Monthly Archives: November 2023

Week 578: From ‘Myself after her death’, by Norman MacCaig

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This is the first section of a three-part elegy that the Scots poet Norman MacCaig wrote towards the end of his life in memory of his wife who died in 1990. In its understated yet poignant way it fuses the idea of the lost woman with images of the country that he has loved, such that the two hardly seem to be separable. Thus, when he speaks of being exiled from ‘my country’, does he mean from Scotland, with its glens and lochs, its mountains and valleys, or does he mean from the lost wife? Both, I would say, for when you lose a person you lose so much of what went with them and what you shared with them, the knowledge and the joy, and the savour goes out of those things. I am minded of Hardy’s poem that begins: ‘Why go to Saint-Juliot? What’s Juliot to me?’, and of Alphonse de Lamartine’s line: ‘Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé’ (‘You lose one person, and all is unpeopled’).

For more poems by Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) see weeks 180 and 407.

From ‘Myself after her death’

I’m exiled from what used to be
my country. It welcomed me
with gifts of peace and storms,
with heights of mountains
and altitudes of joy.

Not now.

No, says the wall, and I turn back.
No, says the mountain
and I sit sad in the valley
listening to the river that says
Trespasser, trespasser, trespasser.

I stubbornly say, All the same
it’s still beautiful.
And I know that’s true
but I know also
why it fails to recognise me.

Norman MacCaig

Week 577: Crossing alone the nighted ferry, by A.E.Housman

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Time for another of my favourite Housman poems, a heartfelt cry of unrequited and exploited love. I am particularly fond of the second stanza, which I was wont to quote to the women in my office when it was my turn to get the coffees again.

Lethe, of course, is one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld, the one whose waters induced forgetfulness. The others were Styx, Acheron, Cocytus and Phlegethon. The ‘one coin’ refers to the obol that was placed in the mouth of the deceased as a payment to Charon, who ferried the dead across the River Styx. Pronunciation note: it looks from the scansion as if Housman pronounced ‘coin’ as having one syllable. To me it has two, so I find I want to drop the ‘for’ after it. Still, it’s not my business to improve Housman…

Crossing alone the nighted ferry

Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee,
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me.

The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
The true sick-hearted slave
Expect him not in the just city
And free land of the grave.

A.E.Housman

Week 576: To A Conscript Of 1940, by Herbert Read

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One for Remembrance Day. Sir Herbert Edward Read (1893-1968) was best known as an art historian, but was also a poet and literary critic. He had served in the First World War, attaining the rank of captain, and won both the MC (Military Cross) and DSO (Distinghuished Service Order) for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’. This piece captures the mood of the poets at the outbreak of the Second World War, which was very different from the jingoistic enthusiasm that greeted the First, being more an acceptance of necessity, of the fact that sometimes good people must do bad things to stop bad people doing worse, all tempered by a weary disillusionment, memorably summed up in C. Day Lewis’s terse quatrain: ‘It is the logic of our times/No subject for immortal verse/That we who live by honest dreams/Defend the bad against the worse’. Of course, at the outset of the war the world had yet to realise just how much worse the worse could be.

To a Conscript of 1940

A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow,
His footsteps muffled, his face unearthly grey:
And my heart gave a sudden leap
As I gazed on a ghost of five-and-twenty years ago.

I shouted Halt! and my voice had the old accustom’d ring
And he obeyed it as it was obeyed
In the shrouded days when I too was one
Of an army of young men marching

Into the unknown. He turned towards me and I said:
‘I am one of those who went before you
Five-and-twenty years ago: one of the many who never returned,
Of the many who returned and yet were dead.

We went where you are going, into the rain and the mud:
We fought as you will fight
With death and darkness and despair;
We gave what you will give – our brains and our blood.

We think we gave in vain. The world was not renewed.
There was hope in the homestead and anger in the streets,
But the old world was restored and we returned
To the dreary field and workshop, and the immemorial feud

Of rich and poor. Our victory was our defeat.
Power was retained where power had been misused
And youth was left to sweep away
The ashes that the fires had strewn beneath our feet.

But one thing we learned: there is no glory in the deed
Until the soldier wears a badge of tarnish’d braid;
There are heroes who have heard the rally and have seen
The glitter of garland round their head.

Theirs is the hollow victory. They are deceived.
But you my brother and my ghost, if you can go
Knowing that there is no reward, no certain use
In all your sacrifice, then honour is reprieved.

To fight without hope is to fight with grace,
The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired.’
Then I turned with a smile, and he answered my salute
As he stood against the fretted hedge, which was like white lace.

Herbert Read

Week 575: Hallowe’en, by Violet Jacob

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One for Hallowe’en: a moving poem by Violet Jacob (1863–1946; see also week 16) inspired by the loss of her only son Harry, who died of wounds sustained at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Although about her son, I have seen it plausibly suggested that the words are to be imagined as spoken not by his mother but by a ploughman, lamenting the loss of his ‘bothy companion’, his ‘head horseman’, and taking no pleasure in the Hallowe’en festivities – the lights, the apple-bobbing, the costumes, the children going from house to house – that once they enjoyed together, as he sees only a new head horseman’s clothes chest next to the fire.

The poem has been set to music by Jim Reid and can be heard on YouTube covered by various artists, notably Karine Polwart/Sheena Wellington and Jean Ridpath.

The poem is written in the local vernacular of the Mearns of Fife; I have added a gloss of the less obvious words.

Hallowe’en

The tattie-liftin’s nearly through,                                  tattie: potato   
They’re ploughin’ whaur the barley grew,
  And aifter dark, roond ilka stack,                               ilka: every
  Ye’ll see the horsemen stand an’ crack                     crack: talk, gossip
O Lachlan, but I mind o’ you!

I mind foo often we hae seen                                      foo: full
Ten thoosand stars keek doon atween                        keek: peep
  The nakit branches, an’ below
  Baith fairm an’ bothie hae their show,
Alowe wi’ lichts o’ Hallowe’en.                                     alowe: alight

There’s bairns wi’ guizards at their tail                        guizards: people in costumes
Cloorin’ the doors wi’ runts o’ kail,                              runts o’ kail: cabbage-stalks
  And fine ye’ll hear the screichs an’ skirls
  O’ lassies wi’ their droukit curls                                 droukit: drenched
Bobbin’ for aipples i’ the pail.

The bothie fire is loupin’ het,                                       loupin’ het: leaping hot
A new heid horseman’s kist is set                               heid: head; kist: chest
  Richt’s o’ the lum; whaur by the blaze                      richt: right; lum: chimney
  The auld ane stude that kept yer claes—                 stude: stood
I canna thole to see it yet!                                          thole: bear, endure

But gin the auld fowks’ tales are richt
An ghaists come hame on Hallow nicht,                     ghaists: ghosts
  O freend o’ friends! what wad I gie
  To feel ye rax yer hand to me                                    rax: reach out
Atween the dark an’ caun’le licht?

Awa’ in France, across the wave,
The wee lichts burn on ilka grave,                              ilka: every
  An’ you an’ me their lowe hae seen—                       lowe: glow, gleam
  Ye’ll mebbe hae yer Hallowe’en
Yont, whaur ye’re lyin’ wi’ the lave.                             yont: yonder; lave: the others

There’s drink an’ daffin’, sang an’ dance                     daffing: playing the fool, frolicking
And ploys and kisses get their chance,                      ploys: courtship stratagems
  But Lachlan, man, the place I see
  Is whaur the auld kist used tae be
And the lichts o’ Hallowe’en in France!

Violet Jacob