Monthly Archives: December 2025

Week 687: Neither Far Out Nor In Deep, by Robert Frost

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As often with Robert Frost, the simplicity of the language in this week’s poem masks a thought of some profundity. ‘They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep’ – really one may think that a big-brained ape species that has only been around on the planet for a blink of geological time has done a pretty good job so far of looking out on the universe and fathoming its workings, but no doubt any scientist would agree firstly that there are still a lot of known unknowns we would like answers to, such as the nature of dark matter, and secondly that these in turn are likely to be swamped by the unknown unknowns, the mysteries that so far have been buried too deep or lain too far off for our perception, let alone our understanding. Still, as the poem suggests, we will keep looking, it is in our nature…

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be –
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost

Week 686: From ‘Requiem’, by Anna Akhmatova

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This week an excerpt from another famous poem by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), for details of whom see week 606. This one, entitled ‘Requiem’, derives from the months she spent in the company of many other women waiting outside Leningrad prison in the hope of seeing their imprisoned loved ones, in Akhmatova’s case her son Lev Gumilev, arrested by the NKVD in 1938.

There are many translations of ‘Requiem’ online, but to me this one stands out for its laconic evocation of anger and pity. I apologise to the translator whose identity I have been unable to discover.

Akhmatova prefixes the poem as a whole with the following prose note:

‘In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison
queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the
queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of
me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and
whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe
this?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a
smile crossed what had once been her face.

1 April, 1957, Leningrad

Epilogue

II

Again the hands of the clock are nearing
The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch

All of you: the cripple they had to support
Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund;

And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and
Say: ‘I come here as if it were home.’

I should like to call you all by name,
But they have lost the lists….

I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

I remember them always and everywhere,
And if they shut my tormented mouth,

Through which a hundred million of my people cry,
Let them remember me also….

And if in this country they should want
To build me a monument

I consent to that honour,
But only on condition that they

Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,

Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me

Lest in blessed death I should forget
The grinding scream of the Black Marias,

The hideous clanging gate, the old
Woman wailing like a wounded beast.

And may the melting snow drop like tears
From my motionless bronze eyelids,

And the prison pigeons coo above me
And the ships sail slowly down the Neva.

Anna Akhmatova


Week 685: Merrow Down, by Rudyard Kipling

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This is a poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote in memory of his beloved daughter Josephine, who died aged six from pneumonia, and for whom he composed what were later published as the ‘Just So’ stories, in one of which he appears as a caveman Tegumai and she as his daughter Taffy, an idea continued in these accompanying verses.

You may see the poem as a little whimsical, a little fey; you may find it sentimental: that is your right. As for me, I can only say with King Lear, ‘I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward’ and I know what it is to have had a small beloved daughter, though happily not to have lost one. So for my part I must confess to finding the poem intensely affecting: in particular I think the last four lines are perhaps the most moving that Kipling ever wrote.

Merrow Down

                          I

There runs a road by Merrow Down –
A grassy track today it is –
An hour out of Guildford Town
Above the river Wey it is.

Here, when they heard the horse-bells ring,
The ancient Britons dressed and rode
To watch the dark Phoenicians bring
Their goods along the Western Road.

Yes, here, or hereabouts, they met
To hold their racial talks and such –
To barter beads for Whitby jet
And tin for gay shell torques and such.

But long and long before that time
(When bison used to roam on it)
Did Taffy and her Daddy climb
That Down, and had their home on it.

Then beavers build in Broadstonebrook
And made a swamp where Bramley stands,
And bears from Shere would come and look
For Taffimai where Shamley stands.

The Wey, that Taffy called Wagai,
Was more than six times bigger then;
And all the tribe of Tegumai
They cut a noble figure then!

                          II

Of all the tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain, –
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry –
The silence and the sun remain.

But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Come Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.

Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.

In mocassins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far – oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!

Rudyard Kipling

Week 684: From The Train, by David Sutton

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We had the first frost of the year the other morning. I love a hard frost, so clean and bright after unmemorable November days of rain and muck. It prompted me to dig out this poem of mine, to which there is a tale. When it first appeared in one of my collections one reviewer was kind enough to single it out for praise as a particularly fine sonnet. Sonnet? I looked at it. I counted the lines. Yep, fourteen. And the rhymes seemed to be in the right place. Well, well, so it was. I was rather impressed with myself. I had as usual just let the poem take the form it seemed to want to take, and had simply not noticed that this particular form had a name. I still can’t decide whether to write a sonnet by accident shows genius or a distressing lack of formal awareness. Naturally I incline to the former view…

Worm-hole: the reference is to the cosmologists’ speculation that there might be passages connecting one universe to another. In this case connecting our universe to a universe of joy and wonder, which is perhaps just our own seen with new eyes.

Fern-seed: as well as being very small, fern-seed (more properly fern spores) was thought in mediaeval times to have magical properties, enabling one to become invisible, see into the future, and stay forever young. Cf. Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’: ‘we have the receipt of fern seed; we walk invisible’.

From The Train

From the train at dawn, on ploughland, frost
Blue-white in the shadow of a wood.
Oh, you again, of all moods soonest lost
And most elusive and least understood.
What should I call you? Vision? Empathy?
Elation’s tunnel? Worm-hole of rejoicing?
Some bliss of childhood, reasonless and free,
The secret microcosms … What a thing
To have no name for, yet to live for, these
Curious contentments under all,
These moments of a planet: weathers, trees –
What dreams, what intimations, fern-seed small,
Are buried in my days, that I must find,
And recognise, and lose, and leave behind?

David Sutton