Category: Poetry

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.

The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most popular poet in America during his lifetime, but his reputation has declined since then.

I think this simple poem has a very clever rhythmic effect, in that the longer lines that include human action have a faster rhythm than the refrain at the end of each verse, which emphasises the inevitability and the eternal nature of the tide.

The word “hostler” is the American spelling. British English has “ostler”, the man who looks after the horses at an inn or hotel. Is the word “nevermore” a nod to Edgar Allen Poe and “The Raven”?

Despite that, it doesn’t strike me as particularly American. It could almost have been written by Walter de la Mare.

The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The November Fog of London by Henry Luttrell

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Here’s another poem that I found by accident when looking for something else.

Henry Luttrell (1765–1851) is not exactly one of the great names of English poetry. A little research reveals that he began his career as a politician and became a well-known figure in London society, renowned for his wit. He was a writer of satirical verse.

I have not been able to find out exactly when The November Fog of London was written. The rhyming couplet style belongs to the eighteenth century, but the reference to industrial pollution perhaps indicates a slightly later period, although it’s not clear if Luttrell realised that the yellow fog and the smoke were connected.

At any rate, it belongs to the early industrial age and this evocative poem describes an earlier manifestation of what became known as “smog” in the 1950s. By then, the cause was fully understood.

Is it any wonder that one of the nicknames for London used to be “the smoke”?    

The November Fog of London by Henry Luttrell

First, at the dawn of lingering day,
It rises of an ashy gray;
Then deepening with a sordid stain
Of yellow, like a lion’s mane.
Vapour importunate and dense
It wars at once with every sense.
The ears escape not. All around
Returns a dull, unwonted sound.
Loath to stand still, afraid to stir,
The chilled and puzzled passenger,
Oft blundering from the pavement, fails
To feel his way along the rails;
Or at the crossings, in the roll
Of every carriage dreads the pole.
Scarce an eclipse with pall so dun
Blots from the face of heaven the sun.
But soon a thicker, darker cloak
Wraps all the town; behold the smoke,
Which steam-compelling trade disgorges
From all her furnaces and forges
In pitchy clouds, too dense to rise,
Descends rejected from the skies;
Till struggling day, extinguished quite,
At noon gives place to candle-light.

Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon

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Dreamers is one of Sassoon’s less well-known war poems. It was written in 1917, after he had made his declaration against the war and been sent to Craiglockhart hospital. It strongly evokes the contrast between the soldiers’ present day in the trenches, in which they seem to be already dead, and their imaginings of the past. It seems impossible for them to ever return to their former lives.

I wonder whether it might have been an influence on Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV (1914), published in 1964. The imagery of pre-war innocence is rather similar.

And although that imagery may be different now, there are volunteer soldiers out there, perhaps thinking rather similar thoughts as I write this.

Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
   Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
   Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
   Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
   They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
   And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
   And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
   And going to the office in the train.

In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

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This poem by Ezra Pound (1885–1972) always reminds me of my student days, because a fellow-student really did not like it at all. “Too short,” he said, “not proper poetry”.

I, of course, took the opposite view. When you read the poem and think about what it says, what could actually be a more serious or appropriate subject for a poem?

This is almost the definitive example of the style of poetry that Pound called “Imagism”. It is influenced by the Japanese Haiku form, although, strictly speaking, it is not a Haiku because it has more than the required seventeen syllables.

I like the way that the title is actually an extra line in the poem, providing a context and another image. It’s not really accurate to describe it as a two-line poem.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast by George Barker

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With George Barker (1913–1991), as with any prolific poet, you have to make your way through an awful lot of not-so-good work to get to the real gold. I think On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast is one of his good ones. It is a forceful and dramatic depiction of an incident that could have become a tragedy. Perhaps it also appeals to me because I know that part of the Norfolk coast and its cold grey treacherous sea.

The phrase “the running grave” in the first line appeared in an earlier poem by Dylan Thomas. George Barker re-used it for his own poem.

Robert Galbraith/J K Rowling used it as the title of the seventh Cormoran Strike novel, in which one of the characters tries to pass off the George Barker poem as his own work. Is that a comment on literary plagiarism? Perhaps, but Dylan Thomas used it to refer to time, whereas Barker has it describing the sea. A drowning on Cromer beach is central to the novel’s plot, so I think Galbraith/Rowling had Barker’s poem in mind.

On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast by George Barker

Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave
  Beside him as he struck
Wildly towards the shore, but the blackcapped wave
  Crossed him and swung him back,
And he saw his son digging in the castled dirt that could save.
  Then the farewell rock
Rose a last time to his eyes. As he cried out
  A pawing gag of the sea
Smothered his cry and he sank in his own shout
  Like a dying airman. Then she
Deep near her son asleep on the hourglass sand
  Was awakened by whom
Save the Fate who knew that this was the wrong time:
  And opened her eyes
On the death of her son’s begetter. Up she flies
  Into the hydra-headed
Grave as he closes his life upon her who for
  Life has so richly bedded him.
But she drove through his drowning like Orpheus and tore
  Back by his hair
Her escaping bridegroom. And on the sand their son
  Stood laughing where
He was almost an orphan. Then the three lay down
  On that cold sand
Each holding the other by a living hand.

QED by Maurice Rutherford

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I found the poem QED online accidently when I was looking for something else. I have no idea who Maurice Rutherford is and there doesn’t seem to be any further information about him.

It is a poem about Philip Larkin, plainly written in a version of Larkin’s style and voice. Rutherford is using this to point out how Larkin’s poetry has been misunderstood. He is drawing attention to the way in which readers have made assumptions about Larkin’s personality from the poems and missed the humour. It gives the impression of having been written some years after Larkin’s death in 1986.

I’m posting it here because I think it deserves to be more widely known. It would fit nicely in the introduction to a collection of Larkin’s poetry.

QED by Maurice Rutherford

I might have thrived on novels, like my friend
Sir Kingsley Whodidnicely, but I end
holed up near Hull, a writer much misread –
a crassness that persists though I’m long dead:
why should, say, lines about a coastal shelf
suggest a mean and miserable self?
Can’t the fools twig when poetry’s tongue-in-cheek,
not about me or mine, but more oblique
to fox the man I might have been, the chap –
or woman maybe – spouting arrant crap?
It’s what and how, but not who writes the stuff,
that hold the reader rapt – they’re quite enough.
The thought that spawned a poem was my own;
the poem isn’t me, it stands alone
and should. Let critics flense us to the bone:
like love, the poem survives, as has been shown.

Why Did I Dream of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

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It’s slightly confusing with Philip Larkin. There are two volumes entitled The Collected Poems. The earlier one, published soon after his death in 1986, contains many uncollected poems that Larkin might not have intended to preserve in book form. The later volume is a more streamlined affair, consisting of Larkin’s four published books and some later uncollected poems.

I only have the shorter volume to hand and this poem does not appear in it, so I have to assume that Why Did I Dream of you Last Night?is a relatively early poem by Larkin.

It’s got that distinctive realistic tone, capturing accurately an experience we have probably all had at one time or another. “Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;” is a wonderful line. Personally, I think it deserves a place in any collection of poems by Larkin. If he did not consider this one worthy of preservation, it just goes to show what a high standard he set himself. 

Why Did I Dream of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

Why did I dream of you last night?
   Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
 Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
         beyond the window.

   So many things I had thought forgotten
 Return to my mind with stranger pain:
– Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon

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Sassoon is famous as a poet of the first world war, but On Scratchbury Camp was written during the second world war, in 1942. Scratchbury Camp is an iron-age hill fort in Wiltshire and Sassoon lived nearby for much of his life. This is an altogether calmer and more reflective piece than the angry and bitter western front poems.

The poem captures the atmosphere of the Wiltshire downs on a June day. The distant past and the present are linked, as are human activity and the natural world. By describing the way in which the ancient fort seems to have been absorbed into the landscape, Sassoon is suggesting that one day the current war will be forgotten. The dreamy mood tells us that the older Sassoon is content to be an observer of this new war rather than a participant.

I think there is a certain resemblance to John Masefield’s poems of the southern English countryside here.

The linking of modern aeroplanes to the distant past of the landscape also reminds me of the opening of Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale.

On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon

Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon,
Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue,
Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June.

Shadows outspread in spacious movement, always you
Have dappled the downs and valleys at this time of year,
While larks, ascending shrill, praised freedom as they flew.
Now, through that song, a fighter-squadron’s drone I hear
From Scratchbury Camp, whose turfed and cowslip’d rampart seems
More hill than history, ageless and oblivion-blurred.

I walk the fosse, once manned by bronze and flint-head spear;
On war’s imperious wing the shafted sun-ray gleams:
One with the warm sweet air of summer stoops the bird.

Cloud shadows, drifting slow like heedless daylight dreams,
Dwell and dissolve; uncircumstanced they pause and pass.
I watch them go. My horse, contented, crops the grass.