Tag Archives: poetry

Week 307: Song, by Seamus Heaney

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No doubt we all have our favourite Seamus Heaney collections (and while ‘Collected Poems’ are very satisfying and serviceable, is there not an excitement that a ‘Collected’ can never quite replace about reading a poet’s collections as they come out?). For me, it has to be ‘Field Work’, which I think shows the poet in his prime, in full relish of his mastery. This week’s choice is a relatively simple lyric from that collection, compared with some of the complex and demanding (but very satisfying) poems that it contains. I have to say that I’m not too sure about the image in the first line. It seems to me that a girl would need to be wearing an awful lot of lipstick in a lot of unusual places to look anything like the berry-laden rowan trees I’ve seen. But I do like the second stanza. Appropriately for an Irish poem, the last line echoes the answer given by the legendary hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, who when asked what he thought was the best music of all said ‘The music of what happens’.

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

Seamus Heaney

Week 306: A Lullaby, by Randall Jarrell

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Another of Randall Jarrell’s war poems, an unillusioned view of military life superbly clinched by its final couplet.

A Lullaby

For wars his life and half a world away
The soldier sells his family and days.
He learns to fight for freedom and the State;
He sleeps with seven men within six feet.

He picks up matches and he cleans out plates,
Is lied to like a child, cursed like a beast.
They crop his head, his dog tags ring like sheep
As his stiff limbs shift wearily to sleep.

Recalled in dreams or letters, else forgot,
His life is smothered like a grave, with dirt;
And his dull torment mottles like a fly’s
The lying amber of the histories.

Randall Jarrell

Week 305: Cradle Song for Eleanor, by Louis MacNeice

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This poem actually forms part of a collection published in 1941, but for me it evokes, in the way that MacNeice does better than anyone, even Auden, the claustrophobic, angst-laden feel of the nineteen-thirties, that uneasy sense of impending doom, like a shadow waiting at the end of the corridor. Which does not stop it also being a beautiful love lyric.

Cradle Song for Eleanor

Sleep, my darling, sleep;
The pity of it all
Is all we compass if
We watch disaster fall.
Put off your twenty-odd
Encumbered years and creep
Into the only heaven
The robbers’ cave of sleep.

The wild grass will whisper,
Lights of passing cars
Will streak across your dreams
And fumble at the stars;
Life will tap on the window
Only too soon again,
Life will have her answer –
Do not ask her when.

When the winsome bubble
Shivers, when the bough
Breaks, will be the moment
But not here or now.
Sleep and, asleep, forget
The watchers on the wall
Awake all night who know
The pity of it all.

Louis MacNeice

Week 304: Dolor, by Theodore Roethke

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A poem that may strike a chord with anyone who has spent their working life in an office, though inevitably it could with a bit of updating to reflect the more modern joys of open plan, computer crashes, hot desking and so on. 

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

Theodore Roethke

Week 303: Woman’s Song, by Judith Wright

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A lyrical celebration of late pregnancy and the unique closeness it embodies. I imagine there must be other ways for women to feel about the imminent prospect of giving birth, like if you’ve been carrying an extra couple of stone around for months it must be quite a relief to get rid of it, but what do I know…

Woman’s Song

O move in me, my darling,
for now the sun must rise:
the sun that will draw open
the lids upon your eyes.

O wake in me, my darling,
the knife of day is bright
to cut the thread that binds you
within the flesh of night.

Today I love and find you
whom yet my blood would keep –
would weave and sing around you
the spells and songs of sleep.

None but I shall know you
as none but I have known;
yet there’s a death and a maiden
who wait for you alone;

So move in me, my darling,
whose debt I cannot pay.
Pain and the dark must claim you
and passion and the day.

Judith Wright

 

Week 302: The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry

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Last Friday I happened to catch the end of one of this year’s Proms concerts which was showcasing British folksong, and the closing piece was a mass singing of the beautiful ballad ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry’. I confess that I wasn’t much taken with this rendering – not as bad as those wince-making drawing-room arrangements of folksong beloved of early twentieth century British composers, but still far too orchestrated and ornamented for my taste. Give me an a cappella version, or at best a very modest instrumental accompaniment: the words of great folksongs are words of power and magic, and they should be allowed to speak for themselves.

A ‘silkie’ (or selkie) was one of the seafolk, enchanted creatures who lived in the sea as seals but could come ashore, take on human form and even take a human husband or wife.

As usual with ballads, there are several versions of the text: what I give here is a shorter version from the Shetlands (Child ballad 113), made popular in the sixties by Joan Baez; there is a much longer Orcadian version favoured by the great Scots ballad singers Jean Redpath and Archie Fisher, and sung to a tune that may be more authentic, but I rather like the more compact Shetland version and like its tune too.

The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry

An earthly nourris sits and sings,
And aye, she sings ‘Ba lily wean,
Little ken I my bairn’s father,
Far less the land that he staps in’.

Then ane arose at her bed fit.
And a grumly guest I’m sure was he,
Saying ‘Here am I, thy bairn’s father,
Although I be not comely.’

‘I am a man upon the land,
I am a silkie on the sea,
And when I’m far and far frae land,
My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie.’

And he has ta’en a purse of gold
And he has placed it upon her knee,
Saying, ‘Give to me my little young son,
And take thee up thy nurse’s fee.

‘It shall come to pass on a summer’s day,
When the sun shines het on every stane,
That I shall fetch my little young son,
And teach him for to swim the faem.

‘And thu shall marry a proud gunner,
And a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be,
And the very first shot that e’er he shoots
He’ll shoot both my young son and me.’

Anon

Week 301: Hospital, by Molly Holden

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I was at a bit of a loss when asked my religion the only time I was ever admitted to hospital. ‘Well, I like churches, but I don’t know that I actually believe anything’. ‘I’ll put you down as C. of E. then, love’. ‘Oh, OK’. This had the advantage that I was left alone, while poor Molly Holden, more positive in her reply, was plagued by a whole string of visitations, which gives this valiant sad poem her characteristic edging of wry humour.

A note on the last line: ‘against great odds in a narrow place’. This is a quote from the work of the scholar W.P.Ker, who uses the phrase to characterise the classic final situation of the doomed protagonist in Norse heroic literature: Gunnar defending his home at Hlitharend, for example, or Hrolf Kraki and his twelve berserkers taking on a whole army, though it might equally apply to the Spartans at Thermopylae or Roland at Roncesvalles. Molly Holden was well acquainted with Icelandic saga literature, and would surely have known Ker’s seminal works ‘Epic and Romance’ and ‘The Dark Ages’.

Hospital

They sought me out, the ancient consolations,
now that I lay helpless in their reach,
with well-greased shoes and oily conversation,
hoping to net me on that painful beach;

helpless indeed I lay, in that white bed, hands outspread,
legs useless down the length before my eyes,
and could not care a deal for anything they said,
kind though they thought themselves and wise.

Jamaican nurses spoke of Christ, wheelchair conversions,
souls brought to God who’d never seen the light;
quietly I nodded when I could, without aspersions,
was grateful that they cared to help me fight.

Catholic nurses said they’d pray for me, raising
their rosaries, promising aves every day;
a priest put up a meaningless blessing, praising
a courage I did not have, and went away.

The Church of England would have liked discussion,
seeing I’d admitted myself: ‘religion none’.
I held my own a while but without passion
and asked to be excused a dialectic run.

And all the while I lay, under the words and attempted curing,
seeking inside not out for a human grace
that would give me a strength and a courage for enduring
against great odds in a narrow place.

Molly Holden

Week 300: A Litany in Time of Plague, by Thomas Nashe

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This poem originally appeared as part of a play called ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament’, published in 1600. In this masque, which features personifications of the four seasons, Summer is old and declining, and requests at one point ‘Sing me some doleful ditty to the Lute/That may complain my near approaching death’, and his request is duly granted. The play itself is pretty much forgotten now except among Elizabethan specialists, and so, one feels, might the poem be, as no more than a string of competent commonplaces, but for its startlingly beautiful third stanza.

A Litany in Time of Plague

Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life’s lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us.

Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords may not fight with fate,
Earth still holds ope her gate.
‘Come, come!’ the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us.

Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us.

Thomas Nashe

Week 299: An Epitaph, by Walter De La Mare

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Recently my wife observed rather sadly. ‘Nan’s birthday today. Just think, when I die there’ll be no one left who remembers that, and no one left who remembers her’. As her grandmother died fifty-five years ago, and had she lived would now be one hundred and twenty-six, it was hard to think of anything useful to say, but I did recite this poem to her. It didn’t help.

An Epitaph

Here lies a most beautiful lady,
Light of step and heart was she;
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.

But beauty vanishes, beauty passes;
However rare — rare it be;
And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country?

Walter De La Mare

Week 298: At His Father’s Grave, by John Ormond

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The Welsh poet John Ormond (1923-1990) was also a film-maker, whose documentaries included studies of Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis, R.S.Thomas and the artist Kyffin Williams. This poems is from his 1969 collection ‘Requiem and Celebration’.

At His Father’s Grave

Here lies a shoemaker whose knife and hammer
Fell idle at the height of summer,
Who was not missed so much as when the rain
Of winter brought him back to mind.

He was no preacher but his working text
Was ‘See all dry this winter and the next’.
Stand still. Remember his two hands, his laugh,
His craftsmanship. They are his epitaph.

John Ormond