Tag Archives: poetry

Week 669: The Grenadier and the Lady, by Anon

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This week what I consider to be one of the most beautiful of English folksongs, and which I was prompted to feature by the news of the death of the actor Terence Stamp: many will remember how in the 1967 film version of ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ an abbreviated version is sung hauntingly by Isla Cameron as an accompaniment to Sergeant Troy’s despairing efforts to put flowers on Fanny Robin’s grave.

The theme of maidens deceived by dodgy characters taking them for walks by the waterside is a common one in folksong: compare, for example, ‘Bogie’s Bonny Belle’ and ‘Willie Archer’, both fine songs but neither of which achieve quite the same combination of ribald innuendo and arcadian innocence. The song gains further poignancy from the fact that these days you would go a long way to find a clear crystal stream that hasn’t been polluted by industrial runoff or sewage, while your chances of ever hearing a nightingale have also become slight due to habitat loss.

The tune is constant, but as usual the words appear to exist in many versions, and I have chosen the one I am most familiar with, as sung by Polly Bolton on her album ‘Songs From A Cold Open Field’.

The Grenadier and the Lady

As I was a walking one morning in May
I spied a young couple a-making the hay.
One was a fair maid, and her beauty shone clear
And the other one was a soldier, and a bold Grenadier.

A-walking and a-talking and a-walking together,
A-walking so far till they couldn’t tell whither,
Till they sat themselves down by a clear crystal stream
For to see the flowers grow and hear the nightingales sing.

Then with kisses and with compliments he took her round the middle
And out of his knapsack he drew forth his fiddle,
And he played her such a fine tune as made the valleys all ring.
‘Hark, hark’, said the maiden, ‘hear the nightingales sing’.

‘O come’ said the soldier, ‘it is time to give o’er’.
‘Ah no’, said the fair maid, ‘please play one tune more.
For I do like your music and the touch of your string
And I do like to see the flowers grow and hear the nightingales sing’.

‘Then come’, said the fair maid, ‘will you marry me?’
’Ah, no’, said the soldier, ‘that never can be,
For I’ve got a wife in my own country
And so fair a woman as you ever did see.

‘I’ve got a wife there, and I’ve got children three.
Two wives in the army’s too many for me.
But if ever I return again it’ll be in the spring:
I’ll come to see the flowers grow and hear the nightingales sing’.

Anon

Week 668: Memory, by W.B.Yeats

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Like much of Yeats, this little poem slips into the memory fairly effortlessly, and the play on the word ‘form’, used here as the correct precise term for a hare’s nest as well in the general sense, is nice. But I do have problems with it, in that the image of the hare’s form, though a charming one, doesn’t really work for me. Clearly it is meant to convey the idea that one particular woman (presumably Maud Gonne) had made such an impression on the poet’s mind that it could never fade or she be replaced. But hares are light, and grass is springy stuff and grows quickly. How long does the mark a hare leaves in grass actually last? I give it a week or two at best – not much of a tribute to poor Maud.

Maybe I am wrong to worry about this sort of thing, yet it seems to me that a poem should not only be neat and sound good, but should stand up to practical scrutiny at every level. Of course, I may be wrong and hares, those creatures of magic and fable, may make more of a lasting impression on the landscape than I imagine. Any leporine experts out there?

Memory

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

W.B.Yeats

Week 667: Surview, by Thomas Hardy

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This week an affecting expression of the kind of regret that seems sadly common to poets as they age, a regret for, as T.S.Eliot puts it, ‘things ill done or done to others’ harm’, or in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘The good not done, the love not given, time/Torn off unused’.

It strikes me that the trigger for this reverie is one that few will now experience, for how many of us these days have open fires? But certainly I remember from my childhood that time in the late evening when the fire had been left to burn down and one could lose oneself in gazing into it, as into an enchanted landscape of fiery plains and red-gold caves. Of course, open fires were dangerous, time-consuming and wildly inefficient, but with their demise a little of the poetry went out of the world.

Cogitavi vias meas: ‘I thought of my ways’, a quote from the Latin version of Psalm 118.

‘green-grained’ – I assume that this choice of epithet refers to the sticks still having some sap in them, causing them to hiss and sputter as they burn in a way that reminds the poet of a human voice.

Surview

‘Cogitavi vias meas’

A cry from the green-grained sticks of the fire
Made me gaze where it seemed to be:
‘Twas my own voice talking therefrom to me
On how I had walked when my sun was higher –
My heart in its arrogancy.

‘You held not to whatsoever was true,’
Said my own voice talking to me:
‘Whatsoever was just you were slack to see;
Kept not things lovely and pure in view,’
Said my own voice talking to me.

‘You slighted her that endureth all,’
Said my own voice talking to me;
‘Vaunteth not, trusteth hopefully;
That suffereth long and is kind withal,’
Said my own voice talking to me.

‘You taught not that which you set about,’
Said my own voice talking to me;
‘That the greatest of things is Charity…’
And the sticks burnt low, and the fire went out,
And my voice ceased talking to me.

Thomas Hardy

Week 666: Delay, by Elizabeth Jennings

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This is a neat little poem, and the astronomical facts are certainly accurate, but I find it hard to pin down Elizabeth Jennings’s exact thought processes here. Is she thinking of poetic fame, which may take years to arrive, and when it does may indeed find us somewhere else, like, well, dead? The poems of Edward Thomas, for example were barely noticed in his lifetime, and it was not until many years after his death that he became the beloved figure he is now.

Or is there a more specific personal narrative at work here? For example, did the poet once love another who did not reciprocate her feelings until it was too late, when she had moved on and become a different person?

In any event, even if we ourselves may have no such prospect or no such narrative, the poem may still give us incidental cause to reflect on the chance nature of love: on how we come down through life bouncing like a pinball from one accidental circumstance to another. I imagine most of us can frame a thousand scenarios in which we never met our partner: never worked for the same organisation, or attended the same school, or got on the same bus, or went to the same party, all leading to a life unknowably different, in which there perhaps never was another for our eyes, as the poem puts it, to claim as beautiful.

Delay

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

Elizabeth Jennings

Week 665: The Last Hero, by G.K.Chesterton

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This is a rather strange poem, and really it just won’t do. Chesterton’s idea of a hero is apparently a psychopathic loner who carries off women by force and can relate to his fellow men only when he is in the process of bashing their brains out. If this had been penned by some warrior skald in Viking times, some Egill Skallagrímsson say, I suppose it might be accorded the tolerance of autres temps, autres moeurs, but coming from a rather portly Edwardian gentleman who had a romantic infatuation with swords, it seems a little short of ridiculous. And yet, and yet… in its way it is vivid and eloquent, and has lines that, taken out of their martial context, might appeal even to the dedicated pacifist. ‘I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,/As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.’ Well, that’s certainly the way I want to go, running in my bluebell woods some spring morning when I am a hundred.

The Last Hero

The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.
Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain,
You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain.

The chance of battle changes — so may all battle be;
I stole my lady bride from them, they stole her back from me.
I rent her from her red-roofed hall, I rode and saw arise,
More lovely than the living flowers the hatred in her eyes.
She never loved me, never bent, never was less divine;
The sunset never loved me, the wind was never mine.
Was it all nothing that she stood imperial in duresse?
Silence itself made softer with the sweeping of her dress.
O you who drain the cup of life, O you who wear the crown,
You never loved a woman’s smile as I have loved her frown.

The wind blew out from Bergen to the dawning of the day,
They ride and run with fifty spears to break and bar my way,
I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,
As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.
How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.
The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, —
You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes.

Know you what earth shall lose to-night, what rich uncounted loans,
What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones?
My loves in deep dim meadows, my ships that rode at ease,
Ruffling the purple plumage of strange and secret seas.
To see this fair earth as it is to me alone was given,
The blow that breaks my brow to-night shall break the dome of heaven.
The skies I saw, the trees I saw after no eyes shall see,
To-night I die the death of God; the stars shall die with me;
One sound shall sunder all the spears and break the trumpet’s breath:
You never laughed in all your life as I shall laugh in death.

G.K.Chesterton

Week 664: Los heraldos negros, by César Vallejo

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This week another rather bleak piece by the strikingly original Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938; see also week 566). It was written at a time of personal crisis, involving the death of his mother, relationship problems, economic hardship and in the face of all these a struggle to retain the deep Catholic faith of his childhood.

It does seem to be a feature of the devout, that having paid what they feel to be their spiritual dues they react to calamity with a sense of personal outrage rather than a weary acceptance of the fact that bad things happen to good people and that’s just the way the world is. Nevertheless, the poem has struck a chord with many readers for the way it expresses the existential bafflement of man trying to make sense of a senseless universe, and for the way in which Vallejo redeems the passivity of his suffering with the defiance of his art. Yep, when the going gets tough, the tough write a poem…

The translation that follows is my own. The word ‘potro’ in line 7 is a bit of a crux here. It can mean ‘colt’ or ‘foal’ but can also mean ‘rack’ (as used for torture). While the rack is an ancient device, having been used by the Greeks, an association with Attila seems unlikely, but a punishment in Attila’s times was certainly to be trampled to death by horses: see for example the Old Norse poem ‘Hamðismál’, in which two brothers Hamðir and Sörli avenge the death of their sister Svanhild who has been executed in this way by Ermanaric, an emperor of the Goths. Thus I have gone with the equine interpretation as seeming to me the more probable, but I would be interested to know how a native Spanish speaker takes this line.

Los heraldos negros

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma… ¡Yo no sé!

Son pocos; pero son… Abren zanjas oscuras
en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros Atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.

Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma
de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.

Y el hombre… Pobre… ¡pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como
cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa, en la mirada.

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… ¡Yo no sé!

César Vallejo

The black heralds

There are blows in life, so heavy… I don’t know!
Blows as from God’s hate, as if beneath them
The undertow of all you ever suffered
Wells up again within you… I don’t know!

They are few, but they are… They scar with their dark trenches
The fiercest faces and the strongest backs.
They are perhaps the steeds of barbarous Attilas
Or the black heralds sent by Death.

They are deep falls that sunder Christ from souls
Whose dear faith is blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloody blows are like the crackling of bread
Left to burn before the oven door.

And man… Poor man! He turns to look, as when
A touch upon the shoulder summons us;
He looks wild-eyed, and all that he has lived
Pools before his gaze to a puddle of guilt.

There are blows in life, so heavy… I don’t know!


Week 663: Two in August, by John Crowe Ransom/The Thatch, by Robert Frost

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This week’s offer is two poems that are strikingly similar in concept, both using the unrest of birds as a trope for marital disharmony, but widely different in style, Ransom’s ornate patrician gravity contrasting with Frost’s plain-spoken simplicity. I like both poems, though my personal kinship would be more with the Frost. Incidentally I would not think that one poem necessarily influenced the other: it seems a thought that could easily occur independently.

Hackberry: a deciduous tree native to North America, producing small berries in autumn that provide food for birds.

Two in August

Two that could not have lived their single lives
As can some husbands and wives
Did something strange: they tensed their vocal cords
And attacked each other with silences and words
Like catapulted stones and arrowed knives.

Dawn was not yet; night is for loving or sleeping,
Sweet dreams or safekeeping;
Yet he of the wide brows that were used to laurel
And she, the famed for gentleness, must quarrel.
Furious both of them, and scared, and weeping.

How sleepers groan, twitch, wake to such a mood
Is not well understood,
Nor why two entities grown almost one
Should rend and murder trying to get undone,
With individual tigers in their blood.

She in terror fled from the marriage chamber
Circuiting the dark rooms like a string of amber
Round and round and back,
And would not light one lamp against the black,
And heard the clock that clanged: Remember, Remember.

And he must tread barefooted the dim lawn,
Soon he was up and gone;
High in the trees the night-mastered birds were crying
With fear upon their tongues, no singing nor flying
Which are their lovely attitudes by dawn.

Whether those bird-cries were of heaven or hell
There is no way to tell;
In the long ditch of darkness the man walked
Under the hackberry trees where the birds talked
With words too sad and strange to syllable.

John Crowe Ransom

The Thatch

Out alone in the winter rain,
Intent on giving and taking pain.
But never was I far out of sight
Of a certain upper-window light.
The light was what it was all about:
I would not go in till the light went out;
It would not go out till I came in.
Well, we should see which one would win,
We should see which one would be the first to yield.
The world was a black invisible field.
The rain by rights was snow for cold.
The wind was another layer of mold.
But the strangest thing: in the thick old thatch,
Where summer birds had been given hatch,
Had fed in chorus, and lived to fledge,
Some still were living in hermitage.
And as I passed along the eaves
So low I brushed the straw with my sleeves,
I flushed birds out of hole after hole,
Into the darkness. It grieved my soul,
It started a gried within a grief,
To think their case was beyond relief –
They could not go flying about in search
Of their nest again, nor find a perch.
They must brood where they fell in mulch and mire,
Trusting feathers and inwad fire
Till daylight made it safe for a flyer.
My greater grief was by so much reduced
As I thought of them without nest or roost.
That was how that grief started to melt.
They tell me the cottage where we dwelt,
Its wind-torn thatch goes now unmended;
Its life of hundreds of years has ended
By letting the rain I knew outdoors
In onto the upper chamber floors.

Robert Frost

Week 662: Fire and Ice, by Robert Frost

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It is easy to take this little poem of Robert Frost’s, justly celebrated for its laconic deftness, as no more than a pithy generalised reflection on human nature and overlook the fact that it is also saying something deeply personal about Frost’s own nature. ‘From what I’ve tasted of desire’ hints at problems with an ardent temperament more fully explored in his poem ‘The Subverted Flower’, while ‘I think I know enough of hate’ echoes his self-description elsewhere as ‘a good hater’. Under the folksy mask Frost was, perhaps more than most poets, a man of lacerating sensitivity, which is not surprising given that he was over forty before he achieved any recognition as a poet and even then had to endure the ill-informed condescension of critics like Edmund Wilson before his reputation became properly established.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

Week 661: The Children Look At The Parents, by A.J.S.Tessimond

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As a young man I worked for a while with someone who had, he told me, once shared an office with A.J.S.Tessimond (1902-1962). I expressed suitable awe at the idea of sharing an office with a poet (I did not think it worth mentioning my own endeavours in the field), but had to confess that I was aware only dimly of the name, mainly from a poem about cats featured in some school anthology. I’ve finally after all these years got round to chasing the name up, and found among others this poem about the parent-child relationship, somewhat reminiscent of Larkin’s famous verses on the subject, but less brutal, if still fairly harsh: one senses that a reluctance to wound is at war with the desire to analyse, with the latter winning out.

Of course, the main point of parents has always been to give children someone to blame when their lives turn out not to be perfect, and it is amazing how early this process can start. I remember how when my two eldest sons were four and not quite three I had to break it to them that one of their grandfathers had died. The four year old took it philosophically; the two year old, a child of a very different temper who had not encountered the idea of death before, was absolutely furious with parents so irresponsible as to bring him into a world where this sort of thing could happen, and indeed might one day happen to him. ‘You should have told me not to be born!’ he howled with all the indignation that a two year old can muster, which is quite a lot. I could only apologise.

The Children Look At The Parents

We being so hidden from those who
Have quietly borne and fed us,
How can we answer civilly
Their innocent invitations?

How can we say ‘we see you
As but-for-God’s-grace-ourselves, as
Our caricatures (we yours), with
Time’s telescope between us’?

How can we say ‘you presumed on
The accident of kinship,
Assumed our friendship coatlike,
Not as a badge one fights for’?

How say ‘and you remembered
The sins of our outlived selves and
Your own forgiveness, buried
The hatchet to slow music;

Shared money but not your secrets;
Will leave as your final legacy
A box double-locked by the spider
Packed with your unsolved problems’?

How say all this without capitals,
Italics, anger or pathos,
To those who have seen from the womb come
Enemies? How not say it?

A.J.S.Tessimond

Week 660: Demain, dès l’aube, by Victor Hugo

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This is one of Victor Hugo’s most celebrated poems, written four years after the death of his daughter Leopoldine, aged nineteen, in a boating accident on the Seine. It appears that Hugo made this pilgrimage every Thursday. I find it very moving in its restrained simplicity.

The translation that follows is my own.

Demain, dès l’aube

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.
J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.
 
Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.
 
Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

Victor Hugo,  3 septembre 1847

Tomorrow, in the dawn

Tomorrow, in the dawn’s first whitening,
I’ll leave. I know, you see, that you are waiting.
I’ll take the forest path, the upland way.
So far from you I can no longer stay.

I’ll walk, lost in my thoughts, with eyes cast down,
Seeing and hearing nothing, quite alone,
Stooped, anonymous, with hands clasped tight,
Sad, and the day for me will be as night.

I shall not watch the gold as evening falls
Nor, dipping to Harfleur, the far off sails,
And when I arrive, I’ll lay upon your tomb
A garland of green holly and heather in bloom.