Author Archives: davidjsutton

Week 563: The Signpost, by R.S.Thomas

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In a way, this can be viewed as a companion piece to last week’s poem. That was about places never visited through being lost to the map, and maybe existing only in the imagination; this one is about those perfectly well-defined places that we never get round to visiting, perhaps a village off the main road down some high-banked country lanes, briefly wondered about as we drive past at speed, and yet which continue to haunt us with a sense of lost possibilities, rather as the door in the wall haunted the protagonist in the short story by H.G.Wells.

The Signpost

Casgob, it said, 2
miles. But I never went
there; left it like an ornament
on the mind’s shelf, covered
with the dust of
its summers; a place on a diet
of the echoes of stopped
bells and children’s
voices; white the architecture
of its clouds, stationary
its sunlight. It was best
so. I need a museum
for storing the dream’s
brittler particles in. Time
is a main road, eternity
the turning that we don’t take.

R.S.Thomas

Week 562: Lost Acres, by Robert Graves

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Robert Graves delighted in out of the way facts and often built poems around them, as in the case of this slightly enigmatic piece that turns on the idea that maps, at least in the old days, were not entirely accurate and whole parcels of land could be omitted from them: the ‘lost acres’ of the title. [I think this has nothing to do with the modern convention whereby certain installations like weapons factories and nuclear bunkers are deliberately not identified as such on maps for reasons of national security, so if you want to know where they are you have to ask the Russians].

Graves plays with this idea in a typically offbeat way, using the lost acres as a metaphor for the edge places of the mind that so fascinated him and ascribing to them an otherworldly quality, along with the perils that otherworlds traditionally possess: ‘to walk there would be loss of sense’. But why? The usual sense lost in otherworld venturings is that of time, when travellers to Tír na nÓg or explorers of fairy mounds return after what seems to them a short stay to find that anything from seven to hundreds of years have passed at home, but I believe that what Graves is suggesting here is that our fragile sanity depends on having things mapped and named, and these places by their nature imperil that sanity: that fear of ‘a substance without words’ reminds one of his reflections in ‘The Cool Web’ (see week 380). But as I say I find the poem slightly enigmatic, so if anyone has any better ideas on how to read it I’d be interested to hear them.

Lost Acres

These acres, always again lost
By every new ordnance-survey
And searched for at exhausting cost
Of time and thought, are still away.

They have their paper-substitute –
Intercalation of an inch
At the so-many-thousandth foot:
And no one parish feels the pinch.

But lost they are, despite all care,
And perhaps likely to be bound
Together in a piece somewhere,
A plot of undiscovered ground.

Invisible, they have the spite
To swerve the tautest measuring-chain
And the exact theodolite
Perched every side of them in vain.

Yet, be assured, we have no need
To plot these acres of the mind
With prehistoric fern and reed
And monsters such as heroes find.

Maybe they have their flowers, their birds,
Their trees behind the phantom fence,
But of a substance without words:
To walk there would be loss of sense.

Robert Graves

Week 561: Epic, by Patrick Kavanagh

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Another poem in which we see Patrick Kavanagh wryly doubting but then triumphantly reasserting the validity of his own experience, which he feared might seem parochial and even humdrum in its attachment to rural Ireland, but transfigured by the poetic imagination could still convey essential things about the human condition. The closing sentence ‘Gods make their own importance’ would perhaps make more sense, in the context of the poem, if it read ‘Poets make their own importance’, and I’m not sure if Kavanagh is modestly backing away from such a claim or, less modestly, equating poets with gods. (If the latter, bagsy Hermes – those winged sandals are just so cool.)

‘rood’: an old land measurement of about a quarter of an acre, so ‘half a rood of rock’ means the dispute concerned a stony plot of land about the size of a couple of standard allotments.

‘march’: here used in the sense of a border or boundary, often, as here, one of disputed ownership; cf. the Welsh Marches.

‘the Munich bother’: I take this to refer to the Munich agreement of 1938, when the then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain brought back from a meeting with Hitler what was supposed to be a guarantee of ‘peace in our time’; next year, of course, the Second World War broke out.

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones.’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 560: The Heron, by Vernon Watkins

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Vernon Watkins (1906-1957; see also weeks 96 and 450) was a modern symbolist, heavily influenced by W.B.Yeats, and I think it is fairly obvious that the heron in this poem is intended to represent the poet, doing his best to fix his attention on the transcendental as represented by light and water even while ‘calamity about him cries’. The ‘calamity’ in this case probably reflects the tumults of the last mid-century (the poem first appeared in a 1954 collection), though Watkins did have five children, and having had four myself I like to think it may also reflect the difficulties of trying to follow one’s poetic vocation in a household full of other people whose priorities in life are not necessarily the writing of poems.

Of course, Watkins was not the first to use a bird as the symbol for a poet. We have Robert Frost’s fine poem ‘The Oven Bird’ (see week 214), and then there is Baudelaire’s ‘L’Albatros’, that uses the albatross to characterise the poet, so graceful when aloft, so awkward and vulnerable when brought to earth. I think Baudelaire’s poem has the edge as far as a reality check goes in that it does not impose upon the bird anything not in its nature and behaviour, whereas in the case of the Watkins poem while we admittedly do not know what goes in the mind of a heron, I would guess that a rapt contemplation of light and water takes a back seat to wondering where the next fish is coming from. Still, Watkins’s poem has some beautiful touches – I particularly like ‘cloud-backed’ – and I think stands as one of his best.

The Heron

The cloud-backed heron will not move:
He stares into the stream.
He stands unfaltering while the gulls
And oyster-catchers scream.
He does not hear, he cannot see
The great white horses of the sea,
But fixes eyes on stillness
Below their flying team.

How long will he remain, how long
Have the grey woods been green?
The sky and the reflected sky,
Their glass he has not seen,
But silent as a speck of sand
Interpreting the sea and land,
His fall pulls down the fabric
Of all that windy scene.

Sailing with clouds and woods behind,
Pausing in leisured flight,
He stepped, alighting on a stone,
Dropped from the stars of night.
He stood there unconcerned with day,
Deaf to the tumult of the bay,
Watching a stone in water,
A fish’s hidden light.

Sharp rocks drive back the breaking waves,
Confusing sea with air.
Bundles of spray blown mountain-high
Have left the shingle bare.
A shipwrecked anchor wedged by rocks,
Loosed by the thundering equinox,
Divides the herded waters,
The stallion and his mare.

Yet no distraction breaks the watch
Of that time-killing bird.
He stands unmoving on the stone;
Since dawn he has not stirred.
Calamity about him cries,
But he has fixed his golden eyes
On water’s crooked tablet,
On light’s reflected word.

Vernon Watkins

Week 559: For Anne Gregory, by W.B.Yeats

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This is one of W.B.Yeats’s lighter pieces. I think it has a characteristic charm, though I confess I have never looked at it in quite the same way since reading Anne Gregory’s own recollections of the poem, which according to your point of view are either very funny or rather sad. Evidently the young Anne, the granddaughter of Yeats’s friend Lady Gregory, was summoned before the great man by her grandma with the words ‘Mr Yeats has written a poem for you and is going to recite it to you’. ‘I was petrified. I had no idea he was going to write a poem for me. I was in agony. I was nearly in tears for fear of doing something silly.’ She dutifully listened as Yeats delivered the poem in his weird singsong way, then stuttered ‘Wonderful, thank you so much, I must go and wash my hair’ and made her escape. She added afterwards that she had never liked the colour of her hair anyway.

I feel for you, William. I remember one of my children coming home complaining that they had had to read in class one of my own poems from a school anthology and it was like, you know, totally embarrassing…

For Anne Gregory

‘Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

‘But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’

‘I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

W.B.Yeats

Week 558: From ‘The Dancers’, by Ivor Gurney

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Another of Ivor Gurney’s short poems (see also weeks 24 and 249), slightly eccentric in their diction but with a tenacious individuality. Gurney, a lifelong sufferer from a bipolar disorder no doubt exacerbated by his experiences in the Great War, spent the last fifteen years of his life in psychiatric hospitals. ‘The Dancers’ is a late poem, written while he was institutionalized, and shows the poet clinging like a swimmer to a spar of driftwood to the memory of some rural scene from his beloved Gloucestershire countryside. While in hospital Ivor was visited several times by Helen Thomas, widow of the poet Edward Thomas, whose work he much loved and some of whose poems he had set to music. Helen would bring with her Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire countryside and united in their separate griefs they would spend the time together tracing out with their fingers footpaths and byways that Edward had walked on, with Gurney, himself a great walker in happier times, remembering every step of the way. [See Helen Thomas, Ivor Gurney — The War Poets Gallery for Helen’s moving account of these meetings].

The poem actually continues for seven more rather incoherent lines, which I’ve cut: the full text can be found in P.J.Kavanagh’s excellent edition of his ‘Collected Poems’.

From ‘The Dancers’

The dancers danced in a quiet meadow.
It was winter, the soft light lit in clouds
Of growing morning – their feet on the firm
Hillside sounded like a baker’s business
Heard from the yard of his beamy barn-grange.
One piped, and the measured irregular riddle
Of the dance ran onward in tangling threads…
A thing of the village, centuries old in charm.

Ivor Gurney

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.