Tag Archives: poetry

Week 195: Swan, from the Exeter Book

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If I were asked to rank the four languages that I studied for my degree as part of the Cambridge Anglo-Saxon Tripos – Old English, Old Norse, Old Irish and Old Welsh – according to the literary merit/interest of what survives in them, then Old Norse would come in a clear winner with Old English, I am sorry to say, limping in a somewhat distant fourth; this may, of course, simply be a reflection of how much of our native heritage has been lost. True, we have ‘Beowulf’, and ‘Beowulf’ has its moments, but not enough of them to sustain a poem of over 3000 lines, and if it was really ever meant for recitation then I like to think of some small Anglo-Saxon child, allowed to stay up late in the mead-hall, tugging at his father’s sleeve saying ‘Dad, when do we get to the bit with the monsters?’.

Still, there are other things in Old English besides ‘Beowulf’, and one of them is this rather beautiful riddle from the Exeter Book, to which the answer is generally assumed to be ‘Swan’. The slightly free translation that follows is my own.

Hrægl min swigað     þōn ic hrusan trede
oþþe þa wic buge     oþþe wado drefe
hwilum mec ahebbað  ofer hæleþa byht
hyrste mine  þeos hea lyft
mec þōn wide     wolcna strengu
ofer folc byreð     frætwe mine
swogað hlude    swinsiað
torhte singað    þōn ic getenge ne beom
flode ond foldan     ferende gæst

My garb is silent when I go on earth
Where men abide, or when I stir the stream.
Sometimes, though, I harness the high air,
Men’s dwellings dwindle as I mount above
Borne on the mighty sky. What music then
My rustling raiment makes, what melodies
It sings in splendour as I soar aloft,
A faring spirit far from field and flood.

Week 194: Long Distance, II, by Tony Harrison

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Tony Harrison (1937-) writes a bracingly acerbic poetry in which anger mingles with compassion: in this one the compassion dominates. I much admire his ability to extract poetry from what on the face of it is plain colloquial speech.

Long Distance, II

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.
He’d put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he’d hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

Tony Harrison

Week 193: Millom Old Quarry, by Norman Nicholson

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I love this poem by Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) – such a sensuous evocation of a northern town’s back streets – those gables ‘sanded with sun’, that ‘smoke of lilac’ – combined with a startling geological perspective.

Millom Old Quarry

‘They dug ten streets from that there hole,’ he said,
‘Hard on five hundred houses.’ He nodded
Down the set of the quarry and spat in the water
Making a moorhen cock her head
As if a fish had leaped. ‘Half the new town
‘Came out of yonder – King Street, Queen Street, all
‘The houses round the Green as far as the slagbank,
‘And Market Street, too, from the Crown allotments
‘Up to the Station Yard.’ – ‘But Market Street’s
‘Brown freestone’, I said. ‘Nobbut the facings
‘We called them the Khaki Houses in the Boer War
‘But they’re Cumberland slate at the back.’

I thought of those streets still bearing their royal names
Like the coat-of-arms on a child’s Jubilee Mug –
Nonconformist gables sanded with sun
Or branded with burning creeper; a smoke of lilac
Between the blue roofs of closet and coal-house;
So much that woman’s blood gave sense and shape to
Hacked from this dynamited combe.
The rocks cracked to the pond, and hawthorns fell
In waterfalls of blossom. Shed petals
Patterned the scum like studs on the sole of a boot
And stiff-legged sparrows skid down screes of gravel.

I saw the town’s black generations
Packed in their caves of rock, as mussel or limpet
Washed by the tidal sky; then swept, shovelled
Back in the quarry again, a landslip of lintels
Blocking the gape of the tarn.
The quick turf pushed a green tarpaulin over
All that was mortal in five thousand lives.
Nor did it seem a paradox to one
Who held quarry and query, turf and town
In the small lock of a recording brain.

Norman Nicholson

Week 192: The Sick Rose, by William Blake

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I find this one of Blake’s most haunting poems but also one of the most troublesome, because despite my own best efforts and the efforts of others I don’t feel that I am any closer to understanding it beyond what seems the fairly safe bet that it is about human sexuality rather than horticulture.

So just stop worrying? The trouble is that once you abandon the quest for meaning, can you be sure of being able to distinguish truly inspired utterance from manufactured gibberish? Well, I don’t think this poem is gibberish, but why not? After all, invisible flying worms seem to fall some way short of sense as we know it.

So, if I can’t figure out what was going in Blake’s head when he wrote it, can I at least figure out what is going in mine when I read it? Not really – I only know that it passes Housman’s test for poetry: that it makes the hairs stand on end.

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

William Blake

Week 191: Bereavement, by Patricia Beer

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Patricia Beer (1919-1999) has a very distinctive voice, as can be heard in this remarkably honest poem about the loss of a parent that does not shrink from facing up to the anger and sense of abandonment that can be a component of grief. I think the image of mother and daughter as sheep and lamb could have been a tricky one to handle, but in the event is brilliantly sustained.

Bereavement

I was too young. I had to watch
My heavy mother lie on her back to scratch.
They never touched ground again, those brittle feet.
I cannot eat what all the others eat.

Foolish mother, rolling to death, how long
Shall the deserted bare an aching tongue
To call for what is drying up inside you
As the afternoon trees begin to shade you?

Soon he will come, the farmer, and haul away
And hide that sheep, who treacherously
Lay down, where I can never find her
Nor go into the slaughter house behind her.

The sharp May grass sings under my nose
And soon the farmer will hear a new voice
That lost the day wailing about hunger
But towards nightfall turns to anger.

Patricia Beer

Week 190: Surgical Ward: Men, by Robert Graves

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I know of very few poems on the subject of physical pain. Perhaps this is because there is nothing much useful to be said about it; perhaps we just don’t have the vocabulary. After all, don’t you just hate the modern fad whereby health services ask you to ‘rate your pain’? So you go to consult about something irksome but fairly minor on the scale of human affliction, say acute sciatica, and you get: ‘And how do you rate that on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst pain you can imagine?’ What do you say? A truthful ‘Well, compared with being burned alive or torn to pieces on the rack or dying of strangury, about 0.01’ seems likely to elicit a response of ‘So, why are you wasting my time?’, whereas a confident ‘Oh, at least six’ surely marks you out as a big wuss with a very limited imagination.

So all credit to Robert Graves in this poem for managing to convey something about the nature of the beast in his usual distinctive way.

Surgical Ward: Men

Something occurred after the operation
To scare the surgeons (though no fault of theirs),
Whose reassurance did not fool me long.
Beyond the shy, concerned faces of nurses
A single white-hot eye, focusing on me,
Forced sweat in rivers down from scalp to belly.
I whistled, gasped or sang, with blanching knuckles
Clutched at my bed-grip almost till it cracked:
Too proud, still, to let loose Bedlamite screeches
And bring the charge-nurse scuttling down the aisle
With morphia-needle levelled….

Lady Morphia –
Her scorpion kiss and dark gyrating dreams –
She in mistrust of whom I dared out-dare,
Two minutes longer than seemed possible,
Pain, that unpurposed, matchless elemental
Stronger than fear or grief, stranger than love.

Robert Graves

Week 189: Come In, by Robert Frost

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It can be a bit annoying when you are having an experience that you are trying to put into words and up pops someone else’s poem in your head to save you the bother. Yet who would forgo the pleasures of a well-stocked memory? This happened to me last Saturday when I was in the local woods at dusk to catch the roding flight of a woodcock, and song thrushes (now sadly vanishing from my garden) could be heard all around. ‘Far in the pillared dark/Thrush music went…’. How perfect that epithet ‘pillared’, I thought, looking at the tall straight beeches disappearing into dimness rank on rank. Here is the whole poem, where Frost contemplates his sense of apartness as a poet with a kind of wistful defiance.

Incidentally, Frost’s ‘pillared’ may well be an echo of A.E.Housman’s beautiful ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’ – ‘And full of shade the pillared forest/Would murmur and be mine’. Good poets borrow, great poets steal!

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music — hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush’s breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went —
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn’t been.

Robert Frost

Week 188: From ‘Peter Grimes’, by George Crabbe

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I tend to think of George Crabbe (1754-1832) as predominantly an eighteenth-century poet, though in fact he was active into the nineteenth, was on friendly terms with Wordsworth and the Lake poets, and was much approved by Byron. Now, I confess that the feeling I get from much eighteenth-century verse is one of claustrophobic brilliance: so deft, so accomplished, so narrowly social – you want to shout ‘Hey, guys, there’s a world out there, what about it?’. Well, with Crabbe you get the world out there all right, but the claustrophobia doesn’t get any less. In ‘Peter Grimes’ the Suffolk coastal landscape is used to devastatingly oppressive effect to mirror the entrapment of a soul damned by its own devices. This passage in particular has always seemed to me quite extraordinary in its use of that favourite eighteenth-century form, the heroic couplet, matching Pope for fluency, Swift for mordancy, yet reaching beyond both to a Shakespearean richness of language and perception.

When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mudbanks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels that left the deeper way
For the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood;
Here dull and hopeless he’d lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging goldeneye;
What time the sea birds to the marsh would come,
And the loud bittern, from the bulrush home,
Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom.
He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce,
And loved to stop beside the opening sluice,
Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried, saddening sound;
Where all presented to the eye or ear
Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear.

George Crabbe

Week 187: Mr Flood’s Party, by Edwin Arlington Robinson

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Could anything express the isolation and desolation of old age better than the closing four lines of this poem? It makes an interesting comparison with Robert Frost’s ‘An Old Man’s Winter Night’, and indeed Robinson may be counted as one of Frost’s influences. Robinson’s diction may be more consciously literary, but there is the same awareness that sometimes the more simply things are said the better they are said.

I remember when I first read the poem at school my literal mind was puzzled by the phrase ‘with only two moons listening’. I felt we could rule out the possibility that the action was taking place on Mars. So did this mean Eben was seeing double because he was drunk? Didn’t seem very poetic. In the end I decided that the second moon must be the remembered harvest moon of other days. For ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past.’

Mr Flood’s Party

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
 Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

 ‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.’ He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: ‘Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.’

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!’
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
‘Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

‘Only a very little, Mr. Flood —
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.’
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang —

‘For auld lang syne.’ The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below —
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Week 186: August, 1914, by Isaac Rosenberg

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These lines by the First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) seem to me a good example of a poem that is flawed yet still memorable, of inspiration triumphing over imperfection. For the most part the compact imagery works well: the symbol of war as a consuming fire, destroying affection and memory, ‘the heart’s dear granary’, is underpinned at the literal level by the fact that war can indeed lead to the burning of actual crops in ‘ripe fields’; the symbol of war as hard cold iron, ousting all that is rich and sweet in life, is similarly underpinned by the actual dominance of iron as a battlefield material. The problem I have is with the last line. Yes, this too may work well enough at the symbolic level: war as disfigurer, maiming the mouth, the very source of utterance, in the way it perverts human speech for the purposes of hate and propaganda. But at the literal level a broken tooth, on the scale of what war can do to the human body, strikes a rather bathetic note, and one can’t help wondering if Rosenberg got into difficulties having to find a rhyme for ‘youth’ and didn’t quite manage to extricate himself.

Still, worth it for that middle quatrain alone.

August 1914

What in our lives is burnt
In the fire of this?
The heart’s dear granary?
The much we shall miss?

Three lives hath one life –
Iron, honey, gold.
The gold, the honey gone –
Left is the hard and cold.

Iron are our lives
Molten right through our youth.
A burnt space through ripe fields,
A fair mouth’s broken tooth.

Isaac Rosenberg