National Poetry Day.

It’s National Poetry Day. I love National Poetry Day. I’ve been thinking about poetry from the moment I got up this morning.

The ones that live in my head are mostly Yeats and Auden, snatches of Frost and E.E. Cummings, lines of Robert Lowell, fragments of TS. (Do I dare to eat a peach?)

I thought though that I should find one about a horse, you will be amazed to hear. The best poem about horses is Yeats’ glorious galloping paean to Galway Races, but I posted that on this day last year. I read it at my father’s funeral. The last lines almost finished me off, in the quiet of the small Norman church:

‘And we find hearteners among men

That ride upon horses.’

My father was a heartener.

Anyway, I wanted something new. So I hunted about the internet and there really wasn’t much that would do. There’s an epic poem by Byron but it goes on for about ten years and is quite knotty, although I’ll go back and read the whole thing later. There’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, but that is far too sad for this sunny day. One of the best things anyone ever wrote about a horse comes from Shakespeare, in Henry V:

‘When I bestride him, I
soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth
sings when he touches it.’

But that is not a poem, so today it does not count.

In the end, I found a slender sliver from DH Lawrence, so short that it is almost a haiku, so mere that is it is mystery. I never adored Lawrence’s novels, but I was ravished by his poems. I remember reading The Snake when I was eight years old and being quite mesmerised. I read it forty years ago, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember the feeling of heat and fascination and passion and shame that lived in the poem, and it made me think of snakes in a different way from that day on.

‘And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.’

This short poem is not one I have ever seen before. I felt rather astonished that it was so new to me, and I’m going to carry it with me in the Scottish sunshine.

The White Horse.

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on

and the horse looks at him in silence.

They are so silent, they are in another world.

 

That’s it. That is all he wrote. What mystery hovers between those lines. Did the horse and his boy exist in the world? Had Lawrence seen them, one misty morning, and remembered? Or are they symbols, metaphors, shimmering figures of the imagination? There is something almost holy in that tiny poem.

The funny thing is that the really, really good horsemen and women do work their horses in silence. I talk to mine, all the time. I tell her she is brilliant, or clever, or a silly old billy, or quite safe. I tell her that is only a cyclist and not a mountain lion. I say: ‘There are your sheep.’ She loves the sheep. I say: ‘Find your soft place.’ We are always looking for her soft place.

Opposite my house, there is a grand old building with arched windows and soaring roofs which was built a hundred and fifty years ago by some eccentric old gentleman for his cows. It is known as the coo cathedral, and the days are long gone when it housed cattle. It is used now for weddings and balls and celebrations. There was a charity sale going on there this morning and rows of cars were drawn up and people streamed across the grass in the dazzling sun to do their early Christmas shopping in a good cause.

There was no silence, but a great deal of bustle. I took the mare along to have a look. She likes an event. She said hello to some very small children. ‘Look, Fergus, it’s a horse.’

Fergus, who was not quite two, smiled all over his face. The mare blinked at him with elegant pleasure.

‘Yes, Fergus,’ I said. ‘She’s a very special horse indeed. She is a thoroughbred horse.’

I rode her down to the great old building and peered through the window. A lady saw us and opened the door and the mare poked her head inside and observed the throng, sagely. Within moments, she had many admirers. I felt the spreading delight of absurd pride. I love that she loves to greet complete strangers. I love that whenever any human eye falls on her, it lights with pure happiness.

There was no silence. We were in the world.

But when we went back to the quiet field, that DH Lawrence silence did fall on us, and we stood together, in wordless harmony, and we were, for a moment, like that horse and his boy.

Why does poetry matter? Why does it need a whole day, all to itself? Isn’t it too old school, too old hat, too out-dated, for the rushing modern world?

I think it matters because it speaks to the heart. It may console a bruised spirit, or remind a harried mind of a universal truth. It sings a fine and human song, and everybody needs a song.

It doesn’t really need to be for anything. It exists in and of itself: beautiful, immutable, true. It can be funny and it can be shocking and it can be stark. Unlike almost any other form of words, it can be read for the sheer beauty, even if one does not understand the precise meaning. (I have read The Wasteland about twenty times, and I still could not tell you what half of it is about. Some of it is even in languages I do not speak, and many of the classical references are lost on me. Yet, it still is a poem that can brighten my morning.)

If one is flayed or seared or bashed or blue, a good poem may fall on the battered human self like a balm.

I think that is worth a day.

 

Today’s pictures:

I don’t have a white horse. I have a red horse. And she is as bright and bold and bonny as the day is long. If I could write poetry, I should write a poem for her. But I can’t, so I shan’t. She has to content herself with the best prose my fingers can type.

I can’t write her a poem, but she is a poem, so it doesn’t really matter:

Remembrance Sunday

It’s not often that the 11th of the 11th falls on an actual Sunday, so today feels important and special, in some ill-defined way.

I am glad the sun shines on all the old soldiers, and the young ones too. I watch the ceremony at the Cenotaph with my sister. It is the young fighters who break our hearts. ‘Don’t be sad!’ one boy of eighteen writes in the letter to be sent in case of his death.

The letter is sent.

I wonder at the courage of those parents, who generously gave it to the BBC to be read.

Eighteen, I think.

We stand up for the two minute silence. We are alone in the house. There is no one to see. But it is right to stand.

Afterwards, I go and see the mare. She does not know anything of distant battles in dusty valleys. She knows only these trees and this grass and this Scottish air, and the sun on her back, and me. She knows me.

 

I don’t really have good enough words for the day of remembrance, so here is  Keith Douglas, who does:

How To Kill

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

 

Beautiful photograph by Ian Forsyth.

WH, WB, and why Samuel West is the only man in Britain who should be allowed to read poetry aloud.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I could tell you all about my journey and where I am now and what I am doing and what it is like to wake up in a house where the very first sound you hear is a baby singing  (she turns out to have an excellent voice and perfect phrasing), but I am going to speak of poetry instead.

Because why not? Sometimes poetry must be spoken of.

On the miracle that is the worth-the-cost-of-the-licence-fee-alone iPlayer, the BBC has quietly put out another of those extraordinary programmes that gets no fanfare or publicity but is so brilliant that it almost hurts when you listen to it. There are certain things in life that are so good they make me cross. This was one of them.

It was not fancy or swanky or post-modern or too clever for its shirt. There were no bells and whistles; no special effects; all the money that could be spared almost certainly was. It was a couple of men speaking, one man reading, and two extraordinary poets. Out of those plain ingredients, fifteen short minutes of magical radio emerged: a brief, profound mediation on Auden, with specific reference to Yeats.

The first astonishing thing I learnt is that apparently Auden is 'unfashionable'. I remember hearing this about Eliot, a few years ago. I did not really understand the concept of poets being unfashionable. I thought you were either a genius of the English language or you were not. It seemed to be so self-evident that The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one of the towering achievements of the 20th century that I could not comprehend anyone having an actual argument about it. As so often, it turns out I was wrong. Poets come in and out of fashion, and dear old WH is out.

This makes me cross and sad. Lay your sleeping head my love is one of the few poems I know by heart. (Others being: tread softly for you tread on my dreams; one man loved the pilgrim soul in you; and certain sections of the highwayman came riding, riding, riding, up to the old inn door.) I once recited it in a murky club north of Westbourne Grove which stayed open until three in the morning in the days when everything closed at midnight. The man who asked said, when I inquired what he did, 'I'm a drug dealer.' I'm not a judgemental type, so when he asked me for the Auden, I spoke it aloud.

Later I said to the friend who introduced us: 'he was very erudite for a drug dealer'.

'Rug dealer,' said my friend. 'Rug dealer. He sells Persian carpets.'

Anyway, that is not the point. The point is that I love and revere Auden, even if he did run away a bit during the war, and I love and revere Yeats even more, even if he did think he heard ghostly voices, and so the two of them together on the radiophonic device was almost more than I could bear. The poem being discussed was this one, which I think is so damn beautiful and true that I don't have enough adjectives for it:

In Memory of WB Yeats:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree 
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.


III

          Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

I pause for a moment in homage to my two favourite lines: 
mad Ireland hurt you into poetry, and Sing of human unsucess. 
Although the bit about what instruments we have and the 
brokers of the Bourse roaring like beasts 
are fairly spectacular.

The thing of it is, not only did the programme give all 
this beauty and interest, it got the one man 
who can actually read poetry to read it. I've banged on about this 
before, and I imagine some of you are frowning, mildly perplexed. 
It's only poetry, how hard can it be to read? The answer is: so 
hard that I cannot count the ways. I've heard poets kill their own 
poems, swallowing the words and drifting into inconsequential 
monotone. 
I've heard actors, who are perhaps the worst and most surprising 
offenders, smash up a work of brilliance with pausing and breath 
and odd line readings and theatricality and just too much acting. 
There is the sententious voice and the sonorous voice and the 
LOOK LOOK I'M READING POETRY voice. 

I should be kind, really, on 
account of the great degree of difficulty. I tried to do some of 
Prufrock once, into the webcam, to see if I had any talent for it, 
and I hashed it all to hell. I cannot tell you how dire I was. 
Luckily though, and people should hang out more flags, there is 
one actor who does it so beautifully and effortlessly that in my 
opinion he should be made to read all the poetry and not allowed to 
do anything else. (I admit I have made this point before, and I 
expect I shall make it again.) This is the glorious Samuel West, 
and luckily the BBC sensibly sent for him and he read that 
great poem with such cleverness and restraint that I wanted 
to send flowers. Perhaps one 
day I shall.

If you want to hear the loveliness, 
it is here. 
Sadly I only discovered it last night, and the mean old Beeb takes 
it off at 3pm today, so rush rush rush now while stocks last. It 
is fifteen minutes you will not regret.

I have not yet taken any pictures of the south, 
so here are some old Scottish ones in the meantime.

Garden:

The colours I left behind:

Views to south and west: 

Ladyships:

Final burst of colour:

PS Apologies for slightly dotty formatting half way through. Some mysterious glitch occurred and I can't make any of it rational.

The Magnificent Frank O'Hara

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Here, in the nuttiest of nutshells, is the miracle of the blogosphere. The wonderful Mrs Trefusis had a new post up, so I beetled over in my lunch hour to have a look. And there I found a ravishing poem, by a poet of whom I knew nothing. (And I call myself a writer?)

A short Google later, and I now know about Frank O'Hara, have read some of his glorious work, and have fallen entirely in love with him. If it weren't for the fascinating game of shuttlecock that is the practice of blogging (slightly forced analogy, but go with it; can't think of a better one just now) I might have gone to my grave without ever having heard of Frank O'Hara.

So now I feel: slightly better educated, generally entranced, and convinced that the sum total of human happiness has been added to. Which is a potent cocktail for an ordinary Friday lunchtime.