Introduction
Index
Poem of the Month

Introduction

Although I have always responded more to modern forms of most of the other arts (prose literature, music, painting, sculpture), poetry was one area where I tended to prefer the greats of yesteryear. Recent discoveries have tended to change this view: poetry seems to be alive and well, and more recent selections for the monthly poem are beginning to reflect this.

Now split into annual archives to speed page loading times, and we'll DEFINITELY update Poem of the Month at each site update - now there's confidence!

Index

Poem of the Month (December 2006)

A seasonal offering.

The Oxen by Thomas Hardy.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

November 2006 - Broadcast by Philip Larkin

I have chosen this Larkin poem in honour of a book I have just finished by his close friend Maeve Brennan - 'The Philip Larkin I Knew'. Much has been written about Larkin's character and troubled relationships, not all of it complementary of course. I think that his lasting friendship with Maeve symbolised his better nature and gave him space to admit his need for the innocent, quiet pleasures of life. This poem simply has him listening on the radio to a concert which Maeve is attending.

Giant whispering and coughing from
Vast Sunday-full and organ-frowned-on spaces
Precede a sudden scuttle on the drum,
'The Queen', and huge resettling. Then begins
A snivelling of the violins:
I think of your face among all those faces,

Beautiful and devout before
Cascades of monumental slithering,
One of your gloves unnoticed on the floor
Beside those new, slightly-outmoded shoes.
Here it goes quickly dark. I lose
All but the outline of the still and withering

Leaves on half-emptied trees. Behind
The glowing wavebands, rabid storms of chording
By being distant overpower my mind
All the more shamelessly, their cut-off shout
Leaving me desperate to pick out
Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding.

October 2006 - Not-Yet by Jane Hirshfield

A poem about that suspended moment in our day when time seems to slow and we can review the state of play. An excellent exhortation for living in 'the now'.

Morning of buttered toast;
of coffeee, sweetened, with milk.

Out the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding them gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch -
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-.

Not-yet-not.

September 2006 - Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

A poem about the healing power of Nature and how, if we can only allow ourselves to reconnect, see ourselves as part of the Earth and its changing scenes, then we can find contentment. I like the choice of wild geese to emphasise this as I am sure I'm not alone in feeling a thrill of hard-to-explain yet deep delight whenever a spearhead formation of these gently calling birds pass over my little sphere of operations.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

August 2006 - For These by Edward Thomas

Thomas wrote this poem on the day he was passed fit for the army (he was killed at Paschendale in 1917). Perhaps the thoughts of death that this must have brought about prompted him to ask himself what he would truly widh from life. The poem shows a great depth of self-knowledge as Thomas, after listing all the physical aspects he desired, ends by realising that he needs first to attain the capability for contentment within his own mind.

An acre of land between the shore and the hills,
Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,
The lovely visible earth and sky and sea
Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills: 

A house that shall love me as I love it,
Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit: 

A garden I need never go beyond,
Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:
A spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond: 

For these I ask not, but, neither too late
Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
And also that something may be sent
To be contented with, I ask of Fate.

July 2006 - From Four Quartets (East Coker, Part V) by T.S. Eliot

This section of the 'Four Quartets' beautifully sums up the feeling of struggling to learn, to understand. I see it myself, as the sense one gets in trying to meditate, that others "one cannot hope to emulate" have already achieved your goal. Do the last four lines refer, I wonder, to the many lives we may have to live, gaining and losing our wisdom before we get to keep it at last?

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

June 2006 - Sea Poems

Actually one and a bit this month, the theme being the sea. I have always been in love with the sea, to me it is not just a body of water, it is a being, an entity. When I am away from it, I am forever hearing it call. When I finally reach it I find that it needs me to be within its waves.

I like 'The Sea Question' for two reasons really, first for its personification of the sea as a patient analyst (sic!) and second because it reminds me of reading it on a train headed for the coast.

The extract from George Darley's unfinished poem 'Nepenthe' I recently came across in a delightfully personal anthology of poems and prose selected by John Bayley. This piece of verse instantly grabbed me as perfectly capturing my own 'sea feelings'. The sea here is certainly a being: old? mad? Struggling and raving its way up the constraining sands. Apparently A.E. Houseman said of it: "the man who reads it sees the sea again." Praise indeed and very true!

The Sea Question by Elizabeth Smither

The sea asks 'How is your life now?'
It does so obliquely, changing colour.
It is never the same on any two visits.

It is never the same in any particular
Only in generalities: tide and such matters
Wave height and suction, pebbles and their rattle.

It doesn't presume to wear a white coat
But it questions you like a psychologist
As you walk beside it on its long couch.

Extract from Nepenthe by George Darley

Hurry me, Nymphs, O, hurry me
Far above the grovelling sea,
Which, with blind weakness and bass roar
Casting his white age on the shore,
Wallows along that slimy floor;
With his wide-spread webbed hands
Seeking to climb the level sands,
But rejected still to rave
Alive in his uncovered grave.

May 2006 - Coming by Philip Larkin

I think Larkin perfectly captures here the feeling that birdsong in spring can bring about - it's there in those last few lines. We may not know why it makes us happy, we may have no reason to be happy, but listening to the joyful notes uttered by a small brown bird, we suddenly are.

On longer evenings,
Light, shill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon -
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

February 2006 - The Manor Farm by Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas here captures the moment which often happens in February when Winter pauses for breath and Spring hesitates on the brink. For a brief while the Earth seems to relax and all is still. Thomas compares this stillness with the picture of an English farm seemingly unaffected by the passage of time.

THE rock-like mud unfroze a little, and rills
Ran and sparkled down each side of the road
Under the catkins wagging in the hedge.
But earth would have her sleep out, spite of the sun;
Nor did I value that thin gliding beam
More than a pretty February thing
Till I came down to the old manor farm,
And church and yew-tree opposite, in age
Its equals and in size. The church and yew
And farmhouse slept in a Sunday silentness.
The air raised not a straw. The steep farm roof,
With tiles duskily glowing, entertained
The mid-day sun; and up and down the roof
White pigeons nestled. There was no sound but one.
Three cart horses were looking over a gate
Drowsily through their forelocks, swishing their tails
Against a fly, a solitary fly.

The winter's cheek flushed as if he had drained
Spring, summer, and autumn at a draught
And smiled quietly. But 'twas not winter--
Rather a season of bliss unchangeable,
Awakened from farm and church where it had lain
Safe under tile and latch for ages since
This England, Old already, was called Merry.

January 2006 - Part V of Little Gidding (no. 4 of Four Quartets) by T.S. Eliot

This is the first Eliot I have read and I stand amazed at how his thinking seems to echo my own at this moment. I have found that one of the marks of a great poem is how it sounds when read aloud, and this piece truly becomes an entity when spoken.

Look out for more Eliot in 2006!

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.