This week’s offering was written by the Irish folk-singer Tommy Sands (born 1941), and is based on a true story involving the deaths of two of Tommy’s friends in Northern Ireland in 1974. It seems to me a powerful evocation of those claustrophobic, fear-ridden times. It is not polished verse, with its rough rhyming and slight awkwardnesses of phrasing and scansion that a poet less intent on telling the story might have smoothed over, but I think that in this case its very rawness and awkwardness gives the poem an added authenticity: it’s a work where anger and pity are more important than literary polish.

As a song it has been covered by numerous artists. The version I am most familiar with is actually Cara Dillon’s, but I’ve gone back to what I believe to be Tommy’s original. Cara, in that slightly cavalier way folksingers have, made quite a few changes, dropping some of the verses and using different names for the protagonists, and in fact, I think, improved things somewhat by tightening up the narrative, but I wouldn’t be too happy about people taking it upon themselves to monkey with my own poems, however much it might benefit them, so let’s give Tommy his full due.

There Were Roses

My song for you this evening, it’s not to make you sad,
Nor for adding to the sorrows of this troubled northern land.
But lately I’ve been thinking and it just won’t leave my mind
I’ll tell you of two friends one time who were both good friends of mine.

Allan Bell from Banagh, he lived just across the fields,
A great man for the music and the dancing and the reels.
O’Malley came from South Armagh to court young Alice fair,
And we’d often meet on the Ryan Road and the laughter filled the air.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

Though Allan, he was Protestant, and Sean was Catholic born,
It never made a difference for the friendship, it was strong.
And sometimes in the evening when we heard the sound of drums
We said, ‘It won’t divide us. We always will be the one.’

For the ground our fathers ploughed in, the soil, it is the same,
And the places where we say our prayers have just got different names.
We talked about the friends who died, and we hoped there’d be no more.
It’s little then we realized the tragedy in store.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

It was on a Sunday morning when the awful news came round,
Another killing has been done just outside Newry Town.
We knew that Allan danced up there, we knew he liked the band.
But when we heard that he was dead we just could not understand.

We gathered at the graveside on that cold and rainy day,
And the minister he closed his eyes and he prayed for no revenge.
And all the ones who knew him from along the Ryan Road,
They bowed our heads and they said a prayer for the resting of his soul.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

Well fear, it filled the countryside.  There was fear in every home
When a car of death came prowling round the lonely Ryan Road.
A Catholic would be killed tonight to even up the score,
‘Oh, Christ!  It’s young O’Malley that they’ve taken from the door.’

‘Allan was my friend,’ he cried.  He begged them with his fear,
But centuries of hatred have ears that cannot hear.
An eye for an eye was all that filled their minds
And another eye for another eye till everyone is blind.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

So my song for you this evening, it’s not to make you sad
Nor for adding to the sorrows of our troubled northern land,
But lately I’ve been thinking and it just won’t leave my mind.
I’ll tell you of two friends one time who were both good friends of mine.

I don’t know where the moral is or where this song should end,
But I wonder just how many wars are fought between good friends.
And those who give the orders are not the ones to die,
It’s Bell and O’Malley and the likes of you and I.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

Tommy Sands

This week another of those poems that I have not featured before on the assumption that everyone at all interested in poetry must already be familiar with them, but maybe with the modern educational curriculum this assumption is no longer justified, so just in case…

This is one of a sequence of poems that Hardy wrote in memory of his dead wife Emma, expressing a grief sharpened by regret for their long estrangement, and it is a poem that champions of Hardy’s verse like to point to as evidence of his greatness. I don’t know how helpful labels like ‘great’ really are when it comes to poetry: personally I tend to think of poems more in terms of being alive or not, as having or lacking that rare electric pulse of truth and urgency. But greatness – I suppose I would say that it is something to do with a unique voice, gifted with the power to create a new verbal landscape and through an intense fusion of thought and emotion expressing a truth both personal and universal. And I certainly wouldn’t deny it to Hardy at his best. Curiously, or perhaps significantly, T.S.Eliot loathed Hardy. Huh.

mead:             meadow
wistlessness:     this appears to be a Hardy coinage, that for me fuses the idea of ‘no longer knowing or being known’ (from the pseudo-archaic verb wist, to know) with the idea of no longer feeling desire (by analogy with wistful, that means ‘longing, yearning with little hope’)
norward:         the direction of the north

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

Thomas Hardy

In the wake of the Government’s not entirely successful attempt to sell the idea that one way of helping poor people is by giving tax cuts and bonuses to rich people, I thought this week might be a good time to dig out this rather spirited piece of class warfare by the Victorian poet Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849). Of course, as a poem it’s a bit of a blunt instrument, and belongs more properly to a time when we had a government that was actively and malevolently repressive towards the working classes rather than a government that is, let us charitably assume, doing its possibly inadequate best to deal with a complex spiral of demands and expectations while weathering an economic tempest. I was brought up on tales of Victorian ancestors extracting their own rotten teeth and attempting to perform their own abortions, of hungry children waiting behind their father’s chair to get the kipper skins when he had finished eating the fish (this was practical, not cruel: the breadwinner must be given the energy for his labour or there would simply be no bread), and of old couples being kept apart as they lived out their pensionless days in the workhouse.

In our times we have somewhat different concepts of ‘hardship’ and ‘poverty’, and while it may no longer be true that we have never had it so good, it is perhaps salutary to remember that we have certainly had it worse. Not that that is much consolation to young people in my area faced with starter home property prices at least fifteen times the average starting salary (my first house cost four times mine), and that after emerging from further education saddled with huge debts even after an injection of parental help (in my days a student grant didn’t exactly allow one to lead the high life, but it came without strings and was just enough to give a measure of financial independence). Were my generation truly the lucky ones, living through the last good times of our country? I don’t know, but I worry for my grandchildren.

Elliott had a difficult early life, at one point going bankrupt, and though he eventually became a successful iron merchant and steel manufacturer, the experience of being homeless and out of work gave him a deep and lasting sympathy for the poor. He was a notable opponent of the Corn Laws, basically restrictions on the import of cheap grain in force from 1815 to 1846, which operated to enhance the profits and political power of the landowning class but caused hardship and starvation among the workers. This did not make him popular with his fellow entrepreneurs, and the workers were too busy starving to have much time for poetry, but at least he tried.

Caged Rats

Ye coop us up, and tax our bread,
And wonder why we pine:
But ye are fat, and round, and red,
And fill’d with tax-bought wine.
Thus, twelve rats starve while three rats thrive,
(Like you on mine and me),
When fifteen rats are caged alive,
With food for nine and three.

Haste! Havoc’s torch begins to glow –
The ending is begun;
Make haste! Destruction thinks ye slow;
Make haste to be undone!
Why are ye call’d ‘My Lord’ and ‘Squire’,
While fed by mine and me,
And wringing food, and clothes and fire,
From bread-tax’d misery?

Make haste, slow rogues! prohibit trade,
Prohibit honest gain;
Turn all the good that God hath made
To fear, and hate, and pain;
Till beggars all, assassins all,
All cannibals we be,
And death shall have no funeral,
From shipless sea to sea.

Ebenezer Elliott

This week I want to put a word in for a work in prose that I find, in the good sense, very poetic. (I am sadly aware, of course, that for most people these days ‘poetic’ has come to be more or less synonymous with ‘obscure, pretentious and artificial’, but I would like to reclaim it for ‘precise, observant, vivid and not too far removed from the idiom and rhythms of common speech’).

The work in question is ‘The Living Mountain’ by Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) and is about her lifelong relationship with the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland. Written towards the end of the Second World War, it lay for years unpublished and assumedly unpublishable in the writer’s drawer, as if waiting till the times were ready for it, and finally appeared to a steadily growing acclaim in the nineteen-seventies.

It is a work hard to characterise, that has a transcendent visionary quality but at the same time is firmly rooted in the tangible, in rock and water, bird and flower, the nuances of changing light and weather, and is suffused throughout with a fierce physical joy in both the writer’s own body and the body of the mountain. The Gaels have a word ‘dùthchas’ (pronounced something like ‘doo-khas’) that is not easily translated: it can simply mean ‘one’s country, the place of one’s birth’, but it can mean more than that: an intense feeling of belonging to a particular landscape, ‘a sense of landscape, geography and history combined into one formal order of experience’. Nan Shepherd’s book seems to me a perfect exemplar of dùthchas. It also brings to mind the words that Walter de la Mare used of Edward Thomas: ‘Long-looking, long-desiring, long-loving – these win at last to the inmost being of a thing.’ They certainly allowed Nan Shepherd to win to the heart of her beloved Cairngorms.

I have chosen just a few almost random extracts to give some idea of the book’s style and substance, but really every page has some luminous phrase, some celebratory flash of observation. Just don’t expect a plot, or any help with peak-bagging. This is not a guide to conquering mountains. It is a guide to being part of them.

‘Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating immense distances with an effortless intensity. So on a clear day one looks without any sense of strain from Morven in Caithness to the Lammermuirs, and out past Ben Nevis to Morar. At midsummer, I have had to be persuaded I was not seeing further even than that. I could have sworn I saw a shape, distinct and blue, very clear and small, further off than any hill the chart recorded. The chart was against me, my companions were against me, I never saw it again. On a day like that, height goes to one’s head. Perhaps it was the lost Atlantis focused for a moment out of time’.

………………………………..

‘To walk out through the top of a cloud is good. Once or twice I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons. Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation.’

………………………………..

‘The Cairngorm water is all clear. Flowing from granite, with no peat to darken it, it never has the golden amber, the ‘horse-back brown’ so often praised in Highlands burns. When it has any colour at all, it is green, as in the Quoich near its linn. It is a green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines, without the vivid brilliance of glacier water.’

………………………………..

‘Of plants that carry their fragrance in their leaves, bog myrtle is the mountain example. This grey-green shrub fill the boggy hollows, neighboured by cotton-grass and sundew, bog asphodel and the spotted orchis, and the minute scarlet cups of the lichens. Its fragrance is cool and clean, and like the wild thyme it gives it most strongly when crushed. The other shrub, juniper, is secretive with its scent. It has an odd habit of dying in patches, and when a dead branch is snapped, a spicy odour comes from it. I have carried a piece of juniper wood for months, breaking it afresh now and then to renew the spice. This dead wood has a grey silk skin, impervious to rain. In the wettest season, when every fir branch in the woods is sodden, the juniper is crackling dry and burns with a clear heat.’

………………………………..

‘Once the snow has fallen, and the gullies are choked and ice is in the burns, green is the most characteristic colour in sky and water. Burns and river alike have a green glint when seen between snowy banks, and the smoke from a woodman’s fire looks greenish against the snow. The shadows on snow are of course blue, but where snow is blown into ripples, the shadowed undercut portion can look quite green. A snowy sky is often pure green, not only at sunrise or sunset, but all day; and a snow-green sky looks greener in reflection, either in water or from windows, than it seems in reality. Against such a sky, a snow-covered hill may look purplish, as though washed in blaeberry. On the other hand, before a fresh snowfall, whole lengths of snowy hill may appear a golden green. One small hill stands out from this greenness: it is veiled by a wide-spaced fringe of fir trees, and behind them the whole snowy surface of the hill is burning with a vivid electric blue.’

………………………………..

‘No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. One neither thinks, nor desires, nor remembers, but dwells in pure intimacy with the tangible world. These moments of quiescent perceptiveness before sleep are among the most rewarding of the day. I am emptied of preoccupation, there is nothing between me and the earth and sky. In midsummer the north glows with light long after midnight is past. As I watch, the light comes pouring round the edges of the shapes that stand against the sky, sharpening them till the more slender have a sort of glowing insubstantiality, as though they themselves were nothing but light.’

I had a friend and work colleague, a woman who loved life and was interested in everything that came along, and who died far too young of cancer in her early forties. By her request this poignant farewell to life by the folk-singer Ewan MacColl was played at her humanist funeral. Certainly for me it expressed far more of her spirit than any hymn could have done. Her ashes were indeed taken to ‘some high place of heather, rock and ling’ and scattered to the wind. I cannot now hear the song without thinking of her.

Notes: Glyder Fach is a mountain in Wales; Cùl Beag is a mountain in the northwest highlands of Scotland; Scafell is a mountain in the Lake District, England; Suilven is a mountain in Scotland; Bleaklow is a peat-covered moorland in Derbyshire, England.

The sleeve notes add the following:

‘Ewan’s love of life, his involvement in politics, his passionate attachment to the traditional music and to theatre never abated, even with the onset of ill health and old age. Although not the last song he wrote, this was meant as a farewell to the world and to the people he loved’

Ewan MacColl (1915-1989) was a seminal figure in the British folk revival of the nineteen-fifties and sixties. One is grateful for all the pioneering work he did in this area, such as the early radio ballads, and in collecting folk songs: he was the first, for example, to rescue the haunting ‘Scarborough Fair’ from obscurity. I admit, though, that I find him a rather problematic character. Apparently his virtues did not include tolerance for other people’s opinions, and his passionate identification with the cause of the working man led him to a lifelong veneration for Joseph Stalin that some may consider questionable: he left the Communist Party in the nineteen-eighties because he felt it had become too moderate, but perhaps in the light of recent events would by now have rejoined it. My feelings, therefore, are uneasily split between admiration and dissent. Yet he could write with love, as he does here, and he could speak for the love in others, as he did for my friend, and those are things that should, I think, weigh something in the balance of a life.

The Joy Of Living

Farewell, you northern hills, you mountains all goodbye,
Moorland and stony ridges, crags and peaks, goodbye.
Glyder Fach farewell, Cùl Beag, Scafell, cloud-bearing Suilven,
Sun-warmed rock and the cold of Bleaklow’s frozen sea,
The snow and the wind and the rain of hills and mountains,
Days in the sun and the tempered wind and the air like wine
And you drink and you drink till you’re drunk on the joy of living.

Farewell to you, my love, my time is almost done,
Lie in my arms once more until the darkness comes.
You filled all my days, held the night at bay, dearest companion,
Years pass by and they’re gone with the speed of birds in flight
Our lives like the verse of a song heard in the mountains.
Give me your hand and love and join your voice with mine
We’ll sing of the hurt and pain and the joy of living.

Farewell to you, my chicks, soon you must fly alone
Flesh of my flesh, my future life, bone of my bone.
May your wings be strong, may your days be long, safe be your journey
Each of you bears inside of you the gift of love,
May it bring you light and warmth and the pleasure of giving.
Eagerly savour each new day and the taste of its mouth.
Never lose sight of the thrill and the joy of living

Take me to some high place of heather, rock and ling,
Scatter my dust and ashes, feed me to the wind,
So that I may be part of all you see, the air you are breathing.
I’ll be part of the curlew’s cry and the soaring hawk,
The blue milkwort and the sundew hung with diamonds,
I’ll be riding the gentle wind that blows through your hair
Reminding you how we shared in the joy of living.

Ewan MacColl 

Maybe I am not the only one rather looking forward to the cool misty days of autumn after a summer far too hot for my taste. And this piece by Vernon Scannell (1922-2007) captures the more urban aspects of that season as well as any I know. I like, of course, the fact that poetry quite properly addresses the great themes of our existence: love, loss, death, our place in the cosmos, but I like it too when poems such as this one find time to stitch humbler things into this word-woven fabric of ours: the smell of burnt porridge on the wind, the halo of mist round street-lamps, the mash of fallen leaves in a gutter.

Velutinous: velvety.

Autumn

It is the football season once more
And the back pages of the Sunday papers
Again show the blurred anguish of goalkeepers.

In Maida Vale, Golders Green and Hampstead
Lamps ripen early in the surprising dusk;
They are furred like stale rinds with a fuzz of mist.

The pavements of Kensington are greasy,
The wind smells of burnt porridge in Bayswater
And the leaves are mashed to silence in the gutter.

The big hotel like an anchored liner
Rides near the park; lit windows hammer the sky.
Like the slow swish of surf the tyres of taxis sigh.

It is a time of year that’s to my taste,
Full of spiced rumours, sharp and velutinous flavours,
Dim with mist that softens the cruel surfaces,
Makes mirrors vague. It is the mist I most favour. 

Vernon Scannell

This week a rather affecting poem by Jonathan Price (1931-1985) that contrasts the ease with which small children express their affections with the inhibitions that adults sometimes bring to the task. On this note I remember how when my daughter was five, and had just discovered the fascination of large numbers, I was for some reason explaining to her the plot of ‘King Lear’, and she couldn’t understand why Cordelia wouldn’t simply tell her daddy that she loved him. ‘I would have said I loved you one thousand and forty nine’, she said. I was touched; admittedly I couldn’t help feeling that this was a bit low on the scale according to which she had previously claimed to love strawberries ‘one hundred million trillion and one’, but it’d do to be going on with.

Jonathan Price was loosely associated with the nineteen-fifties Movement poets, and his work was praised by Philip Larkin. An exacting craftsman, he published very little, and the collected poems, entitled ‘Everything Must Go’, that appeared towards the end of his life comprise just thirty-four pieces. Perhaps as a result he is pretty much forgotten: he deserves better.

A Considered Reply to a Child

‘I love you,’ you said between two mouthfuls of pudding.
But not funny; I didn’t want to laugh at all.
Rolling three years’ experience in a ball,
You nudged it friendlily across the table.

A stranger, almost, I was flattered – no kidding.
It’s not every day I hear a thing like that;
And when I do my answer’s never pat.
I’m about nine times your age, ten times less able

To say – what you said; incapable of unloading
Plonk at someone’s feet, like a box of bricks,
A declaration. When I try, it sticks
Like fish-bones in my throat; my eyes tingle.

What’s called ‘passion’, you’ll learn, may become ‘overriding’.
But not in me it doesn’t: I’m that smart,
I can give everything and keep my heart.
Kisses are kisses. No need for souls to mingle.

Bed’s bed, what’s more, and you’d say it’s meant for sleeping;
And, believe me, you’d be absolutely right.
With luck you’ll never lie awake all night,
Someone beside you (rather like ‘crying’) weeping.

Jonathan Price