Monthly Archives: July 2023

Week 561: Epic, by Patrick Kavanagh

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Another poem in which we see Patrick Kavanagh wryly doubting but then triumphantly reasserting the validity of his own experience, which he feared might seem parochial and even humdrum in its attachment to rural Ireland, but transfigured by the poetic imagination could still convey essential things about the human condition. The closing sentence ‘Gods make their own importance’ would perhaps make more sense, in the context of the poem, if it read ‘Poets make their own importance’, and I’m not sure if Kavanagh is modestly backing away from such a claim or, less modestly, equating poets with gods. (If the latter, bagsy Hermes – those winged sandals are just so cool.)

‘rood’: an old land measurement of about a quarter of an acre, so ‘half a rood of rock’ means the dispute concerned a stony plot of land about the size of a couple of standard allotments.

‘march’: here used in the sense of a border or boundary, often, as here, one of disputed ownership; cf. the Welsh Marches.

‘the Munich bother’: I take this to refer to the Munich agreement of 1938, when the then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain brought back from a meeting with Hitler what was supposed to be a guarantee of ‘peace in our time’; next year, of course, the Second World War broke out.

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones.’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 560: The Heron, by Vernon Watkins

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Vernon Watkins (1906-1957; see also weeks 96 and 450) was a modern symbolist, heavily influenced by W.B.Yeats, and I think it is fairly obvious that the heron in this poem is intended to represent the poet, doing his best to fix his attention on the transcendental as represented by light and water even while ‘calamity about him cries’. The ‘calamity’ in this case probably reflects the tumults of the last mid-century (the poem first appeared in a 1954 collection), though Watkins did have five children, and having had four myself I like to think it may also reflect the difficulties of trying to follow one’s poetic vocation in a household full of other people whose priorities in life are not necessarily the writing of poems.

Of course, Watkins was not the first to use a bird as the symbol for a poet. We have Robert Frost’s fine poem ‘The Oven Bird’ (see week 214), and then there is Baudelaire’s ‘L’Albatros’, that uses the albatross to characterise the poet, so graceful when aloft, so awkward and vulnerable when brought to earth. I think Baudelaire’s poem has the edge as far as a reality check goes in that it does not impose upon the bird anything not in its nature and behaviour, whereas in the case of the Watkins poem while we admittedly do not know what goes in the mind of a heron, I would guess that a rapt contemplation of light and water takes a back seat to wondering where the next fish is coming from. Still, Watkins’s poem has some beautiful touches – I particularly like ‘cloud-backed’ – and I think stands as one of his best.

The Heron

The cloud-backed heron will not move:
He stares into the stream.
He stands unfaltering while the gulls
And oyster-catchers scream.
He does not hear, he cannot see
The great white horses of the sea,
But fixes eyes on stillness
Below their flying team.

How long will he remain, how long
Have the grey woods been green?
The sky and the reflected sky,
Their glass he has not seen,
But silent as a speck of sand
Interpreting the sea and land,
His fall pulls down the fabric
Of all that windy scene.

Sailing with clouds and woods behind,
Pausing in leisured flight,
He stepped, alighting on a stone,
Dropped from the stars of night.
He stood there unconcerned with day,
Deaf to the tumult of the bay,
Watching a stone in water,
A fish’s hidden light.

Sharp rocks drive back the breaking waves,
Confusing sea with air.
Bundles of spray blown mountain-high
Have left the shingle bare.
A shipwrecked anchor wedged by rocks,
Loosed by the thundering equinox,
Divides the herded waters,
The stallion and his mare.

Yet no distraction breaks the watch
Of that time-killing bird.
He stands unmoving on the stone;
Since dawn he has not stirred.
Calamity about him cries,
But he has fixed his golden eyes
On water’s crooked tablet,
On light’s reflected word.

Vernon Watkins

Week 559: For Anne Gregory, by W.B.Yeats

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This is one of W.B.Yeats’s lighter pieces. I think it has a characteristic charm, though I confess I have never looked at it in quite the same way since reading Anne Gregory’s own recollections of the poem, which according to your point of view are either very funny or rather sad. Evidently the young Anne, the granddaughter of Yeats’s friend Lady Gregory, was summoned before the great man by her grandma with the words ‘Mr Yeats has written a poem for you and is going to recite it to you’. ‘I was petrified. I had no idea he was going to write a poem for me. I was in agony. I was nearly in tears for fear of doing something silly.’ She dutifully listened as Yeats delivered the poem in his weird singsong way, then stuttered ‘Wonderful, thank you so much, I must go and wash my hair’ and made her escape. She added afterwards that she had never liked the colour of her hair anyway.

I feel for you, William. I remember one of my children coming home complaining that they had had to read in class one of my own poems from a school anthology and it was like, you know, totally embarrassing…

For Anne Gregory

‘Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

‘But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’

‘I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

W.B.Yeats

Week 558: From ‘The Dancers’, by Ivor Gurney

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Another of Ivor Gurney’s short poems (see also weeks 24 and 249), slightly eccentric in their diction but with a tenacious individuality. Gurney, a lifelong sufferer from a bipolar disorder no doubt exacerbated by his experiences in the Great War, spent the last fifteen years of his life in psychiatric hospitals. ‘The Dancers’ is a late poem, written while he was institutionalized, and shows the poet clinging like a swimmer to a spar of driftwood to the memory of some rural scene from his beloved Gloucestershire countryside. While in hospital Ivor was visited several times by Helen Thomas, widow of the poet Edward Thomas, whose work he much loved and some of whose poems he had set to music. Helen would bring with her Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire countryside and united in their separate griefs they would spend the time together tracing out with their fingers footpaths and byways that Edward had walked on, with Gurney, himself a great walker in happier times, remembering every step of the way. [See Helen Thomas, Ivor Gurney — The War Poets Gallery for Helen’s moving account of these meetings].

The poem actually continues for seven more rather incoherent lines, which I’ve cut: the full text can be found in P.J.Kavanagh’s excellent edition of his ‘Collected Poems’.

From ‘The Dancers’

The dancers danced in a quiet meadow.
It was winter, the soft light lit in clouds
Of growing morning – their feet on the firm
Hillside sounded like a baker’s business
Heard from the yard of his beamy barn-grange.
One piped, and the measured irregular riddle
Of the dance ran onward in tangling threads…
A thing of the village, centuries old in charm.

Ivor Gurney