Monthly Archives: September 2024

Week 622: Poetry for Supper, by R.S.Thomas

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While this piece may lack the luminous dimension that you find in R.S.Thomas’s best work, I find it interesting from a professional point of view. I tend to picture the two old poets here as being Welsh, with one holding out for the strict traditional forms of Welsh poetry – awdl, englyn, cynghanedd, the twenty-four metres – and the other more sympathetic to a younger generation in revolt against such constraints.

The debate is not new, of course: we have Keats’s famous dictum that ‘if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all’, which is a fine romantic notion, but one that goes against the evidence of such poets’ manuscripts as have come down to us, which often bear signs of a fairly laborious textual evolution.

Personally I think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. For what it’s worth my own experience is that a poem begins with a line or two dropped into the mind, like a seeding crystal into a solution, and then, often over several days, the complete poem gradually takes shape as you wait patiently to find out what you are trying to say or, as I prefer to think of it, what is trying to be said. But there is always, or nearly always, a tension between what is given to you and what is supplied by you, the aim being always to minimise the latter.

Poetry for Supper

‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.’

‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.’

‘You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.’

‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’

So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

R.S.Thomas

Week 621: The Self-Unseeing, by Thomas Hardy

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If I am asked what it is that lifts this poem out of the usual run of nostalgic recollection to be, like D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Piano’ (see week 171), one of the great poems of childhood remembrance, I would say it is an individuality, an integrity, an immediacy of tactile memory. Lawrence has his ‘boom of the tingling strings’, Hardy has his floor, ‘footworn and hollowed’, worn thin by the passage of generations of long-departed feet. Not so long ago I visited Hardy’s childhood home at Higher Bockhampton, and it is all still there: that floor, the parlour where he danced as a boy, leaping to the tune of his father’s fiddle, the deep seat by his bedroom window where he would have sat at night looking out on the country darkness and the stars above the trees.

I sometimes think of Hardy as a kind of literary icebreaker, shouldering improbabilities of plot and diction aside by sheer force of will. The diction here is less idiosyncratic than in many of his poems, but still we have the verbal richness of that ‘Blessings emblazoned’, that ‘glowed with a gleam’, set against the simplicity of the rueful, wondering last line. Definitely one of my favourite pieces among all his work.

The Self-Unseeing

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

Thomas Hardy

Week 620: Claudio’s speech from ‘Measure for Measure’, by William Shakespeare

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It’s a long time since we had a bit of Shakespeare, so here is Claudio’s speech from Act 3, Scene 1 of ‘Measure for Measure’. For those unfamiliar with the play, the Duke of Vienna decides he needs a break from the day job and appoints a certain Angelo to govern in his place while he ostensibly goes off on a diplomatic mission abroad (but actually hangs around disguised as a friar, just to see what happens).

Angelo takes up his post full of reforming zeal and, possibly after toying with the idea of stopping the winter fuel allowance for old age pensioners, decides instead to come down hard on fornication (a quaint old term for sex outside marriage). Unfortunately our hero Claudio has recently got a woman pregnant without quite getting round to observing the matrimonial rites, and as a result is sentenced to death.

His sister Isabella, who is a novice nun, goes to see Angelo to plead for her brother’s life. Angelo is at first unmoved but then, smitten by a fancy for Isabella, has the bright idea of sparing Claudio’s life if she will yield up her virginity to him. ‘No way!’ says Isabella and she hurries off to tell Claudio the bad news: you’re on your own in this one, bro. At first he is nobly understanding, but then, having thought about it a bit, he engages in this eloquent reflection, that feels rather like a speech from ‘Hamlet’ dropped into a lesser play, and begs Isabella to save his life even at the expense of her honour. ‘Sweet sister, let me live’. Sadly Isabella is unimpressed and just tells him to man up and stop being a wuss.

But since this is a comedy of sorts, all ends well. The Duke throws off his disguise and after some nonsense featuring a cameo appearance by a severed head pardons Claudio, deals with the despicable Angelo and in a final speech rather surprisingly proposes marriage to Isabella – there appears to be a part of being a nun that he doesn’t understand.

It is a rather odd play, and I’m not sure what moral we are meant to draw from it, unless it is that you can only rely on sisters up to a point. But I think most of us already knew that.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

William Shakespeare

Week 619: The Combe, by Edward Thomas

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I see that badger culls are in the news again, with a Government plan to end them by 2029. This is not the place to get into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of culling, which is purportedly to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis, though I will say that many I have spoken too, including some farmers, feel that the slaughter of these beasts, with over 200,000 killed since the start of culling in 2009, is both inhumane and ineffective.

I remember watching for badgers one holiday evening in a wood near Cilgerran, crouching in some undergrowth not far from a rather muddy sett beneath a mossy oak. The minutes go by; I watch the patterns of ash leaves darken on the darkening sky; a blackbird pinks, a wood pigeon murmurs, far off a horse whinnies. I start to nod off, head on knees, pleasantly lassitudinous from a day of sun and exercise, but a sudden prod from my wife brings me alert. There, a few feet away, a badger is looking at us, its black-and-white mask vivid in the gloom. It turns its head from side to side, making a curious ticking, whiffling noise; then another appears, larger and not so clean looking, that rolls lumberingly along the path for a short way, then disappears down another hole. A brief enough encounter, but still a privilege, and one that it will be sad if future generations can no longer enjoy.

Edward Thomas’s poem  of course, relates not to the possibly excusable practice of culling but the quite inexcusable practice of killing for sport. Though he does not openly condemn, it is clear where his sympathies lie. And the closing appellation, ‘That most ancient Briton of English beasts’, is a masterstroke, especially given that the traditional name ‘brock’ for a badger has Celtic roots.

The Combe

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with brambles, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

Edward Thomas