Category: Poetry

To His Mother, CLM by John Masefield

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John Masefield (1878–1967) had a long and productive writing life. He was the Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death, but today he is perhaps best known for his children’s stories.

His own childhood, though was far from happy. Masefield’s mother died giving birth to his sister when he was six years old and his father died soon afterwards. He did not get on with the aunt he lived with and he attended a boarding school at which he was unhappy.

It was his aunt who decided he should pursue a career in the merchant navy and he was sent to a training ship at the age of thirteen. It was during his time there that he discovered his love of poetry and storytelling, setting him on the path to becoming a well-known writer. He was never really healthy enough for a maritime career and he left the sea, with his first book of poems published in 1902.

This poignant poem about his mother is from 1912 and is deeply personal, the attitude to birth and death reflecting his own sad experience and sense of guilt. The view of women expressed here feels quite ahead of its time.

To His Mother, CLM by John Masefield

In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man.
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth.
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her.

Down in the darkness of the grave
She cannot see the life she gave.
For all her love, she cannot tell
Whether I use it ill or well,
Nor knock at dusty doors to find
Her beauty dusty in the mind.

If the grave’s gates could be undone,
She would not know her little son,
I am so grown. If we should meet,
She would pass by me in the street,
Unless my soul’s face let her see
My sense of what she did for me.

What have I done, or tried, or said
In thanks to that dear woman dead?
Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women’s rights at will.
And man’s lust roves the world untamed.
O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.

What have I done to keep in mind
My debt to her and womankind?
What woman’s happier life repays
Her for those months of wretched days?
For all my mouthless body leeched
Ere Birth’s releasing hell was reached?

What have I done, or tried, or said
In thanks to that dear woman dead?
Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women’s rights at will.
And man’s lust roves the world untamed.
O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.

My Parents by Stephen Spender

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Here’s a short poem on the perennial English theme of class. Stephen Spender (1909–1995) was part of that loose grouping of left-leaning poets in the 1930s, the others being W H Auden, Louis Macneice and C Day Lewis.

There’s a feeling here that the speaker is both afraid of the “rough boys” but also rather envious of their freedom, energy and rude health.

If we assume that the poem is autobiographical, and refers to Spender’s own childhood years, we would be in the early 1920s. The very fact that the poem is entitled My Parents indicates an era in which class and status were still very much a matter of birth.

We might smugly think that everything has changed for the better and that things are different today, but perhaps it’s worth reflecting that the modern equivalents of the speaking voice in this poem are ferried everywhere by car. They never have to run the gauntlet of the rough boys in the street. 

My Parents by Stephen Spender

My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes
Their thighs showed through rags. They ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud
While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

The Ecchoing Green by William Blake

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I came across this poem the other day when I watched an old BBC programme The Queen’s Realm: A Prospect of England, from 1977. This was a helicopter journey over the landscape of England, accompanied by poetry readings, broadcast for the jubilee that year. The line “such, such were the joys” sounded very familiar to me, so I looked it up and discovered this gem by William Blake (1757–1827).

It was published in Songs of Innocence in 1789. There’s a bucolic innocence and joy here to begin with that develops into a powerful awareness of the passing of time and the fleeting nature of life’s pleasures.

I don’t know who first used the metaphor of a single day representing a life, but it’s a universal theme. Here, it is expressed through that powerful symbol of English life, the village green.

As far as I know, the spelling and capitalisation are Blake’s.

The Ecchoing Green by William Blake

The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring.
The sky-lark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells’ cheerful sound
While our sports shall be seen
On the Ecchoing Green.

Old John, with white hair
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk,
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say,
‘Such, such were the joys.
When we all, girls and boys,
In our youth-time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.’

Till the little ones weary
No more can be merry
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end:
Round the laps of their mothers,
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest;
And sport no more seen,
On the darkening Green.

Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican by John Betjeman

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An appropriate poem for this time of year, I think.

I’m not sure exactly when John Betjeman wrote this, but I think it’s one of his later ones from the 1970s. I find it fascinating. With its regular rhythms and rhymes, his poetry is often described as “Victorian” but the sensibility he expresses is quite different, a little bit subversive even, particularly when it comes to sex.

There are many contrasts within what is expressed here. The scene is set in a church and the title refers to a time of restraint, yet he imagines that the beautiful woman he admires is someone living outside conventional Christian morality.

There is a hint of religious doubt here and yet finally the woman’s beauty makes him think of the “unknown God”.

Might there be a veiled autobiographical meaning here? After all, Betjeman himself was “living in sin” as his catholic wife of many years refused to divorce him.       .

Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican by John Betjeman

Isn’t she lovely, “the Mistress”?
With her wide-apart grey-green eyes,
The droop of her lips and, when she smiles,
Her glance of amused surprise?

How nonchalantly she wears her clothes,
How expensive they are as well!
And the sound of her voice is as soft and deep
As the Christ Church tenor bell.

But why do I call her “the Mistress”
Who know not her way of life?
Because she has more of a cared-for air
Than many a legal wife.

How elegantly she swings along
In the vapoury incense veil;
The angel choir must pause in song
When she kneels at the altar rail.

The parson said that we shouldn’t stare
Around when we come to church,
Or the Unknown God we are seeking
May forever elude our search.

But I hope that the preacher will not think
It unorthodox and odd
If I add that I glimpse in “the Mistress”
A hint of the Unknown God.

Nobody Comes by Thomas Hardy

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With any major poet who produces a large body of work, there are the poems that become famous and end up in anthologies and a lot of less well-known ones that are, perhaps unfairly, overlooked. A trawl through Thomas Hardy’s 900-page Collected Poems reveals many hidden gems.

Nobody Comes is dated 1924, towards the end of Hardy’s long life. It is thought to have been inspired by a real-life incident when his wife was in hospital and he was waiting for news. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a sense of isolation and loneliness here.

Some of the imagery is not quite what one expects from Hardy, with references to a car and a telegraph wire. You might not identify it as a Hardy poem if you did not already know. Yet this modern imagery is set against a more familiar rural background.

Perhaps some of the powerful sense of melancholy here is that of an elderly man adrift in a changing world.   

Nobody Comes by Thomas Hardy

Tree-leaves labour up and down,
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.

A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
And nobody pulls up there.

Apple Blossom by Louis Macneice

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Louis Macneice is closely associated with the nineteen thirties group of poets that included W H Auden. Many of his best-known poems date from that period. This one though is from much later, 1957.

I don’t want to say too much about it, because I feel that different readers may interpret it slightly differently. There may be an autobiographical element here. Perhaps Macneice had to be older to write it to convey the sense that life is still worth living after idyllic early years and that the present is connected to the past.

I suppose apple blossoms are more associated with the spring, but there is a powerful sense of optimism and renewal here that makes it appropriate for this first week of the new year.

Apple Blossom by Louis Macneice

The first blossom was the best blossom
For the child who never had seen an orchard;
For the youth whom whisky had led astray
The morning after was the first day.

The first apple was the best apple
For Adam before he heard the sentence;
When the flaming sword endorsed the Fall
The trees were his to plant for all.

The first ocean was the best ocean
For the child from streets of doubt and litter;
For the youth for whom the skies unfurled
His first love was his first world.

But the first verdict seemed the worst verdict
When Adam and Ever were expelled from Eden;
Yet when the bitter gates clanged to
The sky beyond was just as blue.

For the next ocean is the first ocean
And the last ocean is the first ocean
And, however often the sun may rise,
A new thing dawns upon our eyes.

For the last blossom is the first blossom
And the first blossom is the best blossom
And when from Eden we take our way
The morning after is the first day.

Brussels in Winter by W H Auden

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It’s turned so cold that what we would normally expect in January seems to have arrived a bit early.

It has put me in mind of this 1938 poem by W H Auden. There are lots of poems about snow but fewer about winter. This one captures very well that sense of dislocation and transformation that the freezing weather brings, but winter here is a political metaphor as well.

As so often with Auden, who was writing about the 1930s, one feels that nothing has really changed, or that history is repeating itself.

I love that line near the end, “A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van”. It describes not only what this poem does, with its intensity and compression of language, but what poetry in general does, I think.

Brussels in Winter by W H Auden

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

 

Now that You Too Must Shortly Go by Eleanor Farjeon

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First World War poetry used to mean poems written by men who had served as soldiers on the Western Front. The work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenburg and others concentrated on conditions on the battlefield and the terrible consequences of combat for those involved.

More recently, the definition has widened, helped by Andrew Motion’s 2003 anthology, to include poems written by women that deal with bereavement and the situation on the home front.

So here, in the run-up to Remembrance Day is a poignant poem about the moment when a couple must part which speaks for itself, really. It is by Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965), later a prolific author for children and perhaps best known today for the words to the hymn Morning has Broken.

Now that You Too Must Shortly Go by Eleanor Farjeon

Now that you too must shortly go the way
Which in these bloodshot years uncounted men
Have gone in vanishing armies day by day,
And in their numbers will not come again:

I must not strain the moments of our meeting
Striving for each look, each accent, not to miss,
Or question of our parting and our greeting,
Is this the last of all? is this—or this?

Last sight of all it may be with these eyes,
Last touch, last hearing, since eyes, hands, and ears,
Even serving love, are our mortalities,
And cling to what they own in mortal fears:—
But oh, let end what will, I hold you fast
By immortal love, which has no first or last.

Ozymandias by Shelley

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I’ve been watching the BBC programme Russia 1985–1999 and of course it contains scenes of huge statues being toppled as communism was overthrown.

Shelley’s well-known poem about the ephemeral nature of power has been increasingly on my mind in this strange year of war and political upheaval.

It dates from the early nineteenth century and it’s an amazing thought that empires and tyrannies have risen and fallen since then, yet the poem itself has survived. Shelley himself has become like the sculptor that he describes.

It’s somehow reassuring to think that like Ozymandias, Vladimir Putin will one day be just another half-forgotten figure from the past.

Ozymandias by Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Two Plays about John Betjeman by Jonathan Smith

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Something of a treat this for Betjeman fans, from Radio 4 extra. These two linked plays, Mr Betjeman’s Class and Mr Betjeman Regrets were first broadcast in 2017. Benjamin Whitrow does an excellent job of capturing the older Betjeman’s distinctive tones. He died during production and his role was completed by Robert Bathurst but you would never know.

The first play deals with Betjeman’s expulsion from Oxford, leading to his time as a prep school teacher, a role for which he is comically unsuited. This is just the latest in a line of disappointments for his father, played very well by Nicky Henson.

Betjeman junior is not the sort of son he would have preferred. He has no sympathy for John’s aesthetic leanings and a major cause of the difficulties between them is John’s lack of interest in taking over the family business. He thinks that his son’s university education has made him look down on his middle-class origins and turned him into a social-climbing time waster.

The second play is perhaps the stronger of the two, building on the themes of the first one. The older Betjeman is a National Treasure now. The success of his poetry and TV appearances have made him wealthy, but he is not altogether happy. He’s confused about his sexuality, and irritated that his poetry, although popular, is dismissed by critics who prefer the complexity of Eliot and Auden.

He ponders the breakdown of his marriage and his wife’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. He reflects that the feeling of guilt this gave him was actually very helpful in inspiring his writing. It was always a slightly difficult relationship and communication between them was conducted in mocking tones. Betjeman wonders whether he might have driven his own son away by talking to him in the same way, without quite realising that he was doing so.

There’s a sad sense of history repeating itself here, and the feeling that the young Paul Betjeman would have been more the kind of son his grandfather wanted. John’s inability to catch the ball when playing beach cricket with his father is repeated in a scene on the beach with his own son, who would prefer a father keener on games.   

Something that comes across very strongly is John Betjeman’s deep love for the Cornwall that featured so often in his poetry, the village of Trebetherick where his parents had a house, and the church of St Enodoc, where Betjeman himself is now buried. For much of the play, Betjeman is seated on a bench in the churchyard musing over his life. Both plays make full use of the fluidity of time and place that audio drama can convey so much more effectively than any other medium.

There is quite a lot of quotation from Betjeman’s poetry in both plays but I’m not sure what the autobiographical source was. He did write a verse memoir of his early years, Summoned by Bells, in which he says that his father’s monument in Highgate cemetery “points an accusing finger at the sky”.