Monthly Archives: November 2025

Week 683: The Icelandic Language, by Bill Holm

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This week’s offering by the American poet Bill Holm (1943-2009), a kind of hymn to the Icelandic tongue, takes a sensuous delight in the sound and feel of language that reminds me somewhat of Seamus Heaney, and I love how it evokes the landscape and culture of that barren, lava-black, troll-haunted land.

The Icelandic language is a fascinating one, deeply conservative to the extent that modern speakers can read without much difficulty texts first written down in the 11th century. This does not work quite the same in the other direction: I can read Old Norse well enough but find modern Icelandic slow going because of the expanded vocabulary. This is despite the fact that much effort has been expended by a body called the ‘language regulator’ in keeping out foreign loanwords and trying to make sure that any new terms necessary are based on older Icelandic words. Which would have gladdened the heart of the English poet William Barnes, who had a passion for an English purified of foreign, post Norman Conquest influences and wanted us to use such terms as ‘welkinfire’ for meteor and ‘wortlore’ for botany.

Bill Holm was himself the grandson of Icelandic immigrants to the US and spent part of every year at his second home in Iceland.

The Icelandic Language

 In this language, no industrial revolution;
 no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
 only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
 The middle class can hardly speak it.

 In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
 through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
 The door groans; the old smell comes
 up from under the earth to meet you.

 But this language believes in ghosts;
 chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
 neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
 at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

 The woman with marble hands whispers
 this language to you in your sleep; faces
 come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
 wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

 In this language, you can’t chit-chat
 holding a highball in your hand, can’t
 even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
 all your grief and failure come clear at last.

 Old inflections move from case to case,
 gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
 vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
 icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

Bill Holm

Week 682: The End of the Weekend, by Anthony Hecht

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This week a rather strange and disturbing poem by the American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004; see also weeks 345 and 464), apparently inspired by an anecdote of Ted Hughes.

I see the poem as being in the ‘Et in Arcadia, ego’ vein, in which the frailty and transience of human life and love are set against the presence of death and the pitiless indifference of the natural world, here casting their shadows over a romantic weekend getaway. I take the symbolic presence in the last stanza to be an owl, and the scratching in the loft evokes memories of Alan Garner’s ‘The Owl Service’, though there is no suggestion here that our human choice can be benign flowers instead of the predatory and destructive birds.

Of course, it is possible to find unintentionally comic aspects to the poem. Would the narrator really have let himself be distracted by a mere scratching in the roof when he had matters so nearly in hand, so to speak? And then one imagines the perhaps more practically minded woman saying ‘Right, now we’ve established that it’s just an owl that’s caught a mouse, can we get on with it, because I’m standing here freezing’.

But any such irreverent thoughts are overwhelmed by admiration for the sheer skill of the piece: it’s conjuration of shadows, its buildup of erotic tension, and that shaft of moonlight, so stunningly evoked by the unexpected epithet ‘magnesium’.

Quirt: a kind of riding whip.
Lariat: another word for lasso.
Captain Marryat: a Victorian writer of adventure stories.
Dormer: a kind of window positioned directly under a roof, and often found as a way of letting light into attics.

The End of the Weekend

A dying firelight slides along the quirt
Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans
Against my father’s books. The lariat
Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans
Fingers a page of Captain Marryat
Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.
Outside, across the lake, an endless wind
Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails
In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.
She rubs against me and I feel her nails.
Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:
This dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,
Wind, lip, lake, everything awaits
The slow unloosening of her underthings
And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates
Against the attic beams. I climb the stairs
Armed with a belt.

A long magnesium shaft
Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path
Among the shattered skeletons of mice.
A great black presence beats its wings in wrath.
Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.
Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.

Anthony Hecht

Week 681: Chard Whitlow, by Henry Reed

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To appreciate this brilliant parody of T.S.Eliot fully requires a degree of familiarity with Eliot’s work, in particular with ‘Four Quartets’, which some may feel is too high a price to pay, but even a superficial acquaintance should be enough to enjoy the adroitness with which Henry Reed echoes and undercuts the great man’s more sententious passages.

To give credit to Eliot, it has to be said that he took the parody very sportingly, commenting ‘Most parodies of one’s own work strike one as very poor. In fact, one is apt to think one could parody oneself much better. (As a matter of fact, some critics have said that I have done so.) But there is one which deserves the success it has had, Henry Reed’s ‘Chard Whitlow’’.

The title of the poem is a made-up name, parodying the English place names used as titles of the sections in ‘Four Quartets’, such as Burnt Norton.

For Henry Reed (1914-1986) see also week 279.

Chard Whitlow
(Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Evening Postscript)

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and to-day I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again – if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded tube.

There are certain precautions – though none of them very reliable –
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: ‘It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell.’
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray, not for your sins, but for your souls.

And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.
And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

Henry Reed

Week 680: Requiem: The Soldier, by Humbert Wolfe

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Remembrance Sunday is on us again this weekend, and again a surprisingly large crowd from my village will be gathering round its memorial cross to hear the names of the fallen read out, so many from a place that at that time had scarcely four hundred inhabitants. So on that theme I have chosen as this week’s poem an elegy by the Italian-born British poet Humbert Wolfe (1851-1940). Wolfe had a big reputation between the wars and was even considered for Poet Laureate, but he seems to be little remembered today except for his mordant epigram on the British journalist:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

(As an aside, I was amused to come across an AI interpretation of these lines that took them for a straightforward tribute to the British journalist as being of impeccable integrity and needing no base incentive to strive for excellence. Which shows that AI has some way to go in detecting nuance. Unless, of course, it is developing a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour).

Wolfe, who worked as a civil servant, was a bit too close to the Establishment for my taste – I think myself that it is better for poets to maintain a polite distance from anything that might seek to press them into service. But I find that this poem, though possessing nothing like the power of Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, does have a certain quiet poignancy.

Requiem: The Soldier

Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together, slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.

They are speaking together of what they loved in vain here,
but the air is too thin to carry the things they say.
They were young and golden, but they came on pain here,
and their youth is age now, their gold is grey.

Yet their hearts are not changed, and they cry to one another,
‘What have they done with the lives we laid aside?
Are they young with our youth, gold with our gold, my brother?
Do they smile in the face of death, because we died?’

Down some cold field in a world uncharted
the young seek each other with questioning eyes.
They question each other, the young, the golden hearted,
of the world that they were robbed of in their quiet paradise.

Humbert Wolfe