Category Archives: poetry

Week 684: From The Train, by David Sutton

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We had the first frost of the year the other morning. I love a hard frost, so clean and bright after unmemorable November days of rain and muck. It prompted me to dig out this poem of mine, to which there is a tale. When it first appeared in one of my collections one reviewer was kind enough to single it out for praise as a particularly fine sonnet. Sonnet? I looked at it. I counted the lines. Yep, fourteen. And the rhymes seemed to be in the right place. Well, well, so it was. I was rather impressed with myself. I had as usual just let the poem take the form it seemed to want to take, and had simply not noticed that this particular form had a name. I still can’t decide whether to write a sonnet by accident shows genius or a distressing lack of formal awareness. Naturally I incline to the former view…

Worm-hole: the reference is to the cosmologists’ speculation that there might be passages connecting one universe to another. In this case connecting our universe to a universe of joy and wonder, which is perhaps just our own seen with new eyes.

Fern-seed: as well as being very small, fern-seed (more properly fern spores) was thought in mediaeval times to have magical properties, enabling one to become invisible, see into the future, and stay forever young. Cf. Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’: ‘we have the receipt of fern seed; we walk invisible’.

From The Train

From the train at dawn, on ploughland, frost
Blue-white in the shadow of a wood.
Oh, you again, of all moods soonest lost
And most elusive and least understood.
What should I call you? Vision? Empathy?
Elation’s tunnel? Worm-hole of rejoicing?
Some bliss of childhood, reasonless and free,
The secret microcosms … What a thing
To have no name for, yet to live for, these
Curious contentments under all,
These moments of a planet: weathers, trees –
What dreams, what intimations, fern-seed small,
Are buried in my days, that I must find,
And recognise, and lose, and leave behind?

David Sutton

Week 683: The Icelandic Language, by Bill Holm

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This week’s offering by the American poet Bill Holm (1943-2009), a kind of hymn to the Icelandic tongue, takes a sensuous delight in the sound and feel of language that reminds me somewhat of Seamus Heaney, and I love how it evokes the landscape and culture of that barren, lava-black, troll-haunted land.

The Icelandic language is a fascinating one, deeply conservative to the extent that modern speakers can read without much difficulty texts first written down in the 11th century. This does not work quite the same in the other direction: I can read Old Norse well enough but find modern Icelandic slow going because of the expanded vocabulary. This is despite the fact that much effort has been expended by a body called the ‘language regulator’ in keeping out foreign loanwords and trying to make sure that any new terms necessary are based on older Icelandic words. Which would have gladdened the heart of the English poet William Barnes, who had a passion for an English purified of foreign, post Norman Conquest influences and wanted us to use such terms as ‘welkinfire’ for meteor and ‘wortlore’ for botany.

Bill Holm was himself the grandson of Icelandic immigrants to the US and spent part of every year at his second home in Iceland.

The Icelandic Language

 In this language, no industrial revolution;
 no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
 only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
 The middle class can hardly speak it.

 In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
 through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
 The door groans; the old smell comes
 up from under the earth to meet you.

 But this language believes in ghosts;
 chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
 neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
 at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

 The woman with marble hands whispers
 this language to you in your sleep; faces
 come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
 wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

 In this language, you can’t chit-chat
 holding a highball in your hand, can’t
 even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
 all your grief and failure come clear at last.

 Old inflections move from case to case,
 gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
 vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
 icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

Bill Holm

Week 682: The End of the Weekend, by Anthony Hecht

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This week a rather strange and disturbing poem by the American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004; see also weeks 345 and 464), apparently inspired by an anecdote of Ted Hughes.

I see the poem as being in the ‘Et in Arcadia, ego’ vein, in which the frailty and transience of human life and love are set against the presence of death and the pitiless indifference of the natural world, here casting their shadows over a romantic weekend getaway. I take the symbolic presence in the last stanza to be an owl, and the scratching in the loft evokes memories of Alan Garner’s ‘The Owl Service’, though there is no suggestion here that our human choice can be benign flowers instead of the predatory and destructive birds.

Of course, it is possible to find unintentionally comic aspects to the poem. Would the narrator really have let himself be distracted by a mere scratching in the roof when he had matters so nearly in hand, so to speak? And then one imagines the perhaps more practically minded woman saying ‘Right, now we’ve established that it’s just an owl that’s caught a mouse, can we get on with it, because I’m standing here freezing’.

But any such irreverent thoughts are overwhelmed by admiration for the sheer skill of the piece: it’s conjuration of shadows, its buildup of erotic tension, and that shaft of moonlight, so stunningly evoked by the unexpected epithet ‘magnesium’.

Quirt: a kind of riding whip.
Lariat: another word for lasso.
Captain Marryat: a Victorian writer of adventure stories.
Dormer: a kind of window positioned directly under a roof, and often found as a way of letting light into attics.

The End of the Weekend

A dying firelight slides along the quirt
Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans
Against my father’s books. The lariat
Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans
Fingers a page of Captain Marryat
Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.
Outside, across the lake, an endless wind
Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails
In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.
She rubs against me and I feel her nails.
Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:
This dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,
Wind, lip, lake, everything awaits
The slow unloosening of her underthings
And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates
Against the attic beams. I climb the stairs
Armed with a belt.

A long magnesium shaft
Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path
Among the shattered skeletons of mice.
A great black presence beats its wings in wrath.
Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.
Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.

Anthony Hecht

Week 681: Chard Whitlow, by Henry Reed

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To appreciate this brilliant parody of T.S.Eliot fully requires a degree of familiarity with Eliot’s work, in particular with ‘Four Quartets’, which some may feel is too high a price to pay, but even a superficial acquaintance should be enough to enjoy the adroitness with which Henry Reed echoes and undercuts the great man’s more sententious passages.

To give credit to Eliot, it has to be said that he took the parody very sportingly, commenting ‘Most parodies of one’s own work strike one as very poor. In fact, one is apt to think one could parody oneself much better. (As a matter of fact, some critics have said that I have done so.) But there is one which deserves the success it has had, Henry Reed’s ‘Chard Whitlow’’.

The title of the poem is a made-up name, parodying the English place names used as titles of the sections in ‘Four Quartets’, such as Burnt Norton.

For Henry Reed (1914-1986) see also week 279.

Chard Whitlow
(Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Evening Postscript)

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and to-day I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again – if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded tube.

There are certain precautions – though none of them very reliable –
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: ‘It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell.’
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray, not for your sins, but for your souls.

And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.
And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

Henry Reed

Week 680: Requiem: The Soldier, by Humbert Wolfe

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Remembrance Sunday is on us again this weekend, and again a surprisingly large crowd from my village will be gathering round its memorial cross to hear the names of the fallen read out, so many from a place that at that time had scarcely four hundred inhabitants. So on that theme I have chosen as this week’s poem an elegy by the Italian-born British poet Humbert Wolfe (1851-1940). Wolfe had a big reputation between the wars and was even considered for Poet Laureate, but he seems to be little remembered today except for his mordant epigram on the British journalist:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

(As an aside, I was amused to come across an AI interpretation of these lines that took them for a straightforward tribute to the British journalist as being of impeccable integrity and needing no base incentive to strive for excellence. Which shows that AI has some way to go in detecting nuance. Unless, of course, it is developing a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour).

Wolfe, who worked as a civil servant, was a bit too close to the Establishment for my taste – I think myself that it is better for poets to maintain a polite distance from anything that might seek to press them into service. But I find that this poem, though possessing nothing like the power of Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, does have a certain quiet poignancy.

Requiem: The Soldier

Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together, slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.

They are speaking together of what they loved in vain here,
but the air is too thin to carry the things they say.
They were young and golden, but they came on pain here,
and their youth is age now, their gold is grey.

Yet their hearts are not changed, and they cry to one another,
‘What have they done with the lives we laid aside?
Are they young with our youth, gold with our gold, my brother?
Do they smile in the face of death, because we died?’

Down some cold field in a world uncharted
the young seek each other with questioning eyes.
They question each other, the young, the golden hearted,
of the world that they were robbed of in their quiet paradise.

Humbert Wolfe

Week 679: Silver, by Walter de la Mare

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This is one of the first poems I ever remember learning, other than nursery rhymes, and I find it still has a certain charm, though it does come with mixed emotions. It was presented to us in an art lesson at primary school, and we were told to create our own painting based on the poem, which indeed cries out for illustration. Sadly, I could only watch as the boy next to me produced a rather fine effort while I suffered the agonies of the totally inartistic, who may have a perfectly clear vision of things in their heads but are quite unable to render this in any drawn or painted form. In retrospect I might perhaps have tried to pass off my smeary mess as being in the modernist vein, but I was innocent of such a possibility back then, so must endure the teacher’s head-shaking disapproval as she, recognising a lost cause when she saw one, passed silently by. But I still like the poem for the way it captures the gleaming utter stillness of the moonlit night.

For a note on Walter de la Mare see week 105.

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
 
Walter de la Mare

Week 678: The River in March, by Ted Hughes

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A timely celebration of our sadly threatened rivers featuring a rich accumulation of images that in other hands might seem a little over the top but which Ted Hughes carries off by sheer brio.

The syntax of the last two lines is a bit elliptical, and I’m not clear if we’re talking about an actual salmon, leaping, or whether the salmon, the sow of solid silver, is the river itself, swollen with March rain and glittering in the spring sun, rising as if to behold the golden treasure of kingcups that it has bestowed on the land.

Either way the use of the word ‘sow’ here may seem odd, but it may or may not be relevant that historically a ‘silver pig’ was a hollowed out lead ingot filled with silver ore, as in the title of Lindsey Davis’s first Falco book set in ancient Rome and Roman Britain, ‘The Silver Pigs’.

The River in March

Now the river is rich, but her voice is low.
It is her Mighty Majesty the sea
Travelling among the villages incognito.

Now the river is poor. No song, just a thin mad whisper.
The winter floods have ruined her.
She squats between draggled banks, fingering her rags and rubbish.

And now the river is rich. A deep choir.
It is the lofty clouds, that work in heaven,
Going on their holiday to the sea.

The river is poor again. All her bones are showing.
Through a dry wig of bleached flotsam she peers up ashamed
From her slum of sticks.

Now the river is rich, collecting shawls and minerals.
Rain brought fatness, but she takes ninety-nine percent
Leaving the fields just one percent to survive on.

And now she is poor. Now she is East wind sick.
She huddles in holes and corners. The brassy sun gives her a headache.
She has lost all her fish. And she shivers.

But now once more she is rich. She is viewing her lands.
A hoard of king-cups spills from her folds, it blazes, it cannot be hidden.
A salmon, a sow of solid silver,

Bulges to see it.

Ted Hughes

Week 677: From ‘Tam Lin’, by Anon

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This week one of the greatest and most magical of the Scottish border ballads, Child 39. It’s quite long, so I give just the more dramatic second half; the whole is readily available online, though versions may differ. The plot is this: young Janet is forbidden by her father to go anywhere near Carterhaugh, which is the haunt of the notorious Tam Lin, a knight who has been abducted by the fairy court and who is known for seducing young maidens. Being a typical teenager she promptly hoists her skirt up a little above her knee (they wore them longer in those days) and scuttles off to Carterhaugh as fast as she can go, where she meets Tam Lin and predictably comes back pregnant. Scorning her father’s attempts to marry her off respectably to someone else, she goes back to Carterhaugh and tells Tam Lin that he’s going to be a daddy so what about it? Tam Lin says OK but first you have got to release me from the fairy spell, and that’s not going to be easy… This is where our extract begins.

I think one reason why this ballad still resonates so powerfully is that so many today face in their own way the prospect of holding fast to a loved one throughout a series of transformations, whether caused by age or illness or dementia, though sadly, unlike in the ballad, there is for them no happy ending in prospect.

The ballad has been covered by numerous folk artists, perhaps most notably by Fairport Convention on their seminal 1969 album ‘Liege and Lief’.

From ‘Tam Lin’

‘Just at the mirk and midnight hour
The elfin folk will ride
And they that would their true love win
At Miles Cross, they must bide.’

‘But how shall I thee ken, Tam Lin
And how shall I thee know?
Among so many unearthly knights
The like I never saw?’

‘Oh, first let by the black, black steed
And then let by the brown
But haste ye to the milk white steed
And pull the rider down

For I’ll be on the milk white steed
With a gold star in my crown
Because I was an earthly knight
They gave me that renown

And they will turn me in your arms
Into a beast so wild
But hold me fast and fear me not
I’m the father of your child

And they’ll change me in your arms
Into the red hot iron
But hold me fast and fear me not
I’ll do you no harm

They’ll turn me in your arms, my love
Into an awful snake
But hold me fast and fear me not
For I’m to be your mate

At last they’ll turn me in your arms
Into the melting lead
Then throw me into clear well water
And throw me in with speed

And then I’ll be your own true love
I’ll turn a naked knight
Cover me with your green mantle
And cover me out of sight

My right hand will be gloved, Janet,
My left hand will be bare
Cocked up shall my helmet be
No doubt I shall be there.’

Gloomy, gloomy was the night
And eerie was the way
When Janet in her green mantle
To Miles Cross she did gae

About the middle of the night
She heard the bridles ring
Janet was as glad of that
As any mortal thing

First went by the black, black steed
And then went by the brown
But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed
And pulled the rider down

And thunder rolled across the sky
And the stars they burned like day
And out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
Crying young Tam Lin’s away

They turned him to a bear so bold
Then to a lion wild
She held him fast and feared him not
He was the father of her child

And then they turned him in her arms
Into iron like hot fire
She held him fast and feared him not
He was her heart’s desire

They turned him, changed him in her arms
Into a hissing snake
She held him fast and feared him not
He was to be her mate

At last they turned him in her arms
Into the molten lead
She threw him into clear well water
And threw him in with speed

And then he turned a naked knight
She young Tam Lin did win
She covered him with her green mantle
As blithe’s a bird in spring

Out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
Out of a bush of broom
‘She that has gotten young Tamlin
Has gotten a stately groom’

Out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
And angry queen was she
‘Shame betide her ill-starred face
And an ill death may she die’

Out then spoke the Queen of Fairies
Out of a bush of rye
‘She has gotten the fairest knight
In all my company

If what I’d see this night, Tam Lin
Last night I’d understood
I’d have torn out thy two grey eyes
And put in two of wood

If what I see this night, Tam Lin
Last night I’d only known
I’d have taken out your heart of flesh
Put in a heart of stone

If I’d but half the wit yestreen
That I have bought today
I’d have paid my tithe seven times to Hell
E’er you’d been won away’

Anon

Week 676: A slumber did my spirit seal, by William Wordsworth

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The perennial force and freshness of this short poem, that first appeared in the 1798 collection ‘Lyrical Ballads’, reminds us of how William Wordsworth may have become a bit of a bore in his later years but once blew like a great gale through the decorous drawing-rooms of eighteenth-century verse.

The identity of the poem’s subject is not known. It is generally grouped with the four ‘Lucy’ poems, but that doesn’t get us very far because there is no agreement as to who Lucy was, if indeed she was any more than a literary device. Yet the poem’s very anonymity helps to make its truth more universal: that we find it hard, even impossible, to contemplate the death of our loved ones until one day, perhaps suddenly, they are no longer there.

A slumber did my spirit seal

A slumber did my spirit seal
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

William Wordsworth

I wonder, incidentally, if A.E.Housman had this poem in mind when he used a very similar conceit in his own beautiful lyric, ‘The night is freezing fast’:

‘The night is freezing fast,
Tomorrow comes December
And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
And chiefly I remember
How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
Prompt hand and headpiece clever
Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
His overcoat for ever
And wears the turning globe.’

Housman was certainly an admirer of Wordsworth, citing him in his famous 1933 Cambridge lecture ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ as one who spoke with the true voice of poetry, so it seems more than possible.

Week 675: Noth, by Ada Christen

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These rather tart quatrains by the Austrian writer Ada Christen (1839-1901) may be seen as a useful corrective to last week’s piece by Heine and also as a reflection of the way in which mid-nineteenth century German literature was reacting again the Romantic movement that had dominated the early part of the century and turning instead to a kind of social realism. Of course, poets will always be preoccupied with what Robert Frost called ‘inner weather’, but it does no harm for them to be reminded from time to time that most of the world’s population has its hands full dealing with outer weather.

The translation that follows is my own.

Noth

All euer girrendes Herzeleid
Tut lang nicht so weh,
Wie Winterkälte im dünnen Kleid,
Die bloßen Füße im Schnee.

All eure romantische Seelennot
Schafft nicht so herbe Pein,
Wie ohne Dach und ohne Brot
Sich betten auf einen Stein.

Ada Christen

Need

All your cooing heart’s distress
Lasts not so long a woe
As winter cold in threadbare dress
And bare feet in the snow.

And all your soul’s romantic need
Makes far less cause for moan
Than without roof and without bread
To couch upon a stone.