Category: Poetry

The Waggon-Maker by John Masefield

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I have made tales in verse, but this man made
Waggons of elm to last a hundred years;
The blacksmith forged the rims and iron gears,
His was the magic that the wood obeyed.

Each deft device that country wisdom bade,
Or farmers’ practice needed, he preserved.
He wrought the subtle contours, straight and curved
Only by eye, and instinct of the trade.

No weakness, no offense in any part,
It stood the strain in mired fields and roads
In all a century’s struggle for its bread;
Bearing, perhaps, eight thousand heavy loads,
Beautiful always as a work of art,
Homing the bride, and harvest, and men dead.

There is a sense of perfection about this sonnet, with every word and every stress in its right place, that mirrors the theme of the poem beautifully.

There is a deep respect here for country tradition and for the rural working man, who is probably unable to read. Masefield was born in 1878 in Herefordshire and his poems often give one the feeling that he remained a countryman at heart.

The last three words hit the reader with a jolt, reminding us that craftsmanship, whether in wood or words, will outlast the human lifespan.

The poem appeared in Masefield’s 1936 collection, so well into the era of motor lorries and modernist poetry.  Never directly stated, but perhaps hovering over the poem, is a feeling that the waggon-maker is the last of a dying breed. Perhaps Masefield saw himself the same way, content to be a master of traditional poetic forms.

London by A S J Tessimond

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I am the city of two divided cities
Where the eyes of rich and poor collide and wonder;
Where the beggar’s voice is low and unexpectant,
And in clubs the feet of the servants are soft on the carpet
And the world’s wind scarcely stirs the leaves of The Times.

I am the reticent, the private city,
The city of lovers hiding wrapped in shadows,
The city of people sitting and talking quietly
Beyond shut doors and walls as thick as a century,
People who laugh too little and loudly,
Whose tears fall inward, flowing back to the heart.

I am the city whose fog will fall like a finger gently
Erasing the anger of angles, the strident indecorous gesture,
Whose dusk will come like tact, like a change in the conversation,
Violet and indigo, with strings of lemon streetlamps
Casting their pools into the pools of rain
As the notes of the piano are cast from the top-floor window
Into the square that is always Sunday afternoon.

I am always interested to discover poems about London that are new to me, so here is another poem by the mysterious A S J Tessimond (1902–1962). Something about the overall atmosphere makes me think it must date from the 1930s.

There are actually three Londons presented here and each one is personified. The poem begins with the extreme class divisions familiar to us from black-and-white photographs of that era. Clubland is insulated against “the world’s wind” that might be blowing from Germany.

Then we have a place of emotional repression, enforced by the physical structure of the city itself. What a striking phrase is “tears fall inward”.

The third verse bursts into colour and there is a kind of beauty in the foggy dusk, with the lamplight reflected on the rainy pavement. Then the last line brings us back down to earth again, emphasising the somewhat muted, downbeat tone of the whole poem.

Eden Rock by Charles Causley

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They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,

They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

I had not thought that it would be like this.

This poem was written later in Charles Causley’s life, in 1988 when he was 71. It has since become one of his best known.

Sometimes poems find their way to you at the right time in your life. I discovered this one some years after both my parents had passed on. It might not have made as much sense to me if I had read it earlier.

The poem is a mixture of memory and vision. Causley is thinking of his parents as they were when they were young. He seems to be both longing to return to a happy childhood and also imagining being re-united with his parents in the afterlife. This is expressed by a mixture of realistic detail and other-worldly atmosphere, and finally he contemplates the river that, sooner or later, we all must cross.

There is a sense of time being frozen and the parents being thought of in an idealised way. Perhaps that is always how we think of those we have lost, as an ideal version of themselves.

The striking last line can be interpreted in more than one way and leads us to think back about what the poem has said.   

Restaurant Car by Louis Macneice

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Fondling only to throttle the nuzzling moment
Smuggled under the table, hungry or not
We roughride over the sleepers, finger the menu,
Avoid our neighbours’ eyes and wonder what

Mad country moves beyond the steamed-up window
So fast into the past we could not keep
Our feet on it one instant. Soup or grapefruit?
We had better eat to pass the time, then sleep

To pass the time. The water in the carafe
Shakes its hips, both glass and soup plate spill,
The tomtom beats in the skull, the waiters totter
Along their invisible tightrope.

For good or ill, For fish or meat, with single tickets only,
Our journey still in the nature of a surprise,
Could we, before we stop where all must change,
Take one first risk and catch our neighbours’ eyes?

If air travel is going to be affected by current events, and “staycations” are the thing for now, then this poem is rather appropriate.

Louis Macneice (1907–1963) turns an indolent, pleasurable holiday journey by train into a metaphor for life itself, rather as Walter de la Mare did in The Railway Junction.

We are rushing into the future, intent only on idle pleasures. The waiters on their “invisible tightrope” remind us that the pleasant life requires an army of servants.  And life is not a rehearsal because the journey is “still in the nature of a surprise” and we have “single tickets only”.

This poem has something of the atmosphere of the 1930s about it, although I think it is actually a later poem, from around 1960.

Ode to Me by Kingsley Amis

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Fifty today, old lad? Well, that’s not doing so bad:
All those years without
Being really buggered about.
The next fifty won’t be so good,
True, but for now – touch wood –
You can eat and booze and the rest of it,
Still get the best of it,
While the shags with fifty or so
Actual years to go
Will find most of them tougher,
The going a good bit rougher
Within the Soviet sphere –
Which means the bastards are here,
Making it perfectly clear
That all double-think
(Both systems on the blink,
East and West the same,
And war just the name of a game)
Is the ballocks it always was.
But will it be clear?
Because
After a whole generation
Of phasing out education,
Throwing the past away,
Letting the language decay,
And expanding the general mind
Till it bursts, we might well find
That it wouldn’t make much odds
To the poor semi-sentient sods
Shuffling round England then
That they’ve lost what made them men.
So bloody good luck to you mate,
That you weren’t born too late
For at least a chance of happiness
Before unchangeable crappiness
Spreads all over the land.
Be glad you’re fifty – and
That you got there while things were nice,
In a world worth looking at twice.
So here’s wishing you many more years,
But not all that many. Cheers!

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) is much better known as a novelist. Although he carried on writing it, poetry took a back seat after the success of his novel Lucky Jim in 1954.

As the first line makes clear, Ode to Me must have been published sometime after his 50th birthday, which would have been in 1972.

The cold war references mark the poem out as very much of its time. 

I am including it here for two reasons. First, I like it, particularly for the down-to-earth humour. And second, it is hard to find online, and I think it needs to be more widely known. So, here it is, on what would have been Kingsley Amis’ birthday, April 16.     
 

Newsreel By C Day Lewis

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Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.

Fish in their tank electrically heated
Nose without envy the glass wall: for them
Clerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,
Move in a mute day-dream.

Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed –
Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.

There is the mayor opening the oyster season:
A society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:
An old crocks’ race, and a politician
In fishing-waders to prove that all is well.

Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble
In the low power-dive, like gannets they fall steep.
But what are they to trouble –
These silver shadows – to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep?

See the big guns, rising, groping, erected
To plant death in your world’s soft womb.
Fire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected –
Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home!

Grow nearer home – and out of the dream-house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You’ll know you slept too long.

A few years ago, this poem might have read like ancient history, but now it could be taken as a comment on current events.

In Newsreel, published in 1938, C Day Lewis describes the cinema audience as numbed by the fantasies of entertainment and oblivious to the implications of the war scenes depicted in the newsreel. They see it as something distant that will not impinge on their own lives. This was the era of the Munich crisis, of Neville Chamberlain’s “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

The poem is technically very adept. The sudden switch from familiar, cosy and domestic footage to the images of war at the end of the fourth verse is almost like a cinematic jump cut itself. There’s an image of fertilisation and pregnancy running through the later part of the poem, with the guns seen as phallic in the sixth verse. In the final verse there is an extraordinary image for the destruction of buildings in an air raid: “stone niagaras”.

There is a slight feeling here that Day Lewis is looking down at the masses who cannot see what is coming. He was though, in that group of intellectuals who were well-informed about the Spanish civil war and had a shrewd idea of what it might lead to.

221B by Vincent Starrett

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Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears—
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

I am a lifelong reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories and yet I had never heard of this poem, which takes its title from that famous Baker Street address, until I discovered it in a recent magazine article.

Vincent Starrett (1886–1974) was an American journalist and writer, author of one of the first books of Sherlock Holmes scholarship, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933).

I don’t think anyone has ever summed up the timeless appeal of the Sherlock Holmes world quite as effectively as Starrett does in the last stanza. The poem reminds us of the power of all fiction to transcend the everyday and create a world that is more vivid in our minds than mundane reality.    

221B was written in 1942 and fears about the survival of London during wartime are clear in the first stanza. We can imagine the powerful longing for an earlier, more orderly world at that moment. From today’s perspective, it’s as if the poem deals with three times – 1942, 1895 and the world of imagination that is outside time.

Sonnet by Peter Reading

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Nine years of formal marriage (not to mention
the practice run at College), to be candid,
are not devoid of some domestic tension –
‘Why can’t you do bread sauce with cloves, like Gran did?’,
‘Who left the frigging bedroom light on all day?’,
or, the real nitty-gritty, ‘I regret
having had you back when you’d had it away
with that bitch!’ – as in most ménages. And yet,
in nine years, they have got acclimatised
to privacies too blushful to admit
even to close friends (who’d be scandalised
by, for example, their bad taste in Lit. –
like actually reading H G Wells);
in short, neither could stand anyone else.

Peter Reading (1946–2011) was a poet whose work covers a wide range of styles and structures. Some of his poems use a layout on the page, such as an exchange of letters, that makes them more like a mini-drama or a short story. One might see him as operating in similar territory to the experimental 1960s novelist B S Johnson. He was also very adept at producing modernised versions of traditional forms, such as sonnets and ballads. The poem above is a good example of that and is taken from his 1977 collection, Nothing for Anyone.

Whatever the form, the tone is often satirical and laugh-out-loud funny, rather similar to Philip Larkin or John Cooper Clarke. On the other hand, he can be far darker than either of them, as in the sequence C (which is short for cancer).

Reading gave up life as an art teacher to concentrate on poetry. To support himself, he worked in an agricultural feed plant, the sort of manual work that he hoped would leave his mind clear to concentrate on his writing. Perhaps unintentionally, the lives of his fellow workers provided him with a rich source of material.

n some of his finest poems, he reproduces the rural dialect and attitude to life in a way that is completely unpatronising. I think this might be some of the best writing about work outside Charles Bukowski’s novel Post Office.

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.