Monthly Archives: September 2025

Week 674: Der Asra, by Heinrich Heine

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This famous poem by the German poet Heinrich Heine, dealing with the hopeless love of a slave for a sultan’s daughter, first appeared in print in 1846 and was subsequently included in his 1851 collection ‘Romanzero’. It draws its inspiration from a Persian story concerning a tribe for whom love between different social classes was strictly taboo, such that those involved were known for being driven to kill themselves. A growing interest in things oriental was characteristic of the time, and this particular theme, of dying for love, chimed in well with the preoccupations of the German romantic era (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 epistolary novel ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’ has a lot to answer for).

The translation that follows is my own.

Der Asra

Täglich ging die wunderschöne
Sultanstochter auf und nieder
Um die Abendzeit am Springbrunn,
Wo die weissen Wässer plätschern.

Täglich stand der junge Sklave
Um die Abendzeit am Springbrunn,
Wo die weissen Wässer plätschern.
Täglich ward er bleich und bleicher.

Eines Abends trat die Fürstin
Auf ihn zu mit raschen Worten:
‘Deinen Namen will ich wissen,
Deine Heimat, deine Sippschaft!’

Und der Sklave sprach: ‘Ich heisse
Mohamed, ich bin aus Yemen,
Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra,
Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.’

Heinrich Heine

The Asra

Daily walked the sultan’s daughter
In her beauty to and fro
By the fountain in the evening
Where the foam-white waters flow.

Daily watching stood the slave boy
Where the foam-white waters play
By the fountain in the evening,
Growing paler day by day.

Till one evening came the princess
With bold words and started in:
Saying ‘I would know your name,
The land you come from, and your kin!’

He answered: ‘I am called Mohammed,
I am a Yemeni, and I
Am of that tribe they call the Asra,
Those who, when they love, must die.’

Week 673: The Son, by Clifford Dyment

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Clifford Dyment (1914-1971) was only four years old when he lost his father in the First World War. This quietly effective piece commemorates him and all the others like him. It reminds us how great a rip war tears in the fabric of lives, not just of the soldiers themselves, but of those left behind. My own father was luckier than most: he was called up in the Second World War but was rated too short-sighted and flat-footed for active service, so was despatched to Minehead (‘guarding the western approaches’, as he wryly put it) where, to judge from a scrappy diary he kept that I found after his death, he seems to have spent the war weeding the officers’ gardens, playing cards, desperately missing his wife and two young daughters and being thoroughly bored. He came home unscathed, at least physically, but my mother once confided to me in her widowhood that things had never been quite the same between them after he returned: she had grown used to her independence and had realized that she could manage the household finances far better than my father ever had, and she was resentful when on return he demanded to take back control and promptly plunged the family into genteel poverty again. But at least, unlike Clifford Dyment’s father, he did come back.

The Son (1937)

I found the letter in a cardboard box,
Unfamous history. I read the words.
The ink was frail and brown, the paper dry
After so many years of being kept.
The letter was a soldier’s, from the Front—
Conveyed his love, and disappointed hope
Of getting leave. ‘It’s cancelled now,’ he wrote.
‘My luck is at the bottom of the sea.’

Outside, the sun was hot; the world looked bright;
I heard a radio, and someone laughed.
I did not sing, or laugh, or love the sun.
Within the quiet room I thought of him,
My father killed, and all the other men
Whose luck was at the bottom of the sea.

Clifford Dyment

Week 672: Welsh Incident, by Robert Graves

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One has to be careful these days with humour at the expense of ethnic minorities, but I hope that this week’s offering by Robert Graves can be seen for what it is, as a piece of affectionate teasing based on the idea that the Welsh have a certain tendency to prolixity and rhetorical vagueness. I have to say that this is not at all my own experience: it seems to me that Welsh poets and prose writers are perfectly capable of economical, coherent and lucid storytelling. I suppose that the classic Welsh story ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’, that forms part of the collection of tales known as the Mabinogion, could be seen as a bit long-winded with its roll-call of warriors assigned by Arthur to assist Culhwch in his quest for the hand of the giant’s daughter, but for some it would be a pity to lose a single one of those glimpses into a whole lost legendarium.

Anyway, to Graves’ irreverent, unjust but rather entertaining take on the matter…

Welsh Incident

‘But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.’
‘What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?’
‘Nothing at all of any things like that.’
‘What were they, then?’
                                      All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.’
‘Describe just one of them.’
                                          ‘I am unable.’
‘What were their colours?’
                                           Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you’d like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.’
                                ‘Tell me, had they legs?’
‘Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.’
‘But did these things come out in any order?’
What o’clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?’
‘I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thirty-seven shimmering instruments
Collecting for Caernarvon’s (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,
Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,
Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,
Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward
Silently at a snail’s pace. But at last
The most odd, indescribable thing of all
Which hardly one man there could see for wonder
Did something recognizably a something.’
‘Well, what?’
                   ‘It made a noise.’
                                              ‘A frightening noise?’
‘No, no.’
              ‘A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?’
‘No, but a very loud, respectable noise —
Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning
In Chapel, close before the second psalm.’
‘What did the mayor do?’
                                        ‘I was coming to that.’

Robert Graves

Week 671: Cosmologies, by David Sutton

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There is a famous passage in the writings of the physicist Richard Feynman in which he takes issue with poets for their perceived lack of engagement with the realities of science: ‘Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part…. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?’

This is characteristically eloquent, but also, I feel, a bit wrong-headed. I am sure that many poets are, as I am, deeply interested in the wondrous adventures of modern astronomy, but I don’t think Feynman had much understanding of the way poetic inspiration works. Real poems do not come about by poets sitting down and saying to themselves ‘Ah, time I wrote a poem about what Jupiter is really like’. It’s more a matter of having a voice in your head that suddenly says to you ‘Oi! You! Listen up…’ and what that voice says is unpredictable and depends on what, at the deepest level of your being, you are emotionally invested in. And fascinating though an immense sphere of methane and ammonia may be, it is quite hard to be emotionally invested in it. Or to put it another way, W.B.Yeats once said that out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. I think that is very true, and I find it difficult to see how Jupiter can form part of the quarrel with ourselves.

For what it’s worth, here’s one of my own poems on a cosmological theme, that nonetheless remains stubbornly rooted in the human. I don’t think Feynman would approve and yet, for better or worse, it’s what we project on to the universe that we relate to, not what the universe really is.

Cosmologies

‘If you could just keep going in a straight line’ –
Said my father, innocent of Einstein,
As we walked home one night of winter stars –
‘You’d come at last to somewhere where there was
Nothing at all. I mean, there has to be
A last star, and what then?’ This troubled me.
That night in bed I travelled in my mind
Through stars that whirled like snowflakes in the wind
Until I found, beyond one last faint glow,
A blank, like morning fog outside my window.
I woke and cried, but when my father came
To ask what ailed me, was it some old dream,
Sobbed ‘Nothing!’, so was left to sleep again
Like the blind Cyclops in his cave of pain.

Later I learned: my father had it wrong:
All lines bend back at last, however long.
There is no end to the great blizzard of light
I’d like to tell him now, and so I might
Had he not journeyed on, to somewhere far
Beyond all words of mine, and any star.

David Sutton