Monthly Archives: January 2026

Week 692: You, Andrew Marvell, by Archibald MacLeish

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I think that today’s offering by the American poet Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) is a real sustained tour de force in the way it makes palpable the passage of time by imagining the shadow of night as it crosses the world from east to west. The title is inspired, of course, by the lines in Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘For ever at my back I hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’.

The poem can also be construed as a reflection on the way empires rise and fall, enjoying their moment in the sun before disappearing into the dark of history.

Note the way in which the relative lack of punctuation, the short urgent lines and the constant repetition of ‘And’ all go to create the sense of an unstoppable momentum.

As well as being a poet, MacLeish was an important librarian. Of coure, all librarians are important, but MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post to which he was personally appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Ecbatan (now Ecbatana) an ancient city in what is now Iran.

Kermanshah: another Iranian city.

Palmyra: now we are in Syria.

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on …

Archibald MacLeish

Week 691: Lament for Eorl the Young, by J.R.R.Tolkien

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These are the verses that Aragorn speaks when he and his companions first come to Edoras in the land of Rohan in book two of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘The Two Towers’. He speaks them first, we are told, in the language of Rohan, which Tolkien elsewhere renders as Old English, and then as here in the Common Tongue.

As I have said before (see week 167), I feel that Tolkien is a skilled versifier rather than a poet as we now think of poets, but let us grant that this is at the least very effective pastiche that works perfectly in its context. The lines were inspired by a passage in the Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’, and I thought it would be interesting to include the said passage for comparison. As you will see, the Old English is very similar in its elegiac quality, but a good deal more terse and less lyrical. What you have in Tolkien as an essentially romantic sensibility grafted on to an older, tougher rootstock. The result may not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s certainly nothing else quite like it.

Lament for Eorl the Young

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

J.R.R.Tolkien

From ‘The Wanderer’

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?       Where is the horse? Where the young man?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?                              Where is the giver of treasure?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?                            Where are the seats at the feast?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?                             Where are the revels in the hall?
Eala beorht bune!                                             Alas for the bright cup!
Eala byrnwiga!                                                 Alas for the mailed warrior!
Eala þeodnes þrym!                                          Alas for the prince’s renown!
Hu seo þrag gewat,                                          How that time has passed away,
genap under nihthelm,                                     Dark beneath the cover of night,
swa heo no wære.                                           As if it had never been.

Week 690: As I Was Saying, by Dannie Abse

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Dannie Abse (see also weeks 162 and 308) wrote engaging and accessible verse of which this week’s piece is a good example. I don’t really agree with its sentiments: I tend to think that at least a moderate, amateur-level acquaintance with the natural world’s nomenclature – birds, beasts, plants – should be part of every poet’s kit, and unlike Mr Abse I do know my Butterburs, Lady’s Smocks and even my Stinking Hellebores. But of course one must allow for the fact that others may have very different enthusiasms. I remember when my wife and I were out on a country walk with a small grandson. ‘Why does Grandad keep stopping to look at flowers?’, he demanded. ‘Well, Grandad likes flowers’, said my wife. ‘Oh’. (Dismissively). ‘I like machines’.

As I Was Saying

Yes, madam, as a poet I do take myself seriously,
and, since I have a young, questioning family, I suppose
I should know something about English wild flowers:
the shape of their lives, when this one and that one grows,
how old mythologies attribute strange powers
to this or that other. Urban, I should mug up anew
the pleasant names: Butterbur, Ling and Lady’s Smock,
Jack-by-the-hedge, Cuckoo-pint, and Feverfew,
even the Stinking Hellebore – all in that W.H.Smith book
I could bring home for myself (inscribed to my daughter)
to swot, to know which is this and which that one,
what honours the high cornfield, what the low water,
under the slow-pacing clouds and occasional sun of England.

But no! Done for in the ignorant suburb
I’ll drink Scotch, neurotically stare through glass
at the rainy lawn, at green stuff, nameless birds,
and let my daughter, madam, go to nature class.
I’ll not compete with those nature poets you advance,
some in country dialect, and some in dialogue
with the country – few as calm as their words,
Wordsworth, Barnes, sad John Clare who ate grass.

Dannie Abse

Week 689: The Fiddle and the Drum, by Joni Mitchell

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This week’s offering by the Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell first appeared in 1969, at a time when American foreigh policy in Vietnam was increasingly being called into question. I think that in its quiet reasonableness, its readiness to give credit for a once noble dream, it is one of Joni’s best compositions, and indeed one of the most effective antiwar songs ever. Of course, any plea by poets or songwriters for peace and moderation inevitably calls into mind Shakespeare’s lines from sonnet 65: ‘How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,/Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’, though Shakespeare was thinking of tyrannical Time rather than human tyranny. How indeed, and yet flowers persist.

It is no doubt hardly necessary to point out that the fiddle here represents concord and the pleasant arts of peace, as opposed to the drum which stands for all that is martial and inflammatory.

The Fiddle and the Drum

And so once again
My dear Johnny, my dear friend
And so once again you are fightin’ us all
And when I ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and I fall
Oh, my friend, how did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum?

You say I have turned
Like the enemies you’ve earned
But I can remember all the good things you are
And so I ask you, please
Can I help you find the peace and the star?
Oh, my friend, what time is this
To trade the handshake for the fist?

And so once again
Oh, America, my friend
And so once again you are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall
Oh, my friend, how did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum?

You say we have turned
Like the enemies you’ve earned
But we can remember all the good things you are
And so we ask you, please
Can we help you find the peace and the star?
Oh, my friend, we have all come
To fear the beating of your drum

Joni Mitchell

Week 688: The Fall of Rome, by W.H.Auden

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With so much doom and gloom around at the moment I thought I might as well add to it by opening with this one for the New Year: Auden’s take on the way a civilisation decays, couched partly in terms of the fall of Rome, but also cheerfully anachronistic in places. The message seems to be that things end not with a bang but a whimper: his vision is of a society losing cohesion and a sense of purpose, its culture becoming increasingly divorced from reality, its citizens taking refuge in private recreation and the pursuit of personal gain while crime and corruption flourish and such concepts as honour and duty fall by the wayside. The poem concludes on what may or may not be a consoling note with the thought that elsewhere beyond the human sphere nature continues unaffected on its own indifferent way. It should be borne in mind that this was written in 1945, when there was relatively little concern about man’s impact on the environment; I think if he were writing today Auden would be less sanguine about the ability of the natural world to continue inviolate.

The poem is dense with Auden’s idiosyncratic imagery. I love the image of the reindeer in the last stanza, but worry that it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Why are the reindeer in such a hurry? Reindeer eat moss, so confronted with miles and miles of the stuff wouldn’t they instead be moving rather slowly, chomping as they went?

Fisc: the state treasury.
Cato: Cato the Younger (95 BC – 46 BC), a Roman senator notorious for his belief in the old Roman virtues of stoicism and self-sacrifice, making him a scourge of the late Republic; in the end he committed suicide rather than compromise with what he saw as the tyrannical regime of Julius Caesar. Not to be confused with Cato the Elder (234-149 BC), Cato the Younger’s great-grandfather, who was cut from much the same cloth, and is particularly remembered for his tough line on Carthage with speeches in which he repeatedly urged ‘Carthago delenda est’ (Carthage must be destroyed).
Cerebrotonic: having a personality characterized by shyness, introspection, and emotional restraint. Nice example of a mot juste.

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

W.H.Auden