Tag Archives: poetry

Week 43: Shall I come, sweet Love, to thee

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I find a lot of Elizabethan love poetry too formulaic for my taste, but this poem by Thomas Campion (1567-1620) does seem to carry a note of plaintive sincerity as the poor chap desperately tries to get his foot in the beloved’s door, if only so he can stop shivering…

Shall I come, sweet love, to thee?

Shall I come, sweet love, to thee,
When the ev’ning beams are set?
Shall I not excluded be?
Will you find no feignèd let?
Let me not, for pity, more
Tell the long hours at your door.

Who can tell what thief or foe
In the covert of the night,
For his prey, will work my woe,
Or through wicked foul despite?
So may I die unredress’d,
Ere my long love be possess’d.

But, to let such dangers pass,
Which a lover’s thoughts disdain,
’Tis enough in such a place
To attend love’s joys in vain:
Do not mock me in thy bed,
While these cold nights freeze me dead.

Thomas Campion

Week 42: From ‘All The Pretty Horses’, by Cormac McCarthy

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A ‘prose poem’ as such is almost invariably a heartsink of a thing, a miserable affectation neither fish, flesh nor fowl, but that’s not to say one can’t find poetry in prose, words that by their rhythm and resonance enter and possess the mind in the way that a poem can do. I love these lines from Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All The Pretty Horses’, as the young men set out on their journey of love and loss.

‘They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The light fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.’

Week 41: From ‘The Fight On The Wall’ by John Masefield

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It is a truth not always universally acknowledged that unfashionable poets can be rather good just as fashionable ones can be rather bad. When I was young John Masefield was about as unfashionable a poet as one could get, but what the hell, I liked him anyway; indeed, his long narrative poem ‘Reynard The Fox’ still seems to me a very readable piece. The following stanzas are excerpted from a lesser known work, ‘The Fight On The Wall’, a spirited retelling of how the doomed love affair between Lancelot and Arthur’s queen Guinevere is brought to an end when a gang of knights attempt to take the couple in flagrante.

‘O Queen,’ he said, ‘the times are over
That you and I have known.
Beloved Queen, I am your lover,
Body and bone,

Spirit and all of me, past knowing,
Most beautiful, though sin.
Now the old lovely days are going
And bad begin.

————————–

Here is the prelude to the story
That leads us to the grave.
So be it: we have had a glory
Not many have.

Though what tomorrow may discover
Be harsh to what has been,
No matter, I am still your lover
And you my queen.’

Week 40: I Write For…, by John Hewitt

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I Write For…

I write for my own kind
I do not pitch my voice
that every phrase be heard
by those who have no choice:
their quality of mind
must be withdrawn and still,
as moth that answers moth
across a roaring hill.

John Hewitt

A wonderfully terse and defiant manifesto; the image in the last line is based, I take it, on the use by moths of chemical messengers called pheromones, which apparently other moths can indeed detect at remarkable distances.

Week 39: The Kaleidoscope, by Douglas Dunn

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The Kaleidoscope

To climb these stairs again, bearing a tray,
Might be to find you pillowed with your books,
Your inventories listing gowns and frocks
As if preparing for a holiday.
Or, turning from the landing, I might find
My presence watched through your kaleidoscope,
A symmetry of husbands, each redesigned
In lovely forms of foresight, prayer and hope.
I climb these stairs a dozen times a day
And, by the open door, wait, looking in
At where you died. My hands become a tray
Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin.
Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry
For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.

Douglas Dunn

This is one of a series of elegiac poems that Douglas Dunn wrote after the loss of his wife, in a delicate and moving exploration of a complex grief.

Week 38: Dick Darval’s Song, by Anon

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Dick Darval’s Song

I saw a young man come one night
An apple in his hand.
By moonlight and candlelight
We find the Mollhern land.

I saw a young man come one night
All weeping bitterly
By moonlight and candlelight
We find the gallows tree.

Anon

I came across these haunting stanzas, which are possibly only a fragment of a larger piece, in a book about Berkshire ghosts.  To quote: ‘Molly Tape was a local who entered into a passionate love affair with a farmer named Dick Darval. Eventually, Dick rejected the poor girl and, in despair, she hanged herself in the lane between Hurst and the hamlet of Hinton. An old song about Dick indicates that Molly may have unsuccessfully tried her hand at witchcraft in order to win him back. Her scantily clad spirit still haunts the lane.’

The ‘Mollhern land’ is witch-speak for the underworld or land of the dead.

If anyone knows if any more than these two verses exist I should be very pleased to hear from them. Also if anyone knows more about the word Mollhern – the OED gives it as a variant of moll-heron, a grey heron, but what a grey heron might have to do with the land of the dead I don’t know.

Week 37: The Two Maidens, by G.K.Chesterton

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The Two Maidens

‘Robin loved Our Dear Lady
And for doubt of deadly sin
Would never hurt a company
That any woman was in’

– Old Ballad of Robin Hood

The wind had taken the tree-tops
Upon Sherwood, the noble wood,
Two maidens met in the windy ways
Held speech of Robin Hood.

And the first maid to the second said,
‘He keeps not tryst today’.
And the second said to the first maiden,
‘Mayhap he is far away.’

And far away on the upland
The last trees broke in the sky
As they brought him out of grey Kirkleas
To bend his bow and die.

High on the moors above Kirkleas
The mighty thief lay slain,
The woman that had struck him down
He would not strike again.

And the maid cried as the high wind
In the broken tree-top cries,
‘They have taken him out of the good greenwood
And I know not where he lies.

‘The world is a wind that passes
And valour is in vain
And the tallest trees are broken
And the bravest men are slain.

‘Deep in the nettles of a ditch
He may die as a dog dies
Or on the gallows, to be the game
Of the lawyers and the lies.

‘The wood is full of wicked thieves,
Of robbers wild and strong,
But though he walked the gallows way
Of him I had no wrong.

‘Because he scorned to do me scathe
I walked forth clean and free
And I call my name Maid Marian
Because he honoured me.’

‘I too am only a simple maid,
Our stories are the same.
As your green gown to my blue gown
Your name is like my name.

‘The world is full of wicked men,
Of robbers rich and strong,
To plot against my maiden fame,
But of him I had no wrong.

‘And because he scorned to do me scathe
I have travelled many a mile
To bring you a word out of his mouth
To lift your face and smile.

‘He is not dead in the ditch-nettles
Or on the gallows-tree;
But a great king has taken him
To ride with his chivalry.

‘And made him a master of bowmen
For the memory of the day
When one that died at the king’s right hand
Was a thief on the king’s highway.

‘And I have travelled many a mile
From a city beyond the sea
To give you news of your true-love
Because he honoured me.

G.K.Chesterton

Sometimes about a poet’s work the head may say ‘This won’t quite do’ but the heart goes its own way regardless. I feel this way about the wildly romantic but oddly compelling figure of G.K.Chesterton, whose long narrative poem about Alfred the Great,‘The Ballad of the White Horse’, was the first poem I ever loved. This shorter piece puts the unique Chestertonian spin on another staple of the English imagination. I find the stately restraint of its metric fascinating.

Week 36: Carentan O Carentan, by Louis Simpson

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Carentan O Carentan

Trees in the old days used to stand
And shape a shady lane
Where lovers wandered hand in hand
Who came from Carentan.

This was the shining green canal
Where we came two by two
Walking at combat-interval.
Such trees we never knew.

The day was early June, the ground
Was soft and bright with dew.
Far away the guns did sound,
But here the sky was blue.

The sky was blue, but there a smoke
Hung still above the sea
Where the ships together spoke
To towns we could not see.

Could you have seen us through a glass
You would have said a walk
Of farmers out to turn the grass,
Each with his own hay-fork.

The watchers in their leopard suits
Waited till it was time,
And aimed between the belt and boot
And let the barrel climb.

I must lie down at once, there is
A hammer at my knee.
And call it death or cowardice,
Don’t count again on me.

Everything’s all right, Mother,
Everyone gets the same
At one time or another.
It’s all in the game.

I never strolled, nor ever shall,
Down such a leafy lane.
I never drank in a canal,
Nor ever shall again.

There is a whistling in the leaves
And it is not the wind,
The twigs are falling from the knives
That cut men to the ground.

Tell me, Master-Sergeant,
The way to turn and shoot.
But the Sergeant’s silent
That taught me how to do it.

O Captain, show us quickly
Our place upon the map.
But the Captain’s sickly
And taking a long nap.

Lieutenant, what’s my duty,
My place in the platoon?
He too’s a sleeping beauty,
Charmed by that strange tune.

Carentan O Carentan
Before we met with you
We never yet had lost a man
Or known what death could do.

Louis Simpson

This great antiwar ballad is all the more devastating for its surface naivety, the broken rhythms and stumbling rhymes mirroring the mind of a young soldier faced for the first time with the realities of combat.

Week 35: The Thespians at Thermopylae, by Norman Cameron

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The Thespians at Thermopylae

The honours that the people give always
Pass to those use-besotted gentlemen
Whose numskull courage is a kind of fear,
A fear of thought and of the oafish mothers
(‘Or with your shield or on it’) in their rear.
Spartans cannot retreat. Why, then, their praise
For going forward should be less than others.

But we, actors and critics of one play,
Of sober-witted judgment, who could see
So many roads, and chose the Spartan way,
What has the popular report to say
Of us, the Thespians at Thermopylae?

Norman Cameron

A poem finely balanced on a knife-edge of irony. The answer to the question in the last two lines seems to be ‘Not a lot!’, so I take Cameron’s meaning to be that a rational man should view the martial virtues with deep distrust; that sometimes, nonetheless, one must suspend one’s own judgment in a greater cause and follow the Spartan path, as Cameron did by serving in World War II; and that one should expect in return little recognition for this sacrifice of principle and life. The poem makes an interesting comparison with Keith Douglas’s ‘Aristocrats’, that great elegy for a ‘gentle/Obsolescent breed of heroes’.

Week 34: Sandpiper, by Elizabeth Bishop

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Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

– Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs
he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
Minute and vast and clear. The tide
Is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,

Looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
Mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Elizabeth Bishop

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of ‘that blissful precision at the core of art’, and there is certainly a blissful precision at the core of Elizabeth Bishop’s art: having watched sandpipers on a beach behave in exactly the fashion described I can vouch for the exquisite detail underpinning the metaphysics here.