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