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 Twelve Best Sherlock Holmes Short Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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In 1927, for a competition in the Strand magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose his own favourite twelve Sherlock Holmes stories. The reader who most closely matched his selection would win the prize. He omitted the later stories that would appear in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, as these had not yet been published in book form. When the result of the competition was announced, he published an article that gave his list and the reason for each choice.

Since I spent part of last summer working my way through The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, I thought it would be interesting to follow in Sir Arthur’s footsteps, by selecting my own favourites and justifying their inclusion on my list.

It seems to me that there are four stories that simply demand to be included.

A Scandal in Bohemia was the first to be published. It’s memorable for the strong female character of Irene Adler and the choreography of the scene where everyone in the street has been employed by Holmes to create a decoy.

The Final Problem is dramatic, fast-moving and ultimately tragic. It raises Holmes’ moral authority because of his willingness to sacrifice himself to rid the world of the evil of Moriarty. The story made the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland famous.

The Empty House is one of the strongest of all the stories, I think, almost three stories in one. There is the dramatic return of Holmes and the story of his survival, Colonel Moran’s attempt to assassinate him, and the locked room murder mystery, all neatly wrapped up together.

His Last Bow was not the last to be published but is the last chronologically. It’s told in the third person, rather than by Watson. Holmes comes out of retirement to crack a German spy ring on the eve of the great war. His moving speech at the end brings the curtain down on their partnership.

So now I have the general shape of my list, what other stories should be included? Doyle himself, in his introduction to The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, refuted the idea that the quality declined after Holmes returned. I agree, so I will be including some of the later ones.

The Speckled Band is so famous that it has to be on the list. It’s a locked-room mystery to rival Edgar Allan Poe and has the connection to India that features in several other stories.

The Musgrave Ritual is an early case of Holmes’, from the days before he knew Watson, the client being one of Holmes’ former fellow students. It has a rather gothic atmosphere with the country house and missing ancient relics and is also notable for being told largely by Holmes himself.

The Reigate Squires has Holmes at his most ingenious in working out the solution to the mystery. We also get an insight into his health. 

The Norwood Builder differs from the usual formula, because the client who comes to Baker Street is then arrested for murder and Holmes must prove his innocence. There is also Holmes’ friendly rivalry with Inspector Lestrade of the Yard. Holmes spots a crucial clue that the police miss, to do with the manipulation of evidence.

Charles Augustus Milverton features the fascinating character of Milverton, a heartless professional blackmailer who is oblivious to the damage he does. Holmes finds him repulsive, and lets natural justice, rather than the law, deal with him.

The Bruce-Partington Plans is a spy story, perhaps a bit similar to the earlier The Naval Treaty, but more complex and better, I think. It starts with that familiar London smog outside the window of Baker Street, but also makes clever use of the London Underground, rather than Hackney Carriages.      

The Illustrious Client is one of the later stories that Doyle did not include on his list. It takes the theme of violence against women that is often there under the surface to a new level. Baron Gruner is truly loathsome, another example of Doyles’ ability to conjure evil on the page. This one is a suitable riposte to anyone who thinks the Holmes stories are a bit “cosy”.

So now I have eleven, I must select another to bring my list up to twelve. The Red Headed League is notable for its sheer absurdity, that makes Holmes and Watson laugh out loud. The Greek Interpreter has the first appearance of Holmes’ brother Mycroft and the Diogenes Club, for the “most unsociable and unclubbable men in London”. Thor Bridge is Holmes at his most ingenious again, but I think The Reigate Squires has the edge, somehow. Doyle excluded Silver Blaze because he said that the racing detail was wrong. That has not affected its fame or popularity with readers, though, so it has to be this one, for the Devon setting and the curious incident of the dog in the night time, which has entered the language.

So here is my full list, in order of publication date, except for His Last Bow, as already explained.

A Scandal in Bohemia   (1891)
The Speckled Band   (1892)
Silver Blaze   (1892)
The Musgrave Ritual   (1893)
The Reigate Squires   (1893)
The Final Problem   (1893)
The Empty House   (1903)
The Norwood Builder   (1903)
Charles Augustus Milverton   (1904)
The Bruce-Partington Plans   (1908)
The Illustrious Client   (1924)
His Last Bow   (1917)

I suspect that every reader of these stories will have their own likes and dislikes. I see that I have only included six that are on Sir Arthur’s list.

Anyone new to Holmes who wants to find out more would find the stories I have chosen a good starting point.  

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 Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace

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I was very excited when I found out about The Documents in the Case, published in 1930. I have read and enjoyed several of Dorothy L Sayers’ other books, but I did not realise she had written this, the only one not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey. It is a crime novel written in epistolary form, based to a certain extent on the real-life Edith Thompson case. I was hoping it would be another Trent’s Last Case or Malice Aforethought but despite being a compelling read, I was left with a slight feeling of disappointment at the end.

The beginning is the most interesting part, where we gradually learn about the slightly odd Harrison household. It’s rather reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton’s boarding house tales. Margaret Harrison is the much younger second wife of George Harrison, who has a grown-up son, Paul, working abroad. John Munting, a writer, and Harwood Lathom, a painter, rent the flat upstairs and since the hallways adjoin, come into contact with the Harrisons. Agatha Milsom is a sort of paid companion to Mrs Harrison. Mr Harrison is keen on his hobbies of painting and the study of wild mushrooms. It is his sudden death, supposedly from eating the wrong kind of mushroom, that is the case of the title.         

One picture of the Harrisons’ marriage emerges through Agatha Milsom’s letters to her sister. Another view comes from Munting’s letters to his fiancé. Mr Harrison seems quite a different character in his own letters to his son Paul. Miss Milsom thinks that Harrison is an unfeeling brute and his wife is a victim, but she inadvertently reveals that Margaret Harrison is a rather self-dramatising character, perhaps as much the cause of the rows as Mr Harrison. Munting has quite a low opinion of Mrs Harrison and is sure that the marital discord is her fault. Is Harrison the bullying husband that Agatha Milsom takes him to be, or simply older and rather set in his ways with fixed ideas of how a wife should behave? If Margaret Harrison is based to a certain extent on Edith Thompson, I got the feeling that Sayers did not altogether approve of her.

Agatha Milsom, the spinster companion who is mentally troubled and obsessed with sex is the most interesting character, but she disappears from the narrative too early on, after having played a crucial role in how events unfold. The later part of the book features the statements of John Munting and Paul Harrison. These are much longer than the letters and it begins to feel more like a conventional novel.

Munting’s letters to his fiancé, Elizabeth Drake, who is also a writer, convey something of the intellectual climate of the late 1920s, when old certainties had been shattered by the first world war and the ideas of Freud and Einstein were becoming known. His obsession with how life came into being is rather irritating, though. How are we supposed to take all this? It does rather neatly set up the discussion among the scientists at the end that leads to the solution. This chapter is very irritating, but more of that later.

Paul Harrison does not believe his father’s death was an accident and becomes the main investigator into what really happened. It’s very well worked out how he has gathered all the documents together. He also says that Munting’s letters to his wife were the work of a writer with one eye on future publication, giving us a clue as to how to read them. Some of Munting’s comments about publishers probably come from Sayers’ own experience, rather like the advertising agency background she used in Murder Must Advertise.

I was slightly irritated by Sir Gilbert Pugh only being named as the Director of Public Prosecutions right at the end of the book. Since it begins with Paul Harrison sending the bundle of documents to him, it would make the whole story much clearer if Pugh’s role was identified at the beginning.

It’s also slightly frustrating that once the poison is proved to be artificial, that is the rather abrupt end of the novel. Yet Paul Harrison spent a great deal of time trying and failing to work out exactly how the poison was administered and we never learn that.

The book was written as a collaboration between Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace. He was a doctor who had worked with other crime writers before, so I assume the science came from him. I suspect that the science versus religion debate might have appealed to the religious Sayers and her desire to write something that would be seen as more than a detective story. The penultimate chapter, in which the scientists discuss the method of proving whether a substance occurred naturally or was artificially synthesised is far too long and tedious in the extreme.

The novel as a whole reads like a cross between a golden-age detective story and a “highbrow” novel of the 1920s, by an author such as Aldous Huxley, whose Point Counter Point gets a mention. It is full of references to writers of the time. John Munting is rather dismissive about A High Wind in Jamaica, and Agatha Milsom is a bit puzzled by the work of D H Lawrence.

Sayers even refers to one of her own novels, because the pathologist Sir James Lubbock says he is working on an arsenic case, presumably that of Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, published around the same time as The Documents in the Case.

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.