Category Archives: Poetry

Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop (1915)

In the course of my work, I am occa­sion­al­ly called upon to vis­it the vil­lage of Ment­more in Buck­ing­hamshire, ser­viced by the near­by rail­way sta­tion of Ched­ding­ton. I have board­ed and alight­ed trains here on per­haps a dozen occa­sions (the lat­est being just a cou­ple weeks ago) and on not one occa­sion have I ever met anoth­er soul on its plat­forms. I guess it’s because I trav­el there off-peak and it’s no doubt total­ly dif­fer­ent at rush-hour when the com­muters leave and return to their rur­al homes, but it puts me in mind of the poem Adle­strop by the poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917), one of the Dymock poets whom we last vis­it­ed when I wrote about Rupert Brooke’s The Sol­dier here.

The poem is based on a rail­way jour­ney on the Cotswold line Thomas took on 24th June 1914, dur­ing which his train briefly stopped at Adle­strop in Glouces­ter­shire (a sta­tion long closed down, one of the many vic­tims of the Beech­ing cuts in the six­ties). Thomas record­ed the occa­sion in his note­book, writ­ing that the train, from Padding­ton to Malvern, had stopped at Adle­strop at 12:15. He record­ed his obser­va­tions of the grass, the wild­flow­ers, the black­birds and the silence inter­rupt­ed only by the hiss of steam at the stop. The poem itself was writ­ten a few months lat­er. Since then, the poem has become a pop­u­lar sym­bol­ic piece due to its sim­ple ref­er­ences to a peace­ful era and loca­tion just before the out­break of the Great War.

Adle­strop Sta­tion

Thomas enlist­ed the fol­low­ing year, and was killed soon after he arrived in France, at the Bat­tle of Arras, in 1917. His poem was pub­lished in the New States­man, just three weeks after his death. One hun­dred years to the day after the orig­i­nal jour­ney, an “Adle­strop Cen­te­nary Spe­cial” Cotswold Line train was arranged, car­ry­ing 200 pas­sen­gers from Oxford to More­ton-in-Marsh and stop­ping at Adle­strop in the place where the sta­tion for­mer­ly stood. Adle­strop vil­lage also held a cel­e­bra­tion to mark the cen­te­nary, with a pub­lic read­ing of the poem by actor Robert Hardy. The old rail­way sign can still be seen in the village’s bus-stop.

Here is Thomas’s sim­ple but ele­gant poem; know­ing it was writ­ten just before the war that changed every­thing might qui­et­ly break your heart.

Yes. I remem­ber Adle­strop—
The name, because one after­noon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwont­ed­ly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Some­one cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare plat­form. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And wil­lows, wil­low-herb, and grass,
And mead­owsweet, and hay­cocks dry,
No whit less still and lone­ly fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a black­bird sang
Close by, and round him, mist­i­er,
Far­ther and far­ther, all the birds
Of Oxford­shire and Glouces­ter­shire.

Edward Thomas

Walter De La Mare’s The Listeners (1912)

Philistines might say that they “don’t get” poet­ry because it’s dressed up in flow­ery lan­guage and they can’t under­stand it. If the objec­tive is to tell a sto­ry or com­mu­ni­cate a mes­sage, they won­der, why dress it up in poet­ic lan­guage so that the mean­ing is obscured and only serves to cre­ate work for the read­er to tease out the mean­ing? Well, I don’t know if such rad­i­cal philistines actu­al­ly exist, but I do know that the beau­ty of poet­ry is part and par­cel of its abil­i­ty to chal­lenge and inspire the imag­i­na­tion. Neuroscience‑y types will tell you that poet­ic lan­guage bypass­es the ratio­nal left hemi­sphere and enters the imag­i­nal realm of the right brain, where metaphor­i­cal con­nec­tions can be made and ideas fused.

Some­times, though, the poet doesn’t even need to bam­boo­zle us with fan­cy lan­guage – he can lit­er­al­ly omit key infor­ma­tion from the nar­ra­tive alto­geth­er. One such poem that springs to mind is Wal­ter de la Mare’s The Lis­ten­ers which relies entire­ly on the reader’s imag­i­na­tion. The Lis­ten­ers is one of de la Mare’s most famous poems and cer­tain­ly one of his most atmos­pher­ic. Its theme is the noc­tur­nal encounter between an unnamed “Trav­eller” and a house inhab­it­ed by mys­te­ri­ous “Lis­ten­ers”. The poem is delib­er­ate in its pos­ing of ques­tions with­out pro­vid­ing any answers; it’s for the read­er to fill in the gaps or, more like­ly,  sim­ply bask in the mys­tery.

The key char­ac­ters — the Trav­eller, the Lis­ten­ers, and the mys­te­ri­ous “Them” for whom the Trav­eller has a mes­sage — are all unnamed and sparse­ly described. We know noth­ing about this Trav­eller (oth­er than that his eyes are ‘grey’, a non­de­script colour that is pre­sum­ably quite delib­er­ate) nor why he has come knock­ing on the door of this house. Who are the Lis­ten­ers, to whom the Trav­eller declares that he has kept his “word”? We do not know what “word” he is keep­ing, nor to whom he is keep­ing it.

But who cares? De la Mare makes great use of sound imagery in this poem, cre­at­ing a seman­tic field of sound to inten­si­fy the sense of atmos­phere. We can imag­ine how these nois­es would cut into the silence of a for­est by moon­light. The rap on the door, the flut­ter of the dis­turbed bird, the words that go echo­ing through the house, the horse chomp­ing on the for­est floor, and when he final­ly goes off into the dark­ness, there is the sound of “iron on stone” before the “silence surged soft­ly back­ward”. The nois­es in the scene are almost an act of vio­lence upon it.

By the poem’s end, we still don’t know what promise is being kept on this night, nor who the peo­ple involved are, but, at the very least, we’re intrigued…marvellous stuff!

‘Is there any­body there?’ said the Trav­eller,
Knock­ing on the moon­lit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass­es
Of the forest’s fer­ny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the tur­ret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a sec­ond time;
‘Is there any­body there?’ he said.
But no one descend­ed to the Trav­eller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood per­plexed and still.
But only a host of phan­tom lis­ten­ers
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood lis­ten­ing in the qui­et of the moon­light
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood throng­ing the faint moon­beams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the emp­ty hall,
Hear­ken­ing in an air stirred and shak­en
By the lone­ly Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strange­ness,
Their still­ness answer­ing his cry,
While his horse moved, crop­ping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he sud­den­ly smote on the door, even
Loud­er, and lift­ed his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Nev­er the least stir made the lis­ten­ers,
Though every word he spake
Fell echo­ing through the shad­owi­ness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stir­rup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged soft­ly back­ward,
When the plung­ing hoofs were gone.

Wal­ter de la Mare

John Keats’ Ode, To Autumn (1819)

Autumn is in the air, a sign that is wel­comed in my house­hold, and one which trig­gers a swap­ping out of cush­ions and can­dles for ones befit­ting the sea­son. Autum­nal colours and aro­mas abound. My week­end walk was cool­er and cloudi­er but the hedgerows were still full of late-fruit­ing black­ber­ries, and the walk brought to mind that famous open­ing line of John Keats’ poem On Autumn, “Sea­son of mists and mel­low fruit­ful­ness”. Let’s talk about Keats…

Along with Shel­ley and Byron, Keats is the clas­sic exem­plar of the arche­typ­al Roman­tic poet, the fay, tor­tured genius. In Keats’ case, he was also con­sump­tive and short-lived, dying at 25 and thus – a bit like the 27 club of the mod­ern era — being con­ferred ever­last­ing leg­endary sta­tus. He trained to be a doc­tor and worked at Guy’s Hos­pi­tal in Lon­don, but he had long resolved to become a poet and so spent more and more time devot­ed to the study of lit­er­a­ture and the pen­ning of lines of poet­ry.

Although he wrote epics, son­nets and ele­gies, Keats’ most famous and well-regard­ed poems were his odes, writ­ten in quick suc­ces­sion dur­ing an extra­or­di­nary spell of cre­ativ­i­ty in 1819, at his friend Charles Armitage Brown’s house, Went­worth Place on Hamp­stead Heath. He wrote Ode on a Gre­cian Urn, Ode on Indo­lence, Ode on Melan­choly, Ode to a Nightin­gale, and Ode to Psy­che dur­ing the spring, and final­ly, despite wors­en­ing health and loom­ing finan­cial woes, To Autumn in Sep­tem­ber. This was to be his last major work before tuber­cu­lo­sis brought the cur­tain down on his career.

After his stay with Brown, Keats moved to Italy, seek­ing a more salu­bri­ous cli­mate to aid in his recov­ery, but it wasn’t to be. I have vis­it­ed the small room in the house by the Span­ish Steps in Rome, in which Keats spent his last days. He died on the 23rd Feb­ru­ary 1821, and is buried in the city’s Protes­tant ceme­tery (as is his good friend Shel­ley).

Keats’ House, by the Span­ish Steps, Rome

He was con­vinced that he had made no mark in his life­time and in Feb­ru­ary 1820, when he knew that he was dying, he wrote: “I have left no immor­tal work behind me – noth­ing to make my friends proud of my mem­o­ry – but I have lov’d the prin­ci­ple of beau­ty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remem­ber’d”. Lit­tle did he know that he would indeed be remem­bered to pos­ter­i­ty, more per­haps than he could ever have imag­ined — peo­ple like me, after all, are still writ­ing about him over two hun­dred years lat­er!

Sea­son of mists and mel­low fruit­ful­ness,
Close bosom-friend of the matur­ing sun;
Con­spir­ing with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cot­tage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet ker­nel; to set bud­ding more,
And still more, lat­er flow­ers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will nev­er cease,
For sum­mer has o’er-brim­m’d their clam­my cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Some­times who­ev­er seeks abroad may find
Thee sit­ting care­less on a gra­nary floor,
Thy hair soft-lift­ed by the win­now­ing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d fur­row sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of pop­pies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flow­ers:
And some­times like a glean­er thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watch­est the last ooz­ings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stub­ble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wail­ful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the riv­er sal­lows, borne aloft
Or sink­ing as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crick­ets sing; and now with tre­ble soft
The red-breast whis­tles from a gar­den-croft;
And gath­er­ing swal­lows twit­ter in the skies.

John Keats

 

Ben Johnson’s Encomium To Shakespeare (1623)

For some years now I have been inter­est­ed in the Shake­speare author­ship ques­tion: did the man from Strat­ford real­ly pen the plays and poems attrib­uted to him, or was he just a front for some oth­er true genius? Anti-Strat­for­dians (those of the lat­ter per­sua­sion) point out that the sheer breadth of edu­ca­tion, knowl­edge, expe­ri­ence and eru­di­tion dis­played in the works of Shake­speare is sim­ply incom­pat­i­ble with a man born to illit­er­ate par­ents, raised in an unre­mark­able provin­cial town and edu­cat­ed (maybe) at his local gram­mar school. Evi­dence exists to show that the Shake­speare of Strat­ford engaged in grain-deal­ing, mon­ey-lend­ing, and act­ing, and was a share­hold­er in an act­ing company…but noth­ing that shows he was an actu­al writer.

In a rig­or­ous piece of research, Diana Price com­pared the extant doc­u­men­tary evi­dence of var­i­ous kinds with two dozen oth­er big-name Eliz­a­bethan poets and play­wrights. She looked at the lit­er­ary paper trails of the likes of Edmund Spencer, Christo­pher Mar­lowe, Robert Green and Thomas Nashe and found plen­ty of evi­dence of cor­re­spon­dences about lit­er­ary mat­ters, hav­ing patrons, hav­ing extant man­u­scripts, notice at death etc, but found pre­cious lit­tle evi­dence in favour of the man from Strat­ford; look at the emp­ty final col­umn here (click to enlarge):

Eliz­a­bethan lit­er­ary paper trail sum­ma­ry

It cer­tain­ly seems strange that no-one seemed to notice when Shake­speare died – where was the fan­fare? Some might point to Ben John­son as one who explic­it­ly laud­ed Shake­speare in his encomi­um To the mem­o­ry of my Beloved the Author, Mr William Shake­speare, in his pref­ace to the First Folio (the com­mon name for the col­lec­tion of 36 Shake­speare plays pub­lished in 1623), but this was pub­lished sev­en years after Shakespeare’s death. Plen­ty of stand­alone edi­tions of the plays, with his name embla­zoned on the cov­er, exist­ed pri­or to his death, so why the radio silence?

The schol­ar Alexan­der Waugh, a lead­ing Oxfor­dian (those advo­cat­ing for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as the true author), has a field day with this poem, remind­ing us that Ben John­son was known by con­tem­po­raries for his dou­ble mean­ings, clas­si­cal allu­sions and use of num­bers to reveal hid­den mean­ings to the learned few. Waugh argues that Ben John­son, along with all the oth­er drama­tists of the age, was “in the know” about the true iden­ti­ty of the writer of the Shake­speare plays, and he pep­pered his encomi­um with clues point­ing to Edward de Vere.

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

There is no room in this blog to explore that argu­ment, as com­pelling as it is, so instead let’s just take the con­tent on its pri­ma facie mean­ing. It is, after all, in praise of the great­est drama­tist of all time, respon­si­ble for all those works of genius, and that praise is sure­ly jus­ti­fied who­ev­er that man was!

To draw no envy, Shake­speare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I con­fess thy writ­ings to be such
As nei­ther man nor muse can praise too much;
‘Tis true, and all men’s suf­frage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seel­i­est igno­rance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affec­tion, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty mal­ice might pre­tend this praise,
And think to ruin, where it seem’d to raise.
These are, as some infa­mous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed,
Above th’ ill for­tune of them, or the need.
I there­fore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the won­der of our stage!
My Shake­speare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beau­mont lie
A lit­tle fur­ther, to make thee a room:
Thou art a mon­u­ment with­out a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excus­es,
I mean with great, but dis­pro­por­tion’d Mus­es,
For if I thought my judg­ment were of years,
I should com­mit thee sure­ly with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly out­shine,
Or sport­ing Kyd, or Mar­lowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to hon­our thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschy­lus,
Euripi­des and Sopho­cles to us;
Pacu­vius, Accius, him of Cor­do­va dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the com­par­i­son
Of all that inso­lent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ash­es come.
Tri’umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
And all the Mus­es still were in their prime,
When, like Apol­lo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mer­cury to charm!
Nature her­self was proud of his designs
And joy’d to wear the dress­ing of his lines,
Which were so rich­ly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouch­safe no oth­er wit.
The mer­ry Greek, tart Aristo­phanes,
Neat Ter­ence, wit­ty Plau­tus, now not please,
But anti­quat­ed and desert­ed lie,
As they were not of Nature’s fam­i­ly.
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
My gen­tle Shake­speare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet­’s mat­ter nature be,
His art doth give the fash­ion; and, that he
Who casts to write a liv­ing line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the sec­ond heat
Upon the Mus­es’ anvil; turn the same
(And him­self with it) that he thinks to frame,
Or, for the lau­rel, he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet­’s made, as well as born;
And such wert thou. Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shake­speare’s mind and man­ners bright­ly shines
In his well-turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As bran­dish’d at the eyes of igno­rance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemi­sphere
Advanc’d, and made a con­stel­la­tion there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influ­ence, chide or cheer the droop­ing stage;
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despairs day, but for thy vol­ume’s light.

Ben John­son

 

Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Criticism (1711)

When it comes to lit­er­ary “wits”, two names are often bandied about, name­ly Samuel John­son and Oscar Wilde, but hon­ourable men­tion should be reserved for a ver­i­ta­ble club of wits that thrived in ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry Lon­don. Found­ed in 1714, The Scriblerus Club was an infor­mal asso­ci­a­tion of writ­ers com­pris­ing promi­nent fig­ures of the Eng­lish lit­er­ary scene such as the satirists Jonathan Swift, Alexan­der Pope and John Gay. One of the club’s pur­pos­es was to ridicule pre­ten­tious writ­ing of the era which they did through the per­sona of a fic­ti­tious lit­er­ary hack, Mar­t­i­nus Scriblerus. They were the Pri­vate Eye of their time.

Swift would become famous for his 1726 prose satire Gulliver’s Trav­els; John Gay for The Beggar’s Opera in 1728; and Alexan­der Pope for a series of eru­dite mock-hero­ic nar­ra­tive poet­ry includ­ing The Rape of the Lock, The Dun­ci­ad, and An Essay on Crit­i­cism. Despite its dry title, the lat­ter was indeed poet­ry, one of Pope’s first major poems, in fact, and one which had already been pub­lished pri­or to the com­ing togeth­er of the Scriblerati. It is the source of the famous quo­ta­tions “To err is human; to for­give, divine”, “A lit­tle learn­ing is a dan­g’rous thing”, and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, which is a pret­ty impres­sive set of addi­tions to the lex­i­con for just one poem.

An Essay on Crit­i­cism was com­posed in hero­ic cou­plets (pairs of rhyming lines of iambic pen­tame­ter) and writ­ten in the man­ner of the Roman satirist Horace (65–8 BCE), known for his play­ful crit­i­cism of the many and var­ied social vices of Roman soci­ety through his light-heart­ed odes. Essen­tial­ly, Pope’s poem is a Hor­a­t­ian-style verse essay offer­ing advice about the chief lit­er­ary ideals of his age and cri­tiquing writ­ers and crit­ics who failed to attain his (evi­dent­ly pret­ty high) stan­dards.

Pope’s open­ing cou­plets con­tend that bad crit­i­cism is even worse than bad writ­ing, thus sig­nalling that even crit­ics should be on their guard, not just pure writ­ers. Dare I say, it has an ele­ment of con­tem­po­rary “rap bat­tles” or “roasts” with its gen­tle rib­bing of infe­ri­or writ­ers; it’s not too hard to imag­ine a mod­ern-day ren­der­ing of these lines, per­haps with a mike-drop­ping flour­ish at the end:

‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writ­ing or in Judg­ing ill;
But, of the two, less dan­g’rous is th’ Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Num­bers err in this,
Ten Cen­sure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once him­self alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

Pope points out com­mon faults in poet­ry such as set­tling for easy and clichéd rhymes:

While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expect­ed Rhymes.
Where-e’er you find the cool­ing West­ern Breeze,
In the next Line, it whis­pers thro’ the Trees;
If Crys­tal Streams with pleas­ing Mur­murs creep,
The Read­er’s threat­en’d (not in vain) with Sleep.

The cou­plets are impec­ca­bly and relent­less­ly deliv­ered, 372 in all, each rapped out in that steady da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum iambic pen­tame­ter. Pope only breaks out of iambic pen­tame­ter once, and that’s delib­er­ate:

A need­less Alexan­drine ends the song,
That, like a wound­ed snake, drags its slow length along

The sec­ond line of this cou­plet is itself an Alexan­drine, which is iambic hexa­m­e­ter, a form that Pope evi­dent­ly regard­ed as laboured and inel­e­gant with that extra da-dum and which this line demon­strates (ged­dit?). The whole piece is a mas­ter­class in poet­ry, and all writ­ten when Pope was just twen­ty-two, so take that, pre­ten­tious and turgid writ­ers of the 1700s!

Alexan­der Pope

Louis MacNeice’s Prayer Before Birth (1944)

In good poet­ry there is so often a great last line, some­thing that effec­tive­ly clos­es the poem leav­ing the reader/listener with the white space/silence in which to reflect on their expe­ri­ence. Some­times the last line has a sense of fade: take Ozy­man­dias, for exam­ple (see here), in which the once-mighty stat­ue of that ancient king now lies bro­ken and decayed and the final line “The lone and lev­el sands stretch far away” draws our atten­tion to the bar­ren desert in which the ruins reside and allows the irony to sink in.

Oth­er poems end with an encap­su­lat­ing line, sum­ming up the theme of the entire poem in one line: Wil­frid Owen’s last line in Dulce Et Deco­rum Est (see here), after a series of shock­ing imagery about the grim real­i­ties of the front line, sums up the empti­ness of the plat­i­tudes around “hon­our and glo­ry” that the gen­er­als had hoped to instil into the com­mon sol­dier: “The old Lie: Dulce et deco­rum est Pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and fit­ting to die for one’s coun­try”).

Oth­er poems end with a sur­prise, a jolt – often called the “trap door” or the “rug pull” – and today’s poem from Louis Mac­Ne­ice fits the bill per­fect­ly. See what you think…

Louis Mac­Ne­ice (1907–1963) was an Irish poet and play­wright, born in Belfast, and a mem­ber of the Auden Group, that loose affil­i­a­tion of lit­er­ary fig­ures active in the 1930s and includ­ing W. H. Auden, Christo­pher Ish­er­wood, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, names that have come down to mod­ern times with per­haps more celebri­ty than MacNeice’s (and two of whom have appeared in the pages of this blog before, here and here). Mac­Ne­ice’s body of work was wide­ly appre­ci­at­ed by the pub­lic dur­ing his life­time, how­ev­er, due to his appeal­ing style and the fact that, like many mod­ern Eng­lish poets, he found an audi­ence for his work through British radio.

Prayer Before Birth is a poem writ­ten at the height of the Sec­ond World War, and takes the form of an ago­nised plea from the mouth of an unborn infant in its moth­er’s womb. Dra­mat­ic in inten­si­ty, the poem bemoans the deplorable state of the world, but artic­u­lates that, whilst liv­ing in it is a painful expe­ri­ence, being born into it must be tru­ly ter­ri­fy­ing. It mir­rors per­haps the grow­ing mod­ern trend of young peo­ple choos­ing not to have chil­dren due to their fears of what the world is becom­ing.

As pes­simism goes, it’s hard to beat, but it’s incan­ta­to­ry rhythms, allit­er­a­tions and rep­e­ti­tions gives it a hyp­not­ic, rit­u­al­is­tic qual­i­ty and, as I said, it serves up its final line with a pow­er­ful punch.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the blood­suck­ing bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-foot­ed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, con­sole me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; pro­vide me
With water to dan­dle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; for­give me
For the sins that in me the world shall com­mit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my trea­son engen­dered by trai­tors beyond me,
my life when they mur­der by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lec­ture me, bureau­crats hec­tor me, moun­tains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to fol­ly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beg­gar refus­es
my gift and my chil­dren curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
human­i­ty, would dra­goon me into a lethal automa­ton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dis­si­pate my entire­ty, would
blow me like this­tle­down hith­er and
thith­er or hith­er and thith­er
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Oth­er­wise kill me.

Louis Mac­Ne­ice

Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach (1867)

Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) is some­times called the third great Vic­to­ri­an poet along­side Alfred, Lord Ten­nyson and Robert Brown­ing, although, unlike those two full-time mon­eyed poets, he actu­al­ly had a prop­er job too, earn­ing his liv­ing work­ing as an inspec­tor of schools for thir­ty-five years. He was the son of the cel­e­brat­ed head­mas­ter of Rug­by School, Thomas Arnold (who was a neigh­bour and good friend of William Wordsworth, unsur­pris­ing­ly a strong influ­ence on the young Matthew), and it was at Rug­by where Matthew Arnold received most of his edu­ca­tion before win­ning a schol­ar­ship to Bal­li­ol Col­lege, Oxford.

In 1849 (the year before Wordsworth’s death), Arnold pub­lished his first book of poet­ry, The Strayed Rev­eller, and fol­lowed that up in 1852 with his sec­ond vol­ume of poems, Empe­do­cles on Etna, and Oth­er Poems, coin­cid­ing with the launch of both his school-inspect­ing career and his mar­riage. Much out­put would fol­low and not just in poet­ry: Arnold wrote in prose too and was an influ­en­tial lit­er­ary, polit­i­cal and social crit­ic. Between 1867 and 1869 he wrote Cul­ture and Anar­chy, set­ting his High Vic­to­ri­an cul­tur­al agen­da, and famous for the term he pop­u­larised to denote a cer­tain sub-set of the Eng­lish pop­u­la­tion: “Philistines”, i.e. name­ly that class of per­sons hav­ing a dep­re­ca­to­ry atti­tude towards art, beau­ty, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and intel­lect. He would have felt at home here at OGOTS Tow­ers, I feel sure!

These days, Arnold is per­haps best known for his poem Dover Beach. The poem’s speak­er (whom we may assume is Matthew Arnold him­self) begins by describ­ing a calm and qui­et sea out in the Eng­lish Chan­nel. He is stand­ing on the Dover coast and look­ing out across to France, where a small light can be seen briefly and then van­ish­es. Through­out the poem Arnold crafts visu­al and audi­to­ry imagery of the sea reced­ing and return­ing to land. At this point in time, though, the sea is not return­ing; it is reced­ing far­ther out, and we realise that Arnold is equat­ing it with the diminu­tion of reli­gious faith amongst his com­pa­tri­ots.

This was, after all, the post-Dar­win era, when reli­gious faith was being pro­found­ly chal­lenged, and Arnold was known to bemoan the creep of mate­ri­al­ism and, in his eyes, its atten­dant philis­tin­ism. For him, truth and beau­ty were in retreat, like the tide, and, apart from the fact that he has his mis­sus beside him (“Ah, love, let us be true to one anoth­er!”), there’s lit­tle light at the end of his tun­nel, and the poem remains pes­simistic to the end. It’s prob­a­bly a bless­ing that Arnold is not around today: I sus­pect he would con­sid­er his pes­simism to have been under­stat­ed!

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of Eng­land stand,
Glim­mer­ing and vast, out in the tran­quil bay.
Come to the win­dow, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Lis­ten! you hear the grat­ing roar
Of peb­bles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremu­lous cadence slow, and bring
The eter­nal note of sad­ness in.

Sopho­cles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the tur­bid ebb and flow
Of human mis­ery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hear­ing it by this dis­tant north­ern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright gir­dle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melan­choly, long, with­draw­ing roar,
Retreat­ing, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shin­gles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one anoth­er! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So var­i­ous, so beau­ti­ful, so new,
Hath real­ly nei­ther joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor cer­ti­tude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a dark­ling plain
Swept with con­fused alarms of strug­gle and flight,
Where igno­rant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold

Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier (1915)

I recent­ly stayed for a few days in the charm­ing vil­lage of Red­mar­ley d’Abitot in Glouces­ter­shire and when research­ing the local area was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to find that the near­by vil­lage of Dymock was sig­nif­i­cant in poet­ry cir­cles for being the home of the epony­mous Dymock Poets (as well as being the home of the Dymock Red cider apple and also Stink­ing Bish­op cheese!). A vis­it ensued and in its church of St Mary’s I found a dis­play about the Dymock Poets and learnt a bit more.

They were a lit­er­ary group of poets who lived in or around Dymock, or vis­it­ed often, and were active in the peri­od from 1911 to the First World War. Cen­tred around Las­celles Abercrombie’s house The Gal­lows, in near­by Ryton (that I sub­se­quent­ly vis­it­ed and had a nice chat with the cur­rent own­er who told me she gets plen­ty of Amer­i­can and Chi­nese lit­er­ary tourists), the group com­prised Aber­crom­bie, Robert Frost (whose poem The Road Not Tak­en I wrote about here), Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wil­frid Wil­son Gib­son and John Drinkwa­ter.

The group pub­lished their own quar­ter­ly, titled New Num­bers, and it was in this that we first saw Rupert Brooke’s The Sol­dier pub­lished: a poem which was to gain world­wide fame for its sim­ple and affect­ing ‘noble fall­en sol­dier’ motif, and be recit­ed in a thou­sand-fold war memo­ri­als. Whilst a lot of war poet­ry such as Wil­frid Owen’s Dulce et Deco­rum Est (also blogged about, here) had a dis­cernibly real­is­tic view of war, Brooke’s The Sol­dier was dia­met­ri­cal­ly oppo­site: a roman­ti­cised and  sen­ti­men­tal view, speak­ing in unabashed tones of pride, courage, and sac­ri­fice. It was writ­ten near the start of the First World War, per­haps before Brookes had time to sam­ple the bru­tal real­i­ties of bat­tle.

Indeed, he nev­er would: sail­ing with the British Mediter­ranean Expe­di­tionary Force on its way to the Gal­lipoli land­ings in 1915, he devel­oped strep­to­coc­cal sep­sis from an infect­ed mos­qui­to bite and, whilst moored off the Greek island of Sky­ros, died of sep­ti­caemia on 23rd April . As the expe­di­tionary force had orders to depart imme­di­ate­ly, Brooke was buried in an sim­ple olive grove on Sky­ros. It makes the open­ing lines of his poem all the more poignant.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some cor­ner of a for­eign field
That is for ever Eng­land. There shall be
In that rich earth a rich­er dust con­cealed;
A dust whom Eng­land bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flow­ers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of Eng­land’s, breath­ing Eng­lish air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eter­nal mind, no less
Gives some­where back the thoughts by Eng­land giv­en;
Her sights and sounds; dreams hap­py as her day;
And laugh­ter, learnt of friends; and gen­tle­ness,
In hearts at peace, under an Eng­lish heav­en.

Rupert Brooke

John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827)

Not every­one is an expert in Roman­tic poet­ry (and nei­ther am I, though I con­cede I’m no slouch) but if I were to ask you to name “the big six” poets of the Roman­tic era (late 18th to mid-19th cen­tu­ry), I bet you’d stand a fight­ing chance because they almost fall off the tongue: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Shel­ley, and Keats, right? There’s anoth­er poet from the era, how­ev­er, who nev­er rose to the majesty of the afore­men­tioned giants, but who nonethe­less is now regard­ed as a major tal­ent: the “Northamp­ton­shire Peas­ant Poet”, John Clare.

Unlike some of his con­tem­po­raries, John Clare didn’t have the where­with­al to lounge about on the Span­ish Steps in Rome (Keats), swim the Helle­spont (Byron), or swap ghost sto­ries around the fire at a vil­la by Lake Gene­va (Shelley…oh, and Byron again), because he spent his life as an agri­cul­tur­al labour­er, pot­boy, and gar­den­er, and nev­er left the coun­try.

Born in Help­ston in Northamp­ton­shire in 1793, John worked as a farm labour­er with his father from being a young boy onwards. The farm and the nature per­me­at­ing his sur­round­ings pro­vid­ed his inspi­ra­tions; this was where he found his voice and began writ­ing poems and son­nets. In an attempt to stave off his par­ents’ evic­tion from their home, John offered his poems to a local book­seller, who in turn sent them off to the pub­lish­ing firm who had already pub­lished the works of one John Keats. The rur­al aes­thet­ic appealed and thus, these suc­cess­ful col­lec­tions of poems were spawned: Poems Descrip­tive of Rur­al Life and Scenery, The Vil­lage Min­strel and Oth­er Poems, The Rur­al Muse, and the col­lec­tion I own: The Shepherd’s Cal­en­dar.

Whilst Clare’s ear­li­er poems speak of the har­mo­ny and beau­ty of nature in the Eng­lish coun­try­side, his lat­er work bemoans the great changes to the envi­ron­ment and soci­ety brought about by the Enclo­sure Acts. These wiped out a whole way of life by abol­ish­ing the open field sys­tem of agri­cul­ture which had been the way peo­ple farmed in Eng­land for cen­turies. The own­er­ship of the com­mon land was tak­en from them and the coun­try­side was dec­i­mat­ed as new­ly-unem­ployed coun­try folk flowed into the towns to par­tic­i­pate in the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion.

The hurt was deep, and in fact Clare found it increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to cope with life, and he sad­ly descend­ed into depres­sion and men­tal ill­ness, even­tu­al­ly spend­ing many years in an asy­lum. Whilst there he wrote the poem I Am! which is a win­dow into his men­tal strug­gles and a stark con­trast to his hard-work­ing but hap­py hey­day. Here’s a poem from the lat­ter peri­od, Spring, with I Am! fol­low­ing…

Spring

Come, gen­tle Spring, and show thy var­ied greens
In woods, and fields, and mead­ows, by clear brooks;
Come, gen­tle Spring, and bring thy sweet­est scenes,
Where peace, with soli­tude, the loveli­est looks;
Where the blue uncloud­ed sky
Spreads the sweet­est canopy,
And Study wis­er grows with­out her books.

Come hith­er, gen­tle May, and with thee bring
Flow­ers of all colours, and the wild bri­ar rose;
Come in wind-float­ing drap­ery, and bring
Fra­grance and bloom, that Nature’s love bestows–
Mead­ow pinks and columbines,
Keck­sies white and eglan­tines,
And music of the bee that seeks the rose.

Come, gen­tle Spring, and bring thy choic­est looks,
Thy bosom graced with flow­ers, thy face with smiles;
Come, gen­tle Spring, and trace thy wan­der­ing brooks,
Through mead­ow gates, o’er foot­path crooked stiles;
Come in thy proud and best array,
April dews and flow­ers of May,
And singing birds that come where heav­en smiles.

I Am!

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends for­sake me like a mem­o­ry lost:
I am the self-con­sumer of my woes—
They rise and van­ish in obliv­i­ous host,
Like shad­ows in love’s fren­zied sti­fled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the noth­ing­ness of scorn and noise,
Into the liv­ing sea of wak­ing dreams,
Where there is nei­ther sense of life or joys,
But the vast ship­wreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dear­est that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath nev­er trod
A place where woman nev­er smiled or wept
There to abide with my Cre­ator, God,
And sleep as I in child­hood sweet­ly slept,
Untrou­bling and untrou­bled where I lie
The grass below—above the vault­ed sky.

John Clare

Edwin Muir’s The Horses (1956)

Despite being a nat­ur­al opti­mist, I have for some rea­son always been attract­ed by the genre of dystopi­an fic­tion, although I’m not the only one judg­ing by the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of dystopi­an clas­sics such as Orwell’s sem­i­nal 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451, Mar­garet Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The inspi­ra­tion inform­ing this genre comes from many and var­ied sources, includ­ing, just for starters, the rise of indus­tri­al-scale war­fare in the World Wars, the devel­op­ment of the atom bomb, total­i­tar­i­an­ism, AI and Big Tech, genet­ic engi­neer­ing, dead­ly virus­es, the sur­veil­lance soci­ety and cli­mate change. It seems we have a per­pet­u­al col­lec­tive curios­i­ty, and fear, about where our soci­ety might be going.

The genre extends to poet­ry, too; at school I became aware of this enig­mat­ic poem called The Hors­es, by Scot­tish poet Edwin Muir (1887–1959). Muir was born on the island of Orkney and had an idyl­lic child­hood which was cur­tailed in 1901 when his father lost the fam­i­ly farm and they had to move to Glas­gow. For Muir, this was a move from Eden to Hell: with­in a few short years, his father, two broth­ers, and final­ly his moth­er died in quick suc­ces­sion, and mean­while he had to endure a series of mun­dane jobs in fac­to­ries and offices.

Such a change in his life must have had pro­found effects on his future poet­ic works, although bal­anced by the hap­pi­ness that he even­tu­al­ly found when he met his wife, the trans­la­tor and writer Willa Ander­sen. He found great pur­pose with Willa and teamed up with her to trans­late the works of many notable Ger­man-speak­ing authors like Franz Kaf­ka. Any­way, although I haven’t read much else of Muir’s work, the poem that found its way into my school­boy hands nonethe­less stayed with me as a slight­ly dis­turb­ing piece of weird and prophet­ic dystopia right up to the present day.

The poem gets stuck in from the start:

Bare­ly a twelve­month after
The sev­en days war that put the world to sleep

So no mess­ing: we know where we are, we’re in a bleak, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world…and then the very next line of the poem wastes no time by intro­duc­ing the hors­es of the title:

Late in the evening the strange hors­es came

There­after, fifty lines of an imag­i­na­tive con­cep­tion of what it might be like to be in a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world…but with added “strange hors­es”! Of course, inter­pre­ta­tion of the poem and what the hors­es rep­re­sent, is entire­ly up to the read­er. A few years ago I wrote an elec­tron­ic sound­scape to catch the poem’s atmos­phere and to accom­pa­ny a read­ing of the poem. More recent­ly, I revis­it­ed this record­ing and noo­dled about with some images and footage and have set it to video, which I’d like to share with you here. I like to think I have cap­tured the mood of Muir’s poem and I hope he would approve!

Edwin Muir