Monthly Archives: August 2023

Week 565: John Henry, by Anon

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This great ballad of the working man dates from early last century and appears to relate to events in Victorian times. Whether or not there ever was a John Henry, and whether or not anything like the events in the ballad actually happened, there is no doubt that John Henry stands as a powerful symbol of the worker throughout the ages, taking what positives he can from a hardscrabble existence by maintaining a desperate pride in his own competence, even while knowing that he is likely to be ruthlessly cast aside as soon as that competence wanes, or better comes along to replace him.

Poor John, though – he never really had a chance against the inexorable rise of the machine. And of course, in one form or another it still goes on. Back in the nineteen eighties when my day job was computer programmer (it paid better than being a poet by a ratio of approximately 300 to 1) I was involved in coding a software package to perform a ‘cost rollup’, that is, to calculate the total cost of a final assembly by adding up the cost of all its individual components, and also to allow the user to see what would be the effect of changing the cost of any particular widget in the hierarchy. It is the sort of thing that computers can do very well but which is laborious for humans. I remember at one firm a worker whose job had been to make this kind of calculation by hand shaking his head in sad disbelief as the computer carried out in a couple of minutes work that he was used to spending many hours on. I felt obscurely guilty.

The text of the ballad exists in various versions, and it has been covered by numerous folksingers: I use the version I happen to know best, and which I think is punchier than some.

John Henry

John Henry was a little baby,
Sitting on his mammy’s knee.
He gave one long and a lonesome cry,
Said ‘That hammer’ll be the death of me’.

John Henry he had a woman,
Name was Mary Magdalen.
She would go to the tunnel an’ sing for John,
Jes’ to hear John Henry’s hammer ring.

Captain said to John Henry
‘Gonna bring me a steamdrill round,
Gonna take that steamdrill out on the job,
Gonna whop that steel on down.’

John Henry told his captain,
Lightnin’ was in his eye:
‘I’ll never be conquered by your old steam drill,
I’ll beat it to the bottom or I’ll die.’

John Henry walked in the tunnel,
Had his captain by his side,
But the rock so tall, John Henry so small,
Lord, he laid down his hammer an’ he cried.

Now John Henry start on the right hand,
The steam drill start on the left.
‘Before I let this steam drill beat me down,
I’d hammer myself to death.’

Well, John Henry kissed his hammer,
The white man turned on the steam;
Little Bill held John Henry’s trusty steel,
Was the biggest race the world ever seen.

Now John Henry swung his hammer
An’ he brought it down on the ground,
An’ a man in Chatanooga two hundred mile away
Thought he heard a sobbing sound.

Oh the captain said to John Henry
‘I believe this mountain’s fallin’ in.’
John Henry said to his captain
‘Taint nothin’ but my hammer sucking wind.’

John Henry said as he took his stand
‘This’ll be the end of me.’
But every foot that steam drill drove
John Henry’s hammer drove three.

Now the hammer that John Henry swung
It weighed over nine pound.
He broke a rib in his left hand side
And his entrails fell on the ground.

John Henry was hammerin’ on the mountain
An’ his hammer was strikin’ fire.
He drove so hard till he broke his heart
An’ he lay down his hammer an’ he died.

Now all the women out in Kansas
When they heard of John Henry’s death,
They stood in the rain, flagged the eastbound train,
Goin’ where John drew his last breath.

When John Henry died there wasn’t no box
Was big enough to hold his bones
So they buried him in a boxcar deep in the ground,
Let two mountains be his gravestones.

An’ they took John Henry from the graveyard
An’ buried him away in the sand,
An’ every locomotive comin’ roarin’ by
Whistles ‘There lies a steel drivin’ man.’

Anon

Week 564: Sonnet à Pilar, by Jules Supervielle

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The French poet Jules Supervielle was much preoccupied with the idea of an imagined afterlife, a kind of limbo where human beings continue to exist in a disembodied, impotent state along with a strangely random selection of artefacts and other creatures from the earth they have lost: in one of his poems on this theme, ‘Prophétie’, we have a magical flying fish that knows nothing of the sea, a vintage car with four wheels but no road to use them on, and a goldfinch. I suspect that these somewhat fey imaginings have their roots in Supervielle’s permanent state of ill health, that sometimes caused him to doubt his own physical existence to the extent of holding his hand over a candle flame to reassure himself that he was still alive. It’s all a bit odd, and a long way from my own idea of an afterlife, which would be more like Valhalla but with a lot of long runs in place of all the fighting, but I do find the poems have a certain haunting quality.

Pilar was the poet’s wife.

The translation that follows is my own.

Sonnet à Pilar

Pour ne pas être seul durant l’éternité,
Je cherche auprès de toi future compagnie
Pour quand, larmes sans yeux, nous jouerons à la vie
Et voudrons y loger notre fidélité.

Pour ne plus aspirer à l’hiver et l’été,
Ni mourir à nouveau de tant de nostalgie,
Il faut dès à présent labourer l’autre vie,
Y pousser nos grands boeufs enclins à s’arrêter,

Voir comment l’on pourrait remplacer les amis,
La France, le soleil, les enfants et les fruits,
Et se faire un beau jour d’une nuit coriace,

Regarder sans regard et toucher sans les doigts,
Se parler sans avoir de paroles ni voix,
Immobiles, changer un petit peu de place.

Jules Supervielle

Sonnet for Pilar

Lest we should be alone throughout eternity
I look to you for future company
For when we play at life, like eyeless tears,
Still wishing to keep faith with those lost years.

Lest we should long too much for change of season
Or from too much nostalgia die again,
We must from now on plough another way
With our great oxen, so inclined to stay,

Must think how to replace, when all this ends,
Our country, children, sunlight, fruit, our friends,
Conjure a fair day from night’s carapace,

Look though we have no gaze, touch without fingers,
Talk to each other without words or voice,
Immobile, move a little from one place.

Week 563: The Signpost, by R.S.Thomas

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In a way, this can be viewed as a companion piece to last week’s poem. That was about places never visited through being lost to the map, and maybe existing only in the imagination; this one is about those perfectly well-defined places that we never get round to visiting, perhaps a village off the main road down some high-banked country lanes, briefly wondered about as we drive past at speed, and yet which continue to haunt us with a sense of lost possibilities, rather as the door in the wall haunted the protagonist in the short story by H.G.Wells.

The Signpost

Casgob, it said, 2
miles. But I never went
there; left it like an ornament
on the mind’s shelf, covered
with the dust of
its summers; a place on a diet
of the echoes of stopped
bells and children’s
voices; white the architecture
of its clouds, stationary
its sunlight. It was best
so. I need a museum
for storing the dream’s
brittler particles in. Time
is a main road, eternity
the turning that we don’t take.

R.S.Thomas

Week 562: Lost Acres, by Robert Graves

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Robert Graves delighted in out of the way facts and often built poems around them, as in the case of this slightly enigmatic piece that turns on the idea that maps, at least in the old days, were not entirely accurate and whole parcels of land could be omitted from them: the ‘lost acres’ of the title. [I think this has nothing to do with the modern convention whereby certain installations like weapons factories and nuclear bunkers are deliberately not identified as such on maps for reasons of national security, so if you want to know where they are you have to ask the Russians].

Graves plays with this idea in a typically offbeat way, using the lost acres as a metaphor for the edge places of the mind that so fascinated him and ascribing to them an otherworldly quality, along with the perils that otherworlds traditionally possess: ‘to walk there would be loss of sense’. But why? The usual sense lost in otherworld venturings is that of time, when travellers to Tír na nÓg or explorers of fairy mounds return after what seems to them a short stay to find that anything from seven to hundreds of years have passed at home, but I believe that what Graves is suggesting here is that our fragile sanity depends on having things mapped and named, and these places by their nature imperil that sanity: that fear of ‘a substance without words’ reminds one of his reflections in ‘The Cool Web’ (see week 380). But as I say I find the poem slightly enigmatic, so if anyone has any better ideas on how to read it I’d be interested to hear them.

Lost Acres

These acres, always again lost
By every new ordnance-survey
And searched for at exhausting cost
Of time and thought, are still away.

They have their paper-substitute –
Intercalation of an inch
At the so-many-thousandth foot:
And no one parish feels the pinch.

But lost they are, despite all care,
And perhaps likely to be bound
Together in a piece somewhere,
A plot of undiscovered ground.

Invisible, they have the spite
To swerve the tautest measuring-chain
And the exact theodolite
Perched every side of them in vain.

Yet, be assured, we have no need
To plot these acres of the mind
With prehistoric fern and reed
And monsters such as heroes find.

Maybe they have their flowers, their birds,
Their trees behind the phantom fence,
But of a substance without words:
To walk there would be loss of sense.

Robert Graves