Category Archives: poetry

Week 567: Childhood, by Margaret Walker

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Margaret Walker (1915-1998) was an African-American poet and novelist born in Birmingham, Alabama. I think this poem is a good example of the earthy, evocative strength she brought to her writing.

Ishkooda: a mining community located in the Red Mountain area of Alabama, that is part of the Appalachian mountain chain.

Childhood

When I was a child I knew red miners
dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps.
I saw them come down red hills to their camps
dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines.
Night after night I met them on the roads,
or on the streets in town I caught their glance;
the swing of dinner buckets in their hands,
and grumbling undermining all their words.

I also lived in low cotton country
where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,
or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks
with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by;
where sentiment and hatred still held sway
and only bitter land was washed away.

Margaret Walker

Week 566: Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca, by César Vallejo

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The Peruvian poet César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (1892–1938) was part of an avant-garde movement in twentieth-century Spanish literature and has a reputation for difficulty, but this particular poem, one of his most celebrated, seems clear enough, reflecting as it does his sense of mortality and his experiences of being persecuted in his own country: suspect because of his reformist political views, he was accused of a crime he did not commit and thrown into jail, and though later released felt forced, in order to escape further persecution, to emigrate to Europe, where he spent the rest of his life in exile.

The title of the poem is enigmatic and various theories have been put forward to explain it, such as that it refers to the custom whereby the Romans, according to Ovid, used white stones and black stones to denote good and bad days respectively.

Incidentally Vallejo died on a Friday in spring, not, as he foresaw in this poem, on a Thursday in autumn. You can always rely on reality to get things wrong.

The translation that follows is my own.

Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca

Me moriré en París con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en París – y no me corro –
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro

también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos…

César Vallejo

Black Stone On A White Stone

I shall die in Paris on a day of rain,
A day whose memory I keep already.
I shall die in Paris – I shall not run away –
Perhaps like today on a Thursday, a day of autumn.

It will be a Thursday because today, the day
I write these verses, is Thursday, and I put on
My arm bones wrong, and never have I been
So alone as today, with all my road before me.

Cesar Vallejo is dead, whom they would beat,
All of them, though he never does harm to them.
They would give it to him hard with a stick and hard

Also with a rope, as these bear witness,
These Thursdays, and the bones of my upper arms
Along with solitude, the rain, the roads…


Week 565: John Henry, by Anon

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This great ballad of the working man dates from early last century and appears to relate to events in Victorian times. Whether or not there ever was a John Henry, and whether or not anything like the events in the ballad actually happened, there is no doubt that John Henry stands as a powerful symbol of the worker throughout the ages, taking what positives he can from a hardscrabble existence by maintaining a desperate pride in his own competence, even while knowing that he is likely to be ruthlessly cast aside as soon as that competence wanes, or better comes along to replace him.

Poor John, though – he never really had a chance against the inexorable rise of the machine. And of course, in one form or another it still goes on. Back in the nineteen eighties when my day job was computer programmer (it paid better than being a poet by a ratio of approximately 300 to 1) I was involved in coding a software package to perform a ‘cost rollup’, that is, to calculate the total cost of a final assembly by adding up the cost of all its individual components, and also to allow the user to see what would be the effect of changing the cost of any particular widget in the hierarchy. It is the sort of thing that computers can do very well but which is laborious for humans. I remember at one firm a worker whose job had been to make this kind of calculation by hand shaking his head in sad disbelief as the computer carried out in a couple of minutes work that he was used to spending many hours on. I felt obscurely guilty.

The text of the ballad exists in various versions, and it has been covered by numerous folksingers: I use the version I happen to know best, and which I think is punchier than some.

John Henry

John Henry was a little baby,
Sitting on his mammy’s knee.
He gave one long and a lonesome cry,
Said ‘That hammer’ll be the death of me’.

John Henry he had a woman,
Name was Mary Magdalen.
She would go to the tunnel an’ sing for John,
Jes’ to hear John Henry’s hammer ring.

Captain said to John Henry
‘Gonna bring me a steamdrill round,
Gonna take that steamdrill out on the job,
Gonna whop that steel on down.’

John Henry told his captain,
Lightnin’ was in his eye:
‘I’ll never be conquered by your old steam drill,
I’ll beat it to the bottom or I’ll die.’

John Henry walked in the tunnel,
Had his captain by his side,
But the rock so tall, John Henry so small,
Lord, he laid down his hammer an’ he cried.

Now John Henry start on the right hand,
The steam drill start on the left.
‘Before I let this steam drill beat me down,
I’d hammer myself to death.’

Well, John Henry kissed his hammer,
The white man turned on the steam;
Little Bill held John Henry’s trusty steel,
Was the biggest race the world ever seen.

Now John Henry swung his hammer
An’ he brought it down on the ground,
An’ a man in Chatanooga two hundred mile away
Thought he heard a sobbing sound.

Oh the captain said to John Henry
‘I believe this mountain’s fallin’ in.’
John Henry said to his captain
‘Taint nothin’ but my hammer sucking wind.’

John Henry said as he took his stand
‘This’ll be the end of me.’
But every foot that steam drill drove
John Henry’s hammer drove three.

Now the hammer that John Henry swung
It weighed over nine pound.
He broke a rib in his left hand side
And his entrails fell on the ground.

John Henry was hammerin’ on the mountain
An’ his hammer was strikin’ fire.
He drove so hard till he broke his heart
An’ he lay down his hammer an’ he died.

Now all the women out in Kansas
When they heard of John Henry’s death,
They stood in the rain, flagged the eastbound train,
Goin’ where John drew his last breath.

When John Henry died there wasn’t no box
Was big enough to hold his bones
So they buried him in a boxcar deep in the ground,
Let two mountains be his gravestones.

An’ they took John Henry from the graveyard
An’ buried him away in the sand,
An’ every locomotive comin’ roarin’ by
Whistles ‘There lies a steel drivin’ man.’

Anon

Week 564: Sonnet à Pilar, by Jules Supervielle

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The French poet Jules Supervielle was much preoccupied with the idea of an imagined afterlife, a kind of limbo where human beings continue to exist in a disembodied, impotent state along with a strangely random selection of artefacts and other creatures from the earth they have lost: in one of his poems on this theme, ‘Prophétie’, we have a magical flying fish that knows nothing of the sea, a vintage car with four wheels but no road to use them on, and a goldfinch. I suspect that these somewhat fey imaginings have their roots in Supervielle’s permanent state of ill health, that sometimes caused him to doubt his own physical existence to the extent of holding his hand over a candle flame to reassure himself that he was still alive. It’s all a bit odd, and a long way from my own idea of an afterlife, which would be more like Valhalla but with a lot of long runs in place of all the fighting, but I do find the poems have a certain haunting quality.

Pilar was the poet’s wife.

The translation that follows is my own.

Sonnet à Pilar

Pour ne pas être seul durant l’éternité,
Je cherche auprès de toi future compagnie
Pour quand, larmes sans yeux, nous jouerons à la vie
Et voudrons y loger notre fidélité.

Pour ne plus aspirer à l’hiver et l’été,
Ni mourir à nouveau de tant de nostalgie,
Il faut dès à présent labourer l’autre vie,
Y pousser nos grands boeufs enclins à s’arrêter,

Voir comment l’on pourrait remplacer les amis,
La France, le soleil, les enfants et les fruits,
Et se faire un beau jour d’une nuit coriace,

Regarder sans regard et toucher sans les doigts,
Se parler sans avoir de paroles ni voix,
Immobiles, changer un petit peu de place.

Jules Supervielle

Sonnet for Pilar

Lest we should be alone throughout eternity
I look to you for future company
For when we play at life, like eyeless tears,
Still wishing to keep faith with those lost years.

Lest we should long too much for change of season
Or from too much nostalgia die again,
We must from now on plough another way
With our great oxen, so inclined to stay,

Must think how to replace, when all this ends,
Our country, children, sunlight, fruit, our friends,
Conjure a fair day from night’s carapace,

Look though we have no gaze, touch without fingers,
Talk to each other without words or voice,
Immobile, move a little from one place.

Week 563: The Signpost, by R.S.Thomas

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In a way, this can be viewed as a companion piece to last week’s poem. That was about places never visited through being lost to the map, and maybe existing only in the imagination; this one is about those perfectly well-defined places that we never get round to visiting, perhaps a village off the main road down some high-banked country lanes, briefly wondered about as we drive past at speed, and yet which continue to haunt us with a sense of lost possibilities, rather as the door in the wall haunted the protagonist in the short story by H.G.Wells.

The Signpost

Casgob, it said, 2
miles. But I never went
there; left it like an ornament
on the mind’s shelf, covered
with the dust of
its summers; a place on a diet
of the echoes of stopped
bells and children’s
voices; white the architecture
of its clouds, stationary
its sunlight. It was best
so. I need a museum
for storing the dream’s
brittler particles in. Time
is a main road, eternity
the turning that we don’t take.

R.S.Thomas

Week 562: Lost Acres, by Robert Graves

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Robert Graves delighted in out of the way facts and often built poems around them, as in the case of this slightly enigmatic piece that turns on the idea that maps, at least in the old days, were not entirely accurate and whole parcels of land could be omitted from them: the ‘lost acres’ of the title. [I think this has nothing to do with the modern convention whereby certain installations like weapons factories and nuclear bunkers are deliberately not identified as such on maps for reasons of national security, so if you want to know where they are you have to ask the Russians].

Graves plays with this idea in a typically offbeat way, using the lost acres as a metaphor for the edge places of the mind that so fascinated him and ascribing to them an otherworldly quality, along with the perils that otherworlds traditionally possess: ‘to walk there would be loss of sense’. But why? The usual sense lost in otherworld venturings is that of time, when travellers to Tír na nÓg or explorers of fairy mounds return after what seems to them a short stay to find that anything from seven to hundreds of years have passed at home, but I believe that what Graves is suggesting here is that our fragile sanity depends on having things mapped and named, and these places by their nature imperil that sanity: that fear of ‘a substance without words’ reminds one of his reflections in ‘The Cool Web’ (see week 380). But as I say I find the poem slightly enigmatic, so if anyone has any better ideas on how to read it I’d be interested to hear them.

Lost Acres

These acres, always again lost
By every new ordnance-survey
And searched for at exhausting cost
Of time and thought, are still away.

They have their paper-substitute –
Intercalation of an inch
At the so-many-thousandth foot:
And no one parish feels the pinch.

But lost they are, despite all care,
And perhaps likely to be bound
Together in a piece somewhere,
A plot of undiscovered ground.

Invisible, they have the spite
To swerve the tautest measuring-chain
And the exact theodolite
Perched every side of them in vain.

Yet, be assured, we have no need
To plot these acres of the mind
With prehistoric fern and reed
And monsters such as heroes find.

Maybe they have their flowers, their birds,
Their trees behind the phantom fence,
But of a substance without words:
To walk there would be loss of sense.

Robert Graves

Week 561: Epic, by Patrick Kavanagh

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Another poem in which we see Patrick Kavanagh wryly doubting but then triumphantly reasserting the validity of his own experience, which he feared might seem parochial and even humdrum in its attachment to rural Ireland, but transfigured by the poetic imagination could still convey essential things about the human condition. The closing sentence ‘Gods make their own importance’ would perhaps make more sense, in the context of the poem, if it read ‘Poets make their own importance’, and I’m not sure if Kavanagh is modestly backing away from such a claim or, less modestly, equating poets with gods. (If the latter, bagsy Hermes – those winged sandals are just so cool.)

‘rood’: an old land measurement of about a quarter of an acre, so ‘half a rood of rock’ means the dispute concerned a stony plot of land about the size of a couple of standard allotments.

‘march’: here used in the sense of a border or boundary, often, as here, one of disputed ownership; cf. the Welsh Marches.

‘the Munich bother’: I take this to refer to the Munich agreement of 1938, when the then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain brought back from a meeting with Hitler what was supposed to be a guarantee of ‘peace in our time’; next year, of course, the Second World War broke out.

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones.’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 560: The Heron, by Vernon Watkins

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Vernon Watkins (1906-1957; see also weeks 96 and 450) was a modern symbolist, heavily influenced by W.B.Yeats, and I think it is fairly obvious that the heron in this poem is intended to represent the poet, doing his best to fix his attention on the transcendental as represented by light and water even while ‘calamity about him cries’. The ‘calamity’ in this case probably reflects the tumults of the last mid-century (the poem first appeared in a 1954 collection), though Watkins did have five children, and having had four myself I like to think it may also reflect the difficulties of trying to follow one’s poetic vocation in a household full of other people whose priorities in life are not necessarily the writing of poems.

Of course, Watkins was not the first to use a bird as the symbol for a poet. We have Robert Frost’s fine poem ‘The Oven Bird’ (see week 214), and then there is Baudelaire’s ‘L’Albatros’, that uses the albatross to characterise the poet, so graceful when aloft, so awkward and vulnerable when brought to earth. I think Baudelaire’s poem has the edge as far as a reality check goes in that it does not impose upon the bird anything not in its nature and behaviour, whereas in the case of the Watkins poem while we admittedly do not know what goes in the mind of a heron, I would guess that a rapt contemplation of light and water takes a back seat to wondering where the next fish is coming from. Still, Watkins’s poem has some beautiful touches – I particularly like ‘cloud-backed’ – and I think stands as one of his best.

The Heron

The cloud-backed heron will not move:
He stares into the stream.
He stands unfaltering while the gulls
And oyster-catchers scream.
He does not hear, he cannot see
The great white horses of the sea,
But fixes eyes on stillness
Below their flying team.

How long will he remain, how long
Have the grey woods been green?
The sky and the reflected sky,
Their glass he has not seen,
But silent as a speck of sand
Interpreting the sea and land,
His fall pulls down the fabric
Of all that windy scene.

Sailing with clouds and woods behind,
Pausing in leisured flight,
He stepped, alighting on a stone,
Dropped from the stars of night.
He stood there unconcerned with day,
Deaf to the tumult of the bay,
Watching a stone in water,
A fish’s hidden light.

Sharp rocks drive back the breaking waves,
Confusing sea with air.
Bundles of spray blown mountain-high
Have left the shingle bare.
A shipwrecked anchor wedged by rocks,
Loosed by the thundering equinox,
Divides the herded waters,
The stallion and his mare.

Yet no distraction breaks the watch
Of that time-killing bird.
He stands unmoving on the stone;
Since dawn he has not stirred.
Calamity about him cries,
But he has fixed his golden eyes
On water’s crooked tablet,
On light’s reflected word.

Vernon Watkins

Week 559: For Anne Gregory, by W.B.Yeats

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This is one of W.B.Yeats’s lighter pieces. I think it has a characteristic charm, though I confess I have never looked at it in quite the same way since reading Anne Gregory’s own recollections of the poem, which according to your point of view are either very funny or rather sad. Evidently the young Anne, the granddaughter of Yeats’s friend Lady Gregory, was summoned before the great man by her grandma with the words ‘Mr Yeats has written a poem for you and is going to recite it to you’. ‘I was petrified. I had no idea he was going to write a poem for me. I was in agony. I was nearly in tears for fear of doing something silly.’ She dutifully listened as Yeats delivered the poem in his weird singsong way, then stuttered ‘Wonderful, thank you so much, I must go and wash my hair’ and made her escape. She added afterwards that she had never liked the colour of her hair anyway.

I feel for you, William. I remember one of my children coming home complaining that they had had to read in class one of my own poems from a school anthology and it was like, you know, totally embarrassing…

For Anne Gregory

‘Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

‘But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’

‘I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

W.B.Yeats

Week 558: From ‘The Dancers’, by Ivor Gurney

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Another of Ivor Gurney’s short poems (see also weeks 24 and 249), slightly eccentric in their diction but with a tenacious individuality. Gurney, a lifelong sufferer from a bipolar disorder no doubt exacerbated by his experiences in the Great War, spent the last fifteen years of his life in psychiatric hospitals. ‘The Dancers’ is a late poem, written while he was institutionalized, and shows the poet clinging like a swimmer to a spar of driftwood to the memory of some rural scene from his beloved Gloucestershire countryside. While in hospital Ivor was visited several times by Helen Thomas, widow of the poet Edward Thomas, whose work he much loved and some of whose poems he had set to music. Helen would bring with her Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire countryside and united in their separate griefs they would spend the time together tracing out with their fingers footpaths and byways that Edward had walked on, with Gurney, himself a great walker in happier times, remembering every step of the way. [See Helen Thomas, Ivor Gurney — The War Poets Gallery for Helen’s moving account of these meetings].

The poem actually continues for seven more rather incoherent lines, which I’ve cut: the full text can be found in P.J.Kavanagh’s excellent edition of his ‘Collected Poems’.

From ‘The Dancers’

The dancers danced in a quiet meadow.
It was winter, the soft light lit in clouds
Of growing morning – their feet on the firm
Hillside sounded like a baker’s business
Heard from the yard of his beamy barn-grange.
One piped, and the measured irregular riddle
Of the dance ran onward in tangling threads…
A thing of the village, centuries old in charm.

Ivor Gurney