December 2003 - Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
This hauntingly lyrical poem by Robert Frost embodies in its four simple stanzas two major themes which run throughout his work - the beauty of nature and the desire to "lose" oneself within its mystery - a kind of deathless escape from life. In "stopping by woods" the poet describes with great tenderness the sensation of suddenly stopping on a dark snowy night and seeing things which would normally have been unheeded. He is drawn by the "dark and deep" woods, their stillness and invitation but his horse shaking its harness represents the material world in which he is still safely grounded. The repetition of the final two lines brings clearly to mind the echo of his horse's hoof beats as he disappears along his path.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
November 2003 - House and Man by Edward Thomas
I find this poem 'House and Man' to be particularly haunting. It conjures up an old cottage, hidden away in the depth of a forest and a man living there with only the trees and woodland creatures for company.
I love the description of the man seen standing in his doorway from a distance looking
"...like a beggar's rag, clean wrung
And useless on the brier where it has hung
Long years a-washing by sun and wind and rain."
It seems to be a wonderful analogy comparing man and rag, both worn and weathered by the elements. But my favourite lines are the final two - the author, on leaving notices a magpie on a treetop
"... - magpie veering about,
A magpie like a weathercock in doubt."
Anyone familiar with magpies cannot but be highly satisfied and delighted with this description of their actions, it is so right. I also love the repeating of the word "magpie", which emphasises the lasting impression that this sight made on the author's mind. Altogether a memorable poem.
One hour: as dim he and his house now look
As a reflection in a rippling brook,
While I remember him; but first, his house.
Empty it sounded. It was dark with forest boughs
That brushed the walls and made the mossy tiles
Part of the squirrels' track. In all those miles
Of forest silence and forest murmur, only
One house - 'Lonely!' he said, 'I wish it were lonely' -
Which the trees looked upon from every side,
And that was his.
He waved good-bye to hide
A sigh that he converted to a laugh.
He seemed to hang rather than stand there, half
Ghost-like, half like a beggar's rag, clean wrung
And useless on the brier where it has hung
Long years a-washing by sun and wind and rain.
But why I call back man and house again
Is there now a beech-tree's tip I see
As then I saw - I at the gate, and he
In the house darkness, - magpie veering about,
A magpie like a weathercock in doubt.
October 2003 - On The Table by Andrew Motion
This delightful love poem by our Poet Laureate needs little introduction - it remains shy of sentimentality whilst ending on a burst of heartfelt emotion.
I would like to make it clear that I have bought
this tablecloth with its simple repeating pattern
of dark purple blooms not named by any botanist
because it reminds me of that printed dress you had
the summer we met - a dress you have always said
I never told you I liked. Well I did, you know. I did.
I liked it a lot, whether you were inside it or not.
How did it slip so quietly out of our life?
I hate - I really hate - to think of some other bum
swinging those heavy flower-heads left to right.
I hate even more to think of it mouldering on a tip
or torn to shreds - a piece here wiping a dipstick,
a piece there tied round a crack in a lead pipe.
It's all a long time ago now, darling, a long time,
but tonight just like our first night here I am
with my head light in my hands and my glass full,
staring at the big drowsy petals until they start to swim,
loving them but wishing to lift them aside, unbutton them,
tear them, even, if that's what it takes to get through
to the beautiful, moon-white, warm wanting skin of you.
September 2003 - Home Is So Sad by Philip Larkin
This simple two-stanza poem needs little introduction. It is a sad fact of life that when we die, we leave our homes behind us, homes into which we perhaps have put so much of ourselves. To stand in such an abandoned home is to feel its sense of loss. A gleam of Larkin's genius shines for me in the final two-word sentence.
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped in the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft.
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
This is an incredibly powerful poem - powerful and beautiful. Although Philip Larkin claimed that his poetry wasn't particularly meant to be read aloud, I find that in doing so, both his voice and meaning become clearer. High Windows is one of the most pleasant to read aloud, perhaps due to the brilliantly worked-out verse-form in which each stanza slides into the next without a pause. This gives the sensation of a thought-stream which begins robustly and ends with a calm acceptance.
To me, the poem seems to be about two hard-won freedoms - freedom from sexual constraint and freedom from the shackles of religion. Two separate generations represent these victories and as the poet wonders about his part in this emancipation - his godless life - he sees its final emptiness: without a god, there can only be in the end the total extinction which he so fears. The poem invites a comparison with the 'free love' generation suggesting a similar sterility of outcome.
Does each generation, we are left to wonder, possess something coveted by the previous one without valuing its own attributes?
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
August 2003 - I See the Boys of Summer by Dylan Thomas
This is one of the poems which always figure in our picnic readings. After a delicious repast and a few glasses of wine, Thomas's words (which we recently decided were the literary equivalent of Cubism) flow like the perfect digestif!
Though summer features strongly throughout the poem there are also frequent references to its antithesis - winter - and this I think, holds the key to Thomas's thoughts. In part one we see the poet standing on the sidelines watching the heedlessness of youth with the knowing cynicism of age. "These boys of summer" he says, give no thought to other seasons of life, indeed are dismissive of the very idea.
In part two the "boys" respond - "Seasons", they say, "Must be challenged", it is their way of warding off or denying death. Indeed, in part two the image of death is frequent, mixed with that of sex. The "summer boys" use their sexual vigour (for what better revokes death than sex, the begetter of life?) as armour as they rampage heartily through their youth.
The six lines of part three all end with a full stop and looking closely we can see a final line by line exchange between poet and "boys" with the concluding "See the poles are kissing as they cross", suggesting an ultimate understanding or 'truce' between the two.
I
I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.
O see the pulse of summer in the ice.
II
But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and midnight as she blows.
We are the dark deniers, let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp,
And from the planted womb the man of straw.
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds’ iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the country gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies,
Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry.
O see the poles of promise in the boys.
III
I see you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man in his maggot’s barren.
And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.
July 2003 - July by Edward Thomas
This following poem, I think, is possibly the most calming, soothingly relaxing one I know of. As one reads it, one is drawn instantly into the sublime picture painted by the poet.
It is early morning on a perfect summer's day and the poet is lying in his boat on the stillness of a lake. There is nothing to be done, nothing to worry about, nothing for a time exists except the blue sky above the reeds and the distant bird-calls from the shore. A vision of paradise indeed.
Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake
Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.
The boat itself stirs only when I break
This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
To prove if what I see be bird or mote,
Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.
Long hours since dawn grew, - spread, - and passed on high
And deep below, - I have watched the cool reeds hung
Over images more cool in imaged sky:
Nothing there was worth thinking of so long;
All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.
June 2003 - Norfolk by John Betjeman
I first met this beautiful little poem when studying 'O' level English literature. Of all Betjeman's poems this one shone the brightest - for who hasn't looked back upon their childhood and marvelled at its "rapturous ignorance"? Is it always so wonderful, the poet seems to be asking, to see things in the "dreadful daylight" of maturity? Sometimes it is surely better to let our imagination tell us the history of a building rather than to know the name of its restorer!
How did the Devil come? When first attack?
These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence,
The years fall off and find me walking back
Dragging a stick along the wooden fence
Down this same path, where, forty years ago,
My father strolled behind me, calm and slow.
I used to fill my hands with sorrel seeds
And shower him with them from the tops of stiles,
I used to butt my head into his tweeds
To make him hurry down those languorous miles
Of ash and alder-shaded lanes, till here
Our moorings and the masthead would appear.
There after supper lit by lantern light
Warm in the cabin I could lie secure
And hear against the polished sides at night
The lap lap lapping of the weedy Bure,
A whispering and watery Norfolk sound
Telling of all the moonlit reeds around.
How did the Devil come? When first attack?
The church is just the same, though now I know
Fowler of Louth restored it. Time, bring back
The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.
May 2003 - Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
A simple introduction to this poem could merely state - "The finest words written in the English language" for so I believe them to be. This Ode, written in early May 1819 has Keats writing at the height of his genius. The year before, Keats' dearly-loved brother Tom, had died of tuberculosis which coupled perhaps, with the continual singing of a nightingale in the garden of his friend Charles Brown's house, 'Wentworth Place', where Keats was staying led to the thoughts which are expressed in this ode.
Through words of intense beauty we plunge with the poet into a reverie as he listens to the nightingale and contrasts the eternal qualities of nature with the frail, fleeting, human life. 'Ode to a Nightingale' opens up to us, albeit clothed in such a perfection of language, the deepest feelings of its young author. He had trained as a doctor and knew the horrors of human suffering, he had nursed his younger brother and watched him die a painful death, his own health was in a fragile state, he was in love but could not afford to marry.... But the voice of the nightingale was briefly a balm to these troubles for Keats and spoke to him of the never-ending cycle of the natural world, transcending the sorrows of mankind. Only when the singing of the bird fades into the distance does Keats, left now with renewed vision, shoulder the burden of his life once more.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,--
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain ---
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music --- Do I wake or sleep?
April 2003 - The Solo Sock by Garrison Keillor
This month in honour of All Fools Day and the light-heartedness of Spring, the Poetry Page pays homage to a poem by Garrison Keillor, a writer I first came across on BBC Radio Four when he read a series of his short stories at around eight forty five every morning. I would listen whilst I washed up the breakfast pots. I found his rich lyrical Minnesotan accent very relaxing and his stories about life in the backwater town of "Lake Wobegon" with its charmingly understated humour, delightful.
This poem is from a compilation of his writings, entitled "We are still married" and its subject of missing socks is surely one with which we can all sympathize!
(Footnote: according to Google, this seems to be the only instance of the poem in
full on the web!)
Of life's many troubles, I've known quite a few:
Bad plumbing and earaches and troubles with you,
But the saddest of all, when it's all said and done,
Is to look for your socks and find only one.
Here's a series of single socks stacked in a row,
Where in the world did their fellow socks go?
About missing socks we have very few facts,
Some say cats steal them to use for backpacks,
Or desperate Norwegians willing to risk
Prison to steal socks to make lutefisk.
But the robbery theories just don't hold water:
Why would they take one and not the odder?
Now some people lose socks, and though you may scoff,
Some go to shows and have their socks knocked off.
Some use a sock to mop up spilled gin with
And some people had just one sock to begin with.
But for most missing socks, or sock migration,
Sockologists have no quick explanation.
Socks are independent, studies have shown,
And most feel a need for some time alone.
Some socks are bitter from contact with feet;
Some, seeking holiness, go on retreat;
Some need adventure and cannot stay put;
Some socks feel useless and just underfoot.
But whatever the reason these socks lose control,
Each sock has feelings down deep in its sole.
If you wake in the night and hear creaking and scraping,
It's the sound of a sock, bent on escaping.
The socks on the floor that you think the kids dropped?
They're socks that went halfway, got tired and stopped.
It might help if every day,
As you don your socks, you take time to say;
"Thank you, dear socks, for a job that is thankless,
You comfort my feet from tiptoes to ankless,
Working in concert,a cotton duet,
Keeping them snug and absorbing the sweat,
And yet you smell springlike, a regular balm,
As in Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps,
And so I bless you with all of my heart
And pray that the two of you never shall part.
I love you dear socks, you are socko to me,
The most perfect pair that I ever did see.
I thank you and bless you now. Vobiscum Pax"
Then you bend down and put on your socks.
This may help, but you must accept
That half of all socks are too proud to be kept,
And as with children, their leaving is ritual.
Half of all socks need to be individual.
March 2003 - But These Things Also by Edward Thomas
In this poem, Edward Thomas expresses the desire we feel after a long Winter to find the first signs of Spring. The delight we take in the smallest of Spring flowers when first discovered surpasses any pleasure we may later take in the opulent blooms of Summer. At this time of year, we feel we 'deserve' a treat from Nature, having survived months of her severity and so "we seek through Winter's ruins something to pay Winter's debts..."
But these things also are Spring's -
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;
The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds' dung
In splashes of purest white:
All the white things a man mistakes
For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter's ruins
Something to pay Winter's debts,
While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring's here, Winter's not gone.
February 2003 - The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
This is a February poem. Written at the tail end of a long winter - at such a time when one can hardly believe that such a thing as Spring ever has existed or ever will again. The poet is musing gloomily over the grim landscape which seems to echo the bleakness of his thoughts. My favourite lines in the poem - "And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day", sum up the atmosphere perfectly.
Suddenly, we are lifted with the poet from these reflections by the clear and joyful voice of a thrush singing nearby. Although the gloom of a winter's evening remains unchanged, a germ of hope is sown - a promise of warm days to come. Hardy's poem reminds us that each year is merely a cycle without beginning or end and that a human with all his intelligence will never detect the first breath of Spring - only the birds do that!
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
January 2003 - Warning - When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple by Jenny Joseph
This is a useful poem for the month of January - a time when we often take stock of our lives before plunging back into the grind. It is a poem that never fails to make me laugh and yet it does have a serious undertone too.
After listing all the things that she intends to do when she is old (all of which sound like fun) the poet almost sighs as she goes on to detail the things that as a "responsible adult" she still actually has to do. Surely the message we should take away from this poem lies in the fifth line of the final stanza - "But maybe I ought to practice a little now?"........We should all wear purple a little more often.
When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
and satin candles, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired
and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
and run my stick along the public railings
and make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
and pick the flowers in other people's gardens
and learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
and eat three pounds of sausages at a go
or only bread and pickles for a week
and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
and pay our rent and not swear in the street
and set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.