Tag Archives: poetry

Week 175: Mama and Daughter, by Langston Hughes

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I much admire this poem by the American poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967) for its spare evocative dialogue that conveys so well the wistful singing sweetness of memory.

Mama and Daughter

Mama, please brush off my coat.
I’m going down the street.

Where’re you going, daughter?

To see my sugar-sweet.

Who is your sugar, honey?
Turn around – I’ll brush behind.

He is that young man, mama,
I can’t get off my mind.

Daughter, once upon a time –
Let me brush your hem –
Your father, yes he was the one!
I felt like that about him.

But it was a long time ago
He up and went his way.
I hope that wild young son-of-a-gun
Rots in hell today!

Mama, dad couldn’t still be young.

He was young yesterday.
He was young when he –
Turn around!
So I can brush your back, I say!

Langston Hughes

Week 174: The Secret People, by G.K.Chesterton

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Maybe I really should not like G.K. Chesterton as much as I do. Wilfred Owen said of Tennyson, ‘He was always a great child, and so should I have been but for the battle of Beaumont Hamel’, and it has always seemed to me that these words could equally be applied to Chesterton, with his cloak and his swordstick and his rather romantic view of human violence bred, as Orwell noted, from a long age of civilian peace. Yes, a great child, and yet he could be such a wise and eloquent child…. And he was on our side, where by ‘our’ I mean the ordinary working man or woman whose greatest desire is to be left in peace to live their lives, raise their children and pursue their own interests, and who will forgive politicians most things out of gratitude that anyone should be prepared to take on the boring business of actually running the country but who do not like lies and broken promises. It will be fascinating to see what the ‘secret people’ do in the forthcoming European Union referendum. Personally I am all in favour of trade and cultural exchange as far as it goes, but those of us who can’t help feeling that history took a bit of a wrong turn in 1066 may like to recall that the battle-cry of King Harold’s house-carls on that fateful day at Senlac Hill was ‘Ut! Ut!’ – ‘Out! Out!’

The Secret People

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.

The fine French kings came over in a flutter of flags and dames.
We liked their smiles and battles, but we never could say their names.
The blood ran red to Bosworth and the high French lords went down;
There was naught but a naked people under a naked crown.
And the eyes of the King’s Servants turned terribly every way,
And the gold of the King’s Servants rose higher every day.
They burnt the homes of the shaven men, that had been quaint and kind,
Till there was no bed in a monk’s house, nor food that man could find.
The inns of God where no man paid, that were the wall of the weak.
The King’s Servants ate them all. And still we did not speak.

And the face of the King’s Servants grew greater than the King:
He tricked them, and they trapped him, and stood round him in a ring.
The new grave lords closed round him, that had eaten the abbey’s fruits,
And the men of the new religion, with their bibles in their boots,
We saw their shoulders moving, to menace or discuss,
And some were pure and some were vile; but none took heed of us.
We saw the King as they killed him, and his face was proud and pale;
And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.

A war that we understood not came over the world and woke
Americans, Frenchmen, Irish; but we knew not the things they spoke.
They talked about rights and nature and peace and the people’s reign:
And the squires, our masters, bade us fight; and scorned us never again.
Weak if we be for ever, could none condemn us then;
Men called us serfs and drudges; men knew that we were men.
In foam and flame at Trafalgar, on Albuera plains,
We did and died like lions, to keep ourselves in chains
We lay in living ruins; firing and fearing not
The strange fierce face of the Frenchmen who knew for what they fought,
And the man who seemed to be more than man we strained against and broke;
And we broke our own rights with him. And still we never spoke.

Our patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again.
But the squire seemed struck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain,
He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,
He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.
Or perhaps the shades of the shaven men, whose spoil is in his house,
Come back in shining shapes at last to spoil his last carouse:
We only know the last sad squires rode slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land: and still it is not we.

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

G.K.Chesterton

Week 173: A Lyke-wake Dirge

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I think one can respect the sombre power of this poem even if, like me, you have reservations about the belief system that inspired it and feel that the moral progress of humanity is and should be away from the notion of doing good to others in the hope of reward or for the avoidance of punishment in the next world and towards the notion of doing good to others simply because it makes a better place of this world.

Some versions amend ‘fleet’ in the third line to ‘sleet’, and in his ‘English and Scottish Ballads’ Robert Graves amends it to ‘salt’ but I am reluctant to lose the alliteration and anyway there is a perfectly good explanation that ‘fleet’ in Yorkshire dialect means floor or house-room, and so the third line is summarising the comforts of the house which the soul must then leave to go out in the dark and cold.

A Lyke-Wake Dirge

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
—Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

When thou from hence away art past,
—Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
—Every nighte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane
—Every nighte and alle,
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.

From Whinny-muir when thou may’st pass,
—Every nighte and alle,
To Brig o’ Dread thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass,
—Every nighte and alle,
To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest meat or drink,
—Every nighte and alle,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If meat or drink thou ne’er gav’st nane,
—Every nighte and alle,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
—Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

Anon

Week 172: At My Father’s Grave, by Hugh MacDiarmid

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I first read Hugh MacDiarmid’s poems before knowing anything at all about MacDiarmid the man. There are many poets for whom this state of innocence has much to recommend it, but perhaps for few more than the pugnacious anglophobe Hugh MacDiarmid (aka Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892-1978), who brings to mind Auden’s lines about Time that ‘worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives’. I am aware that for many MacDiarmid’s political views – he managed to espouse both fascism and communism – are not in the least forgivable, and I sympathise, but I feel that when it comes to poetry one has to make some effort to play the ball and not the man, and it does seem to me that among all the rant of his work there are, like it or not, some memorable fine lyrics.

At My Father’s Grave

The sunlicht still on me, you row’d in clood,
We look upon ilk other noo like hills,
Athort a valley. I’m nae mair your son.
It is my mind, nae son o’ yours, that looks,
And the great darkness o’ your death comes up
And equals it across the way.
A livin’ man upon a dead man thinks
And ony sma’er thocht’s impossible.

Hugh MacDiarmid

Week 170: From ‘Pearl’ (author unknown)

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‘Pearl’ is a long narrative poem in Middle English from the late 14th century in which a father, apparently mourning the loss of his daughter, falls asleep in a garden and has a vision of a maid in a strange landscape on the other side of a stream: she reproves him for his grief according to Christian doctrine, with a good deal of homily and the usual spiel about submitting to God’s will, and these elements of the poem are maybe not likely to appeal much to our more secular age. But there is one verse that I do find haunting, where the man’s natural humanity is allowed to cry out against the maid’s celestial complacency, while at the same time he remains, in a most pathetic way, desperate not to quarrel with the lost daughter.

I think the English is mostly intelligible to the modern reader, but I append my own attempt at a somewhat modernised rendering.

My blysse, my bale, ye han ben bothe,
But much the bygger yet watz my mone,
Fro thou watz wroken from vch a wothe,
I wyste neuer quere my perle watz gon.
Now I hit see, now lethez my lothe,
And, quen we departed, we wern at on;
God forbede we be now wrothe,
We meten so selden by stok other ston…

My joy, my grief, you have been both,
But much the more has been my moan,
Since you went free from woes of earth,
I knew not where my pearl had gone.
Now that I see, I am less loth,
And when you left, we were as one;
Now God forbid that we be wrath
Who meet no more by stick or stone.

Week 169: One Evening, by Molly Holden

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There are many poets that I take pleasure in for their prowess, but relatively few that I return to over and over because I find them important to me in a way that transcends mere prowess: call it spiritual resonance. Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, A.E.Housman, R.S.Thomas – and Molly Holden. So I make no apology for featuring another of Molly’s poems here, particularly as she seems to me never to have had anything like the notice she deserves, perhaps partly because her concerns were not overtly feminist but simply and unfashionably human. I see in this poem a powerful image of her conflicted life, its storms of illness contrasting with a vision of serenity beyond, glimpsed through those closing gates of light.

One Evening

I came on to waste land
at evening, at the edge of the town,
where the hill drops away to meadow,
lane, and different distances of trees.
The wind was wild and the clouds
furious.

As I looked ahead
my eye’s vision seemed halved
for the earth was dark and the horizon
just as dark with clouds, but above
a sudden space of clear sky captured
breath. For above was the last
light and the first stars, edged
by the insane tumbling of black clouds,
brought up from tremendous distances
of night, framing sudden serenity.

All seemed so close, so furious
that I shrank, and then stared through
that lessening space at space itself,
withdrawn and permanent,
the gates of light now closing
on a stormy night.

Molly Holden

Week 168: Roman Wall Blues, by W.H.Auden

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This may not be Auden’s greatest poem, but I certainly find it one of his most engagingly offbeat, and I have a particular fondness for it since it brings back vividly a day spent visiting Hadrian’s Wall with my small daughter and smaller grandson (there are seventeen years between our first and last child – don’t ask).

We picnicked just north of the wall and I sat propped against it with legs outstretched, watching white clouds go by and grass shimmer in the wind, and thinking of those who once patrolled here, Tungrian or Frisian or German auxiliary. I discovered that I knew ‘Roman Wall Blues’ by heart, and somehow at that moment Auden’s brief poem managed to conjure up their past for me better than any history book. In fact I was just feeling myself to be on the edge of some pretty profound insight when small grandson announced that he needed a wee, so I never quite got there. I think it was something about how little time for private reflection those poor blokes must have had in their hard anonymous lives…

Roman Wall Blues

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I’ve lice in my tunic and cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging round her place,
I don’t like his manners, I don’t like his face.

Piso’s a Christian, he worships a fish,
There’d be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I’m a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

W.H.Auden

Week 167: The Garden of Ithilien, from ‘The Two Towers’ by J.R.R.Tolkien

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How good a poet was J.R.R.Tolkien? Reluctantly, I have to go along with his great admirer W.H.Auden in saying ‘not very’, but with the caveat that this may be the wrong question. Tolkien did not belong, or wish to belong, to any modern tradition: his is a much older lineage, of scop and skald and bard, poets who were judged on their skill in making complex sound patterns in somewhat arcane language rather than, necessarily, on their success in the quest for inner truth and meaning that one likes to think is the business of poetry today. I do not think that line can be profitably resurrected, so I have to reckon Tolkien as a very skilled versifier rather than as a poet as I understand it. The prose is another matter: always clear and serviceable, at best it can have haunting rhythms and an evocative precision, as in this description of the garden of Ithilien from ‘The Two Towers’. It often seems to me that the real hero of ‘Lord of the Rings’ is Middle Earth itself, that ‘mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day’. Certainly I find its weathers and landscapes one of the great joys of the trilogy, and one that lifts it well clear of most other works in the fantasy genre. This particular passage reminds me of D.H.Lawrence’s loving depictions of the Mediterranean flora, though somehow I don’t imagine that Tolkien was much of a Lawrence reader.

Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down into dim hazes far below. All about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs. The long journey from Rivendell had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.

South and west it looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Duath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away. Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants, and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their creeping woody stems mantling in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.

Week 166: Old Furniture, by Thomas Hardy

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I like this poem very much, even though it inspires in me considerable pangs of guilt concerning my father’s writing-desk. This was made of some dark wood, with a flap that let down on brass lopers, and many pigeonholes at the top where he kept his papers; these were of no interest to me, but below the flap were two shelves behind leaded lights which held the books from his own childhood, and tucked away behind them was a full set of Arthur Mee’s ‘The Children’s Encyclopaedia’. So it was that I cut my reading teeth on a combination of sturdy Victorian fare – Captain Marryat, G.A.Henty, R.M.Ballantyne, Rider Haggard, Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, Talbot Baines Reed – together with a science that had no notion of relativity, DNA and continental drift, a history innocent of the Second World War and a geography in which most of the world was still coloured red. I am still trying to catch up.

The desk could have been mine when my mother died, but we had little room, and even I, not known for my sensitivity in matters of décor, could see that it did not ‘go with’ our other furniture, so I passed on it, and consequently don’t see as often as I might the man who spent so many hours seated there and the small boy sprawled on his stomach on the carpet nearby. We don’t have much time for ghosts in our lives these days; fortunately for us, Hardy did.

Old Furniture

I know not how it may be with others
Who sit amid relics of householdry
That date from the days of their mothers’ mothers.
But well I know how it is with me
Continually.

I see the hands of the generations
That owned each shiny familiar thing
In play on its knobs and indentations,
And with its ancient fashioning
Still dallying:

Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.

On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger,
Moving to set the minutes right
With tentative touches that lift and linger
In the wont of a moth on a summer night,
Creeps to my sight.

On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing –
As whilom – just over the strings by the nut,
The tip of a bow receding, advancing
In airy quivers, as if it would cut
The plaintive gut.

And I see a face by that box for tinder,
Glowing forth in fits from the dark,
And fading again, as the linten cinder
Kindles to red at the flinty spark,
Or goes out stark.

Well, well. It is best to be up and doing,
The world has no use for one today
Who eyes things thus – no aim pursuing!
He should not continue in this stay,
But sink away.

Thomas Hardy

Week 165: Postscript, by Seamus Heaney

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I have had more than one poet friend of normally sound judgment who has not taken to Seamus Heaney at all, dismissing him as dull. People are entitled to their tastes, but this puzzles me. Yes, a poem like the following may not be at all flashy, but is it not, at a deep level, quietly satisfying? And is not that image of the swans in line eight the kind of thing that marks out a true maker? It is proper in this trade of ours to resist hype and to question consensus, but one must also allow for the possibility that sometimes just because everybody says that something is good, it doesn’t mean it’s not good.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney