Category Archives: poetry

Week 656: Journal, by David Sutton

Posted on by
6

My eighty-first birthday this week. Ran my birthday mile in 8 minutes 27 seconds – disappointing but at least that’s ten seconds faster than last year’s pathetic effort. Extrapolating this improvement in a way that some may find questionable, I calculate that I should be down to a respectable four minutes by the time I am a hundred and eight. Watch this space.

Meanwhile I thought that as it’s my birthday week I might be excused for offering a poem of my own, a meditation on what is lost with age, and what can still be kept.

Journal

I write in my journal, ‘Thrushes in the lane,
A soft wind, and the blackthorn petals falling.’
There would have been much more when I was young:
Each scent of earth, each bird and flower of spring,
But youth is gone, I cannot visit again
The adventure of the blackbird’s first song.

And once, I might have wanted to share such words
But now it seems enough that they are for me,
And in time, if time allows, will quicken this day,
Since love, in the end, needs little for memory,
But makes of petals, soft winds, singing birds,
Its momentary, everlasting stay.

David Sutton

Week 655: From ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, by Andrew Marvell

Posted on by
Reply

When it comes to the English Civil War I incline to the view of those eminent historians Messrs Sellar and Yeatman that the Cavaliers were romantic but wrong and the Roundheads were repulsive but right. I still feel it was a pity about King Charles I though. In July 1647 he was rather comfortably imprisoned for a few weeks at Caversham and used to visit Hardwick House, just along the Thames from Mapledurham, which is quite near where I live, and from there call in to a local pub at nearby Collins End to play bowls. I think of him making his way up through the woods in the light summer evenings, perhaps pausing to look back wistfully on the fine view he would shortly never see again, down across broad paddocks to the shining river beyond.

If only he hadn’t felt so entitled… it is easy to imagine him in our times, giving a TV interview, completely misjudging the mood of the room and insisting to the end on his divine right to be a complete wally. So where he might, I suppose, have gone into a peaceable exile, instead he got the chop. But at least by all accounts he met his end with considerable dignity, as celebrated by Andrew Marvell in this week’s piece, which is an extract from a longer poem ostensibly in praise of Oliver Cromwell, the subject of the opening lines, but which is, to say the least, ambivalent about the execution of the king and gives him due credit for his behaviour on the scaffold.

Hampton: Charles was for a time imprisoned at Hampton Court, where Cromwell visited him many times to discuss ways in which the dispute between the King and Parliament might be resolved, but received no cooperation from the King.

Carisbrooke: a castle on the Isle of Wight to which Charles was transferred after an attempted escape from Hampton Court.

From ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’

What field of all the civil wars
Where his were not the deepest scars?
    And Hampton shows what part
    He had of wiser art,

Where, twining subtle fears with hope,
He wove a net of such a scope
    That Charles himself might chase
    To Carisbrooke’s narrow case,

That thence the royal actor borne
The tragic scaffold might adorn,
    While round the armed bands
    Did clap their bloody hands.

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
    But with his keener eye
    The axe’s edge did try;

Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
    But bowed his comely head
    Down as upon a bed.

This was that memorable hour
Which first assur’d the forced pow’r.

Andrew Marvell

Week 654: Walls, by Ted Hughes

Posted on by
Reply

This week’s piece makes an interesting comparison with Norman Nicholson’s poem on the same theme (see week 136). I like both poems very much, but Norman’s is more concerned with conjuring up the walls themselves, whereas Ted’s is more about the anonymous lives that went into their making. That image of the faces and palms of the hands cooling in the slow fire of sleep is wonderfully tactile.

Walls

What callussed speech rubbed its edges
Soft and hard again and soft
Again fitting these syllables

To the long swell of land, in the long
Press of weather? Eyes that closed
To gaze at grass-points and gritty chippings.

Spines that were into a bowed
Enslavement, the small freedom of raising
Endless memorials to the labour

Buried in them. Faces
Lifted at the day’s end
Like the palms of the hands

To cool in the slow fire of sleep.
A slow fire of wind
Has erased their bodies and names.

Their lives went into the enclosures
Like manure. Embraced these slopes
Like summer cloud-shadows. Left

This harvest of long cemeteries

Ted Hughes

Week 653: Der Panther, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Posted on by
1

This week one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most famous shorter poems. It exemplifies his poetic theory of empathic identification with the object of his vision, combined with the use of precise evocative language. At one level it is certainly about a majestic animal cooped up in a small cage, but clearly it owes its particular renown to a wider resonance, the panther standing equally for so many human lives, trapped in offices or factories, losing over the years any ability to see beyond the imprisoning bars of duty and routine, yet just occasionally half-remembering another world of freedom and joy, a glimpse, quickly extinguished, of how life might have been.

The translation that follows is my own.

Der Panther

im Jardin des Plantes, Paris

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäbe keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille —
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Panther

His gaze, from seeing bars go by, has grown
so weary there is nothing else it sees.
It is as if for him were bars alone,
a thousand bars, and no world beyond these.

His footfalls, soft and supple as they enter
the smallest of small circles, round and round,
are like a sacred dance about a centre
in which a great will stands forever bound.

Just sometimes, as the curtain of a pupil
lifts soundlessly, some image from before
traverses tense unmoving limbs, until
arriving at the heart it is no more.

Week 652: Hard of Hearing, by Norman Nicholson

Posted on by
1

What I admire most about the poems of Norman Nicholson (1914-1987; see also weeks 15, 136 and 193) is their wonderful tactility, especially when he is describing the landscapes of his beloved Cumbria with their hills like Black Combe where still one can sense ‘the tremor of old volcanoes/Tense with damped-down fires’.

The poem I have chosen this week is a little different, being concerned with the inner landscape of his growing deafness, which in a virtuoso display of synaesthesia he recasts in terms of losing one’s sight. I wonder if today’s discreet modern hearing aids would have helped him, rather than clunky things like the one I remember my deaf Uncle Fred having in my childhood, and which he was forever fiddling with, never able to get the volume right from one minute to the next. Still, sometimes a poet’s loss is our gain.

Hard of Hearing

The landscape of sound
Grows slowly dimmer.
A hush simmers
Up from the ground.
Words are blurred; vowels
Lose almost all their colour;
The lipped and tongued sharp edges
Are smudged and sponged away,
And in an aural darkness
All voices look alike.

Ears staring
Under the twilight,
I grope and blunder
My way to a meaning.
Through the slithering dusk
Walk stumbling, eyes
Strained to the south-
west linger of day.

For behind gloomed tree-trunks
And in shadowy doorways
Unspeaking faces
Gape blankly about me.
Night ties
Bandages round my ears:
Turns verbs
To Blind Man’s Buff;
Sends me to black
Coventry in my own skull,
Where not one crack
Of light breaks in
From the town’s genial hubbub.

For not from out there
Will come my brightening,
Not from that other dumbness.
Myself is my only
Lamplighter now.
I must illumine my own silence,
Give speech to the blank faces;
If the town won’t talk
Must put words in its mouth.

Norman Nicholson

Week 651: Walking in Autumn, by Frances Horovitz

Posted on by
Reply

This poem by Frances Horovitz (1938-1983; see also weeks 80 and 502) combines acutely observed physical details – the pale leaves gleaming like stranded fish, the hard slippery yellow moons of crab-apples – with an almost mythic conjuration of nightfall, harking back to older times when the darkness was full of fears both real and imagined – reivers and footpads, wights and bogles – and yet, equally, could possess a strange allure. Thus it is that the last lines see the poet and her companion caught in a liminal moment, drawn to towards the ancient securities of light and fire, yet at the same time reluctant to relinquish the experience of night with its atavistic frisson of the unknown. One of her best, I think. 

Walking in Autumn
(for Diana Lodge)

We have overshot the wood.
The track has led us beyond trees
to the tarmac edge. Too late now
at dusk to return a different way,
hazarding barbed wire or an unknown bull.
We turn back onto the darkening path.
Pale under-leaves of whitebeam, alder
gleam at our feet like stranded fish
or Hansel’s stones.
A wren, unseen, churrs alarm:
each tree drains to blackness.
Halfway now, we know
by the leaning crab-apple;
feet crunching into mud
the hard slippery yellow moons.
We hurry without reason
stumbling over roots and stones.
A night creature lurches, cries out,
crashes through brambles.
Skin shrinks inside our clothes;
almost we run
falling through darkness to the wood’s end,
the gate into the sloping field.
Home is lights and woodsmoke, voices –
and, our breath caught, not trembling now,
a strange reluctance to enter within doors.

Frances Horovitz

Week 650: An Die Nachgeborenen, by Bertolt Brecht

Posted on by
Reply

In this poem the German poet Bertolt Brecht (see also week 243) reflects on his experiences in the dark years of the mid twentieth century. I find it to be a bleakly powerful and somewhat guilt-inducing statement. I wonder how he would feel now to see what we, the aftercomers, the Nachgeborenen, have made of the inheritance that he speaks of. Dispirited, perhaps, that the efforts of an entire world towards betterment can still be outweighed at a stroke by the whim of some power-mad dictator. He might also be surprised that conversations about trees have become more important than he could ever have imagined.

The translation that follows is my own.

An Die Nachgeborenen

1

Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!  

Das arglose Wort ist töricht. Eine glatte Stirn
Deutet auf Unempfindlichkeit hin. Der Lachende
Hat die furchtbare Nachricht
Nur noch nicht empfangen.

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist
Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!
Der dort ruhig über die Straße geht
Ist wohl nicht mehr erreichbar für seine Freunde
Die in Not sind?

Es ist wahr: ich verdiene noch meinen Unterhalt
Aber glaubt mir: das ist nur ein Zufall. Nichts
Von dem, was ich tue, berechtigt mich dazu, mich satt zu essen.
Zufällig bin ich verschont. (Wenn mein Glück aussetzt
Bin ich verloren.)

Man sagt mir: iß und trink du! Sei froh, daß du hast!
Aber wie kann ich essen und trinken, wenn
Ich es dem Hungernden entreiße, was ich esse, und
Mein Glas Wasser einem Verdurstenden fehlt?
Und doch esse und trinke ich.

Ich wäre gerne auch weise
In den alten Büchern steht, was weise ist:
Sich aus dem Streit der Welt halten und die kurze Zeit
Ohne Furcht verbringen
Auch ohne Gewalt auskommen
Böses mit Gutem vergelten
Seine Wünsche nicht erfüllen, sondern vergessen
Gilt für weise.
Alles das kann ich nicht:
Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!

2

In die Städte kam ich zu der Zeit der Unordnung
Als da Hunger herrschte.
Unter die Menschen kam ich zu der Zeit des Aufruhrs
Und ich empörte mich mit ihnen.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Mein Essen aß ich zwischen den Schlachten
Schlafen legt ich mich unter die Mörder
Der Liebe pflegte ich achtlos
Und die Natur sah ich ohne Geduld.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Die Straßen führten in den Sumpf zu meiner Zeit
Die Sprache verriet mich dem Schlächter
Ich vermochte nur wenig. Aber die Herrschenden
Saßen ohne mich sicherer, das hoffte ich.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Die Kräfte waren gering. Das Ziel
Lag in großer Ferne
Es war deutlich sichtbar, wenn auch für mich
Kaum zu erreichen.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

3

Ihr, die ihr auftauchen werdet aus der Flut
In der wir untergegangen sind
Gedenkt
Wenn ihr von unseren Schwächen sprecht
Auch der finsteren Zeit
Der ihr entronnen seid.

Gingen wir doch, öfter als die Schuhe die Länder wechselnd
Durch die Kriege der Klassen, verzweifelt
Wenn da nur Unrecht war und keine Empörung.

Dabei wissen wir ja:
Auch der Haß gegen die Niedrigkeit
Verzerrt die Züge.
Auch der Zorn über das Unrecht
Macht die Stimme heiser. Ach, wir
Die wir den Boden bereiten wollten für Freundlichkeit
Konnten selber nicht freundlich sein.

Ihr aber, wenn es soweit sein wird
Daß der Mensch dem Menschen ein Helfer ist
Gedenkt unsrer
Mit Nachsicht.

Bertolt Brecht


To Those Who Come After

1

Truly, I live in dark times.

The innocent word is foolish. An unlined forehead
Betokens a lack of feeling. Whoever laughs
Has not yet heard the bad news.

What times are these
When a conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it leaves unspoken so many wrongs
And those who cross peaceably
To the other side of the street are placing themselves
Beyond the reach of friends who may be in need.

It is true: I still earn my living
And yet, believe me, that is only by chance.
Nothing of what I do entitles me
To eat my fill. It is by chance I am spared.
When my luck runs out I shall be lost.

People tell me: eat and drink, and be glad that you can.
But how can I eat and drink, when what I eat
Is taken from the hungry, when my glass of water
Deprives one who is thirsting? And yet
I eat, and drink.

I wish I could be wise.
The old books tell us, what it is to be wise:
Hold back from the strife of the world,
Spend your brief time without fear and do no violence,
For evil return good,
Seek not to fulfil your desires, but to forget them –
These rhings pass for wisdom.
But this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times!

2

I came into the cities at the time of disorder
When hunger was king.
I came among people at the time of revolt
And I rose up with them.
In this way I passed the time
That was given to me on earth.

I ate my food between battles.
I slept among murderers.
I was careless in my loving
And looked on nature without patience.
In this way I passed the time
That was given to me on earth.

The streets in my time led into the swamp.
Language betrayed me to the slaughterers.
There was little I could do. But those who ruled
Would have sat more securely without me, so I hoped.
In this way I passed the time
That was given to me on earth.

Our powers were small. The goal lay far away
Yet clearly visible, though not to be reached by me.
In this way I passed the time
That was given to me on earth.

3

You, who will one day surface from the flood
That overwhelmed us,
Consider,
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also the time of darkness
That you have escaped from.

Changing countries more often than we changed our shoes
We went through the class wars, despairing
When there was only injustice without revolt.

And yet we know this also
That hatred even of baseness
Distorts the features
And anger at injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to lay the ground for a friendlier world
Could not ourselves be friendly.

But you, when the time comes at last
When man can be a helper to man
Look back on us
With forbearance.

Week 649: A Postcard from the Volcano, by Wallace Stevens

Posted on by
4

This week another from Wallace Stevens (see also weeks 164 and 311), a poet that I continue to find myself drawn to yet frustrated by. Frustrated because I can never make my mind up as to whether his are free-floating works of the imagination, all right as far as they go but somewhat rootless and lacking in real substance, or whether they are in fact perfectly well rooted in reality, just not a reality which I as an English reader am culturally attuned to.

Clearly this poem is about what our posterity will and will not be able to make of our lives, about how much (or little) can be conveyed by our physical remains and by language. I do like a lot of the poem’s phrasing, but as usual for me with Stevens there are one or two stumbling blocks. I can live with ‘…the windy sky/Cries out a literate despair’, which has a fine ring to it even though I would be hard put to pin down its precise meaning. But what are ‘budded aureoles’ and how does one weave them? And I find the last line, ‘smeared with the gold of the opulent sun’, a bit strained and precious for my taste.

Still, I am aware that there are those for whom Wallace Stevens is by some margin the greatest American poet of the 20th century, so I remain hopeful of tuning my antenna better to his wavelength.

A Postcard from the Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once   
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes   
Made sharp air sharper by their smell   
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones   
We left much more, left what still is   
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow   
Above the shuttered mansion-house,   
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look   
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is … Children,   
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems   
As if he that lived there left behind   
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,   
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Wallace Stevens

Week 648: Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen, by Heinrich Heine

Posted on by
Reply

This poem, from the 1827 collection ‘Buch der Lieder’, has its genesis in the young Heine’s slightly complicated love life. He was in love with his cousin Amalie, but she had no interest in the poet and anyway had feelings for another. But this other man in his turn did not reciprocate her feelings and married someone else, at which, at least according to Heine’s jaundiced and perhaps rather ungallant view of the matter, Amalie settled for ‘den ersten besten Mann’, the first man to come along, and married him, leaving poor Heine out in the cold.

If this poem with its line in neat ruefulness gives you the impression of reading a German version of A.E.Housman, that is not surprising: Housman once named Heine as one of the three principal influences on his own verse, along with the English ballads and the songs of Shakespeare.

The translation that follows is my own.

XXXIX

Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,
Die hat einen andern erwählt;
Der andre liebt eine andre,
Und hat sich mit dieser vermählt.

Das Mädchen heiratet aus Ärger
Den ersten besten Mann,
Der ihr in den Weg gelaufen;
Der Jüngling ist übel dran.

Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bleibt sie immer neu;
Und wem sie just passieret,
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei.

Heinrich Heine

A young man loves a maiden,
Who would another wed;
This other loves another
And marries her instead.

The maiden out of chagrin
To have a husband still
Weds the first to come along;
The young man takes it ill.

The story is an old one,
Yet stays forever new,
And those to whom it happens,
It breaks their heart in two.

Week 647: Teens, by Molly Holden

Posted on by
Reply

For me this poem captures beautifully that feeling of alienation mingled with relief that arises at a certain age, typically around thirteen, when you realise that human beings are interesting and some may even be lovable but that you have very little in common with most of them and you might as well stop trying to belong and instead do your own thing, contentedly brooding, like the poet here, at the shadowy edge of things. And of course, she is by no means the first poet to find delight in the dissolution of the self into the natural world: think of Keats with his sparrow pecking in the gravel, or Hopkins with his inscapes.

Teens

That was always my place, preferably
at dusk, in a slight rain
– below the drenched allotment bank,
by the bridge not often shaken by a train.

The neat hedge ended there, the fields began,
sloping to shrouded hills,
and the lane grew pot-holed, led only
to flowery pastures and abandoned mills.

There I would stand in the mizzle, watching
thirty martins or so
hawking silently above the meadows
high on black lines of flight, eerily low

as the heads of the grasse, swerving
only at solid hedge
and me, a contentedly brooding phantom,
at the lane’s, at the night’s edge.

Molly Holden