It should be said first that this week’s poem has nothing to do with the Child ballad of the same name, instead it is an original song to be found on the 1970’s folk-rock album ‘Mr Fox’, by a group of the same name formed by Bob and Carole Pegg. The group was short-lived, producing only two albums, and never enjoyed the repute and commercial success of their contemporary folk-rock bands Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, yet they had a very original style that drew on a mix of traditional sources and in particular the musical culture of the Yorkshire Dales. I think this eerie magical ballad is one of their best efforts.

The goshawk’s threat to use supernatural powers, which could be seen as a touch coercive, brings to mind legends attached to mediaeval wizards like Michael Scot, who was reputed to have defeated an indefatigable demon by challenging it to weave a rope out of flying sea-salt.

Note: the first word in line 15 is hard to make out: ‘jasmine’ seems odd but seems to be what people hear.

The Gay Goshawk

The gay goshawk came to my window-sill.
The snow it fell fast and the stars stood still.
‘O won’t you take me in from the storm,
Won’t you take me between your sheets so warm?’

Gold was the colour of his wings so fair,
His eyes they were bold and of silver so rare
And I laid his brown body upon the pillow.
He became a man, lithe as a willow.

‘Don’t breathe a word, don’t scream, don’t shout.
I can turn the whole world round about,
Lay the moon flat on the land,
Twist a rope out of flying sand’.

Whispering women, so happy beguiled,
Now that he’s gone she must care for the child.
Jasmine’s the colour of his hair,
A nut-brown boy with a silvery stare.

The nights have grown cold and the seasons slip by
And knowing seducers still give me the eye,
But on cold winter’s evenings alone I walk,
I watch and pray for my gay goshawk.

Carole Pegg

‘And is it true, and is it true,/This most tremendous tale of all…’ run lines from a John Betjeman poem on the Nativity. To which I suspect that many these days will, like me, answer well, no, probably not, at least not in the sense that it did actually happen and happen in that way, which is our preferred definition of ‘true’. Yet we will be happy to concede ‘true’ in the sense of being a good story, reflecting some of humanity’s deepest hopes and desires, and powerful enough to have resonated down the ages.

I’m not sure how far in this week’s poem by U.A.Fanthorpe the author means to go along with the more literal aspects of the Christmas story, but it’s an entertaining take on the tale and it does for me go some way to capturing the true wonder at the heart of the Nativity which remains even when one strips away such mythic accretions as shepherds and angels, stars and wise men, and which should surely be something that those of all faiths and none can celebrate equally: I mean the sheer miracle of any human birth, this fragile chance to be alive on a green planet orbiting a vast ball of fire in the void.

My thanks to my followers for all their comments and encouragement over the year, and may they feel in whatever way seems right to them the warmth of this ancient glow at the heart of midwinter.

BC:AD

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of Heaven.

U.A.Fanthorpe

Can a poem be powerful yet also, viewed rationally, a bit daft? If so, then I think this one by Rudyard Kipling certainly manages it. It is intimately associated with Kipling’s short story ‘The Wish House’, which it prefixes in his 1926 collection ‘Debits and Credits’, and that story itself is very odd, yet also quite masterful in its way. It concerns a woman Grace Ashcroft, who, after various affairs in which she received affection that she did not return, late in life falls deeply in love with a man called Harry Mockler. He becomes ill and she goes to a ‘wish house’ that is inhabited by a ‘Token’, some kind of wraith or supernatural being who can, or so she believes, grant her the power to take on herself another’s suffering. Which she does, saying ‘Let me take everythin’ bad that’s in store for my man, ’Arry Mockler, for love’s sake’. Subsequently she injures her ankle and then develops an ulcer on her leg that turns cancerous, causing her great pain.

It is a moving tale and the poem is harrowing in its uncompromising evocation of disease and pain, but the problem I have with it is that the world simply does not work like that. Empathy is a fine thing, but it has its practical limits. I knew a little girl who died of childhood leukaemia after a short and suffering life: I am sure that if there had been any way for her loving parents to take pain away from her and into themselves they would have done so. The truth, I fear, lies much more in the direction of Robert Frost’s bleak assessment: ‘The nearest friends can go/With anyone to death, comes so far short/They might as well not try to go at all.’

Nonetheless, the poem and story bear witness to what a strange and powerful writer, quite unlike anyone else, Kipling at his best could be. As for their psychology, given that the story first appeared, in magazine form, in 1924 it is hard not to see in them a wish-fulfilment fantasy on Kipling’s part, a vicarious projection of himself into the narrative. He was racked with guilt over the death of his son John in the Great War, having pulled strings to get him a commission in the army after he had initially been rejected due to poor eyesight. Maybe one can hear in that ‘for love’s sake’ Kipling’s own sublimated version of David’s great cry in the Bible: ‘Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!’

Note: ‘the God’ – I take this to refer to Eros, the god of love, feeling scorned because of Grace Ashcroft’s earlier behaviour in affairs of the heart, and now exacting vengeance. Those averse to divinities, vengeful or otherwise, can simply take it as karma.

‘Late Came The God’ (from ‘The Wish House’)

Late came the God, having sent his forerunners who were not regarded –
Late, but in wrath;
Saying: ‘The wrong shall be paid, the contempt be rewarded
On all that she hath.’
He poisoned the blade and struck home, the full bosom receiving
The wound and the venom in one, past cure or relieving.

He made treaty with Time to stand still that the grief might be fresh –
Daily renewed and nightly pursued through her soul to her flesh –
Mornings of memory, noontides of agony, midnights unslaked for her,
Till the stones of the street of her Hells and her Paradise ached for her.

So she lived while her body corrupted upon her.
And she called on the Night for a sign, and a Sign was allowed,
And she builded an Altar and served by the light of her Vision –
Alone, without hope of regard or reward, but uncowed,
Resolute, selfless, divine.
These things she did in Love’s honour…
What is a God beside Woman? Dust and derision!

Rudyard Kipling

Sandra Lee Scheuer was a student at Kent State University. Her subject was speech therapy. She died in 1970, aged twenty, when she was shot in the neck with a bullet from the M-1 rifle of an Ohio National Guardsman. Three other unarmed students were also killed in the shootings. At the time a student demonstration against the escalation of the Vietnam war into Cambodia was taking place on the campus. There are differing views regarding the magnitude of the threat posed by rock-throwing students to National Guardsmen armed only with rifles and grenade launchers, but all seem to agree on one thing: that Sandra had nothing to do with the demonstration and was merely walking between classes.

The poem appears in a 1980 collection by the Canadian poet Gary Geddes (b. 1940). It must have been hard to write it without overt anger, yet what dominates is pity, and maybe the poem is all the more effective for it. Note how the poet weaves into the narrative Sandra’s subject, speech therapy, such that the silencing of her voice and consequent loss of her healing gift becomes emblematic of the whole violent suppression of the freedom to speak out.

‘or put a flower in his rifle barrel’ – this refers to an incident the day before when another student, Allison Beth Krause, had put a flower in the barrel of a Guardsman’s rifle, saying ‘Flowers are better than bullets’. Allison too was killed in the shootings the next day.

Sandra Lee Scheuer

(Killed at Kent State University, May 4, 1970 by the Ohio National Guard)

‘You might have met her on a Saturday night,
cutting precise circles, clockwise, at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, or walking with quick step

between the campus and a green two-storey house,
where the room was always tidy, the bed made,
the books in confraternity on the shelves.

She did not throw stones, major in philosophy
or set fire to buildings, though acquaintances say
she hated war, had heard of Cambodia.

In truth she wore a modicum of make-up, a brassiere,
and could no doubt more easily have married a guardsman
than cursed or put a flower in his rifle barrel.

While the armouries burned, she studied,
bent low over notes, speech therapy books, pages
open at sections on impairment, physiology.

And while they milled and shouted on the commons,
she helped a boy named Billy with his lisp, saying
Hiss, Billy, like a snake. That’s it, SSSSSSSS,

tongue well up and back behind your teeth.
Now buzz, Billy, like a bee. Feel the air
vibrating in my windpipe as I breathe?

As she walked in sunlight through the parking-lot
at noon, feeling the world a passing lovely place,
a young guardsman, who had his sights on her,

was going down on one knee, as if he might propose.
His declaration, unmistakable, articulate,
flowered within her, passed through her neck,

severed her trachea, taking her breath away.
Now who will burn the midnight oil for Billy,
ensure the perilous freedom of his speech;

and who will see her skating at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, the eight small wooden wheels
making their countless revolutions on the floor?

Gary Geddes

Remembrance Sunday last weekend, and again a surprisingly large crowd from our village gathered round the memorial cross at the corner of the green. I remember when we moved here in the early seventies there would be no more than a rather pathetic handful of attendees, but since then we have had the Falklands, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the hope that war between civilised societies might be becoming a thing of the past has had to be put aside, with a resultant renewed awareness of freedom’s price, and a desire to remember those who have paid it on our behalf. So this week I offer on this theme one of my own poems, that I wrote after a somewhat larger gathering on Shirburn Hill to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of VE day in 1995.

The Remembrance (May 8, 1995)

We crowd the hilltop, standing in loose ranks,
A thousand, maybe, come from all around.

Scents of hawthorn, woodsmoke, trampled grass.
A chilling wind; grey battlements of cloud
Rimmed with gold, pale shafts of hidden fire
Fanwise to the west.
                           Eight thirty-three.

A queue for hot dogs; skittish children; prams;   
A roped-off bonfire darting orange flames
This way and that, on cold upswirling air.
The minutes tick away. We wait, unsure.

For we were young: what grief was this of ours?
A rumour from beyond the sky, a shadow
That fled before our childhood. Fifty years
Is long for men, in life and memory.
Yet we knew names; we saw the sad closed faces.
Their grief has been our freedom.                                                                                                                           A maroon
Cracks like a whip. A deep obedient hush
Falls on the hill; coats rustle; one small child
Cries and is rocked. We stand. Two minutes pass.
Mist on the plain beneath, a white half-moon
Strengthening above.
                           Then bugle notes,
A roll of drums. The solemn statues move,
Speak and are ordinary. We go back,
Torches aloft; cars nose the narrow lane.
Something is served: at least, our silence said
All that the living can say to the dead.

David Sutton

This week an extract from a long poem by the Highland poet and forester Duncan Ban MacIntyre, or to give him his Gaelic name Donnchadh bàn Mac an t-Saoir. Duncan (1724-1812) is generally accounted one of the greatest of Gaelic language poets, and in this piece he laments the changes wrought by careless stewardship on a landscape that he has long loved. In many ways it seems ahead of its time, and bears comparison with John Clare’s poignant lament for a countryside changed by the Enclosure Act (see week 52). Of course, there had from early times been a strong tradition of nature verse in Celtic literature that is largely missing from English, at least up until the time of the Romantic revival: we have, for example, lyrics in early Irish celebrating the natural world purely for its own sake, and the poetry of the mediaeval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym is full of cuckoos, spring in the greenwood and the like. Yet perhaps it is only about this time, in the eighteenth century, that we see a nascent spirit of conservation emerging. This may seem odd given that man had been changing and despoiling the natural world from time immemorial, with, for example, huge clearances of woodland, but maybe up till that point it had just never dawned on people that the earth’s resources might not be infinite, or that its beauty could be irreparably defaced.

Speaking of conservation, may I make a plea for my readers to support the Scots Gaelic language, now down to its last hundred thousand or so native speakers, in any way they can. This is not my fight, of course – as far as I can determine my ancestry is irredeemably Saxon with no trace of the Celt – but anyone who loves language and literature must grieve at the idea that the great blaze of Gaelic poetry and song should be allowed to survive only as few stray sparks, or even go out completely. It can’t be denied that Scots Gaelic is a fairly difficult language for an English speaker, largely because of the pronunciation – you have to remember that half the letters are silent and half the ones that aren’t sound nothing like their English counterparts – but there are some great online resources (try the learngaelic.scot site) – and also a wealth of song on YouTube, much of which I find achingly beautiful.

The translation that follows is my own. It’s a bit free in places – close translations from Scots Gaelic don’t work too well – but I hope it captures a little of the spirit of the piece.

corrie: a kind of basin with steep sides and a gently sloping floor formed in mountainous regions by the erosive action of a glacier, also known as a cirque or cwm.

From ‘Cumha Choire a’ Cheathaich’

Tha choille bh’ anns an fhrith ud,
Na cuislean fada, direach,
Air tuiteam is air crionadh
Sios as an rusg;
Na prisein a bha brioghor
‘Nan dosaibh tiugha, lionmhor,
Air seacadh mar gu’n spiont’ iad
A nios as an uir;

Na failleanan bu bhoidhche,
Na slatan is na h-ògain,
‘S an t-ait am biodh an smeorach
Gu mothar a’ seinn ciuil,
Tha iad uil’ air caochladh,
Cha d’ fhuirich fiodh na fraoch ann ;
Tha ‘m mullach bharr gach craoibhe,
‘S am maor ‘ga thoirt diubh.

Tha Uisge Srath na Dìge
Na shruthladh dubh gun sìoladh,
Le barraig uaine lìth-ghlais,
Gu mì-bhlasta grànd’;
Feur-lochain is tàchair
An cinn an duilleag-bhàthte –
Chan eil gnè tuilleadh fàs
Anns an àit’ ud san àm;

Glumagan a’ chàthair
Na ghlugaibh domhainn sàmhach,
Cho tiugh ri sùghan càtha,
Na làthaich ‘s na phlam;
Seann bhùrn salach ruadhain,
Cha ghlaine ‘ghrunnd na uachdar –
Gur coslach ri muir ruaidh e,
Na ruaimle feadh stang.

Duncan Ban MacIntyre

From ‘Lament for the Misty Corrie’

The woods where once the deer roamed,
The long trunks straight and slender,
Are withered even to the bark
And fallen now forever.
The bushes rich in berries,
So plentiful and thick,
Lie rootless on the soil now,
They plucked up every stick.

The shoots that were the fairest,
The thickets of young trees,
The places where the thrush would sing
Its gentle melodies,
Are changed beyond all knowing,
No wood nor heather there,
And since the bailiff took them
No tree but lopped and bare.

The waters of the burn run black
Like rinsings from a drain
And covered with a foul green scum
Will not run clear again.
The tarns are choked with grass now,
Where water-lilies show
Only the stagnance of a place
Where nothing else will grow.

Like bogland pits its potholes
So limpid in their time
Are filled with a thick porridge
Of sediment and slime.
A scurf of dirty water,
Unclean above, below –
So through the muddied river
The rust-red waters flow.

This week another of my favourite Frost poems, a masterclass in profound simplicity. This is the darker, less folksy Frost that many prefer, lonely, self-doubting, alienated, the poet of ‘Acquainted With The Night’, ‘Design’, ‘To Earthward’ and ‘The Most Of It’. It is worth dwelling on that ‘absent-spirited’. Does that simply mean that his mind is elsewhere, perhaps in happier times and climes, or that the fight has all but gone out of him, that he is on the verge of surrendering to the desolation, almost relishing the fact that it asks of him nothing, offers him nothing and is not even aware of him? But then the last stanza is paradoxically defiant, a wryly stoical acceptance of his own condition: when he speaks of ‘my own desert places’ he is referring, of course, not only to the winter fields near his home but to the cold blank places in his own mind for which those fields serve as what the critics call an ‘objective correlative’. In the end it is a painfully honest poem that manages to conjure an affirmation, even a kind of austere beauty, out of desolation.

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it – it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less –
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost

One of my all-time favourite prose works is ‘Sunset Song’ by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901-1935), a novel set in the north-east of Scotland in the early 20^th century.

It has a lyrical style, and an unforgettable cast of characters, including the free-spirited Chris herself, her mother, her brother Will, her vile bully of a father, her husband Ewan, broken by the Great War, her kindly neighbour Chae Strachan and, eventually and briefly, her soulmate Long Rob the miller.

‘Sunset Song’ is actually the first of a trilogy entitled ‘A Scots Quair’, so the story is continued in two more parts, ‘Cloud Howe’ and ‘Grey Granite’, but I have to confess that I managed only a few chapters of the former before giving up with the words from Wordworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ running in my head: ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’, and I never got to the third book at all.

Of course, anyone’s reading journey from childhood on is likely to be littered with disappointing sequels. Many children over the years (though maybe not so many these days) have devoured Louisa M. Alcott’s ‘Little Women’ and Thomas Hughes’s ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, but I suspect that few have ever done more than nibble at ‘Good Wives’ and ‘Tom Brown At Oxford’. As a child blissfully unaware of its allegorical designs on me I enjoyed C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ but found the rest of the Narnia books fairly forgettable. Parts two to four of T.H.White’s Arthurian epic ‘The Once and Future King’ are worthy enough, but have nothing like the magic of its first book, ‘The Sword In The Stone’. As a devoted fan of Ursula Le Guin’s first three ‘Earthsea’ novels I found the tone of the fourth book ‘Tehanu’ horribly jarring. Alan Garner’s ‘Boneland’ is intriguing in its own right, but as a sequel to ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ and ‘The Moon of Gomrath’ it is barely in the same universe. And while as a teenager I would have been happy to go along with the young Neil Gaiman’s view that ‘Lord of the Rings’ was not only the best book ever written but the best book that ever could be written, ‘The Silmarillion’ was, let’s face it, a bit of a letdown with its remote style and its claustrophobically mediaeval cosmology in which the earth is created before the sun and mankind is placed in the world ready-formed, concepts which (to the best of my understanding) are not entirely in line with modern scientific thinking.

But I am rambling. Back to ‘Sunset Song’, and two passages that I have chosen to illustrate both the book’s lyrical style and some of its main themes: of dual cultural identity, of being bound to the land and to a way of life that you both resented and loved, and of the struggle to maintain that way of life in the face of a changing world:

‘So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d wake with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of this Scottish land and skies. You saw the faces in firelight, father’s, and mother’s, and the neighbours’, before the lamps lit up, tired and kind, faces dear and close to you, you wanted the words they’d known and used, forgotten in the far-off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart how they wrung it and held it, the toil of their days and unendingly their fight. And the next minute that passed from you, you were English, back to the English words so sharp and clean and true — for a while, for a while, till they slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything that was worth the saying at all.’

————————————–

‘And then a queer thought came to her there in the drookèd fields, that nothing endured at all, nothing but the land she passed across, tossed and turned and perpetually changed below the hands of the crofter folk since the oldest of them had set the Standing Stones by the loch of Blawearie and climbed there on their holy days and saw their terraced crops ride brave in the wind and sun. Sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought and were learnèd, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you were close to it and it to you, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurted you.’

drookèd: drenched