Tag Archives: poetry

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

Week 574: My Old, by Alison Brackenbury

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Another poem by Alison Brackenbury (see also weeks 20 and 225), one of the contemporary poets whose work I find most congenial for its humanity and formal skill.

The Queen referred to in the second stanza is of course Queen Victoria, not the late Queen. As I have observed before, it is easy to forget just how far back the direct oral transmission of memories can take one – my own grandparents were born in the 1870s.

My Old

My old are gone; or quietly remain
thinking me a cousin from West Ham,
or kiss me, shyly, in my mother’s name.
(My parents seem to dwindle too; forget
Neat ending to a sentence they began,
Beginning of a journey; if not yet.)

Cards from village shops they sent to me
With postal orders they could not afford.
They pushed in roots of flowers, carelessly,
And yet they grew; they said a message came
To say the Queen was dead, that bells were heard.
My old are gone into the wastes of dream.

The snow froze hard, tramped down. Old footprints pit
Its smoothness, blackened footprints that I tread
That save me falling, though they do not fit
Exactly, stretching out beyond my sight.
My old are gone from name. They flare instead
Candles: that I do not have to light.

Alison Brackenbury

Week 573: The Confirmation, by Edwin Muir

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This week’s offering by the Orkney poet Edwin Muir, which I assume to be addressed to his wife Willa, herself a fine writer, seems to me an unusually moving and effective poem of married love, celebrating not the first flush of romance but something deeper and more durable: a spiritual companionship, and the uniqueness and preciousness of another human being.

The Confirmation

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that’s honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea,
Not beautiful or rare in every part,
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

Edwin Muir