Category Archives: poetry

Week 706: Bat, by D.H.Lawrence

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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

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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

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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

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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