Some years ago I stayed with my family on holiday at Arthog in North Wales, just across the Mawddach estuary from Barmouth, and one of the walks we took was along the old railway track, now converted to a footpath, to Penmaenpool. The railway was opened in 1865, but fell victim to Dr Beeching in the sixties. In the old days it was evidently a treat in the area to take a picnic on the round trip: up to Harlech, then to Minfford, by the Ffestiniog line to Blaenau Ffestiniog, to Bala and back to Dolgellau. Bonneted ladies, men in light suits, excited children, picnic baskets, glimpses of the sea, seeds of willowherb drifting in through the open windows, turning and twinkling in the sun… But all the track long taken up now, grass and moss encroaching on the limestone chippings, willows leaning over, a tangle of soapwort and goldenrod and everlasting pea, and the evening quiet under cloud, only the oystercatchers calling as darkness falls.

Anyway, on a placard in the old signal-box at Penmaenpool, now converted to a bird-hide, I came across a verse which Gerard Manley Hopkins inscribed in the hotel guest book after a stay here:

 ‘Then come who pine for peace and pleasure
Away from counter, court and school,
Spend here your measure of time and treasure
And taste the joys of Penmaenpool.’

O G.M.H, I thought, what a totally undistinguished quatrain! That’s what comes of feeling obligated to say something, or being tempted by a slight vanity – because you always knew what you were worth, didn’t you, even if this particular verse doesn’t show it, and even if no one else at the time knew. So, I thought, you stood here too and watched the light change on the wooded slopes opposite, and the quiet water brimming up the estuary. I didn’t know what to say to your ghost, except glory be to God for you too, and thanks for poems as original and beautiful as this one.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things – 
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
  And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
 
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
  Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

This is a relatively early poem by Robert Graves, but one that shows his particular gifts to great advantage, skilfully combining a traditional ballad form with an individual lyricism. At their best, Graves’s poems have that rare and unfashionable quality, beauty. Of course, there are many kinds of beauty in poetry: the beauty of precision, of the verbal arrow quivering in the centre of its target; the beauty of musicality, of rhythm and cadence; the beauty of evocation, of a few words on the page conjuring up whole vistas of lived experience. And sometimes if we are lucky they come together, as I find in this poem, and particularly in its penultimate stanza.

Note: the version I give differs in several places from others that may be found online, but mine is the version printed in ‘Collected Poems 1965’ that I am familiar with, so I have stuck with that.

drouth: a Scots word for drought, thirst.

Apples and Water

Dust in a cloud, blinding weather,
Drums that rattle and roar!
A mother and daughter stood together
By their cottage door.

‘Mother, the heavens are bright like brass,
The dust is shaken high,
With labouring breath the soldiers pass,
Their lips are cracked and dry.’

‘Mother, I’ll throw them apples down,
I’ll fetch them cups of water.’
The mother turned with an angry frown
Holding back her daughter.

‘But mother, see, they faint with thirst,
They march away to war,’
‘Ay, daughter, these are not the first
And there will come yet more.’

‘There is no water can supply them
In western streams that flow,
There is no fruit can satisfy them
On orchard-trees that grow.’

‘Once in my youth I gave, poor fool,
A soldier apples and water,
And may I die before you cool
Such drouth as his, my daughter.’

Robert Graves

I think Richard Fariña’s ‘Birmingham Sunday’ is one of the most quietly effective of all protest songs. It doesn’t rant or chant, and by comparison that great anthem of the sixties, ‘We Shall Overcome’, might have its heart in the right place but is a bit short on specifics. This song simply tells the story of four young girls, killed when members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, chiselling their names into the memory: Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). Its melody comes from the traditional Scottish ballad, ‘I Once Loved A Lass’.

I first heard the song soon after its composition, sung by Joan Baez on the first (and for some time only) record that I owned. More recently, Tom Paxton and Anne Hills have done a version, but it is still Joan’s young beautiful voice that I hear in my head, as I heard it first on a sunlit autumn morning in 1964, playing it over and over in my student room above the ‘Eagle’ yard in Cambridge.

Birmingham Sunday

Come round by my side and I’ll sing you a song
I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong
On Birmingham Sunday, the blood ran like wine
And the choirs kept singing of freedom

That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one
At an old Baptist church, there was no need to run
And the choirs kept singing of freedom.

The clouds they were gray and the autumn wind blew
And Denise McNair brought the number to two
The falcon of Death was a creature they knew
And the choirs kept singing of freedom

The church it was crowded but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley’s dark number was three
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me
And the choirs kept singing of freedom.

Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four
She asked for a blessing, but asked for no more
And the choirs kept singing of freedom.

On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground
And people all over the earth turned around
For no one recalled a more cowardly sounds
And the choirs kept singing of freedom

The men in the forest, they asked it of me
How many blackberries grew in the blue sea
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye
How many dark ships in the forest

The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone
And I can’t do much more than to sing you this song
I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong
And the choirs keep singing of freedom

Richard Fariña

This is another of Austin Clarke’s beautifully musical short lyrics (see also week 278). It appears at first sight to be a simple enough poem about a woman loved and admired for her beauty, but I have seen more than one interpretation that attempts to set it against the background of Irish social history. According to these, it is significant that the woman is the daughter of a ‘planter’: that is to say, a landowner brought in by the British and settled on land confiscated from the native Irish. The Plantation of Ulster, for example, began in 1606, after the defeat of the last Irish chieftains and acceptance of English rule, when vast tracts of land were given to immigrants, mainly from England and Scotland, who were required to be Protestant and English-speaking.

This practice naturally inspired envy and resentment among the dispossessed, as hinted at in the line ‘The house of the planter is known by the trees’ – that is to say, the wealthy immigrant could afford to screen his ‘big house’ with trees while the native Irish were left to farm the barren hillside. So the feelings of the local populace about the planter’s daughter are understandably ambivalent: they expect her to be standoffish, but it appears that she is not, and the men at least are awed by her beauty; the women gossip about her; but neither really know her in her remote and privileged life. In the fine closing image she is likened to Sunday, the day of the week reserved for worship, and thus seen as a being separate from their normal life of toil, and haloed as it were in her apartness.

I suspect myself that this interpretation could be reading too much into a slight if melodious lyric, but it does allow one to see the poem as a celebration of the way in which an appreciation of beauty, and a respect for innate goodness, can transcend even the chasm-wide class and political divisions of Irish society.

The Planter’s Daughter

When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
 
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went – 
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.

Austin Clarke