Author Archives: davidjsutton

Week 477: The Porch, by R.S.Thomas

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It is not easy to know exactly what is going on in this poem, but I take it to be essentially a poem of yearning and alienation, by a man who has a foot in two worlds, human and preterhuman, but is not entirely at home in either – ‘neither outside nor in’. Clearly the poem focuses on an intense spiritual experience, though as often with Thomas it is hard to align this with the religious orthodoxy that might be expected given his calling as a parish priest. So he has no power to pray, and he acknowledges that the universe knows nothing of him and cares nothing for him – this is not your normal Sunday sermon material. I think Thomas’s problem is that while his vocation may commit him to the idea of a personal deity who looks out for us and listens to our prayers, his intellectual honesty compels him much more in the direction of the physicists’ god, of Einstein’s metaphorical ‘Old One’, the mysterious source of order in the universe, the elusive and uncaring creator of all those exquisite calibrations that underwrite our existence. The result in Thomas is a cognitive dissonance that is painful for him but fruitful for us when it results, as here, in a poem vibrant with a cold clarity and a passion that even unbelievers may bow to. 

The Porch

Do you want to know his name?
It is forgotten. Would you learn
what he was like? He was like
anyone else, a man with ears
and eyes. Be it sufficient
that in a church porch on an evening
in winter, the moon rising, the frost
sharp, he was driven
to his knees and for no reason
he knew. The cold came at him;
his breath was carved angularly
as the tombstones; an owl screamed.

He had no power to pray.
His back turned on the interior
he looked out on a universe
that was without knowledge
of him and kept his place
there for an hour on that lean
threshold, neither outside nor in.

R.S.Thomas

Week 476: Consider, by David Sutton

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Though I gave up on the latest Brian Cox TV offering (for heaven’s sake, enough with the background music, just show us the pictures and let the man talk) I am in general fascinated by anything to do with cosmology, especially the search for alien life, and if there is one thing I would like to live to see it is the resolution of that most fundamental question: are we alone in the universe? Rationally I’m not sure why this should exercise me so: after all, the discovery of life on some far distant planet seems unlikely to make much difference to my own, and there are wonders enough on earth I still know little about. Call it, maybe, the last rays of pure curiosity from the setting sun of my mind. At any rate, this week I offer my own somewhat pessimistic take on the matter.

Consider

Consider how they move, the galaxies,
Through the ocean of night like driftnets
Dragging deep space, though nothing we know is there
To be caught in that radiant star-knotted mesh.

Consider how they pass through one another
Like ghost armadas: let the stars be ships
A million miles apart: still that belittles
The loneliness of those bright galleons.

Consider light: by that same token see
A snail track silverthreading black Saharas
Between the stars, yet nothing anywhere
Outpaces that immortal messenger.

And then consider: who shall know us, what
Companion us: in all the shadowed room
What hands might cup this candle, flickering
In time’s wind, in the vast forever dark.

David Sutton

Week 475: To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence

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This poem was written rather more than a hundred years ago now (Flecker died in 1915), and I feel that any poet who has the chutzpah to address an audience a thousand years in the future at least deserves an intermediate review a century or so on. And I do think there is something touchingly vulnerable about it, especially given that Flecker was only thirty-one when he died, though I find its premises limited. Nothing wrong with wine, music, statues and bright-eyed love as subjects for poetry, but it’s surely good that since Flecker’s time poetry has moved away from a rather narrow aesthetic whereby certain subjects were considered ‘poetic’ towards a joyous engagement with whatever comes along.

But it is interesting to speculate as to what Flecker might have thought of poetic developments after his time. His rather ornate and dated play ‘Hassan’ contains the following passage, famous in its day:

CALIPH ‘Ah, if there shall ever arise a nation whose people have forgotten poetry or whose poets have forgotten the people, though they send their ships around Taprobane and their armies across the hills of Hindustan, though their city be greater than Babylon of old, though they mine a league into earth or mount to the stars on wings–what of them?

HASSAN
‘They will be a dark patch upon the world.’

So, would Flecker consider these prophetic fears to have been fulfilled? I think at one time, when the twentieth-century scene was dominated by the extremer forms of modernism, he might have done, but happily the later years of the century saw the reemergence of poets – Larkin, Hughes, Heaney and R.S.Thomas to name but a few – who at their best wrote poems that were not only very good but were also capable of giving immediate and lasting pleasure not only to litterateurs but to any intelligent reader with no professional axe to grind. Of course, there are dangers in populism, and I am myself not so much interested in bringing poetry to the people as in bringing the people to poetry. But at any rate, I like to think James Elroy Flecker would not be entirely disheartened by what came after, and here and there continues to come.

Note: Maeonides: a name for the poet Homer, from Maeonia, an ancient country in present north-west Turkey thought by some to be his birthplace.

To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.
 
I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure in the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

James Elroy Flecker

Week 474: For A Child Born Dead, by Elizabeth Jennings

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This one has mixed associations for me. Our firstborn came into the world over fifty years ago now, but in many ways it seems like yesterday. My wife’s contractions started soon after midnight, and having had a tricky pregnancy she was whisked off to hospital by ambulance while I followed after. On arrival she was directed to a ward and I to some sort of fathers’ room, where I spent a rather uncomfortable night trying to sleep on a couple of plastic chairs. (My wife wishes to point out that her own night was also not entirely without discomfort). In the course of this I chummed up with another young first-time father.

In the morning my wife was moved to a delivery room and I sat with her through a long hot June morning until around half-past two in the afternoon we were gifted with the never to be taken for granted miracle of a lusty new life coming into the world. I left the room walking on air after holding my firstborn son, and bumping into my friend of the night before told him all about it, remembering at the end to ask how his had gone. ‘Oh, ours was stillborn’, he said quietly, and I saw then his stricken young face.

I could think of nothing to say except ‘Oh, I’m so sorry’, apologising as much for my own tactless happiness as for the cruelty of chance, and perhaps there is nothing more useful anyway to be said in such cases. Yet at least this poem makes some attempt to grapple with that strangest and blankest of griefs.

For A Child Born Dead

What ceremony can we fit
You into now? If you had come
Out of a warm and noisy room
To this, there’d be an opposite
For us to know you by. We could
Imagine you in lively mood

And then look at the other side,
The mood drawn out of you, the breath
Defeated by the power of death
But we have never seen you stride
Ambitiously the world we know.
You could not come and yet you go.

But there is nothing now to mar
Your clear refusal of our world
Not in our memories can we mould
You or distort your character.
Then all our consolation is
That grief can be as pure as this.

Elizabeth Jennings

Week 473: Juliet, by Patricia Beer

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This is an early poem by Patricia Beer (see also week 191), written in her first somewhat romantic and soft-focus style that is quite unlike her later much edgier work. I have never quite made up my mind about it. I do admire it for its imagery and musicality, but the trouble with poems that riff on someone else’s work or draw on the ‘myth kitty’ is that they can seem a bit secondhand and, paradoxically, rootless, so this may be one of those cases where I want to say to the poet ‘Yes, very nice, but why?’. So it is that personally I would rate the week 191 piece, ‘Bereavement’, as the better poem for seeming more urgent, more necessary: a lot of developing as a poet is about getting ever closer to your own experience and less reliant on that of others.

Juliet

So come I into church again
My body straight as thunder rain,
My mouth grey as sirocco skies
My lids are newly fallen snow
And no March now will ever show
The tears that bloom inside my eys

Before the swift world turned to me,
Before the green plain like a sea
Shouldering Verona wall
Pushed the stones and lizards down
Unpicked the cobbles of the town
I never touched the world at all.

Now high in church my father stands
And takes my father by the hands.
The living peal into the sun
United as a chime of bells
But in the dark like scattered pearls
The matchless dead lie one by one.

Low on the bright mosaic floor
I who am Juliet no more
Have become Juliet at last,
Candlelit, unchangeable.
In this loud night the miracle
Of tomb and history go past.

Patricia Beer

Week 472: Sheep, by W.H.Davies

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Following on from last week, another poem with a surprising choice of subject matter: who would have thought that transporting sheep by boat could produce a piece that I for one, not normally much of a W.H.Davies fan, find curiously effective for all its seeming naivety. I think it owes its success to the poet’s empathy with the unfortunate beasts, and that’s fine, but I wonder if it also works by stirring up thoughts of human cargoes, slaves and convicts, also transported by sea in appalling conditions, and with scarcely more notion of where they were or understanding of what lay in store for them than had the poor sheep in the poem.

Sheep

When I was once in Baltimore,
A man came up and cried,
‘Come, I have eighteen hundred sheep,
And we will sail on Tuesday’s tide.

‘If you will sail with me, young man,
I’ll pay you fifty shillings down;
These eighteen hundred sheep I take
From Baltimore to Glasgow town.’

He paid me fifty shillings down,
I sailed with eighteen hundred sheep;
We soon had cleared the harbour’s mouth,
We soon were in the salt sea deep.

The first night we were out at sea
Those sheep were quiet in their mind;
The second night they cried with fear –
They smelt no pastures in the wind.

They sniffed, poor things, for their green fields,
They cried so loud I could not sleep:
For fifty thousand shillings down
I would not sail again with sheep.

W.H.Davies

Week 471: The Hospital, by Patrick Kavanagh

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I do like it when poets surprise one with an unconventional choice of material and make it work. I enjoy poems about stars and flowers and lost love as much as anyone, but I do take my hat off to a man who can work in wash basins, snoring and lorries, not to mention rhyming suntrap and claptrap, and still produce a lyrical, perfectly serious poem with a compelling message.

The Hospital

A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins – an art lover’s woe,
Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.
This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 470: Acquainted with the Night, by Robert Frost

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When I first read this poem, which would have been in my teens, I’m pretty sure I got it badly wrong. Personally ever since I was a child I have loved being out at night – the moon casting its copper glow on flat white shapes of broken cloud like ice-floes, the peppery scent of leaves in the autumnal darkness of a lane, in winter the gray silk of frost on pavements glittering with a million points of light – and I took this at first to be a celebration by a fellow enthusiast, similarly revelling in the quiet and solitude. It later dawned on me that this was much more a poem of alienation, in which Frost is using external darkness to mirror the darker side of his own often troubled mind. And yet I wonder if I was not totally wrong the first time, if there is after all a hint of relish in that alienation, that apartness, in being, as Frost puts it in another poem, ‘the exception/I like to think I am in everything’. Either way, it is a fine evocation of that halfworld that most of us these days simply draw the curtains against.

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost

Week 469: Anniversaries, by Douglas Dunn

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This week another poem from Douglas Dunn’s 1985 volume ‘Elegies’, written in memory of his first wife who died young. It is a collection that I find intensely moving, and also very skilful: I love the lilting movement of poems like this.

Note on the last verse: the beautifully precise word ‘longanimous’ means ‘patient with a suggestion of long-suffering’ – I believe Dunn was a goodish club-level runner in his younger days, so I take it the image here is one of his wife coming along even in the rain to cheer him on.

Roukenglen, Kelvingrove and Inchinnan are names associated with the Glasgow area of Renfrewshire.

Anniversaries

Day by nomadic day
Our anniversaries go by,
Dates anchored in an inner sky,
To utmost ground, interior clay.

It was September blue
When I walked with you first, my love,
In Roukenglen and Kelvingrove,
Inchinnan’s beech-wood avenue.

That day will still exist
Long after I have joined you where
Rings radiate the dusty air
And bangles bind each powdered wrist.

Here comes that day again.
What shall I do? Instruct me, dear,
Longanimous encourager,
Sweet soul in the athletic rain
And wife now to the weather.

Douglas Dunn

Week 468: Prayer, by Dana Gioia

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This week a strange but hauntingly lyrical poem by the American poet Dana Gioia (b. 1950), a sturdy defender of such unfashionable values in verse as form and meaning, whose work has steadily grown on me over the years. I think the key to this poem lies in the death of the poet’s firstborn son in infancy (see also week 140). But who or what exactly is being addressed in this prayer of intercession, and being described in the remarkable series of kennings that form the poem’s build-up? Gioia has a Catholic background, but I think readers are to some extent free to make their own interpretation: God if you like, or Death, or whatever mystery lies behind the making and unmaking of this world.

Prayer

Echo of the clocktower, footstep
in the alleyway, sweep
of the wind sifting the leaves.

Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur
of autumn’s opulence, blade of lightning
harvesting the sky.

Keeper of the small gate, choreographer
of entrances and exits, midnight
whisper travelling the wires.

Seducer, healer, deity or thief,
I will see you soon enough –
in the shadow of the rainfall,

in the brief violet darkening a sunset –
but until then I pray watch over him
as a mountain guards its covert ore

and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

Dana Gioia