Category Archives: poetry

Week 98: From ‘Little Gidding’, by T.S.Eliot

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I confess to having had problems with the poetry of T.S.Eliot. When that pretentious farrago ‘The Waste Land’ was first served up to me in my youth my reaction was ‘Well, if that’s the best modernism has to offer they can stuff it’, and while as a critical response this may lack a certain nuance it still more or less does for me. But ‘Four Quartets’ is another matter: here it is a case of ‘’Well, I may not warm to this in the way I do to, say, the poems of Thomas Hardy, but let’s face it, this is good.’

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.

Week 97: Vine, by Vernon Watkins

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This poem by the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins(1906-1967) finely images that core of patience that lies at the heart of the poetic process, and is perhaps, especially for the young poet, the hardest of its disciplines to learn.

Vine

Deep-rooted vine, delay your fruit
Beyond youth’s rashness. I have seen
Rich promise wither to the root
Before its time had been.

Drain all the darkness of the soil
And stand there shrivelled, crisp and dry,
Too lifeless in your parchment coil
To open one green eye.

Some watch the March winds animate
Those early bulbs in Winter’s bed.
Envy them not, but keep your state.
Let others think you dead.

Contain in secrecy that balm
Strengthening the sap before it move,
That the broad leaves from wells of calm
One day grow dark with love.

I know a tree as dry as yours.
The patient leaf is put forth late.
Its life is anchored in the hours
For which the heart must wait.

Vernon Watkins

Week 96: Hearing your words, and not a word among them, by Edna St Vincent Millay

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The work of the American poet Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950) is on the whole a bit too unabashedly romantic for my taste, but I do much admire this sonnet, which combines her usual sensuousness with a solidity not always present in her work. I would like to know more about the context of the poem – it’s clear that she is pretty cross with someone but whom, when and why I have never been able to establish – anyone know? Not that the whom, when and why really matter.

Hearing your Words

Hearing your words and not a word among them
Tuned to my liking, on a salty day
When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them
Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,
I thought how off Matinicus the tide
Came pounding in, came running through the Gut,
While from the Rock the warning whistle cried,
And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut;
There in the autumn when the men go forth,
With slapping skirts the island women stand
In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,
With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand:
The wind of their endurance, driving south,
Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.

Edna St Vincent Millay

Week 95: For A Dead Lady, by Edwin Arlington Robinson

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The American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) is probably best remembered today for that fine poem of old age, ‘Mr Flood’s Party’, but I like this one too, for all its datedness. Yes, the diction is dodgy in places: a line like ‘Whereof no language may requite’ creaks now and probably creaked when it was written. And yes, it may seem not quite the thing now to speak of women in that tone of courtly adulation that always carries a hint of patronage. But if you can accept the poem on its own terms, you may find it a moving enough indictment of ‘Time that is intolerant/Of the brave and innocent’.

For a Dead Lady

No more with overflowing light
Shall fill the eyes that now are faded,
Nor shall another’s fringe with night
Their woman-hidden world as they did.
No more shall quiver down the days
The flowing wonder of her ways,
Whereof no language may requite
The shifting and the many-shaded.

The grace, divine, definitive,
Clings only as a faint forestalling;
The laugh that love could not forgive
Is hushed, and answers to no calling;
The forehead and the little ears
Have gone where Saturn keeps the years;
The breast where roses could not live
Has done with rising and with falling.

The beauty, shattered by the laws
That have creation in their keeping,
No longer trembles at applause,
Or over children that are sleeping;
And we who delve in beauty’s lore
Know all that we have known before
Of what inexorable cause
Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Week 94: At Castle Boterel, by Thomas Hardy

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I once tried to make a list of my ten favourite Hardy poems, but ended up with nearer to a hundred and a great reluctance to discard any of them. But I think in any shortlist I made ‘Castle Boterel’ would have to figure high, with its honest solipsism, its vision of human love pitted against the vastness of geological time, and its achingly sad last stanza.

At Castle Boterel

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, —
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is — that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.

Thomas Hardy, March 1913

Week 93: From ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’ by Vachel Lindsay

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Vachel Lindsay’s ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’, a long poem chronicling Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 election campaign and ultimate defeat by the Republican candidate William McKinley, is a strange beast, part political rant, part lyrical evocation of youthful idealism, part elegy for lost love and lost dreams. The politics may be a bit dated now – most outside the US will remember Lindsay’s hero William Jennings Bryan, if at all, as an opponent of Darwinism in the Scopes trial – but the lyrical and elegiac parts seem as fresh as ever, and I give here two extracts that seem to me to represent those best.

From ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan Bryan’

The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl.
She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes.
With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear,
But she kept like a pattern without a shaken curl.
She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose.
Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose.
No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way.
But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.

……………

Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna’s McKinley,
His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?
Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time,
And the flames of that summer’s prairie rose.

Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform
Read from the party in a glorious hour?
Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman,
And sledge-hammer Altgeld who wrecked his power.

Where is Hanna, bulldog Hanna,
Low-browed Hanna, who said: ‘Stand pat’?
Gone to his place with old Pierpont Morgan.
Gone somewhere…with lean rat Platt.

Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,
Who hated Bryan, then aped his way?
Gone to join the shadows with mighty Cromwell
And tall King Saul, till the Judgement Day.

Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,
Whose name the few still say with tears?
Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,
Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.

Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan,
That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.

Vachel Lindsay

Week 91: Alone, by E.J.Scovell

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For me, this love poem by the English poet Edith Joy Scovell (1907-1999) more than makes up in resonance for what it lacks in length.

Alone

Nothing will fill the salt caves our youth wore:
Happiness later, nor a house with corn
Ripe to its walls and open door.
We filtered through to sky and flowed into
A pit full of stars; so we are each alone.
Even in this being alone I meet with you.

E.J.Scovell

Week 90: Written in a Copy of Swift’s Poems, for Wayne Burns, by James Wright

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Tributes from one poet to another can get a bit incestuous, but I really like this one by the American poet James Wright (1927-1980), which made me take a fresh look at one of the better things to come out of the eighteenth century. Just not sure about the penultimate line, which seems not quite in keeping with the general register of the poem.

If anyone can point me to the words of Brinsley MacNamara’s ‘lovely elegy’ I’d be grateful – haven’t managed to track that one down.

Written in a Copy of Swift’s Poems, for Wayne Burns

I promised once if I got hold of
This book I’d send it on to you.
These are the songs that Roethke told of,
The curious music loved by few.
I think of lanes in Laracor
Where Brinsley MacNamara wrote
His lovely elegy, before
The Yahoos got the Dean by rote.

Only, when Swift-men are all gone
Back to their chosen fields by train
And the drunk Chairman snores alone,
Swift is alive in secret, Wayne:
Singing for Stella’s happiest day,
Charming a charming man, John Gay,
And meeting, now their bones are lost,
Pope’s beautiful electric ghost.

Here are some songs he lived in, kept
Secret from almost everyone
And laid away, while Stella slept,
Before he slept and died, alone.
Gently, listen, the great shade passes,
Magnificent, who still can bear,
Beyond the range of horses’ asses,
Nobilities, light, light and air.

James Wright

Week 89: In Bertram’s Garden, by Donald Justice

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This sharp yet tender study of seduction by the American poet Donald Justice (1925-2004) seems to me a beautiful poem, though the consolation it offers Jane for her loss of innocence is anything but consoling. There are literary echoes to be appreciated here, notably of Ben Jonson, but it is the movement of the lines, especially in the last stanza, that I find so masterly and so haunting.

In Bertram’s Garden

Jane looks down at her organdy skirt
As if it somehow were the thing disgraced,
For being there, on the floor, in the dirt,
And she catches it up about her waist,
Smooths it out along one hip,
And pulls it over the crumpled slip.

On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,
Asleep is Bertram, that bronze boy,
Who, having wound her around a spool,
Sends her spinning like a toy
Out to the garden, all alone,
To sit and weep on a bench of stone.

Soon the purple dark must bruise
Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
And the little Cupid lose
Eyes and ears and chin and nose,
And Jane lie down with others soon,
Naked to the naked moon.

Donald Justice

Week 88: The Tinkerman’s Daughter, by Sigerson Clifford/Michael McConnel

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I first got to know this ballad through the singing of the wonderful Irish folk-singer Niamh Parsons. The main credit for its composition, it seems, has to go to the Irish poet Sigerson Clifford (1913-1985), but it was then adapted and shortened by Michael McConnel (this sort of thing tends to happen to ballads) and that is the version that Niamh sings (with some minor changes of her own); the version I give here is Niamh’s.

It’s not that long ago, it seems, that women could be bought and sold – compare the famous opening scene in ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’. At least the red-headed Ann was feisty enough to rebel.

Incidentally Niamh has recorded another stunning performance of a poem by Sigerson Clifford, ‘The Boys of Barr na Sráide’, which should not be missed.

The Tinkerman’s Daughter

The small birds were lining the bleak autumn branches
Preparing to fly to a far sunny shore
When the tinkers made camp at the bend on the river
Returning from the horse fair in Ballinsloe.

Now the harvest being over the farmer went walking
All along the Faele River that borders his land
And ’twas there he first saw her twixt firelight and water
The tinkerman’s daughter, the red-headed Ann.

Next morning he rose from a night without slumber
He went straight to the tinker and he made his case known
And at a pub in Listowell they struck out a bargain
To the tinker a pony, to the daughter a home.

Where the trees cast their shadows along the Faele River
The tinker and the farmer inspected the land
And a wild gallant pony was the price they agreed on
For the tinkerman’s daughter, the red-headed Ann.

Now the wedding soon over the tinkers departed
They were eager to travel on south down the road
But the crunch of the iron-shod wheels on the gravel
Was as bitter to her as the way she’d been sold.

But she tried hard to please him she did all his bidding
She slept in his bed and she worked on his land
But the walls of that cabin pressed tighter and tighter
Round the tinkerman’s daughter, the red-headed Ann.

Now as white as the hands of a priest or a hangman
The snow spread its blanket the next Christmas round
And the tinkerman’s daughter got out from the bedside
Turned her back to the land and her face to the town

And it’s said someone saw her at dusk that same evening
She was making her way down by Lyreacrompane
And that was the last that the settled folk saw her
The tinkerman’s daughter, the red-headed Ann.

Where the north Kerry hills cut the Faele at Listowell
At a farm on its banks lives a bitter old man
And he swears by the shotgun he keeps at his bedside
That he’ll kill any tinker that camps on his land

And yet, when he hears iron-shod wheels crunch on gravel
Or a horse in the shafts of a bright caravan
His day’s work’s tormented, his night’s sleep demented
By the tinkerman’s daughter, the red-headed Ann.