On Eastnor Knoll by John Masefield

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Here’s another poem by John Masefield (1878–1967), Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967.

It’s the sort of poem you can easily overlook and dismiss as a typical pastoral piece. Repeated readings, though, reveal some lovely sound effects and the feeling that the sunset symbolises something else.  

As with other Masefield poems that have a rural setting, it’s not clear where we are in time. I had assumed that it was written during the first world war and was a sort of coded reference to that conflict. I was surprised to find out that it was actually written earlier, around the time of the Boer war.

Is it actually the British Empire on which the sun is metaphorically setting? Or is it just a memorable image of a country sunset with words taking the place of paints?

Perhaps it has a more personal meaning because Eastnor is in Herefordshire, near Ledbury where Masefield was born and spent his early years.

On Eastnor Knoll by John Masefield

Silent are the woods, and the dim green boughs are
Hushed in the twilight: yonder, in the path through
The apple orchard, is a tired plough-boy
Calling the cows home.

A bright white star blinks, the pale moon rounds, but
Still the red, lurid wreckage of the sunset
Smoulders in smoky fire, and burns on
The misty hill-tops.

Ghostly it grows, and darker, the burning
Fades into smoke, and now the gusty oaks are
A silent army of phantoms thronging
A land of shadows.

Ding Dong Bell by Walter de la Mare

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This small book of four linked short stories was published in 1924. Knowing that De la Mare wrote extensively for children, you would be forgiven from the title for thinking that this is a children’s book, but it is not. Before the first story, there is a selection of quotes from authors such as Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Thomas Browne. These are reflections on mortality and the passing of time, that set the tone and the theme for the stories to follow. I think the bell of the title is the passing bell.

Each story is set in a rural churchyard and features characters contemplating the inscriptions on the gravestones. These epitaphs and inscriptions are quoted in full, in italics within the stories. I assume that these were written in the traditional style by De la Mare himself, but there is no author’s note, so no way of telling if any of them were found in actual churchyards. Probably not, as they fit the stories so well. De la Mare showed his love of rhymes and verses of all sorts with his anthology Come Hither.

If this all sounds rather gloomy, it really isn’t. As so often with De la Mare, there is that nagging doubt about what has taken place that leaves the reader thinking about the story long after finishing it. Not that too much really does take place in these stories, they are as much meditations as descriptions of events.

In the first story, Lichen, a young woman waiting for a train at a country station passes the time by investigating the churchyard opposite in the company of a fellow passenger, a local old man. He is not an enthusiast of modern developments such as steam trains. “I see no virtue in mere size, or in mere rapidity of motion. Nor can I detect any particular preciousness in time ‘saved’, as you call it, merely to be wasted.” The story has something in common with De la Mare’s poem The Railway Junction. By the end the old man has become a “kind of King Canute by the sad sea waves of progress”.

In Benighted, a couple find themselves stranded in remote countryside and pass the warm summer night in a churchyard. Their reading of the inscriptions appears to have an implication for their future together and the story is presented as an episode in their past.

In Strangers and Pilgrims, the verger of an old church, who is accustomed to showing visitors around it, finds something unusual about his guest, dressed all in black, who is searching for a particular inscription. This is the longest and most complex of the four. Much of it is a conversation between the initially taciturn stranger and the talkative verger, on subjects such as the nature of the past and whether or not the dead can return. At the end there is still a mystery about the visitor’s identity.

For me, the last story, Winter, is the most effective. The narrator recounts his fleeting vision of an uncanny figure in a bleak and silent snowbound churchyard, an encounter that has stayed with him for years. “But such things are difficult to describe – to share. Date, year are, at any rate, of no account; if only for the reason that what impresses us most in life is independent of time. One can in memory indeed live over again events in one’s life even twenty years or more gone by, with the same fever of shame, anxiety, unrest. Mere time is nothing.” It is striking that the apparition is as put out to see the narrator as the narrator is to see him. Then there is the ambiguity of the figure’s final question: “Which is yours?”    

By the time the reader reaches this last story it has become apparent that the book is structured around the four seasons.

De la Mare’s way of writing about the countryside is quite unusual. It’s highly visual and evocative yet somehow slightly unreal at the same time, almost more intense than reality. You find yourself wondering where exactly such a place might actually be. It’s quite different to E F Benson, say, where you can identify the real place even when he doesn’t name it. It’s more akin to the kind of painting that offers a vision of the landscape rather than a directly realistic transcription of it.    

It was the description of the story Winter in the 2013 essay Ghosts in the Material World by the critic John Gray that set me on the path to explore De la Mare’s stories. I am so glad I did because I find something in his writing that I don’t find anywhere else.

I have already written about some of his other stories, such as The House and The Almond Tree in greater detail.

My 1936 edition of Ding Dong Bell comes with a quote from The Daily News that sums this book up rather well: “An odd, loveable little book, stamped with its author’s original imagination and filled with his haunting sense of wonder and beauty.”

The book also has what looks like a woodcut on the title page, that depicts the sort of scene found in the stories, but the artist is not credited.

To Others Than You by Dylan Thomas

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I’m never quite sure whether or not I like the poetry of Dylan Thomas (1914–1953). These days, he’s in danger of becoming one of those poets, like Byron or Rupert Brooke, whose life and premature death overshadows what they wrote.

It’s hard to know where to “place” Thomas; he was a bit of a one-off. There’s no doubt that he had a very individual and unusual way of writing, perhaps showing the influence of the Welsh language. The poem below is densely packed with imagery, a sort of extended metaphor to do with money and fairground attractions.

This evocation of conjuring tricks is entirely appropriate for the theme of false friendship, of looking back and realising that one’s friends were not quite what one took them to be at the time.

I don’t know about Thomas’ work in general, but I admire this poem very much, both for what it says and the way it says it.    

To Others Than You by Dylan Thomas

Friend by enemy I call you out.

You with a bad coin in your socket,
You my friend there with a winning air
Who palmed the lie on me when you looked
Brassily at my shyest secret,
Enticed with twinkling bits of the eye
Till the sweet tooth of my love bit dry,
Rasped at last, and I stumbled and sucked,
Whom now I conjure to stand as thief
In the memory worked by mirrors,
With unforgettably smiling act,
Quickness of hand in the velvet glove
And my whole heart under your hammer,
Were once such a creature, so gay and frank
A desireless familiar
I never thought to utter or think
While you displaced a truth in the air,

That though I loved them for their faults
As much as for their good,
My friends were enemies on stilts
With their heads in a cunning cloud.

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.

The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad

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Most photographs of Conrad show an older man, grave and distinguished. He didn’t become established as a writer until his forties, and it almost comes as a shock to realise that during his twenty-year career as a seaman, on which he drew for inspiration, he was actually quite young.

The Mirror of the Sea, published in 1906, is his non-fiction account of his years afloat. It is subtitled Memories and Impressions and that is a pretty good description of what is contained here. It is a collection of impressions of deep-water sailing ships and the men who sailed them, as well as a meditation on wind, weather and the nature of the sea itself.

The writing is beautiful, as you would expect from Conrad, in places like prose poetry. The book gives a vivid impression of what it was like to serve on a merchant ship during the age of sail. If there is a theme running through these varied, essay-like pieces it is regret for the passing of that era and its replacement by the steam age. “Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea.”

Conrad gives us the benefit of his knowledge gained through many years of experience. He explains how there could be indefinable differences in handling characteristics between one sailing ship and another. The loading of cargo on to a sailing vessel was a fine art, affecting the performance of the ship at sea. An officer who was hard of hearing had great difficulty, because hearing is important in determining the speed and direction of the wind.    

This is the dangerous maritime world before radar or wireless, where a ship posted “overdue” and then “missing” had probably sunk with all hands, its loss never to be explained, as if it had simply vanished.

Much of this is romantic in tone with the west wind personified as a great king and sailing ships regarded as living creatures, but Conrad never loses sight of the complete indifference of nature to human concerns. “The most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty”.

There is a whole chapter devoted to the Thames estuary and the London docks as they were around the end of the nineteenth century. This is fascinating and was a big influence on Rachel Lichtenstein when she wrote her own book about the estuary in 2016.

There is much here for any admirer of Conrad’s fiction to enjoy. Inevitably in a book like this some parts are more interesting than others. The chapter called The Tremolino is an account of an early Mediterranean voyage made by Conrad. It reads like one of his short stories, making the reader wonder if it is quite as factual as the rest of the book. In the last chapter, Conrad gives us an account of the career of Lord Nelson.

The book is a lament for a lost art, for the days when sailors had to understand and respect the moods of the sea. Who knows, with the way the world is going, sailing ships may yet make a return.                

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.

Plain Murder by C S Forester

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Plain Murder was the second of C S Forester’s crime novels and was published in 1930. It’s really a portrait of what came to be known later on as a psychopath, although Forester does not actually use that word. It’s comparatively short and fast-paced, with not a word wasted and a good balance between plot and character.

Forester writes in a rather detached style, and the overall effect is like a cross between Patrick Hamilton and Georges Simenon, with a similar sense of the characters being trapped by circumstances and their own limitations. The nineteen thirties atmosphere is like a black and white photograph. It’s no surprise that these books have been called “London Noir”.        

It’s set in an advertising agency and when the story opens, three young men who work there are discussing what to do about the fact that their scheme to bribe clients has been discovered. Morris is the ringleader and he has rather pushed his colleagues, Oldroyd and Reddy, into going along with it. They fear dismissal without a “character” (a good reference), which would make it almost impossible to get another job. This is London on the verge of the great depression with no welfare safety net.

Morris realises that the manager, Harrison, has not yet told the owner of the company that he is going to sack the three of them. Noticing that the next day is Bonfire Night, he persuades the other two that the only way out is to murder Harrison. Oldroyd has a pistol and Reddy has a motorcycle; their participation is necessary for the plan to work and Morris convinces them that he alone will be criminally responsible. He carries out the killing, the noise of the shots covered by the fireworks, and then scornfully tells the other two that they are accessories to murder who could face hanging if discovered, so must keep their mouths shut about what he has done.

Morris appears to have got away with it. The police make no headway with their investigation and he is promoted to take Harrison’s place. The irony is that the working-class Morris is a much more vigorous and dynamic manager than the rather languid Harrison ever was.

Morris becomes more and more convinced of his cleverness and superiority, both as a successful criminal and someone who is going places in the world of advertising. Meanwhile, young Reddy’s conscience is troubling him deeply. Morris realises that Reddy is likely to blurt out exactly what has happened. He begins to think that he will have to be disposed of too. He approaches this problem like an artist thinking out a creative difficulty. Inspiration strikes when he sees his wife pushing their son’s pram at the top of the hill on the estate where they live. If she let go, there would be nothing to stop the pram running down the hill into the busy traffic on the main road at the bottom.

He contrives a meeting with Reddy and invites him to tea. While he is there, Morris slips away and tampers with Reddy’s motorcycle. Shortly after he leaves, the drive chain comes off because Morris has loosened it; the brakes won’t work because Morris has loosened them too and Reddy is unable to lose any speed as the bike accelerates down the hill and into the stream of traffic where he is killed. The police assume that the drive chain snapped accidently and the brakes were damaged in the subsequent crash. Forester suggests that the German police system, where every citizen has a file, might possibly have led the police to connect Reddy to Morris. If they had realised that Reddy worked at an office where the manager had been murdered in mysterious circumstances and that he had just left the house of another man who worked there, they might have taken a different view of events.

Morris has got away with it again. He now feels that he is a sort of superman and he starts to view other people as “mere tools and instruments that he could use and throw aside”. Forester tells us that the main characteristic of a criminal is “an unusual idea of the importance of his own well-being compared with the importance of the well-being, or the opinions, or the ideals of other people”.

The business goes from strength to strength and more staff are required. The owner brings his daughter to work there and Morris thinks she is a very attractive girl. If only he was not shackled to his wife! Here is another little problem for him to give some creative thought to. He is detached from reality now, completely misinterpreting the young girl’s mild flirting. And he realises that Oldroyd is becoming a problem for him too.

To go beyond this point would spoil the book for anyone who has not read it. I’ll just point out that there are three murders, one that the police can’t solve and two that are never thought to be murders at all. No-one is punished, or at least not by the law. The resolution is very satisfying to the reader. It’s a novel that is almost a hundred years old and has lost none of its power.

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.