Tag Archives: poetry

Week 584: Ode To Billie Joe, by Bobby Gentry

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I take my poetry wherever I find it, and while I may not often find it in popular song, I do feel that this ballad by the American singer-songwriter Bobby Gentry, first released in 1967, with its claustrophobic atmosphere and slow oblique build of narrative tension, is a masterpiece of storytelling quite worthy to stand beside the great mediaeval ballads of illicit love and infanticide such as ‘Mary Hamilton’ and ‘Down By The Greenwood Side’.

For those unfamiliar with the song, it is the story of a young girl living in the Mississipi Delta in the southern U.S. who hears that her childhood friend Billy Joe has committed suicide by jumping of the Tallahatchie Bridge. Slowly we realise that she and Billy Joe have been lovers, that some social gap has made an open relationship impossible, that nonetheless she has become pregnant by Billy Joe, that she has delivered, or perhaps aborted, the child in secret, and that she and Billy Joe have together disposed of it by throwing it off that same bridge, leaving Billy Joe a guilt that he cannot live with. All this is conveyed very skilfully by hints and conversational exchanges, with nothing being made explicit.

I must at this point emphasise that this is my personal interpretation of the song, though I believe one shared by many other listeners. Bobby Gentry herself has consistently refused to give any clarification of the lyrics, especially in the matter of what was thrown off the bridge. She gives as her reason a wish for people to focus instead on the indifference of the supporting characters, the cultural lack of empathy, but I wonder if there is also an element of wanting to preserve the mystery, and also, maybe, of not wanting to commit to what seems to me by far the most compelling interpretation of the narrative on the grounds that it might be rather strong meat for a modern American audience.

Ode To Billy Joe

Was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay
And at dinnertime we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door y’all remember to wipe your feet
And then she said I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge
Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits please
There’s five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow
And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billie Joe MacAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn’t I talkin’ to him after church last Sunday night?
I’ll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don’t seem right
I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge
And now you tell me Billie Joe’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Mama said to me, Child, what’s happened to your appetite?
I’ve been cookin’ all mornin’ and you haven’t touched a single bite
That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today
Said he’d be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin’ off the Tallahatchie Bridge

A year has come and gone since we heard the news ’bout Billie Joe
And brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus goin’ ’round, Papa caught it and he died last spring
And now mama doesn’t seem to wanna do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin’ flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Bobby Gentry

Week 583: Skin, by Philip Larkin

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Philip Larkin, like his poetic hero Hardy, was much haunted by the passing of the years, so it seems appropriate to welcome in 2024, that will be my own 80th, with this poem that I have long admired for its typically Larkinesque combination of gloom redeemed by grace, and its skilfully sustained teasing out of an extended metaphor. Not that it offers any consolation either for the ageing process or for the lost opportunities of youth, but there it is: you don’t go to Larkin for comfort (think too of those bleak poems ‘Aubade’ and ‘The Old Fools’) but you do go for accomplishment and a certain face-the-facts courage. There may be resignation in the sentiment, but there is defiance in the artistry.

Skin

Obedient daily dress,
You cannot always keep
That unfakable young surface.
You must learn your lines –
Anger, amusement, sleep;
Those few forbidding signs

Of the continuous coarse
Sand-laden wind, time;
You must thicken, work loose
Into an old bag
Carrying a soiled name.
Parch then; be roughened; sag;

And pardon me, that I
Could find, when you were new,
No brash festivity
To wear you at, such as
Clothes are entitled to
Till the fashion changes.

Philip Larkin

Week 582: In A Country Church, by R.S.Thomas

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If I may continue the religious theme for one more week (well, it is Christmas) here is another of R.S.Thomas’s spare meditations. Note that as usual with Thomas there is no one else about in the church, and one begins to suspect that this is how he liked it. Which may be fair enough. Of course, Christianity has been from the start a very sociable sort of religion, featuring big outdoor parties for up to five thousand people (free fish sandwiches for all, bring a basket for leftovers) and weddings with copious amounts of wine on tap, so to speak. But just as I have always felt that the writing of true poetry demands a trancelike solitude that rules out anything communal, so maybe for the truly devout the doorway to their god is also a narrow one that no two can pass abreast.

The form of Thomas’s poems fascinates me.

Generally
I am not of that school who believe
that putting in a line break every few words
makes something into
a poem.

So why do I feel that these unrhymed, rather irregular lines, varying from seven to nine syllables, are very much a poem? Mainly, I suppose, because of their content and imagery, but also because of some invisible rhythmic scaffolding that gives structure no less, and perhaps more subtly, than a more regular metrical pattern. It’s intriguing.

In a Country Church

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

R.S.Thomas

Week 581: Carol, by John Short

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Whatever your views of Christianity, I think you have to give it credit for being the first religion, so far as I know, to put a baby centre stage, at least for part of the story, and thus to harness properly that instinct for the love and care of its young which is one of humanity’s more redeeming features. The Norse gods, for example, are far too busy fighting giants and getting ready for the end of the world to have any time for babyolatry, while appearances of babies in Greek myth tend to be rather disturbing: they are either being devoured by their father in case they grow up to overthrow him, getting cast into fires (admittedly with the best of intentions), being submerged in rivers (ditto), or, in the case of Heracles, being assailed by giant snakes slithering towards their cradle (relax: he’d been working out and simply strangled them).

The Nativity in contrast is one of the keystones of Christianity, and among the endless literary and artistic takes on it I like this quirky one by John Short (1911-1991). I’m afraid I know nothing about John Short beyond the fact that he wrote this poem and that it has been set to music – he seems to have largely slipped between the cracks as far as the Internet goes.

Note: Salford is a town in Greater Manchester, England, at one time last century a byword for slums and poverty. It is the ‘dirty old town’ of Ewan MacColl’s famous song.

Carol

There was a Boy bedded in bracken,
Like to a sleeping snake all curled he lay;
On his thin navel turned this spinning sphere,
Each feeble finger fetched seven suns away.
He was not dropped in good-for-lambing weather,
He took no suck when shook buds sung together,
But he is come in cold-as-workhouse weather,
Poor as a Salford child.

John Short

Week 580: Onion, from the Exeter Book

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I recently noticed that an AI search assistant tool had started popping up in my browser, inviting me, with an air of great confidence, to ask it anything, so I thought I’d give it a little test by setting it a riddle. I deliberately didn’t give Bing any clues as to the provenance (it’s from the Old English, Riddle 25 in the Exeter Book), and I used my own unpublished translation rather than anything it might find an exact match of online. The answer, as I am sure will be obvious to you, is ‘onion’. I find it rather touching to think of our distant ancestors, in those days before Netflix, sitting round exchanging riddles about vegetables. Ah, lad, we made our own entertainments in them days…

The exchange went as follows:

‘Hi Bing, I wonder if you can tell me the answer to this riddle:

‘I am a wondrous thing, I give joy to women,
A boon to those nearby; I do harm to none
That dwell in cities, save only to my slayer.
My shaft stands stiff and tall; I rise from a bed
That is shaggy beneath. At times a churl’s beautiful daughter,
A proud-minded maiden, will take me in her grasp,
Rub me to redness, raising up my head
As she holds me fast…. Soon she will feel
Our meeting, that curly-locked maid
Who holds me fast. The eye will be wet.’

Bing’s answer came back in a rather impressive five seconds:

‘Hi. I’m glad you enjoy riddles. This one is from the Exeter Book, a collection of Old English poetry from the 10th century. The most likely answer is onion, although some other possibilities have been suggested, such as hemp, leek, rosehip, mustard or phallus. The riddle plays on the double meaning of the description, which could refer to either a vegetable or a sexual organ. The last line implies that the eye of the person who peels the onion will be wet from tears. Did you guess it right?’

Well, well. I then tried the riddle on my wife, but she said ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about and I’m trying to get the dinner’. So I reckon that’s score one for AI, nought for humans. However, I then went on to test Bing’s appreciation of other poems, and it became clear that while AI is quite good at assembling bits of information already on the Net into a more or less coherent whole, it is quite clueless when asked to do anything that involves real creative understanding. Sample: ‘”Kerr’s Ass” is a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, an Irish poet. The poem, written in a colloquial and humorous style, describes the activities and behavior of a donkey owned by a man named Kerr.’ So maybe we poets needn’t step down just yet.

For those interested, here is the original Old English text:

‘Ic eom wunderlicu wiht, wifum on hyhte,
neahbuendum nyt; nængum sceþþe
burgsittendra, nymþe bonan anum.
Staþol min is steapheah, stonde ic on bedde,
neoþan ruh nathwær. Neþeð hwilum
ful cyrtenu ceorles dohtor,
modwlonc meowle, þæt heo on mec gripeð,
ræseð mec on reodne, reafað min heafod,
fegeð mec on fæsten. Feleþ sona
mines gemotes, seo þe mec nearwað,
wif wundenlocc. Wæt bið þæt eage.’

Week 579: From ‘The Dagger with Wings’, by G.K.Chesterton

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Walking last week in a cold frosty twilight under a full moon, I was reminded of this passage that concludes one of G.K.Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ stories, ‘The Dagger with Wings’. I must admit that just as I read Sherlock Holmes for the ambience and the characterisation rather than for the actual puzzles, so I read Father Brown stories for their descriptive passages rather than for their implausible solutions to improbable crimes. Chesterton’s prose does tend to the purple, but at its best has a luminous, otherworldly quality that encourages one to view the familiar with new eyes, using what Chesterton in his study of Charles Dickens calls the Mooreeffoc effect. This is based on an anecdote of Dickens in which Dickens describes seeing from the wrong side the words COFFEE ROOM painted on an oval glass plate, leading him to a realisation of how fantastic even the commonplace may appear when viewed at great distances of time and space, or simply from an unusual angle. Chesterton describes this as ‘the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact’, and certainly in that cold twilight it did suddenly for a moment seem strange to me, to be alive on a spinning globe in the void, walking under a great silver rock suspended in the sky.

From ‘The Dagger With Wings’

When the priest went forth again and set his face homeward, the cold had grown more intense and yet was somehow intoxicating. The trees stood up like silver candelabra of some incredible cold candlemas of purification. It was a piercing cold, like that silver sword of pure pain that once pierced the very heart of purity. But it was not a killing cold, save in the sense of seeming to kill all the mortal obstructions to our immortal and immeasurable vitality. The pale green sky of twilight, with one star like the star of Bethlehem, seemed by some strange contradiction to be a cavern of clarity. It was as if there could be a green furnace of cold which wakened all things to life like warmth, and that the deeper they went into those cold crystalline colours the more were they light like winged creatures and clear like coloured glass! It tingled with truth and it divided truth from error with a blade like ice; but all that was left had never felt so much alive. It was as if all joy were a jewel in the heart of an iceberg. The priest hardly understood his own mood as he advanced deeper and deeper into the green gloaming, drinking deeper and deeper draughts of that virginal vivacity of the air. Some forgotten muddle and morbidity seemed to be left behind, or wiped out as the snow had painted out the footprints of the man of blood. As he shuffled homewards through the snow, he muttered to himself: ‘And yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.’

G.K.Chesterton

Week 578: From ‘Myself after her death’, by Norman MacCaig

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This is the first section of a three-part elegy that the Scots poet Norman MacCaig wrote towards the end of his life in memory of his wife who died in 1990. In its understated yet poignant way it fuses the idea of the lost woman with images of the country that he has loved, such that the two hardly seem to be separable. Thus, when he speaks of being exiled from ‘my country’, does he mean from Scotland, with its glens and lochs, its mountains and valleys, or does he mean from the lost wife? Both, I would say, for when you lose a person you lose so much of what went with them and what you shared with them, the knowledge and the joy, and the savour goes out of those things. I am minded of Hardy’s poem that begins: ‘Why go to Saint-Juliot? What’s Juliot to me?’, and of Alphonse de Lamartine’s line: ‘Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé’ (‘You lose one person, and all is unpeopled’).

For more poems by Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) see weeks 180 and 407.

From ‘Myself after her death’

I’m exiled from what used to be
my country. It welcomed me
with gifts of peace and storms,
with heights of mountains
and altitudes of joy.

Not now.

No, says the wall, and I turn back.
No, says the mountain
and I sit sad in the valley
listening to the river that says
Trespasser, trespasser, trespasser.

I stubbornly say, All the same
it’s still beautiful.
And I know that’s true
but I know also
why it fails to recognise me.

Norman MacCaig

Week 577: Crossing alone the nighted ferry, by A.E.Housman

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Time for another of my favourite Housman poems, a heartfelt cry of unrequited and exploited love. I am particularly fond of the second stanza, which I was wont to quote to the women in my office when it was my turn to get the coffees again.

Lethe, of course, is one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld, the one whose waters induced forgetfulness. The others were Styx, Acheron, Cocytus and Phlegethon. The ‘one coin’ refers to the obol that was placed in the mouth of the deceased as a payment to Charon, who ferried the dead across the River Styx. Pronunciation note: it looks from the scansion as if Housman pronounced ‘coin’ as having one syllable. To me it has two, so I find I want to drop the ‘for’ after it. Still, it’s not my business to improve Housman…

Crossing alone the nighted ferry

Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee,
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me.

The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
The true sick-hearted slave
Expect him not in the just city
And free land of the grave.

A.E.Housman

Week 576: To A Conscript Of 1940, by Herbert Read

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One for Remembrance Day. Sir Herbert Edward Read (1893-1968) was best known as an art historian, but was also a poet and literary critic. He had served in the First World War, attaining the rank of captain, and won both the MC (Military Cross) and DSO (Distinghuished Service Order) for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’. This piece captures the mood of the poets at the outbreak of the Second World War, which was very different from the jingoistic enthusiasm that greeted the First, being more an acceptance of necessity, of the fact that sometimes good people must do bad things to stop bad people doing worse, all tempered by a weary disillusionment, memorably summed up in C. Day Lewis’s terse quatrain: ‘It is the logic of our times/No subject for immortal verse/That we who live by honest dreams/Defend the bad against the worse’. Of course, at the outset of the war the world had yet to realise just how much worse the worse could be.

To a Conscript of 1940

A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow,
His footsteps muffled, his face unearthly grey:
And my heart gave a sudden leap
As I gazed on a ghost of five-and-twenty years ago.

I shouted Halt! and my voice had the old accustom’d ring
And he obeyed it as it was obeyed
In the shrouded days when I too was one
Of an army of young men marching

Into the unknown. He turned towards me and I said:
‘I am one of those who went before you
Five-and-twenty years ago: one of the many who never returned,
Of the many who returned and yet were dead.

We went where you are going, into the rain and the mud:
We fought as you will fight
With death and darkness and despair;
We gave what you will give – our brains and our blood.

We think we gave in vain. The world was not renewed.
There was hope in the homestead and anger in the streets,
But the old world was restored and we returned
To the dreary field and workshop, and the immemorial feud

Of rich and poor. Our victory was our defeat.
Power was retained where power had been misused
And youth was left to sweep away
The ashes that the fires had strewn beneath our feet.

But one thing we learned: there is no glory in the deed
Until the soldier wears a badge of tarnish’d braid;
There are heroes who have heard the rally and have seen
The glitter of garland round their head.

Theirs is the hollow victory. They are deceived.
But you my brother and my ghost, if you can go
Knowing that there is no reward, no certain use
In all your sacrifice, then honour is reprieved.

To fight without hope is to fight with grace,
The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired.’
Then I turned with a smile, and he answered my salute
As he stood against the fretted hedge, which was like white lace.

Herbert Read

Week 575: Hallowe’en, by Violet Jacob

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One for Hallowe’en: a moving poem by Violet Jacob (1863–1946; see also week 16) inspired by the loss of her only son Harry, who died of wounds sustained at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Although about her son, I have seen it plausibly suggested that the words are to be imagined as spoken not by his mother but by a ploughman, lamenting the loss of his ‘bothy companion’, his ‘head horseman’, and taking no pleasure in the Hallowe’en festivities – the lights, the apple-bobbing, the costumes, the children going from house to house – that once they enjoyed together, as he sees only a new head horseman’s clothes chest next to the fire.

The poem has been set to music by Jim Reid and can be heard on YouTube covered by various artists, notably Karine Polwart/Sheena Wellington and Jean Ridpath.

The poem is written in the local vernacular of the Mearns of Fife; I have added a gloss of the less obvious words.

Hallowe’en

The tattie-liftin’s nearly through,                                  tattie: potato   
They’re ploughin’ whaur the barley grew,
  And aifter dark, roond ilka stack,                               ilka: every
  Ye’ll see the horsemen stand an’ crack                     crack: talk, gossip
O Lachlan, but I mind o’ you!

I mind foo often we hae seen                                      foo: full
Ten thoosand stars keek doon atween                        keek: peep
  The nakit branches, an’ below
  Baith fairm an’ bothie hae their show,
Alowe wi’ lichts o’ Hallowe’en.                                     alowe: alight

There’s bairns wi’ guizards at their tail                        guizards: people in costumes
Cloorin’ the doors wi’ runts o’ kail,                              runts o’ kail: cabbage-stalks
  And fine ye’ll hear the screichs an’ skirls
  O’ lassies wi’ their droukit curls                                 droukit: drenched
Bobbin’ for aipples i’ the pail.

The bothie fire is loupin’ het,                                       loupin’ het: leaping hot
A new heid horseman’s kist is set                               heid: head; kist: chest
  Richt’s o’ the lum; whaur by the blaze                      richt: right; lum: chimney
  The auld ane stude that kept yer claes—                 stude: stood
I canna thole to see it yet!                                          thole: bear, endure

But gin the auld fowks’ tales are richt
An ghaists come hame on Hallow nicht,                     ghaists: ghosts
  O freend o’ friends! what wad I gie
  To feel ye rax yer hand to me                                    rax: reach out
Atween the dark an’ caun’le licht?

Awa’ in France, across the wave,
The wee lichts burn on ilka grave,                              ilka: every
  An’ you an’ me their lowe hae seen—                       lowe: glow, gleam
  Ye’ll mebbe hae yer Hallowe’en
Yont, whaur ye’re lyin’ wi’ the lave.                             yont: yonder; lave: the others

There’s drink an’ daffin’, sang an’ dance                     daffing: playing the fool, frolicking
And ploys and kisses get their chance,                      ploys: courtship stratagems
  But Lachlan, man, the place I see
  Is whaur the auld kist used tae be
And the lichts o’ Hallowe’en in France!

Violet Jacob