Week 432: Stare’s Nest At My Window, by W.B.Yeats

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I think this is one of Yeats’s greatest poems, and that rare thing, an entirely successful political poem. It forms part of a sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, referring to the Irish civil war in 1922, the effects of which Yeats saw at first hand as it swirled around his tower at Thoor Ballylee. But I am not at all sure I am reading it with a perfect understanding of its symbolism. What, you may ask, have bees building in a wall and a starling’s nest outside his window (‘stare’ is a dialect word for starling) got to do with anything? My reading would be that Yeats, disillusioned with political ideology, is turning to the natural world as a refuge, invoking its uninvolved continuities and consoling himself that these will go on whatever human beings make of the world. The fantasies of the fifth stanza I take to be the fantasies of Irish nationalism, of the heroic and romantic past embodied in such figures as Cuchulain, and of the glorious slaughters of Irish epic that contrast so strongly with the real violence of ‘that dead young soldier in his blood’. The phrase ‘My wall is loosening’ would be an image of the poet’s sense that the certainties he once had are now crumbling, with now ‘no clear fact to be discerned’. That much seems clear, yet I still feel that there is a level of specificity about the imagery here, of bees, grubs, flies and empty house, that may be eluding me. Well, it is the mark of a good poem that it not only makes us think, but keeps us thinking.

Stare’s Nest At My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

W.B.Yeats

Week 431: From ‘The Island’, by Francis Brett Young

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My recent offering of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Merlin’ prompted me to dig out this one, on a similar theme but in a very different vein. It is from a long epic poem called ‘The Island’, chronicling the history of Britain from the Bronze Age to modern times. Published in 1944, it was very successful in its time and sold out its sizeable first edition very quickly, clearly having tapped something in the national psyche. I don’t imagine that many people read or remember it now, but when I came across a copy while browsing in a secondhand bookshop and lighted on this particular passage I thought, OK, so in form and style this might be about as unfashionable as you can get, but as a distillation of the historical truth that might or might not underlie the vast Arthurian legendarium it’s really quite potent, especially these last seven stanzas.

Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus

…. And all that coloured tale a tapestry
Woven by poets. As the spider’s skeins
Are spun of its own substance, so have they
Embroidered empty legend – What remains?

This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
That age had sapped and cankered at the root,
Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke
The miracle of one unwithering shoot.

Which was the spirit of Britain – that certain men
Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood
Loved freedom better than their lives; and when
The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood

And charged into the storm’s black heart, with sword
Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed
With a strange majesty that the heathen horde
Remembered when all were overwhelmed;

And made of them a legend, to their chief,
Arthur, Ambrosius – no man knows his name –
Granting a gallantry beyond belief,
And to his knights imperishable fame.

They were so few . . . We know not in what manner
Or where they fell – whether they went
Riding into the dark under Christ’s banner
Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.

But this we know; that when the Saxon rout
Swept over them, the sun no longer shone
On Britain, and the last lights flickered out;
And men in darkness muttered: Arthur is gone . . .

Francis Brett Young

Notes: Roman rule in Britain came to an end around 410 C.E. Gwent was a post-Roman Welsh kingdom. The Welsh flag features a red dragon. Arthur, of course, is conceived of as a leader of the Celtic resistance against the incoming tide of Saxon invaders who arrived in increasing numbers during the fifth century. The Celts at that time were Christians, the Saxons still pagan. The great battle that Arthur is said to have fought, which stemmed that tide for a while, was at Mons Badonicus, or Mount Badon, some time around the end of the fifth century.

The Latin title translates as ‘Here lies Arthur, the once and future king’. In actual fact the grave of Arthur, if indeed he ever existed, is unknown, though it has been claimed by many places. As it says in the ‘Englynion y Beddau’ (Stanzas of the Graves) in the Black Book of Carmarthen: ‘A grave for March, a grave for Gwythur/a grave for Gwgawn Red-sword/a wonder to the world is the grave of Arthur’.

Week 430: Glanmore Sonnets, VII, by Seamus Heaney

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I have been thinking about exactly why this poem gives me such a frisson of pleasure every time I read it. Partly, I think, it is that it evokes for me that curious feeling of comfort I had as a child, lying snug in bed on a winter night listening to the wolf wind outside huffing and puffing round our house on the hill. Also because it conjures for me the words of that 9th century Irish monk whose ghost haunts the poem, who liked winter nights, and the wilder the better, because it meant that the seas would be too rough even for the hardy Vikings who were terrorising the coasts of Ireland at that time: ‘Bitter is the wind tonight/It tosses the ocean’s white hair./Tonight I do not fear the fierce warriors of Norway/Coursing on the Irish sea’. Then there is the nod to these same Norsemen in the skaldic kennings, the compound names that it uses for the sea: ‘eel-road, seal-road, keel-road’.

But perhaps most of all I like it because, like so many of Heaney’s poems, it is part of his program to recognise and celebrate the ‘marvellous and actual’, being what I call a primary poem, one that faces outwards to life as much as it faces inwards to literature, matching the resonances of the past with the music of a unique present.

Glanmore Sonnets, VII

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Étoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven’,
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

Seamus Heaney

Week 429: Merlin, by Geoffrey Hill

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Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) enjoys a high reputation in academic circles and as a ‘poets’ poet’, an accolade which has always seemed to me a bit suspect: certainly it is good to have the approval of one’s fellow poets, but a better trick, it seems to me, is to combine that with an equal gift for giving satisfaction to the general intelligent reader with no professional axe to grind, and Geoffrey Hill does not appear to have achieved that in the same way as such contemporaries as Heaney, Larkin, Hughes and R.S.Thomas. It is not hard to see why: his poems are uncompromisingly difficult, and concessions to the reader who may be less informed or have less arcane preoccupations are few or non-existent, meaning that he seems to me likely to remain popular mainly among those who have most reason to be grateful for the exegetic possibilities that he offers them.

For example, in his well-known sequence ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’, I find the language intriguing, but the meaning a little elusive (oh, come on, let’s be honest here: I haven’t the faintest idea what the guy is on about). So it is that in the end I have filed this poet under ‘Come back to when I’m a bit cleverer’. Sadly time is running out for any sudden access of increased mental powers on my part. It’s a pity, because now and then, as in this short piece, I get a glimmer of what I might be missing.

Merlin

“I will consider the outnumbering dead,
For they are the husks of what was rich seed.
Now should they come together to be fed,
They would outstrip the locust’s covering tide.

“Arthur, Elaine, Mordred – they are all gone
Beneath the raftered galleries of bone.
Under the long barrows of Logres they are made one,
And over their city stands the pinnacled corn.”

Geoffrey Hill

Week 428: The Ballet of the Fifth Year, by Delmore Schwartz

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I was reminded of this poem when I caught the end of a TV documentary last week about the ice-dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, that showed the pair skating on a frozen lake in Alaska. ‘Such grace, so self-contained’ indeed. The poem is by the American poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966). I think that unlike our ice-skating pair it stumbles a bit early on but does weave its way towards a beautiful conclusion. The meaning of the poem is a little hard to unravel, but I think it turns on the contrast between the angst-ridden intensity of the metropolitan intellectual, whose life is full of problems that must be solved by an effort of thought and will, and the effortless unthinking grace of the gulls, who inhabit ‘a place of different traffic’, a place that was known to the child the poet once was, but is now lost to him.

The Ballet of the Fifth Year

Where the sea gulls sleep or indeed where they fly
Is a place of different traffic. Although I
Consider the fishing bay (where I see them dip and curve
And purely glide) a place that weakens the nerve
Of will, and closes my eyes, as they should not be
(They should burn like the street-light all night quietly,
So that whatever is present will be known to me),
Nevertheless the gulls and the imagination
Of where they sleep, which comes to creation
In strict shape and color, from their dallying
Their wings slowly, and suddenly rallying
Over, up, down the arabesque of descent,
Is an old act enacted, my fabulous intent
When I skated, afraid of policemen, five years old,
In the winter sunset, sorrowful and cold,
Hardly attained to thought, but old enough to know
Such grace, so self-contained, was the best escape to know.

Delmore Schwartz

Week 427: From ‘Reynard The Fox’, by John Masefield

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Another piece that my primary school headmistress, God rest her formidable but caring soul, read to us in those far off Literature lessons (see week 419) was extracts from John Masefield’s long narrative poem ‘Reynard The Fox’, in which she, or someone of her acquaintance, had cleverly substituted names from our local Hertfordshire countryside for many of place-names in the poem, such that we small children could follow the great hunt in our minds by woods and fields that we ourelves roamed over. I have had an affection for the poem ever since, and while the more cerebral fashions that followed may have seemed to sweep Masefield’s verse away, I think that at its best it had a vigour and clarity that was and remains admirable. And whatever one thinks of fox-hunting, the poem is very even-handed in its treatment: those who feel that there is something not quite right about taking pleasure in pursuing a small animal to exhaustion then watching it being torn to pieces by dogs can find some consolation in the fact that the actual hunt is written very much from the point of view of the fox, while those who see hunting as a fine old tradition inextricably woven into the fabric of British country life can enjoy the long Chaucerian prologue with its basically sympathetic description of the various human characters involved, and the loving celebration of the English countryside that forms its backdrop.

So here are three extracts from the poem: the first from the prologue, a portrayal of Tom Dansey, the hunt whip; the second from mid-hunt when the fox is still fresh and has hopes of going to earth; the third from towards the end.

….His chief delight
Was hunting fox from noon to night.
His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
Where scent would hang like breath on glass).
He loved the English countryside:
The wine-leaved bramble in the ride,
The lichen on the apple-trees,
The poultry ranging on the lees,
The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover,
His wife’s green grave at Mitcheldover,
Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw.
Under his hide his heart was raw
With joy and pity of these things.

… the hunt gets underway….

The pure clean air came sweet to his lungs,
Till he thought foul scorn of those crying tongues,
In a three mile more he would reach the haven
In the Wan Dyke croaked on by the raven,
In a three mile more he would make his berth
On the hard cool floor of a Wan Dyke earth,
Too deep for spade, too curved for terrier,
With the pride of the race to make rest the merrier.
In a three mile more he would reach his dream,
So his game heart gulped and he put on steam.
Like a rocket shot to a ship ashore,
The lean red bolt of his body tore,
Like a ripple of wind running swift on grass,
Like a shadow on wheat when a cloud blows past,
Like a turn at the buoy in a cutter sailing,
When the bright green gleam lips white at the railing,
Like the April snake whipping back to sheath,
Like the gannet’s hurtle on fish beneath,
Like a kestrel chasing, like a sickle reaping,
Like all things swooping, like all things sweeping,
Like a hound for stay, like a stag for swift,
With his shadow beside like spinning drift.
Past the gibbet-stock all stuck with nails,
Where they hanged in chains what had hung at jails,
Past Ashmundshowe where Ashmund sleeps,
And none but the tumbling peewit weeps,
Past Curlew Calling, the gaunt grey corner
Where the curlew comes as a summer mourner,
Past Blowbury Beacon shaking his fleece,
Where all winds hurry and none brings peace,
Then down, on the mile-long green decline
Where the turf’s like spring and the air’s like wine,
Where the sweeping spurs of the downland spill
Into Wan Brook Valley and Wan Dyke Hill.

… alas for the tox, he finds the entrance to his earth has been barred. I still remember vividly the gasps of shock and howls of outrage from the class of rapt ten year olds when the headmistress delivered the line ‘The earth was stopped. It was barred with stakes’. But the fox runs on and if you don’t know or have forgotten what happens in the end, I won’t spoil it for you….

He thought as he ran of his old delight
In the wood in the moon in an April night,
His happy hunting, his winter loving,
The smells of things in the midnight roving;
The look of his dainty-nosing, red
Clean-felled dam with her footpad’s tread,
Of his sire, so swift, so game, so cunning
With craft in his brain and power of running,
Their fights of old when his teeth drew blood.
Now he was sick, with his coat all mud.

John Masefield


Week 426: The Oxen, by Thomas Hardy

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I’m posting a day early this week, and if it’s Christmas Eve it has to be that perennial Hardy favourite, ‘The Oxen’, and even though I imagine few of my readers will need reminding of it, for me its wistful poignancy still works every time. I do wonder, though, about the line ‘So fair a fancy few would weave/In these years!’. I would have thought that in Hardy’s day the weaving of fair fancies was still going strong. True, it was already some years since Darwin had presented his challenge to religious orthodoxy, and since Matthew Arnold had stood on Dover beach and heard the sea of faith receding, but had these intellectual currents really impinged that much as yet on popular belief?

Not that fair fancy is entirely dead even now. A year or two back, one frosty Christmas Eve with a moon rising, I met a neighbour’s small child who informed very earnestly that if I waited and watched the sky with her I might see Father Christmas and his reindeer flying across the face of the moon on their way to making their deliveries. What could I do but stand with her and look up, hoping it might be so…

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock,
‘Now they are all on their knees,’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come; see the oxen kneel

‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy

Week 425: From ‘The Almond Tree’, by Jon Stallworthy

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This is the last section of a longer poem, ‘The Almond Tree’, by Jon Stallworthy (1935-2014). The poem deals with the birth of a child who turns out to have Down Syndrome. Its inclusion here is a little problematic because, although it appears in the poem as first published, the poet then removed it on the grounds that he no longer felt comfortable with it, seeing it as ‘making explicit things that should have remained implicit’. I think that this is a pity – I feel that this section makes a touching coda to a poem that is diminished without it. A proper reticence is admirable, in poetry as in life, and yet it can be very moving when a poet steps out from behind a screen of symbol and metaphor and simply tells it straight. And if we are to concede a poet’s right to amend a poem after publication, then maybe we should also concede a reader’s right to prefer the original.

Note that the poet’s use of the now jarring term ‘mongol’ in the last stanza merely reflects standard nomenclature at the time the poem was written.

From ‘The Almond Tree’

You turn to the window for the first time.
I am called to the cot
To see your focus shift,
Take tendril-hold on a shaft
Of sun, explore its dusty surface. Climb
To an eye you cannot

meet. You have a sickness they cannot heal,
the doctors say: locked in
your body you will remain.
Well, I have been locked in mine.
We will tunnel each other out. You seal
the covenant with a grin.

In the days we have known one another,
my little mongol love,
I have learnt more from your lips
than you will from mine, perhaps.
I have learnt that to live is to suffer,
to suffer is to live.

Jon Stallworthy

Week 424: Years Ago, by Elizabeth Jennings

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One more on the theme of lost love, this time from the quietly effective Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), who favoured a poetry of plain statement charged with deep emotion that, when it works, I often find more appealing than much showier stuff.

Years Ago

It was what we did not do that I remember,
Places with no markers left by us,
All of a summer, meeting every day,
A memorable summer of hot days,
Day after day of them, evening after evening.
Sometimes we would laze

Upon the river-bank, just touching hands
Or stroking one another’s hands with grasses.
Swans floated by seeming to assert
Their dignity. But we too had our own
Decorum in the small-change of first love.

Nothing was elegiac or nostalgic,
We threw time in the river as we threw
Breadcrumbs to an inquisitive duck, and so
Day entered evening with a sweeping gesture,
Idly we talked of food and where to go.

This is the love that I knew long ago.
Before possession, passion and betrayal.

Elizabeth Jennings

Week 423: Summer Sun, by George Barker

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Continuing last week’s theme of lost love, this week something in a very different style by George Barker (1913-1991), a colourful character who was associated with a neo-romantic 1940s movement known as the New Apocalyptics. It’s not a group whose poetry I feel much affinity for, its diction too strained and artificial for my taste, and even this poem seems to me very uneven: I can’t be doing with fishlipped lovers kissing catastrophes, but I feel the fourth stanza in particular does achieve a memorable lyric quality. An influence on the group was Dylan Thomas, and one Dylan Thomas is, well, I won’t say more than enough, but I will say enough. And yet, despite the fact that the movement was supposedly in reaction against the poetry of the thirties, it seems to me that the echoes I detect here are much more those of Auden than of Dylan Thomas.

Summer Sun

I looked into my heart to write
And found a desert there.
But when I looked again I heard
Howling and proud in every word
The hyena despair.

Great summer sun, great summer sun,
All loss burns in trophies;
And in the cold sheet of the sky
Lifelong the fishlipped lovers lie
Kissing catastrophes.

O loving garden where I lay
When under the breasted tree
My son stood up behind my eyes
And groaned: Remember that the price
Is vinegar for me.

Great summer sun, great summer sun,
Turn back to the designer:
I would not be the one to start
The breaking day and the breaking heart
For all the grief in China.

My one, my one, my only love,
Hide, hide your face in a leaf,
And let the hot tear falling burn
The stupid heart that will not learn
The everywhere of grief.

Great summer sun, great summer sun,
Turn back to the never-never
Cloud-cuckoo, happy, far-off land
Where all the love is true love, and
True love goes on for ever.

George Barker