Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry

Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Criticism (1711)

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When it comes to literary “wits”, two names are often bandied about, namely Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde, but honourable mention should be reserved for a veritable club of wits that thrived in early 18th century London. Founded in 1714, The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of writers comprising prominent figures of the English literary scene such as the satirists Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. One of the club’s purposes was to ridicule pretentious writing of the era which they did through the persona of a fictitious literary hack, Martinus Scriblerus. They were the Private Eye of their time.

Swift would become famous for his 1726 prose satire Gulliver’s Travels; John Gay for The Beggar’s Opera in 1728; and Alexander Pope for a series of erudite mock-heroic narrative poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism. Despite its dry title, the latter was indeed poetry, one of Pope’s first major poems, in fact, and one which had already been published prior to the coming together of the Scriblerati. It is the source of the famous quotations “To err is human; to forgive, divine“, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing“, and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread“, which is a pretty impressive set of additions to the lexicon for just one poem.

An Essay on Criticism was composed in heroic couplets (pairs of rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and written in the manner of the Roman satirist Horace (65–8 BCE), known for his playful criticism of the many and varied social vices of Roman society through his light-hearted odes. Essentially, Pope’s poem is a Horatian-style verse essay offering advice about the chief literary ideals of his age and critiquing writers and critics who failed to attain his (evidently pretty high) standards.

Pope’s opening couplets contend that bad criticism is even worse than bad writing, thus signalling that even critics should be on their guard, not just pure writers. Dare I say, it has an element of contemporary “rap battles” or “roasts” with its gentle ribbing of inferior writers; it’s not too hard to imagine a modern-day rendering of these lines, perhaps with a mike-dropping flourish at the end:

‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

Pope points out common faults in poetry such as settling for easy and clichéd rhymes:

While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees;
If Crystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.

The couplets are impeccably and relentlessly delivered, 372 in all, each rapped out in that steady da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum iambic pentameter. Pope only breaks out of iambic pentameter once, and that’s deliberate:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along

The second line of this couplet is itself an Alexandrine, which is iambic hexameter, a form that Pope evidently regarded as laboured and inelegant with that extra da-dum and which this line demonstrates (geddit?). The whole piece is a masterclass in poetry, and all written when Pope was just twenty-two, so take that, pretentious and turgid writers of the 1700s!

Alexander Pope
Poetry

Louis MacNeice’s Prayer Before Birth (1944)

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In good poetry there is so often a great last line, something that effectively closes the poem leaving the reader/listener with the white space/silence in which to reflect on their experience. Sometimes the last line has a sense of fade: take Ozymandias, for example (see here), in which the once-mighty statue of that ancient king now lies broken and decayed and the final line “The lone and level sands stretch far away” draws our attention to the barren desert in which the ruins reside and allows the irony to sink in.

Other poems end with an encapsulating line, summing up the theme of the entire poem in one line: Wilfrid Owen’s last line in Dulce Et Decorum Est (see here), after a series of shocking imagery about the grim realities of the front line, sums up the emptiness of the platitudes around “honour and glory” that the generals had hoped to instil into the common soldier: “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”).

Other poems end with a surprise, a jolt – often called the “trap door” or the “rug pull” – and today’s poem from Louis MacNeice fits the bill perfectly. See what you think…

Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) was an Irish poet and playwright, born in Belfast, and a member of the Auden Group, that loose affiliation of literary figures active in the 1930s and including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, names that have come down to modern times with perhaps more celebrity than MacNeice’s (and two of whom have appeared in the pages of this blog before, here and here). MacNeice’s body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, however, due to his appealing style and the fact that, like many modern English poets, he found an audience for his work through British radio.

Prayer Before Birth is a poem written at the height of the Second World War, and takes the form of an agonised plea from the mouth of an unborn infant in its mother’s womb. Dramatic in intensity, the poem bemoans the deplorable state of the world, but articulates that, whilst living in it is a painful experience, being born into it must be truly terrifying. It mirrors perhaps the growing modern trend of young people choosing not to have children due to their fears of what the world is becoming.

As pessimism goes, it’s hard to beat, but it’s incantatory rhythms, alliterations and repetitions gives it a hypnotic, ritualistic quality and, as I said, it serves up its final line with a powerful punch.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Louis MacNeice
Poetry

Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach (1867)

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Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet alongside Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, although, unlike those two full-time moneyed poets, he actually had a proper job too, earning his living working as an inspector of schools for thirty-five years. He was the son of the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold (who was a neighbour and good friend of William Wordsworth, unsurprisingly a strong influence on the young Matthew), and it was at Rugby where Matthew Arnold received most of his education before winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.

In 1849 (the year before Wordsworth’s death), Arnold published his first book of poetry, The Strayed Reveller, and followed that up in 1852 with his second volume of poems, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, coinciding with the launch of both his school-inspecting career and his marriage. Much output would follow and not just in poetry: Arnold wrote in prose too and was an influential literary, political and social critic. Between 1867 and 1869 he wrote Culture and Anarchy, setting his High Victorian cultural agenda, and famous for the term he popularised to denote a certain sub-set of the English population: “Philistines”, i.e. namely that class of persons having a deprecatory attitude towards art, beauty, spirituality and intellect. He would have felt at home here at OGOTS Towers, I feel sure!

These days, Arnold is perhaps best known for his poem Dover Beach. The poem’s speaker (whom we may assume is Matthew Arnold himself) begins by describing a calm and quiet sea out in the English Channel. He is standing on the Dover coast and looking out across to France, where a small light can be seen briefly and then vanishes. Throughout the poem Arnold crafts visual and auditory imagery of the sea receding and returning to land. At this point in time, though, the sea is not returning; it is receding farther out, and we realise that Arnold is equating it with the diminution of religious faith amongst his compatriots.

This was, after all, the post-Darwin era, when religious faith was being profoundly challenged, and Arnold was known to bemoan the creep of materialism and, in his eyes, its attendant philistinism. For him, truth and beauty were in retreat, like the tide, and, apart from the fact that he has his missus beside him (“Ah, love, let us be true to one another!”), there’s little light at the end of his tunnel, and the poem remains pessimistic to the end. It’s probably a blessing that Arnold is not around today: I suspect he would consider his pessimism to have been understated!

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold
Poetry

Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier (1915)

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I recently stayed for a few days in the charming village of Redmarley d’Abitot in Gloucestershire and when researching the local area was pleasantly surprised to find that the nearby village of Dymock was significant in poetry circles for being the home of the eponymous Dymock Poets (as well as being the home of the Dymock Red cider apple and also Stinking Bishop cheese!). A visit ensued and in its church of St Mary’s I found a display about the Dymock Poets and learnt a bit more.

They were a literary group of poets who lived in or around Dymock, or visited often, and were active in the period from 1911 to the First World War. Centred around Lascelles Abercrombie’s house The Gallows, in nearby Ryton (that I subsequently visited and had a nice chat with the current owner who told me she gets plenty of American and Chinese literary tourists), the group comprised Abercrombie, Robert Frost (whose poem The Road Not Taken I wrote about here), Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and John Drinkwater.

The group published their own quarterly, titled New Numbers, and it was in this that we first saw Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier published: a poem which was to gain worldwide fame for its simple and affecting ‘noble fallen soldier’ motif, and be recited in a thousand-fold war memorials. Whilst a lot of war poetry such as Wilfrid Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est (also blogged about, here) had a discernibly realistic view of war, Brooke’s The Soldier was diametrically opposite: a romanticised and  sentimental view, speaking in unabashed tones of pride, courage, and sacrifice. It was written near the start of the First World War, perhaps before Brookes had time to sample the brutal realities of battle.

Indeed, he never would: sailing with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on its way to the Gallipoli landings in 1915, he developed streptococcal sepsis from an infected mosquito bite and, whilst moored off the Greek island of Skyros, died of septicaemia on 23rd April . As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried in an simple olive grove on Skyros. It makes the opening lines of his poem all the more poignant.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke
Poetry

John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827)

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Not everyone is an expert in Romantic poetry (and neither am I, though I concede I’m no slouch) but if I were to ask you to name “the big six” poets of the Romantic era (late 18th to mid-19th century), I bet you’d stand a fighting chance because they almost fall off the tongue: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Shelley, and Keats, right? There’s another poet from the era, however, who never rose to the majesty of the aforementioned giants, but who nonetheless is now regarded as a major talent: the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”, John Clare.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, John Clare didn’t have the wherewithal to lounge about on the Spanish Steps in Rome (Keats), swim the Hellespont (Byron), or swap ghost stories around the fire at a villa by Lake Geneva (Shelley…oh, and Byron again), because he spent his life as an agricultural labourer, potboy, and gardener, and never left the country.

Born in Helpston in Northamptonshire in 1793, John worked as a farm labourer with his father from being a young boy onwards. The farm and the nature permeating his surroundings provided his inspirations; this was where he found his voice and began writing poems and sonnets. In an attempt to stave off his parents’ eviction from their home, John offered his poems to a local bookseller, who in turn sent them off to the publishing firm who had already published the works of one John Keats. The rural aesthetic appealed and thus, these successful collections of poems were spawned: Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems, The Rural Muse, and the collection I own: The Shepherd’s Calendar.

Whilst Clare’s earlier poems speak of the harmony and beauty of nature in the English countryside, his later work bemoans the great changes to the environment and society brought about by the Enclosure Acts. These wiped out a whole way of life by abolishing the open field system of agriculture which had been the way people farmed in England for centuries. The ownership of the common land was taken from them and the countryside was decimated as newly-unemployed country folk flowed into the towns to participate in the Industrial Revolution.

The hurt was deep, and in fact Clare found it increasingly difficult to cope with life, and he sadly descended into depression and mental illness, eventually spending many years in an asylum. Whilst there he wrote the poem I Am! which is a window into his mental struggles and a stark contrast to his hard-working but happy heyday. Here’s a poem from the latter period, Spring, with I Am! following…

Spring

Come, gentle Spring, and show thy varied greens
In woods, and fields, and meadows, by clear brooks;
Come, gentle Spring, and bring thy sweetest scenes,
Where peace, with solitude, the loveliest looks;
Where the blue unclouded sky
Spreads the sweetest canopy,
And Study wiser grows without her books.

Come hither, gentle May, and with thee bring
Flowers of all colours, and the wild briar rose;
Come in wind-floating drapery, and bring
Fragrance and bloom, that Nature’s love bestows–
Meadow pinks and columbines,
Kecksies white and eglantines,
And music of the bee that seeks the rose.

Come, gentle Spring, and bring thy choicest looks,
Thy bosom graced with flowers, thy face with smiles;
Come, gentle Spring, and trace thy wandering brooks,
Through meadow gates, o’er footpath crooked stiles;
Come in thy proud and best array,
April dews and flowers of May,
And singing birds that come where heaven smiles.

I Am!

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

John Clare
Poetry

Edwin Muir’s The Horses (1956)

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Despite being a natural optimist, I have for some reason always been attracted by the genre of dystopian fiction, although I’m not the only one judging by the enduring popularity of dystopian classics such as Orwell’s seminal 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The inspiration informing this genre comes from many and varied sources, including, just for starters, the rise of industrial-scale warfare in the World Wars, the development of the atom bomb, totalitarianism, AI and Big Tech, genetic engineering, deadly viruses, the surveillance society and climate change. It seems we have a perpetual collective curiosity, and fear, about where our society might be going.

The genre extends to poetry, too; at school I became aware of this enigmatic poem called The Horses, by Scottish poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959). Muir was born on the island of Orkney and had an idyllic childhood which was curtailed in 1901 when his father lost the family farm and they had to move to Glasgow. For Muir, this was a move from Eden to Hell: within a few short years, his father, two brothers, and finally his mother died in quick succession, and meanwhile he had to endure a series of mundane jobs in factories and offices.

Such a change in his life must have had profound effects on his future poetic works, although balanced by the happiness that he eventually found when he met his wife, the translator and writer Willa Andersen. He found great purpose with Willa and teamed up with her to translate the works of many notable German-speaking authors like Franz Kafka. Anyway, although I haven’t read much else of Muir’s work, the poem that found its way into my schoolboy hands nonetheless stayed with me as a slightly disturbing piece of weird and prophetic dystopia right up to the present day.

The poem gets stuck in from the start:

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep

So no messing: we know where we are, we’re in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world…and then the very next line of the poem wastes no time by introducing the horses of the title:

Late in the evening the strange horses came

Thereafter, fifty lines of an imaginative conception of what it might be like to be in a post-apocalyptic world…but with added “strange horses”! Of course, interpretation of the poem and what the horses represent, is entirely up to the reader. A few years ago I wrote an electronic soundscape to catch the poem’s atmosphere and to accompany a reading of the poem. More recently, I revisited this recording and noodled about with some images and footage and have set it to video, which I’d like to share with you here. I like to think I have captured the mood of Muir’s poem and I hope he would approve!

Edwin Muir
Poetry

Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain (1865)

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Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist, famous for his major poetry collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised multiple times before his death in 1892 (the first edition consisted of only 12 poems; the final edition contained nearly 400). The collection represents a celebration of Whitman’s philosophy of life and humanity, and focuses on nature and the individual human’s role in it, rather than focusing on religious or spiritual matters.

Most of Whitman’s poems are written in free verse and neither rhyme nor follow standard rules for meter and line length. If that was controversial to the purist, so was his use of explicit sexual imagery, and his collection was lambasted at the time (though championed by influential figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau). Over time, however, the collection has infiltrated popular culture and became recognized as one of the central works of American poetry.

In the 1989 film Dead Poets Society (set in 1959), Robin Williams’ English teacher John Keating advocates doing away with the restrictions of poetic rules in order to give creativity free rein. He encourages his students to “make your life extraordinary” and “seize the day” and incites them to rip out the page on dry poetic rules from their textbooks. His unorthodox teaching methods inevitably attract the attention of strict headmaster Gale Nolan, who contrives to remove the heretic. As Mr Keating enters the classroom to collect his belongings, the inspired students express their solidarity by climbing on to their desks and quoting the opening line from Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! (though ironically this poem does rhyme).

During the American Civil War, Whitman, a staunch Unionist, had worked in hospitals caring for the wounded, and his poetry often focused on both loss and healing. O Captain! My Captain! was written in response to the death of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired, and who had been assassinated in April 1865 just as his great work was coming to fruition. The three-stanza poem uses a ship and its dead captain as a metaphor for the Unionist cause and Lincoln himself.

Ezra Pound called Whitman “America’s poet…He is America”. Well, let’s hear the poem recited and then let’s enjoy the emotional power of that final scene in Dead Poets Society.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Walt Whitman
Poetry

A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896)

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Alfred Edward Housman (A E Housman) was a lifelong classical scholar at University College London and Cambridge University, right up until his death in 1936. He was also a gifted poet whose primary work, A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems, was published in 1896 and became a lasting success. The collection struck a chord with many English composers, among them Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Ivor Gurney, all of whom set his poems to music.

The collection’s various melancholy themes, including dying young and being separated from an idealised pastoral childhood, ensured that it accompanied many a young man to the trenches in the Great War. Housman had always had a young male readership in mind and as W H Auden said: “no other poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent“. Equally, George Orwell remembered that, among his generation at Eton College in the wake of World War I: “these were the poems which I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy”.

There’s a phrase Housman used that I have always found striking: “blue remembered hills”, three simple words that exemplify the melancholic tone of poem number XL, Into my heart an air that kills. It consists of just two quatrains that reflect on the passage of time and the futility of longing for a long-gone land and age. The speaker, in a distant land, recalls the hills and spires of his homeland. He recognises that, whilst he was happy when he lived there, he cannot return there now he is older and has left that land behind.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Surprisingly, Housman wasn’t actually from Shropshire, he was from Worcestershire, and hadn’t even visited Shropshire until after he had started writing the poem cycle. It is not Housman who is the Shropshire lad, but a literary construct. Be that as it may, here’s another punchy short poem from the cycle, again referencing the passage of time but this time evoking a carpe diem urgency about the here and now. Funnily enough, as I write this in view of my garden, my own cherry tree is hung with snow, its ‘winter blossom’ as implied by this poem.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow

A E Housman
Poetry

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798)

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Although I am a confirmed land-lubber, the sea holds a fascination for me. There’s something quite horrifying about being in the middle of the ocean, with no land visible in any direction and untold depths below, and being in a vessel whose fortune is dictated by the forces and whims of Nature. Of course, my own experiences of being in the middle of the sea have been limited to very safe, reliable and generally nature-defying cruise ships, so I’m not claiming any real experience of the above. I’m really thinking about those incredible sea adventurers of yore, like Cook or Magellan, or those gnarly men who would go to sea for years on end in pursuit of whales (see my blog about Moby Dick here). Or the man depicted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Coleridge’s epic poem was published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads, the poetry collection in which he collaborated with William Wordsworth (and which marked the beginning of British Romantic literature). For a volume that represented a new modern approach to poetry, it is ironic that this particular poem seems pre-modern in its gothic setting, archaic spelling and supernatural mood; perhaps he thought it was just too good not to be included.

The narrator is accosted at a wedding ceremony by a grey-bearded old sailor who tells him a story of a voyage he took long ago. The wedding guest is at first reluctant to listen, as the ceremony is about to begin, but the mariner’s glittering eye captivates him, and he simply has to listen. The mariner’s tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south by a storm and eventually reaches the icy waters of the Antarctic. An albatross appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam in which it was getting stuck, but even as the albatross is fed and praised by the ship’s crew, the mariner shoots the bird with his crossbow.

Oh dear: bad luck! The crew is angry with the mariner, believing the crime would arouse the wrath of the spirits, and indeed their ship is eventually blown into uncharted waters near the equator, where it is becalmed.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The sailors blame the mariner for the torment of their thirst and force the mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck.

Frontispiece by William Strang, 1903

The mariner endures a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross: one by one, all of the crew members die, but the mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew’s corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces.

Eventually, this stage of the mariner’s curse is lifted and he begins to pray. As he does so, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. It begins to rain and his own thirst is slaked. The bodies of the crew, now possessed by good spirits, rise up and help steer the ship home, floundering just off the coast of the mariner’s home town. The mariner is rescued but as penance, and driven by the agony of his guilt, he is now forced to wander the earth, telling his story over and over. His current rapt listener, the wedding guest, is just one in a long line…

If you have a spare half an hour, and you haven’t yet heard the full Ancient Mariner story, you could do worse than listen to Ian McKellen recite the entire thing here!

Poetry

Sylvia Plath’s Daddy (1962)

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High above the Calder valley in West Yorkshire lies the village of Heptonstall, and in its churchyard lies, rather incongruously, the grave of famous American confessional poet, Sylvia Plath. Hers is a wretched tale of depression, ending ultimately in her suicide in February 1963, but her literary legacy is a powerful one, albeit only fully recognised posthumously (she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, twenty years after her death). The majority of the poems on which her reputation now rests were written during the final months of her life.

Plath had arrived at Cambridge University from her native Massachusetts and had already won awards for her poetry when she met young Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes in February 1956. By June they were married. They moved to the States for a couple of years before returning to London, where Sylvia had her daughter Frieda, and later Tawnton in Devon, where her son Nicholas was born. In July 1962, she discovered that Hughes was having an affair and the couple separated.

Plath had already experienced difficult problems with her mental health and had already undergone electroconvulsive therapy by the time she’d met Hughes. The separation precipitated an even-further downward spiral. She consulted her GP, who prescribed her anti-depressants and also arranged a live-in nurse to be with her.

The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she found Plath dead with her head in the gas oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths. She was 30 years old.

I have selected this poem, Daddy, read aloud by Plath herself. Its theme is her complex relationship with her German father, Otto Plath, who had died shortly after her eighth birthday. It is haunting and disturbing, with dark imagery and the expression of an inscrutable emotional trauma that we can only guess at. Plath’s rendition of her poem, with its disquieting multiple use of “oo” vowel sounds, gripped me, when I first heard this, all the way through to its raw and brutal conclusion.

You do not do, you do not do   
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot   
For thirty years, poor and white,   
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   
Ghastly statue with one gray toe   
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   
Where it pours bean green over blue   
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.   
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   
So I never could tell where you   
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.   
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.   
Every woman adores a Fascist,   
The boot in the face, the brute   
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   
But no less a devil for that, no not   
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.   
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   
And they stuck me together with glue.   
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,   
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you   
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.   
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Sylvia Plath