Category Archives: poetry

Week 712: Beauty, by Edward Thomas

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Week 708: The Beds of Grainne and Diarmuid, by Robert Graves

Posted on by
2

I am told that Robert Graves’s poetry is not much read these days, and that, ironically enough, he is now chiefly remembered as the writer of historical novels such as ‘I Claudius’, which he wrote only to subsidise his less financially rewarding work as a poet. I suppose one can see some reason for the neglect: he was uncompromisingly patrician, perhaps too much so for our populist age, and of course he belongs to a time when poets were still judged on things like skill with words and a mastery of poetic form. But it’s a pity: his oeuvre is large and became a bit repetitive towards the end, but he wrote more good poems with a wider range of style and subject than most twentieth-century poets. Here is another of his takes on Irish legend, that he used to such effect in week 81’s offering.

In case you are unfamiliar with the story, some background may be useful. Fionn mac Cumhaill, chief of the warrior-band known as the Fianna, has grown old and wishes to take a young bride. He chooses Grainne, daughter of the High King of Ireland, but at the wedding-feast her eye falls on one of Fionn’s young champions, the irresistibly handsome Diarmuid. Deciding that he would be a better bet, and being a spirited young woman, she demands that he elopes with her. Diarmuid is reluctant  to break his oath of fealty to Fionn, but in those days it was unthinkable for a man of honour to deny a woman anything that she asked of him (so not much change there, then). Off they go to have many adventures, relentlessly pursued by Fionn and his band, passing the night together in secret places throughout Ireland. Thngs do not go entirely smoothly in the relationship because in an attempt to stay true to his oath to Fionn Diarmuid refrains from actual intercourse with Grainne (hence the ‘pure embrace’ of the poem), and alas, the essential nobility of a man’s character is not always appreciated by the woman in his life…

Graves seems to be using the story to postulate a distinction between sacred and profane love, which probably gives an insight into his own somewhat complicated psyche, but I think one can enjoy the poem for its resonant invocation of legend without worrying too much about that.

sain: to bless

The Beds of  Grainne and Diarmuid

How many secret nooks in copse or glen
We sained for ever with our pure embrace,
No man shall know; though indeed master poets
Reckon one such for every eve of the year,
To sain their calendar.
                                        But this much is true:
That children stumbling on our lairs by chance
In quest of hazelnuts or whortleberries
Will recognise the impress of twin bodies
On the blue-green turf, starred with diversity
Of alien flowers, and shout astonishment.
Yet should some amorous country pair, presuming
To bask in joy on any bed of ours,
Offend against the love by us exampled,
Long ivy roots will writhe up from beneath
And bitterly fetter ankle, wrist and throat.

Robert Graves

Week 707: Dives and Lazarus, by Anon

Posted on by
Reply

Dives and Lazarus is a traditional English folk song that in one form or another may date from around 1550. It is listed as Child ballad 56, and at some stage became linked to a beautiful tune that has also been used for other songs, such as ‘The Star of the County Down’, and which inspired one of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s finest pieces of music, ‘Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus’. 

The story is a punchy retelling of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus as found in Luke 16-19 to 16-31. The doctrine of charity towards the poor is one of Christianity’s more appealing teachings, even if in practice the Church has sometimes seemed more interested in acquisition than in redistribution, and of course as Zakat it is also one of the Five Pillars of Islam. One assumes, though the question may be a complex one, that Christian teaching played a significant role in the foundation of the modern welfare state, that for all its flaws surely remains one of the twentieth century’s great social achievements. Of course, it is tempting to hear the ghost of Norman Tebbit in the background muttering ‘On your bike, Lazarus’, but let us in this case make the charitable assumption that Lazarus did not have a bike.

Dives And Lazarus

As it fell out upon a day
Rich Dives made a feast,
And he invited all his friends
And gentry of the best.

Then Lazarus laid him down and down
And down at Dives’ door:
Some meat, some drink, brother Dives,
Bestow upon the poor.

Thou art none of my brother, Lazarus,
That lies begging at my door;
No meat nor drink will I give thee
Nor bestow upon the poor.

Then Lazarus laid him down and down
And down at Dives’ wall:
Some meat, some drink, brother Dives,
Or with hunger starve I shall.

Thou art none of my brother, Lazarus,
That lies begging at my wall;
No meat nor drink will I give thee
But with hunger starve you shall.

Then Lazarus laid him down and down
And down at Dives’ gate:
Some meat, some drink, brother Dives,
For Jesus Christ his sake.

Thou art none of my brother, Lazarus,
That lies begging at my gate;
No meat nor drink will I give thee
For Jesus Christ his sake.

Then Dives sent out his merry men
To whip poor Lazarus away;
They had no power to strike a stroke
But flung their whips away.

Then Dives sent out his hungry dogs
To bite him as he lay;
They had no power to bite at all
But licked his sores away.

As it fell out upon a day
Poor Lazarus sickened and died;
Then came two angels out of heaven
His soul therein to guide.

Rise up, rise up brother Lazarus,
And go along with me;
For you’ve a place prepared in heaven
To sit on an angel’s knee.

As it fell out upon a day
Rich Dives sickened and died;
Then came two serpents out of hell
His soul therein to guide.

Rise up, rise up brother Lazarus,
And go with us to see
A dismal place prepared in hell
From which thou cannot flee.

Then Dives looked up with his eyes
And saw poor Lazarus blest:
Give me one drop of water, brother Lazarus,
To quench my flaming thirst.

Oh had I as many years to abide
As there are blades of grass,
Then there would be an end, but now
Hell’s pains will ne’er be past.

Oh was I now but alive again
The space of one half hour;
Oh that I had my peace secure;
Then the devil should have no power.

Anon

Week 706: Bat, by D.H.Lawrence

Posted on by
Reply

It is apparent from this poem that D.H.Lawrence didn’t much like bats, but that didn’t stop him from doing a virtuoso job of portraying them in this poem from his collection ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’. How well that image of ‘a black glove thrown up at the light,/And falling back’ captures their elastic flight.

Personally I have always been a bit of a chiropterophile. As a small child I liked to go into the field at the bottom of our garden and watch them at dusk in summer, hawking for insects in the warm air, both bats and insects being far more abundant back then. In those days I could hear them too, an eery thin piping from above. And I shall never forget an evening down in Wales when my son took us to Stackpole Field Centre near his home in Pembrokeshire to watch the bats come out at dusk. It seems that up in the roof under its archway was and maybe still is the main summer roost for about four hundred greater horseshoe bats: they spend the winter in limestone caves on the coast, move to Carew Castle in the spring and then come here. Each evening they stream out from the roost and set off across country on their nocturnal hunt for insects, which can take them as far as north Pembrokeshire. It was certainly an amazing spectacle: I had seen perhaps a dozen bats together before but never anything like this. At first there were only three or four, fluttering below the archway like great black butterflies in the twilight, but then more and more appeared and the butterflies turned to a swirling blizzard of black snowflakes. We sat on the grass near the hedge that served as their flight-path, and one by one they flickered past, a scrambled squadron of small jet fighters, yet more agile than any plane, detecting us at the last second as they rounded the hedge and passed over and round us with an effortless swerve: I thought of the play of Sergeant Troy’s sword round Bathsheba in ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’.

But over to Lawrence and his masterful imagery…

Bat

At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise …

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding …

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno …

Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.

And you think:
’The swallows are flying so late!’

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop …
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio …
Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

In China the bat is symbol for happiness.

Not for me!

D.H.Lawrence

Week 705: The Flyting o’ Life and Daith, by Hamish Henderson

Posted on by
Reply

A flyting is a contest in verse, especially one where two rival poets exchange scurrilous and often ribald insults. As a genre it is very ancient, occurring in many languages. A well known example in Old Norse, for example, is the Lokasenna, where Loki at Aegir’s feast exchanges taunts with each of the other gods in turn, accusing Freya, for instance, of incest with her brother, while in the Old English poem ‘Beowulf’ we have the hero’s exchange of insults with Unferth.

The tradition is also strong in mediaeval Scots, a classic example being ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie’, believed to have been composed around 1500, where two rival poets go at it hammer and tongs. Thus Dunbar addresses Kennedie as ‘Skaldit skaitbird and commoun skamelar,/Wanfukkit funling that Natour maid ane yrle’; Kennedie counters with ‘Revin raggit ruke, and full of rebaldrie,/Skitterand scorpioun, scauld in scurrilitie’, and even without a glossary you can probably guess that all this is not very polite. It’s clever stuff, but pretty crude, and in this week’s offering the 20th century poet Hamish Henderson (1919-2002; see also weeks 212 and 409), a great supporter and interpreter of the folk tradition, adapts the form for more lyrical and reflective purposes as he imagines a dialogue between life and death. Life, you may be pleased to note, gets the last word.

Notes:

lugs                           ears
deef                          deaf
blin                           bleary
maun dwine              must fade
saft                           soft
maet                         food
ilka wean                  each child
crine                         shrivel
keeks                        peeps
dule                          misery
ae galliard hert         one gallant heart
ban                           curse
duddies braw            glad rags
lowp                         leap over
preeson wa’              prison wall
bigg                          build
gar                           make
pest                          plague, disease
syne                         next, thereafter

The Flyting o’ Life and Daith

Quo life, the warld is mine.
The floo’ers and trees, they’re a’ my ain.
I am the day, and the sunshine
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Your lugs are deef, your een are blin
Your floo’ers maun dwine in my bitter win’
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
I hae saft win’s, an’ healin’ rain,
Aipples I hae, an’ breid an’ wine
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Whit sterts in dreid, gangs doon in pain
Bairns wantin’ breid are makin’ mane
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
Your deidly wark, I ken it fine
There’s maet on earth for ilka wean
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Your silly sheaves crine in my fire
My worm keeks in your barn and byre
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
Dule on your een! Ae galliard hert
Can ban tae hell your blackest airt
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Your rantin’ hert, in duddies braw,
He winna lowp my preeson wa’
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
Though ye bigg preesons o’ marble stane
Hert’s luve ye cannae preeson in
Quo life, the world is mine.

Quo daith, the warld is mine.
I hae dug a grave, I hae dug it deep,
For war an’ the pest will gar ye sleep.
Quo daith, the warld is mine.

Quo life, the warld is mine.
An open grave is a furrow syne.
Ye’ll no keep my seed frae fa’in in.
Quo life, the warld is mine.

Hamish Henderson

Week 704: Xenia I.iii

Posted on by
Reply

This is another of the short poems from the sequence ‘Xenia’ that Eugenio Montale wrote in memory of his wife (see also weeks 370 and 501 ).

A comparison has been made between this sequence and the poems that Hardy wrote about his wife Emma after death. Hardy is more lyrical, remembering the happier days of their first love in natural settings, such as walking on the cliffs; Montale by contrast is doggedly yet movingly mundane, and remembers a more lasting happiness. Here he imagines going back to hotels where they used to stay together, and having to ask for a single room, and talking to the hotel staff that had become her friends, then leaving with his grief unassuaged.

The translation that follows is my own.

Notes:

Saint James di Parigi: a hotel in Paris where Montale and his wife often stayed, particularly in his capacity as correspondent of the ‘Corriere del Sera’.

falsa Bisanzio: the hotel Danieli in Venice, famous among other things for its elaborate façade.

‘spaiati’: ‘unpaired’, a word normally used of things like odd socks, so here conveying than the idea of a broken coupledom that is more than mere singleness.

‘esaurita la carica meccanica’: I had difficulty with this line. Literally ‘the mechanical charge exhausted’, but what does this refer to? I consulted a native speaker, who wasn’t sure but thought the reference was to some time-related mechanism such as a watch or old-fashioned wind-up telephone, the basic idea being that the speaker’s time is up, so I’ve gone with that.

Xenia I.iii

Al Saint James di Parigi dovrò chiedere
una camera ‘singola’. (Non amano
i clienti spaiati). E così pure
nella falsa Bisanzio del tuo albergo
veneziano; per poi cercare subito
lo sgabuzzino delle telefoniste,
le tue amiche di sempre; e ripartire,
esaurita la carica meccanica,
il desiderio di riaverti, fosse
pure in un solo gesto o un’abitudine.

Eugenio Montale

At our hotel in Paris I’ll have to ask
For a room for one. (They don’t like guests unpaired).
Similarly at your favourite in Venice
With its Byzantine façade; and then first thing
I’ll track down in their box-room your friends for life
The switchboard operators, to share with them,
Our time together being over, the desire
To have you back again, if only in
A single gesture, one habit.

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

Posted on by
Reply

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