Monthly Archives: December 2023

Week 583: Skin, by Philip Larkin

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Philip Larkin, like his poetic hero Hardy, was much haunted by the passing of the years, so it seems appropriate to welcome in 2024, that will be my own 80th, with this poem that I have long admired for its typically Larkinesque combination of gloom redeemed by grace, and its skilfully sustained teasing out of an extended metaphor. Not that it offers any consolation either for the ageing process or for the lost opportunities of youth, but there it is: you don’t go to Larkin for comfort (think too of those bleak poems ‘Aubade’ and ‘The Old Fools’) but you do go for accomplishment and a certain face-the-facts courage. There may be resignation in the sentiment, but there is defiance in the artistry.

Skin

Obedient daily dress,
You cannot always keep
That unfakable young surface.
You must learn your lines –
Anger, amusement, sleep;
Those few forbidding signs

Of the continuous coarse
Sand-laden wind, time;
You must thicken, work loose
Into an old bag
Carrying a soiled name.
Parch then; be roughened; sag;

And pardon me, that I
Could find, when you were new,
No brash festivity
To wear you at, such as
Clothes are entitled to
Till the fashion changes.

Philip Larkin

Week 582: In A Country Church, by R.S.Thomas

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If I may continue the religious theme for one more week (well, it is Christmas) here is another of R.S.Thomas’s spare meditations. Note that as usual with Thomas there is no one else about in the church, and one begins to suspect that this is how he liked it. Which may be fair enough. Of course, Christianity has been from the start a very sociable sort of religion, featuring big outdoor parties for up to five thousand people (free fish sandwiches for all, bring a basket for leftovers) and weddings with copious amounts of wine on tap, so to speak. But just as I have always felt that the writing of true poetry demands a trancelike solitude that rules out anything communal, so maybe for the truly devout the doorway to their god is also a narrow one that no two can pass abreast.

The form of Thomas’s poems fascinates me.

Generally
I am not of that school who believe
that putting in a line break every few words
makes something into
a poem.

So why do I feel that these unrhymed, rather irregular lines, varying from seven to nine syllables, are very much a poem? Mainly, I suppose, because of their content and imagery, but also because of some invisible rhythmic scaffolding that gives structure no less, and perhaps more subtly, than a more regular metrical pattern. It’s intriguing.

In a Country Church

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

R.S.Thomas

Week 581: Carol, by John Short

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Whatever your views of Christianity, I think you have to give it credit for being the first religion, so far as I know, to put a baby centre stage, at least for part of the story, and thus to harness properly that instinct for the love and care of its young which is one of humanity’s more redeeming features. The Norse gods, for example, are far too busy fighting giants and getting ready for the end of the world to have any time for babyolatry, while appearances of babies in Greek myth tend to be rather disturbing: they are either being devoured by their father in case they grow up to overthrow him, getting cast into fires (admittedly with the best of intentions), being submerged in rivers (ditto), or, in the case of Heracles, being assailed by giant snakes slithering towards their cradle (relax: he’d been working out and simply strangled them).

The Nativity in contrast is one of the keystones of Christianity, and among the endless literary and artistic takes on it I like this quirky one by John Short (1911-1991). I’m afraid I know nothing about John Short beyond the fact that he wrote this poem and that it has been set to music – he seems to have largely slipped between the cracks as far as the Internet goes.

Note: Salford is a town in Greater Manchester, England, at one time last century a byword for slums and poverty. It is the ‘dirty old town’ of Ewan MacColl’s famous song.

Carol

There was a Boy bedded in bracken,
Like to a sleeping snake all curled he lay;
On his thin navel turned this spinning sphere,
Each feeble finger fetched seven suns away.
He was not dropped in good-for-lambing weather,
He took no suck when shook buds sung together,
But he is come in cold-as-workhouse weather,
Poor as a Salford child.

John Short

Week 580: Onion, from the Exeter Book

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I recently noticed that an AI search assistant tool had started popping up in my browser, inviting me, with an air of great confidence, to ask it anything, so I thought I’d give it a little test by setting it a riddle. I deliberately didn’t give Bing any clues as to the provenance (it’s from the Old English, Riddle 25 in the Exeter Book), and I used my own unpublished translation rather than anything it might find an exact match of online. The answer, as I am sure will be obvious to you, is ‘onion’. I find it rather touching to think of our distant ancestors, in those days before Netflix, sitting round exchanging riddles about vegetables. Ah, lad, we made our own entertainments in them days…

The exchange went as follows:

‘Hi Bing, I wonder if you can tell me the answer to this riddle:

‘I am a wondrous thing, I give joy to women,
A boon to those nearby; I do harm to none
That dwell in cities, save only to my slayer.
My shaft stands stiff and tall; I rise from a bed
That is shaggy beneath. At times a churl’s beautiful daughter,
A proud-minded maiden, will take me in her grasp,
Rub me to redness, raising up my head
As she holds me fast…. Soon she will feel
Our meeting, that curly-locked maid
Who holds me fast. The eye will be wet.’

Bing’s answer came back in a rather impressive five seconds:

‘Hi. I’m glad you enjoy riddles. This one is from the Exeter Book, a collection of Old English poetry from the 10th century. The most likely answer is onion, although some other possibilities have been suggested, such as hemp, leek, rosehip, mustard or phallus. The riddle plays on the double meaning of the description, which could refer to either a vegetable or a sexual organ. The last line implies that the eye of the person who peels the onion will be wet from tears. Did you guess it right?’

Well, well. I then tried the riddle on my wife, but she said ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about and I’m trying to get the dinner’. So I reckon that’s score one for AI, nought for humans. However, I then went on to test Bing’s appreciation of other poems, and it became clear that while AI is quite good at assembling bits of information already on the Net into a more or less coherent whole, it is quite clueless when asked to do anything that involves real creative understanding. Sample: ‘”Kerr’s Ass” is a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, an Irish poet. The poem, written in a colloquial and humorous style, describes the activities and behavior of a donkey owned by a man named Kerr.’ So maybe we poets needn’t step down just yet.

For those interested, here is the original Old English text:

‘Ic eom wunderlicu wiht, wifum on hyhte,
neahbuendum nyt; nængum sceþþe
burgsittendra, nymþe bonan anum.
Staþol min is steapheah, stonde ic on bedde,
neoþan ruh nathwær. Neþeð hwilum
ful cyrtenu ceorles dohtor,
modwlonc meowle, þæt heo on mec gripeð,
ræseð mec on reodne, reafað min heafod,
fegeð mec on fæsten. Feleþ sona
mines gemotes, seo þe mec nearwað,
wif wundenlocc. Wæt bið þæt eage.’

Week 579: From ‘The Dagger with Wings’, by G.K.Chesterton

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Walking last week in a cold frosty twilight under a full moon, I was reminded of this passage that concludes one of G.K.Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ stories, ‘The Dagger with Wings’. I must admit that just as I read Sherlock Holmes for the ambience and the characterisation rather than for the actual puzzles, so I read Father Brown stories for their descriptive passages rather than for their implausible solutions to improbable crimes. Chesterton’s prose does tend to the purple, but at its best has a luminous, otherworldly quality that encourages one to view the familiar with new eyes, using what Chesterton in his study of Charles Dickens calls the Mooreeffoc effect. This is based on an anecdote of Dickens in which Dickens describes seeing from the wrong side the words COFFEE ROOM painted on an oval glass plate, leading him to a realisation of how fantastic even the commonplace may appear when viewed at great distances of time and space, or simply from an unusual angle. Chesterton describes this as ‘the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact’, and certainly in that cold twilight it did suddenly for a moment seem strange to me, to be alive on a spinning globe in the void, walking under a great silver rock suspended in the sky.

From ‘The Dagger With Wings’

When the priest went forth again and set his face homeward, the cold had grown more intense and yet was somehow intoxicating. The trees stood up like silver candelabra of some incredible cold candlemas of purification. It was a piercing cold, like that silver sword of pure pain that once pierced the very heart of purity. But it was not a killing cold, save in the sense of seeming to kill all the mortal obstructions to our immortal and immeasurable vitality. The pale green sky of twilight, with one star like the star of Bethlehem, seemed by some strange contradiction to be a cavern of clarity. It was as if there could be a green furnace of cold which wakened all things to life like warmth, and that the deeper they went into those cold crystalline colours the more were they light like winged creatures and clear like coloured glass! It tingled with truth and it divided truth from error with a blade like ice; but all that was left had never felt so much alive. It was as if all joy were a jewel in the heart of an iceberg. The priest hardly understood his own mood as he advanced deeper and deeper into the green gloaming, drinking deeper and deeper draughts of that virginal vivacity of the air. Some forgotten muddle and morbidity seemed to be left behind, or wiped out as the snow had painted out the footprints of the man of blood. As he shuffled homewards through the snow, he muttered to himself: ‘And yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.’

G.K.Chesterton