Tag Archives: poetry

Week 561: Epic, by Patrick Kavanagh

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Another poem in which we see Patrick Kavanagh wryly doubting but then triumphantly reasserting the validity of his own experience, which he feared might seem parochial and even humdrum in its attachment to rural Ireland, but transfigured by the poetic imagination could still convey essential things about the human condition. The closing sentence ‘Gods make their own importance’ would perhaps make more sense, in the context of the poem, if it read ‘Poets make their own importance’, and I’m not sure if Kavanagh is modestly backing away from such a claim or, less modestly, equating poets with gods. (If the latter, bagsy Hermes – those winged sandals are just so cool.)

‘rood’: an old land measurement of about a quarter of an acre, so ‘half a rood of rock’ means the dispute concerned a stony plot of land about the size of a couple of standard allotments.

‘march’: here used in the sense of a border or boundary, often, as here, one of disputed ownership; cf. the Welsh Marches.

‘the Munich bother’: I take this to refer to the Munich agreement of 1938, when the then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain brought back from a meeting with Hitler what was supposed to be a guarantee of ‘peace in our time’; next year, of course, the Second World War broke out.

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones.’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 560: The Heron, by Vernon Watkins

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Vernon Watkins (1906-1957; see also weeks 96 and 450) was a modern symbolist, heavily influenced by W.B.Yeats, and I think it is fairly obvious that the heron in this poem is intended to represent the poet, doing his best to fix his attention on the transcendental as represented by light and water even while ‘calamity about him cries’. The ‘calamity’ in this case probably reflects the tumults of the last mid-century (the poem first appeared in a 1954 collection), though Watkins did have five children, and having had four myself I like to think it may also reflect the difficulties of trying to follow one’s poetic vocation in a household full of other people whose priorities in life are not necessarily the writing of poems.

Of course, Watkins was not the first to use a bird as the symbol for a poet. We have Robert Frost’s fine poem ‘The Oven Bird’ (see week 214), and then there is Baudelaire’s ‘L’Albatros’, that uses the albatross to characterise the poet, so graceful when aloft, so awkward and vulnerable when brought to earth. I think Baudelaire’s poem has the edge as far as a reality check goes in that it does not impose upon the bird anything not in its nature and behaviour, whereas in the case of the Watkins poem while we admittedly do not know what goes in the mind of a heron, I would guess that a rapt contemplation of light and water takes a back seat to wondering where the next fish is coming from. Still, Watkins’s poem has some beautiful touches – I particularly like ‘cloud-backed’ – and I think stands as one of his best.

The Heron

The cloud-backed heron will not move:
He stares into the stream.
He stands unfaltering while the gulls
And oyster-catchers scream.
He does not hear, he cannot see
The great white horses of the sea,
But fixes eyes on stillness
Below their flying team.

How long will he remain, how long
Have the grey woods been green?
The sky and the reflected sky,
Their glass he has not seen,
But silent as a speck of sand
Interpreting the sea and land,
His fall pulls down the fabric
Of all that windy scene.

Sailing with clouds and woods behind,
Pausing in leisured flight,
He stepped, alighting on a stone,
Dropped from the stars of night.
He stood there unconcerned with day,
Deaf to the tumult of the bay,
Watching a stone in water,
A fish’s hidden light.

Sharp rocks drive back the breaking waves,
Confusing sea with air.
Bundles of spray blown mountain-high
Have left the shingle bare.
A shipwrecked anchor wedged by rocks,
Loosed by the thundering equinox,
Divides the herded waters,
The stallion and his mare.

Yet no distraction breaks the watch
Of that time-killing bird.
He stands unmoving on the stone;
Since dawn he has not stirred.
Calamity about him cries,
But he has fixed his golden eyes
On water’s crooked tablet,
On light’s reflected word.

Vernon Watkins

Week 559: For Anne Gregory, by W.B.Yeats

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This is one of W.B.Yeats’s lighter pieces. I think it has a characteristic charm, though I confess I have never looked at it in quite the same way since reading Anne Gregory’s own recollections of the poem, which according to your point of view are either very funny or rather sad. Evidently the young Anne, the granddaughter of Yeats’s friend Lady Gregory, was summoned before the great man by her grandma with the words ‘Mr Yeats has written a poem for you and is going to recite it to you’. ‘I was petrified. I had no idea he was going to write a poem for me. I was in agony. I was nearly in tears for fear of doing something silly.’ She dutifully listened as Yeats delivered the poem in his weird singsong way, then stuttered ‘Wonderful, thank you so much, I must go and wash my hair’ and made her escape. She added afterwards that she had never liked the colour of her hair anyway.

I feel for you, William. I remember one of my children coming home complaining that they had had to read in class one of my own poems from a school anthology and it was like, you know, totally embarrassing…

For Anne Gregory

‘Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

‘But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’

‘I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

W.B.Yeats

Week 558: From ‘The Dancers’, by Ivor Gurney

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Another of Ivor Gurney’s short poems (see also weeks 24 and 249), slightly eccentric in their diction but with a tenacious individuality. Gurney, a lifelong sufferer from a bipolar disorder no doubt exacerbated by his experiences in the Great War, spent the last fifteen years of his life in psychiatric hospitals. ‘The Dancers’ is a late poem, written while he was institutionalized, and shows the poet clinging like a swimmer to a spar of driftwood to the memory of some rural scene from his beloved Gloucestershire countryside. While in hospital Ivor was visited several times by Helen Thomas, widow of the poet Edward Thomas, whose work he much loved and some of whose poems he had set to music. Helen would bring with her Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire countryside and united in their separate griefs they would spend the time together tracing out with their fingers footpaths and byways that Edward had walked on, with Gurney, himself a great walker in happier times, remembering every step of the way. [See Helen Thomas, Ivor Gurney — The War Poets Gallery for Helen’s moving account of these meetings].

The poem actually continues for seven more rather incoherent lines, which I’ve cut: the full text can be found in P.J.Kavanagh’s excellent edition of his ‘Collected Poems’.

From ‘The Dancers’

The dancers danced in a quiet meadow.
It was winter, the soft light lit in clouds
Of growing morning – their feet on the firm
Hillside sounded like a baker’s business
Heard from the yard of his beamy barn-grange.
One piped, and the measured irregular riddle
Of the dance ran onward in tangling threads…
A thing of the village, centuries old in charm.

Ivor Gurney

Week 557: A Shropshire Lad, by John Betjeman

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Whatever one thinks of John Betjeman, and I do feel that he may have been a little overpraised as part of an understandable backlash against the obscurantist excesses of modernism, you have to admit that he wrote the kind of poems that no one else wrote, and that is always a good start. Indeed, I would be hard put myself to say exactly what kind of poem this one is. Comic? Mock heroic? With something of the old music-halls about it? (For some reason I seem to hear it in my head being recited in a sort of ‘Albert and the Lion’ voice). Whatever the case, I like its jaunty quirkiness, though the tale of the real Matthew Webb (1848-1883), who in 1875 became the first man to swim the English Channel with no artifical aids, was a rather sad one. He tried hard to capitalise on the fame accrued from his channel-crossing feat, competing in endurance swimming championships and giving various aquatic exhibitions, but he swam a sedate breast-stroke and there was a limit to how long people wanted to watch him doing rather slow lengths in public baths for hours on end. Finally he was driven to attempt the fairly impossible feat of swimming the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls. His body was never found. As a pathetic footnote, his wife Madeline never did accept that so strong a swimmer could have simply drowned, and looked for his return for years after.

Note: Webb was born at Dawley, now part of Telford, in Shropshire, and learned to swim in the River Severn at Coalbrookdale. The title, of course, is a nod to A.E.Housman’s first collection of poems.

A Shropshire Lad
 
The gas was on in the Institute,
The flare was up in the gym,
A man was running a mineral line,
A lass was singing a hymn,
When Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Came swimming along the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley.
Swimming along –
Swimming along –
Swimming along from Severn,
And paying a call at Dawley Bank while swimming along to Heaven.

The sun shone low on the railway line
And over the bricks and stacks
And in at the upstairs windows
Of the Dawley houses’ backs
When we saw the ghost of Captain Webb,
Webb in a water sheeting,
Come dripping along in a bathing dress
To the Saturday evening meeting.
Dripping along –
Dripping along –
To the Congregational Hall;
Dripping and still he rose over the sill and faded away in a wall.

There wasn’t a man in Oakengates
That hadn’t got hold of the tale,
And over the valley in Ironbridge,
And round by Coalbrookdale,
How Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Rose rigid and dead from the old canal
That carries the bricks to Lawley.
Rigid and dead –
Rigid and dead –
To the Saturday congregation,
Paying a call at Dawley Bank on the way to his destination.

John Betjeman

Week 556: The Man Who Married Magdalene, by Louis Simpson

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Another piece from American poet Louis Simpson (1923-2012), a man whom Seamus Heaney called a ‘touchstone for poetry’. I think this is a slighter piece than his great ballad ‘Carentan O Carentan’ (see week 36), but it shows the same mastery of form and flow.

Mary Magdalene appears in the New Testament as a devoted follower of Jesus. The idea that she was a reformed prostitute seems to have been a later invention, the result of a mistaken identification with another Mary made by Pope Gregory in 591. In 1969 Pope Paul VI backtracked on this identification, acknowledging that Pope Gregory had, well, erred, and in 2016 Pope Francis, perhaps by way of apology, awarded her liturgical memory on the Catholic calendar a free upgrade from ‘memorial’ to ‘feast’, but the idea of her as a classic example of the repentant sinner persists in popular culture and this is what the poem runs with.

The Man Who Married Magdalene

The man who married Magdalene
Had not forgiven her.
God might pardon every sin …
Love is no pardoner.

Her hands were hollow, pale, and blue,
Her mouth like watered wine.
He watched to see if she were true
And waited for a sign.

It was old harlotry, he guessed,
That drained her strength away,
So gladly for the dark she dressed,
So sadly for the day.

Their quarrels made her dull and weak
And soon a man might fit
A penny in the hollow cheek
And never notice it.

At last, as they exhausted slept,
Death granted the divorce,
And nakedly the woman leapt
Upon that narrow horse.

But when he woke and woke alone
He wept and would deny
The loose behavior of the bone
And the immodest thigh.

Louis Simpson

Week 555: From ‘Hákonarmál’, by Eyvindr Finnsson

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It’s quite a while since we had a bit of Old Norse (see week 54). I would have liked to present extracts from the ‘Völuspá’, that wonderful poem from the Elder Edda that tells of the Doom of the Gods, but the text is rather difficult and I suppose that these days it would need to carry a trigger warning: ‘This poem contains information about the end of the world that some may find upsetting, especially those with a phobia about being devoured by a giant wolf’.

The stanzas that precede these closing ones contain many ‘kennings’, often quite elaborate circumlocutory terms for poetic objects or personages, simpler examples being ‘raven-feeder’ for ‘warrior’ or ‘wave-steed’ for ‘ship’. These can seem rather affected to the modern reader, who on the whole may prefer a spade to be called a spade rather than, say, ‘cleaver of the earth-mother’s flesh’ (I made that one up: in practice kennings were reserved for a fairly limited set of referenda and were unlikely to be bestowed on a humble spade). But these three closing stanzas are simpler, with no mythological baggage except the Fenrir reference. It is probably unnecessary to explain this, but just in case… Fenrir was a monstrous wolf, sired by the trickster god Loki on the giantess Angrboða. The other gods grew fearful of him as he grew and tricked him into letting himself be bound with an enchanted dwarf-wrought chain, at the cost of the war-god Tyr’s right hand which Fenrir bit off when he could not get free. But at the end of days the wolf will finally get loose and take his revenge by killing the leader of the gods Óðinn, only to be killed in turn by Óðin’s son Viðarr.

The translation that follows is my own; I’ve tried to capture the spirit of the piece rather than give a literal crib, which would be difficult anyway because the word order in skaldic poetry is so flexible.

From ‘Hákonarmál’

Góðu dœgri
verðr sá gramr of borinn,
es sér getr slíkan sefa.
Hans aldar
mun æ vesa
at góðu getit.

Mun óbundinn
á ýta sjöt
Fenrisulfr of fara,
áðr jafngóðr
á auða tröð
konungmaðr komi.

Deyr fé,
deyja frændr,
eyðisk land ok láð.
Síz Hákon fór
með heiðin goð,
mörg es þjóð of þéuð.

From ‘The Song of Hákon’

It will be a good day
If ever there comes
Such a great-souled lord
With a heart like his.
Forever his times
Shall be told on earth
While men speak of his might.

Fenrir the Wolf
Shall fall unbound
On the fields of men
Before there comes
To stand in his stead
So kingly a man
As good again.

Cattle die,
Kinsmen die,
Waste is laid to land.
Since Hákon fared
To the heathen gods
Sad is the fate
Of a folk forlorn.

Week 553: Pike, by Ted Hughes

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I am of an age to have read each of Ted Hughes’s various volumes of poetry as they came out, and consequently suffered/enjoyed the same rollercoaster ride that many of his fans must have done, though possibly with different ups and downs according to taste. ‘The Hawk In The Rain’ – hm, interesting, need to keep an eye on this one. ‘Lupercal’ – even more interesting, with some definite wows in there. ‘Wodwo’ – a bit odd but still interesting. ‘Crow’ – yuk, how disappointing, not my cup of tea at all. ‘Gaudete’, now this is just plain weird but then ‘Moortown’ – ah, that’s more like it, bang on, especially the first section, and so on through the years with quite a few strange byways but never a dull moment.

So this week, then, one of those first definite wow poems from that second collection, ‘Lupercal’, one that showcases Hughes’s unrivalled power of empathetic identification with the otherness of the natural world and his ability to express the fear and fascination that this evokes.

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads –
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them –
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb –

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks –
The same iron in this eye
Through its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them –

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.

Ted Hughes

Week 552: My Youngest Son Came Home Today, by Eric Bogle

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More evidence that it is still possible to write powerful contemporary folksongs, and like ‘There Were Roses’ (see week 521) this one too, by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eric Bogle (born 1944) has its genesis in the Irish Troubles. Note how the young man is not identified in sectarian terms; I suppose the reference to sainthood in the second stanza might lead one to assume that he is Catholic, since I have a vague idea that Protestants aren’t so much into the saint thing, but that would be to miss the point.

The song, with its stately dirgelike tune, has been covered by various artists: I know it best through the performance of the Irish singer Mary Black.

My Youngest Son Came Home Today

My youngest son came home today.
His friends marched with him all the way.
The pipes and drums beat out the time
As in his box of polished pine
Like dead meat on a butcher’s tray
My youngest son came home today.

My youngest son was a fine young man
With a wife, a daughter and two sons.
A man he would have lived and died
Till by a bullet sanctified
Now he’s a saint, or so they say.
They brought their saint home today.

Above the narrow Belfast streets
An Irish sky looks down and weeps
On children’s blood in gutters spilled
In dreams of freedom unfulfilled
As part of freedom’s price to pay
My youngest son came home today.

My youngest son came home today.
His friends marched with him all the way.
The pipes and drums beat out the time
As in his box of polished pine
Like dead meat on a butcher’s tray
My youngest son came home today.

And this time he’s home to stay.

Eric Bogle

Week 551: From ‘The Knight’s Tale’, by Geoffrey Chaucer

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I tend not to think of Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) as a lyric poet, but more as a kind of story-teller in verse whose strengths lay in narrative and characterisation but who rarely achieved, or even tried for, that concentrated essence of language one looks for in lyric poetry. Yet there is this passage from the end of ‘The Knight’s Tale’, where the dying Arcite speaks a farewell to his love Emily. I suppose it is standard enough stuff for the time, but there are two lines in it that I find quite haunting: ‘But I biquethe the servyce of my ghost/To yow aboven every creature.’ Possibly this too was a standard conceit, as a better mediaeval scholar than I might know, and yet, asking myself why I should find them so affecting, I realise it is because they express for me something quintessential about the craft we practise, about that state of grace that poets, who tend by nature to be selfish or at least  self-preoccupied creatures, may nonetheless enter when, desiring nothing except to be of use, they offer the service of their spirit to something beloved, something beyond themselves.

I don’t know how much ‘The Canterbury Tales’ are read for pleasure these days. A pity if not: the language, once you get accustomed to the antique spelling, is far more straightforward than, say, a good deal of Shakespeare. You do need to do a bit of cherry picking though – some of the tales, like Chaucer’s own, are definite duds; others, like ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, have a bit too much mediaeval baggage. I think ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ makes a good sampling point: this is the one where three men, having heard that one of their comrades has died, set out to kill that ‘privee theef men clepeth Deeth/That in this contree al the people sleeth’. It does not end well for them.

From ‘The Knight’s Tale’

Thanne seyde he thus, as ye shal after heere:
‘Naught may the woful spirit in myn herte
Declare o point of alle my sorwes smerte
To yow, my lady, that I love moost.
But I biquethe the servyce of my ghost
To yow aboven every creature.
Syn that my lyf may no lenger dure,
Allas, the wo! Allas, the peynes stronge,
That I for yow have suffred, and so longe!
Allas, the deeth! Allas, myn Emelye!
Allas, departynge of our compaignye!
Allas, myn hertes queene! allas, my wyf!
Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf!
What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, withouten any compaignye.
Fare-wel, my swete foo, myn Emelye!’

Geoffrey Chaucer