Tag Archives: poetry

Week 124: Elegy of Fortinbras, by Zbigniew Herbert

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I much admire this original take on ‘Hamlet’ by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), in which he seems to come down firmly on the side of Fortinbras, Hamlet’s conqueror and the practical man of action, against the self-torturing introspective held up to us by Shakespeare as the hero. It is clear that for Herbert, a political activist who fought in the Polish resistance against the Nazis, the role of poet in no way excuses one from civic duty and civic action. Quite. And yet it is the unjust power of poetry that the words Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Hamlet continue to resonate with us rather more than the sewer projects and prison reforms that Herbert deploys to such beautifully bathetic effect in the last stanza. I am not sure that Herbert is as rueful about this –‘what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy’ – as, speaking in the character of Fortinbras, he makes out. For there is also in any poet a bit of Hamlet too…

The C.M. of the dedication is Herbert’s fellow Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), who also assisted in what seems to me (not that I know any Polish to judge) a remarkable piece of translation.

Elegy of Fortinbras

To C.M.

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums
drums I know nothing exquisite
those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by neck and shake it a bit

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

Zbigniew Herbert (tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

Week 123: No Answer, by Laurence Whistler

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Laurence Whistler (1912-2000) is best known as a glass engraver, but before that he was a poet of some accomplishment, as shown by this moving elegy for his first wife, the actress Jill Furse, who died in 1944, the same year in which his brother Rex was killed in Normandy. He wrote an account of his life with Jill in ‘The Initials in the Heart’, published in 1964. I find the closing lines of this poem particularly affecting.

No Answer

In the slow lapse of unrecorded afternoons
When nothing seems to change but history itself
Unfolding at the pace of clouds or even weeds
The window murmurs lightly to the vacant room
And seems as if it commented with mild surprise
On some arrival, timely or unique;
Slow by the rapid stream, perhaps, or quick in the slow skies.

Why does the window murmur – and to whom?
What notable event does it report
That’s far above the heads of furniture,
Nor heeded by the absent-minded room?

Is it first cuckoo-fall? – the double word
Dropping like seed into the wood, instant with spring?

Or is it rose-fall? – end of the first rose,
Spilled from the hand of Summer, pensively?

Perhaps first apple-fall? – scatter and thud,
And Autumn here that moment, cornucopia?

Or is it only the first snow-fall? – one,
One, and then one, slid furtive down, as if
Winter himself had thought the moment haunted?

Windows look out of rooms at poetry,
That pours back through them, lyrical in birds,
Epic in weather, narrative in streams.
But they look only out, half-conscious of a being
Shadowed behind them, borrowing their eyes.

O window, when you murmur, ‘Do but look!’
Don’t ask who listens now. Never enquire
Why soundlessness should grow into a habit,
Helpless and final as the dust.

Suppose

She may be resting yet in the great bed,
Tuned always to your accent, though her heart
Is listening miles away to mine. – Might she
Not lie so still? Never so long, so still?
Should there, long since, have come to you at least,
The flicking over of a page – at least
Her busy pencil, whispering word by word
The letter she would send – at very least
A sigh?

So would she sigh
In the dark ages of the afternoon,
When you would draw her to some poetry
(Fall of the word, the rose, the fruit, the fleeting crystal),
So would she sigh a war away – since tears,
If tears were let, would rain away the world:
Sigh in the great bed for its emptiness,
The waste of poetry, the waste of years.

Laurence Whistler

Week 122: If You Should Go To Caistor Town, by Charles Causley

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Time for another poem from the excellent Charles Causley, this time showing his almost unique gift for inhabiting the ballad/folksong form and making it his own while retaining all the qualities of the tradition.

If You Should Go To Caistor Town

If you should go to Caistor town,
Where my true love has gone,
Ask her why she went away
And left me here alone.

She said the Caistor sky was blue,
The wind was never cold,
The pavements were all made of pearl,
The young were never old.

Never a word she told me more
But when the year was fled
Upon a bed of brightest earth
She laid her gentle head.

When I went up to Caistor
My suit was made of black,
And all her words like summer birds
Upon the air came back.

O when I went to Caistor
With ice the sky was sown,
And all the streets were chill and grey
And they were made of stone.

Charles Causley

Week 121: ‘Alas! Poor Queen’ by Marion Angus

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It is difficult to know how far this lament for Mary, Queen of Scots by the Scottish poet Marion Angus (1865-1946) gives an accurate portrait of the unfortunate queen: one suspects that she was rather more than an innocent butterfly broken on the wheels of power, just as one suspects that Thomas Cromwell was rather less humane than the portrayal of him in the current TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ suggests. But since we can’t at this remove know for sure, we might as well take a fine poem, as well as some unusually intelligent TV, at face value and enjoy them.

Alas! Poor Queen

She was skilled in music and the dance
And the old arts of love
At the court of the poisoned rose
And the perfumed glove,
And gave her beautiful hand
To the pale Dauphin
A triple crown to win –
And she loved little dogs
And parrots
And red-legged partridges
And the golden fishes of the Duc de Guise
And a pigeon with a blue ruff
She had from Monsieur d’Elboeuf.

Master John Knox was no friend to her;
She spoke him soft and kind,
Her honeyed words were Satan’s lure
The unwary soul to bind.
‘Good sir, doth a lissome shape
And a comely face
Offend your God His Grace
Whose Wisdom maketh these
Golden fishes of the Duc de Guise?’

She rode through Liddesdale with a song:
‘Ye streams sae wondrous strang,
Oh, mak’ me a wrack as I come back
But spare me as I gang.’
While a hill-bird cried and cried
Like a spirit lost
By the grey storm-wind tost.

Consider the way she had to go,
Think of the hungry snare,
The net she herself had woven,
Aware or unaware,
Of the dancing feet grown still,
The blinded eyes –
Queens should be cold and wise,
And she loved little things,
Parrots
And red-legged partridges
And the golden fishes of the Duc de Guise
And the pigeon with the blue ruff
She had from Monsieur d’Elboeuf.

Marion Angus

Week 120: From ‘Dream Song 90’, by John Berryman

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I have never known quite what to make of John Berryman. He belongs to that confessional school of twentieth-century American poets of whom one sometimes feels that both their lives and their poems might have gone better had they been less interested in themselves and more interested in the world around them. Yet Berryman’s voice, in his persona as the Henry of ‘Dream Songs’, can be memorable and moving, especially, I find, in his elegies for various friends and fellow-poets, such as these lines for Randall Jarrell from ‘Dream Song 90’.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing
cannot restore one instant’s good to, rest:
he’s left us now.
The panic died, and in the panic’s dying
so did my old friend. I am headed west
also, also, somehow.

In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again.
I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat
and all will be as before
whenas we sought, among the beloved faces,
eminence and were dissatisfied with that
and needed more.

John Berryman

Week 119: After Trinity, by John Meade Falkner

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I suppose that in matters of religion I am best described as agnostic, though that is really too definite a label: an agnostic believes that some things are unknowable in principle and I have no idea whether those things are unknowable in principle or not: I only know that I don’t myself know them, and that it would be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise. This doesn’t stop me having some respect for religion in so far as it involves good people getting together to do good things, and in particular being grateful to the C. of E. for providing beautiful ancient buildings up and down the country which, as long as you avoid Sundays, are ideal for a spot of quiet reflection. And also for inspiring a lot of fine music and poetry. Like this piece by John Meade Falkner (1858-1932), perhaps best known as the author of the smuggler’s tale ‘Moonfleet’, but also a poet and onetime Librarian to Durham Cathedral. It is a poem which fuses the Church calendar with the English year in a celebration that may appeal even to those like me who have to look up when Trinity actually is (it seems to move about: this year it’s May 31st).

After Trinity

We have done with dogma and divinity,
Easter and Whitsun past,
The long, long Sundays after Trinity,
Are with us at last;
The passionless Sundays after Trinity,
Neither feast-day nor fast.

Christmas comes with plenty,
Lent spreads out its pall,
But these are five and twenty,
The longest Sundays of all;
The placid Sundays after Trinity,
Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.

Spring with its burst is over,
Summer has had its day,
The scented grasses and clover
Are cut, and dried into hay;
The singing-birds are silent,
And the swallows flown away.

Post pugnam pausa fiet;
Lord, we have made our choice;
In the stillness of autumn quiet,
We have heard the still, small voice.
We have sung Oh where shall Wisdom?
Thick paper, folio, Boyce.

Let it not all be sadness,
Not omnia vanitas,
Stir up a little gladness
To lighten the Tibi cras;
Send us that little summer,
That comes with Martinmas.

When still the cloudlet dapples
The windless cobalt blue,
And the scent of gathered apples
Fills all the store-rooms through,
The gossamer silvers the bramble,
The lawns are gemmed with dew.

An end of tombstone Latinity,
Stir up sober mirth,
Twenty-fifth after Trinity,
Kneel with the listening earth,
Behind the Advent trumpets
They are singing Emmanuel’s birth.

John Meade Falkner

Week 118: From ‘Ghost Voice’, by Roy Fuller

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These honest, rueful lines by the English poet Roy Fuller (1912-1991) turn on the idea that the natural condition of human love is one of an unquestioning domestic familiarity, that what the dead would like to come home to is not fanfares and celebrations, but simply their old state of being taken for granted. If they only could come home….

From ‘Ghost Voice’

Why do we return? Not in the darkened rooms
Of rattling tambourines and butter muslin,
But as you boil an egg or make the bed
You hear us and answer: ‘Darling?’.

Yes, that’s our wish, after all, whatever ancient
Boredom or intervening cause of unwelcome
Would face us, for our presence once again
To be taken all for granted.

We don’t come in actuality, alas!
For we’re in a place that even cosmologists,
Speculating on collapsed stars and anti-matter
Couldn’t find more alien.

Roy Fuller

Week 117: From ‘King Lear’, Act V, Scene 3, by William Shakespeare

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I once attended an open-air performance of ‘King Lear’, and very good it was too on a darkening summer evening against a backdrop of ruins. The only problem was that this being a small company there was some doubling up of roles, and the same female actor played both Cordelia and the Fool. This clearly confused two old ladies sitting in front of me, who, going along with the Shakespearean convention that any change of costume serves as an impenetrable disguise, not unnaturally assumed that the Fool actually was Cordelia, come back to keep an eye on her old dad just as Kent had come back in disguise to serve his master and Edgar to assist Gloucester. I don’t think this is quite what Shakespeare intended – let’s face it, most ideas about Shakespeare are probably not what Shakespeare intended – but there is certainly a case to be made for the Fool as Cordelia’s alter ego, both radiating the same dangerous innocence. It seemed particularly appropriate that these final lines of reconciliation between Lear and his daughter should have coincided with the last light from the west, before the play ended in death and darkness.

  • Edmund. Some officers take them away. Good guard
    Until their greater pleasures first be known
    That are to censure them.
  • Cordelia. We are not the first
    Who with best meaning have incurr’d the worst.
    For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
    Myself could else outfrown false Fortune’s frown.
    Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?
  • Lear. No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
    We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
    When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
    And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
    And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
    At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
    Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too –
     Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out –
     And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
    As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
    In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
    That ebb and flow by th’ moon.

Week 116: Bilberries, by Eric Millward

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This tender poem brings back fond memories of picking berries (blackberries rather than bilberries) with my own small daughter. (I particularly remember how she would put one rather squashed berry into the bowl, take out half a dozen and eat them, then say proudly ‘I are being a helpy girl, aren’t I?’). It is one of those poems that snatch a precious and perhaps never-to be-repeated moment out of time and preserve it in an amber of loving observation.

Bilberries

We have been picking bilberries over an hour.
Your small hand opens, closes: a preying flower.
Warm shadows deepen into greys and blues,
hiding in caches those we didn’t choose
or didn’t see. All of the world is still
except ourselves, upon this glowing hill.
Whatever moved here earlier lies low,
waiting for us to pick our fill and go,
when, watched by them, the patient, the bright-eyed,
we shall go down the bountiful hillside.
But for an hour we lord it over eyes
that watch us covertly, with some surprise,
for hills hold nothing quite like me and you,
stooping and picking till our hands are blue.

Eric Millward

Week 115: On A Poet, by James Reeves

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I think the E.B. of this poem must be Edmund Blunden, as the initials fit, the dates fit (except that Blunden actually died in January 1974, not 1973) and Blunden was a friend of Reeves. The only problem is that Blunden was actually quite well recognised as a poet in his lifetime, assuming that the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry, election to the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, and commemoration on a stone in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey count as recognition.‘By most neglected’, therefore, may be a bit of an overstatement and one can’t help wondering if the poem is more an expression of Reeves’s own relatively unrewarded devotion to his craft.

The Queen of Elfland’s sometimes inconvenient gift to Thomas was, of course, a tongue that was incapable of lying: see ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, Child Ballad no. 37.

On a Poet

E.B. 1896 – 1973

Having no Celtic bombast in his blood,
Nor dipsomaniac rage, nor very much
To give his time of what his time expected,
He saw his Muse, slight thing, by most neglected.

She was no exhibitionist, and he,
With only the Queen of Elfland’s gift to Thomas,
Could not afford to school her in the taste
For stolen gauds and ornaments of paste.

When he is dead and his best phrases stored
With Clare’s and Hardy’s in the book of gold,
She with her unpresuming Saxon grace
In the Queen’s retinue will take her place.

James Reeves