Category Archives: poetry

Week 718: Der Garten des Theophrast, by Peter Huchel

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This week a poignant valediction from the fine East German poet Peter Huchel (1903-1981). It is another of those German poems dense with symbolic meaning, and I am by no means confident that I have sussed out all those meanings, but for what it is worth here is my take on it.

Theophrastus was a Greek philosopher, a friend to Plato and Aristotle, renowned for his interest in the natural world and known as the father of botany. Huchel is likening himself to Theophrastus but in his case the garden he has faithfully tended is a literary one, where he and others of his kind have ‘planted conversations like trees’: as well as writing books he edited a prestigious free-thinking poetry magazine, ‘Sinn und Form’ (Sense and Form). After the building of the Berlin Wall he began to experience the unwelcome attentions of the East German authorities, and was forced to give up the editorship of the magazine and live in isolation under Stasi surveillance.

This poem appeared in the magazine’s last issue. It is at once resigned and defiant. So now he is at the end of his stewardship, his breath comes shorter and the garden is dead. But at noon the light of poetry still dances on the urns that commemorate the great writers of the past, and when it does he urges his son to preserve the garden’s memory and the memory of his patient tending. And there is hope: an olive tree (a symbol of peace and endurance) splits the crumbling wall and a voice still speaks from the hot dust. It is tempting to see ‘das mürbe Gemäuer’, the crumbling wall, as a reference to the Berlin Wall, but the timings don’t quite work: the Wall went up in 1961 and the poem appeared in 1962 but would almost certainly have been written well before, as if in anticipation of the coming censorship, and anyway Huchel did not use direct political references, so we can just take the use of this particular image as a happily proleptic coincidence.

The translation that follows is my own.

Der Garten des Theophrast

Meinem Sohn

Wenn mittags das weiße Feuer
Der Verse über den Urnen tanzt,
Gedenke, mein Sohn. Gedenke derer,
Die einst Gespräche wie Bäume gepflanzt.
Tot ist der Garten, mein Atem wird schwerer,
Bewahre die Stunde, hier ging Theophrast,
Mit Eichenlohe zu düngen den Boden,
Die wunde Rinde zu binden mit Bast.
Ein Ölbaum spaltet das mürbe Gemäuer
Und ist noch Stimme im heißen Staub.
Sie gaben Befehl, die Wurzel zu roden.
Es sinkt dein Licht, schutzloses Laub.

Peter Huchel

The Garden of Theophrastus

To my son

When at noon the white fire of poetry
Dances above the urns,
Remember, my son. Remember those
Who planted conversations once like trees.
The garden is dead, my breath comes shorter now,
Preserve the hour, when here went Theophrastus,
To fertilize the soil with oak tan,
To bind the bark of wounded trunks with bast.
An olive tree splits the crumbling walls
And the hot dust has still a voice.
They gave the order: grub the root out. Now
The light fails on your undefended leaves.

Week 717: From ‘Henry IV, part 2’, by William Shakespeare

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This week one of my favourite passages in all Shakespeare: nothing dramatic, no exalted language, just two old men remembering the escapades of their youth, but showing how well, among all the Bard’s other gifts, he could capture the rhythms of common speech and bring out the latent poetry in them. It comes from ‘Henry IV, part 2’; Falstaff has met up with his old acquaintance Shallow, a Justice of the Peace, and they fall to reminiscing about old times. The passage always reminds me of conversations between my mother and my maternal uncle, who was the only one who kept in touch with their Suffolk side of the family. When he had come back from a visit there she would ask him after various relatives of theirs, aunts, uncles, cousins, and he would shake his head and say ‘Old, very old’ or sometimes, in tones of lugubrious relish, ‘Dead, long dead’. And I would think ‘Yes, it still goes on’.

Bona-roba: a showy, attractive, or well-dressed woman, often with connotations of a courtesan or prostitute. From the Italian, meaning ‘good stuff’.

FALSTAFF

Come, I will go drink with you, but I cannot tarry dinner. I am glad to see you, by my troth, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the windmill in Saint George’s field?

FALSTAFF

No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that.

SHALLOW

Ha! ’twas a merry night. And is Jane Nightwork alive?

FALSTAFF

She lives, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

She never could away with me.

FALSTAFF

Never, never; she would always say she could not abide Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

By the mass, I could anger her to the heart. She was then a bona-roba. Doth she hold her own well?

FALSTAFF

Old, old, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

Nay, she must be old; she cannot choose but be old; certain she’s old; and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement’s Inn.

SILENCE

That’s fifty-five year ago.

SHALLOW

Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that this knight and I have seen! Ha, Sir John, said I well?

FALSTAFF

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

That we have, that we have, that we have; in faith, Sir John, we have: our watch-word was ‘Hem boys!’ Come, let’s to dinner; come, let’s to dinner: Jesus, the days that we have seen! Come, come.

Exeunt FALSTAFF and Justices

William Shakespeare

Week 716: Lochan, by Kathleen Jamie

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I think that this beautiful poem by the Scots poet Kathleen Jamie (1962-), so tranquil on the surface, is about the secret places of the heart, about the dream of casting off all duties and expectations, even those of poetry, and returning to that state of pure being in which the poems are actually born. ‘When all this over…’ When all what is over? The demands of the making, I would guess. The German poet Rilke towards the end of his life spoke of no longer being able to delight in new landscapes as he once did because he would immediately feel he had to set about internalizing them for use in his poetry. In our time Seamus Heaney has similarly spoken of sometimes wanting just to let it all go, to forget about poetry and spend his time on some quiet water fishing from a boat.

Why the white boat in the last two lines? I don’t know, and possible this is a reference entirely personal to the poet, but it can be noted that the rowan is a tree of magical protection, and that there may be a mythical resonance here with the boat that awaited Arthur on his journey to Avalon.

Lochan

(For Jean Johnstone)

When all this is over I mean
to travel north, by the high

drove roads and cart tracks
probably in June

with the gentle dog-roses
flourishing beside me. I mean

to find among the thousands
scattered in that land

a certain quiet lochan
where water lilies rise

like small fat moons.
and tied among the reeds,

underneath a rowan,
a white boat waits.

Kathleen Jamie

Week 715: Y Bychan Newydd-eni

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This week a strange yet tender poem by the Welsh poet Bobi Jones (see also week 287), about the way we respond to newborn babies even if they can sometimes arrive a little the worse for wear, and developing in a surprisingly literal sense the idea of ‘worming their way into one’s heart’. In a wider sense it can be seen as being about how our instinct of care and compassion for the vulnerable and helpless can redeem the troubled soul, and as such it reflects Jones’s Christian preoccupations, though of course such an instinct is by no means the prerogative of one religion, or indeed of religion at all.

The translation that follows is my own.

Y Bychan Newydd-eni

‘Mae dy wallt di’n tenau, a’th wyneb
    Yn grych, a’th gorff yn wyw.
Oedd dy swrnai’n faith? Ai blin y daith
Nes dy heneiddio wrth dreiglo
    O ddninas Duw?

‘Ble’ wyt ti’n myned, yr hen ŵr ifanc,
    Yr hen ŵr ifanca’n fyw?’
‘Rwy’n mynd i dwrian fel mwydyn
Mewn tamaid o bridd cochlaid
    A thorri twll bach ynndo i’r byw.’

‘Pa bridd ydyw hwnnw, yr hen ŵr ifanc,
    Yr hen ŵr ifanca’n fyw?’
‘Dy galon di, gyfaill. Dyna un twll
A fynnais, er llawned o falais.
    A’r fan yna caf fyw.’

‘Beth wnei di am y surni, ’r hen ŵr ifanc
    Yr hen ŵr ifanca’n fyw?’
Sylwi dim arno. Taflu blodau drosto
A chyrlio’n smotyn cryno
    Fel eli mewn briw.’

Bobi Jones

The Little Newborn

‘Your hair so fine, your wrinkled face,
   Your body weak and wan.
Was your journey long? Did it weary you
To age you so as you came your way
   From the citadel of God?

’Where are you going, my young old man,
    My youngest old man alive?’
‘I am going to burrow my way within
As a worm that burrows into red soil
   Then tunnel back out into life.’

‘What soil is that, my young old man,
   My youngest old man alive?’
‘Your heart, my friend. To open that,
For all its sorrow, was my desire.
   It is there that I shall live.’

‘But what will you do with the grief you find
    My youngest old man above ground?’
‘Pay it no heed. Strew it with flowers
And curl up tight in my little spot
   Like salve upon a wound’.

Week 714: If Ever You Go To Dublin Town, by Patrick Kavanagh

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Time for another of my favourite Patrick Kavanagh poems, first published in 1953, full of wry humour and tongue-in-cheek self-appraisal. Kavanagh liked to present the persona of an awkward provincial, disliked by Dublin’s males but loved by its women and at home with its children. This seems to have been in reaction to what he felt was the patronising attitude towards him of Dublin’s literary sophisticates: you want rough diamond, I’ll give you rough diamond. Apparently his manner could indeed be a bit offputting, especially in later life. Seamus Heaney, who admired him greatly, recounts how as a budding young poet he met Kavanagh in a Dublin bar in 1967, a few months before Kavanagh’s death. He offered to buy Kavanagh a drink, but the older poet, who at the time did not know who Heaney was, rebuffed him with a curt ‘No’. Heaney’s friend, the poet Richard Murphy, then introduced Seamus. Seamus reports “Kavanagh then said ‘Are you Heaney’, rhyming with Rainey, as people did in the country at home. ‘Well, I’ll have a Scotch’. I took that as a pass”.

The poem’s folklike quality attracted The Dubliners, who set it to music.

Notes:

Kavanagh regularly walked to the Dublin city centre from his apartment in Pembroke Road via Baggot Street, the most direct route.

If ever you go to Dublin town

If ever you go to Dublin town 
In a hundred years or so 
Inquire for me in Baggot Street 
And what I was like to know.
O he was the queer one 
Fol dol the di do,
He was a queer one 
I tell you.

My great-grandmother knew him well,  
He asked her to come and call  
On him in his flat and she giggled at the thought  
Of a young girl’s lovely fall.  
O he was dangerous,  
Fol dol the di do,  
He was dangerous
I tell you.

On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost 
Dishevelled with shoes untied,  
Playing through the railings with little children  
Whose children have long since died. 
O he was a nice man
Fol do the di do,  
He was a nice man  
I tell you.

Go into a pub and listen well  
If my voice still echoes there,  
Ask the men what their grandsires thought  
And tell them to answer fair.
O he was eccentric
Fol do the di do,  
He was eccentric  
I tell you.

He had the knack of making men feel  
As small as they really were  
Which meant as great as God had made them  
But as males they disliked his air.  
O he was a proud one  
Fol do the di do,  
He was a proud one  
I tell you.

If ever you go to Dublin town  
In a hundred years or so  
Sniff for my personality,  
Is it vanity’s vapour now?  
O he was a vain one  
Fol dol the di do,  
He was a vain one
I tell you.

I saw his name with a hundred others  
In a book in the library,  
It said he had never fully achieved  
His potentiality.  
O he was slothful 
Fol do the di do,  
He was slothful  
I tell you.

He knew that posterity has no use  
For anything but the soul,  
The lines that speak the passionate heart,  
The spirit that lives alone.  
O he was a lone one,  
Fol do the di do, 
Yet he lived happily  
I tell you.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 713: T.S.Eliot, by Robert Lowell

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I confess that in general I do not feel comfortable with the poems of the American poet Robert Lowell. To which some may say, since when was it the function of poetry to make us feel comfortable? Fair point, but it surely is, or should be, the function of poetry, in the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘to see life steadily and see it whole’, and I don’t feel that Lowell does this. But I do like this affectionately elegiac portrayal of T.S.Eliot, which shows a generosity of spirit not always accorded by poets to their peers (think Philip Larkin).

Notes:

Harvard: an American Ivy League university.
Memorial Hall: a Harvard building in memory the University’s Civil War dead.
‘warden’s pace’: presumably implying slow and deliberate – Eliot was an air raid warden during the Second World War.
Poe: the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, who as well as being famous as a writer of macabre stories worked as a reviewer.
‘The Yard’: the campus at the center of Harvard University.
Pound: the American modernist poet Ezra Pound, who had a great influence on Eliot and others in the early twentieth century but moved to Italy in 1924 and threw in his lot with fascism, making broadcasts during the Second World War in support of eugenics and the Holocaust and urging American G.I.s to throw down their weapons and surrender. Captured by the Italian Resistance, he was handed over to the American authorities but ultimately judged unfit to stand trial and instead was interned for twelve years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane, in Washington, where T.S.Eliot visited him. Released in 1958, he returned to Italy to live in Rapallo, where he died in 1972.

I have a bit of a textual problem with the last line. The version of the poem I found and copied out years ago had ‘humor and honor’, which I have kept, but other versions online have ‘humor and boredom’ which seems to make much less sense – can anyone cast any light on this?

T.S.Eliot

Caught between two streams of traffic, in the gloom
of Memorial Hall and Harvard’s war-dead…. And he:
“Don’t you loathe to be compared with your relatives?
I do. I’ve just found two of mine reviewed by Poe.
He wiped the floor with them…and I was delighted.”
Then on with warden’s pace across the Yard,
talking of Pound, “It’s balls to say he only
pretends to be Ezra….He’s better though. This year
He no longer wants to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem.
Yes, he’s better. ‘You speak,’ he said, when he’d talked two hours.
By then I had absolutely nothing to say.”
Ah Tom, one muse, one music, had one your luck —
lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers,
humor and honor from the everlasting dross!

Robert Lowell

Week 712: Beauty, by Edward Thomas

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I would not claim this as one of Edward Thomas’s best poems: the movement a little stiff, the dissection of his melancholia a little too directly confessional for those who may prefer, say, the rueful obliquity of ‘Aspens’. But for those who love him any poem by Edward Thomas has something to offer, such as in this case that exquisite image of the river at evening, and the closing lines are revelatory of the way in which he could find in the natural world an escape from his own too burdensome selfhood, as if tree and twilight were serving as a kind of external locus for his soul. This of course is reminiscent of Keats’s famous observation in one of his letters: ‘I scarcely remember counting upon happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.’

Beauty

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph –
‘Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one,’ Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.

Edward Thomas

Week 711: Die Fremde, by Stefan George

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This rather eerie poem by the German poet Stefan George (1868-1933), written in the guise of a folk-ballad, appears to be an ironic riposte to an earlier poem by Friedrich Schiller. The Schiller poem describes an angelic presence that comes to a village and spreads sweetness and light all round, dishing out flowers to all, the best flowers being reserved for lovers. George’s visitor by contrast is a mysterious and sinister witch, feared by all, who brings only disruption to the community.

It’s a remarkably dense, allusive poem with each element carefully selected to create an atmosphere of disturbing and challenging otherness. I read it as being primarily about the way in which outsiders can be viewed as unsettling presences in closed communities, giving rise to all kinds of fearful and contradictory legends, but at the same time leaving a legacy that must be addressed. The word ‘pfand’ is important here: it can mean ‘pledge but in Germanic folklore can also refer to the token or ambiguous gift that a supernatural being leaves behind when it vanishes, such as a changeling or, in this case, an illegitimate child of unknown parentage.

The theme of the outsider is common in George’s work, and one interpretation sees the mysterious woman as the poet himself, the archetypal outsider, disturbing the community with his truth-telling, and leaving when he goes an unsettling legacy in the form of the poem.

Sadly some of George’s nationalistic ideas were misappropriated by the Nazis, who tried to present him as prophet of the Third Reich. George had nothing but contempt for the Nazi regime and declined all their advances.

Note that normally, of course, German nouns have capital letters, but for whatever reason George eschewed this convention.

The translation that follows is my own.

Notes:

attich, an old word for dwarf elder and ranunkel, buttercup, are both plants associated with magical lore. The dwarf elder is liminal, associated with death and thresholds; the buttercup represents life, brightness and beauty, and the combination is mirrored in the final verse where the child is at once black and white.

hornungschein. This presents one with an untranslatable play on words: Hornung is an old German word for a bastard (etymologically one conceived in a corner), and also an obsolete term for the month of February, in folklore an ill-starred month of cold and misfortune.

Die Fremde

Sie kam allein aus fernen gauen
Ihr haus umging das Volk mit grauen
Sie sott und buk und sagte wahr
Sie sang im mond mit offenem haar.

Am kirchtag trug sie bunten staat
Damit sie oft zur luke trat..
Dann ward ihr lächeln süss und herb
Gatten und brüdern zum verderb.

Und übers jahr als sie im dunkel
Einst attich suchte und ranunkel
Da sah man wie sie sank im torf –
Und andere schwuren dass vorm dorf

Sie auf dem mitten weg verschwand..
Sie liess das knäblein nur als pfand
So schwarz wie nacht so bleich wie lein
Das sie gebar im hornungschein.

Stefan George

The Stranger

She came from far off shires, alone,
The people passed her house in dread
She told men’s fortunes, baked and brewed
She sang by moonlight, bare of head

On church days in her Sunday best
Stood at her window she’d beguile
The village menfolk passing by
So sweet, so bitter was her smile.

And at the year’s end, in the dark,
Some saw her sink into the peat
As she sought herbs, but others swore
They saw her walking down the street

And leaving, as she disappeared,
The little boy for only boon,
As black as night, as linen pale,
She bore beneath a bastard moon.

Week 710: Jamie Foyers, by Ewan MacColl

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This is a hauntingly elegiac song by the folksinger Ewan MacColl about a young man who enlisted to fight in the Spanish Civil War. I was slightly disappointed to learn that Jamie Foyers was not a real person, or at least, not one who ever fought in the Spanish Civil War: MacColl in fact adapted the song from an earlier ballad current in Victorian times about a young soldier, Sergeant James Foyers, who died at the siege of Burgos in 1812, during the Peninsular War. But MacColl’s Foyers serves well enough as a composite figure standing for the many idealistic young men who died in that now remote conflict, such as John Cornford (see week 137), and the two friends that MacColl himself had lost fighting the fascists.

MacColl’s song has been covered by various folk artists; I favour the Dick Gaughan version.

Notes:

Fecht: fight.
Strang: strong.
Fitba’: football.
Braw: fine.
Belchite: A town in Aragon, Spain, destroyed in the 1937 Battle of Belchite between the Republican and Nationalist Forces.
Gandesa: The site of two major battles in 1938.

Jamie Foyers

Far distant, far distant, lies Foyers the brave,
No tombstone memorial shall hallow his grave
His bones they are scattered on the rude soil of Spain,
For young Jamie Foyers in battle was slain.

He’s gane frae the shipyard that stands on the Clyde;
His hammer is silent, his tools laid aside,
To the wide Ebro river young Foyers has gane
To fecht by the side o’ the people of Spain.

There wasna his equal at work or at play,
He was strang in the union till his dying day;
He was grand at the fitba’, at the dance he was braw,
O, young Jamie Foyers was the floo’er o’ them a’.

He came frae the shipyaird, took aff his working claes,
O, I mind that time weel in the lang simmer days;
He said, ‘Fare ye well, lassie, I’ll come back again.’
But young Jamie Foyers in battle was slain.

In the ficht for Belchite he was aye to the fore,
He focht at Gandesa till he couldna fecht more;
He lay owre his machine-gun wi’ a bullet in his brain
And young Jamie Foyers in battle was slain.

Ewan MacColl

Week 709: Bogland, by Seamus Heaney

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I have recently, and somewhat controversially, acquired a copy of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Complete Poems’ (Faber & Faber). I say controversially because my wife is of the firm opinion that the 788 books I already owned were quite enough for one modestly sized house, while I tend more to the view that by the time he is eighty-two any poet worth his salt should have accumulated at least ten thousand volumes and view my meagre 788 (sorry, now 789) with some dissatisfaction. I haven’t told my wife about the Greek poet Simonides, who according to legend didn’t approve of books at all and thought a man should carry everything he needed to know in his head. She would have liked Simonides.

But I really couldn’t miss this one. Admittedly I already had a previous ‘Collected’, but this ‘Complete’ does add a good deal unknown to me, includes an introduction and copious notes, and gives one a chance to see the great man’s work in its final impressive entirety. Inevitably with a collection this size there are poems which are not bad – I don’t think Seamus did bad – just, shall we say, less necessary, poems of the will rather than inspiration, their composition motivated, maybe, by the realisation that it’s Friday and one hasn’t written a poem all week. But even these will be of interest to his admirers in piecing together a final view of what is arguably the greatest poetic mind of my generation.

Yet in the end I find myself returning to familiar favourites, to the fifty or so entirely successful poems which are after all as much or more than any poet has the right to expect in a lifetime. Such as this week’s offering, ‘Bogland’, with its wonderfully tactile evocation of the Irish landscape.

Note: the dedicatee T.P.Flanagan was an Irish landscape painter.

Bogland
for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening–
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

Seamus Heaney