself to say exactly what kind of poem this one is. Comic? Mock heroic? With something of the old music-halls about it? (For some reason I seem to hear it in my head being recited in a sort of ‘Albert and the Lion’ voice). Whatever the case, I like its jaunty quirkiness, though the tale of the real Matthew Webb (1848-1883), who in 1875 became the first man to swim the English Channel with no artifical aids, was a rather sad one. He tried hard to capitalise on the fame accrued from his channel-crossing feat, competing in endurance swimming championships and giving various aquatic exhibitions, but he swam a sedate breast-stroke and there was a limit to how long people wanted to watch him doing rather slow lengths in public baths for hours on end. Finally he was driven to attempt the fairly impossible feat of swimming the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls. His body was never found. As a pathetic footnote, his wife Madeline never did accept that so strong a swimmer could have simply drowned, and looked for his return for years after.

Note: Webb was born at Dawley, now part of Telford, in Shropshire, and learned to swim in the River Severn at Coalbrookdale. The title, of course, is a nod to A.E.Housman’s first collection of poems.

A Shropshire Lad
 
The gas was on in the Institute,
The flare was up in the gym,
A man was running a mineral line,
A lass was singing a hymn,
When Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Came swimming along the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley.
Swimming along –
Swimming along –
Swimming along from Severn,
And paying a call at Dawley Bank while swimming along to Heaven.

The sun shone low on the railway line
And over the bricks and stacks
And in at the upstairs windows
Of the Dawley houses’ backs
When we saw the ghost of Captain Webb,
Webb in a water sheeting,
Come dripping along in a bathing dress
To the Saturday evening meeting.
Dripping along –
Dripping along –
To the Congregational Hall;
Dripping and still he rose over the sill and faded away in a wall.

There wasn’t a man in Oakengates
That hadn’t got hold of the tale,
And over the valley in Ironbridge,
And round by Coalbrookdale,
How Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Rose rigid and dead from the old canal
That carries the bricks to Lawley.
Rigid and dead –
Rigid and dead –
To the Saturday congregation,
Paying a call at Dawley Bank on the way to his destination.

John Betjeman

Week 556: The Man Who Married Magdalene, by Louis Simpson

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Another piece from American poet Louis Simpson (1923-2012), a man whom Seamus Heaney called a ‘touchstone for poetry’. I think this is a slighter piece than his great ballad ‘Carentan O Carentan’ (see week 36), but it shows the same mastery of form and flow.

Mary Magdalene appears in the New Testament as a devoted follower of Jesus. The idea that she was a reformed prostitute seems to have been a later invention, the result of a mistaken identification with another Mary made by Pope Gregory in 591. In 1969 Pope Paul VI backtracked on this identification, acknowledging that Pope Gregory had, well, erred, and in 2016 Pope Francis, perhaps by way of apology, awarded her liturgical memory on the Catholic calendar a free upgrade from ‘memorial’ to ‘feast’, but the idea of her as a classic example of the repentant sinner persists in popular culture and this is what the poem runs with.

The Man Who Married Magdalene

The man who married Magdalene
Had not forgiven her.
God might pardon every sin …
Love is no pardoner.

Her hands were hollow, pale, and blue,
Her mouth like watered wine.
He watched to see if she were true
And waited for a sign.

It was old harlotry, he guessed,
That drained her strength away,
So gladly for the dark she dressed,
So sadly for the day.

Their quarrels made her dull and weak
And soon a man might fit
A penny in the hollow cheek
And never notice it.

At last, as they exhausted slept,
Death granted the divorce,
And nakedly the woman leapt
Upon that narrow horse.

But when he woke and woke alone
He wept and would deny
The loose behavior of the bone
And the immodest thigh.

Louis Simpson

Week 555: From ‘Hákonarmál’, by Eyvindr Finnsson

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It’s quite a while since we had a bit of Old Norse (see week 54). I would have liked to present extracts from the ‘Völuspá’, that wonderful poem from the Elder Edda that tells of the Doom of the Gods, but the text is rather difficult and I suppose that these days it would need to carry a trigger warning: ‘This poem contains information about the end of the world that some may find upsetting, especially those with a phobia about being devoured by a giant wolf’.

The stanzas that precede these closing ones contain many ‘kennings’, often quite elaborate circumlocutory terms for poetic objects or personages, simpler examples being ‘raven-feeder’ for ‘warrior’ or ‘wave-steed’ for ‘ship’. These can seem rather affected to the modern reader, who on the whole may prefer a spade to be called a spade rather than, say, ‘cleaver of the earth-mother’s flesh’ (I made that one up: in practice kennings were reserved for a fairly limited set of referenda and were unlikely to be bestowed on a humble spade). But these three closing stanzas are simpler, with no mythological baggage except the Fenrir reference. It is probably unnecessary to explain this, but just in case… Fenrir was a monstrous wolf, sired by the trickster god Loki on the giantess Angrboða. The other gods grew fearful of him as he grew and tricked him into letting himself be bound with an enchanted dwarf-wrought chain, at the cost of the war-god Tyr’s right hand which Fenrir bit off when he could not get free. But at the end of days the wolf will finally get loose and take his revenge by killing the leader of the gods Óðinn, only to be killed in turn by Óðin’s son Viðarr.

The translation that follows is my own; I’ve tried to capture the spirit of the piece rather than give a literal crib, which would be difficult anyway because the word order in skaldic poetry is so flexible.

From ‘Hákonarmál’

Góðu dœgri
verðr sá gramr of borinn,
es sér getr slíkan sefa.
Hans aldar
mun æ vesa
at góðu getit.

Mun óbundinn
á ýta sjöt
Fenrisulfr of fara,
áðr jafngóðr
á auða tröð
konungmaðr komi.

Deyr fé,
deyja frændr,
eyðisk land ok láð.
Síz Hákon fór
með heiðin goð,
mörg es þjóð of þéuð.

From ‘The Song of Hákon’

It will be a good day
If ever there comes
Such a great-souled lord
With a heart like his.
Forever his times
Shall be told on earth
While men speak of his might.

Fenrir the Wolf
Shall fall unbound
On the fields of men
Before there comes
To stand in his stead
So kingly a man
As good again.

Cattle die,
Kinsmen die,
Waste is laid to land.
Since Hákon fared
To the heathen gods
Sad is the fate
Of a folk forlorn.

Week 554: Se questo è un uomo, by Primo Levi

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This poem stands at the front of the Italian writer Primo Levi’s first book, ‘Se questo è un uomo’ (If this is a man), first published in 1947. The book recounts Levi’s arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.

Knowing its background, I find it difficult to apply the normal tools of poetic appraisal to a poem like this. It is rhetorical, exhortatory, of a kind I would normally be suspicious of, a poetry of bare statement, shorn of poetic device, and with only a single image, that of the frog in the third stanza. It is not rich, it is not complex, so if it is powerful, as I feel it to be, wherein lies that power? The poetry is in the pity, said Wilfred Owen, which may be partly true, but the poetry must also be in the poetry, or how do we distinguish the genuinely inspired from the mere assemblage of well-intentioned, fashionable sentiments which has always, and perhaps never more so than today, served to counterfeit the genuine? I have no answer, unless it comes down in some part to what one has the right to say. I am reminded somewhat of Siegfried Sassoon, who can be similarly excoriating in his wrath and urgency: ‘Swear by the green of spring that you’ll never forget’. Sassoon had the right. Levi had the right.

The translation that follows is my own.

Se questo è un uomo

Voi che vivete sicuri
nelle vostre tiepide case,
voi che trovate tornando a sera
il cibo caldo e visi amici:


Considerate se questo è un uomo
che lavora nel fango
che non conosce pace
che lotta per mezzo pane
che muore per un si o per un no.


Considerate se questa è una donna,
senza capelli e senza nome
senza più forza di ricordare
vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo
come una rana d’inverno.


Meditate che questo è stato:
vi comando queste parole.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
stando in casa andando per via,
coricandovi, alzandovi.
Ripetetele ai vostri figli.


O vi si sfaccia la casa,
la malattia vi impedisca,
i vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.

Primo Levi

If this is a man

You who live secure in your warm houses,
Who find, when you return at evening,
Hot food and the faces of friends:

Consider if this is a man
Who labours in the mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a piece of bread,
Who dies by a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without a name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb
Cold as a frog in winter.

Brood upon it, that this came to pass:
I command to you these words.
Engrave them on your heart
At home, walking the street,
Going to bed, on rising;
Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house fall to ruin,
May maladies beset you,
And may your children turn their faces from you.

Week 553: Pike, by Ted Hughes

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I am of an age to have read each of Ted Hughes’s various volumes of poetry as they came out, and consequently suffered/enjoyed the same rollercoaster ride that many of his fans must have done, though possibly with different ups and downs according to taste. ‘The Hawk In The Rain’ – hm, interesting, need to keep an eye on this one. ‘Lupercal’ – even more interesting, with some definite wows in there. ‘Wodwo’ – a bit odd but still interesting. ‘Crow’ – yuk, how disappointing, not my cup of tea at all. ‘Gaudete’, now this is just plain weird but then ‘Moortown’ – ah, that’s more like it, bang on, especially the first section, and so on through the years with quite a few strange byways but never a dull moment.

So this week, then, one of those first definite wow poems from that second collection, ‘Lupercal’, one that showcases Hughes’s unrivalled power of empathetic identification with the otherness of the natural world and his ability to express the fear and fascination that this evokes.

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads –
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them –
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb –

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks –
The same iron in this eye
Through its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them –

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.

Ted Hughes