Category Archives: poetry

Week 732: Remembering Dido, by David Sutton

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Remembrance Sunday comes round again, and this week I offer one of my own poems on the subject. Not being born until 1944 I have, of course, no memory of the Second World War, let alone the First, but my mother who was born in 1908 told me stories of both, and this one, of a young soldier who was billeted with her family for a while before being sent out to the trenches in the Great War, haunted me for years until I finally made what offering I could to his shade.

Remembering Dido

They never came back, the young men
Billeted with my grandmother in the Great War
At 40, Church Road, Watford on their way to the Front.
My mother forgot their names, she was only six
And they were too many. One, though, she remembered:
Dido, they called him, who was handsome and merry-hearted,
Who called her Pinky, who teased her about her dolls,
Who tossed her up to the ceiling and caught her again
In strong young cricketer’s arms; who died, they heard,
Bullet-riddled, throwing grenades, running forward
Cheering the others on, like a boy at play.
My mother was the last, I think, who knew him,
And she is dead now too. His name was Dido.

David Sutton

Week 731: From ‘Henry V, Act 4’, by William Shakespeare

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It’s a while since we had some Shakespeare, so here is his masterly evocation of the night before the battle of Agincourt, as spoken by the chorus in ‘Henry V’. It will be remembered that the English army have had a pretty rough time of it, being greatly outnumbered and plagued by disease, and that at the time they were in fact trying to retreat to the English-held port of Calais after the Siege of Harfleur, only to find their path blocked by a much larger French force, so their mood is understandably not too chipper. Later in the act we have the famous exchange between a common soldier called William and the king who has gone about his men in disguise to check up on morale. William accepts that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, or to be precise, that a man’s gotta do what his king tells him to do, but points out the king consequently faces a heavy reckoning on the Day of Judgment if, as seems likely, things go badly wrong on the morrow. ‘I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle’, says William, a line which neatly undercuts the King’s later bombastic ‘happy few’ speech, and tempts one to believe that here we have a subtly Shakespearean way of resolving a tension between what the playwright found politic to write and what he really thought.

Umber’d: cast into shadow. Cf. Housman’s ‘Wenlock Edge was umbered/And bright was Abdon Burf/And warm between them slumbered/The smooth green miles of turf’.

From Henry V, Act 4: Prologue

Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night
The hum of either army stilly sounds,
That the fixed sentinels almost receive
The secret whispers of each other’s watch.
Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames
Each battle sees the other’s umber’d face;
Steed threatens steed in high and boastful neighs
Piercing the night’s dull ear; and from the tents
The armorers, accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,
Give dreadful note of preparation:
The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll,
And the third hour of drowsy morning named,
Proud of their numbers and secure in soul,
The confident and overlusty French
Do the low-rated English play at dice;
And chide the cripple tardy-gaited night,
Who, like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp
So tediously away. The poor condemnèd English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
Sit patiently and inly ruminate
The morning’s danger; and their gesture sad,
Investing lank-lean cheeks and war-worn coats,
Presenteth them unto the gazing moon
So many horrid ghosts.

William Shakespeare

Week 730: Sandra’s Mobile, by Douglas Dunn

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I see the poet Douglas Dunn died this week. He was a compassionate craftsman whose work I have long admired; he worked to make his words shaped and memorable in a way that seems to have gone largely out of fashion, to judge from so much of what is now served up to us as poetry. I have already featured two poems from his moving collection ‘Elegies’, written in memory of his wife who died young (see weeks 39 and 469), but let me mark his passing with another from the same collection, that makes a valiant attempt, not to transcend grief, but to balance it with love and the memory of love.

Sandra’s Mobile

A constant artist, dedicated to
Curves, shapes, the pleasant shades, the feel of colour,
She did not care what shapes, what red, what blue,
Scorning the dull to ridicule the duller
With a disinterested, loyal eye.
So Sandra brought her this and taped it up –
Three seagulls from a white and indoor sky –
A gift of old artistic comradeship.
‘Blow on them, Love’. Those silent birds winged round
On thermals of my breath. On her last night,
Trying to stay awake, I saw love crowned
In tears and wooden birds and candlelight.
She did not wake again. To prove our love
Each gull, each gull, each gull turned into dove.

Douglas Dunn

Week 729: The Ballad of East and West, by Rudyard Kipling

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I think that on its own terms this is a fine poem, with its echoes of the old border ballads. Of course, you may dislike those terms, you may throw up your hands and say ‘Huh, Kipling, colonialism’, but I think to do so would be to miss the fact that Kipling here, as in his masterpiece ‘Kim’, is in fact showing love and respect for the people of India, even for those who kicked against the rule of the Raj.

The poem does not appear to be based on an actual incident, but instead is a reworking of a story that had long been in circulation. It seems reasonable to ask how plausible the story is. While one my feel that the Colonel’s son is pushing his luck in places, I think one can accept the basic premise of the poem, that a code of honour and respect for an adversary’s courage really did exist at that time among the wild tribes of the border. I am reminded of the scene in George Macdonald Fraser’s excellent historical novel, ‘Black Ajax’, where the two pugilists Tom Molineaux and Tom Cribb, of totally different backgrounds and ethnicities, Molineaux an ex-slave and Cribb an oaken Englishman, nod to one another over the heads of the crowd as they are about to fight, two strong men bound by mutual respect and by the kind of shared experience known to few.

I do have niggling reservations about some of the detail. We are told how Kamal and the Colonel’s son ride half the night and every rock and thorn-tree they pass, so Kamal boasts, had one of Kamal’s men behind it. Just how many men did Kamal have? It must have taken a lot of organizing. ‘Remind me again why I’m crouching behind this rock’. ‘It’s just in case some mad bastard might take it into his head to chase after Kamal and Kamal might want him shot’. ‘Oh, right’.

I worry too about this business of ‘turning the calkins’ on the mare’s feet, in the hope of confusing pursuers with tracks apparently going the wrong way. This is an idea associated with the old border reivers, but I strongly suspect it belongs to folklore rather than reality. Calkins were a kind of horseshoe, fairly primitive but even so there was a right and wrong way to put them on, and putting them on back to front would surely risk injury to the horse or at very least slow it down, and yet, we are told, the mare flies over the rough terrain ‘like a new-roused fawn’. Also, you surely wouldn’t want to spend time messing about with hooves when you were supposed to making a quick getaway But still, for me any such reservations are swept away by the sheer bravura back-and-forth of the piece.the Guides: a famous regiment of the Indian Army under the British.

ressaldar: a mid-level Indian cavalry officer.

pickets: small parties of troops sent out as scouts to report sightings of the enemy.

breech-bolt: part of the mechanism of a rifle, that makes a clicking sound when operated.

dun: a brownish-grey horse.

the mouth of a bell: presumably means having a hard mouth and so being difficult to control.

the head of a gallows-tree: a slightly puzzling image: I think it just means the horse was ugly-looking.

a stag of ten: an impressive stag with ten tines or points on his antlers, five on each side.

snaffle-bars: parts of the bit used in the mouth to control the horse.

belike: most likely.

a lifter’s dower: a ‘lifter’ in this context is a cattle-stealer; dower is another form of dowry, money given along with a bride to her husband on marriage.

Ling: strictly speaking a kind of heather, Calluna vulgaris, but as this does not grow in India I think here it just means ground cover of whatever kind.

White Queen: Queen Victoria (1819-1901), Empress of India.

Khyber knife: a long Indian knife with a triangular blade.

the Wondrous Names of God: as listed in the Qu’ran: ‘He is Allah, The Creator, The Originator, The Fashioner, To Him belong the most Beautiful Names. Whatever is in the Heavens and on Earth, Do Declare His Praises and Glory, And He is the Exalted in Might, The Wise.’

the Quarter-Guard: in an Indian Army camp a garrison, providing an armed party ready at all times for action in an emergency.

Peshawur: capital of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan.

The Ballad of East and West

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

Kamal is out with twenty men to raise the Border-side,
And he has lifted the Colonel’s mare that is the Colonel’s pride,
He has lifted her out of the stable-door between the dawn and the day,
And turned the calkins upon her feet, and ridden her far away.

Then up and spoke the Colonel’s son that led a troop of the Guides:
‘Is there never a man of all my men can say where Kamal hides?’
Then up and spoke Mohammed Khan, the son of the Ressaldar:
‘If ye know the track of the morning-mist, ye know where his pickets are.
At dusk he harries the Abazai — at dawn he is into Bonair,
But he must go by Fort Bukloh to his own place to fare,
So if ye gallop to Fort Bukloh as fast as a bird can fly,
By the favour of God ye may cut him off ere he win to the Tongue of Jagai.
But if he be past the Tongue of Jagai, right swiftly turn ye then,
For the length and the breadth of that grisly plain is sown with Kamal’s men.
There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between,
And ye may hear a breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen.’

The Colonel’s son has taken a horse, and a raw rough dun was he,
With the mouth of a bell and the heart of Hell and the head of the gallows-tree.
The Colonel’s son to the Fort has won, they bid him stay to eat –
Who rides at the tail of a Border thief, he sits not long at his meat.
He’s up and away from Fort Bukloh as fast as he can fly,
Till he was aware of his father’s mare in the gut of the Tongue of Jagai,
Till he was aware of his father’s mare with Kamal upon her back,
And when he could spy the white of her eye, he made the pistol crack.
He has fired once, he has fired twice, but the whistling ball went wide.
‘Ye shoot like a soldier,’ Kamal said. ‘Show now if ye can ride.’
It’s up and over the Tongue of Jagai, as blown dust-devils go,
The dun he fled like a stag of ten, but the mare like a barren doe.
The dun he leaned against the bit and slugged his head above,
But the red mare played with the snaffle-bars, as a maiden plays with a glove.
There was rock to the left and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between,
And thrice he heard a breech-bolt snick tho’ never a man was seen.
They have ridden the low moon out of the sky, their hoofs drum up the dawn,
The dun he went like a wounded bull, but the mare like a new-roused fawn.
The dun he fell at a water-course – in a woeful heap fell he,
And Kamal has turned the red mare back, and pulled the rider free.
He has knocked the pistol out of his hand – small room was there to strive,
‘’Twas only by favour of mine,’ quoth he, ‘ye rode so long alive:
There was not a rock for twenty mile, there was not a clump of tree,
But covered a man of my own men with his rifle cocked on his knee.
If I had raised my bridle-hand, as I have held it low,
The little jackals that flee so fast were feasting all in a row.
If I had bowed my head on my breast, as I have held it high,
The kite that whistles above us now were gorged till she could not fly.’

Lightly answered the Colonel’s son: ‘Do good to bird and beast,
But count who come for the broken meats before thou makest a feast.
If there should follow a thousand swords to carry my bones away,
Belike the price of a jackal’s meal were more than a thief could pay.
They will feed their horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain,
The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain.
But if thou thinkest the price be fair, – thy brethren wait to sup,
The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn, – howl, dog, and call them up!
And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack,
Give me my father’s mare again, and I’ll fight my own way back!’

Kamal has gripped him by the hand and set him upon his feet.
‘No talk shall be of dogs,’ said he, ‘when wolf and gray wolf meet.
May I eat dirt if thou hast hurt of me in deed or breath;
What dam of lances brought thee forth to jest at the dawn with Death?’
Lightly answered the Colonel’s son: ‘I hold by the blood of my clan:
Take up the mare for my father’s gift – by God, she has carried a man!’
The red mare ran to the Colonel’s son, and nuzzled against his breast;
‘We be two strong men,’ said Kamal then, ‘but she loveth the younger best.
So she shall go with a lifter’s dower, my turquoise-studded rein,
My ’broidered saddle and saddle-cloth, and silver stirrups twain.’
The Colonel’s son a pistol drew and held it muzzle-end,
‘Ye have taken the one from a foe,’ said he; ‘Will ye take the mate from a friend?’
‘A gift for a gift,’ said Kamal straight; ‘a limb for the risk of a limb.
Thy father has sent his son to me, I’ll send my son to him!’
With that he whistled his only son, that dropped from a mountain-crest –
He trod the ling like a buck in spring, and he looked like a lance in rest.
‘Now here is thy master,’ Kamal said, ‘who leads a troop of the Guides,
And thou must ride at his left side as shield on shoulder rides.
Till Death or I cut loose the tie, at camp and board and bed,
Thy life is his – thy fate it is to guard him with thy head.
So, thou must eat the White Queen’s meat, and all her foes are thine,
And thou must harry thy father’s hold for the peace of the Border-line,
And thou must make a trooper tough and hack thy way to power –
Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar when I am hanged in Peshawur.’

They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault,
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,
On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.
The Colonel’s son he rides the mare and Kamal’s boy the dun,
And two have come back to Fort Bukloh where there went forth but one.
And when they drew to the Quarter-Guard, full twenty swords flew clear –
There was not a man but carried his feud with the blood of the mountaineer.
‘Ha’ done! ha’ done!’ said the Colonel’s son. ‘Put up the steel at your sides!
Last night ye had struck at a Border thief – to-night ’tis a man of the Guides!’

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

Rudyard Kipling

Week 728: The Baron O’ Brackley, by Anon

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I think that for narrative speed, pathos and use of dialogue this week’s offering, ‘The Baron o’ Brackley’ (Child 203) ranks among the finest of the Scots ballads, at least in this punchy version (there are other wordier texts). It is apparently based on a real incident, when in 1666 John Farquaharson of Inveray killed John Gordon of Brackley, head of Clan Gordon, in a feud over some stolen cattle.

It is not hard to follow. Inveray turns up at Brackley’s gates and invites him to come out and be killed. Knowing that he is greatly outnumbered (in this version he has only his brother for support against Inveray and thirty-three of his men) Brackley reasonably enough decides that he would rather stay in bed, but his wife Peggy (who turns out to be in cahoots with Inveray), taunts him with cowardice and calls on her serving-maids to fight instead: ‘take up your rocks, lassies, and fight a’ like men’. (This doesn’t mean pick up stones: ‘rocks’ in this sense means distaffs, the things you spin wool on). This shames Brackley enough that he and his brother ride out and are duly cut down. (One feels a bit for the brother, whose loyalty to his sibling is not even rewarded in the poem with a name). Peggy then opens the gates to let Inveray in, serves him food, lets him stay the night and advises him on the best route home the next morning to avoid a potential posse of avenging Gordons. Of course, we don’t know what the state of the Brackley marriage had been, but the ballad-maker leaves us in no doubt that he thinks this has all been a pretty poor show on her part.

The ballad, which has a fine tune to go with it, has been covered by many folk artists, as can be found on YouTube, often with words that vary somewhat from those below. I favour the Ray Fisher version.

yates: gates
gar: make
spin: spill
kye: cattle
gang: go
graith: gear, armour
laith: loth
bann: curse
riving: tearing
syne: then
ha: hall         

The Baron O’ Brackley

O Inverey came down Dee side, whistling and playing;
He’s landed at Braikly’s yates at the day dawing.
Says, Baron of Braikly, are ye within?
There’s sharp swords at the yate will gar your blood spin.

The lady raise up, to the window she went;
She heard her kye lowing oer hill and oer bent.
‘O rise up, John,’ she says, ‘Turn back your kye;
They’re oer the hills rinning, they’re skipping away.’
‘Come to your bed, Peggie, and let the kye rin,
For were I to gang out, I would never get in.’

Then she’s cry’d on her women, they quickly came ben:
‘Take up your rocks, lassies, and fight a’ like men.
‘Though I’m but a woman, to head you I’ll try,
Nor let these vile Highland-men steal a’ our kye.’

Then up gat the baron, and cry’d for his graith;
Says, ‘Lady, I’ll gang, tho to leave you I’m laith.
Come, kiss me, my Peggie, nor think I’m to blame;
For I may well gang out, but I’ll never win in.’

When the Baron of Braikly rade through the close,
A gallanter baron neer mounted a horse.
Tho there came wi Inverey thirty and three,
There was nane wi bonny Braikly but his brother and he.
Twa gallanter Gordons did never sword draw;
But against four and thirty, wae’s me, what was twa?

Wi swords and wi daggers they did him surround,
And they’ve pierc’d bonny Braikly wi mony a wound.
Frae the head of the Dee to the banks of the Spey,
The Gordons may mourn him, and bann Inverey.

‘O came ye by Braikly, and was ye in there?
Or saw ye his Peggy dear riving her hair?’
‘O I came by Braikly, and I was in there,
But I saw not his Peggy dear riving her hair.’

‘O fye on ye, lady! how could ye do sae?
You opend your yate to the faus Inverey.’
She eat wi him, drank wi him, welcomed him in;
She welcomed the villain that slew her baron.
She kept him till morning, syne bad him be gane,
And showd him the road that he woud na be tane.

‘Thro Birss and Aboyne,’ she says, ‘lyin in a tour,
Oer the hills of Glentanor you’ll skip in an hour.’
There is grief in the kitchen, and mirth in the ha,
But the Baron of Braikly is dead and awa.

Anon

Week 727: Vísur Vatnsenda-Rósu, by Rósa Guðmundsdóttir 

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This week we have a very famous Icelandic love poem from the 19th century, written by Rósa Guðmundsdóttir (1795–1855), also known as Rósa of Vatnsendi, and cherished for its heartfelt simplicity. The legend is that at a young age she fell in love with one Páll Melsted, but he was already engaged to another woman and moved to Copenhagen. On his return to Iceland Rósa took service wth Páll and his wife, and eventually he was spokesman at Rósa’s first marriage.

In 1960 the poem was set to music by Jón Ásgeirsson, using the tune of a traditional lullaby, and as such has been covered by many artists, notably Ragnheiður Gröndal; performances can be found on YouTube. It was also used in the soundtrack of Zack Snyder’s film ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’.

The simple folksong quality of the poem may remind readers of Robert Burns, especially of his poem ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, which features the same sentiment as Rosa’s: ‘Had we never lov’d sae kindly/Had we never lov’d sae blindly/Never met – or never parted –/We had ne’er been broken-hearted’.

The slightly free translation that follows is my own. Some months back I speculated on to what degree the ability to read Old Norse might help with understanding modern Icelandic. The answer seems to be that it helps quite a bit, but of course there is a vocabulary problem. There are just so many things that the Vikings didn’t have: no cars, buses, phones, computers, television, soap operas, not even pizza, and with a fine independence of spirit Icelanders like to create their own terms for these things rather than use loanwords. (Actually, in a rare concession to foreign influences, the Icelandic for pizza is ‘pizza’).

Vísur Vatnsenda-Rósu

Augað mitt og augað þitt,
ó, þá fögru steina,
mitt er þitt og þitt er mitt,
þú veizt, hvað eg meina.

Langt er síðan sá eg hann,
sannlega fríður var hann,
allt, sem prýða mátti einn mann,
mest af lýðum bar hann.

Þig eg trega manna mest
mædd af tára flóði,
ó, að við hefðum aldrei sést,
elsku vinurinn góði.

Engan leit eg eins og þann
álma hreyti bjarta.
Einn guð veit eg elskaði hann
af öllum reit míns hjarta.

Þó að kali heitur hver,
hylji dali og jökul ber,
steinar tali og allt, hvað er,
aldrei skal eg gleyma þér.

Rósa Guðmundsdóttir 

Rósa of Vatnsendi’s Verses

My two eyes and your two eyes,
Fair stones to be seen,
Mine is yours and yours is mine,
You know what I mean.

 Long now since I saw him last
With so much beauty blessed,
All that might adorn a man
He most of all possessed.

More than any you I miss,
My tears flow without end.
O that we had never met,
My dear beloved friend!

Never saw I one like that.
With soul that shone so bright.
God alone knows how I loved,
He was my heart’s delight.

Though all that’s hot grow cold at last,
Ice cover hill and dale,
Though stones should speak and all things end,
My love shall never fail.

Week 726: A Shift of Scene, by Robert Graves

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This is a rather unusual poem for Robert Graves: no classical references, no protestations of undying love, no satirical wit, just a sober enough account of what it is like to lie in hospital separated from all that you know and that has given your life meaning, and to wonder what became of it. For me it brings to mind words of my mother towards the end of her long widowhood, reflecting on happier times when she and my father would entertain and the house would be full of life and laughter. ‘Where does it all go?’, she would say, and of course I had no answer.

A Shift of Scene

To lie far off, in bed with a foul cough,
And a view of elms and roofs and six panes’ worth
Of clear sky; here to watch, all the day long,
For a dove, or a black cat, or a puff of smoke
To cause a shift of scene – how could it do so? –
Or to take a pen and write – what else is there
To write but: ‘I am not dead, not quite, as yet
Though I lie far off, in bed with a foul cough
And a view of elms and roofs and six panes’ worth
Of clear sky’? Tell me, love, are you sick too
And plagued like me with a great hole in the mind
Where all those towers we built, and not on sand,
Have been sucked in and lost; so that it seems
No dove, and no black cat, nor puff of smoke
Can cause a shift of scene and fetch us back
To where we lie as one, in the same bed?

Robert Graves

Week 725: The Insusceptibles, by Adrienne Rich

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I do like this poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) even if I find it a challenge to figure out exactly what it is trying to say: as with many of the more recent American poets I have an uneasy feeling that there may be a subtext here that I am missing. This might not be entirely my fault: I am all for poets making you think, but I feel there is a debate to be had as to how hard you should have to think just to figure out what it is they want you to think about. But anyway, here’s my take…

‘The Insusceptibles’ … what is it that they are not susceptible to? The pressures of conformity, I think: it seems to be a poem in praise of those who ‘take a different road’, who are prepared to stay out in the dark when their more cautious feelows  have sought the security of indoors, and as a result are granted spectacles the others miss. As for the last two lines, what is the significance of leaving the light on for them ‘when they should come’? It could just be out of concern for them, but it could also embody a hope on the part of the collective that these deviants will eventually find their way back to conformity, with an implicit play on the idea of ‘seeing the light’.

Whatever the exact meaning, I relish the phrasing. ‘The lustres of the summer dark’, and that ‘vagrant splinter blazing out of space’ – presumably a shooting star. In its diction the poem reminds me a little of Wallace Stevens, another American poet whose opulent language I admire even if he often leaves me frustrated as to its meaning. But at the same time I feel there is also a hint of Robert Frost here. The theme itself reminds me of Frost’s poem ‘Come In’ (see week 189): ‘But no, I was out for stars:/I would not come in./I meant not even if asked/And I hadn’t been’, and the cadences of the closing couplet seem very Frost-like to me.

The Insusceptibles

Then the long sunlight lying on the sea
Fell, folded gold on gold; and slowly we
Took up our decks of cards, our parasols,
The picnic hamper and the sandblown shawls
And climbed the dunes in silence. There were two
Who lagged behind as lovers sometimes do,
And took a different road. For us the night
Was final, and by artificial light
We came indoors to sleep. No envy there
Of those who might be watching anywhere
The lustres of the summer dark, to trace
Some vagrant splinter blazing out of space.
No thought of them, save in a lower room
To leave a light for them when they should come.

Adrienne Rich

Week 724: Épitaphe écrite pour la mort de Molière, by Jean de la Fontaine

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Last week’s elegy for Shakespeare reminded me of this other rather neat poem playing on the idea of a famous poet in his tomb. Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695), now chiefly known for his Fables, was a great admirer of the French dramatist Molière, and with him was a member of a famous literary coterie, whose other members included the playwright Jean Racine and the poet and critic Boileau. Their two tombs may be found close together in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, though there seems to be much doubt as to whether the tombs actually contain their remains.

Terence and Plautus: Roman playwrights famed, like Molière, for their witty comedies. Jean de la Fontaine’s first serious work was a translation of one of Terence’s plays, ‘Eunuchus’.

The translation that follows is my own.

Épitaphe écrite pour la mort de Molière

Sous ce tombeau gisent Plaute et Térence
Et cependant le seul Molière y git.
Leurs trois talents ne formaient qu’un esprit
Dont le bel art réjouissait la France.
Ils sont partis! et j’ay peu d’espérance
De les revoir. Malgré tous nos efforts,
Pour un long temps, selon toute apparence,
Térence, et Plaute, et Molière sont morts.

Jean de la Fontaine

Here in this tomb is Terence found, and Plautus,
Yet only Molière lies here apart.
For their three talents made one genius
Gladdening all France with their fair art.
Now they are gone! And I see little chance
Of such another coming in their stead.
For a long time now, to all appearance,
Terence, Plautus, Molière are dead.

Week 723: Elegy on Shakespeare, by William Basse

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I suspect that few of my readers will have heard of the poet William Basse (1583-1653?), as indeed I hadn’t until I came across this pleasant if slightly macabre tribute to our national bard, in which he first imagines Shakespeare sharing the tomb with three other worthies before deciding that actually he probably merits a grave all to himself. The choice of the three worthies is interesting: Chaucer (fair enough), Spenser (OK, though probably more honoured than read these days) and Beaumont. This would be Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), best known for his collaborations with John Fletcher, and I suspect that while much esteemed in his own time as both poet and playwright his work is little known now except to specialists in the period.

I have modernized the Elizabethan spelling as being unnecessarily distracting to the modern reader, but have left ‘fift’ for ‘fifth’ for the sake of the rhyme.

Elegy on Shakespeare

Renownèd Spencer lie a thought more nigh
To learnèd Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie
A little nearer Spenser, to make room
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold Tomb.
To lodge all four in one bed make a shift
Until Doomsday, for hardly will a fift
Betwixt this day and that by Fate be slain,
For whom your Curtains may be drawn again.
If your precedency in death doth bar
A fourth place in your sacred sepulchre,
Under this carved marble of thine own,
Sleep, rare Tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone;
Thy unmolested peace,  unsharèd cave,
Possess as Lord, not Tenant, of thy Grave,
That unto us and others it may be
Honour hereafter to be laid by thee.

William Basse

Postscript: I amused myself with the idea of adapting this poem for modern times, imagining an eminent poet recently deceased sharing the grave with two other deserving cases and a third whose star seems more likely to fade. Something on the lines of:

‘Renownèd Larkin lie a thought more nigh
To learnèd Hughes, and let Another lie
A little nearer Larkin, to make room
For Heaney in your threefold, fourfold Tomb.’

I will leave it to readers to contemplate possible candidates for the role of Another…