Tag Archives: poetry

Week 629: Harp Song of the Dane Women, by Rudyard Kipling

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This poem, showing Kipling’s verse at its most skilful and eloquent, was a favourite of the Argentinan writer Jorge Luis Borges. Of course, when you think about it the answer to the question the poem poses is obvious and rather practical. I suspect it would be quite wrong to think of the Vikings as having any mystical or sentimental attachment to the sea, or to picture them as mooning about declaiming some Old Norse equivalent of Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’. They had a proper fear of the sea-goddess Rán and her nets that she used to capture and drown mortals who dared to trespass on her kingdom. There is a poignant elegy, the Sonatorrek, attributed to the great 10th century skald Egill Skallagrimsson, in which he laments the death of his son Böðvar, who drowned at sea during a storm:

Mjök hefr Rán rykst um mik;
emk ofsnauðr at ástvinum.
Sleit marr bönd mínnar áttar,
snaran þátt af sjalfum mér.
 
Mightily Ran has wrought on me
who reft me of friend, of scion.
Bare now is his place at board
Since the sea took my son.                    (my translation)

No, it was simply that the sea offered the speediest route to rich plunder with a bit of rape and monk-bashing on the side, and that the voyaging, though hard and dangerous work, at least offered a break from trying to scratch a living from the Scandinavian soil. Be that as it may, the poem is certainly capable of evoking a shiver. That ‘ten-times-fingering weed’ gets me every time.

Harp Song of the Dane Women

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken–

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

Rudyard Kipling

Week 628: No Second Troy, by W.B.Yeats

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This poem, which appeared in the 1910 collection ‘The Green Helmet’, was written in memory of Maud Gonne, for whom Yeats had a lifelong passion, after she had finally rejected the poet’s fourth proposal of marriage in favour of another man, John MacBride. It may be viewed as a companion piece to ‘The Folly Of Being Comforted’ (see week 49). Here, though, there is more of a bitterness, an acknowledgment of the destructive power that beauty can wield, encapsulated in the last line’s allusion to Helen of Troy.

Like many of Yeats’s poems, it seems to me a triumph of style over substance. I think it is possible to look askance at the way Yeats constantly bigs up his friends, and to question his contempt for the ‘little streets’ of democracy, but at the same time fully grant him the power of his supple, incisive language. I think of Auden’s line in his fine elegy for Yeats where he comments how Time: ‘Pardons him for writing well’. Clearly he thought Yeats needed to be pardoned, and you can see what he meant: Yeats adulated the patrician class, romanticised the peasant class, and had little time for the mass of humanity between; also he had a dubious fascination with the occult. Yet it is clear that Time does, and will continue to, pardon Yeats for writing well.

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

W.B.Yeats

Week 627: A Refugee, by E.J.Scovell

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This week another poem by the to my mind much neglected E.J.Scovell (see also weeks 91, 503 and 540). It is easy to understand why Joy’s voice is not more celebrated. Her poems are unfashionably formal. They strike no poses, relying instead on quietly precise observation. Her life she kept private, offering no hook for the journalists of poetry to hang a story on. Well, if her work is only to be kept alive by the love of a few admirers scattered through time, so be it.

Quite a number of her poems reflect her experience on the Home Front during the Second World War. This is one of them, a poem of unostentatious compassion perfectly rounded off by the image of bereft love in the last two lines.

A Refugee

My heart had learnt the habit of earthly life
In an accustomed place.
My voice had learnt the habit of maternal
Sharpness and gentleness.

My thighs had learnt the speech of love. The house
And market tasks that show
So small a flower, rooting in hands and feet
Had matted my flesh through.

My husband died in the mercy of Russian snow.
My child died in the train,
In three days in the weeping cattle truck
From Breslau to Berlin.

I was not taught the song of extremity,
The dancing of duress.
All that I know of infinite is the intensity
Of finite tenderness.

All that I have of goodness is through love –
Their love my only worth.
My rigid arms set in the shape of their love
Have no more use on earth.

E.J.Scovell

Week 626: Sheath and Knife, by Anon

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This is one of the great incest ballads, Child #16.

The social history of brother-sister incest is an odd one. The ancient Egyptians seem to have had no problem with it, at least among members of the royal family, but in Europe it became a very strong taboo, and Germanic legend features heroes who slept, quite unwittingly, with a sister from whom they had been reared separately, and on finding out what they had done were driven to suicidal despair, a theme which is reprised by J.R.R. Tolkien in his tale of Túrin Turambar. Obviously we understand now that incest is a bad idea from a biological point of view, but you’d think it would be enough in such unintentional cases to say ‘Oops, sorry, sis, didn’t realise’ and not do it again.

The old ballad poets did not see it as their business to make overt moral judgments, but as far as one can discern the narrator’s attitude here it seems to be ‘All very sad, but what else was a chap supposed to do in the circumstances?’. Of course, in this ballad it is not clear whether there was foreknowledge or not, but even if there was the brother’s reaction (and the sister’s connivance) are surely a bit over the top: it was hardly the baby’s fault.

I give the slightly modernised version sung by Maddy Prior on her 1998 album ‘Flesh and Blood’.

Sheath And Knife

It’s whispered in the kitchen, it’s whispered in the hall
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
The king’s daughter goes with child, among the ladies all
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

It’s whispered by the ladies one unto the other
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
‘The king’s daughter goes with child unto her own brother’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

He’s ta’en his sister down to his father’s deer park
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
With a yew-tree bow and arrow slung fast across his back
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘And when that you hear me give a loud cry
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Shoot from your bow an arrow, and there let me lie’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And when that you see that I am lying dead
  The broom blooms bonnie, the broom blooms fair
Put me in a grave, with a turf all at my head
  And we’ll never go down to the broom any more.

And when he has heard her give a loud cry
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
A silver arrow from his bow he suddenly let fly
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And he has dug a grave both long and deep
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
He’s buried his sister with their babe all at her feet
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And when he is come to his father’s own hall
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
There was music and dancing, there were minstrels and all
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

O the ladies they asked him, ‘What makes thee in such pain?’
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
‘I’ve lost a sheath and knife, I will never find again’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘O the ships of your father’s a-sailing on the sea
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Can bring as good a sheath and knife unto thee’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘All the ships of my father’s a-sailing on the sea
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Can never ever bring such a sheath and knife to me’.
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

Anon

Week 625: October Fungi, by David Sutton

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October is the peak month for fungi in our local beechwoods, and it seems to be a good year for them, though like everything else in the natural world their abundance and variety are not what they were, and I have seen nothing since to equal one October afternoon back in the early nineteen-eighties that inspired the following poem of mine, when every stump, trunk and fallen log seemed to be covered with fantastic excrescences.

My mycological interest has just been rekindled by reading two excellent books on the subject, ‘Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind’ by Richard Fortey and ‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake. The former is entertainingly anecdotal and concerned mainly with the visible fruiting bodies that we think of as the fungi, the latter more concerned with the role of fungi, and particularly their mycelia (the normally hidden underground parts), in the ecology as a whole. Both highly recommended.

October Fungi

They are back again, the people of the woods,
A travelling circus of freaks: they have pitched their camp
On meadows of moss between the boles of beeches.
There’s no concealment here: they loll on stumps
In sulphur tribes or swagger in the leaves
Scarlet as outlaws. Fear is in their names:
Destroying Angel, Deathcap, Sickener.
The darkness bred them, devilry’s their lore
And parody their style. There’s Dryad’s Saddle
Perched, a monstrous butterfly of leather;
This velvet sleek translucence is Jew’s Ear,
There’s blewit’s ghostly lilac, polypores
Rubber-tough or textured like meringue,
Smelling of peach and honey. So we meet
Towards another year’s end in the woods.
What shall I say to you, gay-sinister
Consorts of corruption? Welcome, life.
The slugs have gorged themselves on stinkhorn jelly
And here’s a puffball ready to explode,
A wrinkled cerebellum, parchment-yellow,
A rotted sack of flour that splits and spills.
The spores rise up, dream-delicate, like smoke.
They glint and dwindle down the shining air.

David Sutton

Week 624: Captain Carpenter, by John Crowe Ransom

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It is hard to know quite what to make of this stylishly subversive poem by the American poet John Crowe Ransom (see also weeks 50, 114 and 223). We like to believe, and perhaps need to believe, that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, and by and large literature supports us in this belief, or possibly delusion: we take it for granted, for example, that whatever happens in reality, Macbeth is not going to chop Macduff into pieces and continue with his blood-soaked tyranny nor, to take the literary register down just a notch, that Jack Reacher is going to get killed in the last chapter leaving the wicked to flourish like the green bay tree. But Ransom turns all this on its head, giving us a pathetically ineffectual hero who talks the talk to the point of braggadocio but is total incapable of walking the walk, losing every fight he engages in as he becomes more and more disfigured and dismembered.

I am tempted to see the poem as a parable of how people may start off in life full of idealistic zeal and a desire to change the world, but are gradually forced to compromise or even abandon those ideals and end up defending no more than their own small circle of light, till their death extinguishes that too. And yet the poem is not entirely downbeat: Captain Carpenter remains ‘an honest gentleman’, fighting to the end in a manner reminiscent of the hero in the old ballad who when his legs were hewn off fought on ‘upon the stumps’. And it is clear that though evil may triumph, the poet’s sympathies remain with the ineffectual but uncompromising Captain.

Captain Carpenter

Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.

It was a pretty lady and all her train
That played with him so sweetly but before
An hour she’d taken a sword with all her main
And twined him of his nose for evermore.

Captain Carpenter mounted up one day
And rode straightway into a stranger rogue
That looked unchristian but be that as may
The Captain did not wait upon prologue.

But drew upon him out of his great heart
The other swung against him with a club
And cracked his two legs at the shinny part
And let him roll and stick like any tub.

Captain Carpenter rode many a time
From male and female took he sundry harms
He met the wife of Satan crying ‘I’m
The she-wolf bids you shall bear no more arms’.

Their strokes and counters whistled in the wind
I wish he had delivered half his blows
But where she should have made off like a hind
The bitch bit off his arms at the elbows.

And Captain Carpenter parted with his ears
To a black devil that used him in this wise
O Jesus ere his threescore and ten years
Another had plucked out his sweet blue eyes.

Captain Carpenter got up on his roan
And sallied from the gate in hell’s despite
I heard him asking in the grimmest tone
If any enemy yet there was to fight?

‘To any adversary it is fame
If he risk to be wounded by my tongue
Or burnt in two beneath my red heart’s flame
Such are the perils he is cast among

But if he can he has a pretty choice
From an anatomy with little to lose
Whether he cut my tongue and take my voice
Or whether it be my round red heart he choose’.

It was the neatest knave that ever was seen
Stepping in perfume from his lady’s bower
Who at this word put in his merry mien
And fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.

I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.

The rogue in scarlet and grey soon knew his mind
He wished to get his trophy and depart
With gentle apology and touch refined
He pierced him and produced the Captain’s heart.

God’s mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now
I thought him Sirs an honest gentleman
Citizen husband soldier and scholar enow
Let jangling kites eat of him if they can.

But God’s deep curses follow after those
That shore him of his goodly nose and ears
His legs and strong arms at the two elbows
And eyes that had not watered seventy years.

The curse of hell upon the sleek upstart
That got the Captain finally on his back
And took the red red vitals of his heart
And made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.

John Crowe Ransom

Week 623: From ‘The Prelude’, by William Wordsworth

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It is easy now to take Wordsworth for granted and to forget just how revolutionary he must have seemed, coming after an age of poetry dominated by Pope’s neat heroic couplets. Pope had famously said ‘The proper study of mankind is man’, and we can concede this up to a considerable point, but the concession is then diminished by the realisation that Pope means ‘man in society’ and that he has little interest in ‘man in the natural world’. Then along comes Wordsworth and all sorts of things start appearing in poetry: lakes, mountains, owls, hazel nuts, moons, stars, mysterious presences…

Here is the stolen boat episode from Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’ (see also week 242). If the strange terror the poet describes seem a little over the top – relax, William, it’s just a big rock – then bearing in mind that Wordsworth was a child, alone at night and feeling some guilt over his small theft, it all seems at least as understandable as the young Seamus Heaney having the heebie-jeebies over a pond full of frogs. Sensitive lot, these poets.

The ‘her’ in the first line refers to Nature as a sort of moral tutor.

From ‘The Prelude’

One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

William Wordsworth

Week 622: Poetry for Supper, by R.S.Thomas

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While this piece may lack the luminous dimension that you find in R.S.Thomas’s best work, I find it interesting from a professional point of view. I tend to picture the two old poets here as being Welsh, with one holding out for the strict traditional forms of Welsh poetry – awdl, englyn, cynghanedd, the twenty-four metres – and the other more sympathetic to a younger generation in revolt against such constraints.

The debate is not new, of course: we have Keats’s famous dictum that ‘if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all’, which is a fine romantic notion, but one that goes against the evidence of such poets’ manuscripts as have come down to us, which often bear signs of a fairly laborious textual evolution.

Personally I think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. For what it’s worth my own experience is that a poem begins with a line or two dropped into the mind, like a seeding crystal into a solution, and then, often over several days, the complete poem gradually takes shape as you wait patiently to find out what you are trying to say or, as I prefer to think of it, what is trying to be said. But there is always, or nearly always, a tension between what is given to you and what is supplied by you, the aim being always to minimise the latter.

Poetry for Supper

‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.’

‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.’

‘You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.’

‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’

So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

R.S.Thomas

Week 621: The Self-Unseeing, by Thomas Hardy

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If I am asked what it is that lifts this poem out of the usual run of nostalgic recollection to be, like D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Piano’ (see week 171), one of the great poems of childhood remembrance, I would say it is an individuality, an integrity, an immediacy of tactile memory. Lawrence has his ‘boom of the tingling strings’, Hardy has his floor, ‘footworn and hollowed’, worn thin by the passage of generations of long-departed feet. Not so long ago I visited Hardy’s childhood home at Higher Bockhampton, and it is all still there: that floor, the parlour where he danced as a boy, leaping to the tune of his father’s fiddle, the deep seat by his bedroom window where he would have sat at night looking out on the country darkness and the stars above the trees.

I sometimes think of Hardy as a kind of literary icebreaker, shouldering improbabilities of plot and diction aside by sheer force of will. The diction here is less idiosyncratic than in many of his poems, but still we have the verbal richness of that ‘Blessings emblazoned’, that ‘glowed with a gleam’, set against the simplicity of the rueful, wondering last line. Definitely one of my favourite pieces among all his work.

The Self-Unseeing

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

Thomas Hardy

Week 620: Claudio’s speech from ‘Measure for Measure’, by William Shakespeare

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It’s a long time since we had a bit of Shakespeare, so here is Claudio’s speech from Act 3, Scene 1 of ‘Measure for Measure’. For those unfamiliar with the play, the Duke of Vienna decides he needs a break from the day job and appoints a certain Angelo to govern in his place while he ostensibly goes off on a diplomatic mission abroad (but actually hangs around disguised as a friar, just to see what happens).

Angelo takes up his post full of reforming zeal and, possibly after toying with the idea of stopping the winter fuel allowance for old age pensioners, decides instead to come down hard on fornication (a quaint old term for sex outside marriage). Unfortunately our hero Claudio has recently got a woman pregnant without quite getting round to observing the matrimonial rites, and as a result is sentenced to death.

His sister Isabella, who is a novice nun, goes to see Angelo to plead for her brother’s life. Angelo is at first unmoved but then, smitten by a fancy for Isabella, has the bright idea of sparing Claudio’s life if she will yield up her virginity to him. ‘No way!’ says Isabella and she hurries off to tell Claudio the bad news: you’re on your own in this one, bro. At first he is nobly understanding, but then, having thought about it a bit, he engages in this eloquent reflection, that feels rather like a speech from ‘Hamlet’ dropped into a lesser play, and begs Isabella to save his life even at the expense of her honour. ‘Sweet sister, let me live’. Sadly Isabella is unimpressed and just tells him to man up and stop being a wuss.

But since this is a comedy of sorts, all ends well. The Duke throws off his disguise and after some nonsense featuring a cameo appearance by a severed head pardons Claudio, deals with the despicable Angelo and in a final speech rather surprisingly proposes marriage to Isabella – there appears to be a part of being a nun that he doesn’t understand.

It is a rather odd play, and I’m not sure what moral we are meant to draw from it, unless it is that you can only rely on sisters up to a point. But I think most of us already knew that.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

William Shakespeare