Tag: Poem

Deer by John Drinkwater

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It feels like it happened to someone else now, but just before the lockdown started I had a temporary job. To get there, I took a train down a rural railway line, a sort of reverse commute, if you like, going away from town.

I was sitting in a modern electric train yet passing through countryside that couldn’t have changed too much since the line was built over one hundred years ago.

Every morning in the pale March sunshine, I saw scenes that reminded me of the paintings of Eric Ravilious. Where was that rusting water tank on a muddy track? Where exactly was that row of ancient cottages, or those fields accessible only by footpath? I made a mental note to look on the map and visit them one day.

I saw kestrels and buzzards flying over fields that were full of rabbits and pheasants. There were sheep, horses and, to my great surprise, deer. Did someone own these creatures, or were they wild? One evening, I saw a lone deer exploring the woods on the bank of a narrow river, and I decided they must be wild.

That brings me rather neatly to the poem below. John Drinkwater (1882-1937) was one of the group of poets who lived in or visited the Gloucestershire village of Dymock in the years just before the first world war. Others included Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas. I don’t know exactly when this poem was written, but it does capture rather well what I felt when I saw the deer.

 

Deer by John Drinkwater  

Shy in their herding dwell the fallow deer.
They are spirits of wild sense. Nobody near
Comes upon their pastures. There a life they live,
Of sufficient beauty, phantom, fugitive,
Treading as in jungles free leopards do,
Printless as evelight, instant as dew.
The great kine* are patient, and home-coming sheep
Know our bidding. The fallow deer keep
Delicate and far their counsels wild,
Never to be folded reconciled
To the spoiling hand as the poor flocks are;
Lightfoot, and swift, and unfamiliar,
These you may not hinder, unconfined
Beautiful flocks of the mind.

 

*old word for cattle

 

 

 

 

Madam Life’s a Piece in Bloom by W E Henley

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I have to apologise for the lack of posts recently. I’ve been in hospital having some rather serious surgery. Face masks all round, no visitors,  and Covid swab tests; it’s hardly surprising that the poem below popped into my mind. W E Henley wrote this in 1877. His Invictus is probably better known today, but I prefer this one. After all, we’ve all been trying to avoid meeting the ruffian on the stair recently, haven’t we.

 

Madam Life’s a Piece in Bloom by W E Henley

Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair.

You shall see her as a friend,
You shall bilk him once or twice;
But he’ll trap you in the end,
And he’ll stick you for her price.

With his kneebones at your chest,
And his knuckles in your throat,
You would reason — plead — protest!
Clutching at her petticoat;

But she’s heard it all before,
Well she knows you’ve had your fun,
Gingerly she gains the door,
And your little job is done.

 

Battle of Britain by C Day Lewis

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The skies over South East England have been quieter and emptier than we are used to of late. Eighty years ago they were full of warplanes as the Battle of Britain began.

This poem was written in 1970 by the then poet laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, for the thirtieth anniversary.

The big-budget cinematic re-enactment of the battle was released around that time, and if my memory is correct, this poem was printed in the programme for the film.

I like the way the narrator of the poem is a witness to the real events, speaking to someone younger for whom they are history. It deserves to be better known, I think.

 

Battle of Britain by C Day Lewis

What did we earth-bound make of it? A tangle
Of vapour trails, a vertiginously high
Swarming of midges, at most a fiery angel
Hurled out of heaven, was all we could descry.

How could we know the agony and pride
That scrawled those fading signatures up there,
And the cool expertise of those who died
Or lived through that delirium of the air?

Grounded on history now, we re-enact
Such lives, such deaths. Time, laughing out of court
The newspaper heroics and the faked
Statistics, leaves us only to record

What was, what might have been: fighter and bomber,
The tilting sky, tense moves and counterings;
Those who outlived that legendary summer;
Those who went down, its sunlight on their wings.

And you, unborn then, what will you make of it—
This shadow-play of battles long ago?
Be sure of this: they pushed to the uttermost limit
Their luck, skill, nerve. And they were young like you.

 

 

 

Ha’nacker Mill by Hilaire Belloc

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I knew who Belloc was, but I did not know much about him. One of the giants of Edwardian writing and friend of G K Chesterton. I was familiar with Cautionary Tales for Children, of course, perhaps his most famous work today. And then there is that poem The South Country, with its repeated references to “the men who were boys when I was a boy”.

But it wasn’t until I saw a television programme about writers in Sussex that I began to realise the depth of Belloc’s attachment to the Sussex countryside over many years.

That led me to the poem below, from 1923. The ruined windmill and the desolate field suggest the end of a rural way of life that was coming to a close at that time. It’s a lament, really, and a poem that needs to be heard to get the full effect.

 

Ha’nacker Mill by Hilaire Belloc 

Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha’nacker Hill.
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly
And ever since then the clapper is still. . .
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha’nacker Mill.

Ha’nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.

Spirits that call and no one answers;
Ha’nacker’s down and England’s done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers,
And never a ploughman under the Sun.
Never a ploughman. Never a one.

 

 

 

The Belfry by Laurence Binyon

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Like most people, I suppose, I knew Laurence Binyon for the famous lines from his 1914 poem For the Fallen: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old/Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn/At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.”

The poem below is in a rather different vein and is completely new to me. I found it in Walter de la Mare’s wonderful anthology Come Hither, which has been a source of inspiration to me for some time now, as it’s full of exactly the sort of poetry I like. The Belfry is rather reminiscent of the style of de la Mare’s own poetry, I feel. It really comes to life if you read it aloud. I don’t know exactly when it was written.

I think it also appeals to me, partly because I too had the childhood experience of climbing up inside an ancient church tower.

 

The Belfry

Dark is the stair, and humid the old walls
Wherein it winds, on worn stones, up the tower.
Only by loophole chinks at intervals
Pierces the late glow of this August hour.

Two truant children climb the stairway dark,
With joined hands, half in glee and half in fear,
The boy mounts brisk, the girl hangs back to hark
If the gruff sexton their light footstep hear.

Dazzled at last they gain the belfry-room.
Barred rays through shutters hover across the floor
Dancing in dust; so fresh they come from gloom
That breathless they pause wondering at the door.

How hushed it is! What smell of timbers old
From cobwebbed beams! The warm light here and there
Edging a darkness, sleeps in pools of gold,
Or weaves fantastic shadows through the air.

How motionless the huge bell! Straight and stiff,
Ropes through the floor rise to the rafters dim.
The shadowy round of metal hangs, as if
No force could ever lift its gleamy rim.

A child’s awe, a child’s wonder, who shall trace
What dumb thoughts on its waxen softness write
In such a spell-brimmed, time-forgotten place,
Bright in that strangeness of approaching night?

As these two gaze, their fingers tighter press;
For suddenly the slow bell upward heaves
Its vast mouth, the cords quiver at the stress,
And ere the heart prepare, the ear receives

Full on its delicate sense the plangent stroke
Of violent, iron, reverberating sound.
As if the tower in all its stones awoke,
Deep echoes tremble, again in clangour drowned,

That starts without a whir of frighted wings
And holds these young hearts shaken, hushed, and thrilled,
Like frail reeds in a rushing stream, like strings
Of music, or like trees with tempest filled,

And rolls in wide waves out o’er the lone land,
Tone following tone toward the far-setting sun,
Till where in fields long-shadowed reapers stand
Bowed heads look up, and lo, the day is done. . . .

 

 

 

The Coombe by Edward Thomas

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I don’t know what brought this one to mind again; perhaps walking in the woods, as I have done so often recently, listening to the birds singing. It’s one of Edward Thomas’ earliest poems, from 1914, I believe.

 

The Coombe

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

 

The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

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I’m lucky enough to live within ten minutes’ walk of some woods that I’ve known since I was a boy. It’s been a life saver to be able to go there during the lockdown. The place has been transformed, with no planes overhead and much less traffic noise.

Everything smells fresh and the birds all sing at the same time so it’s hard to tell the calls apart. Today we went a little further off the beaten track and surprised a bird in a hole in a tree trunk.

So many trees have grown up since I first knew the place. It’s a nature reserve now and allowed to run wild. It’s hard to pick out the features I knew so long ago and the paths seem to lead in different directions from how I remember them. I found the sunken field with a concrete retaining wall, where they used to race bicycles. It’s completely overgrown now.

As I wander the paths, trying to orientate myself, the opening words of Kipling’s poem come into my mind.

 

The Way Through the Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

 

 

 

A Wet Night by Thomas Hardy

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In these difficult times, here is a timely poetic reminder from Thomas Hardy, that those who came before us had to endure far worse and did so with stoicism.

 

I pace along, the rain-shafts riddling me,
Mile after mile out by the moorland way,
And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze gray
Into the lane, and round the corner tree;

Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred,
And the enfeebled light dies out of day,
Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say,
“This is a hardship to be calendared!”

Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot,
When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here,
And night and storm were foes indeed to fear,
Times numberless have trudged across this spot
In sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot,
And taking all such toils as trifles mere.

 

 

The Fighting Téméraire by Henry Newbolt

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To mark the appearance of Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire on the reverse of the £20 note, here is Henry Newbolt’s poem of the same title. The last verse captures in words the scene that Turner recorded in oils. (A linstock, by the way, is a staff that holds the match used to fire a cannon; it allowed the gunner to do so from a safe distance.)

 

It was eight bells ringing,
For the morning watch was done,
And the gunner’s lads were singing
As they polished every gun.
It was eight bells ringing,
And the gunner’s lads were singing,
For the ship she rode a-swinging,
As they polished every gun.

Oh! to see the linstock lighting,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
Oh! to hear the round shot biting,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
Oh! to see the linstock lighting,
And to hear the round shot biting,
For we’re all in love with fighting
On the fighting Téméraire.

It was noontide ringing,
And the battle just begun,
When the ship her way was winging,
As they loaded every gun.
It was noontide ringing,
When the ship her way was winging,
And the gunner’s lads were singing
As they loaded every gun.

There’ll be many grim and gory,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
There’ll be few to tell the story,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
There’ll be many grim and gory,
There’ll be few to tell the story,
But we’ll all be one in glory
With the Fighting Téméraire.

There’s a far bell ringing
At the setting of the sun,
And a phantom voice is singing
Of the great days done.
There’s a far bell ringing,
And a phantom voice is singing
Of renown for ever clinging
To the great days done.

Now the sunset breezes shiver,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
And she’s fading down the river,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
Now the sunset’s breezes shiver,
And she’s fading down the river,
But in England’s song for ever
She’s the Fighting Téméraire.

Weathers by Thomas Hardy

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I had been planning to post a favourite poem of mine, “Snow in the Suburbs” by Thomas Hardy, with a photo to match. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if there is going to be any snow in my neighbourhood this winter. Despite the wind and rain, we are heading towards spring. So, instead of a winter poem, here is another one by Hardy that contrasts spring and autumn.

 

Weathers

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at ‘The Traveller’s Rest,’
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.