Tag: Poem

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 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.

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.

Why Did I Dream of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

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It’s slightly confusing with Philip Larkin. There are two volumes entitled The Collected Poems. The earlier one, published soon after his death in 1986, contains many uncollected poems that Larkin might not have intended to preserve in book form. The later volume is a more streamlined affair, consisting of Larkin’s four published books and some later uncollected poems.

I only have the shorter volume to hand and this poem does not appear in it, so I have to assume that Why Did I Dream of you Last Night?is a relatively early poem by Larkin.

It’s got that distinctive realistic tone, capturing accurately an experience we have probably all had at one time or another. “Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;” is a wonderful line. Personally, I think it deserves a place in any collection of poems by Larkin. If he did not consider this one worthy of preservation, it just goes to show what a high standard he set himself. 

Why Did I Dream of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

Why did I dream of you last night?
   Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
 Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
         beyond the window.

   So many things I had thought forgotten
 Return to my mind with stranger pain:
– Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon

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Sassoon is famous as a poet of the first world war, but On Scratchbury Camp was written during the second world war, in 1942. Scratchbury Camp is an iron-age hill fort in Wiltshire and Sassoon lived nearby for much of his life. This is an altogether calmer and more reflective piece than the angry and bitter western front poems.

The poem captures the atmosphere of the Wiltshire downs on a June day. The distant past and the present are linked, as are human activity and the natural world. By describing the way in which the ancient fort seems to have been absorbed into the landscape, Sassoon is suggesting that one day the current war will be forgotten. The dreamy mood tells us that the older Sassoon is content to be an observer of this new war rather than a participant.

I think there is a certain resemblance to John Masefield’s poems of the southern English countryside here.

The linking of modern aeroplanes to the distant past of the landscape also reminds me of the opening of Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale.

On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon

Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon,
Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue,
Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June.

Shadows outspread in spacious movement, always you
Have dappled the downs and valleys at this time of year,
While larks, ascending shrill, praised freedom as they flew.
Now, through that song, a fighter-squadron’s drone I hear
From Scratchbury Camp, whose turfed and cowslip’d rampart seems
More hill than history, ageless and oblivion-blurred.

I walk the fosse, once manned by bronze and flint-head spear;
On war’s imperious wing the shafted sun-ray gleams:
One with the warm sweet air of summer stoops the bird.

Cloud shadows, drifting slow like heedless daylight dreams,
Dwell and dissolve; uncircumstanced they pause and pass.
I watch them go. My horse, contented, crops the grass.

Calmly we walk through this April’s day by Delmore Schwartz

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There were many fine poets in America in the twentieth century but Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) seems to have been rather overshadowed by those who came after him. He is perhaps best known today as Lou Reed’s mentor at Syracuse university and the inspiration for the title character of Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift.

Like some other poems I have written about here, I discovered this one in the Faber anthology, One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets.

There’s a word in the second verse that I had to look up: “theodicy”. It’s an attempt to explain the existence of evil in a world created by God.

This is a serious poem, a contemplation of one of the classic themes of poetry, the passage of time. From one specific day in 1937, the poem moves mainly back but also forwards in time. I passed a milestone birthday the other day, so the last five lines take on quite a significance for me.

Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day reminds me a bit of T S Eliot, with the language alternating between the modern and colloquial and phrases that seem somehow Elizabethan. 

Calmly we walk through this April’s day by Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn …)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn …)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn …)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(… that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
                   No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Bridge Guard in the Karoo by Rudyard Kipling

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In his selection A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, made in 1941, T S Eliot wrote that Kipling should not be seen as a bad poet but as a great writer of verse. He didn’t really give a clear definition of what he thought the difference between “poetry” and “verse” to be, though. Understandably, given the time it was published, his choice tended more towards the patriotic side of Kipling’s work.

Craig Raine’s 1991 selection included poems that Eliot had omitted, because Raine was keen to stress Kipling’s skill as a poet. The one below is an example. Kipling had already published his Barrack Room Ballads and this is a more poetic development of those perhaps, with the same concern for the plight of the ordinary soldier. It’s a military poem, set during a war, but it doesn’t describe combat. It was published in The Times in 1901, then included in the collection The Five Nations. It reflected Kipling’s experiences as an observer of the Boer War.  

It’s a wonderfully vivid evocation of the South African landscape and the isolation of the men guarding the bridge. It’s impossible to read without the scene coming clearly into one’s mind’s eye. It’s almost cinematic. Kipling’s precise choice of words, the short lines and the strong rhythm all contribute to the overall effect. Has a sunset ever been described in a better way than the second and third verses here? Notice also that as the sun sets and night descends, later in the poem, Kipling picks out the sounds that can be heard.

Whatever one thinks of the “verse” or “poetry” argument, I think this is Kipling at his very best and you won’t be surprised to find it is my favourite of his poems.

Bridge-Guard in the Karroo by Rudyard Kipling

 “ …and will supply details to guard the Blood River Bridge”

District Orders: Lines of Communication
—South African War.

Sudden the desert changes,
  The raw glare softens and clings,
Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges
  Stand up like the thrones of Kings—

Ramparts of slaughter and peril—
  Blazing, amazing, aglow—
’Twixt the sky-line’s belting beryl
  And the wine-dark flats below.

Royal the pageant closes,
  Lit by the last of the sun—
Opal and ash-of-roses
  Cinnamon, umber, and dun.

The twilight swallows the thicket,
  The starlight reveals the ridge.
The whistle shrills to the picket—
  We are changing guard on the bridge.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
  Where the empty metals shine—
No, not combatants—only
  Details guarding the line.)

We slip through the broken panel
  Of fence by the ganger’s shed;
We drop to the waterless channel
  And the lean track overhead;

We stumble on refuse of rations,
  The beef and the biscuit-tins;
We take our appointed stations,
   And the endless night begins.

We hear the Hottentot herders
  As the sheep click past to the fold—
And the click of the restless girders
  As the steel contracts in the cold—

Voices of jackals calling
   And, loud in the hush between,
A morsel of dry earth falling
  From the flanks of the scarred ravine.

And the solemn firmament marches
  And the hosts of heaven rise
Framed through the iron arches—
  Banded and barred by the ties,

Till we feel the far track humming,
  And we see her headlight plain,
And we gather and wait her coming—
  The wonderful north-bound train.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
  Where the white car-windows shine—
No, not combatants—only
  Details guarding the line.)

Quick, ere the gift escape us!
  Out of the darkness we reach
For a handful of week-old papers
  And a mouthful of human speech.

And the monstrous heaven rejoices,
  And the earth allows again,
Meetings, greetings, and voices
  Of women talking with men.

So we return to our places,
  As out on the bridge she rolls;
And the darkness covers our faces,
  And the darkness re-enters our souls.

More than a little lonely
  Where the lessening tail-lights shine.
No—not combatants—only
  Details guarding the line!

Grass by Carl Sandburg

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I don’t think Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) is as widely read in the UK as he has been in his native United States. Perhaps his declamatory, free verse style is more of an American taste. I had never even heard of him when I saw this poem displayed in a tube train carriage as part of the Poems on the Underground initiative some years ago. I think it was published in 1918.

What brought it back into my mind more recently? I think it must have been an article about the Ukraine war that I read not long ago, illustrated with a photograph of a trench that could have come from the first world war.

Nothing changes, I thought and that is the message of this poem. War seems to be a permanent part of the human condition. People forget. They don’t like to think about it, so nothing changes. The personification of the grass in this straightforward and direct poem represents the process of forgetting.    

Grass by Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                             I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
                                            What place is this?
                                            Where are we now?

                                            I am the grass.
                                            Let me work.