Week 212: Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers, by Harry Pynn/Hamish Henderson

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This poem is perhaps best known for having entered the folk tradition, where it is sung to the tune of ‘Lili Marlene’, but it is well able to stand on its own as a masterpiece of ironic invective. The background is that the Conservative MP Lady Astor is alleged to have referred to soldiers of the 8th Army, who were fighting in Italy, as ‘D-Day Dodgers’, since they were not to be involved in the action in Normandy (to be fair, she denied having said any such thing, but let’s not give her the benefit of the doubt…). Unfortunately for her this came to the notice of a certain Lance-Sergeant Harry Pynn of the Tank Rescue Section, 19 Army Fire Brigade, who was out in Italy with the 78th Infantry Division, and penned this response. The poem is also attributed to the Scots writer Hamish Henderson, but it may be that he merely collected various versions of it; I suspect, however, that Henderson, himself a notable poet of whom more one day, may well have honed the original somewhat. 

There are many variants on the words, and I have not been able to pin down the original text, so present what I think is the most trenchant version. In this we get four stanzas of withering sarcasm chronicling the bitter campaign fought by the Eighth Army as it made its way northward up Italy, followed by one stanza of good old-fashioned flyting, before the poem suddenly changes tone completely to finally demolish the lady’s assertion with a hauntingly elegiac last stanza. 

I am no social historian, but it is tempting to see in this poem much of the mood of that remarkable year, 1945, in which a public weary of patronage, deference and rhetoric unceremoniously dumped Churchill and his Tory government in favour of a new order. 

Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers

We’re the D-Day Dodgers, way off in Italy
Always on the vino, always on the spree;
Eighth Army scroungers and their tanks,
We live in Rome, among the Yanks.
We are the D-Day Dodgers, way out in Italy.

We landed in Salerno, a holiday with pay,
The Jerries brought the bands out to greet us on the way.
Showed us the sights and gave us tea,
We all sang songs, the beer was free
To welcome D-Day Dodgers to sunny Italy.

Naples and Cassino were taken in our stride,
We didn’t go to fight there, we went just for the ride.
Anzio and Sangro were just names,
We only went to look for dames,
The artful D-Day Dodgers, way out in Italy.

On our way to Florence we had a lovely time.
We ran a bus to Rimini right through the Gothic Line.
On to  Bologna we did go,
Then we all had a paddle in the Po.
For we are the D-Day Dodgers, out here in Italy.

Dear Lady Astor, you think you know a lot,
Standing on a platform, talking tommyrot.
You’re England’s sweetheart and her pride.
We think your mouth’s too bleeding wide.
That’s from your D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy.

Look around the mountains, in the mud and rain,
You’ll find the scattered crosses, there’s some that have no name.
Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone,
The boys beneath them slumber on.
They are the D-Day Dodgers who stay in Italy.

Harry Pynn/Hamish Henderson/folk tradition

Week 211: The Long Small Room, by Edward Thomas

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The beautiful particularity of this poem should not blind us to the fact that its closing stanzas are bleak as anything Edward Thomas ever wrote. Thomas’s long-running battle with literary hackwork and depression is well-chronicled, and probably the reaction of many will be ‘Join the club, mate’ – after all, most of us, unless we are unusually lucky in our vocation, are doomed to spend the best part of our lives in a place we don’t particularly want to be doing things we don’t particularly want to do. But Thomas, through a combination of temperament and domestic circumstances, did perhaps genuinely suffer more than most. The poem makes an interesting comparison with Philip Larkin’s famous anti-work diatribe ‘Toads’, but set beside Thomas’s existential angst Larkin’s seems no more than a cheery grumble: as a librarian he was after all doing something he clearly took some pride in and which presumably offered a measure of financial security, and by all accounts he seems to have got on rather well with his secretaries. Thomas worked alone for a pittance, and knew himself wasted.

The Long Small Room

The long small room that showed willows in the west
Narrowed up to the end the fireplace filled,
Although not wide. I liked it. No one guessed
What need or accident made them so build.

Only the moon, the mouse and the sparrow peeped
In from the ivy round the casement thick.
Of all they saw and heard there they shall keep
The tale for the old ivy and older brick.

When I look back I am like moon, sparrow, and mouse
That witnessed what they could never understand
Or alter or prevent in the dark house.
One thing remains the same – this my right hand

Crawling crab-like over the clean white page,
Resting awhile each morning on the pillow,
Then once more starting to crawl on towards age.
The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow.

Edward Thomas

Week 210: There’s a certain Slant of light, by Emily Dickinson

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I find this piece haunting, the more so because it is one of those poems that seem to give up their full meaning only slowly over the course of a lifetime. For me it is about those mysterious moments of alertness that we probably all have, those intimations of some platonic parallel world that trouble us with a sense of lost chances, of a realm where not only do things go better for us but we ourselves are better. It is linked in my mind, and not just by reason of the ‘cathedral tunes’ simile, with one of my all-time favourite pieces of music, Vaughan Williams’s ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’. When I listen to that I know exactly what ‘heavenly hurt’ is, and what ‘imperial affliction’ can be sent us of the air. And yet, while the poem may speak of hurt, and of a despair for the fading of the vision which is like a small death, there is a kind of uplift about it as well. For it is no small part of our humanity, that at least we are vulnerable to these intimations of the better, that we have our place in that landscape that listens, among those silent shadows.

There’s a certain Slant of light

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

Emily Dickinson

Week 209: From ‘The Aimer Gate’, by Alan Garner

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In my opinion Alan Garner, though still perhaps best known for his early children’s books, is one of the most interesting English writers of the last century in any genre (and happily still going). True, he needs working at and his books do not give up their secrets easily: I see them as a kind of elf-shot, slowly working their way under the skin to lodge in the heart. For me his most perfect achievement is ‘The Stone Book Quartet’, written in a spare prose with a layered concentration of meaning that any poet might be proud of, and of that quartet ‘The Aimer Gate’ is the most haunting and beautifully realised, with its rural First World War setting, seen through the eyes of boy whose uncle is home on leave from the trenches. In this scene, where rabbits are scared out of the last square of corn at the end of harvest, we realise what the benign Uncle Charlie’s trade is, and get a hint of what it costs him. 

Uncle Charlie didn’t answer. He was on his heel, chewing a straw of stubble and looking at the standing corn. His face had gone different. It was thinner, and Robert couldn’t tell what was in the eyes. He spat the straw out and drank from a flask he carried in his pocket, enough to wet his mouth, no more.

Uncle Charlie stood up. He took the rifle. ‘Get aback of me’, he said

. ….

‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! Wo-o-o-o! ‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! Wo-o-o-o!’ The men and boys yelled the cry. They yelled and yelled and clapped their hands and waved their caps and banged sticks together. ‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! Wo-o-o-o!’ The noise was tremendous.

Uncle Charlie didn’t move. But through the noise came another, a scream, a squeal, and, in terror, rabbits broke out of the last standing corn. All day they had worked inwards from the scythes, and now they ran. Uncle Charlie watched. Over the field, between the kivvers, dodging, driven by noise, the rabbits went, and their screaming pierced all noise.

Uncle Charlie swung the rifle to his shoulder, turning on his hips. He fired. The sound of the rifle deadened Robert’s ears. Left. Left. Right. Left. ‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! Wo-o-o-o!’ Right.

One rabbit was going up hill, in line with the men. Uncle Charlie watched it go until it climbed above them. The rabbit was at the top cornerpost of the field when he shot it.

The others got away. Their squealing stopped when they reached the bracken of the wood.

And Saint Philip’s church was still black, and there were no shadows.

Ozzie Leah shouted ‘Good lad, Sniper!’

Robert looked at Uncle Charlie. The face was no different. ‘When there’s too many’, said Uncle Charlie’, ‘you can’t tell them from poppies.. They’re all alike the same, you see’

. ……

They sat by the heap of road flint stone and gutted the rabbits. Uncle Charlie lifted his eyes to look at the work he had done, at the harvest got.

‘That’s my trade, Dick-Richard’, said Uncle Charlie. ‘I stop rabbits skriking. There’s me craft, and there’s my masterness’

Alan Garner

Note: a kivver is six sheaves of corn in a stack.

Week 208: From ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’ by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, tr. John Montague

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These are just the closing lines of a remarkable eighteenth-century Irish elegy, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, written by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill to lament the death of her husband Art, murdered in County Cork in 1773 at the hands of a British official with whom he had quarrelled. Much of the poem takes the form of a debate between wife and sister in which Art’s vitality and generosity of spirit are celebrated, producing a sense of loss that reminds me of Lorca’s great lament for the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: there is also the same sense of a sophisticated literary intellect harnessing the power of a great oral tradition.

From ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’

Until Art O’Leary comes again
This sorrow won’t lift
That lies across my heart
Like a tightly-locked trunk
With rust on the hasps
And the key thrown away.

So stop your weeping now
Women of the soft wet eyes
And drink to Art O’Leary
Before he enters the grave school
Not to study wisdom and song
But to carry earth and stone.

Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill  (tr. John Montague)

Week 207: The End of the Owls, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

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This poem by the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger (born 1929) may seem very much of its time with its Cold War imagery, but is surely just as relevant today: if the natural world appears to have become less threatened now by swift execution in the form of a nuclear Armageddon, it is only to face instead the slow death of a thousand cuts. I suppose you can call it progress.

I give the poem in its exceptionally fine English translation by Jerome Rothenberg.

The End Of The Owls

I speak for none of your kind,
I speak for the end of the owls.
I speak for the flounder and whale
in their unlighted house,
for the seven cornered sea,
for the glaciers
they will have calved too soon,
raven and dove, feathery witnesses,
for all those that dwell in the sky
and the woods, and the lichen in gravel,
for those without paths, for the colorless bog
and the desolate mountains.
Glaring on radar screens,
interpreted one final time
around the briefing table, fingered
to death by antennas, Florida’s swamps
and the Siberian ice, beast
and bush and basalt strangled
by early bird, ringed
by the latest maneuvers, helpless
under the hovering fireballs,
in the ticking of crises.
We’re as good as forgotten.
Don’t fuss with the orphans,
just empty your mind
of its longing for nest eggs,
glory or psalms that won’t rust.
I speak for none of you now,
all you plotters of perfect crimes,
not for me, not for anyone.
I speak for those who can’t speak,
for the deaf and dumb witnesses
for otters and seals,
for the ancient owls of the earth.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger (translated By Jerome Rothenberg)

Week 206: Hurt Hawks(ii) by Robinson Jeffers

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Apologies for lateness this week; just got back from holiday. Too tired after long drive to muster up anything approaching a perspicacious preamble, but am trusting that this fine piece by the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) will speak for itself anyway.

Hurt Hawks (ii)

I’d sooner, except for the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left him but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under the talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Robinson Jeffers

Week 205: An Ancient To Ancients, by Thomas Hardy

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At first sight one is tempted by its sprightly tone and dancing measure to take this as one of Hardy’s lighter poems, like the morbidly cheerful ‘Voices From Things Growing In A Churchyard’. Yet really it has such a blend of pathos, nostalgia and defiance that it can well stand as a valediction not just to the poet’s own life but to the life of a whole age. And I wonder if this was the last time when our society had a sufficient cultural unity to make such a poem possible – it is hard to imagine an equivalent leave-taking being written now.

An Ancient to Ancients 

Where once we danced, where once we sang,
Gentlemen,
The floors are sunken, cobwebs hang,
And cracks creep; worms have fed upon
The doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then
Than now, with harps and tabrets gone,
Gentlemen!

Where once we rowed, where once we sailed,
Gentlemen,
And damsels took the tiller, veiled
Against too strong a stare (God wot
Their fancy, then or anywhen!)
Upon that shore we are clean forgot,
Gentlemen!

We have lost somewhat of that, afar and near,
Gentlemen,
The thinning of our ranks each year
Affords a hint we are nigh undone,
That shall not be ever again
The marked of many, loved of one,
Gentlemen.

In dance the polka hit our wish,
Gentlemen,
The paced quadrille, the spry schottische,
‘Sir Roger’–And in opera spheres
The ‘Girl’ (the famed ‘Bohemian’),
And ‘Trovatore’ held the ears,
Gentlemen.

This season’s paintings do not please,
Gentlemen
Like Etty, Mulready, Maclise;
Throbbing romance had waned and wanned;
No wizard wields the witching pen
Of Bulwer, Scott, Dumas, and Sand,
Gentlemen.

The bower we shrined to Tennyson,
Gentlemen,
Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon
Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,
The spider is sole denizen;
Even she who voiced those rhymes is dust,
Gentlemen!

We who met sunrise sanguine-souled,
Gentlemen,
Are wearing weary. We are old;
These younger press; we feel our rout
Is imminent to Aides’ den,–
That evening shades are stretching out,
Gentlemen!

And yet, though ours be failing frames,
Gentlemen,
So were some others’ history names,
Who trod their track light-limbered and fast
As these youth, and not alien
From enterprise, to their long last,
Gentlemen.

Sophocles, Plato, Socrates,
Gentlemen,
Pythagoras, Thucydides,
Herodotus, and Homer, –yea,
Clement, Augustin, Origen,
Burnt brightlier towards their setting-day,
Gentlemen.

And ye, red-lipped and smooth-browed; list,
Gentlemen;
Much is there waits you we have missed;
Much lore we leave you worth the knowing,
Much, much has lain outside our ken;
Nay, rush not: time serves: we are going,
Gentlemen. 

Thomas Hardy

Week 204: El Aghir, by Norman Cameron

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I think that what captivates me about this deceptively relaxed, almost throwaway poem with its casual half-rhymes is the intense physicality of its vision and its celebration of water; I know of few poems where that taken for granted substance has such a living presence.

El Aghir

Sprawled on the bags and crates in the rear of the truck,
I was gummy-mouthed from the sun and the dust of the track;
And the two Arab soldiers I’d taken on as hitch-hikers
At a torrid petrol-dump, had been there on their hunkers
Since early morning. I said, in a kind of French
‘On m’a dit, qu’il y a une belle source d’eau fraiche.
Plus loin, a El Aghir.’ It was eighty more kilometres.

Until round a corner we heard a splashing of waters,
And there, in a green, dark street, was a fountain with two facets,
Discharging both ways, from full-throated faucets,
Into basins, thence into troughs and thence into brooks.
Our Negro corporal driver slammed his brakes,
And we yelped and leapt from the truck and went at the double
To fill our bidons and bottles and drink and dabble.
Then, swollen with water, we went to an inn for wine.
The Arabs came, too, though their faith might have stood between.
‘After all,’ they said, ‘it’s a boisson,’ without contrition.

Green, green is El Aghir. It has a railway station,
And the wealth of its soil has borne many another fruit,
A mairie, a school and an elegant Salle de Fetes.
Such blessings, as I remarked, in effect, to the waiter,
Are added unto them that have plenty of water.

Norman Cameron (1905-1953)

Week 203: Carmen 8, by Catullus

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This is one of the best-known poems of the Latin poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – 34 B.C.), written after the final break-up of his relationship with Lesbia, the name that he gave to his mistress, who is generally identified with Clodia Metelli, the wife of a Roman proconsul. Clodia appears to have been somewhat indiscriminate with her favours, and the relationship had been a stormy one. In this poem Catullus struggles to free himself of her spell, admonishing himself in a series of wild mood-swings. 

Such translations of the poem I have seen seem compelled, in deference to some notion of classical diction, to be rather prim and passionless. But this is not a prim and passionless poem: it is alive with the anguish of rejection and wavering resolve, it has, despite all the centuries that separate us, that raw immediacy of a speaking voice that one finds in Wyatt and Donne. Translation is a tricky business and one’s first duty must always be to the sense, but sometimes the more literal the less faithful; in my own translation that follows I have tried to find a balance between letter and spirit.

Carmen 8

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.
Fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,
cum ventitabas quo puella ducebat
amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.
Ibi illa multa cum iocosa fiebant,
quae tu volebas nec puella nolebat,
fulsere vere candidi tibi soles.
Nunc iam illa non vult: tu quoque impotens noli,
nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser vive,
sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.
Vale puella, iam Catullus obdurat,
nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam.
At tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla.
Scelesta, vae te, quae tibi manet vita?
Quis nunc te adibit? cui videberis bella?
Quem nunc amabis? Cuius esse diceris?
Quem basiabis? Cui labella mordebis?
At tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.

Catullus

Catullus, you poor fool, stop faffing about
And face the facts: she’s gone, the one you loved
More than any girl will ever be loved.
How bright the sun shone for you once, when she
Would lead and you would follow her whenever
Even to that place of many pleasures
That you desired, and she did not deny.
Indeed, the sun shone brightly for you then
And now, she does not want you. So, you too,
Left with no other power, learn not to want:
Don’t follow one who runs away, don’t live
A lovesick fool: man up, man, and endure.
Goodbye then, girl – Catullus is enduring –
He will not miss you, will not ask for you
Since you are loth. Let it be your turn, bitch,
To grieve when none desire you. For who now
Will come to you and call you beautiful?
Whom you will you love? Whose will they say you are?
Whom will you kiss? What lips now will you nibble?
Only, Catullus, stay strong and endure.