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

A lot of wet weather lately – one of our local ponds that was bone-dry in October is now brimming over and home once again to a family of mallards. For me the poet of rain has to be Edward Thomas, especially in this piece, written in early 1916 while Thomas was undergoing military training in a camp near Romford. This is actually one of the poems where I part company with Thomas spiritually, since I have always rather liked the sound of rain at night. I remember lying awake one night in the Ogwen Valley in North Wales, listening to a torrential downpour on the roof above my bunk, thinking how it would be falling all over the dark countryside, turning the already wet soil to a black peaty sponge, and thinking how it would overflow, because the country could take no more: the trees had taken up great draughts, and the mosses could drink no more, and the rocks would have nothing to do with it, being no obedient chalks and limestones but hard grits and slates. So droplet would turn to drip, and drip to puddle, and puddle to rill, and rill to rivulet, until the hillsides would be alive with moving water… for some reason I found an exquisite pleasure in the thought of that soft wearing, that sleeking and slicking, gentler than ice but just as powerful in the end, and certainly the rain seemed part of an immense aliveness rather than anything to inspire thoughts of death.

But now for Thomas’s very different take on the matter…

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Edward Thomas