Category Archives: poetry

Week 248: Vergissmeinnicht, by Keith Douglas

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I think that of all the poems of the Second World War this one comes closest to the spirit of Wilfred Owen in expressing ‘war, and the pity of war’. Of course, in many ways Douglas is nothing like Owen. There is none of the exalted, quasi-religious diction of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, none of the dreamlike imagery of ‘Strange Meeting’. Just a warrior’s grim acceptance of the necessity of combat and the facts of combat, yet at the end, as in ‘Strange Meeting’, that same redeeming recognition of the enemy’s humanity, captured in the perfectly balanced, metaphysical neatness of the last stanza.

Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone,
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked by at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Keith Douglas

Week 247: Thalassa, by Louis MacNeice

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This may seem an unusually upbeat poem for MacNeice – at times you feel all it needs is a mention of the happy isles and the great Achilles to segue into Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ – but of course there is a good deal of tension here between the apparent negativity of the remembered past and the positivity of aspiration for the future. Did MacNeice see himself as one of Auden’s ‘ruined boys’, forced to seek redemption? But I am drawn to its valiant spirit, even if that spirit is undercut by a slight desperation.

Thalassa

Run out the boat, my broken comrades;
Let the old seaweed crack, the surge
Burgeon oblivious of the last
Embarkation of feckless men,
Let every adverse force converge –
Here we must needs embark again.

Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades;
Let each horizon tilt and lurch –
You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church –
But let your poison be your cure.

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose records shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

Louis MacNeice

Week 246: Sally In Our Alley, by Henry Carey

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Henry Carey (1687-1743) was a prolific balladeer, playwright and satirist credited, among other things, with giving us the expression namby pamby, which he coined as a nickname for unfortunate fellow writer Ambrose Phillips. 

Robert Graves once cited ‘Sally In Our Alley’ to me as an example of that very rare thing in our language, a poem of pure happiness. Well, yes, though it could be argued that for all the jaunty defiance of its rhythms the poem has some dark social undertones, and the truth is that I had always worried about the young apprentice and his Sally. What, after all, was the most likely prognosis for their love? Poverty, toil, infant mortality, disease, premature ageing, the workhouse… I suspect that the poem’s enduring appeal has had much to do with how well it has accorded with the slightly desperate cheerfulness of the working classes still very much in evidence in my childhood – that philosophy of making the best of things and having a lot to be thankful for, sitting uneasily alongside dreams of a better life, and above all that heroic faith in the power of human love to redeem the misery of circumstance. 

Sally In Our Alley

Of all the girls that are so smart
There’s none like pretty Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.
There is no lady in the land
Is half so sweet as Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.

Her father he makes cabbage-nets,
And through the streets does cry ‘em;
Her mother she sells laces long
To such as please to buy ‘em:
But sure such folks could ne’er beget
So sweet a girl as Sally!
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in my alley.

When she is by, I leave my work,
I love her so sincerely;
My master comes like any Turk,
And bangs me most severely:
But let him bang his bellyful,
I’ll bear it all for Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.

Of all the days that’s in the week
I dearly love but one day–
And that’s the day that comes betwixt
A Saturday and Monday;
For then I’m drest all in my best
To walk abroad with Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.

My master carries me to church,
And often am I blamed
Because I leave him in the lurch
As soon as text is namèd;
I leave the church in sermon-time
And slink away to Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.

My master and the neighbours all
Make game of me and Sally,
And, but for her, I’d better be
A slave and row a galley;
But when my seven long years are out,
O, then I’ll marry Sally;
O, then we’ll wed, and then we’ll bed–
But not in our alley! 

Henry Carey

Week 245: The Shy Man, by Theodore Roethke

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I have never quite made my mind up about the work of the American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). I find the musicality of his verse captivating, but when it comes to tone and substance somehow I don’t quite ‘get’ him: the poems come across to me as a bit fey, as not quite earthed. But I do like the way his lines move. See what you think.  

The Shy Man

The full moon was shining upon the broad sea;
I sang to the one star that looked down at me;
I sang to the white house that grazed on the quay, –
As I walked by the high sea-wall.
But my lips they,
My lips they,
Said never a word,
As I moped by the high sea-wall.

The curlew’s slow night song came on the water.
That tremble of sweet notes set my heart astir,
As I walked beside her, the O’Connell’s daughter,
I knew that I did love her.
But my lips they,
My lips they
Said never a word,
As we walked by the high sea-wall.

The full moon has fallen, the night wind is down
And I lie here thinking in bleak Bofin town,
I lie here and thinking, ‘I am not alone’
For here close beside me is O’Connell’s daughter,
And my lips they, my lips they,
Say many a word,
As we embrace by the high sea-wall.
O! my lips they, my lips they
Say many a word,
As we kiss by the high sea-wall.

Theodore Roethke

 

Week 244: You Hated Spain, by Ted Hughes

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1998 saw the publication of Ted Hughes’s ‘Birthday Letters’, a verse-chronicle of the poet’s troubled marriage to fellow-poet Sylvia Plath. I read it when it first came out, which is a touch hypocritical of me since I have reservations about how far famous poets should go in feeding the biographical industry that tends to spring up around them. Of course it can be argued that an understanding of the life is necessary to a full understanding of the work, but I don’t know – is our appreciation of the ‘Iliad’, for example, really much impaired by our knowing nothing whatsoever about Mr Homer’s personal life, let alone Mrs Homer’s? Still, when these things are on offer it is hard to look away, and I have to admire Hughes’s striving for what must often have been a painful veracity. 

Inevitably with a collection like this the quality of the poems is a bit uneven, but there are plenty marked by Hughes’s characteristic raw energy and startling powers of observation. I pondered which to feature. ‘Daffodils’? ‘Flounders’? ‘Red’? ‘Robbing Myself’? (there really should be more poems that give a starring role to potatoes). But finally I went for this piece with its darkly sensuous imagery and, at the end, its wistful tenderness.

You Hated Spain

Spain frightened you. Spain
Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.
You did not know the language, your soul was empty
Of the signs, and the welding light
Made your blood shrivel. Bosch
Held out a spidery hand and you took it
Timidly, a bobby-sox American.
You saw right down to the Goya funeral grin
And recognized it, and recoiled
As your poems winced into chill, as your panic
Clutched back towards college America.
So we sat as tourists at the bullfight
Watching bewildered bulls awkwardly butchered,
Seeing the grey-faced matador, at the barrier
Just below us, straightening his bent sword
And vomiting with fear. And the horn
That hid itself inside the blowfly belly
Of the toppled picador punctured
What was waiting for you. Spain
Was the land of your dreams: the dust-red cadaver
You dared not wake with, the puckering amputations
No literature course had glamorized.
The juju land behind your African lips.
Spain was what you tried to wake up from
And could not. I see you, in moonlight,
Walking the empty wharf at Alicante
Like a soul waiting for the ferry,
A new soul, still not understanding,
Thinking it is still your honeymoon
In the happy world, with your whole life waiting,
Happy, and all your poems still to be found.

Ted Hughes

Week 243: Mein Bruder war ein Flieger, by Bertolt Brecht

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One of Bertolt Brecht’s most famous antiwar poems, an ironic celebration of Germany’s role in supporting the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, in particular of the pilots forming its Condor Legion, who were involved among other actions in the bombing of Guernica. You don’t go to Brecht for subtlety, but he sure knew how to make a point. The translation that follows is my own.

Mein Bruder war ein Flieger

Mein Bruder war ein Flieger
Eines Tages bekam er eine Kart
Er hat seine Kiste eingepackt
Und südwärts ging die Fahrt.

Mein Bruder ist ein Eroberer
Unserm Volke fehlt’s an Raum
Und Grund und Boden zu kriegen, ist
Bei uns alter Traum.

Der Raum, den mein Bruder eroberte
Liegt im Guadarramamassiv
Er ist lang einen Meter achtzig
Und einen Meter fünfzig tief.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

My brother was a pilot
His papers came one day
He got his kit together
And took a southward way

My brother is a conqueror
Our people need more space
And winning territory by war’s
An old dream of our race

The space in the Spanish mountains
My brother got to keep
Measures just six feet in length
And is five foot deep.

Week 242: From ‘The Prelude’, by William Wordsworth

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Wordsworth was, as far as I recall, the first of my poetic influences: I read ‘The Prelude’ in my early teens and admired it greatly, the more so because it chimed so well with the kind of wandering, reflective, close to nature childhood that it was still just about possible to have back then, and which I had myself enjoyed, though in a rather less rugged environment than Wordsworth’s Lake District. Later I came to be not exactly disenchanted with Wordsworth, but to feel that he was no longer quite what I wanted or needed: what he offered, it seemed to me, was a leisurely ramble in the hills that offered you great views at some points but also involved a lot of slightly tedious plodding in between, and I was beginning to feel that a poem should be more like a fell run, taut and unrelenting all the way to the top. But here, for the sake of that early admiration, is my favourite passage from ‘The Prelude’, that I think shows the poet at his vivid, immediate best, and if I now wish that overall his gait were just a little less leisurely, I remain grateful for those visionary viewpoints that from time to time it takes us to.

From ‘The Prelude’

And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows blazed through twilight gloom,
I heeded not their summons: happy time
It was indeed for all of us – for me
It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud
The village clock tolled six, – I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home. All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures, – the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me – even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

William Wordsworth

Week 241: Perfection isn’t like a perfect story, by P.J.Kavanagh

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This is one of several poems that P.J.Kavanagh (1931-2015) wrote in memory of his first wife Sally, who died tragically young two years into their marriage. He commemorates her in his partial autobiography ‘The Perfect Stranger’, a book which like this poem manages to be both grounded and luminous.

Perfection isn’t like a perfect story

I think often of the time I was perfectly happy,
And sat by the harbour reading a borrowed Cavafy.
You were there of course and the night before we
Played bar billiards, green under lights, in the café,
Postponing our first shared bedtime and every ball
That didn’t come back made us look at each other and down.
I collected the key and we crossed the late-night hall
And seeing the room you cried, it was so small.

We were too close. We bore each other down.
I changed the room and we found that you were ill.
Nothing was perfect, or as it should have been.
I lay by your side and watched the green of dawn
Climb over our bodies and bring out of darkness the one
Perfect face that made nothing else matter at all.

P.J.Kavanagh

Week 240: Walking Away, by C. Day-Lewis

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I tend to think of Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) as the archetypal career poet: his work accomplished, urbane, but a little manufactured, a little safe, not often charged with the excitement that real poems bring, that sense that something not entirely under the poet’s control has taken him or her by the scruff of the neck and said ‘Oi! You! Listen up!’. But I do very much like this wise, empathic piece that must surely resonate with anyone who has ever been a parent, and if it should prove in the end that a poet’s fate is to be remembered for just one poem, well, that most of us should be so lucky.

Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still.  Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

C. Day-Lewis

Week 239: On My First Son, by Ben Jonson

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Ben Jonson’s first son died of the plague in 1603, aged seven. This for me is one of the great English poems, an elegy for a lost child that resonates as powerfully now as it must have done four centuries ago. Where does that power come from? One is tempted to say that this is one time, perhaps the only time, when clever Ben Jonson, classically educated Renaissance man, contemporary and not entirely uncritical admirer of Shakespeare, lays down all defences of wit and irony and lets the words come directly from the heart. But this would not be wholly true: there is wit and conceit enough in the poem: in the concept of a child being a debt to fate that must be repaid, in the paradox that really the child’s state is to be envied, in the idea, expressed in the somewhat tortured syntax of the last two lines, of never again risking too great an attachment to an object of love. Yet here, as is not always the case with Jonson and other Elizabethan poets, the wit and conceits seem perfectly harnessed in the service of a heartfelt emotion.

Note: Jonson’s son was also called Benjamin, which in Hebrew means ‘fortunate’ or ‘dexterous’, a meaning echoed in the phrase ‘child of my right hand’.

On My First Son

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, ‘Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

Ben Jonson