I think Richard Fariña’s ‘Birmingham Sunday’ is one of the most quietly effective of all protest songs. It doesn’t rant or chant, and by comparison that great anthem of the sixties, ‘We Shall Overcome’, might have its heart in the right place but is a bit short on specifics. This song simply tells the story of four young girls, killed when members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, chiselling their names into the memory: Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). Its melody comes from the traditional Scottish ballad, ‘I Once Loved A Lass’.

I first heard the song soon after its composition, sung by Joan Baez on the first (and for some time only) record that I owned. More recently, Tom Paxton and Anne Hills have done a version, but it is still Joan’s young beautiful voice that I hear in my head, as I heard it first on a sunlit autumn morning in 1964, playing it over and over in my student room above the ‘Eagle’ yard in Cambridge.

Birmingham Sunday

Come round by my side and I’ll sing you a song
I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong
On Birmingham Sunday, the blood ran like wine
And the choirs kept singing of freedom

That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one
At an old Baptist church, there was no need to run
And the choirs kept singing of freedom.

The clouds they were gray and the autumn wind blew
And Denise McNair brought the number to two
The falcon of Death was a creature they knew
And the choirs kept singing of freedom

The church it was crowded but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley’s dark number was three
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me
And the choirs kept singing of freedom.

Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four
She asked for a blessing, but asked for no more
And the choirs kept singing of freedom.

On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground
And people all over the earth turned around
For no one recalled a more cowardly sounds
And the choirs kept singing of freedom

The men in the forest, they asked it of me
How many blackberries grew in the blue sea
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye
How many dark ships in the forest

The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone
And I can’t do much more than to sing you this song
I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong
And the choirs keep singing of freedom

Richard Fariña

This is another of Austin Clarke’s beautifully musical short lyrics (see also week 278). It appears at first sight to be a simple enough poem about a woman loved and admired for her beauty, but I have seen more than one interpretation that attempts to set it against the background of Irish social history. According to these, it is significant that the woman is the daughter of a ‘planter’: that is to say, a landowner brought in by the British and settled on land confiscated from the native Irish. The Plantation of Ulster, for example, began in 1606, after the defeat of the last Irish chieftains and acceptance of English rule, when vast tracts of land were given to immigrants, mainly from England and Scotland, who were required to be Protestant and English-speaking.

This practice naturally inspired envy and resentment among the dispossessed, as hinted at in the line ‘The house of the planter is known by the trees’ – that is to say, the wealthy immigrant could afford to screen his ‘big house’ with trees while the native Irish were left to farm the barren hillside. So the feelings of the local populace about the planter’s daughter are understandably ambivalent: they expect her to be standoffish, but it appears that she is not, and the men at least are awed by her beauty; the women gossip about her; but neither really know her in her remote and privileged life. In the fine closing image she is likened to Sunday, the day of the week reserved for worship, and thus seen as a being separate from their normal life of toil, and haloed as it were in her apartness.

I suspect myself that this interpretation could be reading too much into a slight if melodious lyric, but it does allow one to see the poem as a celebration of the way in which an appreciation of beauty, and a respect for innate goodness, can transcend even the chasm-wide class and political divisions of Irish society.

The Planter’s Daughter

When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
 
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went – 
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.

Austin Clarke

A lot of wet weather lately – one of our local ponds that was bone-dry in October is now brimming over and home once again to a family of mallards. For me the poet of rain has to be Edward Thomas, especially in this piece, written in early 1916 while Thomas was undergoing military training in a camp near Romford. This is actually one of the poems where I part company with Thomas spiritually, since I have always rather liked the sound of rain at night. I remember lying awake one night in the Ogwen Valley in North Wales, listening to a torrential downpour on the roof above my bunk, thinking how it would be falling all over the dark countryside, turning the already wet soil to a black peaty sponge, and thinking how it would overflow, because the country could take no more: the trees had taken up great draughts, and the mosses could drink no more, and the rocks would have nothing to do with it, being no obedient chalks and limestones but hard grits and slates. So droplet would turn to drip, and drip to puddle, and puddle to rill, and rill to rivulet, until the hillsides would be alive with moving water… for some reason I found an exquisite pleasure in the thought of that soft wearing, that sleeking and slicking, gentler than ice but just as powerful in the end, and certainly the rain seemed part of an immense aliveness rather than anything to inspire thoughts of death.

But now for Thomas’s very different take on the matter…

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Edward Thomas

It should be said first that this week’s poem has nothing to do with the Child ballad of the same name, instead it is an original song to be found on the 1970’s folk-rock album ‘Mr Fox’, by a group of the same name formed by Bob and Carole Pegg. The group was short-lived, producing only two albums, and never enjoyed the repute and commercial success of their contemporary folk-rock bands Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, yet they had a very original style that drew on a mix of traditional sources and in particular the musical culture of the Yorkshire Dales. I think this eerie magical ballad is one of their best efforts.

The goshawk’s threat to use supernatural powers, which could be seen as a touch coercive, brings to mind legends attached to mediaeval wizards like Michael Scot, who was reputed to have defeated an indefatigable demon by challenging it to weave a rope out of flying sea-salt.

Note: the first word in line 15 is hard to make out: ‘jasmine’ seems odd but seems to be what people hear.

The Gay Goshawk

The gay goshawk came to my window-sill.
The snow it fell fast and the stars stood still.
‘O won’t you take me in from the storm,
Won’t you take me between your sheets so warm?’

Gold was the colour of his wings so fair,
His eyes they were bold and of silver so rare
And I laid his brown body upon the pillow.
He became a man, lithe as a willow.

‘Don’t breathe a word, don’t scream, don’t shout.
I can turn the whole world round about,
Lay the moon flat on the land,
Twist a rope out of flying sand’.

Whispering women, so happy beguiled,
Now that he’s gone she must care for the child.
Jasmine’s the colour of his hair,
A nut-brown boy with a silvery stare.

The nights have grown cold and the seasons slip by
And knowing seducers still give me the eye,
But on cold winter’s evenings alone I walk,
I watch and pray for my gay goshawk.

Carole Pegg

‘And is it true, and is it true,/This most tremendous tale of all…’ run lines from a John Betjeman poem on the Nativity. To which I suspect that many these days will, like me, answer well, no, probably not, at least not in the sense that it did actually happen and happen in that way, which is our preferred definition of ‘true’. Yet we will be happy to concede ‘true’ in the sense of being a good story, reflecting some of humanity’s deepest hopes and desires, and powerful enough to have resonated down the ages.

I’m not sure how far in this week’s poem by U.A.Fanthorpe the author means to go along with the more literal aspects of the Christmas story, but it’s an entertaining take on the tale and it does for me go some way to capturing the true wonder at the heart of the Nativity which remains even when one strips away such mythic accretions as shepherds and angels, stars and wise men, and which should surely be something that those of all faiths and none can celebrate equally: I mean the sheer miracle of any human birth, this fragile chance to be alive on a green planet orbiting a vast ball of fire in the void.

My thanks to my followers for all their comments and encouragement over the year, and may they feel in whatever way seems right to them the warmth of this ancient glow at the heart of midwinter.

BC:AD

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of Heaven.

U.A.Fanthorpe