Category Archives: poetry

Week 634: The Innumerable Christ, by Hugh MacDiarmid

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This week, a poem for Christmas, if not exactly a Christmassy poem. It turns on the idea of other worlds throughout space and time needing to be redeemed from sin by the coming of their own Christ figure. I must admit that this is not a part of Christian doctrine I have ever understood: it seems to me that people need to take responsibility for their own sins and I don’t see how someone else suffering a painful death ostensibly on their behalf helps anyone. Be that as it may, I think MacDiarmid makes an eerily effective poem of the idea, conjuring up vast cosmic distances and alien worlds that are nonetheless united by a common experience of suffering and sacrifice.

MacDiarmid has often been criticised for inventing his own version of Scots dialect that no one ever spoke. But of course no one ever spoke like much of Shakespeare either. ‘What did you say, dear?’ ‘I said, the multitudinous seas incarnadine’. ‘Oh, right. Why not take a break, it’s nearly teatime anyway’.

kens – knows
whatna – what kind of
heids – heads
licht – light
’yont – beyond
oor – our
een – eyes
unco – strange, foreign
bairnies – children
lift – sky
doon – dow
cauld – cold
mune – moon
lang syne – long since
maun – must

The Innumerable Christ

Other stars may have their Bethlehem and the Calvary too. (Professor JY Simpson).

‘Wha kens on whatna Bethlehems
Earth twinkles like a star the nicht,
An’ whatna shepherds lift their heids
In its unearthly licht?

‘Yont a’ the stars oor een can see
An’ farther than their lichts can fly,
I’ mony an unco warl’ the nicht
The fatefu’ bairnies cry.

I’ mony an unco warl’ the nicht
The lift gaes black as pitch at noon,
An’ sideways on their chests the heids
O’ endless Christs roll doon.

An’ when the earth’s as cauld’s the mune
An’ a’ its folk are lang syne deid,
On coontless stars the Babe maun cry
An’ the Crucified maun bleed.’

Hugh MacDiarmid

Week 633: Love’s Advocate, by Phoebe Hesketh

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Another poem about grief by the fine and rather overlooked poet Phoebe Hesketh (1909-2005, see also week 60), that captures the way the mind, the ‘love’s advocate’ of the title, tries with small, inconsequential remembered things to fill the great absence in the heart.

Love’s Advocate

I remember sitting together in parks
leaning over bridges
counting trout and swans
holding hands under arches
kissing away suns
and moons into darkness.

I remember platform good-byes
last-minute trains
slamming us apart
and my non-self walking back alone.
I remember smaller things:
a pebble in my shoe
and you throwing a match-box on the Serpentine.

I stood still hearing the years
flow over and over
as over a stone
in a river-bed
polishing, cleaning, wearing away.
But I still remember the last day.

What I cannot remember is how I felt –
mind, love’s advocate,
must remind heart
of the end, the abyss.

The bottom of the world remains;
each day climbs to a new start.

Phoebe Hesketh

Week 632: Elegy for Jane – My student, thrown by a horse, by Theodore Roethke

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Here we see the subject of last week’s elegy writing an elegy of his own for one of his students who died after a fall from a horse, Theodore Roethke having been a notable teacher of the young. It is a poem that walks the edge both of feeling and expression, yet in the end triumphs through an obvious sincerity coupled with a humility, a recognition that the poet’s grief is a marginal one, lacking the entitlement of someone with familial or romantic ties to the young woman. The language sometimes seems on the point of veering off into the merely poetic – ‘And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose’ is a bit too Dylan Thomas for my taste – and yet this slightly over-the-top imagery is sufficiently reined in and redeemed by the touching simplicity of the closing stanzas.

Pickerel: a young pike. It might be thought that being described as having a smile like a pike, even a young one, is not entirely complimentary, especially remembering Ted Hughes’s lines (see week 553): ‘Finally one/With a sag belly and the grin it was born with’. But I suspect that Roethke is thinking here not of the pike’s apparent facial expression but of the shy, elusive nature of the young woman’s smile, like the shadowy flicker of a fish moving underwater.

Elegy for Jane – My student, thrown by a horse

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow,
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

Theodore Roethke

Week 631: Dream Song 18: A Strut for Roethke, by John Berryman

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It is hard to think of a poet more different from last week’s Richard Wilbur than his contemporary John Berryman (see also weeks 120 and 342): Wilbur formal, fastidious, controlled sometimes to the point of decorousness, Berryman wild, constantly verging on the uncontrolled, a manic driver on the cliff roads of language. Yet apparently they got on well enough together, and I can only say that at their best both of them work for me: taken in isolation Berryman’s fractured syntax, his stylistic affectations can be irritating and yet somehow, against all the odds, the words cohere into an effective whole.

This is another of Berryman’s elegies for poet friends, who seem to have predeceased him in considerable numbers, such that in another poem he wonders why he alone ‘still breasts the wronging tide’. This one is for Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), a fine poet who drew his inspiration mainly, but not exclusively, from the natural world, as reflected in the last two lines.

Dream Song 18: A Strut for Roethke

Westward, hit a low note, for a roarer lost
across the Sound but north from Bremerton,
hit a way down note.
And never cadenza again of flowers, or cost.
Him who could really do that cleared his throat
& staggered on.

The bluebells, pool-shallows, saluted his over-needs,
While the clouds growled, heh-he, & snapped, & crashed.

No stunt he’ll ever unflinch once more will fail
(O lucky fellow, eh Bones?) – drifted off upstairs,
downstairs, somewheres.
No more daily, trying to hit the head on the nail:
thirstless: without a think in his head:
back from wherever, with it said.

Hit a high long note, for a lover found
needing a lower into friendlier ground
to bug among worms no more
around um jungles where ah blurt ‘What for?’
Weeds, too, he favoured as most men     don’t favour men.
The Garden Master’s gone.

John Berryman

Week 630: For the Student Strikers, by Richard Wilbur

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This poem by the American poet Richard Wilbur (see also weeks 29, 144, 264, 355 and 417) was written in 1969, at the height of the protests by American students against the US government’s military involvement in Vietnam. It was composed at the request of a radical student newspaper, who felt that Wilbur was sympathetic to their cause, as indeed he was, but its humane and reasonable tone was not quite what they were expecting, and at first it found its way to their wastepaper-basket. But then, and some credit to them, they had second thoughts and retrieved it.

There may be different causes now, but in an age where there is an increasing tendency to shut down opposing points of view, or simply shut the ears to them, the poem’s message seems as valid as ever, even if the probability of anyone taking notice of it may be even smaller than ever.

For The Student Strikers

Go talk with those who are rumoured to be unlike you,
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind towards force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening
Changes of heart.

They are your houses, the people are not unlike you,
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman’s son.

Richard Wilbur

Week 629: Harp Song of the Dane Women, by Rudyard Kipling

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This poem, showing Kipling’s verse at its most skilful and eloquent, was a favourite of the Argentinan writer Jorge Luis Borges. Of course, when you think about it the answer to the question the poem poses is obvious and rather practical. I suspect it would be quite wrong to think of the Vikings as having any mystical or sentimental attachment to the sea, or to picture them as mooning about declaiming some Old Norse equivalent of Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’. They had a proper fear of the sea-goddess Rán and her nets that she used to capture and drown mortals who dared to trespass on her kingdom. There is a poignant elegy, the Sonatorrek, attributed to the great 10th century skald Egill Skallagrimsson, in which he laments the death of his son Böðvar, who drowned at sea during a storm:

Mjök hefr Rán rykst um mik;
emk ofsnauðr at ástvinum.
Sleit marr bönd mínnar áttar,
snaran þátt af sjalfum mér.
 
Mightily Ran has wrought on me
who reft me of friend, of scion.
Bare now is his place at board
Since the sea took my son.                    (my translation)

No, it was simply that the sea offered the speediest route to rich plunder with a bit of rape and monk-bashing on the side, and that the voyaging, though hard and dangerous work, at least offered a break from trying to scratch a living from the Scandinavian soil. Be that as it may, the poem is certainly capable of evoking a shiver. That ‘ten-times-fingering weed’ gets me every time.

Harp Song of the Dane Women

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken–

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

Rudyard Kipling

Week 628: No Second Troy, by W.B.Yeats

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This poem, which appeared in the 1910 collection ‘The Green Helmet’, was written in memory of Maud Gonne, for whom Yeats had a lifelong passion, after she had finally rejected the poet’s fourth proposal of marriage in favour of another man, John MacBride. It may be viewed as a companion piece to ‘The Folly Of Being Comforted’ (see week 49). Here, though, there is more of a bitterness, an acknowledgment of the destructive power that beauty can wield, encapsulated in the last line’s allusion to Helen of Troy.

Like many of Yeats’s poems, it seems to me a triumph of style over substance. I think it is possible to look askance at the way Yeats constantly bigs up his friends, and to question his contempt for the ‘little streets’ of democracy, but at the same time fully grant him the power of his supple, incisive language. I think of Auden’s line in his fine elegy for Yeats where he comments how Time: ‘Pardons him for writing well’. Clearly he thought Yeats needed to be pardoned, and you can see what he meant: Yeats adulated the patrician class, romanticised the peasant class, and had little time for the mass of humanity between; also he had a dubious fascination with the occult. Yet it is clear that Time does, and will continue to, pardon Yeats for writing well.

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

W.B.Yeats

Week 627: A Refugee, by E.J.Scovell

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This week another poem by the to my mind much neglected E.J.Scovell (see also weeks 91, 503 and 540). It is easy to understand why Joy’s voice is not more celebrated. Her poems are unfashionably formal. They strike no poses, relying instead on quietly precise observation. Her life she kept private, offering no hook for the journalists of poetry to hang a story on. Well, if her work is only to be kept alive by the love of a few admirers scattered through time, so be it.

Quite a number of her poems reflect her experience on the Home Front during the Second World War. This is one of them, a poem of unostentatious compassion perfectly rounded off by the image of bereft love in the last two lines.

A Refugee

My heart had learnt the habit of earthly life
In an accustomed place.
My voice had learnt the habit of maternal
Sharpness and gentleness.

My thighs had learnt the speech of love. The house
And market tasks that show
So small a flower, rooting in hands and feet
Had matted my flesh through.

My husband died in the mercy of Russian snow.
My child died in the train,
In three days in the weeping cattle truck
From Breslau to Berlin.

I was not taught the song of extremity,
The dancing of duress.
All that I know of infinite is the intensity
Of finite tenderness.

All that I have of goodness is through love –
Their love my only worth.
My rigid arms set in the shape of their love
Have no more use on earth.

E.J.Scovell

Week 626: Sheath and Knife, by Anon

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This is one of the great incest ballads, Child #16.

The social history of brother-sister incest is an odd one. The ancient Egyptians seem to have had no problem with it, at least among members of the royal family, but in Europe it became a very strong taboo, and Germanic legend features heroes who slept, quite unwittingly, with a sister from whom they had been reared separately, and on finding out what they had done were driven to suicidal despair, a theme which is reprised by J.R.R. Tolkien in his tale of Túrin Turambar. Obviously we understand now that incest is a bad idea from a biological point of view, but you’d think it would be enough in such unintentional cases to say ‘Oops, sorry, sis, didn’t realise’ and not do it again.

The old ballad poets did not see it as their business to make overt moral judgments, but as far as one can discern the narrator’s attitude here it seems to be ‘All very sad, but what else was a chap supposed to do in the circumstances?’. Of course, in this ballad it is not clear whether there was foreknowledge or not, but even if there was the brother’s reaction (and the sister’s connivance) are surely a bit over the top: it was hardly the baby’s fault.

I give the slightly modernised version sung by Maddy Prior on her 1998 album ‘Flesh and Blood’.

Sheath And Knife

It’s whispered in the kitchen, it’s whispered in the hall
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
The king’s daughter goes with child, among the ladies all
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

It’s whispered by the ladies one unto the other
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
‘The king’s daughter goes with child unto her own brother’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

He’s ta’en his sister down to his father’s deer park
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
With a yew-tree bow and arrow slung fast across his back
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘And when that you hear me give a loud cry
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Shoot from your bow an arrow, and there let me lie’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And when that you see that I am lying dead
  The broom blooms bonnie, the broom blooms fair
Put me in a grave, with a turf all at my head
  And we’ll never go down to the broom any more.

And when he has heard her give a loud cry
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
A silver arrow from his bow he suddenly let fly
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And he has dug a grave both long and deep
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
He’s buried his sister with their babe all at her feet
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And when he is come to his father’s own hall
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
There was music and dancing, there were minstrels and all
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

O the ladies they asked him, ‘What makes thee in such pain?’
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
‘I’ve lost a sheath and knife, I will never find again’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘O the ships of your father’s a-sailing on the sea
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Can bring as good a sheath and knife unto thee’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘All the ships of my father’s a-sailing on the sea
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Can never ever bring such a sheath and knife to me’.
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

Anon

Week 625: October Fungi, by David Sutton

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October is the peak month for fungi in our local beechwoods, and it seems to be a good year for them, though like everything else in the natural world their abundance and variety are not what they were, and I have seen nothing since to equal one October afternoon back in the early nineteen-eighties that inspired the following poem of mine, when every stump, trunk and fallen log seemed to be covered with fantastic excrescences.

My mycological interest has just been rekindled by reading two excellent books on the subject, ‘Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind’ by Richard Fortey and ‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake. The former is entertainingly anecdotal and concerned mainly with the visible fruiting bodies that we think of as the fungi, the latter more concerned with the role of fungi, and particularly their mycelia (the normally hidden underground parts), in the ecology as a whole. Both highly recommended.

October Fungi

They are back again, the people of the woods,
A travelling circus of freaks: they have pitched their camp
On meadows of moss between the boles of beeches.
There’s no concealment here: they loll on stumps
In sulphur tribes or swagger in the leaves
Scarlet as outlaws. Fear is in their names:
Destroying Angel, Deathcap, Sickener.
The darkness bred them, devilry’s their lore
And parody their style. There’s Dryad’s Saddle
Perched, a monstrous butterfly of leather;
This velvet sleek translucence is Jew’s Ear,
There’s blewit’s ghostly lilac, polypores
Rubber-tough or textured like meringue,
Smelling of peach and honey. So we meet
Towards another year’s end in the woods.
What shall I say to you, gay-sinister
Consorts of corruption? Welcome, life.
The slugs have gorged themselves on stinkhorn jelly
And here’s a puffball ready to explode,
A wrinkled cerebellum, parchment-yellow,
A rotted sack of flour that splits and spills.
The spores rise up, dream-delicate, like smoke.
They glint and dwindle down the shining air.

David Sutton