Week 680: Requiem: The Soldier, by Humbert Wolfe

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Remembrance Sunday is on us again this weekend, and again a surprisingly large crowd from my village will be gathering round its memorial cross to hear the names of the fallen read out, so many from a place that at that time had scarcely four hundred inhabitants. So on that theme I have chosen as this week’s poem an elegy by the Italian-born British poet Humbert Wolfe (1851-1940). Wolfe had a big reputation between the wars and was even considered for Poet Laureate, but he seems to be little remembered today except for his mordant epigram on the British journalist:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

(As an aside, I was amused to come across an AI interpretation of these lines that took them for a straightforward tribute to the British journalist as being of impeccable integrity and needing no base incentive to strive for excellence. Which shows that AI has some way to go in detecting nuance. Unless, of course, it is developing a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour).

Wolfe, who worked as a civil servant, was a bit too close to the Establishment for my taste – I think myself that it is better for poets to maintain a polite distance from anything that might seek to press them into service. But I find that this poem, though possessing nothing like the power of Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, does have a certain quiet poignancy.

Requiem: The Soldier

Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together, slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.

They are speaking together of what they loved in vain here,
but the air is too thin to carry the things they say.
They were young and golden, but they came on pain here,
and their youth is age now, their gold is grey.

Yet their hearts are not changed, and they cry to one another,
‘What have they done with the lives we laid aside?
Are they young with our youth, gold with our gold, my brother?
Do they smile in the face of death, because we died?’

Down some cold field in a world uncharted
the young seek each other with questioning eyes.
They question each other, the young, the golden hearted,
of the world that they were robbed of in their quiet paradise.

Humbert Wolfe

Week 679: Silver, by Walter de la Mare

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This is one of the first poems I ever remember learning, other than nursery rhymes, and I find it still has a certain charm, though it does come with mixed emotions. It was presented to us in an art lesson at primary school, and we were told to create our own painting based on the poem, which indeed cries out for illustration. Sadly, I could only watch as the boy next to me produced a rather fine effort while I suffered the agonies of the totally inartistic, who may have a perfectly clear vision of things in their heads but are quite unable to render this in any drawn or painted form. In retrospect I might perhaps have tried to pass off my smeary mess as being in the modernist vein, but I was innocent of such a possibility back then, so must endure the teacher’s head-shaking disapproval as she, recognising a lost cause when she saw one, passed silently by. But I still like the poem for the way it captures the gleaming utter stillness of the moonlit night.

For a note on Walter de la Mare see week 105.

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
 
Walter de la Mare

Week 678: The River in March, by Ted Hughes

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A timely celebration of our sadly threatened rivers featuring a rich accumulation of images that in other hands might seem a little over the top but which Ted Hughes carries off by sheer brio.

The syntax of the last two lines is a bit elliptical, and I’m not clear if we’re talking about an actual salmon, leaping, or whether the salmon, the sow of solid silver, is the river itself, swollen with March rain and glittering in the spring sun, rising as if to behold the golden treasure of kingcups that it has bestowed on the land.

Either way the use of the word ‘sow’ here may seem odd, but it may or may not be relevant that historically a ‘silver pig’ was a hollowed out lead ingot filled with silver ore, as in the title of Lindsey Davis’s first Falco book set in ancient Rome and Roman Britain, ‘The Silver Pigs’.

The River in March

Now the river is rich, but her voice is low.
It is her Mighty Majesty the sea
Travelling among the villages incognito.

Now the river is poor. No song, just a thin mad whisper.
The winter floods have ruined her.
She squats between draggled banks, fingering her rags and rubbish.

And now the river is rich. A deep choir.
It is the lofty clouds, that work in heaven,
Going on their holiday to the sea.

The river is poor again. All her bones are showing.
Through a dry wig of bleached flotsam she peers up ashamed
From her slum of sticks.

Now the river is rich, collecting shawls and minerals.
Rain brought fatness, but she takes ninety-nine percent
Leaving the fields just one percent to survive on.

And now she is poor. Now she is East wind sick.
She huddles in holes and corners. The brassy sun gives her a headache.
She has lost all her fish. And she shivers.

But now once more she is rich. She is viewing her lands.
A hoard of king-cups spills from her folds, it blazes, it cannot be hidden.
A salmon, a sow of solid silver,

Bulges to see it.

Ted Hughes

Week 677: From ‘Tam Lin’, by Anon

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This week one of the greatest and most magical of the Scottish border ballads, Child 39. It’s quite long, so I give just the more dramatic second half; the whole is readily available online, though versions may differ. The plot is this: young Janet is forbidden by her father to go anywhere near Carterhaugh, which is the haunt of the notorious Tam Lin, a knight who has been abducted by the fairy court and who is known for seducing young maidens. Being a typical teenager she promptly hoists her skirt up a little above her knee (they wore them longer in those days) and scuttles off to Carterhaugh as fast as she can go, where she meets Tam Lin and predictably comes back pregnant. Scorning her father’s attempts to marry her off respectably to someone else, she goes back to Carterhaugh and tells Tam Lin that he’s going to be a daddy so what about it? Tam Lin says OK but first you have got to release me from the fairy spell, and that’s not going to be easy… This is where our extract begins.

I think one reason why this ballad still resonates so powerfully is that so many today face in their own way the prospect of holding fast to a loved one throughout a series of transformations, whether caused by age or illness or dementia, though sadly, unlike in the ballad, there is for them no happy ending in prospect.

The ballad has been covered by numerous folk artists, perhaps most notably by Fairport Convention on their seminal 1969 album ‘Liege and Lief’.

From ‘Tam Lin’

‘Just at the mirk and midnight hour
The elfin folk will ride
And they that would their true love win
At Miles Cross, they must bide.’

‘But how shall I thee ken, Tam Lin
And how shall I thee know?
Among so many unearthly knights
The like I never saw?’

‘Oh, first let by the black, black steed
And then let by the brown
But haste ye to the milk white steed
And pull the rider down

For I’ll be on the milk white steed
With a gold star in my crown
Because I was an earthly knight
They gave me that renown

And they will turn me in your arms
Into a beast so wild
But hold me fast and fear me not
I’m the father of your child

And they’ll change me in your arms
Into the red hot iron
But hold me fast and fear me not
I’ll do you no harm

They’ll turn me in your arms, my love
Into an awful snake
But hold me fast and fear me not
For I’m to be your mate

At last they’ll turn me in your arms
Into the melting lead
Then throw me into clear well water
And throw me in with speed

And then I’ll be your own true love
I’ll turn a naked knight
Cover me with your green mantle
And cover me out of sight

My right hand will be gloved, Janet,
My left hand will be bare
Cocked up shall my helmet be
No doubt I shall be there.’

Gloomy, gloomy was the night
And eerie was the way
When Janet in her green mantle
To Miles Cross she did gae

About the middle of the night
She heard the bridles ring
Janet was as glad of that
As any mortal thing

First went by the black, black steed
And then went by the brown
But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed
And pulled the rider down

And thunder rolled across the sky
And the stars they burned like day
And out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
Crying young Tam Lin’s away

They turned him to a bear so bold
Then to a lion wild
She held him fast and feared him not
He was the father of her child

And then they turned him in her arms
Into iron like hot fire
She held him fast and feared him not
He was her heart’s desire

They turned him, changed him in her arms
Into a hissing snake
She held him fast and feared him not
He was to be her mate

At last they turned him in her arms
Into the molten lead
She threw him into clear well water
And threw him in with speed

And then he turned a naked knight
She young Tam Lin did win
She covered him with her green mantle
As blithe’s a bird in spring

Out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
Out of a bush of broom
‘She that has gotten young Tamlin
Has gotten a stately groom’

Out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
And angry queen was she
‘Shame betide her ill-starred face
And an ill death may she die’

Out then spoke the Queen of Fairies
Out of a bush of rye
‘She has gotten the fairest knight
In all my company

If what I’d see this night, Tam Lin
Last night I’d understood
I’d have torn out thy two grey eyes
And put in two of wood

If what I see this night, Tam Lin
Last night I’d only known
I’d have taken out your heart of flesh
Put in a heart of stone

If I’d but half the wit yestreen
That I have bought today
I’d have paid my tithe seven times to Hell
E’er you’d been won away’

Anon

Week 676: A slumber did my spirit seal, by William Wordsworth

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The perennial force and freshness of this short poem, that first appeared in the 1798 collection ‘Lyrical Ballads’, reminds us of how William Wordsworth may have become a bit of a bore in his later years but once blew like a great gale through the decorous drawing-rooms of eighteenth-century verse.

The identity of the poem’s subject is not known. It is generally grouped with the four ‘Lucy’ poems, but that doesn’t get us very far because there is no agreement as to who Lucy was, if indeed she was any more than a literary device. Yet the poem’s very anonymity helps to make its truth more universal: that we find it hard, even impossible, to contemplate the death of our loved ones until one day, perhaps suddenly, they are no longer there.

A slumber did my spirit seal

A slumber did my spirit seal
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

William Wordsworth

I wonder, incidentally, if A.E.Housman had this poem in mind when he used a very similar conceit in his own beautiful lyric, ‘The night is freezing fast’:

‘The night is freezing fast,
Tomorrow comes December
And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
And chiefly I remember
How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
Prompt hand and headpiece clever
Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
His overcoat for ever
And wears the turning globe.’

Housman was certainly an admirer of Wordsworth, citing him in his famous 1933 Cambridge lecture ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ as one who spoke with the true voice of poetry, so it seems more than possible.

Week 675: Noth, by Ada Christen

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These rather tart quatrains by the Austrian writer Ada Christen (1839-1901) may be seen as a useful corrective to last week’s piece by Heine and also as a reflection of the way in which mid-nineteenth century German literature was reacting again the Romantic movement that had dominated the early part of the century and turning instead to a kind of social realism. Of course, poets will always be preoccupied with what Robert Frost called ‘inner weather’, but it does no harm for them to be reminded from time to time that most of the world’s population has its hands full dealing with outer weather.

The translation that follows is my own.

Noth

All euer girrendes Herzeleid
Tut lang nicht so weh,
Wie Winterkälte im dünnen Kleid,
Die bloßen Füße im Schnee.

All eure romantische Seelennot
Schafft nicht so herbe Pein,
Wie ohne Dach und ohne Brot
Sich betten auf einen Stein.

Ada Christen

Need

All your cooing heart’s distress
Lasts not so long a woe
As winter cold in threadbare dress
And bare feet in the snow.

And all your soul’s romantic need
Makes far less cause for moan
Than without roof and without bread
To couch upon a stone.

Week 674: Der Asra, by Heinrich Heine

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This famous poem by the German poet Heinrich Heine, dealing with the hopeless love of a slave for a sultan’s daughter, first appeared in print in 1846 and was subsequently included in his 1851 collection ‘Romanzero’. It draws its inspiration from a Persian story concerning a tribe for whom love between different social classes was strictly taboo, such that those involved were known for being driven to kill themselves. A growing interest in things oriental was characteristic of the time, and this particular theme, of dying for love, chimed in well with the preoccupations of the German romantic era (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 epistolary novel ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’ has a lot to answer for).

The translation that follows is my own.

Der Asra

Täglich ging die wunderschöne
Sultanstochter auf und nieder
Um die Abendzeit am Springbrunn,
Wo die weissen Wässer plätschern.

Täglich stand der junge Sklave
Um die Abendzeit am Springbrunn,
Wo die weissen Wässer plätschern.
Täglich ward er bleich und bleicher.

Eines Abends trat die Fürstin
Auf ihn zu mit raschen Worten:
‘Deinen Namen will ich wissen,
Deine Heimat, deine Sippschaft!’

Und der Sklave sprach: ‘Ich heisse
Mohamed, ich bin aus Yemen,
Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra,
Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.’

Heinrich Heine

The Asra

Daily walked the sultan’s daughter
In her beauty to and fro
By the fountain in the evening
Where the foam-white waters flow.

Daily watching stood the slave boy
Where the foam-white waters play
By the fountain in the evening,
Growing paler day by day.

Till one evening came the princess
With bold words and started in:
Saying ‘I would know your name,
The land you come from, and your kin!’

He answered: ‘I am called Mohammed,
I am a Yemeni, and I
Am of that tribe they call the Asra,
Those who, when they love, must die.’

Week 673: The Son, by Clifford Dyment

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Clifford Dyment (1914-1971) was only four years old when he lost his father in the First World War. This quietly effective piece commemorates him and all the others like him. It reminds us how great a rip war tears in the fabric of lives, not just of the soldiers themselves, but of those left behind. My own father was luckier than most: he was called up in the Second World War but was rated too short-sighted and flat-footed for active service, so was despatched to Minehead (‘guarding the western approaches’, as he wryly put it) where, to judge from a scrappy diary he kept that I found after his death, he seems to have spent the war weeding the officers’ gardens, playing cards, desperately missing his wife and two young daughters and being thoroughly bored. He came home unscathed, at least physically, but my mother once confided to me in her widowhood that things had never been quite the same between them after he returned: she had grown used to her independence and had realized that she could manage the household finances far better than my father ever had, and she was resentful when on return he demanded to take back control and promptly plunged the family into genteel poverty again. But at least, unlike Clifford Dyment’s father, he did come back.

The Son (1937)

I found the letter in a cardboard box,
Unfamous history. I read the words.
The ink was frail and brown, the paper dry
After so many years of being kept.
The letter was a soldier’s, from the Front—
Conveyed his love, and disappointed hope
Of getting leave. ‘It’s cancelled now,’ he wrote.
‘My luck is at the bottom of the sea.’

Outside, the sun was hot; the world looked bright;
I heard a radio, and someone laughed.
I did not sing, or laugh, or love the sun.
Within the quiet room I thought of him,
My father killed, and all the other men
Whose luck was at the bottom of the sea.

Clifford Dyment

Week 672: Welsh Incident, by Robert Graves

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One has to be careful these days with humour at the expense of ethnic minorities, but I hope that this week’s offering by Robert Graves can be seen for what it is, as a piece of affectionate teasing based on the idea that the Welsh have a certain tendency to prolixity and rhetorical vagueness. I have to say that this is not at all my own experience: it seems to me that Welsh poets and prose writers are perfectly capable of economical, coherent and lucid storytelling. I suppose that the classic Welsh story ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’, that forms part of the collection of tales known as the Mabinogion, could be seen as a bit long-winded with its roll-call of warriors assigned by Arthur to assist Culhwch in his quest for the hand of the giant’s daughter, but for some it would be a pity to lose a single one of those glimpses into a whole lost legendarium.

Anyway, to Graves’ irreverent, unjust but rather entertaining take on the matter…

Welsh Incident

‘But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.’
‘What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?’
‘Nothing at all of any things like that.’
‘What were they, then?’
                                      All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.’
‘Describe just one of them.’
                                          ‘I am unable.’
‘What were their colours?’
                                           Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you’d like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.’
                                ‘Tell me, had they legs?’
‘Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.’
‘But did these things come out in any order?’
What o’clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?’
‘I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thirty-seven shimmering instruments
Collecting for Caernarvon’s (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,
Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,
Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,
Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward
Silently at a snail’s pace. But at last
The most odd, indescribable thing of all
Which hardly one man there could see for wonder
Did something recognizably a something.’
‘Well, what?’
                   ‘It made a noise.’
                                              ‘A frightening noise?’
‘No, no.’
              ‘A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?’
‘No, but a very loud, respectable noise —
Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning
In Chapel, close before the second psalm.’
‘What did the mayor do?’
                                        ‘I was coming to that.’

Robert Graves

Week 671: Cosmologies, by David Sutton

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There is a famous passage in the writings of the physicist Richard Feynman in which he takes issue with poets for their perceived lack of engagement with the realities of science: ‘Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part…. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?’

This is characteristically eloquent, but also, I feel, a bit wrong-headed. I am sure that many poets are, as I am, deeply interested in the wondrous adventures of modern astronomy, but I don’t think Feynman had much understanding of the way poetic inspiration works. Real poems do not come about by poets sitting down and saying to themselves ‘Ah, time I wrote a poem about what Jupiter is really like’. It’s more a matter of having a voice in your head that suddenly says to you ‘Oi! You! Listen up…’ and what that voice says is unpredictable and depends on what, at the deepest level of your being, you are emotionally invested in. And fascinating though an immense sphere of methane and ammonia may be, it is quite hard to be emotionally invested in it. Or to put it another way, W.B.Yeats once said that out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. I think that is very true, and I find it difficult to see how Jupiter can form part of the quarrel with ourselves.

For what it’s worth, here’s one of my own poems on a cosmological theme, that nonetheless remains stubbornly rooted in the human. I don’t think Feynman would approve and yet, for better or worse, it’s what we project on to the universe that we relate to, not what the universe really is.

Cosmologies

‘If you could just keep going in a straight line’ –
Said my father, innocent of Einstein,
As we walked home one night of winter stars –
‘You’d come at last to somewhere where there was
Nothing at all. I mean, there has to be
A last star, and what then?’ This troubled me.
That night in bed I travelled in my mind
Through stars that whirled like snowflakes in the wind
Until I found, beyond one last faint glow,
A blank, like morning fog outside my window.
I woke and cried, but when my father came
To ask what ailed me, was it some old dream,
Sobbed ‘Nothing!’, so was left to sleep again
Like the blind Cyclops in his cave of pain.

Later I learned: my father had it wrong:
All lines bend back at last, however long.
There is no end to the great blizzard of light
I’d like to tell him now, and so I might
Had he not journeyed on, to somewhere far
Beyond all words of mine, and any star.

David Sutton