Category: Poetry

The Song of the Dying Gunner AA1 by Charles Causley

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Oh mother my mouth is full of stars
As cartridges in the tray
My blood is a twin-branched scarlet tree
And it runs all runs away.

Oh ‘Cooks to the galley’ is sounded off
And the lads are down in the mess
But I lie down by the forrard gun
With a bullet in my breast.

Don’t send me a parcel at Christmas time
Of socks and nutty and wine
And don’t depend on a long weekend
By the Great Western Railway line.

Farewell, Aggie Weston, the Barracks at Guz,
Hang my tiddley suit on the door.
I’m sewn up neat in a canvas sheet
And I shan’t be home no more.

[HMS Glory, 1945]

This is an appropriate poem for Remembrance Day.

Charles Causley (1917– 2003) was a Cornishman, born and bred, and apart from his years in the navy during the second world war, spent most of his life working there as an English teacher, writing poetry in his spare time.

He was unusual among poets of the world wars in that he served in the ranks, rather than as an officer. The Song of the Dying Gunner AA1 appeared in his first collection in 1951 and a line from the poem gives the book its title, Farewell, Aggie Weston. The poem can be seen as a more modern version of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. It is also an interesting contrast to Henry Newbolt’s heroic naval ballads.

The “AA 1” in the title tells us that the speaker is an anti-aircraft gunner, first class. In the last verse, “Aggie Weston” refers to the sailors’ hostels founded by Dame Agnes Weston, “Guz” was Plymouth and a “tiddley suit” was a seaman’s best uniform, kept for shore leave.

1805 by Robert Graves

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At Viscount Nelson’s lavish funeral,
While the mob milled and yelled about St Paul’s,
A General chatted with an Admiral:

“One of your colleagues, Sir, remarked today
That Nelson’s exit, though to be lamented,
Falls not inopportunely, in its way”

“He was a thorn in our flesh”, came the reply—
“The most bird-witted, unaccountable,
Odd little runt that ever I did spy”.

“One arm, one peeper, vain as Pretty Poll,
A meddler too, in foreign politics
And gave his heart in pawn to a plain moll.

“He would dare lecture us Sea Lords, and then
Would treat his ratings as though men of honour
And play leap-frog with his midshipmen!

“We tried to box him down, but up he popped,
And when he banged Napoleon on the Nile
Became too much the hero to be dropped.

“You’ve heard that Copenhagen ‘blind eye’ story?
We’d tied him to Nurse Parker’s apron-strings—
By G-d, he snipped them through and snatched the glory!”

“Yet”, cried the General, “sic-and-twenty sail
Captured or sunk by him off Trafalgar—
That writes a handsome finis to the tale.”

“Handsome enough. The seas are England’s now.
That fellow’s foibles need no longer plague us
He died most creditably, I’ll allow.”

“And Sir, the secret of his victories?”
“By his unServicelike, familiar ways, Sir,
He made the whole Fleet love him, damn his eyes!”

It was the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar the other day, so here is an appropriate poem, 1805 by Robert Graves. This is a humorous look at how the Royal Navy actually thought of Nelson before his exploits made him a national hero and beyond criticism.

It’s a reminder that history always depends on who is writing it, an idea explored in another Graves poem, The Persian Version.

The admiral in this poem is rather more concerned with the navy’s way of doing things, than with its true purpose. That concern for the institution above all else seems quite modern.

Now, as then, an unconventional genius is always going to trouble those who look at things in a more hidebound way.

Ballad of the Londoner by James Elroy Flecker

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Evening falls on the smoky walls,
    And the railings drip with rain,
And I will cross the old river
    To see my girl again.

The great and solemn-gliding tram,
    Love’s still-mysterious car,
Has many a light of gold and white,
    And a single dark red star.

I know a garden in a street
    Which no one ever knew;
I know a rose beyond the Thames,
    Where flowers are pale and few.

I found this poem by James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) quite by chance when I was looking through one of those Poems on the Underground anthologies in a charity shop.

I have a personal connection with the poem because it reminds me that my father said he had never actually been south of the river until he met my mother.

I’m not sure exactly when it was written. Although it is more traditional in form, I think the opening lines have something of the same urban feel as T S Eliot’s Preludes.

Flecker was only thirty when he died, not as you might imagine a casualty of the first world war, but from TB.

He’s best known for poems that have a connection to the middle east, where he worked as a diplomat, such as The Gate of Damascus. With Ballad of the Londoner he created a fine, evocative poem of the city, adding to the great collective picture of London that so many poets have left behind.


Railway Scrapbook by Peter Ashley

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Here’s my little contribution to the Railway 200 celebrations.

Peter Ashley edited the anthology Railway Rhymes (2007) and included his own poem, Railway Scrapbook. He very cleverly, through the use of half-rhyme and rhythm, turns a list into a poem, an evocative picture of a vanished, gentler age of railway travel. It’s striking how only a few of the things described remain as a recognisable part of the railway scene today.

It’s a marvellous anthology, and I’ve included more than one poem from it on this blog. The dustjacket resembles the clipped railway ticket mentioned in this poem.

My only quibble is that I would have liked the lyrics to the song Slow Train by Flanders and Swann to be included.  

Railway Scrapbook by Peter Ashley

Dockside stations
Estuary halts
Trolleys for luggage
Platelayers’ huts
Steamy warm buffets
Station clock hands
Weighing machines
Post Office vans
Sidings and signals
Newspapers sweets
Cycles in cardboard
Platform seats
Coalyards and taxis
Pincers on tickets
Gaslight on blossom
Pigeons in baskets
Fire buckets red
Timetables white
Posters for seasides
Booking halls bright
Bridges and cuttings
Telephone wires
Tunnels and viaducts
Waiting room fires

At Lord’s by Francis Thompson

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As the cricket season comes to an end, it’s an appropriate time to look at one of the most famous of all cricket poems, At Lord’s by Francis Thompson (1859–1907).

The lines quoted below are actually the opening and closing verses of a longer poem, but they have become well-known in their shorter form.

For non-cricketers, Lord’s in London is regarded as the home of cricket and the red rose is the symbol of Lancashire.

The poem is as much about nostalgia and the passing of time as cricket, so perhaps it’s not a surprise to find out it was written near the end of Francis Thompson’s life.

At Lord’s by Francis Thompson

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro: –
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

The Retired Colonel by Ted Hughes

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Here is an early poem by Ted Hughes. The Retired Colonel appeared in the Spectator magazine in August 1958 and then in Hughes’ second collection Lupercal. The date is important, because 1956 was the year of the Suez Crisis, the last occasion when Britain acted as a great power, and often taken as the real end of the British Empire.

The poem is rather double-edged. Towards the end there is a tinge of regret for the grandeur of the era that has now passed for ever and already seems impossibly remote. The colonel is a figure to be mocked yet respected, representing something bigger than himself.

The very structure of the poem seems to emphasise the passage of time. With its overlapping lines, it’s a more modern type of verse than the Edwardian patriotic ballads of Kipling and Newbolt that we might associate with such a character.

The Retired Colonel

Who lived at the top end of our street
Was a Mafeking stereotype, ageing.
Came, face pulped scarlet with kept rage,
For air past our gate.
Barked at his dog knout and whipcrack
And cowerings of India: five or six wars
Stiffened in his reddened neck;
Brow bull-down for the stroke.

Wife dead, daughters gone, lived on
Honouring his own caricature.
Shot through the heart with whisky wore
The lurch like ancient courage, would not go down
While posterity’s trash stood, held
His habits like a last stand, even
As if he had Victoria rolled
In a Union Jack in that stronghold.

And what if his sort should vanish?
The rabble starlings roar upon
Trafalgar. The man-eating British lion
By a pimply age brought down.
Here’s his head mounted, though only in rhymes,
Beside the head of the last English
Wolf (those starved gloomy times!)
And the last sturgeon of Thames.

Memory by Walter de la Mare

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It must be the sunny weather that made me think of the poem Memory by Walter de la Mare. It’s an appropriate one for the changing of the seasons. De la Mare wrote two poems with this title and this is the earlier one that was published in the 1933 collection, The Fleeting.

Perhaps it hints at that all too human tendency to wish oneself elsewhere. The last two lines tell us that De la Mare sees this as a positive thing. Memory enables us to live in our physical surroundings and the world of the imagination at one and the same time.

There is some archaic language in the second verse. “Nowel” is an alternative spelling of “Noel”, and “Waits” are carol singers. This part of the poem requires careful reading because the word order has been inverted in a slightly tricky way.

Memory by Walter de la Mare

When summer heat has drowsed the day
With blaze of noontide overhead,
And hidden greenfinch can but say
What but a moment since it said;
When harvest fields stand thick with wheat,
And wasp and bee slave—dawn till dark—
Nor home, till evening moonbeams beat,
Silvering the nightjar’s oaken bark:
How strangely then the mind may build
A magic world of wintry cold,
Its meadows with frail frost-flowers filled—
Bright-ribbed with ice, a frozen wold!. . .

When dusk shuts in the shortest day,
And dark Orion spans the night;
Where antlered fireflames leap and play
Chequering the walls with fitful light—
Even sweeter in mind the summer’s rose
May bloom again; her drifting swan
Resume her beauty; while rapture flows
Of birds long since to silence gone:
And though the Nowel, sharp and shrill,
Of Waits from out the snowbound street,
Drums to their fiddle beneath the hill
June’s mill-wheel where the waters meet. . .

O angel Memory that can
Double the joys of faithless Man!

The Man in the Bowler Hat by A S J Tessimond (Peter Black)

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I discovered The Man in the Bowler Hat in the 2007 anthology, Railway Rhymes. It is credited there to Peter Black and a little research revealed that it was first published under that name in 1943. Peter Black, however, was merely one of the many names used by the poet whose real name was A S J Tessimond (1902–1962). It was published under his own name in 1947.

Tessimond is a somewhat enigmatic figure, highly thought of during his writing career but pretty much forgotten today, perhaps at least partly because of the confusion over his real identity.

The speaking voice of the poem is a persona that the poet has adopted, rather than the poet himself. He is a representative “little man” figure, perhaps bringing to mind G K Chesterton’s “people of England, who never have spoken yet”.

I think I am drawn to the poem because it describes the world my father knew. He was not a “little man” in any sense, but he did wear a bowler hat, smoke a pipe and commute to his work on the train. 

The Man in the Bowler Hat by A S J Tessimond (Peter Black)

I am the unnoticed, the unnoticable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man you looked through like a windowpane:
The man who was the colour of the carriage, the
       colour of the mounting
Morning pipe smoke.

I am the man too busy with a living to live,
Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch:
The man who is patient too long and obeys too much
And wishes too softly and seldom.

I am the man they call the nation’s backbone,
Who am boneless – playable catgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

I am the rails on which the moment passes,
The megaphone for many words and voices:
I am graph, diagram,
Composite face.

I am the led, the easily-fed,
The tool, the not-quite-fool,
The would-be-safe-and-sound,
The uncomplaining, bound,
The dust fine-ground,
Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round.

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

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The poem From a Railway Carriage appeared in Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, published in 1885.

From their very beginning, railways seem to have inspired more poems than any other form of transport. The fleeting glimpse of something seen from a train window then gone forever features in quite a lot of them.

The first verse here captures that familiar sensation of the landscape moving while the passenger stays still. It’s worth remembering that when this poem was published, a train journey was the only experience of travelling at speed that was available to the ordinary person.

The fast-paced rhythm captures the speed of the train. A similar rhythm was used by W H Auden for the later and more famous Night Mail. The poet Christopher Reid has suggested that Auden might have been influenced by Stevenson’s poem.   

Railway journeys are rich in metaphorical possibilities for the poet. We use the metaphor of life as a journey all the time now. Perhaps that has its origin in railway poems.

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

The Night Will Never Stay by Eleanor Farjeon

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Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) was a well-known writer for children. Her most enduring work is the hymn Morning Has Broken, something we used to sing in junior school days.  

More recently, her book of poems A Sussex Alphabet has been re-issued.

I don’t know exactly when the short poem below was written. Something about it suggest the 1920s, as it almost a minimalist work in a style influenced by modernism.

It is an appropriate poem for the turn of the year, as it is about the inevitability of the passage of time. What fascinates me is the ambiguity of the last line. Is the fleeting nature of the night being seen as a negative or positive thing? After all, one would want sorrow to pass as quickly as possible but for a tune to last longer. A reminder that even the good things will pass, perhaps. It just goes to show how much meaning can be packed into so few words when a poet really knows what they are doing.   

This is another poem that I discovered in that wonderful anthology, Come Hither, compiled by Walter de la Mare and first published in 1923.  

The Night Will Never Stay by Eleanor Farjeon

The night will never stay,
The night will still go by,
Though with a million stars
You pin it to the sky;
Though you bind it with the blowing wind
And buckle it with the moon,
The night will slip away
Like sorrow or a tune.