W.B.Yeats' 'The Fisherman'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

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

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

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

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

Two Epitaphs for an Army of Mercenaries

The second of these two poems was written in direct response to the first.

A.E.Houseman (1859-1936) was one of the leading classical scholars of his day. Today he’s remembered as the author of ‘The Shropshire Lad’, one of the most well known collections of poems from the first quarter of the last century. I suspect his mercenary army owes a lot to Xenophon’s classic account of how ten thousand Greek soldiers marched to the sea after their Persian paymaster was killed in battle.
Hugh MacDairmid (1892-1978), one of the significant Scottish poets of the twentieth century, had a less romantic view of Mercenaries. which i suspect might be shared by those unlucky enough to have encountered them.

from 'Watt' by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Technically this isn’t a poem, but an extract from Beckett’s novel Watt, where it’s set out as continuous prose. But it’s too much fun to read to leave out on the grounds that it’s not ‘a poem’.

If you want to tie your head in knots you can try to define ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’. Whatever your definition there will always be a liminal case that challenges the definition. Beckett’s prose is also often a lot funnier than the stern photos of Beckett would lead you to expect. So go along for the ride. And enjoy.

Rudyard Kipling's 'The Last of the Light Brigade'

Rudyard Kipling: 1865-1936

This isn’t one of Kipling’s best poems. But it reveals a side of him most people ignore. The incident described here is probably apocryphal. The savagery of the last line depends on a play on the meanings of the word charge. It’s too vicious and carries too much contempt to call it a pun.

The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. In what is sometimes remembered as one of history’s great military blunders, or stupidities, approximately 670 British lightly armed cavalry charged straight down a valley at Russian Cannons with Russian batteries firing at them from either side. There is no record of any of the troopers saying, this is a really stupid idea…Surprisingly, there were some survivors. It would probably have been quietly forgotten to every one but military historians of disaster, a classic case of bad communication, if Alfred Lord Tennyson hadn’t written ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ within weeks of the event.
The popularity of the poem, taught in British schools for the best part of a century, can be measured by the way phrases from it entered into popular discourse. ‘Someone had blundered’ ‘there’s not to reason why/there’s but to do and die’ even if the quotations were often incorrect.
As part of the education of British children, the poem with its insistence on the courage, glory and honour of the participants, contributed not just to to the mentality that lead to equally disastrous military stupidities in the First World War, but the the enthusiasm for the military that contributed to so many eagerly signing up for that war.
Kipling’s poem, written almost forty years after Tennyson’s is an indirect critique both of Tennyson’s poem and the British Public’s attitude towards its military, which he criticises in other poems, most simply in ‘Tommy’.

Memory, from A Man of Heart.

This is taken from A Man of Heart, by Liam Guilar. Published by Shearsman books 2023.

Lullingston Roman Villa remains, Kent, England.

Maxim 1
History is a record of brutality
tempered by outbursts of idealism.

Memory
There was never enough light
Even in summer, shade
and shadows contour brightness.
At night, torches and lamps
shiver the edge of sight.
The candle drew attention to itself
while life continued in the silent,
darker ebb and pool beyond. 

I remember her hand on the pillar,
a shadow on the white stone.
Her eyes bright in a dark face.
She was worried, there were visitors,
men of power and influence,
come to court her daughter.
Not bad for a freed slave
from the lands around Carthage.
I remember her hand on the pillar,
the light shaking over the mosaic floor.
She had plans. We all had plans.

The Wassail ceremony. Vortigern meets Rowena

This extract is taken from A Man of Heart, by Liam Guilar. Published by Shearsman books (January 2023)

Rowena offers Vortigern the Cup.

If you’ve ever ‘Gone Wassailing’ or heard the Christmas Carol ‘Here we come a wassailing’ and wondered what wassailing was, it comes from this story.

The Old English greeting Wes Þu hal (Be well!) became Wassail.

In the previous episode of The Poetry Voice I read an extract from A Man of Heart in which Hengist left for Britain, leaving his daughter on the shoreline, watching him depart. One he established himself he sent for her, and in this extract he’s pitching her at Vortigern the King. If the king marries his daughter, Hengist will become the grandfather of Kings. In my version of the story, Vortigern is aware of Hengist’s plan, thinks he’s in control, but then he meets Rowena for the first time,

If you’d like to see the original Middle English version of this episode, I’ve pasted it below.

Reowen sæt a cneowe; & cleopede to þan kinge.  
& þus ærest sæide; in Ænglene londe.   
Lauerd king wæs hæil; For þine kime ich æm uæin. 
Þe king þis ihærde; & nuste what heo seide.   
þe king Vortigerne; fræinede his cnihtes sone. 
what weoren þat speche; þe þat maide spilede. 
Þa andswarede Keredic; a cniht swiðe sellic.    
he wes þe bezste latimer; þat ær com her.   
Lust me nu lauerd king; & ich þe wulle cuðen.   
whæt seið Rouwenne; fæirest wimmonnen.    
Hit beoð tiðende; inne Sæxe-londe.   
whær-swa æi duȝeðe gladieð of drenche;    
þat freond sæiðe to freonde; mid fæire loten hende.   
Leofue freond wæs hail; Þe oðer sæið Drinc hail.    
Þe ilke þat halt þene nap; he hine drinkeð up.    
o[ð]er uuel me þider fareð; & bi-thecheð his iueren
þenne þat uul beoð icumen; þenne cusseoð heo þreoien.    
Þis beoð sele laȝen; inne Saxe-londe.
& inne Alemaine; heo beoð ihalden aðele.

Hengist Leaves for Britain. From Liam Guilar's 'A Man of Heart'.

This extract is taken from ‘A Man of Heart’ by Liam Guilar, published by Shearsman in January 2023.

The Venerable Bede dated this event to 450 AD. The British, attacked on all sides, abandoned by Rome, hired mercenaries to help them to fight their enemies. Traditionally, they hired three boat loads of ‘Germanic Warriors’, led by Hengist and his brother, Horsa. On the beach watching them depart is his daughter, Rowena, who will play a significant role in subsequent events.

Their story is told in A Man of Heart.

Michael Alexander's 'Beowulf Reduced'

Michael Alexander’s translations of Old English poetry, published by Penguin Classics, were my introduction to the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. His translation of Beowulf, carefully preserving the alliterative sound of the poem, was a ‘best seller’ in the world of translations.

‘Beowulf Reduced’ is his tongue in cheek synopsis of the story, cutting three thousand lines down to fifteen. It was published in Alexander’s Here At The Door by Shoestring Press in 2021.

Robert Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

There’s a story. A bemused reader asked Browning what this poem meant. ‘Well,’ said the poet, ‘when I wrote it only God and Robert Browning knew. Now only God knows.’

Sadly this conversation didn’t take place, and the comment was most likely made by a character called Robert Browning in a play. But it’s worth keeping in mind. There’s nothing wrong with worrying about ‘what it means’ but a better question with this poem is what does it do to you while you hear it or read it. What do the images suggest, the words evoke? Go along for the ride and experience the story before you start worrying about what it means.

The irrational came into English Literature at the end of the 18th Century with the first wave of Gothic literature. It was given substance in English poetry by Coleridge, and you can trace it through the 19th century. Browning’s Childe Roland and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market are two of the finest examples.

Stephen’s King ‘Dark Tower’ series ostensibly begins as a riff on this poem. But if you want a version, then Louise MacNeice’s play ‘The Dark Tower’ does a better job of capturing the spirit of the original.

William Shakespeare's 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow'

Macbeth Act five, scene five, lines 18-28

Why Shakespeare? It’s a question generations of students have asked. One of the good answers is that the plays contain passages like this where you can enjoy the way a few words can be made to do a great deal of work.

Words associated with time, mortality, the stage, images of transience and futility, all coalesce in that last magnificent sentence to present one of the most nihilistic views of life in English.

Life is brief, death is dusty. There is no afterlife, no possible redemption. If there is a God overseeing it all, he she or it is an idiot. You live your life as an actor in a play, unable to make your own decisions, a puppet of the script and the director. But you’re not even a  good actor, you’re clumsy, you have a bit part and if life were a film when the credits roll you can only appear as ‘man walking dog across street’, or ‘girl third from right in crowd’. You don’t even have the consolation that you took part in a masterpiece,. You’re trapped in a trivial story,  written by an idiot, and it means nothing.

It's not only nihilistic, it’s also startlingly unchristian,

And then you should remember that this is a speech by a specific character at a specific moment in the play. Macbeth has made bad choices from the start. He is about to be held accountable for them. What better self-defence than to claim he had no choice? The speech may be nihilistic, but the play contradicts everything he says. He’s lying to himself.

Very clever that  Mr. William Shakespeare. Wrote some good lines.

Jeremy Hooker's '1st of July 2016

Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941)

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

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

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

Liam Guilar's 'Akhmatova's requiem'

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

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

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

Classes often found this most moving part of her story.

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

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

Rudyard Kipling's 'The Way through the Woods'.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

If it weren’t for the rhymes, this poem feels as though it could have been written by Thomas Hardy.

Kipling could be tub thumpingly obvious when he wanted to be, riding a steady rhythm that takes his poems close to sing song. Here rhythm and rhyme are used to contribute to the way that he suggests a mood and a place and a story and leaves them to settle into the reader’s imagination.

Anna Akhmatova's 'Requiem'

Akhmatova’s statue opposite the prison in St. Petersburg.

Anna Akhmatova 1869-1966

‘Requiem’ is Akhmatova’s memorial for those who waited with her outside the prison in Saint Petersburg in the 1930s, hoping for news of their loved ones during ‘the terrible years of the Yezhov Terror’.

The context of the poem is explained properly in the second section, a prose ‘By way of a preface’. Some sections have titles, others numbers.

This translation, by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward is taken from ‘Twentieth century Russian Poetry; Silver and steel, An anthology’. Selected and Introduced by Yevgeny Yevthushenko, edited by Albert. C. Todd and Max Hayward. ( Doubleday 1993)

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

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)

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

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

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

Taliesin's 'Marwnat Owein'. The lament for Owain son of Urien Rheged.

A page from the Book of Taliesin showing the start of Marwnat Owain at the Large black capital.

Taliesin (6th Century)

There are at least two Taliesin’s. There was an Historical bard who composed poetry in the courts of ‘Welsh Princes’ in the Sixth Century, a contemporary of Aneirin. There was also a character from a folk tale, who gained knowledge and inspiration from a cauldron he was stirring, and after many transformations was born again as a miraculous child who could speak as soon as he was born and went on to be a magician and prophet as well as a poet.

The Book of Taliesin is one of those precious medieval manuscripts which are worth their weight in Guttenberg bibles. It dates from the 14th century, and the two figures have obviously merged. Brilliant scholars have spent their careers trying to untangle the poems, trying to date which may belong to the Historical Bard and which have been attributed to him. Most seem to think this one might be ‘authentic’.

It’s a marvellous controlled howl of a poem that belongs to a very different world. “King’ and ‘Prince’ dignify men who spent their lives raiding and being raided by their neighbours. Enthusiastic cattle thieves. It’s also a world where poetry served a very public function and the poet was an honoured member of the court.

Taliesin laments the dead Owein by celebrating highlights from his ruthless destruction of his enemies. The highest praise possible is to state that he was a generous, ferocious killer. The line ‘Medel galon geueilat’ could be translated almost literally as ‘A reaper of foes, a predator’.

This translation is taken from The Book of Taliesin, Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain, translated by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. Penguin Classics 2020.

My pronunciation is not up to inflicting the original on an audience, but if you can, find a Welsh speaker reading the original.

Alun Lewis' 'The Swan's way'

Alun Lewis (1915-1944)

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

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

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

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

Two poems, written some years apart.

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

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

Both are still available from www.liamguilar.com

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

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

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Watson's 'Why she began to study the works of Sir Thomas Malory'.

Susan Watson

The Time of the Angels is a sequence of poems in which a young woman reads and re-reads Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur during the winter and spring of 1979. She is researching and writing an undergraduate dissertation, but her encounter with Malory is also a highly personal one; she perceives the centrality of ‘chances, choices, prophecies, destinies, past and future time’ and responds to an atmosphere of ‘loss soaking backwards through the pages like a tide receding’. And there is Malory’s voice: ‘a plain voice, threading beads’.

The Pamphlet is available by clicking here: Doing so will open a new window.