Tag: Poetry

L’Art, 1910 by Ezra Pound

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I am beginning to wonder whether I will ever be able to go to an art exhibition again, so on this first anniversary of the UK lockdown, here is an appropriate poem.

Every word counts in this short, haiku-like poem. In the title, for instance, we have “L’Art” rather than “Art” and that specific date. This was the year of the post-impressionist exhibition in London that introduced Van Gogh, Cezanne and other French modern artists to a puzzled public.

The poem is a very good example of imagism, the poetic style that sought to make a break with the more wordy Victorian style of poetry, just as artists were trying to find new means of visual representation.

There are strange clashes here, red and green, food and poison, but the overall impression is a sense of excitement, helped by that exclamation mark and the use of the word “feast”. To me, it conveys the sheer pleasure of oil paint thickly applied to the canvas.     

L’Art, 1910 by Ezra Pound

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

The Dead Knight by John Masefield

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Here is another overlooked gem from John Masefield that I discovered not long ago. I can’t find an exact date for this poem. The anthology from which I took it was published in 1928, so it was written before then, at least.

I think the date is important because it could well have been written either during the first world war or in its long shadow. I wonder whether Masefield was inviting his original readers to think of the casualties of the western front. Can anyone out there shed any light on this for me?

The theme of the poem also bears some resemblance to the Scottish language ballad, The Twa Corbies, by our old friend anonymous. I can’t help feeling too, that it might have inspired the lyrics of the 1967 song Conquistador by Procul Harum. 

Perhaps it’s not the most original theme. Be that as it may, Masefield made a haunting, musical and memorable poem out of it.


The Dead Knight by John Masefield

The cleanly rush of the mountain air,
And the mumbling, grumbling humble-bees,
Are the only things that wander there,
The pitiful bones are laid at ease,
The grass has grown in his tangled hair,
And a rambling bramble binds his knees.

To shrieve his soul from the pangs of hell,
The only requiem-bells that rang
Were the hare-bell and the heather-bell.
Hushed he is with the holy spell
In the gentle hymn the wind sang,
And he lies quiet, and sleeps well.

He is bleached and blanched with the summer sun;
The misty rain and cold dew
Have altered him from the kingly one
(That his lady loved, and his men knew)
And dwindled him to a skeleton.

The vetches have twined about his bones,
The straggling ivy twists and creeps
In his eye-sockets; the nettle keeps
Vigil about him while he sleeps.
Over his body the wind moans
With a dreary tune throughout the day,
In a chorus wistful, eerie, thin
As the gull’s cry — as the cry in the bay
The mournful word the seas say
When tides are wandering out or in.

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.