Author Archives: davidjsutton

Week 557: A Shropshire Lad, by John Betjeman

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Whatever one thinks of John Betjeman, and I do feel that he may have been a little overpraised as part of an understandable backlash against the obscurantist excesses of modernism, you have to admit that he wrote the kind of poems that no one else wrote, and that is always a good start. Indeed, I would be hard put myself to say exactly what kind of poem this one is. Comic? Mock heroic? With something of the old music-halls about it? (For some reason I seem to hear it in my head being recited in a sort of ‘Albert and the Lion’ voice). Whatever the case, I like its jaunty quirkiness, though the tale of the real Matthew Webb (1848-1883), who in 1875 became the first man to swim the English Channel with no artifical aids, was a rather sad one. He tried hard to capitalise on the fame accrued from his channel-crossing feat, competing in endurance swimming championships and giving various aquatic exhibitions, but he swam a sedate breast-stroke and there was a limit to how long people wanted to watch him doing rather slow lengths in public baths for hours on end. Finally he was driven to attempt the fairly impossible feat of swimming the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls. His body was never found. As a pathetic footnote, his wife Madeline never did accept that so strong a swimmer could have simply drowned, and looked for his return for years after.

Note: Webb was born at Dawley, now part of Telford, in Shropshire, and learned to swim in the River Severn at Coalbrookdale. The title, of course, is a nod to A.E.Housman’s first collection of poems.

A Shropshire Lad
 
The gas was on in the Institute,
The flare was up in the gym,
A man was running a mineral line,
A lass was singing a hymn,
When Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Came swimming along the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley.
Swimming along –
Swimming along –
Swimming along from Severn,
And paying a call at Dawley Bank while swimming along to Heaven.

The sun shone low on the railway line
And over the bricks and stacks
And in at the upstairs windows
Of the Dawley houses’ backs
When we saw the ghost of Captain Webb,
Webb in a water sheeting,
Come dripping along in a bathing dress
To the Saturday evening meeting.
Dripping along –
Dripping along –
To the Congregational Hall;
Dripping and still he rose over the sill and faded away in a wall.

There wasn’t a man in Oakengates
That hadn’t got hold of the tale,
And over the valley in Ironbridge,
And round by Coalbrookdale,
How Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Rose rigid and dead from the old canal
That carries the bricks to Lawley.
Rigid and dead –
Rigid and dead –
To the Saturday congregation,
Paying a call at Dawley Bank on the way to his destination.

John Betjeman

Week 556: The Man Who Married Magdalene, by Louis Simpson

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Another piece from American poet Louis Simpson (1923-2012), a man whom Seamus Heaney called a ‘touchstone for poetry’. I think this is a slighter piece than his great ballad ‘Carentan O Carentan’ (see week 36), but it shows the same mastery of form and flow.

Mary Magdalene appears in the New Testament as a devoted follower of Jesus. The idea that she was a reformed prostitute seems to have been a later invention, the result of a mistaken identification with another Mary made by Pope Gregory in 591. In 1969 Pope Paul VI backtracked on this identification, acknowledging that Pope Gregory had, well, erred, and in 2016 Pope Francis, perhaps by way of apology, awarded her liturgical memory on the Catholic calendar a free upgrade from ‘memorial’ to ‘feast’, but the idea of her as a classic example of the repentant sinner persists in popular culture and this is what the poem runs with.

The Man Who Married Magdalene

The man who married Magdalene
Had not forgiven her.
God might pardon every sin …
Love is no pardoner.

Her hands were hollow, pale, and blue,
Her mouth like watered wine.
He watched to see if she were true
And waited for a sign.

It was old harlotry, he guessed,
That drained her strength away,
So gladly for the dark she dressed,
So sadly for the day.

Their quarrels made her dull and weak
And soon a man might fit
A penny in the hollow cheek
And never notice it.

At last, as they exhausted slept,
Death granted the divorce,
And nakedly the woman leapt
Upon that narrow horse.

But when he woke and woke alone
He wept and would deny
The loose behavior of the bone
And the immodest thigh.

Louis Simpson

Week 555: From ‘Hákonarmál’, by Eyvindr Finnsson

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It’s quite a while since we had a bit of Old Norse (see week 54). I would have liked to present extracts from the ‘Völuspá’, that wonderful poem from the Elder Edda that tells of the Doom of the Gods, but the text is rather difficult and I suppose that these days it would need to carry a trigger warning: ‘This poem contains information about the end of the world that some may find upsetting, especially those with a phobia about being devoured by a giant wolf’.

The stanzas that precede these closing ones contain many ‘kennings’, often quite elaborate circumlocutory terms for poetic objects or personages, simpler examples being ‘raven-feeder’ for ‘warrior’ or ‘wave-steed’ for ‘ship’. These can seem rather affected to the modern reader, who on the whole may prefer a spade to be called a spade rather than, say, ‘cleaver of the earth-mother’s flesh’ (I made that one up: in practice kennings were reserved for a fairly limited set of referenda and were unlikely to be bestowed on a humble spade). But these three closing stanzas are simpler, with no mythological baggage except the Fenrir reference. It is probably unnecessary to explain this, but just in case… Fenrir was a monstrous wolf, sired by the trickster god Loki on the giantess Angrboða. The other gods grew fearful of him as he grew and tricked him into letting himself be bound with an enchanted dwarf-wrought chain, at the cost of the war-god Tyr’s right hand which Fenrir bit off when he could not get free. But at the end of days the wolf will finally get loose and take his revenge by killing the leader of the gods Óðinn, only to be killed in turn by Óðin’s son Viðarr.

The translation that follows is my own; I’ve tried to capture the spirit of the piece rather than give a literal crib, which would be difficult anyway because the word order in skaldic poetry is so flexible.

From ‘Hákonarmál’

Góðu dœgri
verðr sá gramr of borinn,
es sér getr slíkan sefa.
Hans aldar
mun æ vesa
at góðu getit.

Mun óbundinn
á ýta sjöt
Fenrisulfr of fara,
áðr jafngóðr
á auða tröð
konungmaðr komi.

Deyr fé,
deyja frændr,
eyðisk land ok láð.
Síz Hákon fór
með heiðin goð,
mörg es þjóð of þéuð.

From ‘The Song of Hákon’

It will be a good day
If ever there comes
Such a great-souled lord
With a heart like his.
Forever his times
Shall be told on earth
While men speak of his might.

Fenrir the Wolf
Shall fall unbound
On the fields of men
Before there comes
To stand in his stead
So kingly a man
As good again.

Cattle die,
Kinsmen die,
Waste is laid to land.
Since Hákon fared
To the heathen gods
Sad is the fate
Of a folk forlorn.

Week 554: Se questo è un uomo, by Primo Levi

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This poem stands at the front of the Italian writer Primo Levi’s first book, ‘Se questo è un uomo’ (If this is a man), first published in 1947. The book recounts Levi’s arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.

Knowing its background, I find it difficult to apply the normal tools of poetic appraisal to a poem like this. It is rhetorical, exhortatory, of a kind I would normally be suspicious of, a poetry of bare statement, shorn of poetic device, and with only a single image, that of the frog in the third stanza. It is not rich, it is not complex, so if it is powerful, as I feel it to be, wherein lies that power? The poetry is in the pity, said Wilfred Owen, which may be partly true, but the poetry must also be in the poetry, or how do we distinguish the genuinely inspired from the mere assemblage of well-intentioned, fashionable sentiments which has always, and perhaps never more so than today, served to counterfeit the genuine? I have no answer, unless it comes down in some part to what one has the right to say. I am reminded somewhat of Siegfried Sassoon, who can be similarly excoriating in his wrath and urgency: ‘Swear by the green of spring that you’ll never forget’. Sassoon had the right. Levi had the right.

The translation that follows is my own.

Se questo è un uomo

Voi che vivete sicuri
nelle vostre tiepide case,
voi che trovate tornando a sera
il cibo caldo e visi amici:


Considerate se questo è un uomo
che lavora nel fango
che non conosce pace
che lotta per mezzo pane
che muore per un si o per un no.


Considerate se questa è una donna,
senza capelli e senza nome
senza più forza di ricordare
vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo
come una rana d’inverno.


Meditate che questo è stato:
vi comando queste parole.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
stando in casa andando per via,
coricandovi, alzandovi.
Ripetetele ai vostri figli.


O vi si sfaccia la casa,
la malattia vi impedisca,
i vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.

Primo Levi

If this is a man

You who live secure in your warm houses,
Who find, when you return at evening,
Hot food and the faces of friends:

Consider if this is a man
Who labours in the mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a piece of bread,
Who dies by a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without a name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb
Cold as a frog in winter.

Brood upon it, that this came to pass:
I command to you these words.
Engrave them on your heart
At home, walking the street,
Going to bed, on rising;
Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house fall to ruin,
May maladies beset you,
And may your children turn their faces from you.

Week 553: Pike, by Ted Hughes

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I am of an age to have read each of Ted Hughes’s various volumes of poetry as they came out, and consequently suffered/enjoyed the same rollercoaster ride that many of his fans must have done, though possibly with different ups and downs according to taste. ‘The Hawk In The Rain’ – hm, interesting, need to keep an eye on this one. ‘Lupercal’ – even more interesting, with some definite wows in there. ‘Wodwo’ – a bit odd but still interesting. ‘Crow’ – yuk, how disappointing, not my cup of tea at all. ‘Gaudete’, now this is just plain weird but then ‘Moortown’ – ah, that’s more like it, bang on, especially the first section, and so on through the years with quite a few strange byways but never a dull moment.

So this week, then, one of those first definite wow poems from that second collection, ‘Lupercal’, one that showcases Hughes’s unrivalled power of empathetic identification with the otherness of the natural world and his ability to express the fear and fascination that this evokes.

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads –
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them –
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb –

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks –
The same iron in this eye
Through its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them –

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.

Ted Hughes

Week 552: My Youngest Son Came Home Today, by Eric Bogle

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More evidence that it is still possible to write powerful contemporary folksongs, and like ‘There Were Roses’ (see week 521) this one too, by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eric Bogle (born 1944) has its genesis in the Irish Troubles. Note how the young man is not identified in sectarian terms; I suppose the reference to sainthood in the second stanza might lead one to assume that he is Catholic, since I have a vague idea that Protestants aren’t so much into the saint thing, but that would be to miss the point.

The song, with its stately dirgelike tune, has been covered by various artists: I know it best through the performance of the Irish singer Mary Black.

My Youngest Son Came Home Today

My youngest son came home today.
His friends marched with him all the way.
The pipes and drums beat out the time
As in his box of polished pine
Like dead meat on a butcher’s tray
My youngest son came home today.

My youngest son was a fine young man
With a wife, a daughter and two sons.
A man he would have lived and died
Till by a bullet sanctified
Now he’s a saint, or so they say.
They brought their saint home today.

Above the narrow Belfast streets
An Irish sky looks down and weeps
On children’s blood in gutters spilled
In dreams of freedom unfulfilled
As part of freedom’s price to pay
My youngest son came home today.

My youngest son came home today.
His friends marched with him all the way.
The pipes and drums beat out the time
As in his box of polished pine
Like dead meat on a butcher’s tray
My youngest son came home today.

And this time he’s home to stay.

Eric Bogle

Week 551: From ‘The Knight’s Tale’, by Geoffrey Chaucer

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I tend not to think of Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) as a lyric poet, but more as a kind of story-teller in verse whose strengths lay in narrative and characterisation but who rarely achieved, or even tried for, that concentrated essence of language one looks for in lyric poetry. Yet there is this passage from the end of ‘The Knight’s Tale’, where the dying Arcite speaks a farewell to his love Emily. I suppose it is standard enough stuff for the time, but there are two lines in it that I find quite haunting: ‘But I biquethe the servyce of my ghost/To yow aboven every creature.’ Possibly this too was a standard conceit, as a better mediaeval scholar than I might know, and yet, asking myself why I should find them so affecting, I realise it is because they express for me something quintessential about the craft we practise, about that state of grace that poets, who tend by nature to be selfish or at least  self-preoccupied creatures, may nonetheless enter when, desiring nothing except to be of use, they offer the service of their spirit to something beloved, something beyond themselves.

I don’t know how much ‘The Canterbury Tales’ are read for pleasure these days. A pity if not: the language, once you get accustomed to the antique spelling, is far more straightforward than, say, a good deal of Shakespeare. You do need to do a bit of cherry picking though – some of the tales, like Chaucer’s own, are definite duds; others, like ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, have a bit too much mediaeval baggage. I think ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ makes a good sampling point: this is the one where three men, having heard that one of their comrades has died, set out to kill that ‘privee theef men clepeth Deeth/That in this contree al the people sleeth’. It does not end well for them.

From ‘The Knight’s Tale’

Thanne seyde he thus, as ye shal after heere:
‘Naught may the woful spirit in myn herte
Declare o point of alle my sorwes smerte
To yow, my lady, that I love moost.
But I biquethe the servyce of my ghost
To yow aboven every creature.
Syn that my lyf may no lenger dure,
Allas, the wo! Allas, the peynes stronge,
That I for yow have suffred, and so longe!
Allas, the deeth! Allas, myn Emelye!
Allas, departynge of our compaignye!
Allas, myn hertes queene! allas, my wyf!
Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf!
What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, withouten any compaignye.
Fare-wel, my swete foo, myn Emelye!’

Geoffrey Chaucer

Week 550: Will Ye Go Lassie Go, by Robert Tannahill/Francis McPeake

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I had always thought of ‘Will Ye Go Lassie Go’, aka ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, as a quintessential folksong, possessed of anonymous purity, a little mysterious, a little magical, never dating but instead, as it recedes into the mists of time, accruing to itself an ever-increasing charge of power from all those who have performed it, listened to it and loved it over the years. It seems, however, that this particular song has a definite origin: the lyrics and melody are based on the song ‘The Braes of Balquhither’ by the Scottish poet Robert Tannahill (1774–1810) and Scottish composer Robert Archibald Smith (1780–1829), but in their present form, as covered by countless folk artists, were adapted by the Irish musician Francis McPeake (1885–1971) and first recorded by his family in the 1950s.

Anonymous or not, I feel that the second stanza in particular manages to tap into some resonant stratum of Celtic myth, having for me faint echoes of the Fourth Branch of the Welsh ‘Mabinogion’ where the wizard Gwydion and Math fab Mathonwy conjure up a wife for Lleu Llaw Gyffes: ‘and they took the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and made from them the fairest maiden that was ever seen by man’. It seems possible that Alan Garner made the same association when he chose it as an epigraph to his fine contemporary reworking of that story, ‘The Owl Service’, though he has a slightly different version of the words e.g. ‘tower’ for ‘bower’, and ascribes it to ‘Traditional’.

Of those countless performances, I might make special mention of one from the Transatlantic Sessions featuring Dick Gaughan, Emmylou Harris and the McGarrigle family. Now that’s what you call a line-up.

Will Ye Go Lassie Go

Oh, the summer time is coming,
And the leaves are sweetly blooming,
And the wild mountain thyme
Grows around the purple heather.

   Will you go, lassie, go?
   And we’ll all go together
   To pull wild mountain thyme
   All around the blooming heather,
   Will you go lassie, go?

I will build my love a bower
By yon clear crystal fountain,
And around it I will pile
All the flowers of the mountain.

   Will you go, lassie, go?
   And we’ll all go together
   To pull wild mountain thyme
   All around the blooming heather,
   Will you go lassie, go?

If my true love will not go,   
I will surely find another
To pull wild mountain thyme
All around the blooming heather.

   Will you go, lassie, go?
   And we’ll all go together
   To pull wild mountain thyme
   All around the blooming heather,
   Will you go lassie, go?

Oh, the summer time is coming
And the trees are sweetly blooming
And the wild mountain thyme
Grows around the blooming heather.

Robert Tannahill/Francis McPeake

Week 549: Le Dernier Poème, by Robert Desnos

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Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was a French poet who began his poetic career as a surrealist, associated with such poets as Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, but in his later work evolved a plainer, more direct style. In the Second World War he was much involved with the French Resistance, and was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and sent first to Auschwitz, and then transferred to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. He survived long enough to be liberated, but had contracted typhoid and died shortly afterwards.

This poem, though one of his most famous and best-loved, is a bit of an oddity in that it never actually existed as such. It began life as the last stanza of a longer poem, ‘A La Mystérieuse’, written about the singer Yvonne George, for whom he nursed an unrequited passion. When he died, the lines were quoted in a Czech obituary, which was then mistranslated back into French in a way that gave rise to the belief that this was a poem in its own right, and the last one Desnos wrote as a farewell to his wife Youki.

I am not sure how proper it is to override authorial intent, but the fact is that these detached lines work better for me as a poem without the more florid preceding stanzas of the original, so I present them here without too much compunction.

The translation that follows is my own.

Le Dernier Poème

J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,
J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,
Tellement aimé ton ombre,
Qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi.

Il me reste d’être l’ombre parmi les ombres,
D’être cent fois plus ombre que l’ombre,
D’être l’ombre qui viendra et reviendra
Dans ta vie ensoleillée.

Robert Desnos

The Last Poem

I have so dreamed of you,
I have so walked, so talked with you,
So greatly loved your shadow,
That there is nothing left to me of you.

And what is left to me
Is to be a shadow among shades,
A hundred times more shadow than the shade,
To be the shadow that will come and come
Into your sunlit life.

Week 548: The Good Morrow, by John Donne

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It is entirely reasonable that when it comes to poetic taste the circle of admiration should be far more encompassing than the circle of love, and while for me John Donne (1572-1631) certainly falls well within the former circle, I cannot quite bring myself to place him in the latter. This week’s poem has so much going for it: wit, dexterity, a lively conversational idiom, and for some a pleasing element of intellectual challenge in its references and conceits, though others may feel that in the last verse in particular Donne loses his way in a maze of metaphors. So what does it lack? For me, I suppose, the conviction that Donne is concerned with real love for another human being, rather than using a slightly simulated extravagance of passion as a vehicle for a bit of poetry. This is poetry that stimulates the intellect but does not engage the emotions, and I want a poem to do both.

I compare it with poems like William Barnes’s ‘Woak Hill’ (see week 31) and ‘The Wife A-lost’ (see week 176). Now these for me hit you in the solar plexus and knock the wind out of you, and with Donne’s poem I feel no such impact. I am not saying that Barnes is a greater poet than Donne – there are other factors to be considered, like influence and centrality. And anyway who cares about labels and precedences, there are just poems, and maybe our reactions to them are, and indeed should be, far more personal and circumstantial than any attempt to impose a formal discipline of ‘poetry appreciation’ on the matter can allow for.

Note: The Seven Sleepers: in mediaeval legend, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus were Christian youths who hid in a cave to escape the persecution of the Roman emperor Decius (250 CE) and fell into a miraculous sleep. There is an implicit comparison between their wonder on waking and Donne’s own as he progresses from mere carnal love to the ‘agapic’ or spiritual love felt by their ‘waking souls’.

The Good Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
‘Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be:
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.

And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears.
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

John Donne