Category Archives: poetry

Week 208: From ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’ by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, tr. John Montague

Posted on by
1

These are just the closing lines of a remarkable eighteenth-century Irish elegy, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, written by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill to lament the death of her husband Art, murdered in County Cork in 1773 at the hands of a British official with whom he had quarrelled. Much of the poem takes the form of a debate between wife and sister in which Art’s vitality and generosity of spirit are celebrated, producing a sense of loss that reminds me of Lorca’s great lament for the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: there is also the same sense of a sophisticated literary intellect harnessing the power of a great oral tradition.

From ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’

Until Art O’Leary comes again
This sorrow won’t lift
That lies across my heart
Like a tightly-locked trunk
With rust on the hasps
And the key thrown away.

So stop your weeping now
Women of the soft wet eyes
And drink to Art O’Leary
Before he enters the grave school
Not to study wisdom and song
But to carry earth and stone.

Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill  (tr. John Montague)

Week 207: The End of the Owls, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Posted on by
1

This poem by the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger (born 1929) may seem very much of its time with its Cold War imagery, but is surely just as relevant today: if the natural world appears to have become less threatened now by swift execution in the form of a nuclear Armageddon, it is only to face instead the slow death of a thousand cuts. I suppose you can call it progress.

I give the poem in its exceptionally fine English translation by Jerome Rothenberg.

The End Of The Owls

I speak for none of your kind,
I speak for the end of the owls.
I speak for the flounder and whale
in their unlighted house,
for the seven cornered sea,
for the glaciers
they will have calved too soon,
raven and dove, feathery witnesses,
for all those that dwell in the sky
and the woods, and the lichen in gravel,
for those without paths, for the colorless bog
and the desolate mountains.
Glaring on radar screens,
interpreted one final time
around the briefing table, fingered
to death by antennas, Florida’s swamps
and the Siberian ice, beast
and bush and basalt strangled
by early bird, ringed
by the latest maneuvers, helpless
under the hovering fireballs,
in the ticking of crises.
We’re as good as forgotten.
Don’t fuss with the orphans,
just empty your mind
of its longing for nest eggs,
glory or psalms that won’t rust.
I speak for none of you now,
all you plotters of perfect crimes,
not for me, not for anyone.
I speak for those who can’t speak,
for the deaf and dumb witnesses
for otters and seals,
for the ancient owls of the earth.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger (translated By Jerome Rothenberg)

Week 206: Hurt Hawks(ii) by Robinson Jeffers

Posted on by
Reply

Apologies for lateness this week; just got back from holiday. Too tired after long drive to muster up anything approaching a perspicacious preamble, but am trusting that this fine piece by the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) will speak for itself anyway.

Hurt Hawks (ii)

I’d sooner, except for the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left him but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under the talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Robinson Jeffers

Week 205: An Ancient To Ancients, by Thomas Hardy

Posted on by
Reply

At first sight one is tempted by its sprightly tone and dancing measure to take this as one of Hardy’s lighter poems, like the morbidly cheerful ‘Voices From Things Growing In A Churchyard’. Yet really it has such a blend of pathos, nostalgia and defiance that it can well stand as a valediction not just to the poet’s own life but to the life of a whole age. And I wonder if this was the last time when our society had a sufficient cultural unity to make such a poem possible – it is hard to imagine an equivalent leave-taking being written now.

An Ancient to Ancients 

Where once we danced, where once we sang,
Gentlemen,
The floors are sunken, cobwebs hang,
And cracks creep; worms have fed upon
The doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then
Than now, with harps and tabrets gone,
Gentlemen!

Where once we rowed, where once we sailed,
Gentlemen,
And damsels took the tiller, veiled
Against too strong a stare (God wot
Their fancy, then or anywhen!)
Upon that shore we are clean forgot,
Gentlemen!

We have lost somewhat of that, afar and near,
Gentlemen,
The thinning of our ranks each year
Affords a hint we are nigh undone,
That shall not be ever again
The marked of many, loved of one,
Gentlemen.

In dance the polka hit our wish,
Gentlemen,
The paced quadrille, the spry schottische,
‘Sir Roger’–And in opera spheres
The ‘Girl’ (the famed ‘Bohemian’),
And ‘Trovatore’ held the ears,
Gentlemen.

This season’s paintings do not please,
Gentlemen
Like Etty, Mulready, Maclise;
Throbbing romance had waned and wanned;
No wizard wields the witching pen
Of Bulwer, Scott, Dumas, and Sand,
Gentlemen.

The bower we shrined to Tennyson,
Gentlemen,
Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon
Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,
The spider is sole denizen;
Even she who voiced those rhymes is dust,
Gentlemen!

We who met sunrise sanguine-souled,
Gentlemen,
Are wearing weary. We are old;
These younger press; we feel our rout
Is imminent to Aides’ den,–
That evening shades are stretching out,
Gentlemen!

And yet, though ours be failing frames,
Gentlemen,
So were some others’ history names,
Who trod their track light-limbered and fast
As these youth, and not alien
From enterprise, to their long last,
Gentlemen.

Sophocles, Plato, Socrates,
Gentlemen,
Pythagoras, Thucydides,
Herodotus, and Homer, –yea,
Clement, Augustin, Origen,
Burnt brightlier towards their setting-day,
Gentlemen.

And ye, red-lipped and smooth-browed; list,
Gentlemen;
Much is there waits you we have missed;
Much lore we leave you worth the knowing,
Much, much has lain outside our ken;
Nay, rush not: time serves: we are going,
Gentlemen. 

Thomas Hardy

Week 204: El Aghir, by Norman Cameron

Posted on by
Reply

I think that what captivates me about this deceptively relaxed, almost throwaway poem with its casual half-rhymes is the intense physicality of its vision and its celebration of water; I know of few poems where that taken for granted substance has such a living presence.

El Aghir

Sprawled on the bags and crates in the rear of the truck,
I was gummy-mouthed from the sun and the dust of the track;
And the two Arab soldiers I’d taken on as hitch-hikers
At a torrid petrol-dump, had been there on their hunkers
Since early morning. I said, in a kind of French
‘On m’a dit, qu’il y a une belle source d’eau fraiche.
Plus loin, a El Aghir.’ It was eighty more kilometres.

Until round a corner we heard a splashing of waters,
And there, in a green, dark street, was a fountain with two facets,
Discharging both ways, from full-throated faucets,
Into basins, thence into troughs and thence into brooks.
Our Negro corporal driver slammed his brakes,
And we yelped and leapt from the truck and went at the double
To fill our bidons and bottles and drink and dabble.
Then, swollen with water, we went to an inn for wine.
The Arabs came, too, though their faith might have stood between.
‘After all,’ they said, ‘it’s a boisson,’ without contrition.

Green, green is El Aghir. It has a railway station,
And the wealth of its soil has borne many another fruit,
A mairie, a school and an elegant Salle de Fetes.
Such blessings, as I remarked, in effect, to the waiter,
Are added unto them that have plenty of water.

Norman Cameron (1905-1953)

Week 203: Carmen 8, by Catullus

Posted on by
4

This is one of the best-known poems of the Latin poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – 34 B.C.), written after the final break-up of his relationship with Lesbia, the name that he gave to his mistress, who is generally identified with Clodia Metelli, the wife of a Roman proconsul. Clodia appears to have been somewhat indiscriminate with her favours, and the relationship had been a stormy one. In this poem Catullus struggles to free himself of her spell, admonishing himself in a series of wild mood-swings. 

Such translations of the poem I have seen seem compelled, in deference to some notion of classical diction, to be rather prim and passionless. But this is not a prim and passionless poem: it is alive with the anguish of rejection and wavering resolve, it has, despite all the centuries that separate us, that raw immediacy of a speaking voice that one finds in Wyatt and Donne. Translation is a tricky business and one’s first duty must always be to the sense, but sometimes the more literal the less faithful; in my own translation that follows I have tried to find a balance between letter and spirit.

Carmen 8

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.
Fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,
cum ventitabas quo puella ducebat
amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.
Ibi illa multa cum iocosa fiebant,
quae tu volebas nec puella nolebat,
fulsere vere candidi tibi soles.
Nunc iam illa non vult: tu quoque impotens noli,
nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser vive,
sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.
Vale puella, iam Catullus obdurat,
nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam.
At tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla.
Scelesta, vae te, quae tibi manet vita?
Quis nunc te adibit? cui videberis bella?
Quem nunc amabis? Cuius esse diceris?
Quem basiabis? Cui labella mordebis?
At tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.

Catullus

Catullus, you poor fool, stop faffing about
And face the facts: she’s gone, the one you loved
More than any girl will ever be loved.
How bright the sun shone for you once, when she
Would lead and you would follow her whenever
Even to that place of many pleasures
That you desired, and she did not deny.
Indeed, the sun shone brightly for you then
And now, she does not want you. So, you too,
Left with no other power, learn not to want:
Don’t follow one who runs away, don’t live
A lovesick fool: man up, man, and endure.
Goodbye then, girl – Catullus is enduring –
He will not miss you, will not ask for you
Since you are loth. Let it be your turn, bitch,
To grieve when none desire you. For who now
Will come to you and call you beautiful?
Whom you will you love? Whose will they say you are?
Whom will you kiss? What lips now will you nibble?
Only, Catullus, stay strong and endure.

Week 202: The Death of Socrates, by Plato

Posted on by
Reply

I think it is possible to respond to philosophy in general and Plato in particular with that usefully indolent modernism ‘Whatever!’, but still to be moved by this account of the death of Plato’s mentor, which has a particularity and humanity that mark it out from the somewhat tedious discussions about the afterlife and immortality of the soul that form the bulk of the accompanying dialogue. 

And it is hard not to wonder about the Shakespearean echo here. Though Shakespeare had, according to Ben Jonson, ‘small Latin and less Greek’, there were certainly Latin translations available to him, from which he might have got enough to inspire the following lines from the account of the death of Falstaff in ‘Henry V’.

‘So a’ bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and they were as cold as any stone, and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone.’

The Death of Socrates

Socrates alone retained his calmness: ‘What is this strange outcry?’ he said. ‘I sent away the women mainly in order that they might not misbehave in this way, for I have been told that a man should die in peace. Be quiet then, and have patience’.

When we heard his words we were ashamed, and refrained our tears; and he walked about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he lay on his back, according to the directions, and the man who gave him the poison now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a while he pressed his foot hard, and asked him if he could feel; and he said, No; and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and said: When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end.

He was beginning to feel cold about the groin, when he uncovered his face, for he had covered himself up, and said – they were his last words – ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?’

‘The debt shall be paid’, said Crito. ‘Is there anything else?’. There was no answer to this question.

From Plato’s ‘Phaedo’, translated by Benjamin Jowett

Week 201: The Homecoming, by Anna Wickham

Posted on by
Reply

Anna Wickham (the pen-name of Edith Alice Mary Harper, 1883–1947) wrote this sad poem after her husband was killed in an accident in 1929. The marriage had been a troubled one: he was a solicitor who would have preferred his wife to be less bohemian and was hostile to her poetry-writing, while she came to despise his middle-class respectability, which explains why her grief in the poem is compounded by more than the usual measure of regret for what might have been, should have been and had not been.

The Homecoming

I waited ten years in the husk
That once had been our home,
Watching from dawn to dusk
To see if he would come.

And there he was beside me
Always at board and bed;
I looked – and woe betide me
He I had loved was dead.

He fell at night on the hillside,
They brought him home to his place,
I had not the solace of sorrow
Till I had looked at his face.

Then I clasped the broken body
To see if it breathed or moved,
For there, in the smile of his dying,
Was the gallant man I had loved.

O wives come lend me your weeping,
I have not enough of tears,
For he is dead who was sleeping
These ten accursed years.

Anna Wickham

Week 200: Ardglass Town, by Richard Rowley

Posted on by
1

The anonymity of great cities naturally inspires poems of exile, and London has produced its fair share of them – one thinks of Housman’s desolate lines ‘Here I lie down in London/And turn to rest alone’, and Patrick Kavanagh, exiled in Ealing Broadway, naming the pieces of a harness for comfort in ‘Kerr’s Ass’. Here is another of them, a simple but effective lament by the Irish poet Richard Rowley (1877-1947); Richard Rowley was actually a penname of Richard Valentine Williams.

A loaning is a lane, or in particular an open space for passage between fields.

Ardglass Town

The sun is hid in heaven,
The fog floats thick and brown,
I walk the streets of London,
And think of Ardglass town.

About the point of Fennick,
The snowy breakers roll,
And green they shine in patterned squares,
The fields above Ardtole.

Oh, there by many a loaning,
Past farms that I could name
Thro’ Sheeplands to Gun Island,
The whins are all aflame.

And my heart bleeds within me
To think of times I had,
Walking with my sweetheart
The green road to Ringfad.

Richard Rowley

Week 199: To An Athlete Dying Young, by A.E.Housman

Posted on by
Reply

The Olympic Games are with us again, and as a one time runner myself of rather modest accomplishment – as many a poet must come sadly to accept, it is quite possible to be passionately devoted to a pursuit while having no great talent for it – I take as much pleasure as anyone in watching the world’s young strut their hour upon the global stage, bringing to mind those lines of Marlowe’s: ‘Is it not passing brave to be a king/And ride in triumph through Persepolis’ (or, as the case may be, Rio de Janeiro). And yet, how brief that hour really is, and how quickly our heroes and heroines must come to terms with physical decline and the anonymity of oblivion. For which of those golden lads and lasses, I wonder, will be remembered in a hundred years’ time, or even fifty? The mighty Bolt, maybe, in the way that some fabled racehorse is remembered. But all those others, now for a short while instantly recognisable by forename alone, Jess and Mo, Laura and Jason, Max and Adam, Alistair and Johnny? Almost certainly not. Well, as usual A.E.Housman has the words to match a mood tinged with rue.

To An Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

A.E.Housman