Category Archives: poetry

Week 617: Ye Who Enter In, by Jamie McKendrick

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I have an uneasy relationship with Dante, at the same time admiring and a little
repulsed, though I readily concede that he is, as Sam Gamgee felt about elves, ‘a
bit above my likes and dislikes, so to speak’. I think this piece by poet and
translator Jamie McKendrick (b. 1955) is a miniature tour de force in how it
captures the way in which Dante manages simultaneously to alienate yet compel.

Ye Who Enter In
(after Antonio Machado)

To plumb the depths of hell and meet
ministers, saladins and scholars,
Marilyn Monroe and Cleopatra,
the latter naked as the day they died:
to give audience where you please
and where you don’t to curl your lip
or deftly rabbit-punch a kidney
sure that your arm is power-assisted.
To be steered about by someone who just
happens to be Virgil, and you like his poems.
to write as a chisel writes on rock
so every phrase you write resounds forever:
ABANDON ALL HOPE… You first.
No really I insist please after you.

Jamie McKendrick

Week 616: The Most of It, by Robert Frost

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This poem appears in Robert Frost’s 1942 collection ‘A Witness Tree’, and for me is one of the finest poems in that collection, which I think is the last to show his lyric gift at full strength. It came after a period in which Frost had suffered a number of tragic losses in his life: the death of his daughter Marjorie in 1934, his wife’s death in 1938, and then the suicide of his son Carol in 1940, and perhaps as a result it is informed by disillusionment and loneliness, and by an absence of consolation no longer to be found in the natural world, that the poet now sees as at best indifferent, at worst disturbingly alien and even dangerous. The image of the great buck at the end has something elemental, indeed almost demonic about it, and certainly it has no interest in communicating with the wistful observer.

Despite the reference to the universe in the first line it is clear that Frost was really talking about man on earth, but with the recent SETI initiative and the discovery of ever more exoplanets one can see the poem as having acquired an additional resonance since it was written. If there is indeed alien life out there, will it do us any good to find out, or will it be just as incommunicable and set on its own purposes as the great buck?

The Most of It

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush – and that was all.

Robert Frost

Week 615: The Persistence of Memory, by John Burnside

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John Burnside (1955-2024) was a very prolific Scottish writer who died this May. Though principally a poet he produced works of fiction, essays, reviews and also a prize-winning memoir. His is a very congenial voice, though I do sometimes feel, as with so much contemporary poetry, that his work could have done with a bit more shaping, being ever mindful of Frost’s pithy but slightly too sweeping condemnation of free verse: ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. But when Burnside gets it right, as here, he combines exactitude with a haunting music that more than compensates for any lack of formality.

The Persistence of Memory

Out in the field where, once,
we played Dead Man’s Fall,

the others are being called
through the evening dusk

– Kenny and Marek, the Corrigans, Alex McClure –
mothers and sisters calling them home for tea

from kitchens fogged with steam and buttered toast,
broth on the hot plate, ham hough and yellow lentils.

Barely a wave, then they’re gone, till no one is left,
and the dark from the woods closes in on myself alone,

the animals watching, the older gods
couched in the shadows.

Decades ago, I suppose,
though I cannot be sure.

I have waited here, under the stars,
for the longest time.

John Burnside

Week 614: Acceptance, by David Sutton

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My wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary next week, making fifty-eight in all, of which over the years I have managed to remember fifty-seven. Which is surely a pretty impressive record, though you wouldn’t think so to hear some people go on about it. So, this week I offer one of my own poems on the subject of long-married love, which I wrote a while back, but which I am glad to say is still just as applicable.

Acceptance

We stop at the garden centre for tea and cake,
Our time our own now, all the children gone,
And you talk to another couple at the next table
While I half-drowse in late October sun,
Answering your smiles on cue, but thinking
This is not me, not yet, or not today:
I am not ready for the small contentments,
Though what I want instead is hard to say.

Our forty years again, of toil and trial?
Indeed, if strength came with them to endure
All that love asks, the given and the taken,
But we have come where only loss is sure,
So I must learn new lines, an awkward actor
Who thought to have no part in age’s play.
Rehearse me, then, in love’s last role, acceptance.
Above all, till the final curtain, stay.

David Sutton

Week 613: From ‘Autumn Journal’ by Louis MacNeice

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‘Autumn Journal’ by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is a long poem in twenty-four cantos, written between August and December 1938. It is very much a poem of its time, foreshadowing the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, which does not of course mean that it cannot be also a poem for our time.

MacNeice himself was curiously defensive about it in his introduction, as if he knew that some people might feel that this was not quite poetry as they knew it. ‘It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced. . . poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty’. This is in line with his advocacy in ‘Modern Poetry’ for what he calls ‘an impure poetry’ that is, poetry conditioned by the poet’s life and the world around him.

The result is discursive, conversational, charged with immediacy, irregular in its rhythms, moving from theme to theme: the Munich agreement, an Oxford by-election, a visit to Spain as it fell to Franco, the Irish situation, while also interweaving the personal in the shape of reminiscences of his ex-wife. Yes, it can be prosaic, and one should not go to it expecting much in the way of lyric intensity, such as is to be found, for example, in Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ (see week 315) with its evocation of the parallel period just before the outbreak of the First World War. But MacNeice’s much longer form does allow for far more in the way of reflection and analysis, and it is never less than intelligent and engaged.

I give here only the closing canto, that summarises his fear and hopes for the future.

Asclepius: the Greek god of healing.

Cagney, Lombard, Bing and Garbo: James Cagney, Carole Lombard, Bing Crosby, Greta Garbo: well-known film stars of the period.

Tir nan Og: the mythical Irish land of eternal youth.

a pillar of salt: a reference to biblical story of Lot, whose wife was allegedly turned to salt when she looked back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.Rubicon: the river in northern Italy that Caesar had to cross with his legions when marching on Rome to claim the dictatorship, now a byword for any critical and irreversible decision.

XXIV

Sleep, my body, sleep, my ghost,
    Sleep, my parents and grand-parents,
And all those I have loved most:
    One man’s coffin is another’s cradle.
Sleep, my past and all my sins,
    In distant snow or dried roses
Under the moon for night’s cocoon will open
    When day begins.
Sleep, my fathers, in your graves
    On upland bogland under heather
What the wind scatters the wind saves,
    A sapling springs in a new country.
Time is a country, the present moment
    A spotlight roving round the scene;
We need not chase the spotlight,
    The future is the bride of what has been.

Sleep, my fancies and my wishes,
    Sleep a little and wake strong,
The same but different and take my blessing —
    A cradle-song.
And sleep, my various and conflicting
    Selves I have so long endured,
Sleep in Asclepius’ temple
    And wake cured.
And you with whom I shared an idyll
    Five years long,
Sleep beyond the Atlantic
    And wake to a glitter of dew and to bird-song.
And you whose eyes are blue, and whose ways are foam,
    Sleep quiet and smiling
And do not hanker
    For a perfection which can never come.
And you whose minutes patter
    To crowd the social hours,
Curl up easy in a placid corner
    And let your thoughts close in like flowers.
And you, who work for Christ, and you, as eager
    For a better life, humanist, atheist,
And you, devoted to a cause, and you, to a family,
    Sleep and may your beliefs and zeal persist.

Sleep quietly, Marx and Freud,
    The figure-heads of our transition.
Cagney, Lombard, Bing and Garbo,
    Sleep in your world of celluloid.
Sleep now also; monk and satyr,
    Cease your wrangling for a night.
Sleep, my brain, and sleep, my senses,
    Sleep, my hunger and my spite.
Sleep, recruits to the evil army,
    Who, for so long misunderstood,
Took to the gun to kill your sorrow;
    Sleep and be damned and wake up good.

While we sleep, what shall we dream?
    Of Tir nan Og or South Sea islands,
Of a land where all the milk is cream
    And all the girls are willing?
Or shall our dream be earnest of the real
    Future when we wake,
Design a home, a factory, a fortress
    Which, though with effort, we can really make?
What is it we want really?
    For what end and how?
If it is something feasible, obtainable,
    Let us dream it now,
And pray for a possible land
    Not of sleep-walkers, not of angry puppets,
But where both heart and brain can understand
    The movements of our fellows;
Where life is a choice of instruments and none
    Is debarred his natural music,
Where the waters of life are free of the ice-blockade of hunger
    And thought is free as the sun,
Where the altars of sheer power and mere profit
    Have fallen to disuse,
Where nobody sees the use
    Of buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money,
Where the individual, no longer squandered
    In self-assertion, works with the rest, endowed
With the split vision of a juggler and the quick lock of a taxi,
    Where the people are more than a crowd.
So sleep in hope of this — but only for a little;
    Your hope must wake
While the choice is yours to make,
    The mortgage not foreclosed, the offer open.

Sleep serene, avoid the backward
    Glance; go forward, dreams, and do not halt
(Behind you in the desert stands a token
    Of doubt — a pillar of salt).
Sleep, the past, and wake, the future,
    And walk out promptly through the open door
But you, my coward doubts, may go on sleeping,
    You need not wake again — not any more.
The New Year comes with bombs, it is too late
    To dose the dead with honourable intentions:
If you have honour to spare, employ it on the living;
    The dead are dead as 1938.
Sleep to the noise of running water
    To-morrow to be crossed, however deep;
This is no river of the dead or Lethe,
    To-night we sleep
On the banks of Rubicon — the die is cast;
    There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
    And the equation will come out at last.

Louis MacNeice

Week 612: Who Goes Home? by G.K.Chesterton

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This is a very odd poem, at least from my perspective, since normally I find G.K.Chesterton a perfectly clear writer but on this occasion I simply do not understand what he is trying to say. If it were by some modernist poet, for whom communication with the reader was not a priority, I would simply pass on, but Chesterton is not like that at all. And it has the feel to me of a powerful and eloquent poem, if only I had the key to it.

All I can offer by way of elucidation is that the cry of ‘Who goes home?’ is a tradition of the British parliament, being uttered simultaneously by two Doorkeepers (one behind the Speaker’s chair and one in Members’ lobby) when the House rises. This is often explained as an invitation to Members to join together in bands to cross what in the past were the dangerous unlit fields between Westminster and the City or to hire boats homeward on the Thames as a party in order to save the individual fares (the same may apply to taxis nowadays). 

The ‘city set upon slime and loam’ is thus obviously London. But what is the ‘city of graves’? Who are they who ‘shall perish and understand’? Understand what? Who are the ‘men that are men again’? Whose is the blood – that of those who die defending democracy?

As usual, any help from minds more perceptive than mine will be gratefully received.

Tocsin: an alarm bell or warning signal.

Who Goes Home?

In the city set upon slime and loam
They cry in their parliament ‘Who goes home?’
And there comes no answer in arch or dome,
For none in the city of graves goes home.
Yet these shall perish and understand,
For God has pity on this great land.

Men that are men again; who goes home?
Tocsin and trumpeter! Who goes home?
For there’s blood on the field and blood on the foam
And blood on the body when Man goes home.
And a voice valedictory . . . Who is for Victory?
Who is for Liberty? Who goes home?

G. K. Chesterton

Week 611: Hospital for Defectives, by Thomas Blackburn

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Although this week’s poem, as a mid-20th century composition, is relatively recent, I suspect that some readers may find its premise rather dated, in that the majority of people now, at least in the secular West, would probably go along with Einstein in giving no credence to the idea of a personal divinity who directs our affairs, while at the same time remaining well aware that this leaves a lot of big questions unanswered, like whose bright idea was it to have a universe in the first place, and why is that universe so finely tuned as to allow the emergence of beings capable of wondering why it is so finely tuned.

Be that as it may, to reject the poetry of the past because we may no longer share its belief systems is to cut ourselves off from much of our history and our humanity, and while it may seem that this week’s poem offers no answers to a non-question, there is surely always a place for its brand of reflective compassion.

Hospital for Defectives

By your unnumbered charities,
A miracle disclose,
Lord of the Images, whose love
The eyelid and the rose
Takes for a language, and today
Tell to me what is said
By these men in the turnip field
And their unleavened bread.

For all things seem to figure out
The stirrings of your heart;
And two men pick the turnips up
And two men pull the cart;
And yet between the four of them
No word is ever said,
Because the yeast was not put in
Which makes the human bread.
But three men stare on vacancy,
And one man strokes his knees;
What is the language that you speak
Through such dark vowels as these?

Lord of the Images, whose love
The eyelid and the rose
Takes for a metaphor, today,
Beneath the warder’s blows,
The unleavened man did not cry out,
Or turn his face away;
Through such men in a turnip field
What is it that you say?

Thomas Blackburn

Week 610: Diamonds and Rust, by Joan Baez

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 ‘My poetry was lousy, you said’ – such, according to this week’s poem, was Bob Dylan’s verdict on the poetic efforts of the young Joan Baez. That must have hurt, but one has to say that Bob was right, as far as Joan at that time was concerned. I remember one of Joan’s early albums, the first LP I ever bought, being covered with a kind of prose-poem that was cringe-making even by the standards of the sixties.

But then something happened: Joan’s work became sharper, tougher, culminating in this song which is surely one of the best songwriter compositions of recent years: plangent, humane, specific. It deals with Joan’s love affair with the young Dylan. It is hard to judge these things from the outside, but the usual narrative is that she recognised his talent and fostered it but he, as his fame grew, failed to reciprocate and became reluctant to share a stage with her. Here we see her contemplating a past that is now distant yet still tinged with a kind of autumnal rue.

‘bluer than robin’s eggs’… hang on, I hear you object, a robin’s egg is not blue at all. Joan, however, being American, is thinking of the American robin, a bird not closely related to our European robin, being a member of the thrush family, and the eggs of the American robin are indeed an intense shade of blue.

’the girl on the half-shell’… alluding to the famous painting by Botticelli, showing the goddess Venus, who was born fully grown of sea-foam, arriving at the shore after her birth, a bit short of clothes.

Diamonds And Rust

Well, I’ll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that’s not unusual
It’s just that the moon is full
And you happened to call

And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I’d known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

As I remember, your eyes
Were bluer than robin’s eggs
My poetry was lousy, you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the Midwest

Ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks
You brought me something
We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms

And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
To keep you unharmed

Now I see you standing with brown leaves
Falling all around and snow in your hair
Now you’re smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel over Washington Square

Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

Now you’re telling me, you’re not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You were so good with words
And at keeping things vague

‘Cause I need some of that vagueness now
It’s all come back too clearly
Yes, I loved you dearly
And if you’re offering me diamonds and rust
I’ve already paid

Joan Baez

Week 609: The Colour of His Hair, by A.E.Housman

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This week’s choice follows on fairly naturally from last week’s in that A.E.Housman, himself a lifelong closet homosexual, wrote this savagely ironic denunciation of the laws and attitudes then prevailing in response to the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde: it is easy to forget just how much of a social and indeed criminal stigma attached to homosexuality only a couple of generations ago. I don’t myself have a dog in this fight, but for what it’s worth see no reason to quarrel with the consensus now prevailing, at least in the West, that what really matters about people is that they should be kind, honest and reliable and that when it comes to consenting adults there are more things in this world to get exercised about (and indeed, more interesting things to think about) than other people’s sexual proclivities.

Due to the climate of the time Housman felt obliged to suppress its publication until after his death in 1936, and of course it still took many years after that before certain hair colours became acceptable.

poll: the part of the head on which hair grows
haling: dragging, esp. with force or violence
oakum: a preparation of tarred fibres used to seal gaps e.g. between planks in ships. At one time it was recycled from old tarry ropes, and the job of doing this was given to prisoners deemed unsuitable for heavier labour. It was a much hated task, causing the fingers to bleed.
Portland: a tied island in the English Channel, connected to the mainland by Chesil Beach, and the source of Portland limestone, a much-prized building stone that continues to be quarried there.

The Colour of His Hair

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after, that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they’re haling him to justice for the colour of his hair.

Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

A.E.Housman

Week 608: From ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, by Oscar Wilde

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I confess to not in general having much time for the work of Oscar Wilde. I find the witticisms too carefully manufactured and the plays tediously unfunny, though I admit that as the chandelier episode in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ had me rolling on the floor it may be that my sense of humour lacks a certain sophistication. But my real problem with Wilde’s work is the feeling it gives me that he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying or he hasn’t thought it through enough. Those aphorisms seem designed to appeal to the adolescent in us: neatly subversive and without too much in the way of nuance to tax our underdeveloped brains. ‘For each man kills the thing he loves…’ Well, of course he doesn’t. The world is full of people who do a pretty good lifelong job of cherishing the thing they love, whether a partner, children, dogs, music, ageing donkeys or a patch of woodland… But this said, I think we can grant that the poem in which that doubtful sentiment appears, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, still has considerable power. It appeared in 1898, and was inspired by a time that Wilde spent in the gaol for what was then perceived as ‘gross indecency’. It is a long poem, full of anger and pity, of which I give only the opening stanzas. The fellow who had to swing was one Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards who had murdered his estranged wife; Wilde never met him but would observe him at exercise in the prison yard, and was deeply moved by his demeanour. It is as if life had finally got Oscar in a corner and said ‘Right, let’s see what you’re really made of’. And it turned out Oscar really was made of something.

Incidentally Reading Gaol, which I used to pass every day on my way to work, closed as a prison in 2014, and after various unsuccessful attempts to develop it as an arts hub was finally sold in January this year to a Chinese educational foundation. I don’t know what Oscar would make of that, but no doubt he would have something to say.

From ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’

He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.

He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby gray;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing.’

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Oscar Wilde