Wilfrid Owen's 'The Parable of the Old man and the Young'

Men of the Royal Irish Rifles in the opening hours of the battle of the Somme 1916

Wilfrid Owen (1893-1918)

The last of a short run of poems in which poets use familiar names and stories in their poems.

In the Book of Genesis ,Abraham is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride God offers him, and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between Biblical sacrifice and the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men wearing belts and straps. I’ve always felt that he didn’t trust his readers to make that link

At the risk of being heretical, Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the same point more powerfully, and more effectively.

John Dressel's 'Lets Hear It For Goliath'

John Dressel (b1934)

I worry about my pronunciation of people’s names, so if I have mispronounced John Dressel’s I apologise. 

Like Hamlet (see previous episode) Goliath has escaped his story.

Recently a news headline read; ‘Firm wins in David and Goliath legal battle’.

The writer of the headline was confident that the reader would know that this meant a battle between a small firm and a much bigger one. The writer was also positioning the reader to see the smaller as heroic and admirable, and the bigger as the bad guy in the case.

The story of David and Goliath has entered into popular discourse, and people who have never read the Bible know enough to make sense of that headline.

But there’s no reason why we should automatically sympathise with David, or with every small entity taking on a larger one. Dressel’s poem makes this point, playfully.

This poem is taken from ‘Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry’ edited by Dannie Abse and printed by Seren/Poetry Wales Press 1997, reprinted 1998.   

Gwyn Thomas’ 'You've Lived'.

Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016)

This is the first of a run of poems in which poets use other works of literature or characters from literature to make a point or to consider an idea. Hamlet is one of the most famous characters in the western tradition, so much so that he has escaped his play and lives a life of his own. People who have never seen a version of the play or read it have heard of him. ‘To be or not to be’ entered everyday speech so long ago it may be used without any knowledge of what the rest of the speech contains.

It’s a young man struggling to verbalise a reason for either living or dying.
Anyone can be driven to ask ‘what is the point’ or ‘what is the meaning of life’. You don’t need to be haunted by what may be the revengeful ghost of your father, or suspect your mother of adultery with your regicidal, fratricidal uncle. Once the religious and philosophical answers have been rejected, the purpose of life becomes finding a a purpose that will make life seem desirable. As Thomas says in this poem, it doesn’t have to be a desire to win an olympic medal or climb mount Everest. Growing onions will do it. Only when you have a reason to live, that matters to you, will you fear death, and only having feared death will you have lived.

I found this poem quoted at the end of Tony Conran’s introduction to ‘Welsh Verse; Translations by Tony Conran.’ Poetry Wales Press 1986. I knew of Gwyn Thomas as a translator of The Mabinogion and his reputation as a poet. I know very little about this poem except I assume it’s translated by Tony Conran from Welsh. If anyone knows differently please let me know.

W.B.Yeats' 'Politics'

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

I have been rereading Yeats. Something I recommend everyone with an interest in English poetry should do. It’s difficult to think of a collected poems which has so many great poems in it, or where the quality improves chronologically.

This poem sits at the end of his ‘Last Poems’. It’s not a great poem by his standards, but the honesty of it is appealing. Old men are just young men in failing bodies and Yeats was acutely aware of this. The last two lines express an impossible wish but also acknowledge and accept what has passed.
If you wanted to, you could ask yourself which is the more human response: the men obsessed with politics, or the man admiring the girl. You could also ask yourself which one of the two is less likely to start a war.

Roy Fisher's Birmingham Screwdriver.

Roy Fisher (1930-2017)

Roy Fisher is one of those poets who are highly regarded by critics and readers who know his work, and yet nowhere near as well known as he should be.

This poem is an extract from Talking to Cameras, the first part of the sequence ‘Texts for a Film’. I laughed the first time I read it. As he explains, a Birmingham screwdriver is a hammer, I grew up in Coventry, about 20 miles from Birmingham, and I often heard the phrase. It’s one of those faintly humorous regional insults that abound in the UK, suggesting something about the craftsmanship and craftsmen from Birmingham.
But Fisher takes what is an insult and turns it into a mediation on a way of thinking. It’s the shift, and the humour, that distinguishes this poem.

The poem is taken from ‘The Long and Short of it, poems 1955-2010 (new edition 2012) Bloodaxwe books.

W.B.Yeats' 'The Fisherman'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential.

At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem’s most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he’s old, he will have written him one poem ‘as cold/and passionate as the dawn’.

You can spend some time admiring those two adjectives, and the effect they create.

Hugh Kenner suggested the difference between Yeats and Pound, or Yeats and most poets, was that Pound, once he’d left London, could sit in relative isolation at his typewriter in Rapallo telling himself he was a genius and dismissing any rumours of negative response to his work as the sniping of lesser interigences. Yeats, standing in the wings at the abbey theatre was forced to confront an often baffled, sometimes hostile audience. It might be one of the reasons Yeats’ poems got better as he got older.

Jeremy Hooker's '1st of July 2016

Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941)

I’m assuming this poem was written to commemorate the Hundredth Anniversary of the First Day of the Somme offensive in 1916. When i was at school we learnt the statistics; 60,00 casualties, 20, 00 of them dead. In one morning, between 7.30am and “lunch time”. By the end of the battle, which got them nowhere, when the snows closed it down in November, British, Empire and allied troops had suffered over half a million casualties.
While historians might debate the significance of the battle and the actual casuality figures, (57,470 of which 19,240 died). The image of men lined up in rows and ordered to advance into machine gun fire was a dark shadow on the collective imagination, made more terrible by the fact they were fighting in a ‘war to end wars’.

Hooker shows how effective a poem can be without the poet having to resort to distorted syntax, complex rhyme schemes or obscure allusions. The tragedy is summed up …’the old men/that we knew and the young men/we did not.’ The poem also deftly suggests a difference between then and now in its play on ‘divisions.’

The poem is taken from Hooker’s excellent ‘Word and Stone’ (Sheearsman 2019).

Liam Guilar's 'Akhmatova's requiem'

I read the poem Requiem by Anna Akhmatova on a previous podcast.

Several things made this poem happen. WHile Akhmatova lived through Stalin’s times, many of the people who persecuted her are now forgotten, they are just ‘footnotes in her history’.

I used her poem as part of a unit on poetry in translation. I would tell the story of how, when it was being written, she would write the new verses on cigarette paper. She would show them silently to her friend, who would nod when she had memorised the lines, then they would burn the paper.

Classes often found this most moving part of her story.

But at the end of every lesson, there’d be at least one of the printed copies of the poem left in the classroom, often dropped on the floor. Once one of the papers had a foot print on it.

The poem first appeared in the Irish Journal , The SHOp, and was then chosen for ‘The SHOp, An Anthology of Poetry’, their ‘best of’ collection.

Patrick Kavanagh's 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin..'

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)

Clicking the Kavanagh tag at the bottom of the page will take you to a reading of ‘Kerr’s Ass’.

The full title of this poems is: 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal , Dublin, 'Erected to the memory of Mrs Dermot O'Brien' It belongs to a cluster he wrote later in life, and his friends took him at his word, clubbed together and made him a memorial which you can see in the picture.

One cold December day in Dublin, before google maps, I set out to walk to the canal to find the statue. I found it, and Raglan Road which is near by, but that bench seat is metal. You have to be dedicated to sit there long enough to have your photo taken when the temperature is hovering round zero. .

Alun Lewis' 'The Swan's way'

Alun Lewis (1915-1944)

Considered by some one of the few great poets to serve and write during the second world war.

This is his take on the myth of Leda and the Swan. Zeus turns himself into a swan to rape leda, and Helen of Troy is born. It’s been a subject in art since Classical times.

Yeats wrote a fine poem on the same subject. But in Lewis’ version the God disguised as Swan is stricken by an understanding of what he’s done. Such remorse rarely figures in either the pictures or the stories.

Liam Guilar's 'These heroics One and Two'.

Two poems, written some years apart.

The modern admiration for the action hero seems like a childish escape into fantasy, until you realise the implications. Real heroism, the courage to keep going on a daily basis where there is no simple victory, no cheering crowd, no prize, goes unnoticed.

These heroics number one is takes from I’ll Howl before you bury me. These heroics number two from Rough spun to Close Weave.

Both are still available from www.liamguilar.com

(A note on pronunciation. There are at least two ways of pronouncing Cuchulainn. I naturalised mine from Irish speakers I grew up with. At university I was told: ‘Oh Guilar, you mean Kah Hool lin’. He said it in such a patronising way, in his Bow Tie English Accent, that I have stuck with what I started with. )

Dylan Thomas' 'The Force that though the green fuse drives the flower'

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

I first encountered Thomas’s writing when I was in high school. Naturally, this discovery had nothing to do with school, I found the recording of Under Milkwood in the city record library. Richard Burton reading First Voice ! That opening!

I was captivated by the astonishing sound scape, and the humour of the script. From there I went to the short stories in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog, an obsession it took a decade to escape.

The poems I was never sure about. There were some that were immediately attractive, And Death shall have no Dominion, Do not go gentle into that good night, (both read on the Poetry Voice) but most of the poems baffled my desire for a prose sense.

Your response to Thomas’s poems is always going to reveal a lot about what you appreciate in a poem. If you like sound, they are magnificent. It’s very difficult not to read 'The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ without launching into an imitation of an ecstatic revivalist preacher pounding the pulpit. It took me several takes to escape from it.

If you are looking for prose sense you may be disappointed. If you’re looking for original ideas you will be looking in the wrong place.

The idea in the poem, all living things are linked, is hardly new. But that in no way detracts from the drive of the syntax. This poem is a good antidote to those who confuse poetry and philosophy. If you want rationally argued philosophy or theology stop being lazy and read the philosophers and the theologians.

And if you pay too much attention this poem also seems to be in two halves. The first two quatrains are magnificent, but then the force of the repeated ‘the force that’….is dissipated. If you think too long about the statements in the rest of the poem you might start to ask the wrong questions and undermine the rhetorical flourish. You might even wonder if Thomas, young as he was when he wrote this, found himself with eight magnificent lines and had no real idea what to do with them.

Or you might just sit back and go with the marvellous surge of the verse.

William Blake's 'London'.

A London Street in 1902. Poverty hadn’t changed much since Blake’s time

William Blake (1757-1827)

For some, Blake is the great visionary poet of the 18/19th century. He had to wait a long time until his reputation and position amongst some critics was established. He can still seem like a peripheral character who became lost in his own private mythology.

There’s an odd sense in some corners of poetry world that you have to like or admire certain poets. As much as I admire this particular poem, and it is undeniably a great poem and a fine work of social criticism, I am bored by the majority of Blake’s poetry, especially the longer works.

There was a time I thought this was a failure on my part and I would have apologised for it. Obviously the result of a lack of intelligence on my part, or a failure of critical acumen. But one of the great liberations in reading poetry comes when you realise that you don’t have to like anything.

Think music. There are fans of Wagner who don’t like Purcell, and fans of guitar based music who don’t like The Stones.

Think literature. There are educated people who see no greatness in James Joyce and readers who still think T.S.Eliot was a fraud.

Read widely, dismiss nothing at first encounter, listen to other people and their preferences, but don’t be deterred from the effort to find what love..

Liam Guilar's 'Byron In Venice: The poet in Exile.'

The Grand Canal in Venice

 Byron in Venice

(The poet in exile)

 The debris of a city in decline
slops at the crumbling steps,
as the sun sets over palaces 
even dusk can’t dignify.

 The clock strikes, he puts down the page
and calls for servants. Suddenly
cannot remember if he is to meet
the opera singer or the serving maid.

 No matter how elaborate the choreography,
his hands run free, his mind completes the rhyme.
Afterwards, duty done, excuses made, 
he’ll coax these stanzas to their climax 

 and scrawl defiance on the blank of time’s indifference,
graffiti on the walls of history. 
He has explored the tangled pathways of his heart
and written travelogues for those who stayed at home. 

If that leads here, to age and desolation;
the fading light, broken on the Grand Canal,
where life is repetition, and even lust grows stale;
the boys and women he has loved 

the friends he misses as he dines alone,
faded signatures on bundled letters,
locks of hair, old arguments the night returns;
if it leads here; beyond the poem, what remains? 

An aging face, once beautiful,  
staring through its own reflection,
soliciting an audience
to dignify the commonplace as art?

I wrote it after reading Byron’s letters. All twelve volumes. I was thinking about what it means to write, to live abroad, to use writing to organise memory. What happens when a commonplace experience or emotion is written about by a master like Byron? Is there any point to writing poetry?

The poem is taken from ‘From Rough Spun to Close Weave’. Signed copies are available from the shop at

www. Liamguilar.com Otherwise available at online book sellers.

R.S. Thomas' 'Mice'

R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)

R.S. Thomas outside his cottage

Over the course of a long life R.S.Thomas produced one of the most interesting bodies of work in the twentieth century. He wrote a lot, and most of what he wrote was short poems like this one, which work like a pebble dropped into the pond.

The speaker is listening to mice.

For a priest like Thomas, nagging away at his relationship to his God, how much doubt is healthy? At what point do the questions bring down the building?

Think of it another way.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, then the over examined life might well be unliveable. An informed, grounded skepticism might be healthy, but too much skepticism is simply destructive.

A bad poem would preach an answer. This one doesn’t.

Jeremy Hooker's 'Gull on a Post'

Jeremy Hooker (Born 1941)

Shearsman published Hooker’s Selected poems (1965-2018) in 2020. It’s an impressive body of work, through provoking, moving, and very enjoyable to read.

I like the way this poem uses a single, familiar (If you live near the coast) image to explore a complex idea, and resists the temptation to shut down the exploration with a neat conclusion. I also like the way the poem never loses sight of the physical world. The gull and the post are always a gull and a post, carefully observed, rather than a convenient symbol for the poet’s musings. He’s right about Gulls’ eyes.

Meirion Jordan's 'Arawn Lord of Annwn'

Meirion Jordan (Born 1985)

This is the second of two readings of poems based on the Welsh prose Mabinogion. This is taken from Meirion Jordan’s ‘Regeneration/Redbook’. While Mathew Francis retells the stories, (see previous Podcast) Jordan uses his poems to respond to them.

Based on the stories, but treating them aslant, his poems raise the question of whether a poem like this works if you don’t know the story. Or even if they do work when you do know the background.

In the Mabinogion Arawn appears in the first branch. Seas of ink have been split over the translation of ‘Annwn’ or ‘Annwfn’. Though sometimes translated as Hell, it lacks the negative overtones of the Christian version, and in both irish and Welsh literature ‘the other world’ is not a bad place to visit. in the First Branch of the Mabinogion, after meeting Arawn, Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, is able to ride to Annwn where he spends a thoroughly enjoyable year feasting, hunting and carousing.

George Herbert's 'The Collar'

George Herbert 1593-1633

Herbert was a priest, and his poetry has been described as ‘some of the most moving devotional poetry in the English Language’. But often, as in this poem, the relationship between priest and god, is strained.

‘The collar’ runs on a series of puns, some depending on spellings and usage which are not longer current, and which may not be evident in a reading. A collar was a yoke, but also a priest’s collar, a sign of service. It’s also a way of being caught, and an aural pun on choler, or anger. A board was a table, but also the altar. Free as the rode is free as the road and free as the rode (the Cross). ‘Still in suit’ puns on both Still and suit…And so on. He was Donne’s contemporary after all.

Of all Herbert’s poems why this one? For very non religious reasons. It reminds of those moments when study becomes onerous; progress isn’t progressing, time and effort seem wasted and the thought of doing anything that will give an immediate return, no matter how trivial, becomes so very attractive.

Having flung the grammars at the wall, and sworn to never open them again, sooner or later the voice is chiding…childe….calling you back to the necessities of discipline.

Herbert has been the subject of a fine biography: Music at Midnight by John Drury. Penguin published his complete English poems. Mark Oakley’s, ‘My Sour Sweet Days, George Herbert and the Journey fo the Soul’ is a gentle thoughtful non-academic introduction.

Sappho's 'Fragment 31'

Sappho (c600 BC)

Possibly the most famous female poet in history? Well known and highly respected in her own Greek culture. Her name is still very well known, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. Very little of her work survives, and most of it seems to be fragments.

There are numerous attempts at translating this particular poem: Catullus, Campion, Bunting and others have done their best. I like this version because it respects the fragment and works as a poem.

This is taken from Sappho, Poems and Fragments, translated by Josephine Balmer. Published by Bloodaxe books.

Carol Ann Duffy's 'You'

Carol Ann Duffy (1955-)

This is the first poem in Duffy’s ‘Rapture’ (2005), which is either a book length love poem or a book length sequence of poems which chart the rise and fall of a passionate love affair. ‘Rapture’ won the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2005.

For many people the relationship between love and poetry seems a simple one. But of the thousands of poems written each day, and the thousands published each year, there are very few good love poems. As an experiment, pick up a general anthology of English poetry through the ages and see how many you can find. As is often pointed out: ‘I love you’ may be the most beautiful thing you’ll ever say, or hear, but it’s not a poem.

Because of this, ‘Rapture’ is an outstanding collection, as the poems move from ‘Love’s first plague to her wintry fever’.