Tag Archives: poetry

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

Week 619: The Combe, by Edward Thomas

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I see that badger culls are in the news again, with a Government plan to end them by 2029. This is not the place to get into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of culling, which is purportedly to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis, though I will say that many I have spoken too, including some farmers, feel that the slaughter of these beasts, with over 200,000 killed since the start of culling in 2009, is both inhumane and ineffective.

I remember watching for badgers one holiday evening in a wood near Cilgerran, crouching in some undergrowth not far from a rather muddy sett beneath a mossy oak. The minutes go by; I watch the patterns of ash leaves darken on the darkening sky; a blackbird pinks, a wood pigeon murmurs, far off a horse whinnies. I start to nod off, head on knees, pleasantly lassitudinous from a day of sun and exercise, but a sudden prod from my wife brings me alert. There, a few feet away, a badger is looking at us, its black-and-white mask vivid in the gloom. It turns its head from side to side, making a curious ticking, whiffling noise; then another appears, larger and not so clean looking, that rolls lumberingly along the path for a short way, then disappears down another hole. A brief enough encounter, but still a privilege, and one that it will be sad if future generations can no longer enjoy.

Edward Thomas’s poem  of course, relates not to the possibly excusable practice of culling but the quite inexcusable practice of killing for sport. Though he does not openly condemn, it is clear where his sympathies lie. And the closing appellation, ‘That most ancient Briton of English beasts’, is a masterstroke, especially given that the traditional name ‘brock’ for a badger has Celtic roots.

The Combe

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with brambles, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

Edward Thomas

Week 618: Egan O Rahilly, by James Stephens

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This quirky lament was composed by the Irish poet Egan O’Rahilly (1670-1726), or to give his name in the more Irish spelling Aodhagán (or Aogán) Ó Rathaille. Not to be confused with The O’Rahilly, Michael O’Rahilly, the subject of a poem by W.B.Yeats, who was a leader of the Irish Volunteers killed in the Easter Rising in 1916.

Egan was the last of his kind, an ollamh, a professional poet trained in a bardic school, who made his living by travelling between the houses of Irish chieftains, where he was treated with great honour. This is of course hard for a poet of today to imagine: when I was small and was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I vacillated between being a tramp and being a poet, and it is hard to say which prospect appalled my elders more.

But O’Rahilly was unfortunate to live at a time of huge social changes, that included the Battle of the Boyne which ended the hopes of the Stuart dynasty and led to the repression of the Irish language and the death of the bardic tradition. He was to end as an embittered destitute, who never gave up on his dreams of a restored Ireland, expressed in the ‘aisling’ or vision genre of poetry which he pioneered, in which such politically dangerous aspirations are disguised as a love poem to a beautiful woman.

Egan O Rahilly
(translated from the Irish by James Stephens)

Here in a distant place I hold my tongue;
I am O Rahilly!

When I was young,
Who now am young no more,
I did not eat things picked up from the shore:
The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish
At even-tide have got into my dish!

The great, where are they now! The great had said –
This is not seemly! Bring to him instead
That which serves his and serves our dignity –
And that was done.

I am O Rahilly!
Here in a distant place he holds his tongue;
Who once said all his say, when he was young!

Week 617: Ye Who Enter In, by Jamie McKendrick

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I have an uneasy relationship with Dante, at the same time admiring and a little
repulsed, though I readily concede that he is, as Sam Gamgee felt about elves, ‘a
bit above my likes and dislikes, so to speak’. I think this piece by poet and
translator Jamie McKendrick (b. 1955) is a miniature tour de force in how it
captures the way in which Dante manages simultaneously to alienate yet compel.

Ye Who Enter In
(after Antonio Machado)

To plumb the depths of hell and meet
ministers, saladins and scholars,
Marilyn Monroe and Cleopatra,
the latter naked as the day they died:
to give audience where you please
and where you don’t to curl your lip
or deftly rabbit-punch a kidney
sure that your arm is power-assisted.
To be steered about by someone who just
happens to be Virgil, and you like his poems.
to write as a chisel writes on rock
so every phrase you write resounds forever:
ABANDON ALL HOPE… You first.
No really I insist please after you.

Jamie McKendrick

Week 616: The Most of It, by Robert Frost

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This poem appears in Robert Frost’s 1942 collection ‘A Witness Tree’, and for me is one of the finest poems in that collection, which I think is the last to show his lyric gift at full strength. It came after a period in which Frost had suffered a number of tragic losses in his life: the death of his daughter Marjorie in 1934, his wife’s death in 1938, and then the suicide of his son Carol in 1940, and perhaps as a result it is informed by disillusionment and loneliness, and by an absence of consolation no longer to be found in the natural world, that the poet now sees as at best indifferent, at worst disturbingly alien and even dangerous. The image of the great buck at the end has something elemental, indeed almost demonic about it, and certainly it has no interest in communicating with the wistful observer.

Despite the reference to the universe in the first line it is clear that Frost was really talking about man on earth, but with the recent SETI initiative and the discovery of ever more exoplanets one can see the poem as having acquired an additional resonance since it was written. If there is indeed alien life out there, will it do us any good to find out, or will it be just as incommunicable and set on its own purposes as the great buck?

The Most of It

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush – and that was all.

Robert Frost

Week 615: The Persistence of Memory, by John Burnside

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John Burnside (1955-2024) was a very prolific Scottish writer who died this May. Though principally a poet he produced works of fiction, essays, reviews and also a prize-winning memoir. His is a very congenial voice, though I do sometimes feel, as with so much contemporary poetry, that his work could have done with a bit more shaping, being ever mindful of Frost’s pithy but slightly too sweeping condemnation of free verse: ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. But when Burnside gets it right, as here, he combines exactitude with a haunting music that more than compensates for any lack of formality.

The Persistence of Memory

Out in the field where, once,
we played Dead Man’s Fall,

the others are being called
through the evening dusk

– Kenny and Marek, the Corrigans, Alex McClure –
mothers and sisters calling them home for tea

from kitchens fogged with steam and buttered toast,
broth on the hot plate, ham hough and yellow lentils.

Barely a wave, then they’re gone, till no one is left,
and the dark from the woods closes in on myself alone,

the animals watching, the older gods
couched in the shadows.

Decades ago, I suppose,
though I cannot be sure.

I have waited here, under the stars,
for the longest time.

John Burnside