Category: Poetry

The Persian Version by Robert Graves

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Here’s another poem from Robert Graves. He wrote this one during the second world war, referring back to classical antiquity to comment on current events.

It refers to the battle of Marathon in 490BC, at which the Greeks halted the Persian invasion. The major source for this is the Greek writer Herodotus, known as “the father of history”. He more or less invented the idea that history depends on who exactly is telling the story.

Graves would have been familiar with questioning the news, wondering whether the latest British military success reported on the BBC had actually happened quite as it was described.

We can appreciate the timelessness of this poem today, when the news about what is happening in Ukraine depends on whether it is from a Ukrainian or Russian source.

The last two lines here are a magnificent example of what we would now call “spin”, putting the best possible interpretation on what was actually a defeat.   

The Persian Version by Robert Graves

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer’s expedition
Not as a mere reconnaissance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece – they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.

Surgical Ward: Men by Robert Graves

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It’s just over two years since I had a major operation so it seems appropriate to look again at this poem by Robert Graves. It concerns a subject that doesn’t get written about very often. I’m not sure when it was written, but I think it refers to an operation later in Graves’ life, rather than any of his experiences in the first world war.

I think it is a remarkable poem, but I must admit I have to supress a wry smile. As so often with Graves, there’s just the merest hint of a boast in his telling us that he was able to resist asking for morphine. I have to admit that I gave in and pressed the green button on the pump as often as it would let me.

Surgical Ward: Men by Robert Graves

Something occurred after the operation
To scare the surgeons (though no fault of theirs),
Whose reassurance did not fool me long.
Beyond the shy, concerned faces of nurses
A single white-hot eye, focusing on me,
Forced sweat in rivers down from scalp to belly.
I whistled, gasped or sang, with blanching knuckles
Clutched at my bed-grip almost till it cracked:
Too proud, still, to let loose Bedlamite screeches
And bring the charge-nurse scuttling down the aisle
With morphia-needle levelled…
                                     Lady Morphia—
Her scorpion kiss and dark gyrating dreams—
She in mistrust of whom I dared out-dare,
Two minutes longer than seemed possible,
Pain, that unpurposed, matchless elemental
Stronger than fear or grief, stranger than love.

  

Epitaph on a Tyrant by W H Auden

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Only a week or two ago, this short poem by W H Auden could be filed away as a piece of twentieth century history. Suddenly, it is topical all over again.   

I re-discovered it when I watched the 2003 BBC series, Cambridge Spies, in which it is featured. “Is he talking about Hitler?, asks the character who reads it aloud. It was published in Auden’s 1940 collection, Another Time. Certainly, at the end of the 1930s, or in Auden’s words, “that low, dishonest decade”, most readers in Britain would probably have taken it as referring to Hitler, Franco or Mussolini.

The irony in a drama about Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, is that as dedicated anti-fascists, they failed to see that in offering their clandestine services to Stalin, they were collaborating with a dictator of equal ferocity.

Epitaph on a Tyrant by W H Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

To Any Member Of My Generation by George Barker

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Given the grim events of the last few days, I thought I should try to find an appropriate poem, but it’s been a harder task than I imagined. For some reason, this one popped into my mind. Perhaps it is the feeling of “we should have seen this coming” that it conveys so powerfully.

George Barker, (1913–1991) was a prolific poet, much admired in his time, but perhaps over-prolific, which may be part of the reason he has become less well-known today.

He was in the generation that came to maturity in the 1930s, and who were in their twenties during the second world war.

To avoid any confusion, I should point out that the “Richmond” here is Richmond on Thames, a place I know well and perhaps another reason this poem speaks to me.

To Any Member Of My Generation by George Barker

What is it you remember? – the summer mornings
Down by the river at Richmond with a girl,
And as you kissed, clumsy in bathing costumes,
History guffawed in a rosebush. What a warning –
If only we had known, if only we had known!
And when you looked in mirrors was this meaning
Plain as the pain in the centre of a pearl?
Horrible tomorrow in Teutonic postures
Making absurd the past we cannot disown?

Whenever we kissed we cocked the future’s rifles
And from our wild-oat words, like dragon’s teeth,
Death underfoot now arises; when we were gay
Dancing together in what we hoped was life,
Who was it in our arms but the whores of death
Whom we have found in our beds today, today?

The Old Familiar Faces by Charles Lamb

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I had the sad experience recently of finding out that one of the friends of my youth had died. Another link with the past was broken. It was to this poem that I turned. 

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was an essayist and poet. He was a schoolfriend of Coleridge, and knew Wordsworth and Hazlitt. His best-known work today is the children’s book Tales from Shakespeare, co-written with his sister Mary.

He wrote many poems, but it is only this one that has survived to achieve immortality. It’s easy to see why. It says something that we can all recognise, particularly as we get older, in plain and clear language. It captures the pain of nostalgia perfectly. And with the title, Lamb added a phrase to the language.

The Old Familiar Faces by Charles Lamb

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her —
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces —

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

The Fifties by Hugo Williams

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Hugo Williams is probably my favourite current poet. This one is from 2014 and it’s a good example of his style, easy to read with those overlapping lines, almost conversational, but with more going on than might be apparent at first. Like so much of his writing, it’s a  slightly melancholy comment on changing times and social mores.

I don’t actually remember porters, but I do remember people wondering why they had disappeared. The whole question was rendered redundant by the invention of the wheeled suitcase, of course.

Another reason I like his work so much, is that he has written about how he came to poetry via song lyrics. That is a journey I myself have made over the years. The title of the collection in which this appeared is I Knew The Bride, a reference to the Nick Lowe song. It also contains a poem called Twenty Yards Behind, dedicated to Wilko Johnson. Those two go back a long way. Hugo Williams is also a journalist and wrote the programme notes for Doctor Feelgood in 1975.  

The Fifties by Hugo Williams

Remember porters? Weatherbeaten old boys
with watery blue eyes, who found you a corner seat
‘facing the engine’ and stowed your luggage
in a net above your head? You gave them a coin,
worth almost nothing, even then,
and they touched their caps and thanked you
as they struggled out through the sliding doors
of the compartment into the corridor.
You used to worry vaguely
that they wouldn’t have time to get down.

Days of Wine and Roses by Ernest Dowson

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I have given this poem the title by which it is generally known, because Ernest Dowson (1867–1900)himself did not give it an English title. As an Oxford man of that era, he preferred a Latin one, Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam, from the poet Horace. It translates roughly as“the shortness of life forbids us long hopes”.

It was used very memorably in the TV series The Durrells, where it was recited by Keeley Hawes as Louisa Durrell. She was trying to make her squabbling children understand that their life on Corfu was an idyllic sojourn that would not last forever.

Sadly but somewhat appropriately for the author of a poem about the brevity of life, Dowson, who was associated with the decadent movement, died of alcoholism at the age of thirty–two.

Days of Wine and Roses by Ernest Dowson

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.

The Poplar Field by William Cowper

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They came and did some work on the tall plane trees in my road back in the spring. Men swarmed up on ropes and cut off all the small branches, leaving the trees black and stumpy against the blue sky.

Those trees are so high, they must be older than a lot of the local buildings that surround them. I don’t know just why it had to be done; there will be green shoots again, in time, I thought, but will they come this year?

At least the trees, even in their denuded state, were still there. During the summer, helped by the rain perhaps, they became bushy and green again, and now the leaves are starting to change colour.

You can see why the whole episode made me think of the poem below. Writing towards the end of his life, William Cowper (1731–1800) uses the image of the felled trees replaced by newly grown ones to reflect on the passing of time and life itself, and the impermanence of all things. 

The Poplar Field by William Cowper

The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view
Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew;
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.

The blackbird has fled to another retreat
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene where his melody charmed me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.

’Tis a sight to engage me if anything can,
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a being less durable even than he.

The Idlers by Edmund Blunden

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Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) is remembered as one of the soldier-poets of the first world war. He served on the Western Front from May 1916 until the end of the war and, like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, was awarded the Military Cross. After the war, he became an academic and writer.

There is an emphasis on the rural world in much of his work, and his prose memoir Undertones of War has a particular feel for the shattered landscapes of Belgium and France. One of his later books is Cricket Country, an examination of the rural roots of cricket and its abiding significance in English culture.

Gypsies with their brightly painted caravans were a bit of a thing in early twentieth century British art, featuring in works by Augustus John, Alfred Munnings, Laura Knight and others. The Idlers was published in 1922. One can imagine that the gypsy lifestyle might have seemed attractive to Blunden after his time in the trenches. It’s almost as if he is talking about “dropping out” before that was even a concept.

There’s a strong sense here of a less-developed, less crowded country, where there was room for this sort of life.  

The Idlers by Edmund Blunden

The gipsies lit their fires by the chalk-pit gate anew,
And the hoppled horses supped in the further dusk and dew;
The gnats flocked round the smoke like idlers as they were
And through the goss* and bushes the owls began to churr.

An ell above the woods the last of sunset glowed
With a dusky gold that filled the pond beside the road;
The cricketers had done, the leas all silent lay,
And the carrier’s clattering wheels went past and died away.

The gipsies lolled and gossiped, and ate their stolen swedes,
Made merry with mouth-organs, worked toys with piths of reeds:
The old wives puffed their pipes, nigh as black as their hair,
And not one of them all seemed to know the name of care.

* goss is a form of gorse 

When I Have Fears by Noel Coward

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Some years ago, a dear friend of mine from schooldays died prematurely. He was blessed with an exceptional sense of humour. It is one of the great regrets of my life that I had lost contact with him somewhat.

I wish I had known this poem in those sad days after the funeral. The last three lines of the second verse sum up my feelings exactly. I am sure many people have gained comfort from this poem over the years. It uses straightforward words to express universal emotions.

It may be a surprise that such a poignant meditation on life and death came from the pen of Noel Coward, of all people. There again, one of his best and most enduring plays is Blithe Spirit, which suggests that there may be some kind of survival after death, as do the last two lines here.

Now I think of it, the words blithe spirit apply rather well to my late friend. As someone else who died too young said: “Only the bores stay to the end of the party”.  

When I Have Fears by Noel Coward

When I have fears, as Keats had fears,
Of the moment I’ll cease to be
I console myself with vanished years
Remembered laughter, remembered tears,
And the peace of the changing sea.

When I feel sad, as Keats felt sad
That my life is so nearly done
It gives me comfort to dwell upon
Remembered friends who are dead and gone
And the jokes we had and the fun.

How happy they are I cannot know,
But happy I am who loved them so.