What a richness of poetry there is around us. Like music, they cater for all moods and styles. I know writing my own poetry has been influenced a lot by several poets, consciously and sub-consciously. In this section I want to share some poems I like (perhaps even love) and tell you something about why they appeal to me.
Grief fills the room
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
Fare you well; had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do.
I will not keep this form upon my head,
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrow’s cure.
This is one of Contance’s speeches in Act 3, Scene IV in ‘The Life and Death of King John’ by William Shakespeare. Am sure I’m not alone in thinking this must be one of most moving descriptions of grief over the loss of a child.
‘Greater Love’ by Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918)
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead.
Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce Love they bear
Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.
Your voice sings not so soft, –
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, –
Your dear voice is not so dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear,
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.
Heart, you were never hot,
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.
Many amazing poems were outcomes of the First World War. It was hard for choose a few to “commemorate” the centenary on my web site. In the end I chose this one and the following one because, for me, they underline the futility of such heart-wrenching violence but also the amazing sparks of love, unity and hope that can emerge from such great tragedy.
‘Everyone Sang’ by Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967)
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun;
My heart was shaken with tears; and horrorDrifted away . . . O but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushes of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter’s robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste of allotments the dawn halts.
When I first read this poem (and sometimes since) I wondered what on earth it was about but found myself seduced by Thomas’s imagery, use of words and phrases to return to it again and again. Now I usually find an understanding of sorts – which can change and move like the sea – and which I suspect is personal to me. Like some kinds of art, some poetry is meant to be like this I guess – with meanings and responses differing between people – and within ourselves, depending on moods and contexts when reading. A must to be read aloud – preferably with subdued lighting. Is Dylan laughing at us????
‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning’
written by either Charlotte Bronte or Emily Bronte
Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:
Today, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The cloudy forms of long past history.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the moutain side.
What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
Although a longing for the freedom to walk in moors or moutains is in the heart of this poem for me, at this time in my life, it tells me no matter how many times I “fail” and am rebuked by myself or others, I still have the freedom to start again, to make choices which are of value – to me.
Envoy by Ernest Dawson (1867 -1900)
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter.
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Although the feeling ‘Envoy’ provokes is common when we face a death, I much
prefer Blake’s ‘Eternity’ (see below)
Eternity by William Blake (1787-1827)
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingéd life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
Blake had lots of moods and ‘lessons’ – a common one in poetry – the importance of living in the ‘now’?
A Thunderstorm In Town by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
She wore a new ‘terra-cotta’ dress.
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom’s dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm.
Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more.
Happy The Man by John Dryden (1631-1700)
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Nor Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
If only living for today was as easy to achieve as it is to say – but we can try, can’t we? I wonder if it was easier then? Doubt it.
Poem No. 291 by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
How the old Mountains drip with Sunset
How the Hemlocks burn –
How the Dun Brake is draped in Cinder
By the Wizard Sun –
How the old Steeples hand the Scarlet
Till the Ball is full –
Have I the lip of the Flamingo
That I dare to tell?
Then, how how the Fire ebbs like Billows –
Touching all the Grass
With a departing – Sapphire – feature –
As a Duchess passed –
How a small Dusk crawls on the Village
Till the Houses blot
And the odd Flambeau, no men carry
Glimmer on the Street –
How it is Night in Nest and Kennel –
And where was the Wood –
Just a Dome of Abyss is Bowing
Into Solitude –
These are the Visions fitted Guido –
Titian – never told –
Domenichino dropped his pencil –
Paralyzed with Gold –
For our January Poetry Group meeting this year we were asked to take poems to do with colour. I took this one. I love Emily Dickinson’s use of words, capitalization and punctuation – such a help when reading aloud. If you like this, you might also like to read my ‘The Colour Of Love?’ poem.
I Stood on a Tower by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing,
And I said, ‘O years, that meet in tears,
Have you all that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matters enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?’
Seas at my feet were flowing,
Waves on the shingle poring,
Old year roaring and blowing,
And New Year blowing and roaring.
I read this poem on December 31st 2012 the morning after the (late evening/early morning) I had written my own poem ‘Almost New Year’s Eve’. Tennyson wrote the above poem in 1865. Looks like we were both experiencing similar turn-of-the-year weather. But he was by the sea, lucky man.
My November Guest by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
a Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
a She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
a She talks and I am fain to list;
She’s glad the birds have gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray,
a Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
a The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eyes for these,
a And vexes me for reasons why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
a The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
a And they are better for her praise.
The stories about Robert Frost going on ‘botanizing walks’ with the poet Edward Thomas when he visited England, make me feel we have a lot in common. I enjoy such walks as well. I like the ways Frost uses capitalization, punctuation and word patterning to achieve rhythm and the conversational quality of the poem. The ‘personalisation’ of Sorrow, who, as a guest, is temporary ‘works’ for me. It is recorded that one of his poems was inspired by a conversations with Thomas about which paths to take on their walks together which led Frost to write his more famous poem – ‘The Road Not Taken’.
From ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My Spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
I love the imagery in this poem and the use of words – though I think he rather overdid the exclamation marks! Another poem I like reputedly written in a wood, this time in Florence. How wonderful that poets can write scatter their words through the internet……. And that includes the words of Shelley.
From ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost Act V Scene ii’ by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail.
When blood is nipped and ways be foul. Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit, Tu-who! A merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And bird sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the pan, Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit, Tu-who! A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
This image of winter long ago has much that resonates still. Okay, perhaps frozen milk is rare for most people where I live and thank goodness for central heating but the birds still brood, icicles still hang, the parson’s sermon (and maybe other’s too) can still drone on. We still blow our fingers to keep them warm and still have jobs we have to do. Fancy some roasted crab?
‘The Good-Morrow’ by John Donne (1572-1631)
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then?
But suck’d on countrey pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?
‘Twas so; But this, all pleasures fancy bee,
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee.
And now good morrow to our waking soules, Which watch not one another out of feare; For love, all love of other sights controules, And makes one little roome, an every where. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne, Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, And true plain hearts doe in the faces rest, Where can we finde two better hemispheres Without sharp North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mix’d equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.