Tag Archives: poetry

Week 216: Their Lonely Betters, by W.H.Auden

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There seems to be a general view that the work of the later, postwar Auden is marked by a decline in poetic power. I can see that it has its wobbles, but I think there were also gains: a move towards greater lucidity, towards writing less for a coterie audience and more for the only audience really worth having, the company of free spirits throughout time. I like, for example, this poem, written in 1950, in which Auden characteristically combines a light touch with a serious thought.

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

W.H.Auden

Week 215: Sonnet 71, by William Shakespeare

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It is easy to become mesmerised by the eloquence and technical accomplishment of Shakespeare’s Sonnets at the expense of paying sufficient attention to what is actually being said. For these are not comfortable poems. In some cases they are hardly love poems at all, less a celebration of that emotion than a forensic dissection of it, and if human affection is there it often seems to ride on dark undercurrents of doubt, despair, jealousy and even revulsion. This sonnet, for example, is masterly as a poem, but what it actually says seems rather odd. How exactly are we to take the closing couplet? ‘When I’m dead, just forget about me: you know what people are like and I don’t want them making fun of you on account of some playwright chap having written poems about you’. If so, this sentiment sits strangely with the more rhetorical assertions in other of the sonnets about the loved one being forever celebrated in the poet’s eternal lines. Yet maybe this one comes closer to expressing the fundamental insecurity at the heart of the sonnets, that does much to give them their tantalising power. [The next sonnet in the sequence, 72, does develop the theme of this one but hardly elucidates it, losing itself in the verbal quibbling that the Bard so often defaults to, a kind of idling mode while he waits to get into gear again].

Sonnet 71

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that write it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

William Shakespeare

Week 214: The Oven Bird, by Robert Frost

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Robert Frost’s reputation might have been built initially on his admirable longer poems like ‘Home Burial’ and ‘Death of the Hired Man’, but how easily his shorter lyrics too can slip into the memory. Like this beautifully oblique meditation on ageing and decline.

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Robert Frost

 

Week 213: For My Newborn Son, by Sydney Goodsir Smith

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I guess some may find this poem by the Scots poet Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-1975) a touch sentimental, but if you can’t be sentimental about a newborn baby what can you be sentimental about, and I speak as one who has, with some assistance from my wife, had four of them.

I think the Scots words shouldn’t present much of a problem. Schire-bleezan: blazing brightly; causey: road (causeway); kist: chest; lap: leapt; dirlin: beating; downa: do not; maikless: matchless (cf. the beautiful Middle English lyric ‘I sing of a maiden/That is makeless’)

For My Newborn Son

Blythe was yir comin,
Hert never dreamt it,
A new man bydan
In warld whan I’ve left it.

Bricht was yon morn,
Cauld in September,
Wi sun aa the causey
Glentered wi glamer,
Sclate roofs like siller
Schire-bleezan yon morn.

Hert in my kist lap,
Joyrife its dirlin,
Bairn, whan oor lips met
Yir mither’s were burnan,
Weet were oor een then,
Puir words downa tell it.

As hert never dreamt on
Was joy in yir comin,
Maikless wee nesslin
Ma sleepan reid Robin.

Sydney Goodsir Smith

Week 212: Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers, by Harry Pynn/Hamish Henderson

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This poem is perhaps best known for having entered the folk tradition, where it is sung to the tune of ‘Lili Marlene’, but it is well able to stand on its own as a masterpiece of ironic invective. The background is that the Conservative MP Lady Astor is alleged to have referred to soldiers of the 8th Army, who were fighting in Italy, as ‘D-Day Dodgers’, since they were not to be involved in the action in Normandy (to be fair, she denied having said any such thing, but let’s not give her the benefit of the doubt…). Unfortunately for her this came to the notice of a certain Lance-Sergeant Harry Pynn of the Tank Rescue Section, 19 Army Fire Brigade, who was out in Italy with the 78th Infantry Division, and penned this response. The poem is also attributed to the Scots writer Hamish Henderson, but it may be that he merely collected various versions of it; I suspect, however, that Henderson, himself a notable poet of whom more one day, may well have honed the original somewhat. 

There are many variants on the words, and I have not been able to pin down the original text, so present what I think is the most trenchant version. In this we get four stanzas of withering sarcasm chronicling the bitter campaign fought by the Eighth Army as it made its way northward up Italy, followed by one stanza of good old-fashioned flyting, before the poem suddenly changes tone completely to finally demolish the lady’s assertion with a hauntingly elegiac last stanza. 

I am no social historian, but it is tempting to see in this poem much of the mood of that remarkable year, 1945, in which a public weary of patronage, deference and rhetoric unceremoniously dumped Churchill and his Tory government in favour of a new order. 

Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers

We’re the D-Day Dodgers, way off in Italy
Always on the vino, always on the spree;
Eighth Army scroungers and their tanks,
We live in Rome, among the Yanks.
We are the D-Day Dodgers, way out in Italy.

We landed in Salerno, a holiday with pay,
The Jerries brought the bands out to greet us on the way.
Showed us the sights and gave us tea,
We all sang songs, the beer was free
To welcome D-Day Dodgers to sunny Italy.

Naples and Cassino were taken in our stride,
We didn’t go to fight there, we went just for the ride.
Anzio and Sangro were just names,
We only went to look for dames,
The artful D-Day Dodgers, way out in Italy.

On our way to Florence we had a lovely time.
We ran a bus to Rimini right through the Gothic Line.
On to  Bologna we did go,
Then we all had a paddle in the Po.
For we are the D-Day Dodgers, out here in Italy.

Dear Lady Astor, you think you know a lot,
Standing on a platform, talking tommyrot.
You’re England’s sweetheart and her pride.
We think your mouth’s too bleeding wide.
That’s from your D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy.

Look around the mountains, in the mud and rain,
You’ll find the scattered crosses, there’s some that have no name.
Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone,
The boys beneath them slumber on.
They are the D-Day Dodgers who stay in Italy.

Harry Pynn/Hamish Henderson/folk tradition

Week 211: The Long Small Room, by Edward Thomas

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The beautiful particularity of this poem should not blind us to the fact that its closing stanzas are bleak as anything Edward Thomas ever wrote. Thomas’s long-running battle with literary hackwork and depression is well-chronicled, and probably the reaction of many will be ‘Join the club, mate’ – after all, most of us, unless we are unusually lucky in our vocation, are doomed to spend the best part of our lives in a place we don’t particularly want to be doing things we don’t particularly want to do. But Thomas, through a combination of temperament and domestic circumstances, did perhaps genuinely suffer more than most. The poem makes an interesting comparison with Philip Larkin’s famous anti-work diatribe ‘Toads’, but set beside Thomas’s existential angst Larkin’s seems no more than a cheery grumble: as a librarian he was after all doing something he clearly took some pride in and which presumably offered a measure of financial security, and by all accounts he seems to have got on rather well with his secretaries. Thomas worked alone for a pittance, and knew himself wasted.

The Long Small Room

The long small room that showed willows in the west
Narrowed up to the end the fireplace filled,
Although not wide. I liked it. No one guessed
What need or accident made them so build.

Only the moon, the mouse and the sparrow peeped
In from the ivy round the casement thick.
Of all they saw and heard there they shall keep
The tale for the old ivy and older brick.

When I look back I am like moon, sparrow, and mouse
That witnessed what they could never understand
Or alter or prevent in the dark house.
One thing remains the same – this my right hand

Crawling crab-like over the clean white page,
Resting awhile each morning on the pillow,
Then once more starting to crawl on towards age.
The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow.

Edward Thomas

Week 210: There’s a certain Slant of light, by Emily Dickinson

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I find this piece haunting, the more so because it is one of those poems that seem to give up their full meaning only slowly over the course of a lifetime. For me it is about those mysterious moments of alertness that we probably all have, those intimations of some platonic parallel world that trouble us with a sense of lost chances, of a realm where not only do things go better for us but we ourselves are better. It is linked in my mind, and not just by reason of the ‘cathedral tunes’ simile, with one of my all-time favourite pieces of music, Vaughan Williams’s ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’. When I listen to that I know exactly what ‘heavenly hurt’ is, and what ‘imperial affliction’ can be sent us of the air. And yet, while the poem may speak of hurt, and of a despair for the fading of the vision which is like a small death, there is a kind of uplift about it as well. For it is no small part of our humanity, that at least we are vulnerable to these intimations of the better, that we have our place in that landscape that listens, among those silent shadows.

There’s a certain Slant of light

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

Emily Dickinson

Week 209: From ‘The Aimer Gate’, by Alan Garner

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In my opinion Alan Garner, though still perhaps best known for his early children’s books, is one of the most interesting English writers of the last century in any genre (and happily still going). True, he needs working at and his books do not give up their secrets easily: I see them as a kind of elf-shot, slowly working their way under the skin to lodge in the heart. For me his most perfect achievement is ‘The Stone Book Quartet’, written in a spare prose with a layered concentration of meaning that any poet might be proud of, and of that quartet ‘The Aimer Gate’ is the most haunting and beautifully realised, with its rural First World War setting, seen through the eyes of boy whose uncle is home on leave from the trenches. In this scene, where rabbits are scared out of the last square of corn at the end of harvest, we realise what the benign Uncle Charlie’s trade is, and get a hint of what it costs him. 

Uncle Charlie didn’t answer. He was on his heel, chewing a straw of stubble and looking at the standing corn. His face had gone different. It was thinner, and Robert couldn’t tell what was in the eyes. He spat the straw out and drank from a flask he carried in his pocket, enough to wet his mouth, no more.

Uncle Charlie stood up. He took the rifle. ‘Get aback of me’, he said

. ….

‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! Wo-o-o-o! ‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! Wo-o-o-o!’ The men and boys yelled the cry. They yelled and yelled and clapped their hands and waved their caps and banged sticks together. ‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! Wo-o-o-o!’ The noise was tremendous.

Uncle Charlie didn’t move. But through the noise came another, a scream, a squeal, and, in terror, rabbits broke out of the last standing corn. All day they had worked inwards from the scythes, and now they ran. Uncle Charlie watched. Over the field, between the kivvers, dodging, driven by noise, the rabbits went, and their screaming pierced all noise.

Uncle Charlie swung the rifle to his shoulder, turning on his hips. He fired. The sound of the rifle deadened Robert’s ears. Left. Left. Right. Left. ‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! Wo-o-o-o!’ Right.

One rabbit was going up hill, in line with the men. Uncle Charlie watched it go until it climbed above them. The rabbit was at the top cornerpost of the field when he shot it.

The others got away. Their squealing stopped when they reached the bracken of the wood.

And Saint Philip’s church was still black, and there were no shadows.

Ozzie Leah shouted ‘Good lad, Sniper!’

Robert looked at Uncle Charlie. The face was no different. ‘When there’s too many’, said Uncle Charlie’, ‘you can’t tell them from poppies.. They’re all alike the same, you see’

. ……

They sat by the heap of road flint stone and gutted the rabbits. Uncle Charlie lifted his eyes to look at the work he had done, at the harvest got.

‘That’s my trade, Dick-Richard’, said Uncle Charlie. ‘I stop rabbits skriking. There’s me craft, and there’s my masterness’

Alan Garner

Note: a kivver is six sheaves of corn in a stack.

Week 208: From ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’ by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, tr. John Montague

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These are just the closing lines of a remarkable eighteenth-century Irish elegy, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, written by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill to lament the death of her husband Art, murdered in County Cork in 1773 at the hands of a British official with whom he had quarrelled. Much of the poem takes the form of a debate between wife and sister in which Art’s vitality and generosity of spirit are celebrated, producing a sense of loss that reminds me of Lorca’s great lament for the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: there is also the same sense of a sophisticated literary intellect harnessing the power of a great oral tradition.

From ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’

Until Art O’Leary comes again
This sorrow won’t lift
That lies across my heart
Like a tightly-locked trunk
With rust on the hasps
And the key thrown away.

So stop your weeping now
Women of the soft wet eyes
And drink to Art O’Leary
Before he enters the grave school
Not to study wisdom and song
But to carry earth and stone.

Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill  (tr. John Montague)

Week 207: The End of the Owls, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

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This poem by the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger (born 1929) may seem very much of its time with its Cold War imagery, but is surely just as relevant today: if the natural world appears to have become less threatened now by swift execution in the form of a nuclear Armageddon, it is only to face instead the slow death of a thousand cuts. I suppose you can call it progress.

I give the poem in its exceptionally fine English translation by Jerome Rothenberg.

The End Of The Owls

I speak for none of your kind,
I speak for the end of the owls.
I speak for the flounder and whale
in their unlighted house,
for the seven cornered sea,
for the glaciers
they will have calved too soon,
raven and dove, feathery witnesses,
for all those that dwell in the sky
and the woods, and the lichen in gravel,
for those without paths, for the colorless bog
and the desolate mountains.
Glaring on radar screens,
interpreted one final time
around the briefing table, fingered
to death by antennas, Florida’s swamps
and the Siberian ice, beast
and bush and basalt strangled
by early bird, ringed
by the latest maneuvers, helpless
under the hovering fireballs,
in the ticking of crises.
We’re as good as forgotten.
Don’t fuss with the orphans,
just empty your mind
of its longing for nest eggs,
glory or psalms that won’t rust.
I speak for none of you now,
all you plotters of perfect crimes,
not for me, not for anyone.
I speak for those who can’t speak,
for the deaf and dumb witnesses
for otters and seals,
for the ancient owls of the earth.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger (translated By Jerome Rothenberg)