Monthly Archives: May 2024

Week 605: Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

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A friend has suggested that I feature the work of the very popular and prolific American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019). I was only vaguely aware of the name at that point, but thought the least I could do was pay her some proper attention and report back.

My conclusion (sorry, Andy) is that hers is very much the sort of poetry, nature-loving and reflective, that I want to like and usually do, but somehow hers doesn’t quite work for me. I’m not sure why. She’s certainly accessible, and I thoroughly approve of poets being accessible. She clearly appeals to popular sentiment, but again, nothing wrong with that: I am all in favour of readers having a genuine response to what does move them rather than a simulated response to what they feel should move them. I just find her a little unsubtle, a little too in your face. I think it would have been better if she had stood back more in her poems rather than pushing herself to their forefront so much. I feel too, as with many contemporary poets, that she could have benefited from a stricter form, the advantage of this, if used properly, being that it forces you to focus on what you really want and need to say and discourages you from merely wittering on. But I’ll get out of the way now and let you form your own opinions: this poem, ‘Wild Geese’, is one of her best-known and evidently best-loved.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

Week 604: The Lamentation Of The Old Pensioner, by W.B.Yeats

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I celebrated my eightieth birthday this week, and yesterday ran a carefully measured road mile in 8 minutes 37 seconds, which in age-adjusted terms is not that bad but in absolute terms is pathetic. I am an absolutist.

So this week’s choice was an easy one. It’s not entirely apposite. I never had, nor am ever likely to have, a chair nearest to the fire – I see myself more as a presence in the outer dark, quietly listening – but the general sentiment will do for me.

The Lamentation Of The Old Pensioner

Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree,
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me.

Though lads are making pikes again
For some conspiracy,
And crazy rascals rage their fill
At human tyranny,
My contemplations are of Time
That has transfigured me.

There’s not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory;
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.

W.B.Yeats

Week 603: Naming The Moths, by David Sutton

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We recently had an unusual visitor to our front door, where it clung for hours: this beautiful Lime Hawkmoth. I’m afraid my attempt at a photo doesn’t really do justice to it: the dark patches should be blacker, the green more vivid. It reminded me that I had once written a poem about moth names, which I find fascinating for their idiosyncratic poetry. They are not folk-names – since, unlike plants, Lepidoptera are not obviously useful the common folk never seem to have had much interest in differentiating and naming moths and the vernacular names are the invention of various gentleman naturalists who began to emerge in the eighteenth century: the full story can be found in Peter Marren’s very readable book ‘Emperors, Admirals and Chimney Sweepers’.

In the first five stanzas of my poem I imagine one of those early naturalists speaking in answer to someone who has hailed him as a poet, and modestly disclaiming the title. The remaining three stanzas are my own fanciful elegy for his kind.

‘arms and the man I did not sing’: an allusion to the opening words of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’: ‘Arma virumque cano’, I sing arms and the man.

Naming The Moths

‘You’d call me poet? Hardly, Sir,
         Arms and the man I did not sing,
But once upon an August night
         I named the Yellow Underwing.

‘We found on language’s great map
         A little corner, left all blank.
Such handiwork, without a name!
         (The Maiden’s Blush has me to thank).

‘How I recall that dew-damp eve
         Of honeysuckle-scented June
When first upon the Silver Y
         I set the summons of man’s rune.

‘I see them now, our haunts of old,
         Our hedgerow banks, our woodland glades,
Like memory itself they flit,
         My Early Thorns, my Angle Shades.

‘And some, you say, would honour us?
         Then, Sir, I am obliged to you,
But such was never our intent.
         We did what seemed our own to do.’

Swifts and Ushers, fold your wings
         Softly on the moonlit land.
They who loved you best are gone,
         Walking somewhere, lamp in hand,

Seeking down eternal lanes
         Moths the angels might have missed,
Proffering before the Throne
         ‘Some Amendments to Your List. ‘

Willow Beauty, Burnished Brass,
         China Mark and all the Plumes
With the Footmen gather, dance
         Lightly now above these tombs.

David Sutton

Week 602: After the Titanic, by Derek Mahon

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Following on from last week’s theme of the loss of the ‘Titanic’, this week’s offering is what I think is a very fine poem by the Irish poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020), the subject of which is J. Bruce Ismay. Ismay was chairman and managing director of the White Star Line who owned the ‘Titanic’, and he was aboard on her doomed maiden voyage. He survived but afterwards was bitterly criticised for allegedly taking up a place in the lifeboats while there were still women and children aboard. This may not in fact have been the case, as there was much confusion at the time and eyewitness accounts differ, but he was ever after haunted by the loss and what was perceived as his failure to do the honourable thing, and he became a solitary figure, spending his summers at his Connemara cottage on the west coast of Ireland.

I admire this poem for its empathy, with its masterly last line that says it all.

After the Titanic

     They said I got away in a boat
And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
     I sank as far that night as any
Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
     I turned to ice to hear my costly
Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of
     Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,
Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide
     In a lonely house behind the sea
Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes
     Silently at my door. The showers of
April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the
     Late light of June, when my gardener
Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed
     On seaward mornings after nights of
Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is
     I drown again with all those dim
Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul
     Screams out in the starlight, heart
Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.
     Include me in your lamentations.

Derek Mahon

Week 601: From a newspaper article on the wreck of the ‘Titanic’, by unknown author

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I don’t remember where I came across this week’s piece, but I believe it to be from a newspaper of the time, possibly the ‘Sunday Express’, describing the last hours of the ‘Titanic’ in 1912. It seems to me a very fine piece of journalism, restrained and moving, with just the one touch of purple prose at the end. Of course, one must always beware of myths springing up around such events, and it is the British way to extract what heroic capital they can from total disasters – look at Dunkirk – but there does seem to be plenty of corroboration from eyewitness sources for its general veracity, and if one is tempted to smile at the self-conscious heroism of some of the participants, then remember this: they put their lives where their mouths were.

‘Benjamin Guggenheim appeared on deck with his male secretary, both resplendent in evening clothes. He told a steward: ‘I think there is grave doubt that the men will get off. I am willing to play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the woman and children. We’ve dressed in our best and we are prepared to go down like gentlemen. If it should happen that my secretary and I both go down and you are saved, tell my wife I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward’.

Mrs Isidor Strauss also refused to go. ‘I’ve always stayed with my husband, so why should I leave him now? Where you go, I go’, she told him. As she rejected all pleas to get into a lifeboat, a friend said to Mr Strauss: ‘I’m sure nobody would object to an old gentleman like you getting in…’ He answered: ‘I will not go before other men’.

And that, wrote Walter Lord, was that. ‘Mrs Strauss tightened her grasp on his arm, patted it, smiled up at him, and then they sat together on a pair of deck chairs’.

… While the drama was unfolding, the ship’s band assembled on one of the decks and helped to keep up morale by playing ragtime tunes. ‘Many brave things were done that night’, wrote Beesley, ‘but none more brave than by those few men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower, and the sea rose higher and higher to where they stood, the music serving as their own immortal requiem’.