Rudyard Kipling's 'If'

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

There was a time poems entered the language and were recycled in daily usage. And ‘If’ is perhaps one of the best examples of such a poem. It has been voted Britain’s Most popular poem, though I suspect that day has passed.

It’s full of good advice, memorably expressed. Nowhere does it suggest you need counselling or a handbook of excuses. But I can also imagine a Victorian father giving his son such a lecture, and the son walking out thinking, well, that’s that then. Not possible. Can’t do it. Might as well become some kind of debauched failure of a chronic sinner right now.

Federico Garcia Lorca's 'Somnambule Ballad'

A still from Un Chien Andalou

A still from Un Chien Andalou

Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

(Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L Gill)

For those outside Spain, who read no Spanish, Lorca is probably the most famous Spanish poet of the twentieth century.

This is a very different poem to the ones I’ve previously read on the podcast.

It helps, listening to this poem or reading it, to remember Lorca was friends with Dali and Bunuel. There is a story that when those two were making Un Chien Andalou, their ground breaking ‘surrealist’ film, one would sketch scenes and the other would say, no, that means something, throw it out.

‘Avant Garde’ and ‘Surrealist’ are terms that might be useful as pathways to approach this poem without necessarily being definitive or even accurate as labels.

For a long time I used this poem as an example of what happens when readers are confronted with work they find initially incomprehensible. Read it, I’d say, then come back and tell me what you think it means. The answers were often ingenious. They varied greatly. They were all interesting.

So what does it mean they’d ask.

It means what it says. Images that link without narrative, suggesting narrative, cohering because they linked in the writer’s mind at the time of writing. The links are not made explicit. But the images sing together.

Yes, but what does it mean?

Wrong question.

This is taken from ‘The Selected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca’ edited by Francisco Garcia Lorca and Donald m. Allen. A New Directions paperback 1985.

Charles Hamilton Sorley's 'When you see millions of the mouthless dead'

Charles Hamilton Sorley ( May 1895- October 1915)

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Sorely was killed by a sniper in 1915 while serving on the Western Front. This poem, written in pencil, was found amongst his belongings.

The few poems he had written were collected and published in January 1916 as ‘Marlborough and other poems’. This is taken from the slightly enlarged second edition of February 1916.

Had Sorely lived and continued to write, most of the poems in the book would probably have been filed away as ‘Juvenilia’. As it was, he didn’t get to revise any of them for publication.

He has been particularly well-served by Jean Moorcraft Wilson who not only wrote a Biography but collected and edited his letters and his poems.

You can read more about Sorely here:

https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2017/05/charles-hamilton-sorely-footnote-poet.html

C.P. Cavafy's 'The God Abandons Anthony'


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Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)

This is the second of Cavafy’s poems on the Podcast. Like the first it plays off a classical story. In this case it takes an incident from Plutarch’s life of Anthony, and shifts from the particular historical event, when Anthony is supposed to have heard his patron God, DIonysus leaving the city, to a more universal poem about loss and defeat. How should you behave when faced with failure?

The poem offers advice to an unnamed protagonist.

Leonard Cohen used this poem as a starting point for his song Alexandra Leaving, turning Alexandria the city into a human Alexandra and turning the general defeat into a romantic one.

This is taken from ‘C. P. Cavafy Collected Poems, revised edition’, trans Keeley and Sherrard, edited by George Savidis (Princeton University Press)


David Jones from 'The Fatigue'

David Jones (1895-1974)

Why me?

In this particular case, why is this soldier on duty at The Crucifixion and not that one?

More generally, why did some soldiers sign up for the first world war and find themselves in units sent into action on their first day at the front while others, signing up on the same day, found themselves transferred to garrison duties?

Why me? What impossible string of accidents and co-incidences caused me to be here at that particular place and time?

This extract from ‘The Fatigue’ answer that question. It begins a long way away in a guarded room. Anonymous decision makers make their decisions for reasons that are hidden, influenced by anything from bad wine, a broken heating system or a cold draft. It’s not personal. They didn’t choose you for a reason related to ‘who’ you are. But gradually the results of each decision pick up momentum. There’s an increase in the rhythm as the decisions move inexorably closer to their final unintended target.

It’s the best answer to ‘why me’ that I know.

A Note on Pronunciation

Jones’s writing is characterised by his use of non-English words. With the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh I’m reasonably sure how close i am with the pronunciation but with Latin I have no idea. Jones was at pains to point out that ‘inconspicious’ in this extract was not a misprint for inconspicuous.

‘The Fatigue’ was published in ‘The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments’ (Faber). I’ve used this version and read the last third or so of ‘The Fatigue’ . In the magnificent new edition of ‘The Grail Mass and other works’ (Bloomsbury Academic) what I have read is presented as a self contained section. In this version it ends

Partee-party, halt.
Party-stand fast men detailed-
re-mainder- steady!
Middle watch-to quarters-Dismiss

R.S.Thomas' 'Bravo'

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)

I first encountered R.S.Thomas’s work in a school poetry text book in about 1975. I’ve been reading his poetry, with admiration and enjoyment, ever since.

In the twentieth century’s three horse Thomas race, I’d back R.S over Dylan and Edward.

Over the course of a long writing life he produced a enormous number of high quality poems. ‘Collected Poems 1945-1990’ and ‘Collected Later poems 1988-2000’ combined run to over 800 pages. Most of the poems, like this one, take up less than a page.

Thomas himself was an interesting man. Photographs usually present him as a wild, wind swept celtic mage, the last of the Druids lowering at the camera or striding over the hills. He spent his working life as an Anglican priest working in small Welsh parishes. He learnt Welsh, wrote at least one autobiography in Welsh, but published his poems in English. Though probably a Welsh Nationalist, he was one of the twentieth century’s leading English language poets. There’s a fine, readable, award winning biography by Byron Rogers; ‘The man who went into the west’.

Many of the poems seem to be addressed to a God who if not absent, is not paying attention, and certainly not responding. The poems are characteristically short, with abrupt, line breaks which look almost arbitrary on the page. Read aloud they lose their jaggedness. Often turning on the precise use of a word, usually containing memorable lines and images, the apparently effortless way in which a speaker addresses the reader hides a considerable art.

Despite decades of rereading, It’s hard to choose an individual poem. I have the irrational sense that if you put the two collecteds together, you might have one of the longest, and most successful poetic sequences in twentieth century English poetry..

Robert Graves' 'Ulysses'

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

There’s almost a sub genre of poems in English about Ulysses. They would make a fascinating anthology. and I’m steadily adding them to The Poetry Voice index. But in these poems Ulysses is usually heroic or admirable. Most often he’s someone to sympathise with. This poem is unsual in the way it treats its hero.

Graves fancied himself as a classicist. He also had an independent and often idiosyncratic view of the world.

Liam Guilar's 'You never asked me for the Moon'

This is taken from Lady Godiva and Me.

My Leofric is not Tennyson’s. Nor is he, at this point of the sequence, the historical Earl anymore than Lady G is either the Historical Godgifu or the legendary Godiva.

Leofric is the one who stands and waits, hoping his lady will return. Hoping that being devoted in some way cuts him from the crowd, and knowing that it rarely does.

Lady Godiva and Me is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry, from its earliest Roman beginnings to the present day. More information and samples can be found at www.Liamguilar.com.

Sylvia Plath's 'The Applicant'

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

The reception and treatment of Plath’s poetry has been affected by the details of her life to an extent that is unusual.

But if you ignore the gravitational pull of the biography and the polemics, what you’re left with is a superb poet who produced some fine poems. Although he was talking about Robert Graves, Sir Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that great art is produced when trauma and technique are in balance applies to Plath. in some other poems, and in some of her most famous poems, the technique is overwhelmed by the trauma. In others technique wins out and there’s nothing much left. When she got the balance right she produced impressive art.

I don’t know if this is one of her better poems, but it’s one I like for its surreal menace.

Liam Guilar's 'More than a broken token song'

I am a life long devotee of the ‘Traditional folk song’. This poem is dedicated, without irony, ‘For the Ballad singers, with gratitude and affection.’

But I don’t like Broken Token Songs, even if some of them have the best tunes.

In this particular sub set of the folk genre, a girl, we shall call her Sweet Dotty, is usually walking in her garden, or down by a river, when a stranger arrives and propositions her. She says she is waiting for Sweet William to return from the wars, or from sea, or wherever he’s been these last seven years, and she will be faithful to his memory. Having told the girl various lies, the stranger then reveals himself as the missing William. They produce their ‘broken tokens’ and live happily ever after.

The back story here is that before Sweet William went off to the war, set sail to make his fortune or was press ganged, he and Dotty broke a token, a ring or a coin, in two and each kept a half, so that when the battered and disfigured male returned he could prove who he was.

What I don’t like about broken token songs is the implication that it’s ok for the guy to have gone off and had all sorts of adventures but the girl must remain chaste and true. I know this goes back to the Odyssey and I know it’s cultural, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. So I wrote my own version.

If you don’t see the man in the door’s stories and language as utterly inappropriate, and see what that suggests about him, then I can’t help you. This poem is published in ‘Rough Spun To Close Weave’ by Ginninderra press. Available from all online sellers, details at www.liamguilar.com

Basil Bunting's 'Now there's no hope of going back'

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting was) and he may be talking to his boat, but there’s a sense of defeat here lacking in MacNeice’s poem.

The epigraph to this poem is ‘Perche no Spero’, because there is no hope, which I left out of the reading for no other reason than I forgot to read it.

John Agard's 'Reporting from the front line of the great Dictionary Disaster'

John Agard (1949-)

My first encounter with John Agard’s poetry was his collection ‘Love Lines for a Goat-Born Lady’.

I don’t know if I’d read Grace Nichols first and then read John Agard because they were married or if it were the other way round and it really didn’t matter. They were both eye opening.

When 'Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur recently went mega on the best seller lists, journalists tied themselves in knots trying to explain the book’s baffling popularity. It was direct. it was immediate, It was not ‘dusty’.

Made me wonder where the journalists had been for the past fifty years or so. Or what kind of poetry they were reading. They had certainly not been reading John Agard, or Grace Nichols, or a list that's too long to fill out.

You can be direct and immediate and intelligent. You can also be witty and make a political point without resorting to political slogans while you’re doing it. If you don’t believe me go read John Agard or Grace Nichols. My only regret here is that John Arlott is not reading this poem.

W.B.Yeats' 'An Irish Airman foresees his death'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise.

Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from the poem alone. It’s this delicate mix of the general and specific, combined with Yeats’ superb phrase making, that makes the poem so effective.

If you’re interested in technique you should compare this poem with its companion piece, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ written for the same Irish Airman.