Tag Archives: poetry

Week 114: Vision By Sweetwater, by John Crowe Ransom

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I have long found this poem enchanting but also just a little annoying. I like to understand a poem as thoroughly as I can, and get frustrated when that understanding seems to require some private key that I don’t have. And this one, after its beautiful opening stanzas, appears to tail off into a slightly wilful irresolution. ‘Where have I seen before, against the wind, These bright virgins…?’. I don’t know, mate, where have you seen them before? And what’s with the scream?

I have seen it suggested that the allusion is to the story of Susannah and the Elders in the apocryphal addition to the Book of Daniel, but if that’s really what Ransom had in mind, I can only say that the parallel between two voyeuristic old men hiding in the bushes to watch a woman bathing and the awakening of a young boy to his first romantic perception of womanhood does not seem a particularly happy one. But I’ll forgive all for the willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass and the steep turn of Sweetwater.

Later: one suggestion I have had is that the boy is startled out of his daydreaming by one of the girls, who has ‘been adventuring with delicate paces’, falling into the steep-banked stream, hence the sudden cry.

Vision By Sweetwater

Go and ask Robin to bring the girls over
To Sweetwater, said my Aunt; and that was why
It was like a dream of ladies, sweeping by
The willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass and river.

Robin’s sisters and my Aunt’s lily daughter
Laughed and talked and tinkled light as wrens
If there were a little colony all hens
To go walking by the steep turn of Sweetwater.

Let them alone, dear Aunt, just for one minute
While I go fishing in the dark of my mind:
Where have I seen before, against the wind,
These bright virgins, robed and bare of bonnet,

Flowing with music of their strange quick tongue
And adventuring with delicate paces by the stream,
Myself a child, old suddenly at the scream
From one of the white throats which it hid among?

John Crowe Ransom

Week 113: The Death of Lancelot, by Sir Thomas Malory

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You have to feel sorry for King Arthur. He starts off in the earliest matter of Britain, the now sadly fragmented Celtic sources, as a true legendary hero in his own right, leading a band of extraordinary warriors on quests to hunt monstrous boars, as in ‘Culhwch and Olwen’, or to steal magical cauldrons from the Otherworld, as in the poem ‘Preiddeu Annwfn’ that can still give one a shiver of the mysterious: ‘’Three times the fullness of Prydwen we went in…None but seven ever came back from Caer Rigor’. Then along comes Lancelot and not only cuckolds him but nicks all the best lines. Disapproving Dante might have been, but it was still Lancelot and Guinevere, not Arthur, who inspired one of the most beautiful passages in the ‘Inferno’, and despite the title of his work, ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’, it’s Lancelot who gets the great send-off from Sir Thomas Malory….

The Death of Lancelot

AND when Sir Ector heard such noise and light in the quire of Joyous Gard, he alighted and put his horse from him, and came into the quire, and there he saw men sing and weep. And all they knew Sir Ector, but he knew not them. Then went Sir Bors unto Sir Ector, and told him how there lay his brother, Sir Launcelot, dead; and then Sir Ector threw his shield, sword, and helm from him. And when he beheld Sir Launcelot’s visage, he fell down in a swoon. And when he waked it were hard any tongue to tell the doleful complaints that he made for his brother. Ah Launcelot, he said, thou were head of all Christian knights, and now I dare say, said Sir Ector, thou Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight’s hand. And thou were the courteoust knight that ever bare shield. And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse. And thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman. And thou were the kindest man that ever struck with sword. And thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights. And thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest. Then there was weeping and dolour out of measure.

Sir Thomas Malory

Week 112: Ha’nacker Mill, by Hilaire Belloc

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There is a real Ha’nacker Mill, Halnaker Mill near Chichester in Sussex, and maybe there was a real Sally, but what draws me most to this poem by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) is its hauntingly prophetic image of what might be called the unpeopling of the countryside. I am old enough to have just caught the last years of a rural way of life now vanished, to remember a time when farms employed whole gangs of workers and an obliging tractor-driver, innocent of health and safety, might give small children a ride on the end of his trailer as it bumped its way across the fields with its harvest load.

Ha’nacker Mill

Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha’nacker Hill
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly;
And ever since then the clapper is still…
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha’nacker Mill.

Ha’nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.

Spirits that call and no one answers —
Ha’nacker’s down and England’s done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers,
And never a ploughman under the Sun:
Never a ploughman. Never a one.

Hilaire Belloc

Week 111: Hamnavoe, by George Mackay Brown

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I first met the work of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) through the short stories in ‘A Calendar of Love’, and for a while assumed that he was a prose writer who dabbled in poetry, till I realised that this was as unjust as seeing him as a poet who tried his hand at prose: the work is seamless and stamped in both forms by strong individuality and a kind of elemental clarity. As in this poem in memory of his father, that both celebrates and transcends the particulars of his Orkney life.

‘Cuithe-hung’ refers to the practice of hanging cuithe, a kind of fish, round the doors of houses to dry: they took on a woody texture and gave off a kind of phosphorescence.

Hamnavoe

My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe’s morning broke

On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide

And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.

Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.

A tinker keened like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of cornstalks and milk.

In ‘The Arctic Whaler’ three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.

The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring,

And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From the tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.

The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.

He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
My seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;

And because, under equality’s sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.

George Mackay Brown

Week 110: Art and Reality, by James Simmons

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James Simmons (1933-2001) was one of a generation of fine Ulster writers. I admire this poem for its mix of truthfulness and rueful tenderness, though one has to wonder if the object of the poet’s contemplation was quite so enamoured of it: ‘Huh, so much for twenty years of diet and exercise, remind me again why I bothered…’

Art and Reality

From twenty yards I saw my old love
Locking up her car.
She smiled and waved, as lovely still
As girls of twenty are.

That cloud of auburn hair that bursts
Like sunrise round her head,
The smile that made me smile
At ordinary things she said.

But twenty years have gone and flesh
Is perishable stuff;
Can art and exercise and diet
Ever be enough

To save the tiny facial muscles
And keep taut the skin,
And have the waist, in middle-age,
Still curving firmly in?

Beauty invites me to approach,
And lies make truth seem hard
As my old love assumes her age,
A year for every yard.

James Simmons

Week 109: The Tryst, by William Soutar

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I was glad to be reminded of this beautiful lyric by hearing it on a poetry program on Radio 4 last Monday, ‘The Still Life Poet’, in which Liz Lochhead discussed the life and work of the Scots poet William Soutar (1898-1943). Though given particular poignancy by Soutar’s situation – he was for years bedridden with a painful spinal condition – the poem also stands in an ancient Celtic tradition: an early Irish saga, Aislinge Óengus (The Dream of Óengus), tells the story of how Aengus Og, the Irish god of love, was visited in dream by ‘the most beautiful woman in Eriu’ and fell sick with the ‘sercc ecmaise’, the ‘love of absence’.

I don’t think the Scots words should give much trouble. ‘Caller’ means fresh, ‘smool’d’ means slipped away, ‘waukrife’ means wakeful.

The Tryst

Sae luely luely cam she in,
And luely she lay doun;
I kent her by her caller lips
And her breists sae sma’ and roun’.

A’ thru the nicht we spak nae word
Nor sinder’d bane frae bane.
A’ thru the nicht I heard her hert
Gang soundin wi’ my ain.

It was aboot the waukrife hour
Whan cocks begin tae craw
That she smool’d saftly thru the mirk
Afore the day wud daw

Sae luely luely cam she in
Sae luely was she gaen
And wi’ her a’ my simmer days
Like they had never been.

William Soutar

Week 108: I Remember, by Stevie Smith

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The poems of Stevie Smith (1902-1971) remind me of those optical tricks like the witch illusion, that shifts as you look at it between hag and young girl. This poem, for example – is it eccentric to the point of daftness, or is it a very original, tender love lyric? I never quite make up my mind, but one way or another it has put a hook into my memory.

I Remember

It was my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.

Stevie Smith

Week 107: Exposure, by Seamus Heaney

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A comet has been much in the news this week as the remarkable Rosetta probe makes its successful landing. Maybe those immemorial loners from the outer dark don’t figure in poetry as much as they should, but here’s a poem where one does make a beautiful (and deeply resonant) appearance. I have wondered if Heaney had a specific comet in mind: maybe comet Kohoutek that brightened our skies for a while in 1973. For those who missed it, the good news is that it will be back in about 75000 years.

Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.

Seamus Heaney

Week 106: From ‘Canu Heledd’

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Remembrance Sunday this weekend, which invites something by Owen or Sassoon, but instead let’s go back to a poem from a much older time about a much older war, yet one that speaks no less powerfully of loss and desolation. The following lines are from a cycle of early Welsh poems known as Canu Heledd, the Song of Heledd, probably composed some time in the ninth century though relating to events from a couple of centuries before. Heledd was the sister of Cynddylan, a seventh-century prince of Powys, and here she laments the loss of her brother and all his royal household, fallen in some forgotten battle against the English, leaving her as the last of her line.

The plain translation that follows is my own; it would take a better man than me to reproduce the intricate verbal music of the Welsh englynion.

From ‘Canu Heledd’

stauell gyndylan ys tywyll heno,
heb dan, heb wely.
wylaf wers; tawaf wedy.

stauell gyndylan ys tywyll heno,
heb dan, heb gannwyll.
Namyn duw, pwy a’m dyry pwyll?

stauell gyndylan ys tywyll heno,
heb dan, heb oleuat.
Etlit a’m daw amdanat.

……..

tywarchen ercal ar erdywal wyr,
o etiued moryal:
a gwedy rys, mac rys mal.

Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight
Without fire, without bed.
I will weep a while, then be silent.

Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight
Without fire, without candle.
Unless to God, where shall I turn for counsel?

Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight
Without fire, without light.
Grief for you comes upon me.

….

The grass of Ercal covers up brave men,
Moryal’s lineage:
It bred them, then it broke them.

Week 105: The Children of Stare, by Walter de la Mare

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The poetry of Walter de la Mare was once much in vogue, a vogue that lasted into my childhood, but then his reputation seemed to get swept away on a tide of modernism, meaning that the best he could hope for was a grudging ‘good of its kind, but we don’t want that kind any more, thank you very much’. Yet really the good of any kind in poetry is not so common that we can afford to throw it away. It is true that de la Mare’s work is perhaps best described as fey, and a little feyness goes a long way, but at his best he can be quite haunting. I don’t entirely understand what this poem is about, but I like the wintry atmosphere it evokes, which conjures up for me that hour of frosty dusk between coming home from school and teatime when I would play outside with my companions, not, it is true, in the grounds of a grand ancestral house, but in a scruffy but much-loved bit of waste land we called The Hedge.

The Children of Stare

Winter is fallen early
On the house of Stare;
Birds in reverberating flocks
Haunt its ancestral box;
Bright are the plenteous berries
In clusters on the air.

Still is the fountain’s music,
The dark pool icy still,
Whereupon a small and sanguine sun
Floats in a mirror on,
Into a West of crimson,
From a South of daffodil.

’Tis strange to see young children
In such a wintry house;
Like rabbits’ on the frozen snow
Their tell-tale footprints go;
Their laughter rings like timbrels
’Neath evening ominous:

Their small and heightened faces
Like wine-red winter buds;
Their frolic bodies gentle as
Flakes in the air that pass,
Frail as the twirling petal
From the briar of the woods.

Above them silence lours,
Still as an arctic sea;
Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon
Glitters; the crocus soon
Will open grey and distracted
On earth’s austerity:

Thick mystery, wild peril,
Law like an iron rod:-
Yet sport they on in Spring’s attire,
Each with his tiny fire
Blown to a core of ardour
By the awful breath of God.

Walter De La Mare