Author Archives: davidjsutton

Week 597: Filling Station, by Elizabeth Bishop

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It’s an unlikely conjunction, but this poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) puts me in mind of Patrick Kavanagh, the man whose credo was ‘Nothing whatever is by love debarred’. A garage forecourt, just like Kavanagh’s chest hospital, seems an unlikely place in which to find poetry, but I guess that if you bring to the business a kind of universal empathy, a reverence for the fact, then anything is possible.

Note how the poem moves from a tone of apparent disdain, albeit mingled with fascination, to a final humbling realisation that here too a spirit of love is at work, expressing itself in the family’s valiant efforts to add homely touches to their challenging and work-impregnated environment.

I won’t say that I exactly like this poem – in fact I feel a strong urge to clean my hands with Swarfega after reading it – but I have to admire a poet so prepared to boldly go where few if any have gone before her.

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Elizabeth Bishop

Week 596: South Of My Days, by Judith Wright

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Judith Wright’s fine evocation of a vanished Australia, first published in 1946, gives full rein to her intense feeling for landscape and for the past of her people. There is decay here and desolation, and the sense of a heritage under siege, conveyed through images of winter and darkness and forgetfulness, but there is also resilience and a note of defiance. ‘No one is listening’ – this reflects Judith Wright’s fear that no one was paying attention to those issues that concerned her all her life: the wrongs of the colonial past, Aboriginal land rights, the environment. But of course, as the poem proves, someone was listening, and now the stories that went walking in her sleep are passed on to walk in ours too.

‘that tableland’: this refers to Judith’s home country, a region of the Great Dividing Range in northern New South Wales where she was brought up.

‘medlar’: a kind of tree yielding an edible fruit, usually eaten when bletted, i.e. in a softened state beyond ripeness.

‘Droving that year’: this refers to cattle droving, which was central to Judith’s family life. The first anecdote concerns a time of drought, when sixty cattle were lost at a river crossing and a sulky – a kind of horse-drawn cart – came into camp carrying a dead driver with flies announcing the death.

‘Charleville’: a town in Queensland.

‘the Hunter’: a river in New South Wales.

‘McIntyre’: the MacIntyre river in Queensland.

‘Bogongs’: an area of the high country of Victoria; this time the hazard is snow, and more cattle perish in blizzards: ‘we brought them down, what aren’t there yet’.

Tamworth: a city in northern New South Wales.

Thunderbolt: the name of a famous bushranger. The drover tips him off that troopers are on his tail.

‘True or not’: the factual accuracy of the anecdotes that the old man produces like a conjuror shuffling cards is less important to the poet than what he represents: the lore of her people, their ancient storytelling tradition.

South Of My Days

South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite –
clean, lean,  hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.

O cold the black-frost night. The walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle
hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer
will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler-roses,
thrust its hot face in here to tell another yarn –
a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter.
Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones.
Seventy years are hived in him like old honey.

Droving that year, Charleville to the Hunter,
nineteen-one it was, and the drought beginning;
sixty head left at the McIntyre, the mud round them
hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died
in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on,
stopped at Sandy Camp and waited in the evening.
It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees.
Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand –
cruel to keep them alive – and the river was dust.

Or mustering up in the Bogongs in the autumn
when the blizzards came early. Brought them down; we
brought them down, what aren’t there yet. Or driving for Cobb’s on the run
up from Tamworth – Thunderbolt at the top of Hungry Hill,
and I give him a wink. I wouldn’t wait long, Fred,
not if I was you. The troopers are just behind,
coming for that job at the Hillgrove. He went like a luny,
him on his big black horse.

Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards.
True or not, it’s all the same; and the frost on the roof
cracks like a whip, and the back-log break into ash.
Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over.
No-one is listening
South of my days’ circle
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.

Judith Wright

Week 595: Dido reproaching Aeneas, from Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, Book IV

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This is one of the great passages of classical literature, from Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, Book IV. In case anyone is unfamiliar with the story, Aeneas and his companions, fleeing from the sack of Troy, are shipwrecked on the coast of Libya, where they are taken in and entertained by the Queen of Carthage, Dido. Predictably she falls for Aeneas and they have a lot of fun together, including a hunting trip in which they take refuge from a storm in a cave where, to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning, it appears that their relationship is consummated. So far so good, but Jupiter, who has other plans for Aeneas, is not too happy about this and sends his messenger Mercury to pay Aeneas a visit and speak to him on the lines of ‘Look son, enough of the hanky-panky, you do remember that you are supposed to be founding a new kingdom in Italy?’. Reluctantly Aeneas prepares to set sail, meaning to tell Dido at some convenient moment, but she gets wind of his plans and angrily confronts him. He tries to excuse himself with a ‘Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ speech, but women, I have noted, tend to be much less impressed by that sort of sentiment than are men, and in the speech below she gives him both barrels in reply.

Blake said of ‘Paradise Lost’ that Milton ‘was of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. I think it would be too much to claim that Virgil was of Dido’s party without knowing it: I have no doubt that he had a genuine belief in the Roman virtues of duty and piety, even setting aside the fact that as an intimate of the Emperor Augustus such a belief would be politic for him. But that does not stop his empathy for Dido and her suffering being remarkable in a man of the time.

The translation that follows is my own.

Dardanus: in  legend, the son of Zeus and Electra, and ancestor of the Trojan race.

‘No goddess was your mother…’: Aeneas was said to be the product of a union between the Trojan prince Anchises and the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

Caucasus: a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, in classical times a byword for wildness.

The shift at line 7 into referring to Aeneas in the third person suggests that she can no longer bear to address him directly.‘and this is what the gods do…’: the tone here is heavily sarcastic, as if she does not believe a word of his protestations.

Talia dicentem iamdudum aversa tuetur
huc illuc volvens oculos totumque pererrat
luminibus tacitis et sic accensa profatur:
‘nec tibi diva parens generis nec Dardanus auctor,               
perfide, sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens
Caucasus Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres.
nam quid dissimulo aut quae me ad maiora reservo?
num fletu ingemuit nostro? num lumina flexit?
num lacrimas victus dedit aut miseratus amantem est?               
quae quibus anteferam? iam iam nec maxima Iuno
nec Saturnius haec oculis pater aspicit aequis.
nusquam tuta fides. eiectum litore, egentem
excepi et regni demens in parte locavi.
amissam classem, socios a morte reduxi               
(heu furiis incensa feror!): nunc augur Apollo,
nunc Lyciae sortes, nunc et Iove missus ab ipso
interpres divum fert horrida iussa per auras.
scilicet is superis labor est, ea cura quietos
sollicitat. neque te teneo neque dicta refello:               
i, sequere Italiam ventis, pete regna per undas.
spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,
supplicia hausurum scopulis et nomine Dido
saepe vocaturum. sequar atris ignibus absens
et, cum frigida mors anima seduxerit artus,               
omnibus umbra locis adero. dabis, improbe, poenas.
audiam et haec Manis veniet mihi fama sub imos.’

As he spoke, she looked him up and down,
A silent stare, surveying the whole man
And then in anger spoke to him. ‘Deceiver,
No goddess was your mother, nor Dardanus
The father of your race: harsh Caucasus
Begat you on the rocks, and tigers reared you.
But why hold back? What worse can come? Was he
Moved by my weeping? Did he look at me?
Did he shed tears, outargued? Pity me?
What can I cleave to now? The gods themselves,
Jupiter, son of Saturn, and great Juno
Look down on this and with no friendly eyes.
Where now shall faith be found? I welcomed him,
A castaway upon my shore, a beggar,
I saved his ships, I saved his friends from death,
With foolish heart I shared with him my realm.
Driven by the Furies, now I burn.
And so, you say, Apollo prophesies,
The oracles proclaim, Jove’s messenger
Carries his commandments through the air.
And this is what the gods do, this is what
Troubles them in their tranquillity?
But go, I will not keep you then, nor argue.
Go, seek your Italy, the winds be with you,
Find your land beyond the waves. And yet,
If the good gods have power, I pray that you
May drink your cup of death among the reefs,
Over and over calling my name, Dido.
I’ll follow you from far off with dark fires
And when my soul is sundered by cold death
My ghost will be about you. Cruel one,
You shall be punished, and I’ll know: that news
Will reach me even in the depths of Hades’.

Week 594: To Earthward, by Robert Frost

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This poem works off the premise that as we grow older our jaded senses require ever stronger stimuli to engage them. I am not sure that this is entirely true. If it is true then what on earth are today’s young disco fans going to do in later life when they want to up their aural ante? Stand next to a Saturn rocket on takeoff? But let’s grant the poet his perception. The quest for such ever-increasing stimuli leads the poet to a darkly ironic imagining of the grave as the ultimate sensory experience: ‘to feel the earth as rough/To all my length’. This may seem morbid, but there is a paradox here: Frost, who had a good deal of personal tragedy in his life, may indeed at times have been, like Keats, ‘half in love with easeful death’, but that does not stop poems like this one from being a sensuous affirmation of life. The same paradox is to be found in ‘Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening’ (see week 490), where a longing for the final sleep does not preclude the exquisite sensibility of ‘easy wind and downy flake’.

To Earthward

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of – was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

Robert Frost

Week 593: After The Storm, by Derek Walcott

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The Caribbean poet Derek Walcott (1930-2017) wrote poems dense with imagery and allusion that sometimes give me the feeling of pushing my way through the undergrowth of a tropical forest: an exotic and interesting landscape but not one in which I feel entirely at home. Though he is probably best known for his long and complex epic poem ‘Omeros’ the best way into his work may be through some of his shorter lyrics, such as this week’s offering, which I take as portraying a man who has been through much and is coming to terms with age and loss by letting the burden of identity dissolve into the sea and space around him. It is a little strange, but after after a reading or two the strangeness abates to leave a calm beauty of night and stars.

‘But things must fall’: I wonder if there is an echo of scripture here, as when Jesus speaks about the end times – cf. Mark 13.25 ‘And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken’.

‘cotch’: Afro-Caribbean slang for to relax, hang out

‘Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea’: Shabine is the principal figure in another, longer Walcott poem, ‘The Schooner Flight’, where he appears as a conflicted figure trying to come to terms with, or to escape from, the complexities of his mixed race heritage and his people’s colonial past. I think Shabine is clearly to a great extent a stand-in for Walcott himself, and this last line of the poem is a statement of the poet’s legacy.

After The Storm

There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.
But things must fall, and so it always was,
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam
as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

Derek Walcott

Week 592: Beeswing, by Richard Thompson

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I think that this beautiful ballad by the singer/songwriter Richard Thompson is one of the greatest of contemporary folksongs. It seems to me poetry for its substance, its detail, its turns of phrase and above all for the ache at its heart. Apparently it was inspired in part by the life of the remarkable a cappella folksinger Anne Briggs, though it should not be taken as autobiographical: Thompson met Anne on only two occasions, and the content is based more on conversations about her with fellow-singer Sandy Denny. It certainly captures her wild, free and somewhat wayward spirit: while much in demand in the folk scene of the sixties it seems that getting her to turn up for gigs was a nightmare, though this didn’t stop her from being highly influential on a whole raft of other singers. In a way the song seems like an elegy not just for one singer but for a whole decade when for a time the future offered hope to the young in a way scarcely thinkable now.

The song has been covered by numerous artists but I still think Richard’s own version is the best.

‘the summer of love’: 1968, the year of student protests, especially against the escalating war in Vietnam
‘steamie’: a Scots word for a public laundry
‘Caldrum Street’: a street in Dundee, Scotland
‘the Gower’: a coastal area in South Wales
‘White Horse’: a brand of whisky

Beeswing

I was nineteen when I came to town,
They called it the summer of love.
They were burning babies, burning flags,
The hawks against the doves.
I took a job in the steamie
Down on Caldrum Street,
I fell in love with a laundry girl
Who was working next to me.

She was a rare thing
Fine as a beeswing,
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away.
She was a lost child,
O she was running wild,
She said ‘As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay,
And you wouldn’t want me any other way.’

Brown hair zig-zag round her face,
And a look of half-surprise.
Like a fox caught in the headlights
There was animal in her eyes.
She said ‘Young man, oh can’t you see
I’m not the factory kind.
If you don’t take me out of here
I’ll surely lose my mind.’

She was a rare thing
Fine as a beeswing,
So fine that I might crush here where she lay.
She was a lost child,
O she was running wild,
She said ‘As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay,
And you wouldn’t want me any other way.’

We busked around the market towns
And picked fruit down in Kent
And we could tinker lamps and pots
And knives wherever we went.
And I said that we might settle down,
Get a few acres dug,
Fire burning in the hearth
And babies on the rug.
She said ‘O man, you’re a foolish man,
It surely sounds like hell,
You might be lord of half the world
You’ll not own me as well.’

She was a rare thing
Fine as a beeswing,
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away.
She was a lost child,
O she was running wild,
She said ‘As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay,
And you wouldn’t want me any other way.’

We was camping down the Gower one time,
The work was pretty good.
She thought we shouldn’t wait for the frost
I thought maybe we should.
We was drinking more in those days
And tempers reached a pitch.
And like a fool I let her run
With a rambling itch.

Oh the last I hear she’s sleeping
Back on the Derby beat,
White Horse in her hip pocket
And a wolfhound at her feet.
And they say she even married once
A man called Romany Brown
But even a gypsy caravan
Was too much settling down.
And they say her flower has faded now,
Hard weather and hard booze,
But maybe it’s just the price you pay
For the chains you refuse.

O she was a rare thing
Fine as a beeswing,
And I miss her more than ever words can say.
If I could just taste
All of her wildness now,
If I could hold her in my arms again
And I wouldn’t want her any other way.

Richard Thompson

Week 591: Die Grenadiere, by Heinrich Heine

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This ballad by the German poet Heinrich Heine (see also weeks 70 and 457) first appeared in a collection of 1822. It is a testimony to the fact that in France, and even beyond it, Napoleon Bonaparte was regarded as a Good Thing. This was not the case in Britain, of course, but even here, as many songs and stories of the time attest, old Boney was regarded with fascination and even a grudging amount of respect.

Which just goes to show that if a leader wants the allegiance of a people, all he has to do is offer them three things: pride, a sense of destiny, and an excuse for behaving very badly towards members of other tribes.

The translation that follows is my own.

Die Grenadiere

Nach Frankreich zogen zwei Grenadier,
Die waren in Rußland gefangen.
Und als sie kamen ins deutsche Quartier,
Sie ließen die Köpfe hangen.

Da hörten sie beide die traurige Mär:
Daß Frankreich verloren gegangen,
Besiegt und zerschlagen das große Heer –
Und der Kaiser, der Kaiser gefangen.

Da weinten zusammen die Grenadier
Wohl ob der kläglichen Kunde.
Der eine sprach: Wie weh wird mir,
Wie brennt meine alte Wunde!

Der andre sprach: Das Lied ist aus,
Auch ich möcht mit dir sterben,
Doch hab ich Weib und Kind zu Haus,
Die ohne mich verderben.

Was schert mich Weib, was schert mich Kind,
Ich trage weit beßres Verlangen;
Laß sie betteln gehn, wenn sie hungrig sind –
Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser gefangen!

Gewähr mir, Bruder, eine Bitt:
Wenn ich jetzt sterben werde,
So nimm meine Leiche nach Frankreich mit,
Begrab mich in Frankreichs Erde.

Das Ehrenkreuz am roten Band
sollst du aufs Herz mir legen;
Die Flinte gib mir in die Hand,
Und gürt mir um den Degen.

So will ich liegen und horchen still,
Wie eine Schildwach, im Grabe,
Bis einst ich höre Kanonengebrüll
Und wiehernder Rosse Getrabe.

Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab,
Viel Schwerter klirren und blitzen;
Dann steig ich gewaffnet hervor aus dem Grab,
Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu schützen.

Heinrich Heine

The Grenadiers

Two grenadiers were bound for France,
Returned from Russia’s snow,
And when they crossed the German line
They let their heads hang low.

For there they heard the tragic tale
Of France by fate forsaken:
Its army conquered and destroyed,
Its emperor, o taken!

The grenadiers together wept
This woeful news to learn.
One spoke: ‘Such hurt this does to me,
It makes my old wound burn’.

The other spoke: ‘The song is done,
And I would die with thee,
But I’ve a wife and child at home
Who’ll perish without me’.

‘What care I for wife and child
When better wants awaken!
Let them go beg, or let them starve.
My emperor, o taken!

‘But grant me, brother, one request
For what my death is worth:
Bear my body back to France
To bury in French earth.

‘My honour cross with ribbon red
Upon my heart be laid,
Place my musket in my hand,
And gird me with my blade.

‘So I will lie and listen still,
A sentry evermore,
Till neighing stallions stamp above
And I hear cannon roar.

‘Then I will know he rides again,
Swords flashing far afield,
And climb accoutred from my grave
My emperor to shield!’

Week 590: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, by Catullus

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This week we are back with poor Gaius Valerius Catullus (see also week 203), this time at an earlier stage of his doomed passion for Clodia Metelli. Alas, it is doubtful whether she was much impressed by this most famous and eloquent of ‘carpe diem’ poems. Possibly she felt that it involved all too much arithmetic and that the demands it placed on her were a little unreasonable. After all, allow ten seconds per kiss (I assume we are talking here about a proper full on osculation, not a mere peck on the cheek), and we are looking at 10 x 3300 = 33000 seconds = 9 hours 10 minutes of solid snogging. A girl does have other things to do with her time, you know, one can hear her saying…

The translation that follows is my own, though pretty much anyone who has ever done Latin has had a go at this one, so alternative offerings shouldn’t be hard to find.

Catullus 5

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love,
And count the muttered malice of old men
As worth no more to us than a brass farthing.
Suns may set and suns may rise again;
For us, when our brief day is done, there waits
Only the sleep of one eternal night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
A thousand more, and then another hundred,
Then yet another thousand, then a hundred;
And then, when we have made such multitudes
We’ll mix them up, till we ourselves lose count,
That none of ill intent may do us spite
Who seek to know the number of our kisses.

Week 589: Nick and the Candlestick, by Sylvia Plath

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I have never quite made up my mind about Sylvia Plath. Is she the great poet her admirers claim her to be, or is she more of a Rupert Brooke figure, a poet of genuine but modest attainment who happened to fit perfectly a role that the Zeitgeist had created for her, and has consequently been exalted somewhat above her station? She makes an interesting contrast to her onetime husband, Ted Hughes. Ted was interested in everything, which I thoroughly approve; Sylvia Plath seems to have been mainly interested in Sylvia Plath, which is fine up to a point but can get a bit claustrophobic. And I feel she sometimes labours too much for effect, piling on image after image in a slightly frenzied way that ends up by diluting rather than reinforcing her message.

But there we are. Poetry is a kind of metaverse of many worlds through which our disembodied minds voyage, sometimes immediately drawn to one of those worlds, sometimes simply passing one by, sometimes orbiting one at a wary distance, interested but not wholly committed. I am still orbiting Sylvia, but here at least is one poem of hers with which I can more easily identify than with some others. Its concatenation of resonant images is remarkable (but again, maybe just a little over the top?), but beyond that it has a tenderness of feeling that I can relate to, perhaps because it brings back memories of comforting my firstborn when for a brief spell he would wake in the night crying, and I would rub his back and sing to him tunelessly until, probably out of sheer self-preservation, he fell asleep.

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Sylvia Plath



Week 588: The Atavist, by Robert W. Service

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Once as a teenager, when I was just coming into poetry, I chanced at a church jumble sale upon the ‘Collected Poems’ of Robert W. Service, and after a quick glance decided it was worth risking a threepenny bit on. For those deprived souls who know only our modern decimal currency, I should explain that in real money twelve pennies made one shilling while twenty shillings, and hence two hundred and forty pennies, made one pound. Back in the nineteen fifties a threepenny bit would get you a Mars bar, so it was a tough choice, but on the whole I don’t regret it. True, when I got the book home a lot of it seemed to me no better than doggerel, but here and there were poems about the Canadian Arctic that did give my young imagination the same kind of shiver I got from some of Jack London’s stories, and now get from more subtle vehicles like Barry Lopez’s ‘Arctic Dreams’ with its evocation of a strange inhuman beauty. This week’s offering ‘The Atavist’, for example, falls into the category of what I would now call good bad verse – Service was clearly much influenced by Kipling, and while this is a long way from Kipling at his best, it’s maybe not so far from Kipling at his second best.

Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was born in Lancashire of Scottish descent but moved to America and spent much time drifting from job to job, from Mexico to British Columbia before achieving fame as ‘the Bard of the Yukon’, initially on the strength of the immensely popular ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’, followed by ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’. His sales were phenomenal (he made the equivalent of three million dollars on his first book alone) but he seems to have remained a fairly modest and level-headed man, working in the First World War as a stretcher-bearer and ambulance driver, and dismissing his own work as ‘verse, not poetry…Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened.’ Which makes him, I think, a more honest and attractive figure than many a better poet, even if that, one must ruefully acknowledge, is not really what the game’s about.

The Atavist

What are you doing here, Tom Thorne, on the white top-knot o’ the world,
Where the wind has the cut of a naked knife and the stars are rapier keen?
Hugging a smudgy willow fire, deep in a lynx robe curled,
You that’s a lord’s own son, Tom Thorne — what does your madness mean?

Go home, go home to your clubs, Tom Thorne! home to your evening dress!
Home to your place of power and pride, and the feast that waits for you!
Why do you linger all alone in the splendid emptiness,
Scouring the Land of the Little Sticks on the trail of the caribou?

Why did you fall off the Earth, Tom Thorne, out of our social ken?
What did your deep damnation prove? What was your dark despair?
Oh with the width of a world between, and years to the count of ten,
If they cut out your heart to-night, Tom Thorne, her name would be graven there!

And you fled afar for the thing called Peace, and you thought you would find it here,
In the purple tundras vastly spread, and the mountains whitely piled;
It’s a weary quest and a dreary quest, but I think that the end is near;
For they say that the Lord has hidden it in the secret heart of the Wild.

And you know that heart as few men know, and your eyes are fey and deep,
With a ‘something lost’ come welling back from the raw, red dawn of life:
With woe and pain have you greatly lain, till out of abysmal sleep
The soul of the Stone Age leaps in you, alert for the ancient strife.

And if you came to our feast again, with its pomp and glee and glow,
I think you would sit stone-still, Tom Thorne, and see in a daze of dream,
A mad sun goading to frenzied flame the glittering gems of the snow,
And a monster musk-ox bulking black against the blood-red gleam.

I think you would see berg-battling shores, and stammer and halt and stare,
With a sudden sense of the frozen void, serene and vast and still;
And the aching gleam and the hush of dream, and the track of a great white bear,
And the primal lust that surged in you as you sprang to make your kill.

I think you would hear the bull-moose call, and the glutted river roar;
And spy the hosts of the caribou shadow the shining plain;
And feel the pulse of the Silences, and stand elate once more
On the verge of the yawning vastitudes that call to you in vain.

For I think you are one with the stars and the sun, and the wind and the wave and the dew;
And the peaks untrod that yearn to God, and the valleys undefiled;
Men soar with wings, and they bridle kings, but what is it all to you,
Wise in the ways of the wilderness, and strong with the strength of the Wild?

You have spent your life, you have waged your strife where never we play a part;
You have held the throne of the Great Unknown, you have ruled a kingdom vast:

. . . . .

But to-night there’s a strange, new trail for you, and you go, O weary heart!
To the place and rest of the Great Unguessed . . . at last, Tom Thorne, at last.

Robert W. Service