Category Archives: poetry

Week 128: The Coast: Norfolk, by Frances Cornford

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Frances Cornford (1886-1960) was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin now perhaps best remembered for her somewhat condescending poem ‘To A Fat Lady Seen from the Train’, which begins ‘O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,/Missing so much and so much?/O fat white woman whom nobody loves/Why do you walk through the fields in gloves’ and which aroused the ire of the redoubtable G.K.Chesterton who, himself inclined to corpulence, leapt to the stout lady’s defence with a poem that begins ‘Why do you rush through the field in trains,/Guessing so much and so much?/Why do you flash through the flowery meads,/Fat-head poet that nobody reads…’. This is all good fun, but a bit unfair to Frances who did write some fine lyrics including this favourite of mine, that seems to me a perfect evocation of the East Anglian landscape.

I suspect that the ‘finches on the telegraph’ were actually corn buntings, which love to sit on telegraph wires and were at that time classed with finches, but are now placed in a different family. But enough of the ornithological pedantry… 


The Coast: Norfolk

As on the highway’s quiet edge
He mows the grass beside the hedge,
The old man has for company
The distant, grey, salt-smelling sea,
A poppied field, a cow and calf,
The finches on the telegraph.

Across his faded back a hone,
He slowly, slowly scythes alone
In silence of the wind-soft air,
With ladies’ bedstraw everywhere,
With whitened corn, and tarry poles,
And far-off gulls like risen souls.

Frances Cornford

Week 127: From W.B. Yeats to his Friend Maud Gonne, by Jon Stallworthy

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I have tended to move in practical rather than literary circles and consequently have spent most of my life among people who regard poetry, if they think about it all, with intense suspicion: ‘Why can’t it say what it means?’. This has sometimes moved me to mild protest: ‘It does say what it means, it’s just that sometimes it means more than it says’. But really it does a poet no harm to be reminded from time to time that there is a world out there with concerns very different from his or her own, and I take wry comfort from the fact that if this poem by Jon Stallworthy is to be believed, I am in august company!

It is probably unnecessary to explain that W.B.Yeats nursed an unrequited passion for the political activist Maud Gonne, and made her the subject of some of his best poems, and that sometimes books used to be issued with their pages uncut, so that if you actually wanted to read them you had to get busy with a knife.

From W.B. Yeats to his Friend Maud Gonne

‘From W.B. Yeats to his friend Maud Gonne’.
The writing modest as the words upon
the title-page. Him I can understand;
picture him turning the pen in his hand
considering what to write: something not cold
nor yet embarrassingly overbold.
But in the gallery where my portraits are
I cannot see the heart that, set ajar
for anarchists and peasants and sick birds,
could not be crowbarred open by such words
as break the heart of time; that fountained out
in tears or laughter at a newsboy’s shout
– only to the poet remaining shut
as these clenched pages that she never cut.

Jon Stallworthy

Week 126: Elle avait pris ce pli, by Victor Hugo

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The French poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885) lost his beloved elder daughter Lėopoldine when she was only nineteen: she drowned along with her husband in a boating accident on the Seine. Hugo wrote many moving poems in her memory; this is one of them. The translation that follows is my own.

‘Elle avait pris ce pli…’

Elle avait pris ce pli dans son âge enfantin
De venir dans ma chambre un peu chaque matin;
Je l’attendais ainsi qu’un rayon qu’on espère;
Elle entrait, et disait: Bonjour, mon petit père;
Prenait ma plume, ouvrait mes livres, s’asseyait
Sur mon lit, dérangeait mes papiers, et riait,
Puis soudain s’en allait comme un oiseau qui passe.
Alors, je reprenais, la tête un peu moins lasse,
Mon oeuvre interrompue, et, tout en écrivant,
Parmi mes manuscrits je rencontrais souvent
Quelque arabesque folle et qu’elle avait tracée,
Et mainte page blanche entre ses mains froissée
Où, je ne sais comment, venaient mes plus doux vers.
Elle aimait Dieu, les fleurs, les astres, les prés verts,
Et c’était un esprit avant d’être une femme.
Son regard reflétait la clarté de son âme.
Elle me consultait sur tout à tous moments.
Oh! que de soirs d’hiver radieux et charmants
Passés à raisonner langue, histoire et grammaire,
Mes quatre enfants groupés sur mes genoux, leur mère
Tout près, quelques amis causant au coin du feu!
J’appelais cette vie être content de peu!
Et dire qu’elle est morte! Hélas! que Dieu m’assiste!
Je n’étais jamais gai quand je la sentais triste;
J’étais morne au milieu du bal le plus joyeux
Si j’avais, en partant, vu quelque ombre en ses yeux.

Victor Hugo

From her earliest years, this was her thing
To come into my room a while each morning.
I’d wait, as for a sunbeam to appear.
She’d march in, say ‘Good morning, little father’,
Sit down on my bed, take up my pen,
Open my books, muddle my papers, laughing,
Then like a bird of passage she’d be gone
And I, with clearer head, begin again
My interrupted work, often to find
Some zany arabesque she’d left behind
Among my manuscripts, a sketch she’d traced,
And then, blank pages that her hands had creased.
Somehow, my best lines fell between those folds.
She loved God, flowers, starry skies, green fields.
Before she was a woman, she was spirit
And from her clear eyes her bright soul shone out.
She quizzed me constantly, upon all things.
Ah, but the warm glow of those winter evenings
When we’d talk language, grammar, history,
Their mother near, four children at my knee,
A few friends by the hearth and much to say –
That was a life to which content came easy.
And now to think that she is dead! God help me,
For I, when she was sad, was never happy.
I took no joy in joyous balls and parties
If parting I’d seen shadow in her eyes.

Week 125: Elegy for Minor Poets, by Louis MacNeice

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It is probably not a good idea for poets to worry much about whether their poems are major or minor: far better to concentrate on just getting the damn things right and let posterity do the worrying. But I do like this rueful elegy by Louis MacNeice, which covers so many of the ways that things can go wrong for the many that are called as compared with the few that are chosen.

Elegy for Minor Poets

Who often found their way to pleasant meadows
Or maybe once to a peak, who saw the Promised Land,
Who took the correct three strides but tripped their hurdles,
Who had some prompter they barely could understand,
Who were too happy or sad, too soon or late,
I would praise these in company with the Great;

For if not in the same way, they fingered the same language
According to their lights. For them as for us
Chance was a coryphaeus who could be either
An angel or an ignis fatuus.
Let us keep our mind open, our fingers crossed;
Some who go dancing through dark bogs are lost.

Who were lost in many ways, through comfort, lack of knowledge,
Or between women’s breasts, who thought too little, too much,
Who were the world’s best talkers, in tone and rhythm
Superb, yet as writers lacked a sense of touch,
So either gave up or just went on and on–
Let us salute them now their chance is gone;

And give the benefit of the doubtful summer
To those who worshipped the sky but stayed indoors
Bound to a desk by conscience or by the spirit’s
Hayfever. From those office and study floors
Let the sun clamber on to the notebook, shine,
And fill in what they groped for between each line.

Who were too carefree or careful, who were too many
Though always few and alone, who went the pace
But ran in circles, who were lamed by fashion,
Who lived in the wrong time or the wrong place,
Who might have caught fire had only a spark occurred,
Who knew all the words but failed to achieve the Word–

Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,
Some of their names–not all–we learnt in school
But, life being short, we rarely read their poems,
Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,
While those opinions which rank them high are based
On a wish to be different or on lack of taste.

In spite of and because of which, we later
Suitors to their mistress (who, unlike them, stays young)
Do right to hang on the grave of each a trophy
Such as, if solvent, he would himself have hung
Above himself; these debtors preclude our scorn–
Did we not underwrite them when we were born?

Louis MacNeice

Week 124: Elegy of Fortinbras, by Zbigniew Herbert

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I much admire this original take on ‘Hamlet’ by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), in which he seems to come down firmly on the side of Fortinbras, Hamlet’s conqueror and the practical man of action, against the self-torturing introspective held up to us by Shakespeare as the hero. It is clear that for Herbert, a political activist who fought in the Polish resistance against the Nazis, the role of poet in no way excuses one from civic duty and civic action. Quite. And yet it is the unjust power of poetry that the words Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Hamlet continue to resonate with us rather more than the sewer projects and prison reforms that Herbert deploys to such beautifully bathetic effect in the last stanza. I am not sure that Herbert is as rueful about this –‘what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy’ – as, speaking in the character of Fortinbras, he makes out. For there is also in any poet a bit of Hamlet too…

The C.M. of the dedication is Herbert’s fellow Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), who also assisted in what seems to me (not that I know any Polish to judge) a remarkable piece of translation.

Elegy of Fortinbras

To C.M.

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums
drums I know nothing exquisite
those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by neck and shake it a bit

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

Zbigniew Herbert (tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

Week 123: No Answer, by Laurence Whistler

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Laurence Whistler (1912-2000) is best known as a glass engraver, but before that he was a poet of some accomplishment, as shown by this moving elegy for his first wife, the actress Jill Furse, who died in 1944, the same year in which his brother Rex was killed in Normandy. He wrote an account of his life with Jill in ‘The Initials in the Heart’, published in 1964. I find the closing lines of this poem particularly affecting.

No Answer

In the slow lapse of unrecorded afternoons
When nothing seems to change but history itself
Unfolding at the pace of clouds or even weeds
The window murmurs lightly to the vacant room
And seems as if it commented with mild surprise
On some arrival, timely or unique;
Slow by the rapid stream, perhaps, or quick in the slow skies.

Why does the window murmur – and to whom?
What notable event does it report
That’s far above the heads of furniture,
Nor heeded by the absent-minded room?

Is it first cuckoo-fall? – the double word
Dropping like seed into the wood, instant with spring?

Or is it rose-fall? – end of the first rose,
Spilled from the hand of Summer, pensively?

Perhaps first apple-fall? – scatter and thud,
And Autumn here that moment, cornucopia?

Or is it only the first snow-fall? – one,
One, and then one, slid furtive down, as if
Winter himself had thought the moment haunted?

Windows look out of rooms at poetry,
That pours back through them, lyrical in birds,
Epic in weather, narrative in streams.
But they look only out, half-conscious of a being
Shadowed behind them, borrowing their eyes.

O window, when you murmur, ‘Do but look!’
Don’t ask who listens now. Never enquire
Why soundlessness should grow into a habit,
Helpless and final as the dust.

Suppose

She may be resting yet in the great bed,
Tuned always to your accent, though her heart
Is listening miles away to mine. – Might she
Not lie so still? Never so long, so still?
Should there, long since, have come to you at least,
The flicking over of a page – at least
Her busy pencil, whispering word by word
The letter she would send – at very least
A sigh?

So would she sigh
In the dark ages of the afternoon,
When you would draw her to some poetry
(Fall of the word, the rose, the fruit, the fleeting crystal),
So would she sigh a war away – since tears,
If tears were let, would rain away the world:
Sigh in the great bed for its emptiness,
The waste of poetry, the waste of years.

Laurence Whistler

Week 122: If You Should Go To Caistor Town, by Charles Causley

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Time for another poem from the excellent Charles Causley, this time showing his almost unique gift for inhabiting the ballad/folksong form and making it his own while retaining all the qualities of the tradition.

If You Should Go To Caistor Town

If you should go to Caistor town,
Where my true love has gone,
Ask her why she went away
And left me here alone.

She said the Caistor sky was blue,
The wind was never cold,
The pavements were all made of pearl,
The young were never old.

Never a word she told me more
But when the year was fled
Upon a bed of brightest earth
She laid her gentle head.

When I went up to Caistor
My suit was made of black,
And all her words like summer birds
Upon the air came back.

O when I went to Caistor
With ice the sky was sown,
And all the streets were chill and grey
And they were made of stone.

Charles Causley

Week 121: ‘Alas! Poor Queen’ by Marion Angus

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It is difficult to know how far this lament for Mary, Queen of Scots by the Scottish poet Marion Angus (1865-1946) gives an accurate portrait of the unfortunate queen: one suspects that she was rather more than an innocent butterfly broken on the wheels of power, just as one suspects that Thomas Cromwell was rather less humane than the portrayal of him in the current TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ suggests. But since we can’t at this remove know for sure, we might as well take a fine poem, as well as some unusually intelligent TV, at face value and enjoy them.

Alas! Poor Queen

She was skilled in music and the dance
And the old arts of love
At the court of the poisoned rose
And the perfumed glove,
And gave her beautiful hand
To the pale Dauphin
A triple crown to win –
And she loved little dogs
And parrots
And red-legged partridges
And the golden fishes of the Duc de Guise
And a pigeon with a blue ruff
She had from Monsieur d’Elboeuf.

Master John Knox was no friend to her;
She spoke him soft and kind,
Her honeyed words were Satan’s lure
The unwary soul to bind.
‘Good sir, doth a lissome shape
And a comely face
Offend your God His Grace
Whose Wisdom maketh these
Golden fishes of the Duc de Guise?’

She rode through Liddesdale with a song:
‘Ye streams sae wondrous strang,
Oh, mak’ me a wrack as I come back
But spare me as I gang.’
While a hill-bird cried and cried
Like a spirit lost
By the grey storm-wind tost.

Consider the way she had to go,
Think of the hungry snare,
The net she herself had woven,
Aware or unaware,
Of the dancing feet grown still,
The blinded eyes –
Queens should be cold and wise,
And she loved little things,
Parrots
And red-legged partridges
And the golden fishes of the Duc de Guise
And the pigeon with the blue ruff
She had from Monsieur d’Elboeuf.

Marion Angus

Week 120: From ‘Dream Song 90’, by John Berryman

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I have never known quite what to make of John Berryman. He belongs to that confessional school of twentieth-century American poets of whom one sometimes feels that both their lives and their poems might have gone better had they been less interested in themselves and more interested in the world around them. Yet Berryman’s voice, in his persona as the Henry of ‘Dream Songs’, can be memorable and moving, especially, I find, in his elegies for various friends and fellow-poets, such as these lines for Randall Jarrell from ‘Dream Song 90’.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing
cannot restore one instant’s good to, rest:
he’s left us now.
The panic died, and in the panic’s dying
so did my old friend. I am headed west
also, also, somehow.

In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again.
I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat
and all will be as before
whenas we sought, among the beloved faces,
eminence and were dissatisfied with that
and needed more.

John Berryman

Week 119: After Trinity, by John Meade Falkner

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I suppose that in matters of religion I am best described as agnostic, though that is really too definite a label: an agnostic believes that some things are unknowable in principle and I have no idea whether those things are unknowable in principle or not: I only know that I don’t myself know them, and that it would be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise. This doesn’t stop me having some respect for religion in so far as it involves good people getting together to do good things, and in particular being grateful to the C. of E. for providing beautiful ancient buildings up and down the country which, as long as you avoid Sundays, are ideal for a spot of quiet reflection. And also for inspiring a lot of fine music and poetry. Like this piece by John Meade Falkner (1858-1932), perhaps best known as the author of the smuggler’s tale ‘Moonfleet’, but also a poet and onetime Librarian to Durham Cathedral. It is a poem which fuses the Church calendar with the English year in a celebration that may appeal even to those like me who have to look up when Trinity actually is (it seems to move about: this year it’s May 31st).

After Trinity

We have done with dogma and divinity,
Easter and Whitsun past,
The long, long Sundays after Trinity,
Are with us at last;
The passionless Sundays after Trinity,
Neither feast-day nor fast.

Christmas comes with plenty,
Lent spreads out its pall,
But these are five and twenty,
The longest Sundays of all;
The placid Sundays after Trinity,
Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.

Spring with its burst is over,
Summer has had its day,
The scented grasses and clover
Are cut, and dried into hay;
The singing-birds are silent,
And the swallows flown away.

Post pugnam pausa fiet;
Lord, we have made our choice;
In the stillness of autumn quiet,
We have heard the still, small voice.
We have sung Oh where shall Wisdom?
Thick paper, folio, Boyce.

Let it not all be sadness,
Not omnia vanitas,
Stir up a little gladness
To lighten the Tibi cras;
Send us that little summer,
That comes with Martinmas.

When still the cloudlet dapples
The windless cobalt blue,
And the scent of gathered apples
Fills all the store-rooms through,
The gossamer silvers the bramble,
The lawns are gemmed with dew.

An end of tombstone Latinity,
Stir up sober mirth,
Twenty-fifth after Trinity,
Kneel with the listening earth,
Behind the Advent trumpets
They are singing Emmanuel’s birth.

John Meade Falkner