Category Archives: Poetry

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
Poetry

John Betjeman’s The Subaltern’s Love Song (1941)

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Sir John Bet­je­man (1906–1984) was Poet Lau­re­ate from 1972 until his death in 1984, though both poems that I dis­cuss here in this blog were writ­ten way back in 1937 and 1941 respec­tive­ly. He was a life­long poet but also a jour­nal­ist and TV broad­cast­er and some­thing of an “insti­tu­tion” in Britain, pop­u­lar for his bum­bling per­sona and wry­ly com­ic out­look. He was known for being a staunch defend­er of Vic­to­ri­an archi­tec­ture, and he played a large part in sav­ing St Pan­cras rail­way sta­tion (and many oth­er build­ings) from demo­li­tion.

Indeed, Bet­je­man bemoaned all that he saw slip­ping away in the wake of the indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion of Britain. The town of Slough had acquired up to 850 new fac­to­ries just before the Sec­ond World War and was the epit­o­me of all that he saw wrong with moder­ni­ty, the “men­ace to come”. His poem Slough begins:

Come, friend­ly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now

Some­what harsh, per­haps. On the cen­te­nary of Betjeman’s birth in 2006 his daugh­ter Can­di­da Lycett-Green apol­o­gised to the peo­ple of Slough on his behalf and said that her father had regret­ted writ­ing the poem. He may well have regret­ted pick­ing on a par­tic­u­lar town but I doubt that his sen­ti­ments had changed regard­ing the chang­ing urban archi­tec­tur­al land­scape.

The first poem of Betjeman’s I came across was arguably about anoth­er world in the process of being sub­sumed by the march of progress and the Sec­ond World War. The Subaltern’s Love Song is a gen­tle poem reflect­ing the mid­dle-class cul­ture of Sur­rey at the time it was writ­ten in 1941. The sto­ry is imag­ined, though the muse of his poem was very real: Miss Joan Hunter Dunn worked at the can­teen at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don where Bet­je­man was work­ing. He was so tak­en by her that he was inspired to write the poem, imag­in­ing him­self as a sub­al­tern (a junior offi­cer in the mil­i­tary) in her thrall through­out a breath­less series of sum­mer activ­i­ties that ends in their engage­ment.

Eleven qua­trains of flow­ing ten-syl­la­ble iambic rhythm tell the unfold­ing sto­ry of the imag­i­nary love affair, and it does it with wit and sparkle. Let’s leave aside the fact that its writer was mar­ried at the time!

Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn,
Fur­nish’d and bur­nish’d by Alder­shot sun,
What stren­u­ous sin­gles we played after tea,
We in the tour­na­ment — you against me!

Love-thir­ty, love-forty, oh! weak­ness of joy,
The speed of a swal­low, the grace of a boy,
With care­fullest care­less­ness, gai­ly you won,
I am weak from your love­li­ness, Joan Hunter Dunn

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-han­dled rack­et is back in its press,
But my shock-head­ed vic­tor, she loves me no less.

Her father’s euony­mus shines as we walk,
And swing past the sum­mer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the veran­dah that wel­comes us in
To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bed­room of moss-dap­pled path,
As I strug­gle with dou­ble-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my vic­tor and I.

On the floor of her bed­room lie blaz­er and shorts,
And the cream-coloured walls are be-tro­phied with sports,
And wes­t­er­ing, ques­tion­ing set­tles the sun,
On your low-lead­ed win­dow, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The Hill­man is wait­ing, the light’s in the hall,
The pic­tures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am stand­ing beside the oak stair
And there on the land­ing’s the light on your hair.

By roads “not adopt­ed”, by wood­land­ed ways,
She drove to the club in the late sum­mer haze,
Into nine-o’clock Cam­ber­ley, heavy with bells
And mush­roomy, pine-woody, ever­green smells.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Sur­rey twi­light! impor­tu­nate band!
Oh! strong­ly adorable ten­nis-girl’s hand!

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the inti­mate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words nev­er said,
And the omi­nous, omi­nous danc­ing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twen­ty to one
And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

John Bet­je­man
Poetry

Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken (1916)

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One pos­i­tive con­se­quence of the lock­down has been, for me and sure­ly for many oth­ers, the re-dis­cov­ery of the ben­e­fits of walk­ing the trails near one’s home. Vir­tu­al­ly every day through­out this peri­od I have strode out and delved into the woods, walk­ing wher­ev­er the mood takes me and dis­cov­er­ing that the myr­i­ad of criss-cross­ing trails allow for a near-infi­nite choice of dif­fer­ent routes to take. Cou­pled with the coin­ci­dent good weath­er and the sea­son­al bloom­ing of the blue­bells, these jaunts have been a source of great plea­sure.

Occa­sion­al­ly, I make out a quite faint trail, per­haps once used but for some rea­son now large­ly untrod­den and over­grown, and I take it, putting me in mind of that famous poem The Road Not Tak­en by the Amer­i­can Robert Frost, in which he says:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less trav­eled by

This idea of “The Road Not Tak­en” has tak­en off in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion and you can find its key lines on mugs, fridge mag­nets and in greet­ing cards, and it has an Eat-Pray-Love-style vibe about it. Of course, the first inter­pre­ta­tion a read­er is like­ly to leap to, read­ing the lines above, is one of indi­vid­u­al­ism and self-asser­tion (“I don’t go with the main­stream, me”), but actu­al­ly, when you read the poem, it’s not quite that sim­ple: the two ways “equal­ly lay / In leaves no step had trod­den black” and “the pass­ing there / Had worn them real­ly about the same”, which is to say, they’re inter­change­able. So it’s not real­ly about well-trod­den ver­sus untrod­den, or going with or against the crowd; it’s a sub­tler com­men­tary about ran­dom choic­es, about freewill ver­sus deter­min­ism. Like in the movie Slid­ing Doors, some split-sec­ond, this-way-or-that-way choic­es are bound to beget marked­ly dif­fer­ent con­se­quences, but you can nev­er know before­hand which is right. Such is life.

What­ev­er its inter­pre­ta­tion, its gen­e­sis actu­al­ly sprung from a sur­pris­ing­ly lit­er­al source. Frost spent the years 1912–1915 in Eng­land, where he befriend­ed Eng­lish-Welsh poet Edward Thomas who, when out walk­ing with Frost, would often regret not hav­ing tak­en a dif­fer­ent path and would sigh over what they might have seen and done. Frost liked to tease Thomas: “No mat­ter which road you take, you always sigh and wish you’d tak­en anoth­er!”.

So it’s iron­ic that Frost ini­tial­ly meant the poem to be some­what light-heart­ed when it turned out to be any­thing but. It’s the hall­mark of the true poet, though, to take an every­day expe­ri­ence and trans­form it into some­thing much more. Frost cer­tain­ly suc­ceeds in imbu­ing his short poem with an enig­mat­ic appeal. Here it is in full, and may the roads you choose in life’s jour­ney be the right ones!

Two roads diverged in a yel­low wood,
And sor­ry I could not trav­el both
And be one trav­el­er, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the under­growth;

Then took the oth­er, as just as fair,
And hav­ing per­haps the bet­ter claim,
Because it was grassy and want­ed wear;
Though as for that the pass­ing there
Had worn them real­ly about the same,

And both that morn­ing equal­ly lay
In leaves no step had trod­den black.
Oh, I kept the first for anoth­er day!
Yet know­ing how way leads on to way,
I doubt­ed if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Some­where ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less trav­eled by,
And that has made all the dif­fer­ence.

Robert Frost
Poetry

William Wordsworth’s Daffodils (1807)

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The verges near where I live are sea­son­al­ly awash with daf­fodils, as no doubt are yours if you live vir­tu­al­ly any­where in the UK, so what bet­ter time to take a look at that clas­sic poem that reg­u­lar­ly makes its way into the nation’s favourite poem lists, name­ly William Wordsworth’s I Wan­dered Lone­ly as a Cloud (aka Daf­fodils)? I’m less cer­tain about nowa­days, but when I was young, this poem was the one that lit­er­al­ly every­one knew. If pushed to quote a line of poet­ry you could always fall back upon “I wan­dered lone­ly as a cloud” in the same way you might have said “To be or not to be” if pushed to quote Shake­speare.

Wordsworth was the man who helped to launch the Roman­tic move­ment in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture when, in 1798, he pub­lished Lyri­cal Bal­lads with Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge. As well as being a vol­ume of poems by the two men, the work includ­ed a pref­ace expound­ing the poets’ lit­er­ary the­o­ry and prin­ci­ples. They want­ed to make poet­ry acces­si­ble to the aver­age per­son by writ­ing verse in com­mon, every­day lan­guage and with com­mon, every­day sub­jects as the focus. This was against the grain, of course — how often do we find an artist, famous to us today, push­ing the bound­aries of con­ven­tion in their own time?

Although ini­tial­ly received mod­est­ly, Lyri­cal Bal­lads came to be seen as a mas­ter­piece and launched both poets into the pub­lic gaze, so when in 1807 Wordsworth pub­lished Poems, in Two Vol­umes, includ­ing Daf­fodils, he was already a well-known fig­ure in lit­er­ary cir­cles. Wordsworth had talked of poet­ry being “the spon­ta­neous over­flow of pow­er­ful feel­ings: it takes its ori­gin from emo­tion rec­ol­lect­ed in tran­quil­i­ty”, and Daf­fodils is the per­fect illus­tra­tion of what he meant ( For oft, when on my couch I lie, In vacant or in pen­sive mood, They flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of soli­tude…) .

It was inspired by Wordsworth and his sis­ter Dorothy hav­ing come across a long and strik­ing swathe of daf­fodils whilst out on a stroll around Ull­swa­ter in April 1802. Dorothy was a keen diarist who record­ed her own feel­ings about the daf­fodils, and this like­ly helped William frame his poem, and indeed, Wordsworth’s wife Mary also con­tributed a cou­ple of lines to the poem: it was a real fam­i­ly affair. If you want to remind your­self of the poem beyond its immor­tal open­ing line, here it is…

I wan­dered lone­ly as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of gold­en daf­fodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Flut­ter­ing and danc­ing in the breeze.

Con­tin­u­ous as the stars that shine
And twin­kle on the milky way,
They stretched in nev­er-end­ing line
Along the mar­gin of a bay:
Ten thou­sand saw I at a glance,
Toss­ing their heads in spright­ly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund com­pa­ny:
I gazed—and gazed—but lit­tle thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pen­sive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of soli­tude;
And then my heart with plea­sure fills,
And dances with the daf­fodils.

William Wordsworth
Poetry

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s A Psalm Of Life (1838)

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The poet Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfel­low (1807–1882) is prob­a­bly best known over here in the UK for his Song of Hiawatha (which I for one remem­ber doing at school), but also in his native US for his com­mem­o­ra­tive poem about that icon­ic event of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, Paul Revere’s Ride. He also com­posed the epic poem Evan­ge­line, about that shame­ful episode in British his­to­ry known as the Great Upheaval, or the Expul­sion of the Aca­di­ans, dur­ing the French and Indi­an War of 1754–1763. This was the forced depor­ta­tion by the British of thou­sands of the large­ly civil­ian pop­u­la­tions from the Cana­di­an Mar­itime provinces to oth­er colonies (includ­ing Span­ish Louisiana where the Aca­di­ans would become “Cajuns”, but that’s anoth­er sto­ry).

In addi­tion to the lengthy sto­ry­telling poet­ry, how­ev­er, there is also a short and sim­ple poem for which Longfel­low is cel­e­brat­ed, the inspi­ra­tional A Psalm of Life. First pub­lished in 1838 in the New York mag­a­zine The Knicker­bock­er, it is a sub­tle glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of life and its pos­si­bil­i­ties. As with Max Ehrmann’s Desider­a­ta and Rud­yard Kipling’s If, the poem is didac­tic in tone: an invo­ca­tion to mankind to fol­low the right path and think pos­i­tive­ly about life.

Its sub­ti­tle is What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist, which cre­ates some con­text: it is a psalm in response to a psalm. It is an objec­tion to the idea, gleaned by the nar­ra­tor from lis­ten­ing to some bib­li­cal teach­ing, that this human life is not impor­tant; that we are made of dust and will even­tu­al­ly return to dust. No! he says — life is real, it’s seri­ous, and this is not a drill…your body may return to dust but you have a soul so don’t squan­der your time here by wor­ry­ing about death. As the sev­enth stan­za says, we can make our lives sub­lime, and, depart­ing, leave behind us foot­prints on the sands of time…

I can’t do oth­er than endorse that thought! Now, read on…

Tell me not, in mourn­ful num­bers,
Life is but an emp­ty dream!
For the soul is dead that slum­bers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spo­ken of the soul.

Not enjoy­ment, and not sor­row,
Is our des­tined end or way;
But to act, that each to-mor­row
Find us far­ther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleet­ing,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muf­fled drums, are beat­ing
Funer­al march­es to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of bat­tle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, dri­ven cat­tle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleas­ant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the liv­ing Present!
Heart with­in, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sub­lime,
And, depart­ing, leave behind us
Foot­prints on the sands of time;

Foot­prints, that per­haps anoth­er,
Sail­ing o’er life’s solemn main,
A for­lorn and ship­wrecked broth­er,
See­ing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achiev­ing, still pur­su­ing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfel­low
Poetry

T S Eliot’s Macavity The Mystery Cat (1939)

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Thomas Stearns (T S) Eliot (1888–1965) was a giant lit­er­ary fig­ure: one of the major poets of the 20th cen­tu­ry, as well as essay­ist, pub­lish­er, play­wright, and lit­er­ary crit­ic. He was born in St Louis, Mis­souri into a promi­nent Boston Brah­min fam­i­ly, but moved to Eng­land at the age of 25 and set­tled and mar­ried here, becom­ing a British sub­ject in 1927.

With­in a year of arriv­ing in Britain, Eliot had pub­lished his first major poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), which came to be regard­ed as a mas­ter­piece of the Mod­ernist move­ment, and he fol­lowed that up with some of the best-known poems in the Eng­lish lan­guage, includ­ing The Waste Land (1922), The Hol­low Men (1925), Ash Wednes­day (1930), and Four Quar­tets (1943).

Eliot also had his whim­si­cal side, how­ev­er, and in 1939 pub­lished Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats. This was a series of light poems about cats and their traits which he’d writ­ten through­out the thir­ties in let­ters to his god­chil­dren (“Old Pos­sum” was fel­low poet Ezra Pound’s nick­name for him). The best-known poem from that col­lec­tion, Macav­i­ty the Mys­tery Cat, is the one that arrest­ed my atten­tion the moment I read it (or heard it recit­ed) when I was a lad (it may well have been the only poem from the Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats that I read or heard recit­ed, giv­en that it was the “stand out” that pri­ma­ry school teach­ers reg­u­lar­ly latched onto).

Eliot was a big fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries and the char­ac­ter of Macav­i­ty is a lit­er­ary allu­sion to Mori­ar­ty, the arch-vil­lain and mas­ter­mind of those sto­ries (Holmes dubs Mori­ar­ty the “Napoleon of crime”, which is how Macav­i­ty is described in the last line of the poem). I loved that repeat­ing final line: “Macavity’s not there!”. It con­jures up the trope of the mas­ter jew­el thief or gen­tle­man spy, always one step ahead of the Law, always out­wit­ting his pur­suers. You can imag­ine the non­cha­lance.

But of course in real­i­ty it’s a cat, so it’s the spilled milk, the feath­ers on the lawn, the crash of a dust­bin lid, the scratch on the sofa…and of course he’s nev­er there. The lit­tle dev­il’s scarpered!

Here’s a record­ing of the man him­self recit­ing the poem:

Macav­i­ty’s a Mys­tery Cat: he’s called the Hid­den Paw—
For he’s the mas­ter crim­i­nal who can defy the Law.
He’s the baf­fle­ment of Scot­land Yard, the Fly­ing Squad’s despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!

Macav­i­ty, Macav­i­ty, there’s no one like Macav­i­ty,
He’s bro­ken every human law, he breaks the law of grav­i­ty.
His pow­ers of lev­i­ta­tion would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!
You may seek him in the base­ment, you may look up in the air—
But I tell you once and once again, Macav­i­ty’s not there!

Macav­i­ty’s a gin­ger cat, he’s very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is high­ly domed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.
He sways his head from side to side, with move­ments like a snake;
And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s always wide awake.

Macav­i­ty, Macav­i­ty, there’s no one like Macav­i­ty,
For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a mon­ster of deprav­i­ty.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square—
But when a crime’s dis­cov­ered, then Macav­i­ty’s not there!

He’s out­ward­ly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his foot­prints are not found in any file of Scot­land Yard’s
And when the larder’s loot­ed, or the jew­el-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is miss­ing, or anoth­er Peke’s been sti­fled,
Or the green­house glass is bro­ken, and the trel­lis past repair
Ay, there’s the won­der of the thing! Macav­i­ty’s not there!

And when the For­eign Office find a Treaty’s gone astray,
Or the Admi­ral­ty lose some plans and draw­ings by the way,
There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair—
But it’s use­less to investigate—Macavity’s not there!
And when the loss has been dis­closed, the Secret Ser­vice say:
It must have been Macavity!’—but he’s a mile away.
You’ll be sure to find him rest­ing, or a‑licking of his thumb;
Or engaged in doing com­pli­cat­ed long divi­sion sums.

Macav­i­ty, Macav­i­ty, there’s no one like Macav­i­ty,
There nev­er was a Cat of such deceit­ful­ness and suavi­ty.
He always has an ali­bi, and one or two to spare:
At what­ev­er time the deed took place: MACAVITY WASN’T THERE !
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are wide­ly known
(I might men­tion Mungo­jer­rie, I might men­tion Grid­dle­bone)
Are noth­ing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just con­trols their oper­a­tions: the Napoleon of Crime!

2nd June 1951: Amer­i­can-Eng­lish poet and play­wright, TS Eliot (1888 — 1965). He wrote amongst many oth­er things, ‘The Waste Land ’ and the plays, ‘The Cock­tail Par­ty’ and ‘Mur­der in the Cathe­dral’. Orig­i­nal Pub­li­ca­tion: Pic­ture Post — 5314 — Are Poets Real­ly Nec­es­sary? — pub. 1951 (Pho­to by George Douglas/Picture Post/Getty Images)