This week’s piece was written by the folk artist Martin Simpson, and appears on his album ‘Prodigal Son’. As poetry it may be a bit rough and ready (and of course it’s better with the music), yet I find it very moving in the way it speaks for a whole generation of fragile, unfulfilled, war-torn twentieth-century lives, and also portrays a father-son relationship that will resonate with many. Certainly I see in his portrayal much of my own kindly but improvident father, a man who was deeply unsettled by any surplus funds that came his way and disposed of them as quickly as possible in slot machines or by improbable bets with the local bookmaker. Money, in the phrase of the time, ‘burned a hole in his pocket’, and this left my much thriftier mother to keep the family finances just about afloat, which she did by squirrelling away small sums from her meagre weekly housekeeping allowance into a complex system of secret purses hidden around the house. Thus, when a big bill like the annual rates came around (this being nominally my father’s responsibility) and he professed himself unable to pay it, she would produce her ‘rates purse’ with a triumphant flourish and the words ‘You’d better have this then!’. At which he would say, ‘Well, girl, what a good little manager you are!’, and she would glow with pride. Yes, I know – modern women everywhere will be tearing their hair out, but what can I say: it was a different world back then; he loved her and he played her and when he died of cancer at seventy after a lifetime’s heavy smoking she mourned him every day for twenty-three years.

‘Not hard enough for the hod’: not tough enough for physical labour, such as on a building site.
‘Norton’: a long-established make of motorcycle, much esteemed by some even if, according to the song, ‘they don’t have a soul like a Vincent 52’.
‘Split cane rod’: a kind of fly-fishing rod made of bamboo; I’m no angler but I believe these would now be regarded as a bit vintage, having been replaced by more modern materials such as carbon fibre.
‘Pirate King’: a song from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera ‘The Pirates of Penzance’.
’Fulmars’:  a genus of seabirds, breeding on cliffs and superficially resembling gulls.
’Eyebright’ a wildflower of the Euphrasia genus, formerly used to treat eye infections.
’Traveller’s Joy’: another name for the woody hedgerow climber wild clematis.

Never Any Good With Money

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be riding your Norton
Or going fishing with your split cane rod.
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

When your grammar school days were over
It was nineteen-seventeen
And you did the right and proper thing
You were just eighteen.
You were never mentioned in dispatches
You never mentioned what you did or saw,
You were just another keen young man
In the mud and stink of war.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be singing the ‘Pirate King’
Or fishing with your split cane rod.
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

You came home from the Great War
With the pips of a Captain’s rank,
A German officer’s Luger
And no money in the bank.
Your family sent you down the coal mine
To learn to be Captain there
But you didn’t stand it very long
You needed the light and the air.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be watching the fulmars fly
Or fishing with your split cane rod.
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

When the second war came along
You knew what should be done
You would reenlist to teach young men
The booby trap and the gun
And they sent you home to Yorkshire
With a crew and a Lewis gun
So you could save your seaside town
From the bombers of the Hun.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be finding the nightjar’s nest
Or fishing with your split cane rod.
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

And when my mother came to your door
With a baby in her arms,
Her big hurt boy, just nine years old,
Trying to keep her from harm,
If you had been a practical man
You would have been forewarned,
You would have seen that it never could work
And I would have never been born.

There’s no proper work in your seaside town
So you come here looking for a job,
You were storeman at the power station
Just before I came along.
Nobody talked about how you quit
But I know that’s what you did.
My mother said you were a selfish man
And I was your selfish kid.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office
Not hard enough for the hod.
And your Norton it was soon gone
Along with your split cane rod
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

You showed me Eyebright in the hedgerow,
Speedwell and Traveller’s Joy,
You showed me how to use my eyes
When I was just a boy
And you taught me how to love a song
And all you knew of nature’s ways,
The greatest gifts I have ever known
And I use them every day.

You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job,
Not steady enough for the office maybe
Not hard enough for the hod.
You’d rather be riding your Norton
Or going fishing with your split cane rod
You were never any good with money
You couldn’t even hold a job.

Martin Simpson

This week an uncharacteristically self-revealing piece by the Scots poet Andrew Young (1885-1971), who is best known for his keen-eyed and idiosyncratic celebrations of the natural world – see, for example, week 19’s ‘The Sheaf’. But here he opens up emotionally in a way that may remind one of the later Hardy, except that the wife being ruefully addressed is still alive. It appears from Young’s biography (written jointly by his daughter and his son–in-law, the poet Edward Lowbury) that he was a complex man, subject to depressions, who could be warm and witty but could also be domineering and capable of unkindness. Well, maybe we all approach the end of our lives knowing that there have been times when we have failed of our charity, and hearing that ‘voice from the green-grained sticks of the fire’ that Hardy speaks of in his poem ‘Surview’:

‘You taught not that which you set about,’
Said my own voice talking to me;
‘That the greatest of things is Charity…’

And while a poem like this may not be much of an amends, one likes to think that it is something.

A Prospect of Death

If it should come to this
You cannot wake me with a kiss,
Think I but sleep too late
Or once again keep a cold angry state.

So now you have been told; —
I or my breakfast may grow cold,
But you must only say
‘Why does he miss the best part of the day?’

Even then you may be wrong;
Through woods torn by a blackbird’s song
My thoughts may often roam
While graver business make me stay at home.

There will be time enough
To go back to the earth I love
Some other day that week,
Perhaps to find what all my life I seek.

So do not dream of danger;
Forgive my lateness or my anger;
You have so much forgiven,
Forgive me this or that, or Hell or Heaven.

Andrew Young

Do not be deceived by the simplicity of the language and metric: this is a poem raw with anger and pity, that puts one somewhat in mind of Blake in his more lucid moments.

My Mother Saw A Dancing Bear

My mother saw a dancing bear
By the schoolyard, a day in June.
The keeper stood with chain and bar
And whistle-pipe, and played a tune.

And bruin lifted up its head
And lifted up its dusty feet,
And all the children laughed to see
It caper in the summer heat.

They watched as for the Queen it died
They watched it march. They watched it halt.
They heard the keeper as he cried,
‘Now, roly-poly!’ ‘Somersault!’

And then, my mother said, there came
The keeper with a begging-cup,
The bear with burning coat of fur,
Shaming the laughter to a stop.

They paid a penny for the dance,
But what they saw was not the show;
Only, in bruin’s aching eyes,
Far-distant forests, and the snow.

Charles Causley

Another poem of Patrick Kavanagh’s showing his deep attachment to his native patch, an attachment that combines the spiritual, almost mystical, with the concrete and practical (see also, for example, week 86’s ‘Threshing Morning’).

The puzzle in this poem is how to read the last line: ‘I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?’. Does one take it at face value: ‘I hear what you are saying, and yes, it is pretty depressing to think that this meagre patch is all I have to show for a life of devotion to my land and my craft’. Or does one hear a mocking, ‘am I bothered’ note: ‘I hear what you are saying, but why should I need a greater domain than these small hills that for me are as good as any Alps, or more wealth than the bright shillings of March sunlight that they offer me?’. Not surprisingly I favour the latter reading, but of course the two could coexist: many poets must have viewed their material poverty with a slight degree of rue while accepting it as the price of their spiritual plenty.

Shancoduff is a townland in Co. Monaghan, Ireland.

Shancoduff

My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.
Lot’s wife would not be salt if she had been
Incurious as my black hills that are happy
When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.

My hills hoard the bright shillings of March
While the sun searches in every pocket.
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn
With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves
In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage.

The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff
While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush
Look up and say: ‘Who owns them hungry hills
That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken?
A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor.’
I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?

Patrick Kavanagh

I am not sure why I should find this piece of cricketing nostalgia by the Victorian poet Francis Thompson (1859-1907) so evocative, given that I have never really got on with ball games in general and cricket in particular. I mean, so many rules to remember, compared with running where ‘don’t start before the gun goes’ pretty much covers it. I was playing football recently against my two young grandsons, and while I admit that my understanding of the offside rule has always been tenuous at best, I wish someone would explain to me how I could have constantly been ruled offside when I was the only player on my team. I did in fact presume to query this, but was told very firmly ‘my ball, my rules’, so that was the end of that.

Still, it’s good to think of the tubercular, angst-ridden, opium-addicted Thompson finding solace in such an innocent pastime.

I take Hornby to be Albert Neilsen Hornby (1847-1925), a famous Victorian sportsman who captained the country at both rugby and cricket, and Barlow to be Richard Gorton Barlow (1851-1919), a well-known all-rounder. Readers may wish to update the references to something more modern like, say, Hutton and Bedser (note: my knowledge of the game’s heroes may not be entirely up to date).

‘repair’ in the sense of ‘to go to’, nothing to do with mending.

‘red roses’: presumably referring to the emblem of Thompson’s home county Lancashire; Thompson was born in Preston.

‘Southron’ an old or Scots word for ‘southern’.

At Lord’s

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:–
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

Francis Thompson

This week another elegiac poem by Frances Horovitz (1938-1983), foreshadowing her own early death (see week 80).

I have tried to figure out if the particular flowers mentioned, soapwort and figwort, are meant to have any special symbolic resonance for the poem, but nothing obvious comes to my mind. Soapwort yields a vegetable saponin used as a laundering agent by mediaeval fullers, figwort is so named not because it had anything to do with the fruit, but because it was used as a curative for the ‘fig’, or piles. So possibly one has to ascribe their particular appearance in the poem to happenstance: these are simply the flowers the poet picked that day that stuck in her mind, perhaps because they are not especially well-known or celebrated.

But the poem as a whole surely does have a resonance, and a mythopoeic one at that. That final image of the poet holding up the flowers ‘as torch and talisman/Against the coming dark’ – just so, one thinks, might the flower-gathering Persephone have held up her blooms in a last affirmation of life and springtime before dark Hades carried her off to his underworld.

Flowers
(for Winifred Nicholson)

Flowers,
a dozen or more,
I picked one summer afternoon
from field and hedgerow.
Resting against a wall
I held them up
to hide the sun.
Cell by cell,
exact as dance,
I saw the colour,
structure, purpose
of each flower.
I named them with their secret names.
They flamed in air.

But, waking
I remember only two
– soapwort and figwort,
the lilac and the brown.
The rest I guess at
but cannot see
– only myself,
almost a ghost upon the road,
without accoutrement,
holding the flowers
as torch and talisman
against the coming dark.

Frances Horovitz

This is one of the poems from the sequence ‘Xenia II’, written by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale in 1967 in memory of his wife Drusilla Tanzi (see also week 370). A recurrent theme in the sequence, as here, is her short-sightedness, paradoxically played off against the acuteness of her vision in other ways, her gift, the poet claims, for seeing what is truly important in life, that allowed her to transcend the limited, quotidian view of reality believed in by some. Like the other poems in the sequence, it manages to combine restraint with poignancy.

Going downstairs together, of course, is not just to be taken literally, but as a symbol for negotiating life’s difficulties as a couple.

The translation that follows is my own.

Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio

‘Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale
e ora che non ci sei è il vuoto ad ogni gradino.
Anche così è stato breve il nostro lungo viaggio.
Il mio dura tuttora, né più mi occorrono
le coincidenze, le prenotazioni,
le trappole, gli scorni di chi crede
che la realtà sia quella che si vede.

Ho sceso milioni di scale dandoti il braccio
non già perché con quattr’occhi forse si vede di più.
Con te le ho scese perché sapevo che di noi due
le sole vere pupille, sebbene tanto offuscate,
erano le tue.’

Eugenio Montale

Giving you my arm, I have gone down

Giving you my arm, I have gone down,
At least a million stairs.
And now you are no longer here I feel
The void at every step.
So after all it has been short
This long shared voyage of ours.
Mine still goes on, and now I need no more
Coincidences, reservations,
Traps, the scorn of those believing
That reality is only what we see.

I have gone down, giving you my arm,
A million stairs, not just because
With four eyes one maybe sees more.
I went down with you because I knew
That between us two the eyes that truly saw,
For all their being so obscured, were yours.