Week 132: Gone, by Carl Sandburg

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I don’t know how far Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) thought in terms of gender politics – probably as a poet he just loved the individuality of people and things. But certainly in this poem he manages to reconcile male yearnings with a respect for feminine independence to achieve a balance perhaps not always to be found in the poetry of the past.

Gone

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.
Far off
Everybody loved her.

So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold
On a dream she wants.
Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.
Nobody knows why she packed her trunk…
A few old things
And is gone,

Gone with her little chin
Thrust ahead of her
And her soft hair blowing careless
From under a wide hat,
Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.

Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?
Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts?
Everybody loved Chick Lorimer.
Nobody knows where she’s gone.

Carl Sandburg

Week 131: As I Walked Out One Evening, by W.H.Auden

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It is possible to be irritated at the wilful obscurity of much of the early Auden but still to acknowledge that he was at least trying to do something different, and then when it worked the results were sensational. Had anything been heard before in English poetry quite like this mordant blend of folksong and nursery rhyme, where the words seem to dance to a ghostly tune that one can never quite identify?

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

“I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.”

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you
You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver”s brilliant bow.

“O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With all your crooked heart.”

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

W.H.Auden

Week 130: The Haystack in the Floods, by William Morris

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If you have been led to think of William Morris only as an arty Victorian with an interest in patterned wallpaper it may come as a surprise to discover that he was also the writer of some powerful poems set in the Middle Ages notable for their unsentimental view of that grim period, such as this brutal tale of force majeure. 

The Haystack in the Floods

Had she come all the way for this,
To part at last without a kiss?
Yea, had she borne the dirt and rain
That her own eyes might see him slain
Beside the haystack in the floods?

Along the dripping leafless woods,
The stirrup touching either shoe,
She rode astride as troopers do;
With kirtle kilted to her knee,
To which the mud splash’d wretchedly;
And the wet dripp’d from every tree
Upon her head and heavy hair,
And on her eyelids broad and fair;
The tears and rain ran down her face.
By fits and starts they rode apace,
And very often was his place
Far off from her; he had to ride
Ahead, to see what might betide
When the roads cross’d; and sometimes, when
There rose a murmuring from his men
Had to turn back with promises;
Ah me! she had but little ease;
And often for pure doubt and dread
She sobb’d, made giddy in the head
By the swift riding; while, for cold,
Her slender fingers scarce could hold
The wet reins; yea, and scarcely, too,
She felt the foot within her shoe
Against the stirrup: all for this,
To part at last without a kiss
Beside the haystack in the floods.

For when they near’d that old soak’d hay,
They saw across the only way
That Judas, Godmar, and the three
Red running lions dismally
Grinn’d from his pennon, under which
In one straight line along the ditch,
They counted thirty heads.   So then
While Robert turn’d round to his men
She saw at once the wretched end,
And, stooping down, tried hard to rend
Her coif the wrong way from her head,
And hid her eyes; while Robert said:
‘Nay, love, ’tis scarcely two to one,
At Poictiers where we made them run
So fast–why, sweet my love, good cheer,
The Gascon frontier is so near.
Naught after this.’

But, ‘Oh!’ she said,
‘My God! my God! I have to tread
The long way back without you; then
The court at Paris; those six men;
The gratings of the Chatelet;
The swift Seine on some rainy day
Like this, and people standing by
And laughing, while my weak hands try
To recollect how strong men swim.
All this, or else a life with him,
For which I should be damned at last.
Would God that this next hour were past!’

He answer’d not, but cried his cry,
‘St. George for Marny!’ cheerily;
And laid his hand upon her rein.
Alas! no man of all his train
Gave back that cheery cry again;
And, while for rage his thumb beat fast
Upon his sword-hilts, some one cast
About his neck a kerchief long,
And bound him.

Then they went along
To Godmar; who said: ‘Now, Jehane,
Your lover’s life is on the wane
So fast, that, if this very hour
You yield not as my paramour,
He will not see the rain leave off–
Nay, keep your tongue from gibe or scoff,
Sir Robert, or I slay you now.’
She laid her hand upon her brow,
Then gazed upon the palm, as though
She thought her forehead bled, and–’No!’
She said, and turn’d her head away,
As there were nothing else to say,
And everything were settled: red
Grew Godmar’s face from chin to head:
‘Jehane, on yonder hill there stands
My castle, guarding well my lands:
What hinders me from taking you,
And doing that I list to do
To your fair wilful body, while
Your knight lies dead?’   A wicked smile
Wrinkled her face, her lips grew thin,
A long way out she thrust her chin:
‘You know that I would strangle you
While you were sleeping; or bite through
Your throat, by God’s help–ah!’ she said,
‘Lord Jesus, pity your poor maid!
For in such wise they hem me in,
I cannot choose but sin and sin,
Whatever happens: yet I think
They could not make me eat or drink,
And so should I just reach my rest.’
‘Nay, if you do not my behest,
O Jehane! though I love you well,’
Said Godmar, ‘would I fail to tell
All that I know?’ ‘Foul lies,’ she said.
‘Eh? lies, my Jehane? by God’s head,
At Paris folks would deem them true!
Do you know, Jehane, they cry for you:
‘Jehane the brown! Jehane the brown!
Give us Jehane to burn or drown!’–
Eh–gag me Robert!–sweet my friend,
This were indeed a piteous end
For those long fingers, and long feet,
And long neck, and smooth shoulders sweet;
An end that few men would forget
That saw it–So, an hour yet:
Consider, Jehane, which to take
Of life or death!’     So, scarce awake,
Dismounting, did she leave that place,
And totter some yards: with her face
Turn’d upward to the sky she lay,
Her head on a wet heap of hay,
And fell asleep: and while she slept,
And did not dream, the minutes crept
Round to the twelve again; but she,
Being waked at last, sigh’d quietly,
And strangely childlike came, and said:
‘I will not.’ Straightway Godmar’s head,
As though it hung on strong wires, turn’d
Most sharply round, and his face burn’d.
For Robert–both his eyes were dry,
He could not weep, but gloomily
He seem’d to watch the rain; yea, too,
His lips were firm; he tried once more
To touch her lips; she reach’d out, sore
And vain desire so tortured them,
The poor grey lips, and now the hem
Of his sleeve brush’d them.     With a start
Up Godmar rose, thrust them apart;
From Robert’s throat he loosed the bands
Of silk and mail; with empty hands
Held out, she stood and gazed, and saw
The long bright blade without a flaw
Glide out from Godmar’s sheath, his hand
In Robert’s hair, she saw him bend
Back Robert’s head; she saw him send
The thin steel down; the blow told well,
Right backward the knight Robert fell,
And moaned as dogs do, being half dead,
Unwitting, as I deem: so then
Godmar turn’d grinning to his men,
Who ran, some five or six, and beat
His head to pieces at their feet.
Then Godmar turn’d again and said:
‘So, Jehane, the first fitte is read!
Take note, my lady, that your way
Lies backward to the Chatelet!’
She shook her head and gazed awhile
At her cold hands with a rueful smile,
As though this thing had made her mad.

This was the parting that they had
Beside the haystack in the floods.

William Morris

Week 129: Where do they go?, by Douglas Dunn

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I imagine we have all had the experience of being mysteriously drawn to a face, perhaps only glimpsed in passing, as if it held something important to us, yet having no time to work out what that it is and being left only with a vague regret for what might have been. This poem by Douglas Dunn captures that experience with a wistful exactitude.

Where do they go?

Where do they go, the faces, the people seen
In glances and longed for, who smile back
Wondering where the next kiss is coming from?

They are seen suddenly, from the top decks of buses,
On railway platforms at the tea machine,
When the sleep of travelling makes us look for them.

A whiff of perfume, an eye, a hat, a shoe,
Bring back vague memories of names,
Thingummy, that bloke, what’s-her-name.

What great thing have I lost, that faces in a crowd
Should make me look at them for one I know,
What are faces that they must be looked for?

But there’s one face, seen only once,
A fragment of a crowd. I know enough of her,
That face makes me dissatisfied with myself.

Those we secretly love, who never know of us,
What happens to them? Only this is known,
They will never meet us suddenly in pleasant rooms.

Douglas Dunn

Week 128: The Coast: Norfolk, by Frances Cornford

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Frances Cornford (1886-1960) was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin now perhaps best remembered for her somewhat condescending poem ‘To A Fat Lady Seen from the Train’, which begins ‘O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,/Missing so much and so much?/O fat white woman whom nobody loves/Why do you walk through the fields in gloves’ and which aroused the ire of the redoubtable G.K.Chesterton who, himself inclined to corpulence, leapt to the stout lady’s defence with a poem that begins ‘Why do you rush through the field in trains,/Guessing so much and so much?/Why do you flash through the flowery meads,/Fat-head poet that nobody reads…’. This is all good fun, but a bit unfair to Frances who did write some fine lyrics including this favourite of mine, that seems to me a perfect evocation of the East Anglian landscape.

I suspect that the ‘finches on the telegraph’ were actually corn buntings, which love to sit on telegraph wires and were at that time classed with finches, but are now placed in a different family. But enough of the ornithological pedantry… 


The Coast: Norfolk

As on the highway’s quiet edge
He mows the grass beside the hedge,
The old man has for company
The distant, grey, salt-smelling sea,
A poppied field, a cow and calf,
The finches on the telegraph.

Across his faded back a hone,
He slowly, slowly scythes alone
In silence of the wind-soft air,
With ladies’ bedstraw everywhere,
With whitened corn, and tarry poles,
And far-off gulls like risen souls.

Frances Cornford

Week 127: From W.B. Yeats to his Friend Maud Gonne, by Jon Stallworthy

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I have tended to move in practical rather than literary circles and consequently have spent most of my life among people who regard poetry, if they think about it all, with intense suspicion: ‘Why can’t it say what it means?’. This has sometimes moved me to mild protest: ‘It does say what it means, it’s just that sometimes it means more than it says’. But really it does a poet no harm to be reminded from time to time that there is a world out there with concerns very different from his or her own, and I take wry comfort from the fact that if this poem by Jon Stallworthy is to be believed, I am in august company!

It is probably unnecessary to explain that W.B.Yeats nursed an unrequited passion for the political activist Maud Gonne, and made her the subject of some of his best poems, and that sometimes books used to be issued with their pages uncut, so that if you actually wanted to read them you had to get busy with a knife.

From W.B. Yeats to his Friend Maud Gonne

‘From W.B. Yeats to his friend Maud Gonne’.
The writing modest as the words upon
the title-page. Him I can understand;
picture him turning the pen in his hand
considering what to write: something not cold
nor yet embarrassingly overbold.
But in the gallery where my portraits are
I cannot see the heart that, set ajar
for anarchists and peasants and sick birds,
could not be crowbarred open by such words
as break the heart of time; that fountained out
in tears or laughter at a newsboy’s shout
– only to the poet remaining shut
as these clenched pages that she never cut.

Jon Stallworthy

Week 126: Elle avait pris ce pli, by Victor Hugo

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The French poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885) lost his beloved elder daughter Lėopoldine when she was only nineteen: she drowned along with her husband in a boating accident on the Seine. Hugo wrote many moving poems in her memory; this is one of them. The translation that follows is my own.

‘Elle avait pris ce pli…’

Elle avait pris ce pli dans son âge enfantin
De venir dans ma chambre un peu chaque matin;
Je l’attendais ainsi qu’un rayon qu’on espère;
Elle entrait, et disait: Bonjour, mon petit père;
Prenait ma plume, ouvrait mes livres, s’asseyait
Sur mon lit, dérangeait mes papiers, et riait,
Puis soudain s’en allait comme un oiseau qui passe.
Alors, je reprenais, la tête un peu moins lasse,
Mon oeuvre interrompue, et, tout en écrivant,
Parmi mes manuscrits je rencontrais souvent
Quelque arabesque folle et qu’elle avait tracée,
Et mainte page blanche entre ses mains froissée
Où, je ne sais comment, venaient mes plus doux vers.
Elle aimait Dieu, les fleurs, les astres, les prés verts,
Et c’était un esprit avant d’être une femme.
Son regard reflétait la clarté de son âme.
Elle me consultait sur tout à tous moments.
Oh! que de soirs d’hiver radieux et charmants
Passés à raisonner langue, histoire et grammaire,
Mes quatre enfants groupés sur mes genoux, leur mère
Tout près, quelques amis causant au coin du feu!
J’appelais cette vie être content de peu!
Et dire qu’elle est morte! Hélas! que Dieu m’assiste!
Je n’étais jamais gai quand je la sentais triste;
J’étais morne au milieu du bal le plus joyeux
Si j’avais, en partant, vu quelque ombre en ses yeux.

Victor Hugo

From her earliest years, this was her thing
To come into my room a while each morning.
I’d wait, as for a sunbeam to appear.
She’d march in, say ‘Good morning, little father’,
Sit down on my bed, take up my pen,
Open my books, muddle my papers, laughing,
Then like a bird of passage she’d be gone
And I, with clearer head, begin again
My interrupted work, often to find
Some zany arabesque she’d left behind
Among my manuscripts, a sketch she’d traced,
And then, blank pages that her hands had creased.
Somehow, my best lines fell between those folds.
She loved God, flowers, starry skies, green fields.
Before she was a woman, she was spirit
And from her clear eyes her bright soul shone out.
She quizzed me constantly, upon all things.
Ah, but the warm glow of those winter evenings
When we’d talk language, grammar, history,
Their mother near, four children at my knee,
A few friends by the hearth and much to say –
That was a life to which content came easy.
And now to think that she is dead! God help me,
For I, when she was sad, was never happy.
I took no joy in joyous balls and parties
If parting I’d seen shadow in her eyes.

Week 125: Elegy for Minor Poets, by Louis MacNeice

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It is probably not a good idea for poets to worry much about whether their poems are major or minor: far better to concentrate on just getting the damn things right and let posterity do the worrying. But I do like this rueful elegy by Louis MacNeice, which covers so many of the ways that things can go wrong for the many that are called as compared with the few that are chosen.

Elegy for Minor Poets

Who often found their way to pleasant meadows
Or maybe once to a peak, who saw the Promised Land,
Who took the correct three strides but tripped their hurdles,
Who had some prompter they barely could understand,
Who were too happy or sad, too soon or late,
I would praise these in company with the Great;

For if not in the same way, they fingered the same language
According to their lights. For them as for us
Chance was a coryphaeus who could be either
An angel or an ignis fatuus.
Let us keep our mind open, our fingers crossed;
Some who go dancing through dark bogs are lost.

Who were lost in many ways, through comfort, lack of knowledge,
Or between women’s breasts, who thought too little, too much,
Who were the world’s best talkers, in tone and rhythm
Superb, yet as writers lacked a sense of touch,
So either gave up or just went on and on–
Let us salute them now their chance is gone;

And give the benefit of the doubtful summer
To those who worshipped the sky but stayed indoors
Bound to a desk by conscience or by the spirit’s
Hayfever. From those office and study floors
Let the sun clamber on to the notebook, shine,
And fill in what they groped for between each line.

Who were too carefree or careful, who were too many
Though always few and alone, who went the pace
But ran in circles, who were lamed by fashion,
Who lived in the wrong time or the wrong place,
Who might have caught fire had only a spark occurred,
Who knew all the words but failed to achieve the Word–

Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,
Some of their names–not all–we learnt in school
But, life being short, we rarely read their poems,
Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,
While those opinions which rank them high are based
On a wish to be different or on lack of taste.

In spite of and because of which, we later
Suitors to their mistress (who, unlike them, stays young)
Do right to hang on the grave of each a trophy
Such as, if solvent, he would himself have hung
Above himself; these debtors preclude our scorn–
Did we not underwrite them when we were born?

Louis MacNeice

Week 124: Elegy of Fortinbras, by Zbigniew Herbert

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I much admire this original take on ‘Hamlet’ by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), in which he seems to come down firmly on the side of Fortinbras, Hamlet’s conqueror and the practical man of action, against the self-torturing introspective held up to us by Shakespeare as the hero. It is clear that for Herbert, a political activist who fought in the Polish resistance against the Nazis, the role of poet in no way excuses one from civic duty and civic action. Quite. And yet it is the unjust power of poetry that the words Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Hamlet continue to resonate with us rather more than the sewer projects and prison reforms that Herbert deploys to such beautifully bathetic effect in the last stanza. I am not sure that Herbert is as rueful about this –‘what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy’ – as, speaking in the character of Fortinbras, he makes out. For there is also in any poet a bit of Hamlet too…

The C.M. of the dedication is Herbert’s fellow Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), who also assisted in what seems to me (not that I know any Polish to judge) a remarkable piece of translation.

Elegy of Fortinbras

To C.M.

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums
drums I know nothing exquisite
those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by neck and shake it a bit

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

Zbigniew Herbert (tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

Week 123: No Answer, by Laurence Whistler

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Laurence Whistler (1912-2000) is best known as a glass engraver, but before that he was a poet of some accomplishment, as shown by this moving elegy for his first wife, the actress Jill Furse, who died in 1944, the same year in which his brother Rex was killed in Normandy. He wrote an account of his life with Jill in ‘The Initials in the Heart’, published in 1964. I find the closing lines of this poem particularly affecting.

No Answer

In the slow lapse of unrecorded afternoons
When nothing seems to change but history itself
Unfolding at the pace of clouds or even weeds
The window murmurs lightly to the vacant room
And seems as if it commented with mild surprise
On some arrival, timely or unique;
Slow by the rapid stream, perhaps, or quick in the slow skies.

Why does the window murmur – and to whom?
What notable event does it report
That’s far above the heads of furniture,
Nor heeded by the absent-minded room?

Is it first cuckoo-fall? – the double word
Dropping like seed into the wood, instant with spring?

Or is it rose-fall? – end of the first rose,
Spilled from the hand of Summer, pensively?

Perhaps first apple-fall? – scatter and thud,
And Autumn here that moment, cornucopia?

Or is it only the first snow-fall? – one,
One, and then one, slid furtive down, as if
Winter himself had thought the moment haunted?

Windows look out of rooms at poetry,
That pours back through them, lyrical in birds,
Epic in weather, narrative in streams.
But they look only out, half-conscious of a being
Shadowed behind them, borrowing their eyes.

O window, when you murmur, ‘Do but look!’
Don’t ask who listens now. Never enquire
Why soundlessness should grow into a habit,
Helpless and final as the dust.

Suppose

She may be resting yet in the great bed,
Tuned always to your accent, though her heart
Is listening miles away to mine. – Might she
Not lie so still? Never so long, so still?
Should there, long since, have come to you at least,
The flicking over of a page – at least
Her busy pencil, whispering word by word
The letter she would send – at very least
A sigh?

So would she sigh
In the dark ages of the afternoon,
When you would draw her to some poetry
(Fall of the word, the rose, the fruit, the fleeting crystal),
So would she sigh a war away – since tears,
If tears were let, would rain away the world:
Sigh in the great bed for its emptiness,
The waste of poetry, the waste of years.

Laurence Whistler