Author Archives: davidjsutton

Week 607: At The Gate, by Robert Graves

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This touching but slightly enigmatic lyric is one of Robert Graves’s final poems, written not long before the dementia twilight of his last years, and haunted by the consciousness that his powers and memories were slipping away from him, like a handful of dry sand trickling grain by grain between the fingers, however tight the grasp that tries to retain them.

It presents, at least for me, some challenges of interpretation. The first stanza is perfectly clear, but then things become more difficult. ‘Grappling a monster never seen before’ – this sounds to me like a scene from Greek myth, on which Graves was an authority, but I can’t quite place it. Echoes maybe of Nike, sometimes seen as an aspect of Athene, helping Zeus in his battle with the Titans? Or even of the Indian demon-slaying goddess Durga? Anyway, I take it to be an image of his Muse, representing beauty, order and clarity, struggling against the chaos threatening to overwhelm his mind, while Graves himself, rather pathetically, not only feels guilt at the situation but feels that she is holding him accountable.

And then I find the last line problematic. ‘Stealing green leaves to light an alien fire’. What’s this about? If you want to start a fire, green leaves do not seem a very good choice of material, but setting that aside, is this Graves’s way of saying that he has always been true to his poetic faith, where the ‘green leaves’ represent poetry – of protesting that he has never ignored the Muse’s calls upon him nor betrayed her by using his gift in the service of anything else, the ‘alien fire’ representing as it were an offering to some other divinity? (Incidentally, as far as the green leaves go, I am minded here of a beautiful image in R.S.Thomas’s poem ‘Prayer’: ‘the tree of poetry/that is eternity wearing/the green leaves of time’).

Anyway, an intriguing and moving poem, and if anyone has any better ideas about its imagery I should be glad to hear them.

At The Gate

Where are poems? Why do I now write none?
This can mean no lack of pens, nor lack of love,
But need perhaps of an increased magic –
Where have my ancient powers suddenly gone?

Tonight I caught a glimpse of her at the gate
Grappling a monster never seen before,
And jerking back its head. Had I come too late?
Her eyes blazed fire and I could look no more.

What could she hold against me? Never yet
Had I lied to her or thwarted her desire,
Rejecting prayers that I could never forget,
Stealing green leaves to light an alien fire.

Robert Graves

Week 606: Muse, by Anna Akhmatova

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The tragic life of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) will no doubt be familiar to many of my readers: censored and vilified by the Stalinist regime, her first husband executed, her son and her second husband imprisoned for years in a gulag, she steadfastly refused to leave Russia and continued to bear witness to her times in poems many of which could be circulated only among friends on scraps of paper, to be memorised and then burnt lest they should fall into the wrong hands.

‘The Muse’ is one of her most famous short poems. I can think of few poets with the right to make the laconic claim that concludes it: in most it would seem like a colossal chutzpah. But if such a right can be earned by long endurance and long devotion, then Akhmatova surely had it.

The translation that follows is my own.

Муза

Когда я ночью жду ее прихода,
Жизнь, кажется, висит на волоске.
Что почести, что юность, что свобода
Пред милой гостьей с дудочкой в руке.

И вот вошла. Откинув покрывало,
Внимательно взглянула на меня.
Ей говорю: «Ты ль Данту диктовала
Страницы Ада?» Отвечает: «Я».

Анна Ахматова

Muse

In the night I wait for her, my life
Suspended now upon a single strand.
Not fame, not youth, not freedom can match this
Beloved guest who comes with flute in hand.

And now she enters. Casting back her veil
She looks me through with long attentiveness.
I say, ‘Are you the one who guided Dante,
Who gave him the pages of Hell?’ She answers ‘Yes’.

Week 605: Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

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A friend has suggested that I feature the work of the very popular and prolific American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019). I was only vaguely aware of the name at that point, but thought the least I could do was pay her some proper attention and report back.

My conclusion (sorry, Andy) is that hers is very much the sort of poetry, nature-loving and reflective, that I want to like and usually do, but somehow hers doesn’t quite work for me. I’m not sure why. She’s certainly accessible, and I thoroughly approve of poets being accessible. She clearly appeals to popular sentiment, but again, nothing wrong with that: I am all in favour of readers having a genuine response to what does move them rather than a simulated response to what they feel should move them. I just find her a little unsubtle, a little too in your face. I think it would have been better if she had stood back more in her poems rather than pushing herself to their forefront so much. I feel too, as with many contemporary poets, that she could have benefited from a stricter form, the advantage of this, if used properly, being that it forces you to focus on what you really want and need to say and discourages you from merely wittering on. But I’ll get out of the way now and let you form your own opinions: this poem, ‘Wild Geese’, is one of her best-known and evidently best-loved.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

Week 604: The Lamentation Of The Old Pensioner, by W.B.Yeats

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I celebrated my eightieth birthday this week, and yesterday ran a carefully measured road mile in 8 minutes 37 seconds, which in age-adjusted terms is not that bad but in absolute terms is pathetic. I am an absolutist.

So this week’s choice was an easy one. It’s not entirely apposite. I never had, nor am ever likely to have, a chair nearest to the fire – I see myself more as a presence in the outer dark, quietly listening – but the general sentiment will do for me.

The Lamentation Of The Old Pensioner

Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree,
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me.

Though lads are making pikes again
For some conspiracy,
And crazy rascals rage their fill
At human tyranny,
My contemplations are of Time
That has transfigured me.

There’s not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory;
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.

W.B.Yeats

Week 603: Naming The Moths, by David Sutton

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We recently had an unusual visitor to our front door, where it clung for hours: this beautiful Lime Hawkmoth. I’m afraid my attempt at a photo doesn’t really do justice to it: the dark patches should be blacker, the green more vivid. It reminded me that I had once written a poem about moth names, which I find fascinating for their idiosyncratic poetry. They are not folk-names – since, unlike plants, Lepidoptera are not obviously useful the common folk never seem to have had much interest in differentiating and naming moths and the vernacular names are the invention of various gentleman naturalists who began to emerge in the eighteenth century: the full story can be found in Peter Marren’s very readable book ‘Emperors, Admirals and Chimney Sweepers’.

In the first five stanzas of my poem I imagine one of those early naturalists speaking in answer to someone who has hailed him as a poet, and modestly disclaiming the title. The remaining three stanzas are my own fanciful elegy for his kind.

‘arms and the man I did not sing’: an allusion to the opening words of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’: ‘Arma virumque cano’, I sing arms and the man.

Naming The Moths

‘You’d call me poet? Hardly, Sir,
         Arms and the man I did not sing,
But once upon an August night
         I named the Yellow Underwing.

‘We found on language’s great map
         A little corner, left all blank.
Such handiwork, without a name!
         (The Maiden’s Blush has me to thank).

‘How I recall that dew-damp eve
         Of honeysuckle-scented June
When first upon the Silver Y
         I set the summons of man’s rune.

‘I see them now, our haunts of old,
         Our hedgerow banks, our woodland glades,
Like memory itself they flit,
         My Early Thorns, my Angle Shades.

‘And some, you say, would honour us?
         Then, Sir, I am obliged to you,
But such was never our intent.
         We did what seemed our own to do.’

Swifts and Ushers, fold your wings
         Softly on the moonlit land.
They who loved you best are gone,
         Walking somewhere, lamp in hand,

Seeking down eternal lanes
         Moths the angels might have missed,
Proffering before the Throne
         ‘Some Amendments to Your List. ‘

Willow Beauty, Burnished Brass,
         China Mark and all the Plumes
With the Footmen gather, dance
         Lightly now above these tombs.

David Sutton

Week 602: After the Titanic, by Derek Mahon

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Following on from last week’s theme of the loss of the ‘Titanic’, this week’s offering is what I think is a very fine poem by the Irish poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020), the subject of which is J. Bruce Ismay. Ismay was chairman and managing director of the White Star Line who owned the ‘Titanic’, and he was aboard on her doomed maiden voyage. He survived but afterwards was bitterly criticised for allegedly taking up a place in the lifeboats while there were still women and children aboard. This may not in fact have been the case, as there was much confusion at the time and eyewitness accounts differ, but he was ever after haunted by the loss and what was perceived as his failure to do the honourable thing, and he became a solitary figure, spending his summers at his Connemara cottage on the west coast of Ireland.

I admire this poem for its empathy, with its masterly last line that says it all.

After the Titanic

     They said I got away in a boat
And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
     I sank as far that night as any
Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
     I turned to ice to hear my costly
Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of
     Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,
Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide
     In a lonely house behind the sea
Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes
     Silently at my door. The showers of
April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the
     Late light of June, when my gardener
Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed
     On seaward mornings after nights of
Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is
     I drown again with all those dim
Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul
     Screams out in the starlight, heart
Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.
     Include me in your lamentations.

Derek Mahon

Week 601: From a newspaper article on the wreck of the ‘Titanic’, by unknown author

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I don’t remember where I came across this week’s piece, but I believe it to be from a newspaper of the time, possibly the ‘Sunday Express’, describing the last hours of the ‘Titanic’ in 1912. It seems to me a very fine piece of journalism, restrained and moving, with just the one touch of purple prose at the end. Of course, one must always beware of myths springing up around such events, and it is the British way to extract what heroic capital they can from total disasters – look at Dunkirk – but there does seem to be plenty of corroboration from eyewitness sources for its general veracity, and if one is tempted to smile at the self-conscious heroism of some of the participants, then remember this: they put their lives where their mouths were.

‘Benjamin Guggenheim appeared on deck with his male secretary, both resplendent in evening clothes. He told a steward: ‘I think there is grave doubt that the men will get off. I am willing to play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the woman and children. We’ve dressed in our best and we are prepared to go down like gentlemen. If it should happen that my secretary and I both go down and you are saved, tell my wife I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward’.

Mrs Isidor Strauss also refused to go. ‘I’ve always stayed with my husband, so why should I leave him now? Where you go, I go’, she told him. As she rejected all pleas to get into a lifeboat, a friend said to Mr Strauss: ‘I’m sure nobody would object to an old gentleman like you getting in…’ He answered: ‘I will not go before other men’.

And that, wrote Walter Lord, was that. ‘Mrs Strauss tightened her grasp on his arm, patted it, smiled up at him, and then they sat together on a pair of deck chairs’.

… While the drama was unfolding, the ship’s band assembled on one of the decks and helped to keep up morale by playing ragtime tunes. ‘Many brave things were done that night’, wrote Beesley, ‘but none more brave than by those few men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower, and the sea rose higher and higher to where they stood, the music serving as their own immortal requiem’.

Week 600: The Performance, by James Dickey

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James Dickey (1923-1997) was an American poet and novelist who served as a radar operator in the Pacific during the Second World War. This week’s poem relates an incident from that war.

For once I’ll put my comments at the end, to avoid a major spoiler, so please read the poem first and form your own opinions.

The Performance

The last time I saw Donald Armstrong   
He was staggering oddly off into the sun,   
Going down, off the Philippine Islands.   
I let my shovel fall, and put that hand
Above my eyes, and moved some way to one side
That his body might pass through the sun,

And I saw how well he was not
Standing there on his hands,
On his spindle-shanked forearms balanced,   
Unbalanced, with his big feet looming and waving   
In the great, untrustworthy air
He flew in each night, when it darkened.

Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,   
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.
Next day, he toppled his head off
On an island beach to the south,

And the enemy’s two-handed sword   
Did not fall from anyone’s hands   
At that miraculous sight,
As the head rolled over upon
Its wide-eyed face, and fell
Into the inadequate grave

He had dug for himself, under pressure.   
Yet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows   
Months later, to see him again
In the sun, when I learned how he died,   
And imagined him, there,
Come, judged, before his small captors,

Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them—
The back somersault, the kip-up—
And at last, the stand on his hands,   
Perfect, with his feet together,
His head down, evenly breathing,
As the sun poured from the sea

And the headsman broke down   
In a blaze of tears, in that light   
Of the thin, long human frame   
Upside down in its own strange joy,
And, if some other one had not told him,   
Would have cut off the feet

Instead of the head,
And if Armstrong had not presently risen   
In kingly, round-shouldered attendance,   
And then knelt down in himself
Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done   
All things in this life that he could.

James Dickey

For me this poem is a real problem. When I first read it I thought it accomplished, moving, inspirational even. Then I came across a piece by a critic who had done some fact-checking. It turned out that the whole thing was pretty much made up. There had been a pilot called Donald Armstrong, but he had simply died in the crash. Another pilot with him had indeed been beheaded by the Japanese, but there had been no ‘performance’, no heroic gymnastics – that was something Dickey himself liked to do around camp, and he had simply projected it on to the situation in a kind of narcissistic wish fulfilment. I felt shocked and betrayed. But why, exactly? After all, we know that most of literature is ‘made up’. We don’t expect there to have been a real Odysseus who took ten years to get home after the Trojan War. We know Dante didn’t really get a guided tour of hell in the company of Virgil. We would not be perturbed to learn that the only pilgrimage Chaucer ever made to Canterbury was in his imagination, and we happily accept that Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is a gross slander on the real king of that name who apparently ruled wisely and well for many years. In short, we normally accept the principle of ‘Si non è vero, è ben trovato’ – it may not be true, but it makes a good story.

So why do I feel that Dickey’s falsification of the facts in this case is such a letdown? I think it is because one feels it as a violation of trust, that in this instance so much hinges on the events described being literally true that if they aren’t, then what’s the point of it all? I don’t mind poets making honest mistakes. Larkin beat himself up about ‘An Arundel Tomb’ because he quite unintentionally misremembered or misinterpreted a few details. ‘Everything went wrong with that poem: I got the hands wrong – it’s right-hand gauntlet really – and anyway the hands were a nineteenth-century addition, not pre-Baroque at all’. I can live with that, and still admire the poem. But if you’re just going to take real people and real events and make stuff up about them for effect, then maybe you’ve chosen the wrong vocation and should be in politics, not poetry.

And yet, and yet… the poem still moves me. It is very confusing. Should I simply accept Dickey’s own view that there is nothing wrong in letting imagination prevail over veracity? What does anyone think?

Week 599: The Winged Horse, by Hilaire Belloc

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Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953; see also weeks 112 and 263) was a rambunctious, opinionated, larger than life figure whose reputation has suffered partly due to his oft expressed dislike of Jews, though it should be said that he abominated Hitler and totally condemned Nazi anti-semitism. Nor was he alone among intellectuals at the time in holding problematic views: T.S.Eliot’s anti-semitic streak has not stopped him from being venerated in certain quarters, nor has H.G.Wells’s enthusiasm for culling non-white races in the name of eugenics inhibited a continuing interest in his fiction. So maybe Belloc too deserves to be cut some slack, and perhaps anyway we should be wary of demonising writers for one unacceptable opinion and should simply reject that opinion while seeing what else they might have to offer. Which in Belloc’s case, as far as poetry goes, is a quantity of skilful, entertaining and sometimes quite edgy light verse, and some pieces like this which hover somewhere between the light and the serious.

Apparently this particular poem was written in reaction to his failure to obtain a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and expresses a defiant scorn for the academia that has rejected him. It seems odd to me that a poet should wish to compromise his independence of mind by too close an assocation with an academic institution, but evidently it was a lifelong disappointment to him. The poem is a bit of a romantic muddle – I would like to know just how high you would have to fly a winged horse to see the English Channel from anywhere near Wantage, and I’m not sure what the cast of the ‘Chanson de Roland’ are doing on the nearby Lambourn Downs – it’s a long way from Roncesvalles. But you have to admit it goes with a swing.

The Winged Horse: this is a reference to Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, ridden by the hero Bellephoron who defeated the monster Chimaera. The point here is that Pegasus is said to have created the spring Hippocrene on Mount Helicon by striking his hoof in the earth, and drinking from the Hippocrene was thought to bring poetic inspiration, which ties in with ‘spouting well of joy’ in the last stanza.

Lambourn: a town in Berkshire famous as a centre for the training of racehorses, which are exercised on the nearby downs.

Roland: hero of the 11th century Old French epic poem ‘Chanson de Roland’, which is very loosely based on a real historical 8th century incident. In the poem the French emperor Charlemagne is leading his army back from Spain when its rearguard, under the command of his champion Count Roland, is ambushed in a narrow Pyrenean pass by a large army of Saracens (in reality it was a small army of Basques). Not wanting to be thought a coward, Roland refuses to summon help by blowing his horn, despite the repeated urgings of his friend Oliver (‘Cumpaign Rolland, car sunez vostre corn’, which I like to translate as ‘For f—k’s sake, Roland, just blow the bloody horn!’). As a result the entire rearguard is wiped out, with Roland the last to fall.

Marches: here used in the sense of borderlands – the historical Roland was military governor of the Breton March, responsible for defending Francia‘s frontier against the Bretons.

Turpin: a martial archbishop who fell with Roland, the last of his companions to do so. It may seem odd that a churchman should also be a doughty warrior, but it is well attested that among William the Conqueror’s retinue at the Battle of Hastings was a certain Bishop Odo. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that as his calling forbade him to shed blood, he eschewed the use of a sword and instead bashed people’s brains in with a club. So that was all right.

The Winged Horse

It’s ten years ago today you turned me out o’ doors
To cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shores
And I thought about the all-in-all, oh more than I can tell!
But I caught a horse to ride upon and I rode him very well,
He had flames behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side,
And I ride, and I ride!

I rode him out of Wantage and I rode him up the hill,
And there I saw the Beacon in the morning standing still,
Inkpen and Hackpen and southward and away
High through the middle airs in the strengthening of the day,
And there I saw the channel-glint and England in her pride
And I ride, and I ride!

And once atop of Lambourn Down towards the hill of Clere
I saw the Host of Heaven in rank and Michael with his spear,
And Turpin out of Gascony and Charlemagne the Lord
And Roland of the marches with his hand upon his sword
For the time he should have need of it, and forty more beside
And I ride, and I ride!

For you that took the all-in-all, the things you left were three,
A loud voice for singing and keen eyes to see
And a spouting well of joy that never yet was dried
And I ride.

Hilaire Belloc

Week 598: Love After Love, by Derek Walcott

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Another of Derek Walcott’s intriguing shorter lyrics, this one apparently on the theme of finding peace and healing after a failed relationship, or perhaps more than one failed relationship (Walcott was divorced three times), by learning to embrace oneself rather than another, and thus at last becoming self-sufficient in one’s own identity.

Looked at from this angle, the sentiment of the poem seems debatable. Surely if there is one thing that most of us, and perhaps especially poets, are not short on it is self-love, and maybe those failed relationships wouldn’t fail so readily were it not so.

But there may be another way of interpreting the poem. The fact is that poets, perhaps more than most of us, live with the perpetual fret of not having world enough and time, to love all that they would wish to love and be all that they would wish to be, and I think these lines can also be taken as a reassurance that this state of self-dissatisfaction can have an end, that there may wait for us a final contentment, a time to reap what we have sown. ‘Sit. Feast on your life.’ Well, it’s a nice idea. Me, I’m still fretting.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott