Alfred Edward Housman (A E Housman) was a lifelong classical scholar at University College London and Cambridge University, right up until his death in 1936. He was also a gifted poet whose primary work, A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems, was published in 1896 and became a lasting success. The collection struck a chord with many English composers, among them Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Ivor Gurney, all of whom set his poems to music.
The collection’s various melancholy themes, including dying young and being separated from an idealised pastoral childhood, ensured that it accompanied many a young man to the trenches in the Great War. Housman had always had a young male readership in mind and as W H Auden said: “no other poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent“. Equally, George Orwell remembered that, among his generation at Eton College in the wake of World War I: “these were the poems which I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy”.
There’s a phrase Housman used that I have always found striking: “blue remembered hills”, three simple words that exemplify the melancholic tone of poem number XL, Into my heart an air that kills. It consists of just two quatrains that reflect on the passage of time and the futility of longing for a long-gone land and age. The speaker, in a distant land, recalls the hills and spires of his homeland. He recognises that, whilst he was happy when he lived there, he cannot return there now he is older and has left that land behind.
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
Surprisingly, Housman wasn’t actually from Shropshire, he was from Worcestershire, and hadn’t even visited Shropshire until after he had started writing the poem cycle. It is not Housman who is the Shropshire lad, but a literary construct. Be that as it may, here’s another punchy short poem from the cycle, again referencing the passage of time but this time evoking a carpe diem urgency about the here and now. Funnily enough, as I write this in view of my garden, my own cherry tree is hung with snow, its ‘winter blossom’ as implied by this poem.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide
Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more
And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow
Although I am a confirmed land-lubber, the sea holds a fascination for me. There’s something quite horrifying about being in the middle of the ocean, with no land visible in any direction and untold depths below, and being in a vessel whose fortune is dictated by the forces and whims of Nature. Of course, my own experiences of being in the middle of the sea have been limited to very safe, reliable and generally nature-defying cruise ships, so I’m not claiming any real experience of the above. I’m really thinking about those incredible sea adventurers of yore, like Cook or Magellan, or those gnarly men who would go to sea for years on end in pursuit of whales (see my blog about Moby Dick here). Or the man depicted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Coleridge’s epic poem was published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads, the poetry collection in which he collaborated with William Wordsworth (and which marked the beginning of British Romantic literature). For a volume that represented a new modern approach to poetry, it is ironic that this particular poem seems pre-modern in its gothic setting, archaic spelling and supernatural mood; perhaps he thought it was just too good not to be included.
The narrator is accosted at a wedding ceremony by a grey-bearded old sailor who tells him a story of a voyage he took long ago. The wedding guest is at first reluctant to listen, as the ceremony is about to begin, but the mariner’s glittering eye captivates him, and he simply has to listen. The mariner’s tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south by a storm and eventually reaches the icy waters of the Antarctic. An albatross appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam in which it was getting stuck, but even as the albatross is fed and praised by the ship’s crew, the mariner shoots the bird with his crossbow.
Oh dear: bad luck! The crew is angry with the mariner, believing the crime would arouse the wrath of the spirits, and indeed their ship is eventually blown into uncharted waters near the equator, where it is becalmed.
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
The sailors blame the mariner for the torment of their thirst and force the mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck.
Frontispiece by William Strang, 1903
The mariner endures a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross: one by one, all of the crew members die, but the mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew’s corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces.
Eventually, this stage of the mariner’s curse is lifted and he begins to pray. As he does so, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. It begins to rain and his own thirst is slaked. The bodies of the crew, now possessed by good spirits, rise up and help steer the ship home, floundering just off the coast of the mariner’s home town. The mariner is rescued but as penance, and driven by the agony of his guilt, he is now forced to wander the earth, telling his story over and over. His current rapt listener, the wedding guest, is just one in a long line…
If you have a spare half an hour, and you haven’t yet heard the full Ancient Mariner story, you could do worse than listen to Ian McKellen recite the entire thing here!
High above the Calder valley in West Yorkshire lies the village of Heptonstall, and in its churchyard lies, rather incongruously, the grave of famous American confessional poet, Sylvia Plath. Hers is a wretched tale of depression, ending ultimately in her suicide in February 1963, but her literary legacy is a powerful one, albeit only fully recognised posthumously (she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, twenty years after her death). The majority of the poems on which her reputation now rests were written during the final months of her life.
Plath had arrived at Cambridge University from her native Massachusetts and had already won awards for her poetry when she met young Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes in February 1956. By June they were married. They moved to the States for a couple of years before returning to London, where Sylvia had her daughter Frieda, and later Tawnton in Devon, where her son Nicholas was born. In July 1962, she discovered that Hughes was having an affair and the couple separated.
Plath had already experienced difficult problems with her mental health and had already undergone electroconvulsive therapy by the time she’d met Hughes. The separation precipitated an even-further downward spiral. She consulted her GP, who prescribed her anti-depressants and also arranged a live-in nurse to be with her.
The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she found Plath dead with her head in the gas oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths. She was 30 years old.
I have selected this poem, Daddy, read aloud by Plath herself. Its theme is her complex relationship with her German father, Otto Plath, who had died shortly after her eighth birthday. It is haunting and disturbing, with dark imagery and the expression of an inscrutable emotional trauma that we can only guess at. Plath’s rendition of her poem, with its disquieting multiple use of “oo” vowel sounds, gripped me, when I first heard this, all the way through to its raw and brutal conclusion.
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene
An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984, though both poems that I discuss here in this blog were written way back in 1937 and 1941 respectively. He was a lifelong poet but also a journalist and TV broadcaster and something of an “institution” in Britain, popular for his bumbling persona and wryly comic outlook. He was known for being a staunch defender of Victorian architecture, and he played a large part in saving St Pancras railway station (and many other buildings) from demolition.
Indeed, Betjeman bemoaned all that he saw slipping away in the wake of the industrialisation of Britain. The town of Slough had acquired up to 850 new factories just before the Second World War and was the epitome of all that he saw wrong with modernity, the “menace to come”. His poem Slough begins:
Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now
Somewhat harsh, perhaps. On the centenary of Betjeman’s birth in 2006 his daughter Candida Lycett-Green apologised to the people of Slough on his behalf and said that her father had regretted writing the poem. He may well have regretted picking on a particular town but I doubt that his sentiments had changed regarding the changing urban architectural landscape.
The first poem of Betjeman’s I came across was arguably about another world in the process of being subsumed by the march of progress and the Second World War. The Subaltern’s Love Song is a gentle poem reflecting the middle-class culture of Surrey at the time it was written in 1941. The story is imagined, though the muse of his poem was very real: Miss Joan Hunter Dunn worked at the canteen at the University of London where Betjeman was working. He was so taken by her that he was inspired to write the poem, imagining himself as a subaltern (a junior officer in the military) in her thrall throughout a breathless series of summer activities that ends in their engagement.
Eleven quatrains of flowing ten-syllable iambic rhythm tell the unfolding story of the imaginary love affair, and it does it with wit and sparkle. Let’s leave aside the fact that its writer was married at the time!
Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun, What strenuous singles we played after tea, We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy, The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy, With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won, I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won, The warm-handled racket is back in its press, But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.
Her father’s euonymus shines as we walk, And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk, And cool the verandah that welcomes us in To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin.
The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath, The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path, As I struggle with double-end evening tie, For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.
On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts, And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports, And westering, questioning settles the sun, On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
The Hillman is waiting, the light’s in the hall, The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall, My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair And there on the landing’s the light on your hair.
By roads “not adopted”, by woodlanded ways, She drove to the club in the late summer haze, Into nine-o’clock Camberley, heavy with bells And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, I can hear from the car park the dance has begun, Oh! Surrey twilight! importunate band! Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand!
Around us are Rovers and Austins afar, Above us the intimate roof of the car, And here on my right is the girl of my choice, With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.
And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said, And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead. We sat in the car park till twenty to one And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
One positive consequence of the lockdown has been, for me and surely for many others, the re-discovery of the benefits of walking the trails near one’s home. Virtually every day throughout this period I have strode out and delved into the woods, walking wherever the mood takes me and discovering that the myriad of criss-crossing trails allow for a near-infinite choice of different routes to take. Coupled with the coincident good weather and the seasonal blooming of the bluebells, these jaunts have been a source of great pleasure.
Occasionally, I make out a quite faint trail, perhaps once used but for some reason now largely untrodden and overgrown, and I take it, putting me in mind of that famous poem The Road Not Taken by the American Robert Frost, in which he says:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by
This idea of “The Road Not Taken” has taken off in the public imagination and you can find its key lines on mugs, fridge magnets and in greeting cards, and it has an Eat-Pray-Love-style vibe about it. Of course, the first interpretation a reader is likely to leap to, reading the lines above, is one of individualism and self-assertion (“I don’t go with the mainstream, me”), but actually, when you read the poem, it’s not quite that simple: the two ways “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”, which is to say, they’re interchangeable. So it’s not really about well-trodden versus untrodden, or going with or against the crowd; it’s a subtler commentary about random choices, about freewill versus determinism. Like in the movie Sliding Doors, some split-second, this-way-or-that-way choices are bound to beget markedly different consequences, but you can never know beforehand which is right. Such is life.
Whatever its interpretation, its genesis actually sprung from a surprisingly literal source. Frost spent the years 1912-1915 in England, where he befriended English-Welsh poet Edward Thomas who, when out walking with Frost, would often regret not having taken a different path and would sigh over what they might have seen and done. Frost liked to tease Thomas: “No matter which road you take, you always sigh and wish you’d taken another!”.
So it’s ironic that Frost initially meant the poem to be somewhat light-hearted when it turned out to be anything but. It’s the hallmark of the true poet, though, to take an everyday experience and transform it into something much more. Frost certainly succeeds in imbuing his short poem with an enigmatic appeal. Here it is in full, and may the roads you choose in life’s journey be the right ones!
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
The verges near where I live are seasonally awash with daffodils, as no doubt are yours if you live virtually anywhere in the UK, so what better time to take a look at that classic poem that regularly makes its way into the nation’s favourite poem lists, namely William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (aka Daffodils)? I’m less certain about nowadays, but when I was young, this poem was the one that literally everyone knew. If pushed to quote a line of poetry you could always fall back upon “I wandered lonely as a cloud” in the same way you might have said “To be or not to be” if pushed to quote Shakespeare.
Wordsworth was the man who helped to launch the Romantic movement in English literature when, in 1798, he published Lyrical Ballads with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As well as being a volume of poems by the two men, the work included a preface expounding the poets’ literary theory and principles. They wanted to make poetry accessible to the average person by writing verse in common, everyday language and with common, everyday subjects as the focus. This was against the grain, of course – how often do we find an artist, famous to us today, pushing the boundaries of convention in their own time?
Although initially received modestly, Lyrical Ballads came to be seen as a masterpiece and launched both poets into the public gaze, so when in 1807 Wordsworth published Poems, in Two Volumes, including Daffodils, he was already a well-known figure in literary circles. Wordsworth had talked of poetry being “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”, and Daffodils is the perfect illustration of what he meant ( For oft, when on my couch I lie, In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude…) .
It was inspired by Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy having come across a long and striking swathe of daffodils whilst out on a stroll around Ullswater in April 1802. Dorothy was a keen diarist who recorded her own feelings about the daffodils, and this likely helped William frame his poem, and indeed, Wordsworth’s wife Mary also contributed a couple of lines to the poem: it was a real family affair. If you want to remind yourself of the poem beyond its immortal opening line, here it is…
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is probably best known over here in the UK for his Song of Hiawatha (which I for one remember doing at school), but also in his native US for his commemorative poem about that iconic event of the American Revolution, Paul Revere’s Ride. He also composed the epic poem Evangeline, about that shameful episode in British history known as the Great Upheaval, or the Expulsion of the Acadians, during the French and Indian War of 1754-1763. This was the forced deportation by the British of thousands of the largely civilian populations from the Canadian Maritime provinces to other colonies (including Spanish Louisiana where the Acadians would become “Cajuns”, but that’s another story).
In addition to the lengthy storytelling poetry, however, there is also a short and simple poem for which Longfellow is celebrated, the inspirational A Psalm of Life. First published in 1838 in the New York magazine The Knickerbocker, it is a subtle glorification of life and its possibilities. As with Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata and Rudyard Kipling’s If, the poem is didactic in tone: an invocation to mankind to follow the right path and think positively about life.
Its subtitle is What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist, which creates some context: it is a psalm in response to a psalm. It is an objection to the idea, gleaned by the narrator from listening to some biblical teaching, that this human life is not important; that we are made of dust and will eventually return to dust. No! he says – life is real, it’s serious, and this is not a drill…your body may return to dust but you have a soul so don’t squander your time here by worrying about death. As the seventh stanza says, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time…
I can’t do other than endorse that thought! Now, read on…
Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle, In the bivouac of Life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,— act in the living Present! Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.
Thomas Stearns (T S) Eliot (1888-1965) was a giant literary figure: one of the major poets of the 20th century, as well as essayist, publisher, playwright, and literary critic. He was born in St Louis, Missouri into a prominent Boston Brahmin family, but moved to England at the age of 25 and settled and married here, becoming a British subject in 1927.
Within a year of arriving in Britain, Eliot had published his first major poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), which came to be regarded as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement, and he followed that up with some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).
Eliot also had his whimsical side, however, and in 1939 published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. This was a series of light poems about cats and their traits which he’d written throughout the thirties in letters to his godchildren (“Old Possum” was fellow poet Ezra Pound’s nickname for him). The best-known poem from that collection, Macavity the Mystery Cat, is the one that arrested my attention the moment I read it (or heard it recited) when I was a lad (it may well have been the only poem from the Book of Practical Cats that I read or heard recited, given that it was the “stand out” that primary school teachers regularly latched onto).
Eliot was a big fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the character of Macavity is a literary allusion to Moriarty, the arch-villain and mastermind of those stories (Holmes dubs Moriarty the “Napoleon of crime”, which is how Macavity is described in the last line of the poem). I loved that repeating final line: “Macavity’s not there!”. It conjures up the trope of the master jewel thief or gentleman spy, always one step ahead of the Law, always outwitting his pursuers. You can imagine the nonchalance.
But of course in reality it’s a cat, so it’s the spilled milk, the feathers on the lawn, the crash of a dustbin lid, the scratch on the sofa…and of course he’s never there. The little devil’s scarpered!
Here’s a recording of the man himself reciting the poem:
Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw— For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law. He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair: For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare, And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there! You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air— But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!
Macavity’s a ginger cat, he’s very tall and thin; You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in. His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed; His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed. He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake; And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s always wide awake.
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity. You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square— But when a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there!
He’s outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.) And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard’s And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled, Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled, Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there!
And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty’s gone astray, Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way, There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair— But it’s useless to investigate—Macavity’s not there! And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say: It must have been Macavity!’—but he’s a mile away. You’ll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumb; Or engaged in doing complicated long division sums.
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare: At whatever time the deed took place: MACAVITY WASN’T THERE ! And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known (I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone) Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!
2nd June 1951: American-English poet and playwright, TS Eliot (1888 – 1965). He wrote amongst many other things, ‘The Waste Land ‘ and the plays, ‘The Cocktail Party’ and ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. Original Publication: Picture Post – 5314 – Are Poets Really Necessary? – pub. 1951 (Photo by George Douglas/Picture Post/Getty Images)
My brother-in-law Phil is a man with style (which I say because it’s true, not because there’s a slight chance he may read this blog) and when I attended his wedding back on a December day in 2007, I noted how typical of his style it was that he should have chosen, as the site for his nuptials, the wonderful St Giles parish church at Stoke Poges (actually, thinking about it, is was more likely to have been Zoe’s choice than Phil’s but let’s not let that get in the way of a good intro). It was a stylish choice, for St Giles is a wonderful example of a really old and really quaint English village church, as perfect for a wedding as can be imagined. It was also the inspiration and setting for one of the 18th century’s most famous and enduring poems, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
Thomas Gray was an English poet and classical scholar, who lived in Stoke Poges from 1750. The poem is a meditation on death and remembrance, inspired in turns by the deaths of his friend Richard West and his aunt Mary (not to mention the very near death of his friend Horace Walpole following an incident with two highwaymen, but that’s another story). Gray sent the completed poem to Walpole, who popularised it among London literary circles, and it was published in 1751.
Gray’s Elegy quickly became popular, and was printed many times and in a variety of formats, and praised by critics. It contains many phrases that have entered the common English lexicon: for example “far from the madding crowd” was used as the title of Thomas Hardy’s novel, and the terms “kindred spirit” and “paths of glory” also come from this poem (Gray also coined the term “ignorance is bliss”, though in a different poem). His elegy isn’t technically an elegy – not a conventional one at any rate – but it does contain elements of the elegiac genre and it is a thoughtful contemplation on mortality. It is worth taking the time to read or listen to it, as of course you can below.
Gray is himself buried in St Giles’ graveyard, and thus, since I was at the time an enthusiast for the hobby of discovering and visiting literary graves (or “stiff-bagging” as my sister-in-law indelicately puts it), Phil and Zoe’s choice handed me that one on a plate!
Here is a reading of the poem, with the words of the poem below, to follow along with:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r, Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise, Where thro’ the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d, Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll; Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land, And read their hist’ry in a nation’s eyes,
Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray; Along the cool sequester’d vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die.
For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.
For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead Dost in these lines their artless tale relate; If chance, by lonely contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say, “Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Mutt’ring his wayward fancies he would rove, Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, Or craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.
“One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill, Along the heath and near his fav’rite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
“The next with dirges due in sad array Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay, Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”
THE EPITAPH Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heav’n did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear, He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God.
Everybody knows The Owl and the Pussycat, the nonsense poem by Edward Lear. There’s no rule that impels its inclusion in the primary school curriculum; it is just one of those pieces of our culture that gets passed down and which everyone has heard by the time they’re ten. Perhaps by osmosis. Or more likely, its appeal to many a nursery school assistant charged with entertaining a roomful of children, due to its delicious use of language, rhyme, and imagery.
First published in 1871 as part of his book Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, Lear wrote the poem for the daughter of a friend. And like that other great Victorian purveyor of nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll, Lear had that exquisite talent for choosing just the right made-up nonsense words. ‘Runcible’, for example, as in the phrase “…which they ate with a runcible spoon”, was one such coinage, right up there with Lewis Carroll’s ‘galumphing’ and ‘frumious’ from Jabberwocky. Lear went on to use this wonderfully meaningless adjective to describe his hat, a wall, and even his cat. Incidentally, wouldn’t “The Runcible Spoon” be a great name for a café? In fact, there already is one: I came across this in the village of Hinderwell, whilst on holiday in Runswick Bay:
The Runcible Spoon cafe, Hinderwell
But is The Owl and the Pussycat meant to mean anything? Is it simply a delightful fantasy, with its owl and cat talking, playing guitar and singing songs, its pig that engages in financial transactions, and its turkey officiating at a wedding? Should we read anything into the fact that they have to sail the seas for a year and a day, travelling to the land of the Bong-Tree, in order to get a ring? Or is it perhaps making a commentary on Victorian society, cheekily subverting its norms and mores? I don’t think we need to know. Simply enjoy the vermonious* use of Lear’s words.
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, “O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!”
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?” They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the Bong-Tree grows And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood With a ring at the end of his nose, His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose.
“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.” So they took it away, and were married next day By the Turkey who lives on the hill. They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.
*vermonious? I just made it up, of course!
Edward Lear
Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature
But is The Owl and the Pussycat meant to mean anything? Is it simply a delightful fantasy, with its owl and cat talking, playing guitar and singing songs, its pig that engages in financial transactions, and its turkey officiating at a wedding? Should we read anything into the fact that they have to sail the seas for a year and a day, travelling to the land of the Bong-Tree, in order to get a ring? Or is it perhaps making a commentary on Victorian society, cheekily subverting its norms and mores? I don’t think we need to know. Simply enjoy the vermonious* use of Lear’s words.