Author Archives: davidjsutton

Week 362: What were they like?, by Denise Levertov

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I have been reading Max Hastings’ ‘Vietnam’, an account of the Vietnamese War in which he meticulously chronicles the destruction of the country and the devastating effect of the conflict on those caught in the middle. This poem by the American poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997) distils the essence of that calamity. The diction has a lyric quality which may seem at odds with the subject, yet adds a further sheen of irony to the poem.

What were they like?

Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
Had they an epic poem?
Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they once gathered to delight in blossoms,
but after the children were killed, there were no more buds.

Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps.
Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.

It is not remembered. Remember, most were peasants:
their life was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies,
and water buffaloes stepped along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs shattered those mirrors,
there was time only to scream.

There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported that their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.

Denise Levertov

Week 361: The River’s Tale, by Rudyard Kipling

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Another example of Kipling’s power to evoke the quasi-mythical past of Britain, in much the same vein as he manages in ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’, conjuring up ‘Merlin’s isle of gramarye’, (see week 270), and its successor volume ‘Rewards and Fairies’. As history it’s a romantic gallimaufry, but it’s still good fun.

The River’s Tale

Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew
Wanted to know what the River knew,
For they were young, and the Thames was old
And this is the tale that River told:

‘I walk my beat before London Town,
Five hours up and seven down.
Up I go till I end my run
At Tide-end-Town, which is Teddington.
Down I come with the mud in my hands
And plaster it over the Maplin Sands.
But I’d have you know that these waters of mine
Were once a branch of the River Rhine,
When hundreds of miles to the East I went
And England was joined to the Continent.

‘I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds,
The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds,
And the giant tigers that stalked them down
Through Regent’s Park into Camden Town.
And I remember like yesterday
The earliest Cockney who came my way,
When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand,
With paint on his face and a club in his hand.
He was death to feather and fin and fur.
He trapped my beavers at Westminster.
He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer,
He killed my heron off Lambeth Pier.
He fought his neighbour with axes and swords,
Flint or bronze, at my upper fords.
While down at Greenwich, for slaves and tin
The tall Phoenician ships stole in,
And North Sea war-boats, painted and gay,
Flashed like dragon-flies, Erith Way;
And Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek
Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek,
And life was gay, and the world was new,
And I was a mile across at Kew!
But the Roman came with a heavy hand,
And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,
And the Roman left and the Danes blew in –
And that’s where your history-books begin!’

Rudyard Kipling

Week 360: American Names, by Stephen Vincent Benet

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I think it is possible to find this poem evocative even if, like me, one has little idea of what is being evoked. I have no idea, for example, what associations Carquinez Straits or Skunktown Plain might have for the American reader, but there is always a kind of magic in place-names, those human appropriations or summonings of small pieces of our planet..

The racial appellation in the fourth stanza grates on us now, of course: one can only plead that the poet at the time (1927) would not have seen it as offensive, which invites, I suppose, the rejoinder well, he should have.

I don’t know who the Henry and John of the sixth stanza were. My guess is a couple of writers who left America for Europe, possibly Henry James and John Dos Passos.

Nantucket Light, on the island of Nantucket off the coast Massachusetss, would be one of the first things seen by a traveller returning to America.

American Names

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn,
But I will remember where I was born.

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

Stephen Vincent Benét (1927)

Week 359: On Raglan Road, by Patrick Kavanagh

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There are probably few in my audience who have not already met this beautiful poem of unrequited love by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, either in its original form as a poem first published in 1946 under the title ‘Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away’, or else (with slightly altered wording) as a song first made popular by Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, set to a traditional Irish air ‘The Dawning of the Day’, and subsequently covered by scores of folk artists. The poem was written for a young medical student Hilda Moriarty, but Kavanagh was 40 at the time as against her 22, and evidently the relationship foundered, or perhaps never really got going, because of that gap.

I have sometimes wondered if in line 12 Kavanagh really meant to capitalise May – when I first heard it, as a song, I took it as ‘clouds over fields of may’ i.e. fields of hawthorn blossom, which seemed to make sense as contrasting dark hair and white skin. But all versions seem to agree on the capitalisation.

On Raglan Road

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay-
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 358: Llananno, by R.S.Thomas

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I think it is possible for even R.S.Thomas’s greatest admirers, among whom I would certainly count myself, to become a little exasperated at his repetitive and somewhat one-sided conversations with God, and to want to quote the physicist Richard Feynman at him: ‘that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know.’ But in this serenely beautiful poem at least it appears that for once the divinity who so often eluded his questing search is present for him.

Llananno

I often call there.
There are no poems in it
for me. But as a gesture
of independence of the speeding
traffic I am a part
of, I stop the car,
turn down the narrow path
to the river and enter
the church with its clear reflection
beside it.

There are few services
now; the screen has nothing
to hide. Face to face
with no intermediary
between me and God, and only the water’s
quiet insistence on a time
older than man, I keep my eyes
open and am not dazzled,
so delicately does the light enter
my soul from the serene presence
that waits for me till I come next.

R.S.Thomas

Week 357: Was It Not Curious? by Stevie Smith

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In this age of relativism it can be quite refreshing to come across a poem where one is left in no doubt about the poet’s moral opinion. Here the feyly idiosyncratic Stevie Smith gives both barrels to St Augustin and Pope Gregory. 

Was It Not Curious?

Stevie Smith … Upon seeing English children in the slave market, Aúgustin asked who they were. Being told they were ‘Angli’, that is, English, he said ‘Non Angli sed angeli’, that is, Not English but angels, and Pope Gregory I, hearing the story, promptly sent Aúgustin to England to convert the English.

Was it not curious of Aúgustin
Saint Aúgustin, Saint Aúgustin,
When he saw the beautiful British children
To say such a curious thing?

He said he must send the gospel, the gospel,
At once to them over the waves
He never said he thought it was wicked
To steal them away for slaves

To steal the children away
To buy and have slavery at all
Oh no, oh no, it was not a thing
That caused him any appal.

Was it not curious of Gregory
Rather more than of Aúgustin?
It was not curious so much
As it was wicked of them.

Stevie Smith

Week 356: Adonis Blue, Yoesden Bank, by David Sutton

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I don’t like to peddle my own wares in this weekly slot, but every so often I feel a twinge of guilt at doing nothing to assist the publisher who has so gallantly but imprudently invested in my work, so here is a fairly recent effort that just made it into my ‘Collected Poems’, for details of which see the ‘News’ page. Just in case anyone feels like ordering it through their library…

Yoesden Bank is a nature reserve in Buckinghamshire, not far from my home.

Adonis Blue, Yoesden Bank

Yes, I have loved them, just the way one loves
Unknowingly, until a thing is lost:
Peacocks, tortoiseshells, red admirals
Browsing buddleia’s sweet purple pastures;
Brimstones, woken by the year’s first warmth,
Dancing over bank and brambled ditch;
Once on a beach a fall of painted ladies
Like leaves from some fabulous autumn; orange-tips
And clouded yellows, but never till today
This one, with its wings like summer sky
Bordered with white cloud. It makes the day
Perfect: it distils, it gathers in
The whole of this chalk hillside hazed with flowers,
The hum of sun-warmed grass, the church below
Lost among trees – you’d say that some great artist
Had added to his canvas, Turner-wise,
One drop of purest colour, then stood back
Satisfied at last, his work complete.

David Sutton

 

Week 355: The Pardon, by Richard Wilbur

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Another of the American poet Richard Wilbur’s elegant, compassionate poems.

The Pardon

My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive

Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies’ intolerable buzz.

Well, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man. My father took the spade

And buried him. Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)
And saw the dog emerging. I confess

I felt afraid again, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies,
And death was breeding in his lively eyes.
I started in to cry and call his name,

Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head.
… I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death’s pardon now. And mourn the dead.

Richard Wilbur

Week 354: The President Sang Amazing Grace, by Zoe Mulford

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In the week following yet another all too common event in the United States, the words of this song by Zoe Mulford, written after the Charleston church shootings in 2015, seem to go to the heart of the matter without fuss or frills. The song has been covered by, among others, Joan Baez and can be found on her album ‘Whistle Down The Wind’. The President in this case is Barack Obama, not to be confused with the present incumbent.

The President Sang Amazing Grace

A young man came to a house of prayer
They did not ask what brought him there
He was not friend, he was not kin
But they opened the door and let him in

And for an hour the stranger stayed
He sat with them and seemed to pray
But then the young man drew a gun
And killed nine people, old and young

In Charleston in the month of June
The mourners gathered in a room
The President came to speak some words
And the cameras rolled and the nation heard

But no words could say what must be said
For all the living and the dead
So on that day and in that place
The President sang Amazing Grace
The President sang Amazing Grace

We argued where to lay the blame
On one man’s hate or our nation’s shame
Some sickness of the mind or soul
And how the wounds might be made whole

But no words could say what must be said
For all the living and the dead
So on that day and in that place
The President sang Amazing Grace
My President sang Amazing Grace

Zoe Mulford

Week 353: Indifference, by G.A. Studdert Kennedy

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Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy (1883-1929) was an Anglican priest who served in the trenches as a chaplain during the First World War, and was known as Woodbine Willie from his practice of distributing cigarettes along with spiritual comfort to the troops. I suppose you would call Studdert Kennedy a skilled versifier rather than a poet, and yet it seems to me that this poem makes a point that you don’t need to be a believer to find interesting, and makes it quite clearly and movingly.

Indifference

When Jesus came to Golgotha they hanged Him on a tree,
They drave great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.

When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by,
They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.

Still Jesus cried, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall and cried for Calvary.

G.A. Studdert Kennedy