Week 122: If You Should Go To Caistor Town, by Charles Causley

Posted on by
Reply

Time for another poem from the excellent Charles Causley, this time showing his almost unique gift for inhabiting the ballad/folksong form and making it his own while retaining all the qualities of the tradition.

If You Should Go To Caistor Town

If you should go to Caistor town,
Where my true love has gone,
Ask her why she went away
And left me here alone.

She said the Caistor sky was blue,
The wind was never cold,
The pavements were all made of pearl,
The young were never old.

Never a word she told me more
But when the year was fled
Upon a bed of brightest earth
She laid her gentle head.

When I went up to Caistor
My suit was made of black,
And all her words like summer birds
Upon the air came back.

O when I went to Caistor
With ice the sky was sown,
And all the streets were chill and grey
And they were made of stone.

Charles Causley

Week 121: ‘Alas! Poor Queen’ by Marion Angus

Posted on by
Reply

It is difficult to know how far this lament for Mary, Queen of Scots by the Scottish poet Marion Angus (1865-1946) gives an accurate portrait of the unfortunate queen: one suspects that she was rather more than an innocent butterfly broken on the wheels of power, just as one suspects that Thomas Cromwell was rather less humane than the portrayal of him in the current TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ suggests. But since we can’t at this remove know for sure, we might as well take a fine poem, as well as some unusually intelligent TV, at face value and enjoy them.

Alas! Poor Queen

She was skilled in music and the dance
And the old arts of love
At the court of the poisoned rose
And the perfumed glove,
And gave her beautiful hand
To the pale Dauphin
A triple crown to win –
And she loved little dogs
And parrots
And red-legged partridges
And the golden fishes of the Duc de Guise
And a pigeon with a blue ruff
She had from Monsieur d’Elboeuf.

Master John Knox was no friend to her;
She spoke him soft and kind,
Her honeyed words were Satan’s lure
The unwary soul to bind.
‘Good sir, doth a lissome shape
And a comely face
Offend your God His Grace
Whose Wisdom maketh these
Golden fishes of the Duc de Guise?’

She rode through Liddesdale with a song:
‘Ye streams sae wondrous strang,
Oh, mak’ me a wrack as I come back
But spare me as I gang.’
While a hill-bird cried and cried
Like a spirit lost
By the grey storm-wind tost.

Consider the way she had to go,
Think of the hungry snare,
The net she herself had woven,
Aware or unaware,
Of the dancing feet grown still,
The blinded eyes –
Queens should be cold and wise,
And she loved little things,
Parrots
And red-legged partridges
And the golden fishes of the Duc de Guise
And the pigeon with the blue ruff
She had from Monsieur d’Elboeuf.

Marion Angus

Week 120: From ‘Dream Song 90’, by John Berryman

Posted on by
Reply

I have never known quite what to make of John Berryman. He belongs to that confessional school of twentieth-century American poets of whom one sometimes feels that both their lives and their poems might have gone better had they been less interested in themselves and more interested in the world around them. Yet Berryman’s voice, in his persona as the Henry of ‘Dream Songs’, can be memorable and moving, especially, I find, in his elegies for various friends and fellow-poets, such as these lines for Randall Jarrell from ‘Dream Song 90’.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing
cannot restore one instant’s good to, rest:
he’s left us now.
The panic died, and in the panic’s dying
so did my old friend. I am headed west
also, also, somehow.

In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again.
I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat
and all will be as before
whenas we sought, among the beloved faces,
eminence and were dissatisfied with that
and needed more.

John Berryman

Week 119: After Trinity, by John Meade Falkner

Posted on by
Reply

I suppose that in matters of religion I am best described as agnostic, though that is really too definite a label: an agnostic believes that some things are unknowable in principle and I have no idea whether those things are unknowable in principle or not: I only know that I don’t myself know them, and that it would be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise. This doesn’t stop me having some respect for religion in so far as it involves good people getting together to do good things, and in particular being grateful to the C. of E. for providing beautiful ancient buildings up and down the country which, as long as you avoid Sundays, are ideal for a spot of quiet reflection. And also for inspiring a lot of fine music and poetry. Like this piece by John Meade Falkner (1858-1932), perhaps best known as the author of the smuggler’s tale ‘Moonfleet’, but also a poet and onetime Librarian to Durham Cathedral. It is a poem which fuses the Church calendar with the English year in a celebration that may appeal even to those like me who have to look up when Trinity actually is (it seems to move about: this year it’s May 31st).

After Trinity

We have done with dogma and divinity,
Easter and Whitsun past,
The long, long Sundays after Trinity,
Are with us at last;
The passionless Sundays after Trinity,
Neither feast-day nor fast.

Christmas comes with plenty,
Lent spreads out its pall,
But these are five and twenty,
The longest Sundays of all;
The placid Sundays after Trinity,
Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.

Spring with its burst is over,
Summer has had its day,
The scented grasses and clover
Are cut, and dried into hay;
The singing-birds are silent,
And the swallows flown away.

Post pugnam pausa fiet;
Lord, we have made our choice;
In the stillness of autumn quiet,
We have heard the still, small voice.
We have sung Oh where shall Wisdom?
Thick paper, folio, Boyce.

Let it not all be sadness,
Not omnia vanitas,
Stir up a little gladness
To lighten the Tibi cras;
Send us that little summer,
That comes with Martinmas.

When still the cloudlet dapples
The windless cobalt blue,
And the scent of gathered apples
Fills all the store-rooms through,
The gossamer silvers the bramble,
The lawns are gemmed with dew.

An end of tombstone Latinity,
Stir up sober mirth,
Twenty-fifth after Trinity,
Kneel with the listening earth,
Behind the Advent trumpets
They are singing Emmanuel’s birth.

John Meade Falkner

Week 118: From ‘Ghost Voice’, by Roy Fuller

Posted on by
Reply

These honest, rueful lines by the English poet Roy Fuller (1912-1991) turn on the idea that the natural condition of human love is one of an unquestioning domestic familiarity, that what the dead would like to come home to is not fanfares and celebrations, but simply their old state of being taken for granted. If they only could come home….

From ‘Ghost Voice’

Why do we return? Not in the darkened rooms
Of rattling tambourines and butter muslin,
But as you boil an egg or make the bed
You hear us and answer: ‘Darling?’.

Yes, that’s our wish, after all, whatever ancient
Boredom or intervening cause of unwelcome
Would face us, for our presence once again
To be taken all for granted.

We don’t come in actuality, alas!
For we’re in a place that even cosmologists,
Speculating on collapsed stars and anti-matter
Couldn’t find more alien.

Roy Fuller

Week 117: From ‘King Lear’, Act V, Scene 3, by William Shakespeare

Posted on by
Reply

I once attended an open-air performance of ‘King Lear’, and very good it was too on a darkening summer evening against a backdrop of ruins. The only problem was that this being a small company there was some doubling up of roles, and the same female actor played both Cordelia and the Fool. This clearly confused two old ladies sitting in front of me, who, going along with the Shakespearean convention that any change of costume serves as an impenetrable disguise, not unnaturally assumed that the Fool actually was Cordelia, come back to keep an eye on her old dad just as Kent had come back in disguise to serve his master and Edgar to assist Gloucester. I don’t think this is quite what Shakespeare intended – let’s face it, most ideas about Shakespeare are probably not what Shakespeare intended – but there is certainly a case to be made for the Fool as Cordelia’s alter ego, both radiating the same dangerous innocence. It seemed particularly appropriate that these final lines of reconciliation between Lear and his daughter should have coincided with the last light from the west, before the play ended in death and darkness.

  • Edmund. Some officers take them away. Good guard
    Until their greater pleasures first be known
    That are to censure them.
  • Cordelia. We are not the first
    Who with best meaning have incurr’d the worst.
    For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
    Myself could else outfrown false Fortune’s frown.
    Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?
  • Lear. No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
    We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
    When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
    And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
    And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
    At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
    Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too –
     Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out –
     And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
    As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
    In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
    That ebb and flow by th’ moon.

Week 116: Bilberries, by Eric Millward

Posted on by
1

This tender poem brings back fond memories of picking berries (blackberries rather than bilberries) with my own small daughter. (I particularly remember how she would put one rather squashed berry into the bowl, take out half a dozen and eat them, then say proudly ‘I are being a helpy girl, aren’t I?’). It is one of those poems that snatch a precious and perhaps never-to be-repeated moment out of time and preserve it in an amber of loving observation.

Bilberries

We have been picking bilberries over an hour.
Your small hand opens, closes: a preying flower.
Warm shadows deepen into greys and blues,
hiding in caches those we didn’t choose
or didn’t see. All of the world is still
except ourselves, upon this glowing hill.
Whatever moved here earlier lies low,
waiting for us to pick our fill and go,
when, watched by them, the patient, the bright-eyed,
we shall go down the bountiful hillside.
But for an hour we lord it over eyes
that watch us covertly, with some surprise,
for hills hold nothing quite like me and you,
stooping and picking till our hands are blue.

Eric Millward

Week 115: On A Poet, by James Reeves

Posted on by
Reply

I think the E.B. of this poem must be Edmund Blunden, as the initials fit, the dates fit (except that Blunden actually died in January 1974, not 1973) and Blunden was a friend of Reeves. The only problem is that Blunden was actually quite well recognised as a poet in his lifetime, assuming that the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry, election to the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, and commemoration on a stone in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey count as recognition.‘By most neglected’, therefore, may be a bit of an overstatement and one can’t help wondering if the poem is more an expression of Reeves’s own relatively unrewarded devotion to his craft.

The Queen of Elfland’s sometimes inconvenient gift to Thomas was, of course, a tongue that was incapable of lying: see ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, Child Ballad no. 37.

On a Poet

E.B. 1896 – 1973

Having no Celtic bombast in his blood,
Nor dipsomaniac rage, nor very much
To give his time of what his time expected,
He saw his Muse, slight thing, by most neglected.

She was no exhibitionist, and he,
With only the Queen of Elfland’s gift to Thomas,
Could not afford to school her in the taste
For stolen gauds and ornaments of paste.

When he is dead and his best phrases stored
With Clare’s and Hardy’s in the book of gold,
She with her unpresuming Saxon grace
In the Queen’s retinue will take her place.

James Reeves

Week 114: Vision By Sweetwater, by John Crowe Ransom

Posted on by
5

I have long found this poem enchanting but also just a little annoying. I like to understand a poem as thoroughly as I can, and get frustrated when that understanding seems to require some private key that I don’t have. And this one, after its beautiful opening stanzas, appears to tail off into a slightly wilful irresolution. ‘Where have I seen before, against the wind, These bright virgins…?’. I don’t know, mate, where have you seen them before? And what’s with the scream?

I have seen it suggested that the allusion is to the story of Susannah and the Elders in the apocryphal addition to the Book of Daniel, but if that’s really what Ransom had in mind, I can only say that the parallel between two voyeuristic old men hiding in the bushes to watch a woman bathing and the awakening of a young boy to his first romantic perception of womanhood does not seem a particularly happy one. But I’ll forgive all for the willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass and the steep turn of Sweetwater.

Later: one suggestion I have had is that the boy is startled out of his daydreaming by one of the girls, who has ‘been adventuring with delicate paces’, falling into the steep-banked stream, hence the sudden cry.

Vision By Sweetwater

Go and ask Robin to bring the girls over
To Sweetwater, said my Aunt; and that was why
It was like a dream of ladies, sweeping by
The willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass and river.

Robin’s sisters and my Aunt’s lily daughter
Laughed and talked and tinkled light as wrens
If there were a little colony all hens
To go walking by the steep turn of Sweetwater.

Let them alone, dear Aunt, just for one minute
While I go fishing in the dark of my mind:
Where have I seen before, against the wind,
These bright virgins, robed and bare of bonnet,

Flowing with music of their strange quick tongue
And adventuring with delicate paces by the stream,
Myself a child, old suddenly at the scream
From one of the white throats which it hid among?

John Crowe Ransom

Week 113: The Death of Lancelot, by Sir Thomas Malory

Posted on by
3

You have to feel sorry for King Arthur. He starts off in the earliest matter of Britain, the now sadly fragmented Celtic sources, as a true legendary hero in his own right, leading a band of extraordinary warriors on quests to hunt monstrous boars, as in ‘Culhwch and Olwen’, or to steal magical cauldrons from the Otherworld, as in the poem ‘Preiddeu Annwfn’ that can still give one a shiver of the mysterious: ‘’Three times the fullness of Prydwen we went in…None but seven ever came back from Caer Rigor’. Then along comes Lancelot and not only cuckolds him but nicks all the best lines. Disapproving Dante might have been, but it was still Lancelot and Guinevere, not Arthur, who inspired one of the most beautiful passages in the ‘Inferno’, and despite the title of his work, ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’, it’s Lancelot who gets the great send-off from Sir Thomas Malory….

The Death of Lancelot

AND when Sir Ector heard such noise and light in the quire of Joyous Gard, he alighted and put his horse from him, and came into the quire, and there he saw men sing and weep. And all they knew Sir Ector, but he knew not them. Then went Sir Bors unto Sir Ector, and told him how there lay his brother, Sir Launcelot, dead; and then Sir Ector threw his shield, sword, and helm from him. And when he beheld Sir Launcelot’s visage, he fell down in a swoon. And when he waked it were hard any tongue to tell the doleful complaints that he made for his brother. Ah Launcelot, he said, thou were head of all Christian knights, and now I dare say, said Sir Ector, thou Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight’s hand. And thou were the courteoust knight that ever bare shield. And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse. And thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman. And thou were the kindest man that ever struck with sword. And thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights. And thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest. Then there was weeping and dolour out of measure.

Sir Thomas Malory