Category Archives: poetry

Week 703: I grow these white lilies, by Molly Holden

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The English language may have no word that corresponds exactly to the Welsh ‘hiraeth’ or the Scots Gaelic ‘cianalas’, an overwhelming sense of love and loss felt by those exiled from a particular region dear to them, but that does not stop our poets expressing such a feeling, as Molly Holden does here, conjuring up her beloved Wiltshire downs. But though at one level this poem is clearly about actual lilies in actual landscapes, at another I think it may also be saying something about how the poet sees her own work: that her affinity is not for the luxurious and well-tended blooms grown in fertile gardens, but for those made all the more beautiful to her for being rooted in starveling soil, just as her poems have grown out of the difficult circumstances of her illness (see week 2).

I grow these white lilies

I grow these white lilies for homesickness.

Here they are set on clay, in a scoop
of midland valley, backed by a creosote fence,
luxuriant gardens. Over them droop
roses and raspberries, willow and almond tree.
This seems their element. Here they should thrive.

I grow them for this memory though – of lilies
spare as sticks, their flowers more waxenly alive
than these, by cinder paths in flat, infertile
gardens in the downs, rooted in chalk and flint,
heady and sweet by day against bare slopes,
scent and sentinel both by moonlight’s glint.

These are not they, are no compensation
for those lost lilies growing in that lost land.
But, as I reach to touch inferior petals,
I think I see the chalk beneath my hand.

Molly Holden

Week 702: From ‘Dauber’, by John Masefield

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As I have observed before (see week 41), in the latter part of the last century the once acclaimed John Masefield became about as unfashionable a poet as it is possible to be, finishing his days as Poet Laureate, in which role he penned the usual dutiful piffle. But if you want a straight tale in verse told without literary sophistication yet still with considerable literary skill, Masefield remains your man, and the long poem ‘Dauber’, from which this week’s extract is taken, is one of his most accomplished. It tells the story of a young man with a burning ambition to be a painter, who takes service aboard a clipper partly for economic reasons and partly because he wants to learn how to paint the sea properly, ‘by one who really knows’.

There he finds himself adrift in a society that sets no store by his artistic talents and offers no reward for them. (Well, we’ve all been there. When my children were small I put them each on a pocket-money bonus of a 5% share in my annual royalties; this gave them, if nothing else, some useful practice in the arithmetic of the infinitesimal). Though woefully ill-fitted for the hard nautical life, Dauber does his best to do what is required of him, and eventually earns some grudging respect, only to fall to his death in a race to the riggings to adjust the sails in a storm. His last words are a defiant ‘It will go on’, referring to his faith both that beauty will endure and that there will always be those who wish to capture it.

The following stanzas capture vividly his fall from height.

From ‘Dauber’

There came a gust, the sail leaped from his hands,

So that he saw it high above him, grey,
And there his mate was falling; quick he clutched
An arm in oilskins swiftly snatched away.
A voice said ‘Christ!’ a quick shape stooped and touched.
Chain struck his hands, ropes shot, the sky was smutched
With vast black fires that ran, that fell, that furled,
And then he saw the mast, the small snow hurled,

The fore-topgallant yard far, far aloft,
And blankness settling on him and great pain;
And snow beneath his fingers wet and soft
And topsail-sheet-blocks shaking at the chain.
He knew it was he who had fallen; then his brain
Swirled in a circle while he watched the sky.
Infinite multitudes of snow blew by.

‘I thought it was Tom who fell,’ his brain’s voice said.
‘Down on the bloody deck!’ the Captain screamed.
The multitudinous little snow-flakes sped.
His pain was real enough, but all else seemed.
Si with a bucket ran, the water gleamed
Tilting upon him; others came, the Mate …
They knelt with eager eyes like things that wait

For other things to come. He saw them there.
‘It will go on,’ he murmured, watching Si.
Colours and sounds seemed mixing in the air,
The pain was stunning him, and the wind went by.
‘More water,’ said the Mate. ‘Here, Bosun, try.
Ask if he’s got a message. Hell, he’s gone!
Here, Dauber, paints.’ He said, ‘It will go on.’

Not knowing his meaning rightly, but he spoke
With the intenseness of a fading soul
Whose share of Nature’s fire turns to smoke,
Whose hand on Nature’s wheel loses control.
The eager faces glowered red like coal.
They glowed, the great storm glowed, the sails, the mast.
‘It will go on,’ he cried aloud, and passed.

John Masefield

Week 701: The Need of Being Versed in Country Things, by Robert Frost

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Much as I like this poem by Robert Frost with its easy rhythms and neat descriptive touches, I regretfully have to point out that saying a thing well doesn’t make it true and that the last two lines sound like a piece of proverbial wisdom that like many pieces of proverbial wisdom doesn’t bear too much scrutiny. ‘One had to be versed in country things/Not to believe the phoebes wept’. On the contrary there must be innumerable town-dwelling folk who may not know much about the countryside and wouldn’t recognise a phoebe (a kind of American flycatcher) if one came and sat on their head but who would nonetheless be highly sceptical of the idea that birds could be in any way empathetic towards human loss, let alone weep for it.

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

Robert Frost

Week 700: X Agosto, by Giovanni Pascoli

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This week a famous Italian poem by Giovanni Pascolo (1855-1912), written in memory of his father Ruggero who was killed by an assassin on August 10th, 1867 while on the way home from market with gifts for his children. August 10th is San Lorenzo’s saint’s day. Giovanni was eleven at the time. The incident, together with later bereavements, was to haunt Giovanni all his life and infuse his work with a deep recurrent sadness: in one poem he likes his father to a fallen oak tree but here he compares him to a swallow returning to the nest.

San Lorenzo: the night of San Lorenzo was traditionally associated with falling stars, which Pascoli likens to tears falling from heaven as it weeps for the evil below.

I can’t quite make up my mind about this poem. I think the idea of falling stars being the tears of heaven is not an image that works well in this secular age, and the extended symbolism of the swallow may strike the English reader as a bit heavy-handed. On the other hand there is still enough restraint and pathos here to make it one of Pascoli’s most moving and memorable poems.

The translation that follows is my own.

X Agosto

San Lorenzo, io lo so perché tanto
di stelle per l’aria tranquilla
arde e cade, perché sì gran pianto
nel concavo cielo sfavilla.

Ritornava una rondine al tetto:
l’uccisero: cadde tra i spini;
ella aveva nel becco un insetto:
la cena dei suoi rondinini.

Ora è là, come in croce, che tende
quel verme a quel cielo lontano;
e il suo nido è nell’ombra, che attende,
che pigola sempre più piano.

Anche un uomo tornava al suo nido:
l’uccisero: disse: Perdono;
e restò negli aperti occhi un grido:
portava due bambole in dono.

Ora là, nella casa romita,
lo aspettano, aspettano in vano:
egli immobile, attonito, addita
le bambole al cielo lontano.

E tu, Cielo, dall’alto dei mondi
sereni, infinito, immortale,
oh! d’un pianto di stelle lo inondi
quest’atomo opaco del Male!

Giovanni Pascolo

August 10

San Lorenzo, I know why so many stars
Fall blazing through the calm air
To leave their traces like sparkling tears
In the hollow dome of the sky.

A swallow was returning to her nest:
And they killed her: she fell among thorns;
In her beak she was bearing an insect:
The meal for her little ones.

And now she is there, lying as if crucified,
Proffering that grub to the far off sky;
While her nest waits in the shadows, and the sound
Of its cheeping grows fainter and fainter.

Just so a man was returning to his home
And they killed him: he said: Forgive me;
And in the open eyes remained a lament:
He was bringing two dolls as a gift.

Now in the lonely house
They wait, and wait in vain
While he, astonished, lying still, points out
The dolls to the far off sky. 

You, Heaven, from the height
Of infinite, serene, immortal worlds,
Oh, send down starry tears to drown
This impenetrable atom of Evil!

Week 699: XXXII, by Philip Larkin

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This week’s offering is the last poem in Philip Larkin’s first collection, ‘The North Ship’, first published in 1945 and then republished in 1966 after the appearance of ‘The Less Deceived’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. This particular poem did not in fact appear in the original collection, not having been written until 1947, but did appear in a 1951 pamphlet ‘XX poems’. It was added to show the young Larkin at that time in transition between the influence of W.B.Yeats and one far more suited to his temperament, that of Thomas Hardy.

The poems in the ‘The North Ship’ are for the most part, as Larkin himself recognised, not very good: far too derivative of Yeats and quite lacking in what Seamus Heaney was later to call Larkin’s ‘Shakespearean felicity’. Elizabeth Jennings, reviewing the book, said somewhat inexplicably that it was good to know that the young Larkin could write so well; I thought that on the contrary that it was good to know that the young Larkin could write so badly: it gave the rest of us hope for the possibility of a radical improvement.

But the last poem in the book is a different kettle of fish, a definite foreshadowing of what was to come: precise in its evocation of an outer world while at the same time forensically honest in its examination of the poet’s inner world. Larkin appears to have spent the night with a woman, a night that while it might not have qualified for a place in what he later called ‘fulfilment’s desolate attic’ apparently fell short of expectations. ‘I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.’ (Seems a bit ungallant, but let it pass).

And yet, the morning after triggers in him something he thought he had lost, the impulse to poetry, his ‘lost lost world’, and his euphoria at this leads to a rush of affection for the woman, ‘easily tipping the balance towards love’. Of course, all this is not entirely creditable: one’s affection for other human beings should not vary like a weather-vane according to the state of one’s poetic inspiration, but at least he is honest enough to recognise this tendency in himself, which in turn leads him on to the self-questioning last stanza where he meditates on the problem that was to preoccupy him all his life, that of reconciling his need for other people with the solitary demands of his art, that he retuns to in other poems such as ‘Wants’: ‘Beyond all this, the wish to be alone’, and the morbidly funny ‘Vers de Société’.

XXXII

Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair,
I looked down at the empty hotel yard
Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,
But sent no light back to the loaded sky,
Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs.
Drainpipes and fire—escape climbed up
Past rooms still burning their electric light:
I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.

Misjudgment: for the stones slept, and the mist
Wandered absolvingly past all it touched,
Yet hung like a stayed breath; the lights burnt on,
Pin-points of undisturbed excitement; beyond the glass
The colourless vial of day painlessly spilled
My world back after a year, my lost lost world
Like a cropping deer strayed near my path again,
Bewaring the mind’s least clutch. Turning, I kissed her,
Easily for sheer joy tipping the balance to love.

But, tender visiting,
Fallow as a deer or an unforced field,
How would you have me? Towards your grace
My promises meet and lock and race like rivers,
But only when you choose. Are you jealous of her?
Will you refuse to come till I have sent
Her terribly away, importantly live
Part invalid, part baby, and part saint?

Philip Larkin

Week 698: Memory, by G.K.Chesterton

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This week’s poem is a bit of an oddity in the Chesterton canon. G.K.Chesterton is normally a fairly straightforward poet, with the only obstacles to understanding likely to be topical references in his more polemical pieces to events or public figures long forgotten. But this one has taken me a fair bit of figuring out, and I still cannot claim to understand the last stanza, which I nonetheless find quite haunting. I’ll put my notes, for what they’re worth, at the end.

Memory

If I ever go back to Baltimore,
The City of Maryland,
I shall miss again as I missed before
A thousand things of the world in store,
The story standing in every door
That beckons on every hand.

I shall not know where the bonds were riven,
And a hundred faiths set free,
Where a wandering cavalier had given
Her hundredth name to the Queen of Heaven,
And made oblation of feuds forgiven
To Our Lady of Liberty.

I shall not travel the tracks of fame
Where the war was not to the strong;
Where Lee the last of the heroes came
With the Men of the South and a flag like flame,
And called the land by its lovely name
In the unforgotten song.

If ever I cross the sea and stray
To the City of Maryland,
I will sit on a stone and watch or pray
For a stranger’s child that was there one day:
And the child will never come back to play,
And no one will understand.

G.K.Chesterton

Notes:

‘where the bonds were riven / And a hundred faiths set free’. Maryland was originally founded by Lord Baltimore (Cecil Calvert) as a refuge for religious liberty, a colony where Catholics, Protestants, and others could worship freely. The Maryland Toleration Act (1649) was one of the earliest laws protecting Christian religious freedom in the New World. So ‘the bonds were riven’ means that people were freed from the old religious restrictions of Europe.

‘the wandering cavalier’ i.e. Lord Baltimore, who actually named the state in honour of Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. But Chesterton chooses to take the name as being for the Virgin Mary, who in the Catholic faith has many titles, hence ‘her hundredth name’.‘Lee the last of the heroes’. Referring to General Robert E. Lee, leader of the Confederate armies in the American Civil War. He invaded Maryland in 1862, hoping that the state would join the confederacy.

‘and gave the land its lovely name in the unforgotten song’. This refers to ‘Maryland, My Maryland’, a Confederate poem/song written by James Ryder Randall, which was the state song until 1921.

‘the stranger’s child’. When I first read the poem I took this to be Chesterton himself, but this makes no sense, since there is no record that Chesterton ever visited Maryland at all, and certainly not as a child. So I find this whole stanza perplexing. Perhaps the most likely interpretation is that the child represents the young country itself, symbolising a lost innocence that can never be recaptured. This may well be something of an idealisation of America’s past, but it must be remembered that Chesterton was seeing things, as he always did, from the viewpoint of a devout Catholic. I also find it confusing that the poet appears to be rather romanticising the Confederacy. I know of course that the American Civil War was not solely or even primarily about slavery, but even so I would have thought anything to do with that institution would have been anathema to the humane and freedom-loving Chesterton.

So, all in all a bit of a puzzle poem, and yet plaintively memorable.

Week 697: If I Could Tell You, by W.H.Auden

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I see this villanelle by W.H.Auden as a triumph of form over substance where the virtuosity of rhythm and rhyme scheme lend the poem a gnomic quality that suggests a profundity of thought which proves rather elusive on close inspection. ‘The winds must come from somewhere when they blow’ is on the one hand a line that I find quite haunting but on the other hand is uncontroversial to the point of banality and doesn’t get you very far on the meteorological front. ‘Perhaps the roses really want to grow’ – perhaps, but it seems doubtful that volition as we understand it comes into it, it’s just what roses do. ‘Suppose all the lions get up and go’ – hang on, what lions? go where?

I take it that the poet is expressing a frustration at the unknowability of the future, which may reflect the state of things when the poem first appeared in 1940, soon after the outbreak of World War II, and that this frustration is compounded by his inability to communicate his feelings for another person. But perhaps it is best not to strive too hard for a literal meaning in this poem, but instead to view it as a rather beautiful poetic Rorschach test that lets you project on to it your own meanings and emotions.

If I Could Tell You

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose all the lions get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

W.H.Auden

Week 696: The Rule, by Richard Wilbur

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This week’s offering by the American poet Richard Wilbur (see also weeks 29, 144, 264, 355, 417 and 630) has his characteristic neatness of touch, but its line of thought, in so far as I follow it, is a bit tendentious. Willbur, who was an Anglican, seems to be saying that those who fail to follow the prescriptions of a strict religious observance, in this case Christian, risk falling prey to destructive superstitions of a worse kind. So the holy oil must be blessed at a certain time by a suitably qualified person – ‘Does that revolt you?’ he asks. Well, no, it doesn’t revolt me, it just seems a bit daft. ‘Things must be done in one way or another’, he concludes. All right, but who says the alternative to his way has to be seeking out the spiritual equivalent of a poisonous tree to sit under – why not simply do what seems good to do without mumbo-jumbo of any kind? To take a humble example, at about this time of year a lot of volunteers from my village spend their evenings on ‘toad patrol’, making sure that the local amphibians can cross the roads safely on their way to the ponds where they spawn. This is done without recitations from scripture, ritual invocations to deities and the promise of a place in heaven, and apparently for no other reason than that they, like Thomas Hardy in last week’s poem, share a desire that ‘such innocent creatures should come to no harm’. Still, if people find meaning and comfort in ritual observances who am I to say them nay.

And I did like finding out about the manchineel. This is a very toxic tree that grows in South America: the modern Spanish name for it is manzanilla de la muerte, ‘little apple of death’. The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, he of Florida fame who probably didn’t actually spend his time searching for the Fountain of Youth, died from a wound from an arrowhead coated with manchineel sap.

The Rule

The oil for extreme unction must be blessed
On Maundy Thursday, so the rule has ruled,
And by the bishop of the diocese.
Does that revolt you? If so, you are free
To squat beneath the deadly manchineel,
That tree of caustic drops and fierce aspersion,
And fancy that you have escaped from mercy.
Things must be done in one way or another.

Richard Wilbur

Week 695: Afterwards, by Thomas Hardy

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I try not to include too many anthology standards, but I feel I can no longer pass over this perennial Hardy favourite. Let us admit, though, that for a great poem it has a very shaky start. ‘When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay’. Come again? The guy is saying ‘When I’m dead’. Oh, right. But it soon becomes a most touching meditation on mortality, drawing its strength in typical Hardy fashion from the specific and sensuous: the darkness of a summer night, ‘mothy and warm’, the thorn trees bent by the wind, the night skies of winter with Orion bright above.

Dewfall-hawk: the nightjar, that is known for making what are called roding flights at dusk, the time when the dew forms.

Bell of quittance: the bell tolled at a church to mark a parishioner’s passing. Cf. Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’: ‘They tolled the one bell only/Groom was there none to see’.

Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbors say,
‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
‘To him this must have been a familiar sight.’

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winters sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?

Thomas Hardy

Week 694: The Oakey Strike Evictions, by Tommy Armstrong

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Thomas (Tommy) Armstrong (1849-1919) was a true poet of the people whose verses, published originally in the form of broadsheets that he sold round public houses for a penny a time, chronicled the life and hard times of the Durham mining community towards the end of the nineteenth century. Known as the Pitman Poet, he achieved a reputation in particular for writing songs about mining disasters, of which ‘The Trimdon Grange Disaster’ is the best known.

‘The Oakey Strike Evictions’ describes the repressive measures taken by the coal owners of the time in the face of industrial unrest. When miners at the Oakey pit in the Northwest Durham Coalfield, long subject to dangerous working conditions, low pay and long hours, went on strike in 1885 the owner did not hesitate to call in a force of hired goons (the ‘candymen’ of the song), to evict the miners from their homes (which were, of course, owned by the colliery). They were led by the town crier (‘Johnny whe carries the bell’).

The words were set to a jaunty tune, which works well to counterpoint the anger and contempt of the lyrics. Note that the prime focus of this anger and contempt is not so much the bosses, who are cheerfully consigned to hell with no particular animus, because the boss class were ever thus and you wouldn’t expect anything different from them, but the underlings, the candymen and the town crier, who come from the same social class as the miners yet let themselves be used as tools of oppression. The same spirit informs another song of the period, the viciously anti-scab ‘Blackleg Miner’, probably best known as sung by Steeleye Span on their album ‘Hark The Village Wait’.

The Oakey Strike Evictions were long remembered in the north-east, with a long smouldering resentment that burst into flame again during the miners’ strike in the 1980s.

Note: ‘candyman’ does not here have its modern American sense of ‘drug pusher’. A candyman at the time could simply be one who sold sweets, and could also be a rag-and-bone man who would give sweets in exchange for recyclable materials that he collected on a cart. (Now there’s a trade that’s disappeared, but when I was a child in the nineteen-fifties we still had a rag-and-bone man come up the road periodically with his horse and cart, for housewives to bring out their unwanted textiles or scrap metal and perhaps get sixpence or a shilling in return). But the candyman of the poem is simply a hired thug, often drawn from dockside labourers in the large towns, the implication of the name being that they would do anything for a handful of sweets.

The Oakey Strike Evictions

It was in November and I never will forget
When the polisses and the candymen at Oakey Hooses met
Johnny the Bellman, he was there, he was squintin’ roond aboot
And they put three men on every door to turn the miners oot

And what would ah de if ah had the power mesel’?
Ah would hang the twenty candymen and Johnny whe carries the bell

They went from hoose to hoose and then they put things on the road
But mind they didn’t hurt themselves, carrying heavy loads
One would carry the poker oot, the fender or the rake
But if they carried two at once, it was a great mistake

Oh what would ah de if ah had the power mesel’?
Ah would hang the twenty candymen and Johnny whe carries the bell

Some of these dandy candymen were dressed up like a clown
Some had hats without a slice and some of them without a crown
And one of them that was with them, aye, I’ll swear that he was worse
Cos every time he had to speak, it was a terrible farce

And what would ah de if ah had the power mesel’?
Ah would hang the twenty candymen and Johnny whe carries the bell

Well next up comes the masters and I think they should be shamed
Depriving wives and families of their comfortable homes
And when you shift from where you live, I hope you go to hell
Along with the twenty candymen and Johnny who carries the bell

And what would ah de if ah had the power mesel’?
Ah would hang the twenty candymen and Johnny whe carries the bell

Thomas Armstrong