Tag Archives: poetry

Week 64: The Ballad of Rudolph Reed, by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Unsubtle it may be, but I can recall few poems that have left me so shaken with anger and pity as this one. Auden famously said that poetry makes nothing happen: not directly maybe, but if the better angels of our nature do, as some claim, slowly and insecurely prevail, it is hard not to believe that works like this have some part in it.

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Rudolph Reed was oaken.
His wife was oaken too.
And his two good girls and his good little man
Oakened as they grew.

‘I am not hungry for berries,
I am not hungry for bread,
But hungry as hungry for a house
Where at night a man in bed

‘May never hear the plaster
Stir as if in pain.
May never hear the roaches
Falling like fat rain.

‘Where never wife and children need
Go blinking through the gloom.
Where every room of many rooms
Will be full of room.

‘Oh my home may have its east or west
Or north or south behind it.
All I know is I shall know it
And fight for it when I find it’.

It was in a street of bitter white
That he made his application.
For Rudolph Reed was oakener
Than others in the nation.

The agent’s steep and steady stare
Corroded to a grin.
‘Why, you black old, tough old hell of a man,
Move your family in!’

Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.

A neighbor would look, with a yawning eye
That squeezed into a slit.
But the Rudolph Reeds and the children three
Were too joyous to notice it.

For were they not firm in a home of their own.
With windows everywhere
And a beautiful banistered stair
And a front yard for flowers and a back yard for grass?

The first night a rock, big as two fists.
The second a rock, big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed
(Though oaken as man could be).

The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience ached to endure.
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel’s blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.

Then up did rise our Rudolph Reed
And pressed the hand of his wife,
And went to the door with a thirty-four
And a beastly butcher knife.

He ran like a mad thing into the night.
And the words in his mouth were stinking.
By the time he had hurt his first white man
He was no longer thinking.

By the time he had hurt his fourth white man
Rudolph Reed was dead.
His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.
‘Nigger – ‘ his neighbor said.

Small Mabel whimpered all night long,
For calling herself the cause.
Her oak-eyed mother did no thing
But change the bloody gauze.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Week 63: The Sundial, by Gillian Clarke

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I hear that this poem initially found its way into Gillian Clarke’s wastepaper basket. While the wastepaper basket may be a much underused accoutrement in most poets’ homes, in this case at least I’m glad the poem found its way out again: I do admire its febrile precision, and in particular the strangely compelling image in the last two lines.

The Sundial

Owain was ill today. In the night
He was delirious, shouting of lions
In the sleepless heat. Today, dry
And pale, he took a paper circle,
Laid on the grass which held it
With curling fingers. In the still
Centre he pushed the broken bean
Stick, gathering twelve fragments
Of stone, placed them at measured
Distances. Then he crouched, slightly
Trembling with fever, calculating
The mathematics of sunshine.

He looked up, his eyes dark,
Intelligently adult as though
The wave of fever taught silence
And immobility for the first time.
Here, in his enforced rest, he found
Deliberation, and the slow finger
Of light, quieter than night lions,
More worthy of his concentration.
All day he told the time to me.
All day we felt and watched the sun
Caged in its white diurnal heat,
Pointing at us with its black stick.

Gillian Clarke

Week 62: Quondam Was I, by Sir Thomas Wyatt

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This bitter poem of betrayed love may not have quite the same force as Wyatt’s masterpiece, ‘They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek’, or Donne’s ‘The Apparition’ (let’s face it, Elizabethan poets didn’t have much luck when it came to finding a nice steady girl) but it shares the same quality of a speaking voice, direct and passionate, straining at the seams of the convention that contains it.

Quondam Was I

Quondam was I in my lady’s grace,
I think as well as now be you;
And when that you have trad the trace,
Then shall you know my words be true
That quondam was I.

Quondam was I. She said forever:
That lasted but a short while;
Promise made not to dissever.
I thought she laugh’d – she did but smile,
Then quondam was I.

Quondam was I: he that full oft lay
In her arms with kisses many one.
It is enough that this I may say
Though among the moo now I be gone,
Yet quondam was I.

Quondam was I. Yet she will you tell
That since the hour she first was born
She never loved none half so well
As you. But what altho she had sworn,
Sure quondam was I.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Week 61: The Thocht, by William Soutar

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I think the meaning of the Scots words in this poem should be fairly obvious, but just in case: thocht = thought, jizzen-bed = childbed, deed = died, aye = always, owrecome = refrain, gin = if, hinny = honey, ghaist = ghost and I take ‘or’ in the second line of the third stanza to mean ‘before’.

The Thocht

Young Janie was a strappan lass
Wha deed in jizzen-bed;
And monie a thocht her lover thocht
Lang eftir she was dead:

But aye, wi a’ he brocht to mind
O’ misery and wrang,
There was a gledness gether’d in
Like the owrecome o’ a sang:

And, gin the deid are naethingness
Or they be minded on,
As hinny to a hungry ghaist
Maun be a thocht like yon.

William Soutar

Week 60: Vernon (1920 – 1996), by Phoebe Hesketh

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I find this short spare poem of loss and grief more moving than many less restrained elegies.

Vernon (1920 – 1996)

I talk to you
and listen…
Silence.

I run to meet you;
the distance exceeds miles.
A faraway church
rises from the trees
to spire the sky.

Impossible to live without you;
I will live on
in the great spaces
till the sun
burns down around us
in a ring of light.

Phoebe Hesketh

Week 59: Street Performers, 1881 by Terence Tiller

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An evocative poem that takes me back to the urban, late Victorian childhood of my grandparents and the stories I was told, of lamplighters and muffin-men and sellers of hot chestnuts, and the hooves of horses clopping along the streets. Fantoccini are puppets operated by moving wires or mechanical means; Chinese shades seem to have been part of a galanty show, a play or pantomime produced by throwing shadows of puppets on to a wall; a ‘Chinese shades’ man is interviewed by Henry Mayhew in ‘London Labour and the London Poor’.

Street Performers, 1881

London is painted round them: burly railings
and grey rich inaccessible houses; squares –
laurelled and priveted, flowered, and fast in palings –
where the grave children move and are not theirs
and are more bright and distant than the sun
whose wan dry wine shines in the windows – squares
and heavy curtains, curtains and steps of stone:
these are their coloured cards, their theatres.

Hooked nose and hump, the Black Man, the police,
the hangman’s shadow by the prison wall,
the wandering misery in the courts of peace:
the mad voice like a wire will draw them all –
the puppets and the puppet-masters. Watch:
who is to tell, seeing no showman’s hands,
which are the audience, penny-foolish, which
the fantoccini and the Chinese shades?

Now (scarlet plush and gilt) the lights go on;
cold smoky curtains fold the stage away;
and all but shadows, penny plain, are gone.
Flare-cast from vehement oil, great blurs of grey
upon the gold and indigo, their dole
habit’s iniquity and ungiven bread,
they drift before the rainy street; they roll
on sad wheels rags to be inherited.

The salamander and the swordsman, and
the maypole-ribboned bear; from dark they pass
to dark, through blazing islands – as if stained
in mockery upon hot slips of glass; the fingers are withdrawn,
the puppets tumble, there are no more slides,
the paints are in their boxes: they have gone,
the fantoccini and the Chinese shades.

Terence Tiller

Week 58: Forefathers, by Edmund Blunden

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A deep-rooted pastoral elegy that achieves a fusion of romantic and classical all its own: the poem clearly owes much to Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ but the diction has touches of a Keatsian richness, especially in the last stanza.

Forefathers

Here they went with smock and crook,
Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade,
Here they mudded out the brook
And here their hatchet cleared the glade:
Harvest-supper woke their wit,
Huntsman’s moon their wooings lit.

From this church they led their brides,
From this church themselves were led
Shoulder-high; on these waysides
Sat to take their beer and bread.
Names are gone—what men they were
These their cottages declare.

Names are vanished, save the few
In the old brown Bible scrawled;
These were men of pith and thew
Whom the city never called;
Scarce could read or hold a quill,
Built the barn, the forge, the mill.

On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me;
While the bat and beetle flew
On the warm air webbed with dew.

Unrecorded, unrenowned,
Men from whom my ways begin,
Here I know you by your ground
But I know you not within—
There is silence, there survives
Not a moment of your lives.

Like the bee that now is blown
Honey-heavy on my hand,
From his toppling tansy-throne
In the green tempestuous land—
I’m in clover now, nor know
Who made honey long ago.

Edmund Blunden

Week 57: The Dream About Our Master, William Shakespeare, by Hyam Plutzik

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Dream poems don’t normally do much for me, but I find this one by the American poet Hyam Plutzik (1911-1962) quite haunting, perhaps the more so for its tropes that seem familiar and yet, just as in a dream, I feel I never quite grasp: I suppose the gate referred to may be the gate of horn through which true dreams come, as opposed to the gate of ivory, but what is the hound of air, what are the ropes of shade?

The Dream About Our Master, William Shakespeare

This midnight dream whispered to me:
Be swift as a runner, take the lane
Into the green mystery
Beyond the farm and haystack at Stone.
You leave tomorrow, not to return.

Hands that were fastened in a vise,
A useless body, rooted feet,
While time like a bell thundered the loss,
Witnessed the closing of the gate.
Thus sleep and waking both betrayed.

I had one glimpse: In a close of shadow
There rose the form of a manor-house,
And in a corner a curtained window.
All was lost in a well of trees,
Yet I knew for certain this was the place.

If the hound of air, the ropes of shade,
And the gate between that is no gate,
Had not so held me and delayed
These cowardly limbs of bone and blood,
I would have met him as he lived.

Hyam Plutzik

Week 56: Clara d’Ellébeuse, by Francis Jammes

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I love this poem’s wistful sensuality coupled with its autumnal regret for long gone summers. I have never quite figured out, though, why a shipwreck off Newfoundland makes an appearance in the fourth verse: is this just offered as a random memory of the period or does it have some deeper significance for the poem as a whole that eludes me?

There are many translations of this poem into English, but I don’t find any of them satisfactory, so append an unsatisfactory one of my own.

Clara d’Ellébeuse

J’aime dans le temps Clara d’Ellébeuse,
l’écolière des anciens pensionnats,
qui allait, les soirs chauds, sous les tilleuls
lire les magazines d’autrefois.

Je n’aime qu’elle, et je sens sur mon coeur
la lumière bleue de sa gorge blanche.
Où est-elle? Où etait donc ce bonheur?
Dans sa chambre claire il entrait des branches.

Elle n’est peut-être pas encore morte
– ou peut-être que nous l’étions tous deux.
La grande cour avait des feuilles mortes
dans le vent froid des fins d’Étés tres vieux.

Te souviens-tu de ces plumes de paon,
dans un grand vase, auprès de coquillages?
On apprenait qu’on avait fait naufrage,
on appelait Terre-Neuve: le Banc.

Viens, viens, ma chère Clara d’Ellébeuse:
aimons-nous encore si tu existes.
Le vieux jardin a de vieilles tulipes.
Viens toute nue, ô Clara d’Ellébeuse.

Francis Jammes

I loved long ago Clara d’Ellébeuse,
The pupil of old boarding-schools, who came
To sit beneath the lime trees on warm evenings
Reading the magazines of other days.

I love her still, and only her. I feel
The blue light of her white throat on my heart.
Where is she now? Where was that happiness?
Branches would come into her bright room.

Perhaps she is not yet dead, or perhaps we both were.
Dead leaves used to blow about the great courtyard
In the cold wind at the end of long-lost summers.

Do you remember the peacock feathers in the vase
Next to the shells?… we heard there had been a shipwreck.
They spoke of Newfoundland: The Banks.

Come to me now, Clara d’Ellébeuse.
Let us love each other still, if you still live.
Old tulips may yet bloom in the old garden.
Come quite naked, Clara d’Ellébeuse.

Week 55: Aspens, by Edward Thomas

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I have been reading Matthew Hollis’s fine account of Edward Thomas’s last four years, ‘Now All Roads Lead To France’, and this seems a good time to feature another piece by the man who is perhaps not the greatest of twentieth-century English poets, but is certainly now among the most loved. Which might have surprised him: the biography paints a picture of a difficult, overburdened man whose capacity to inspire love was sometimes greater than his capacity to return it. I think that what we respond to is the core of absolute integrity in his life and work, that finally found its expression in poems like this that combine hauntingly precise observation of the natural world with wry self-analysis.


All day and all night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing
Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
And over lightless pane and footless road,
Empty as sky, with every other sound
Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
In tempest or the night of nightingales,
To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.

Edward Thomas