Category: Poetry

A Child’s Winter Evening by Gwen John

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This is another poem I found in my copy of Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither anthology. I was looking through the section entitled Autumn Leaves, Winter Snow, in search of an appropriate poem for the cold and snowy weather we have been having.

I assume that this is the Gwen John who was a painter and older sister of Augustus John. I didn’t know she wrote any poetry. There are comprehensive notes at the back of the book, but no note for this one, unfortunately. I have not been able to find any information at all about it online. I can’t date it, but the anthology I found it in is the 1928 edition.

It therefore has to speak for itself, which is probably a good thing. The title might suggest something with a rather cosy feel, but that is not quite the case here. 

The last two stanzas describe something perhaps better known to older readers, who may remember staring at an open fire and imagining all kinds of pictures in the shapes created by the burning wood or coal.


A Child’s Winter Evening by Gwen John

The smothering dark engulfs relentlessly
With nightmare tread approaching steadfastly;
All horrors thicken as the daylight fails
And, is it wind, or some lost ghost that wails?

Tongue cannot tell the stories that beset
With livid pictures blackness dense as jet,
Or that wild questioning – whence we are; and why;
If death is darkness; and why I am I.

The children look through the uneven pane
Out to the world, to bring them joy again;
But only snowflakes melting into mire
Without, within the red glow of the fire.

They long for something wonderful to break
This long-drawn winter wistfulness and take
Shape in the darkness; threatening like Fate
There comes a hell-like crackling from the grate.

But hand in hand they urge themselves anear
And watch the cities burning bright and clear;
Faces diabolical and cliffs and halls
And strangely-pinnacled, molten castle walls.

Tall figures flicker on the ceiling stark
Then grimly fade into one ominous dark;
Dream terrors iron-bound throng on them apace
And dusk with fire, and flames with shadows race. 

Snow by Walter de la Mare

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We finally got some snow yesterday. It was a welcome change from the lockdown to feel the crisp, crunchy snow under one’s feet.

Today, it’s a bright sunny day, almost with the promise of early spring in the air, and the snow has turned to treacherous ice on the pavement, or slush where it has melted. Will we see any more this winter?

There are several famous poems about snow or the winter more generally. I decided to go with this one, because I think it is less well-known than those by Thomas Hardy or Robert Bridges.

I’m not sure exactly when it was written; it is included in De la Mare’s 1944 Collected Rhymes and Verses. This is the collection intended for children. With De la Mare, though, the line between works for adults and works for children is always blurry. As he wrote in his introduction: “Somewhere the two streams divide — and may re-intermingle. Both, whatever the quality of the water, and of what it holds in solution, sprang from the same source”.  


Snow by Walter de la Mare

No breath of wind,
No gleam of sun —
Still the white snow
Whirls softly down —
Twig and bough
And blade and thorn
All in an icy
Quiet, forlorn.
Whispering, rustling,
Through the air,
On sill and stone,
Roof — everywhere,
It heaps its powdery
Crystal flakes,
Of every tree
A mountain makes;
Till pale and faint
At shut of day,
Stoops from the West
One wintry ray,
And, feathered in fire,
Where ghosts the moon,
A robin shrills
His lonely tune.

Up On The Downs by John Masefield

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John Masefield (1878–1967) had a long and productive career in both prose and poetry, but comparatively few of his works are well-known today. He was appointed poet laureate in 1930 when that was a job for life, so held the position for thirty-seven years. His Collected Poems is a hefty volume, yet it is only two short poems, “Sea Fever” and “Cargoes”, that turn up in anthologies. I think there might be other gems waiting to be re-discovered. For example, I recently came across, almost by accident, “CLM”, a poignant poem about his mother, who died when Masefield was a small boy.

I suspect that Masefield has different readerships for different aspects of his work. For example, his 1937 children’s novel The Box of Delights has never been out print, almost having a cult following, helped perhaps by the 1984 BBC television adaptation. His 1917 description of the topography of the Somme battlefield, The Old Front Line, is a masterpiece of descriptive writing and could be called the first battlefield guide. A theme that runs through much of his work is the sense of history in the landscape.

The poem below is another that I discovered through the BBC Radio 3 programme, Words and Music, in the edition entitled The Haunted Landscape. The format of this programme is that the titles of the pieces and their creators are not identified. You can get that information from the programme website. It works quite well if you listen to the programme, then go back and identify the things that made a particular impression on you.

I was amazed when I found out how old it is and who had written it. I had assumed it was by a more recent poet. It actually dates from the first world war period, when Masefield was living at  Lollingdon Farm in Berkshire. I had also rather lazily assumed that the human sacrifice in the 1972 film The Wicker Man was a scriptwriter’s invention. Whether it is an invention or not, the idea is clearly not as new as I thought.

Masefield was too old to be a fighting soldier but did see the western front both as a hospital orderly and later, as a journalist. I have seen it suggested that this poem can also be interpreted as referring to conditions on the battlefield. However one interpretates it, this is a powerful and atmospheric poem, collapsing the distance between past and present with something of the atmosphere of what is now known as folk horror.


Up On The Downs by John Masefield

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.


At Castle Boterel by Thomas Hardy

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Something funny has happened to my sense of time during the various lockdowns. Memories of things I thought I had forgotten keep popping up into my mind and they seem as vivid as the present. Time has collapsed, and the barrier between the past and present has broken down, it would appear.

Perhaps it’s not just the strange circumstances of 2020 that has caused this. It might also have something to do with my experience of major surgery in hospital during the summer of that year.   

It feels appropriate, then, to look at a poem where Thomas Hardy reflects on his past and the passage of time.

I heard this poem in an edition of the BBC Radio 3 programme Words and Music, entitled “The Haunted Landscape”. The readings are not identified, so I did not know who had written it. The effect was quite interesting; something about the poem made me think it was comparatively recent. The word “wagonette” called to mind an American station wagon.

I was quite surprised that the poem turned out to be by Hardy. That demonstrates quite neatly, I think, why his poetry has lasted. He gets to grips with fundamental things that do not change. Although a Victorian, his sensibility feels curiously modern.

As in some of his other poems, in this one he contrasts the history of the landscape with the personal history of the speaker of the poem.  

The date at the bottom tells us that it is one of his “poems of 1912–13”, a series of elegiac poems where Hardy remembers his first wife and looks back on their life together.  

At Castle Boterel by Thomas Hardy

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
   And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
   And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
         Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
   In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
   To ease the sturdy pony’s load
         When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
   Matters not much, nor to what it led, ―
Something that life will not be balked of
   Without rude reason till hope is dead,
         And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
   A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
   Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
         By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
   And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
   But what they record in colour and cast
         Is—that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
   In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
   Remains on the slope, as when that night
         Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
   I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
   And I shall traverse old love’s domain
         Never again.

March 1913

Ring Out, Wild Bells by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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If ever there was a year we wanted to say goodbye to, it is this one. This poem is part of Tennyson’s long elegy, In Memoriam A H H. It was inspired by the death of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, in 1833 at the age of twenty-two, which led Tennyson to question his Christian faith. He thought it through for many years, before the poem was published in 1850.

The Ring Out, Wild Bells section comes near the end, where, after confronting his doubts, Tennyson has found his faith again. The bells of the local church are ringing in the New Year. We don’t have to be practising Christians to respond to the poem’s powerful and moving message of renewal, and hopes for better times to come.

Tennyson did not actually invent the unusual stanza form, but it has come to be so closely identified with his use of it in this long poem, that it is known as the “In Memoriam” stanza. As so often with Tennyson, if you read it aloud, it sounds like music. No other poet does that so well, in my opinion.       

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

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It can often be difficult to date a Hardy poem exactly. He wrote poems for many years before he started to publish them in the early twentieth century when his  career as a novelist began to wind down.

There is no such problem with The Darkling Thrush, because Hardy included a very specific date at the bottom of the poem. This confirms for us that the note of hope the speaker of the poem finds in the song of the bedraggled thrush, was a hope for the new twentieth century.

It’s one of Hardy’s best-known and best-loved poems, and it’s not hard to see why. With its strong rhythm and end rhymes it is powerfully musical, and a vivid evocation of a bleak, dead, and inhospitable wintry landscape. What is the message here? I think it is that when all seems lost, there is some hope, if only we can find it.

It’s a little early in the year for a winter poem, perhaps, but after the year we have all just experienced, Hardy’s song of hope speaks to us once more, as strongly as it ever did.   



The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
      The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

31 December 1900

Corporal Stare by Robert Graves

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Following on from my previous post, it appears that Remembrance Day events will now be allowed to go ahead this coming Sunday, as long as they are outdoors and follow social distancing rules. Don’t they usually take place outdoors anyway? I suppose the point is that no church services can take place.

So here is another poem from one of the poets most closely associated with the first world war. It was written in 1917. Graves later gave a more detailed account of the real life incident that inspired the poem in his famous prose memoir, Goodbye to All That. He writes there: “Ghosts were numerous in France at that time”.

Corporal Stare by Robert Graves

Back from the line one night in June,
I gave a dinner at Bethune —
Seven courses, the most gorgeous meal
Money could buy or batman steal.
Five hungry lads welcomed the fish
With shouts that nearly cracked the dish;
Asparagus came with tender tops,
Strawberries in cream, and mutton chops.
Said Jenkins, as my hand he shook,
“They’ll put this in the history book.”
We bawled Church anthems in choro
Of Bethlehem and Hermon snow,
With drinking songs, a jolly sound
To help the good red Pommard round.
Stories and laughter interspersed,
We drowned a long La Bassée thirst —
Trenches in June make throats damned dry.
Then through the window suddenly,
Badge, stripes and medals all complete,
We saw him swagger up the street,
Just like a live man — Corporal Stare!
Stare! Killed last May at Festubert.
Caught on patrol near the Boche wire,
Torn horribly by machine-gun fire!
He paused, saluted smartly, grinned,
Then passed away like a puff of wind,
Leaving us blank astonishment.
The song broke, up we started, leant
Out of the window-nothing there,
Not the least shadow of Corporal Stare,
Only a quiver of smoke that showed
A fag-end dropped on the silent road.

Peace by Walter de la Mare

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Remembrance Sunday is going to be a bit odd this year. The latest lockdown means that the familiar ceremonies at war memorials in towns and villages up and down the country will not now take place. We already knew that the ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall was going to feature the politicians but not the public, and that there would be no march past. That seems a pity, as 2020 marks the centenary of the installation of the permanent memorial in Whitehall.

Here is a poem that does not fall into the usual definition of “first world war poetry”, as it was not written by a combatant and does not deal with life in the trenches. It was published in Walter de la Mare’s 1918 collection Motley.

De la Mare was already in his forties when he wrote it; how must he have felt twenty years later, when the peace he described was about to be shattered once again?  

Peace by Walter de la Mare

Night is o’er England, and the winds are still;
Jasmine and honeysuckle steep the air;
Softly the stars that are all Europe’s fill
Her heaven-wide dark with radiancy fair;
That shadowed moon now waxing in the west
Stirs not a rumour in her tranquil seas;
Mysterious sleep has lulled her heart to rest,
Deep even as theirs beneath her churchyard trees.

Secure, serene; dumb now the night-hawk’s threat;
The guns’ low thunder drumming o’er the tide;
The anguish pulsing in her stricken side….
All is at peace….But, never, heart, forget:
For this her youngest, best, and bravest died,
These bright dews once were mixed with bloody
      sweat.

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

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I have written before about the way in which familiar novels, stories and poems have taken on new meanings with the unforeseen events that we have all been living through this year.

This poem is a new discovery for me. How did I not find it until now? It is regarded as one of the best about the impact of the blitz on London in 1941, yet lines leap out from it as if they were written recently about what has been going on these last few months.

It is a long poem in five sections, too long to quote in full here, so I have just included the first two sections. There are lines that seem to me startlingly appropriate for the situation we find ourselves in now. I think that Binyon, who was not a young man at this point, poured all his dismay at what he saw happening around him in London into this poem.

The second part describes the sadness of the closed and empty theatres during the blitz. It is sobering to read this during a week when it seems that cinemas may have closed forever.

A poem for this season of autumn then, and truly a poem whose time has come again.

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

I
Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

II
Never was anything so deserted
As this dim theatre
Now, when in passive greyness the remote
Morning is here,
Daunting the wintry glitter of the pale,
Half-lit chandelier.

Never was anything disenchanted
As this silence!
Gleams of soiled gilding on curved balconies
Empty; immense
Dead crimson curtain, tasselled with its old
And staled pretence.

Nothing is heard but a shuffling and knocking
Of mop and mat,
Where dustily two charwomen exchange
Leisurely chat.
Stretching and settling to voluptuous sleep
Curls a cat.

The voices are gone, the voices
That laughed and cried.
It is as if the whole marvel of the world
Had blankly died,
Exposed, inert as a drowned body left
By the ebb of the tide.

Beautiful as water, beautiful as fire,
The voices came,
Made the eyes to open and the ears to hear,
The hand to lie intent and motionless,
The heart to flame,
The radiance of reality was there,
Splendour and shame.

Slowly an arm dropped, and an empire fell.
We saw, we knew.
A head was lifted, and a soul was freed.
Abysses opened into heaven and hell.
We heard, we drew
Into our thrilled veins courage of the truth
That searched us through.

But the voices are all departed,
The vision dull.
Daylight disconsolately enters
Only to annul.
The vast space is hollow and empty
As a skull.



Nashe’s Elegy

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I have seen this poem by Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) given several titles; the one at the head of this piece, “Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss”, or “Elegy in Plague Time”.

I think I first came across it in the anthology 100 Poems by 100 Poets.

I once heard it read on the radio by Andrew Motion when he was the poet laureate. He brought it wonderfully to life, with his slightly gloomy voice making the refrain at the end of each verse sound as if it were being pronounced by a vicar in church.

I never imagined that I would live through a time when a poem about the plague took on a new immediacy. It comes from an age when people believed in Christianity as we believe in science today. We like to think we are much more rational these days, but some of the events of this strange last few months have made me wonder if that is really true.

Some things never change, as the poem reminds us.

Nashe’s Elegy

Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss,
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life’s lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys,
None from his darts can fly.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade,
All things to end are made.
The plague full swift goes by.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath clos’d Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave,
Swords may not fight with fate,
Earth still holds open her gate.
Come! come! the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny.
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!