Tag Archives: poetry

Week 327: The Rolling English Road, by G.K.Chesterton

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I have always had a soft spot for this G.K.Chesterton poem. OK, it may take a somewhat romantic view of intoxication – Chesterton took a somewhat romantic view of everything – but it is fun, and underneath the fun can be seen a more serious dialectic about individual freedom versus civic responsibility that has been ongoing since the days of Falstaff and Prince Hal, and that finds a kind of serene balance in the closing stanza.

The poem has, so far as I know, been mercifully spared the attention of composers, but Maddy Prior does a fine folk version of it on her album ‘Flesh and Blood’.

The Rolling English Road

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

G.K.Chesterton

Week 326: I Listen To The Desert Wind, by Keith Douglas

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In its naked pain this poem of lost or unrequited love may seem very much a young man’s outpouring, but after all Keith Douglas was only 24 when he died, something that one tends to forget, given the power and originality of his best poems.

I Listen To The Desert Wind

I listen to the desert wind
that will not blow her from my mind;
the stars will not put down a hand,
the moon’s ignorant of my wound

moving negligently across
by clouds and cruel tracts of space
as in my brain by nights and days
moves the reflection of her face.

skims like a bird my sleepless eye
the sands who at this hour deny
the violent heat they have by day
as she denies her former way:

all the elements agree
with her, to have no sympathy
for my tactless misery
as wonderful and hard as she.

O turn in the dark bed again
and give to him what once was mine
and I’ll turn as you turn
and kiss my swarthy mistress pain

Keith Douglas

Week 325: Meeting and Passing, by Robert Frost

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Robert Frost was a fine poetic chronicler of marital disharmony, as attested by such poems as ‘Home Burial’, ‘The Subverted Flower’ and ‘The Thatch’. But this poem is one of a love still unshadowed by the tragic events and stresses of his life, about that sweet unrepeatable time when a couple are first exploring the territory of each other’s life and identity. If you want an object lesson in what simplicity of language can achieve, look at the closing two lines.

Meeting and Passing

As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol

Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.

Robert Frost

Week 324: From ‘The Cave of Making’, by W.H.Auden

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This excerpt from a longer, slightly rambling elegy for Auden’s friend Louis MacNeice seems even more likely to strike a chord with practitioners of poetry today than when it was written back in the sixties. A slightly dangerous chord maybe: its proud stance too easily tipping over into a disdain for the common reader and a retreat into the obscurantism that goes some of the way towards explaining the common reader’s alienation from poetry in the first place. Yet when all is said and done poets must still reconcile any distaste they may have for elitism with a desire to render a true account, a desire that they may feel to be largely lacking in the culture that surrounds them, and in the end may feel that they have no choice but to continue broadcasting on their own channel even though no one, it seems, is tuning in to listen… 

From ‘The Cave of Making’

Who would, for preference,
be a bard in an oral culture,
obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy
of some beefy illiterate burner,
giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a
Baroque Prince, expected,
like his dwarf, to amuse? After all, it’s rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
cannot be ‘done’ like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored: our handful
of clients at least can rune.

W.H.Auden

Week 323: Winter Warfare, by Edgell Rickword

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At school I used to go out running with a slightly mad fellow enthusiast who persuaded me one winter that we should run barefoot in the snow ‘to toughen our feet’. Small stuff on the scale of what cold can do to you, but enough that this poem by Edgell Rickword (1898-1982) can still make my toes tingle at the memory of it. And what a brilliant stroke of personification, to fuse the hostility of winter with that image of callous commanding officers whom at least some of their soldiers on either side seem to have viewed as no less a hazard of the war. 

Winter Warfare

Colonel Cold strode up the Line
(tabs of rime and spurs of ice);
stiffened all that met his glare:
horses, men and lice.

Visited a forward post,
left them burning, ear to foot;
fingers stuck to biting steel,
toes to frozen boot.

Stalked on into No Man’s Land,
turned the wire to fleecy wool,
iron stakes to sugar sticks
snapping at a pull.

Those who watched with hoary eyes
saw two figures gleaming there;
Hauptmann Kälte, Colonel Cold,
gaunt in the grey air.

Stiffly, tinkling spurs they moved,
glassy-eyed, with glinting heel
stabbing those who lingered there
torn by screaming steel.

Edgell Rickword

 

Week 322: From ‘The Woodlanders’, by Thomas Hardy

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‘Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first’, said Ezra Pound in praise of Thomas Hardy’s poetry when it first appeared. Certainly it is tempting to find in the novels passages that with their mastery of cadence and rhythm seem to be moving in the direction of poetry, like the following from ‘The Woodlanders’. To set the context: the woodsman Giles Winterborne is loved by the peasant girl Marty South, but has eyes only for his childhood sweetheart Grace Melbury, who has however become better educated and at her father’s urging makes a match instead with the handsome young doctor Edred Fitzpiers. Fitzpiers proves unfaithful and the marriage does not turn out well; he goes off to the Continent with another woman but quarrels with her and returns to resume his marriage. The distraught Grace flees to Giles for help. On a foul night of storm, he gives her refuge in his woodland cottage but mindful of her reputation insists on staying outside all night in a very inadequate shelter made of a few branches. He is already unwell, and the exposure finishes him off. Grace returns to Fitzpiers and only Marty is left to mourn Giles: her touching elegy for him closes the book.

‘Now, my own, own love’, she whispered, ‘you are mine, and only mine; for she has forgot ’ee at last, although for her you died! But I – whenever I get up I’ll think of ’ee, and whenever I lie down I’ll think of ’ee again. Whenever I plant the young larches I’ll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider wring, I’ll say that none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name let me forget home and heaven!… But no, no, my love, I never can forget ’ee; for you was a good man, and did good things.’

Thomas Hardy

Week 321: Mid-winter Waking, by Robert Graves

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I thought this poem, one of my favourite Graves love lyrics, would make a suitable piece for the winter solstice.

Mid-Winter Waking

Stirring suddenly from long hibernation,
I knew myself once more a poet
Guarded by timeless principalities
Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;
And presently dared open both my eyes.

O gracious, lofty, shone against from under,
Back-of-the-mind-far clouds like towers;
And you, sudden warm airs that blow
Before the expected season of new blossom,
While sheep still gnaw at roots and lambless go –

Be witness that on waking, this mid-winter,
I found her hand in mine laid closely
Who shall watch out the Spring with me.
We stared in silence all around us
But found no winter anywhere to see.

Robert Graves

Week 320: Mrs. Arbuthnot, by Stevie Smith

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This week another poem by the wonderfully eccentric Stevie Smith, who sometimes comes across to me as the improbable love-child of Emily Dickinson and William McGonagall, yet at other times, as in the last stanza here, achieves a lyricism all of her own. Are the last two lines actually true, that creativity requires, if not actual unhappiness, at least some kind of spiritual unrest? Looking at the lives of poets, it would seem so: no grit in the oyster, no pearl. 

Mrs. Arbuthnot

Mrs. Arbuthnot was a poet
A poet of high degree,
But her talent left her;
Now she lives at home by the sea.

In the morning she washes up,
In the afternoon she sleeps,
Only in the evenings sometimes
For her lost talent she weeps,

Crying: I should write a poem,
Can I look a wave in the face
If I do not write a poem about a sea-wave,
Putting the words in place.

Mrs. Arbuthnot has died,
She has gone to heaven,
She is one with the heavenly combers now
And need not write about them.

Cry: she is a heavenly comber,
She runs with a comb of fire,
Nobody writes or wishes to
Who is one with their desire.

Stevie Smith

Week 319: Jimmy Newman, by Tom Paxton

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The singer/songwriter Thomas Richard (‘Tom’) Paxton was born in 1937. For full effect you really need to hear this as sung by Tom, with its urgent driving rhythms an accompaniment to the increasing pathos and desperation of the soldier who cannot or will not see what we realise early on about his buddy. But I think that even on the printed page it makes a very effective antiwar poem: it may not be Wilfred Owen, but it’s not that far removed from the saeva indignatio of Sassoon.

Jimmy Newman

Get up, Jimmy Newman, the morning is come
The engines are rumbling, the coffee’s all brewed
Get up, Jimmy Newman, there’s work to be done
And why do you lie there still sleeping?

There’s a waiting line forming to use the latrine
And the sun is just opening the sky
Ah the breakfast they’re serving just has to be seen
And you’ve only to open your eyes

Get up, Jimmy Newman, my radio’s on
The news is all bad, but it’s good for a laugh
The tent flap is loose and the peg must be gone
And why do you lie there still sleeping?

The night nurse is gone and the sexy one’s here
And she tells us such beautiful lies
Her uniform’s tight on her marvellous rear
And you’ve only to open your eyes

Get up, Jimmy Newman, you’re missing the fun
They’re loading the planes, Jim, it’s time to go home
It’s over for us; there’s no more to be done
And why do you lie there still sleeping?

It’s stateside for us, Jim, the folks may not know
We’ll let it be such a surprise
They’re loading us next, Jim, we’re ready to go
And you’ve only to open your eyes

Get up, Jimmy Newman! They won’t take my word
I said you sleep hard, but they’re shaking their heads
Get up, Jimmy Newman, and show them you heard
Ah, Jimmy just show them you’re sleeping

A joke is a joke, but there’s nothing to gain
Jim, I’d slap you, but I’m too weak to rise
Get up, damn it, Jimmy! You’re missing the plane
And you’ve only to open your eyes

Tom Paxton

Week 318: The Song Of Wandering Aengus, by W.B.Yeats

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This is one of the first poems I ever possessed, or was possessed by, copying it out longhand from some school anthology into my private poetry notebook. I would have been thirteen. Now, over sixty years on, I find its magic not much diminished, just tinged with a wistfulness for that first unrepeatable awakening to poetry, that is bound up for me with the memory of long ago sunsets and running barefoot on summer grass in the wild exuberance of youth.

The Song Of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lads and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

W.B.Yeats