Monthly Archives: May 2026

Week 709: Bogland, by Seamus Heaney

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I have recently, and somewhat controversially, acquired a copy of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Complete Poems’ (Faber & Faber). I say controversially because my wife is of the firm opinion that the 788 books I already owned were quite enough for one modestly sized house, while I tend more to the view that by the time he is eighty-two any poet worth his salt should have accumulated at least ten thousand volumes and view my meagre 788 (sorry, now 789) with some dissatisfaction. I haven’t told my wife about the Greek poet Simonides, who according to legend didn’t approve of books at all and thought a man should carry everything he needed to know in his head. She would have liked Simonides.

But I really couldn’t miss this one. Admittedly I already had a previous ‘Collected’, but this ‘Complete’ does add a good deal unknown to me, includes an introduction and copious notes, and gives one a chance to see the great man’s work in its final impressive entirety. Inevitably with a collection this size there are poems which are not bad – I don’t think Seamus did bad – just, shall we say, less necessary, poems of the will rather than inspiration, their composition motivated, maybe, by the realisation that it’s Friday and one hasn’t written a poem all week. But even these will be of interest to his admirers in piecing together a final view of what is arguably the greatest poetic mind of my generation.

Yet in the end I find myself returning to familiar favourites, to the fifty or so entirely successful poems which are after all as much or more than any poet has the right to expect in a lifetime. Such as this week’s offering, ‘Bogland’, with its wonderfully tactile evocation of the Irish landscape.

Note: the dedicatee T.P.Flanagan was an Irish landscape painter.

Bogland
for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening–
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

Seamus Heaney

Week 708: The Beds of Grainne and Diarmuid, by Robert Graves

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I am told that Robert Graves’s poetry is not much read these days, and that, ironically enough, he is now chiefly remembered as the writer of historical novels such as ‘I Claudius’, which he wrote only to subsidise his less financially rewarding work as a poet. I suppose one can see some reason for the neglect: he was uncompromisingly patrician, perhaps too much so for our populist age, and of course he belongs to a time when poets were still judged on things like skill with words and a mastery of poetic form. But it’s a pity: his oeuvre is large and became a bit repetitive towards the end, but he wrote more good poems with a wider range of style and subject than most twentieth-century poets. Here is another of his takes on Irish legend, that he used to such effect in week 81’s offering.

In case you are unfamiliar with the story, some background may be useful. Fionn mac Cumhaill, chief of the warrior-band known as the Fianna, has grown old and wishes to take a young bride. He chooses Grainne, daughter of the High King of Ireland, but at the wedding-feast her eye falls on one of Fionn’s young champions, the irresistibly handsome Diarmuid. Deciding that he would be a better bet, and being a spirited young woman, she demands that he elopes with her. Diarmuid is reluctant  to break his oath of fealty to Fionn, but in those days it was unthinkable for a man of honour to deny a woman anything that she asked of him (so not much change there, then). Off they go to have many adventures, relentlessly pursued by Fionn and his band, passing the night together in secret places throughout Ireland. Thngs do not go entirely smoothly in the relationship because in an attempt to stay true to his oath to Fionn Diarmuid refrains from actual intercourse with Grainne (hence the ‘pure embrace’ of the poem), and alas, the essential nobility of a man’s character is not always appreciated by the woman in his life…

Graves seems to be using the story to postulate a distinction between sacred and profane love, which probably gives an insight into his own somewhat complicated psyche, but I think one can enjoy the poem for its resonant invocation of legend without worrying too much about that.

sain: to bless

The Beds of  Grainne and Diarmuid

How many secret nooks in copse or glen
We sained for ever with our pure embrace,
No man shall know; though indeed master poets
Reckon one such for every eve of the year,
To sain their calendar.
                                        But this much is true:
That children stumbling on our lairs by chance
In quest of hazelnuts or whortleberries
Will recognise the impress of twin bodies
On the blue-green turf, starred with diversity
Of alien flowers, and shout astonishment.
Yet should some amorous country pair, presuming
To bask in joy on any bed of ours,
Offend against the love by us exampled,
Long ivy roots will writhe up from beneath
And bitterly fetter ankle, wrist and throat.

Robert Graves

Week 707: Dives and Lazarus, by Anon

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Dives and Lazarus is a traditional English folk song that in one form or another may date from around 1550. It is listed as Child ballad 56, and at some stage became linked to a beautiful tune that has also been used for other songs, such as ‘The Star of the County Down’, and which inspired one of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s finest pieces of music, ‘Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus’. 

The story is a punchy retelling of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus as found in Luke 16-19 to 16-31. The doctrine of charity towards the poor is one of Christianity’s more appealing teachings, even if in practice the Church has sometimes seemed more interested in acquisition than in redistribution, and of course as Zakat it is also one of the Five Pillars of Islam. One assumes, though the question may be a complex one, that Christian teaching played a significant role in the foundation of the modern welfare state, that for all its flaws surely remains one of the twentieth century’s great social achievements. Of course, it is tempting to hear the ghost of Norman Tebbit in the background muttering ‘On your bike, Lazarus’, but let us in this case make the charitable assumption that Lazarus did not have a bike.

Dives And Lazarus

As it fell out upon a day
Rich Dives made a feast,
And he invited all his friends
And gentry of the best.

Then Lazarus laid him down and down
And down at Dives’ door:
Some meat, some drink, brother Dives,
Bestow upon the poor.

Thou art none of my brother, Lazarus,
That lies begging at my door;
No meat nor drink will I give thee
Nor bestow upon the poor.

Then Lazarus laid him down and down
And down at Dives’ wall:
Some meat, some drink, brother Dives,
Or with hunger starve I shall.

Thou art none of my brother, Lazarus,
That lies begging at my wall;
No meat nor drink will I give thee
But with hunger starve you shall.

Then Lazarus laid him down and down
And down at Dives’ gate:
Some meat, some drink, brother Dives,
For Jesus Christ his sake.

Thou art none of my brother, Lazarus,
That lies begging at my gate;
No meat nor drink will I give thee
For Jesus Christ his sake.

Then Dives sent out his merry men
To whip poor Lazarus away;
They had no power to strike a stroke
But flung their whips away.

Then Dives sent out his hungry dogs
To bite him as he lay;
They had no power to bite at all
But licked his sores away.

As it fell out upon a day
Poor Lazarus sickened and died;
Then came two angels out of heaven
His soul therein to guide.

Rise up, rise up brother Lazarus,
And go along with me;
For you’ve a place prepared in heaven
To sit on an angel’s knee.

As it fell out upon a day
Rich Dives sickened and died;
Then came two serpents out of hell
His soul therein to guide.

Rise up, rise up brother Lazarus,
And go with us to see
A dismal place prepared in hell
From which thou cannot flee.

Then Dives looked up with his eyes
And saw poor Lazarus blest:
Give me one drop of water, brother Lazarus,
To quench my flaming thirst.

Oh had I as many years to abide
As there are blades of grass,
Then there would be an end, but now
Hell’s pains will ne’er be past.

Oh was I now but alive again
The space of one half hour;
Oh that I had my peace secure;
Then the devil should have no power.

Anon

Week 706: Bat, by D.H.Lawrence

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It is apparent from this poem that D.H.Lawrence didn’t much like bats, but that didn’t stop him from doing a virtuoso job of portraying them in this poem from his collection ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’. How well that image of ‘a black glove thrown up at the light,/And falling back’ captures their elastic flight.

Personally I have always been a bit of a chiropterophile. As a small child I liked to go into the field at the bottom of our garden and watch them at dusk in summer, hawking for insects in the warm air, both bats and insects being far more abundant back then. In those days I could hear them too, an eery thin piping from above. And I shall never forget an evening down in Wales when my son took us to Stackpole Field Centre near his home in Pembrokeshire to watch the bats come out at dusk. It seems that up in the roof under its archway was and maybe still is the main summer roost for about four hundred greater horseshoe bats: they spend the winter in limestone caves on the coast, move to Carew Castle in the spring and then come here. Each evening they stream out from the roost and set off across country on their nocturnal hunt for insects, which can take them as far as north Pembrokeshire. It was certainly an amazing spectacle: I had seen perhaps a dozen bats together before but never anything like this. At first there were only three or four, fluttering below the archway like great black butterflies in the twilight, but then more and more appeared and the butterflies turned to a swirling blizzard of black snowflakes. We sat on the grass near the hedge that served as their flight-path, and one by one they flickered past, a scrambled squadron of small jet fighters, yet more agile than any plane, detecting us at the last second as they rounded the hedge and passed over and round us with an effortless swerve: I thought of the play of Sergeant Troy’s sword round Bathsheba in ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’.

But over to Lawrence and his masterful imagery…

Bat

At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise …

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding …

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno …

Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.

And you think:
’The swallows are flying so late!’

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop …
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio …
Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

In China the bat is symbol for happiness.

Not for me!

D.H.Lawrence

Week 705: The Flyting o’ Life and Daith, by Hamish Henderson

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A flyting is a contest in verse, especially one where two rival poets exchange scurrilous and often ribald insults. As a genre it is very ancient, occurring in many languages. A well known example in Old Norse, for example, is the Lokasenna, where Loki at Aegir’s feast exchanges taunts with each of the other gods in turn, accusing Freya, for instance, of incest with her brother, while in the Old English poem ‘Beowulf’ we have the hero’s exchange of insults with Unferth.

The tradition is also strong in mediaeval Scots, a classic example being ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie’, believed to have been composed around 1500, where two rival poets go at it hammer and tongs. Thus Dunbar addresses Kennedie as ‘Skaldit skaitbird and commoun skamelar,/Wanfukkit funling that Natour maid ane yrle’; Kennedie counters with ‘Revin raggit ruke, and full of rebaldrie,/Skitterand scorpioun, scauld in scurrilitie’, and even without a glossary you can probably guess that all this is not very polite. It’s clever stuff, but pretty crude, and in this week’s offering the 20th century poet Hamish Henderson (1919-2002; see also weeks 212 and 409), a great supporter and interpreter of the folk tradition, adapts the form for more lyrical and reflective purposes as he imagines a dialogue between life and death. Life, you may be pleased to note, gets the last word.

Notes:

lugs                           ears
deef                          deaf
blin                           bleary
maun dwine              must fade
saft                           soft
maet                         food
ilka wean                  each child
crine                         shrivel
keeks                        peeps
dule                          misery
ae galliard hert         one gallant heart
ban                           curse
duddies braw            glad rags
lowp                         leap over
preeson wa’              prison wall
bigg                          build
gar                           make
pest                          plague, disease
syne                         next, thereafter

The Flyting o’ Life and Daith

Quo life, the warld is mine.
The floo’ers and trees, they’re a’ my ain.
I am the day, and the sunshine
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Your lugs are deef, your een are blin
Your floo’ers maun dwine in my bitter win’
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
I hae saft win’s, an’ healin’ rain,
Aipples I hae, an’ breid an’ wine
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Whit sterts in dreid, gangs doon in pain
Bairns wantin’ breid are makin’ mane
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
Your deidly wark, I ken it fine
There’s maet on earth for ilka wean
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Your silly sheaves crine in my fire
My worm keeks in your barn and byre
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
Dule on your een! Ae galliard hert
Can ban tae hell your blackest airt
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Your rantin’ hert, in duddies braw,
He winna lowp my preeson wa’
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
Though ye bigg preesons o’ marble stane
Hert’s luve ye cannae preeson in
Quo life, the world is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
I hae dug a grave, I hae dug it deep,
For war an’ the pest will gar ye sleep.
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
An open grave is a furrow syne.
Ye’ll no keep my seed frae fa’in in.
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Hamish Henderson