Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry

Walter De La Mare’s The Listeners (1912)

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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
Poetry

John Keats’ Ode, To Autumn (1819)

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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

 

Poetry

Ben Johnson’s Encomium To Shakespeare (1623)

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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

 

Poetry

Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Criticism (1711)

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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
Poetry

Louis MacNeice’s Prayer Before Birth (1944)

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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
Poetry

Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach (1867)

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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
Poetry

Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier (1915)

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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
Poetry

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

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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
Poetry

Edwin Muir’s The Horses (1956)

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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
Poetry

Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain (1865)

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Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist, famous for his major poetry collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised multiple times before his death in 1892 (the first edition consisted of only 12 poems; the final edition contained nearly 400). The collection represents a celebration of Whitman’s philosophy of life and humanity, and focuses on nature and the individual human’s role in it, rather than focusing on religious or spiritual matters.

Most of Whitman’s poems are written in free verse and neither rhyme nor follow standard rules for meter and line length. If that was controversial to the purist, so was his use of explicit sexual imagery, and his collection was lambasted at the time (though championed by influential figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau). Over time, however, the collection has infiltrated popular culture and became recognized as one of the central works of American poetry.

In the 1989 film Dead Poets Society (set in 1959), Robin Williams’ English teacher John Keating advocates doing away with the restrictions of poetic rules in order to give creativity free rein. He encourages his students to “make your life extraordinary” and “seize the day” and incites them to rip out the page on dry poetic rules from their textbooks. His unorthodox teaching methods inevitably attract the attention of strict headmaster Gale Nolan, who contrives to remove the heretic. As Mr Keating enters the classroom to collect his belongings, the inspired students express their solidarity by climbing on to their desks and quoting the opening line from Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! (though ironically this poem does rhyme).

During the American Civil War, Whitman, a staunch Unionist, had worked in hospitals caring for the wounded, and his poetry often focused on both loss and healing. O Captain! My Captain! was written in response to the death of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired, and who had been assassinated in April 1865 just as his great work was coming to fruition. The three-stanza poem uses a ship and its dead captain as a metaphor for the Unionist cause and Lincoln himself.

Ezra Pound called Whitman “America’s poet…He is America”. Well, let’s hear the poem recited and then let’s enjoy the emotional power of that final scene in Dead Poets Society.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Walt Whitman