Author Archives: davidjsutton

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

Week 587: It Rains, by Edward Thomas

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I imagine most people first come upon Edward Thomas through the celebrated ‘Adlestrop’, but my own acquaintance began with this lesser known but entirely characteristic piece. I was immediately attracted by its beautiful precision – the diamonds of rain on the grassblades, the unshaken petals further down, the parsley stalks that ‘twilight has fined to naught’. I did not fully appreciate at the time that how deeply sad a poem this is, and how subtly revealing of the writer’s temperament. It turns on that almost throwaway phrase that begins the third verse, ‘Unless alone..’, an admission that he can no longer respond to human love as he did in the first flush of courtship, that happiness now is a thing to be sought only in solitude. This would of course have been hurtful to those who loved him, particularly his long-suffering wife Helen, but that’s how it goes: a poet’s passion for truth can be a sharp blade on which others cut themselves.

Parsley: this is of course cow-parsley with its white umbels, not the garden herb.

It Rains

It rains, and nothing stirs within the fence
Anywhere through the orchard’s untrodden, dense
Forest of parsley. The great diamonds
Of rain on the grassblades there is none to break,
Or the fallen petals further down to shake.

And I am nearly as happy as possible
To search the wilderness in vain though well,
To think of two walking, kissing there,
Drenched, yet forgetting the kisses of the rain:
Sad, too, to think that never, never again,

Unless alone, so happy shall I walk
In the rain. When I turn away, on its fine stalk
Twilight has fined to naught, the parsley flower
Figures, suspended still and ghostly white,
The past hovering as it revisits the light.

Edward Thomas

Week 586: The Rider at the Gate, by John Masefield

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I think that this is one of the somewhat underrated John Masefield’s finest poems, showing his gift for vivid historical reconstruction, and his masterful use of a metre that drives the poem like the hoofbeats of a galloping horse. I imagine the story of Caesar’s assassination is too well known to need explanation, but just as a reminder Pompey had been at one time a political ally of Julius Caesar, and along with him and Crassus a member of the First Triumvirate, but later he became Caesar’s enemy and after being defeated by him at the Battle of Pharsalus fled to Egypt, where a faction thinking to curry favour with Caesar had him killed and decapitated. Caesar was apparently not as pleased as they had hoped – these Bullingdon types may feud among themselves but they soon close ranks when there are lower orders to be kept in their place. This happened in 48 BC, four years before Caesar’s own death.

Calpurnia: Caesar’s third or fourth wife, and wife to him at the time of his assassination.

Cressets: torches. Note how the guttering of the torches (i.e. their flickering in the wind as if about to go out) symbolically prefigures the coming end of Caesar’s life.

Loaning: a lane, an open space for passage between fields of corn; a place for milking cows.

The Rider at the Gate

A windy night was blowing on Rome,
The cressets guttered on Caesar’s home,
The fish-boats, moored at the bridge, were breaking
The rush of the river to yellow foam.

The hinges whined to the shutters shaking,
When clip-clop-clep came a horse-hoof raking
The stones of the road at Caesar’s gate;
The spear-butts jarred at the guard’s awaking.

‘Who goes there?’ said the guard at the gate.
‘What is the news, that you ride so late?’
‘News most pressing, that must be spoken
To Caesar alone, and that cannot wait.’

‘The Caesar sleeps; you must show a token
That the news suffice that he be awoken.
What is the news, and whence do you come?
For no light cause may his sleep be broken.’

‘Out of the dark of the sands I come,
From the dark of death, with news for Rome.
A word so fell that it must be uttered
Though it strike the soul of the Caesar dumb.’

Caesar turned in his bed and muttered,
With a struggle for breath the lamp-flame guttered;
Calpurnia heard her husband moan:
‘The house is falling,
The beaten men come into their own.’

‘Speak your word,’ said the guard at the gate;
‘Yes, but bear it to Caesar straight,
Say, “Your murderers’ knives are honing,
Your killers’ gang is lying in wait.”

‘Out of the wind that is blowing and moaning,
Through the city palace and the country loaning,
I cry, “For the world’s sake, Caesar, beware,
And take this warning as my atoning.

‘“Beware of the Court, of the palace stair,
Of the downcast friend who speaks so fair,
Keep from the Senate, for Death is going
On many men’s feet to meet you there.”

‘I, who am dead, have ways of knowing
Of the crop of death that the quick are sowing.
I, who was Pompey, cry it aloud
From the dark of death, from the wind blowing.

‘I, who was Pompey, once was proud,
Now I lie in the sand without a shroud;
I cry to Caesar out of my pain,
“Caesar beware, your death is vowed.”’

The light grew grey on the window-pane,
The windcocks swung in a burst of rain,
The window of Caesar flung unshuttered,
The horse-hoofs died into wind again.

Caesar turned in his bed and muttered,
With a struggle for breath the lamp-flame guttered;
Calpurnia heard her husband moan:
‘The house is falling,
The beaten men come into their own.’

John Masefield

Week 585: Moonlit Night, by Du Fu

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Du Fu (formerly Tu Fu) was a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, 712-770, reckoned by those who know to rank, along with his friend Li Bai (formerly Li Po), as China’s greatest poet, and indeed one of the great poets of the world. (The annoying name changes are due to new transliteration practices rather than to posthumous acts of deed poll). His work is marked by its range and humanity, its lyrical awareness of the natural world and its adherence to strict forms.

This poem is about being separated by war from his wife and children, and thinking one moonlit night about how the same moon will be shining on them far away.

I do not speak Chinese, which is a shameful admission for a poet to have to make but you know how it is, the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne… The translation is mine, therefore, but drawing on a prose crib for the literal meaning, so I offer it with even more reservations than usual.

Chang’an: a former city in north central China.
Fu-chou: (Fuzhou or Foochow), the capital of Fujian province, China. A long way from Chang’an.
White as jade: I thought jade was green but apparently it can be all sorts of colours, and at times white jade has been prized as a symbol of nobility.

Moonlit Night

Tonight at Fu-chou, she watches this same moon
Alone in our room. And my children, far away,
Are too young to understand what keeps me from them
Or even remember Chang’an. By now her hair

Will be scented by the mist, her arms, white as jade,
Be chilled in its clear light. When will it find us
Together again, the curtains drawn back, its shine
Silvering the tear tracks on each face?

Du Fu

Week 584: Ode To Billie Joe, by Bobby Gentry

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I take my poetry wherever I find it, and while I may not often find it in popular song, I do feel that this ballad by the American singer-songwriter Bobby Gentry, first released in 1967, with its claustrophobic atmosphere and slow oblique build of narrative tension, is a masterpiece of storytelling quite worthy to stand beside the great mediaeval ballads of illicit love and infanticide such as ‘Mary Hamilton’ and ‘Down By The Greenwood Side’.

For those unfamiliar with the song, it is the story of a young girl living in the Mississipi Delta in the southern U.S. who hears that her childhood friend Billy Joe has committed suicide by jumping of the Tallahatchie Bridge. Slowly we realise that she and Billy Joe have been lovers, that some social gap has made an open relationship impossible, that nonetheless she has become pregnant by Billy Joe, that she has delivered, or perhaps aborted, the child in secret, and that she and Billy Joe have together disposed of it by throwing it off that same bridge, leaving Billy Joe a guilt that he cannot live with. All this is conveyed very skilfully by hints and conversational exchanges, with nothing being made explicit.

I must at this point emphasise that this is my personal interpretation of the song, though I believe one shared by many other listeners. Bobby Gentry herself has consistently refused to give any clarification of the lyrics, especially in the matter of what was thrown off the bridge. She gives as her reason a wish for people to focus instead on the indifference of the supporting characters, the cultural lack of empathy, but I wonder if there is also an element of wanting to preserve the mystery, and also, maybe, of not wanting to commit to what seems to me by far the most compelling interpretation of the narrative on the grounds that it might be rather strong meat for a modern American audience.

Ode To Billy Joe

Was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay
And at dinnertime we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door y’all remember to wipe your feet
And then she said I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge
Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits please
There’s five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow
And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billie Joe MacAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn’t I talkin’ to him after church last Sunday night?
I’ll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don’t seem right
I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge
And now you tell me Billie Joe’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Mama said to me, Child, what’s happened to your appetite?
I’ve been cookin’ all mornin’ and you haven’t touched a single bite
That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today
Said he’d be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin’ off the Tallahatchie Bridge

A year has come and gone since we heard the news ’bout Billie Joe
And brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus goin’ ’round, Papa caught it and he died last spring
And now mama doesn’t seem to wanna do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin’ flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Bobby Gentry

Week 583: Skin, by Philip Larkin

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Philip Larkin, like his poetic hero Hardy, was much haunted by the passing of the years, so it seems appropriate to welcome in 2024, that will be my own 80th, with this poem that I have long admired for its typically Larkinesque combination of gloom redeemed by grace, and its skilfully sustained teasing out of an extended metaphor. Not that it offers any consolation either for the ageing process or for the lost opportunities of youth, but there it is: you don’t go to Larkin for comfort (think too of those bleak poems ‘Aubade’ and ‘The Old Fools’) but you do go for accomplishment and a certain face-the-facts courage. There may be resignation in the sentiment, but there is defiance in the artistry.

Skin

Obedient daily dress,
You cannot always keep
That unfakable young surface.
You must learn your lines –
Anger, amusement, sleep;
Those few forbidding signs

Of the continuous coarse
Sand-laden wind, time;
You must thicken, work loose
Into an old bag
Carrying a soiled name.
Parch then; be roughened; sag;

And pardon me, that I
Could find, when you were new,
No brash festivity
To wear you at, such as
Clothes are entitled to
Till the fashion changes.

Philip Larkin

Week 582: In A Country Church, by R.S.Thomas

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If I may continue the religious theme for one more week (well, it is Christmas) here is another of R.S.Thomas’s spare meditations. Note that as usual with Thomas there is no one else about in the church, and one begins to suspect that this is how he liked it. Which may be fair enough. Of course, Christianity has been from the start a very sociable sort of religion, featuring big outdoor parties for up to five thousand people (free fish sandwiches for all, bring a basket for leftovers) and weddings with copious amounts of wine on tap, so to speak. But just as I have always felt that the writing of true poetry demands a trancelike solitude that rules out anything communal, so maybe for the truly devout the doorway to their god is also a narrow one that no two can pass abreast.

The form of Thomas’s poems fascinates me.

Generally
I am not of that school who believe
that putting in a line break every few words
makes something into
a poem.

So why do I feel that these unrhymed, rather irregular lines, varying from seven to nine syllables, are very much a poem? Mainly, I suppose, because of their content and imagery, but also because of some invisible rhythmic scaffolding that gives structure no less, and perhaps more subtly, than a more regular metrical pattern. It’s intriguing.

In a Country Church

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

R.S.Thomas

Week 581: Carol, by John Short

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Whatever your views of Christianity, I think you have to give it credit for being the first religion, so far as I know, to put a baby centre stage, at least for part of the story, and thus to harness properly that instinct for the love and care of its young which is one of humanity’s more redeeming features. The Norse gods, for example, are far too busy fighting giants and getting ready for the end of the world to have any time for babyolatry, while appearances of babies in Greek myth tend to be rather disturbing: they are either being devoured by their father in case they grow up to overthrow him, getting cast into fires (admittedly with the best of intentions), being submerged in rivers (ditto), or, in the case of Heracles, being assailed by giant snakes slithering towards their cradle (relax: he’d been working out and simply strangled them).

The Nativity in contrast is one of the keystones of Christianity, and among the endless literary and artistic takes on it I like this quirky one by John Short (1911-1991). I’m afraid I know nothing about John Short beyond the fact that he wrote this poem and that it has been set to music – he seems to have largely slipped between the cracks as far as the Internet goes.

Note: Salford is a town in Greater Manchester, England, at one time last century a byword for slums and poverty. It is the ‘dirty old town’ of Ewan MacColl’s famous song.

Carol

There was a Boy bedded in bracken,
Like to a sleeping snake all curled he lay;
On his thin navel turned this spinning sphere,
Each feeble finger fetched seven suns away.
He was not dropped in good-for-lambing weather,
He took no suck when shook buds sung together,
But he is come in cold-as-workhouse weather,
Poor as a Salford child.

John Short