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.

Dafydd ap Gwilym's 'Love's affliction'. (Cystudd Cariad)

Dafydd ap Gwilym (?1320-?1350?)

 Dafydd ap Gwilym is not only one of the great poets of the Welsh Tradition, but of the  European Middle Ages.  If you haven’t heard his name before, you’ve missed out.

For a non-Welsh reader the attraction of Dafydd's poems in translation often lie in the persona he creates. He may be one of the great love poets of the Middle Ages, but his range marks him out. There’s desire to regret, with the usual amount of unrequited pining thrown in but the mix is seasoned with self-depreciation, humour, and an enjoyment of his own absurdity.

This particular poem is almost a cliché. The old poet looks back on his life and sees no future. It’s all over. ‘unless she beckons’. In which case everything he’s said should be immediately forgotten. 

It's one of those final lines that is awe inspiring in its 'correctness'. It closes the poem on a visual image that realigns everything that comes before it. It's as good as it gets.

 And as far as I can tell it's not what Dafydd wrote. 

On the University of Swansea Website, the last four lines of the translation read:

There rises in me (poetry's memory)
no joyful thought or passion,
nor any pleasant talk of them,
nor ever love, unless a girl asks for it. 

Rachel Bromwich translates the same lines as:

No joyful thought nor passionate desire
Arises in me-memory of song-
Nor is there any talk concerning them
No ever more of Love. Unless a girl should ask? 

Merchant and Feletra, whose translation I’m reading, point out the difficulty of transferring Dafydd's superb control of a fiendish poetic into English and hope 'If in our versions the poet seems uninhibited, eccentric, and outrageously ambitious, we have partly succeeded.'

Perhaps the best testimony to their success is that last line. To make the poem work as an English poem, they have made an imaginative leap from ‘ask’ to ‘beckon’ which as far as I can tell is not supported by the dictionary. It’s one of those fine moments of creative translation. 

  Unless She Beckons poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym. Translated by Merchant and Faltra. Redcoat books. 2018

Dafydd ap Gwilym. Poems Translated by Rachel Bromwich. Gomer Press 1982.

You can hear this poem read in its original Welsh at the superb University of Swansea site dedicated to Dafydd and his work.
Unfortunately it won’t let me link directly to the poem:
Click on this link…which will open a new window.

http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.php

Choose poem 82 from the drop down menu in the left hand corner, then click the ‘audio’ link at the bottom of the page.

Jeremy Hooker's 'Novelty'

Jeremy Hooker (born 1941)

I don’t often read two consecutive poems from the same poet, but I wanted to hear this one.

It’s also taken from Hookers’s ‘Selected Poems (1965-2018) published in 2020 by Shearsman books.

Lewis Carroll's 'You are Old Father William'

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

Like many things in Alice in Wonderland, this was a parody, but the target has long been consigned to the footnotes. It is what it is: Carroll’s control of rhyme and rhythm seems effortless. It’s certainly enviable. And the poem is memorably funny.

I’m probably not the only one to remember hearing ‘I have answered three questions and that is enough’ or ‘be off and don’t give yourself airs’ quoted by an exasperated adult.

Liam Guilar's 'Just once'

The household fire.

‘Coke’ in this sense, is fuel for a fire. Thought cleaner than coal, it was much harder to light.

This poem is taken from Rough Spun to Close Weave which is still available from online booksellers or direct from www.Liamguilar.com.



Rudyard Kipling's 'If'

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

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

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

Austin Clarke's 'The Planter's Daughter'

Austin Clarke (1896-1974)

A man with a prodigious output over a long life: he wrote verse plays, novels, memoires and about twenty collections of poetry. Perhaps, like a lot of Irish Poets, he is understandably overshadowed by Yeats, though why he might also be overshadowed by Paddy Kavanagh is a more interesting question.

His Collected Poems, published by Carcanet in 2008, is a fascinating book. I bought it because I had heard this poem, recited at a concert. It is probably not representative of his work as a whole.

It might be worth pointing out for those under ‘a certain age’ that when this poem was written, Sunday was the day on which no work was done, no shops were opened, and once they had been to mass, people had the day off.

W. B. Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium'

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

When i was at school in the 1970s my poetry text book could casually identify Yeats as ‘The Greatest Poet of the Twentieth Century’. If the claim seems premature, given there was a quarter of a century yet to run, changing fashions in academic approaches to poetry in that final quarter meant the claim took a battering. This isn’t the place to point out how limited and limiting those approaches were, but the poems have been resilient.

For me Yeats is the unavoidable English language poet. He was so very good at what he did. He wrote better lines, better images, better stanzas and better short poems than almost anyone else, and he did it more often. He also had the unusual capacity to go on getting better at what he did, thoughout a long writing life.

You can learn a great deal about writing poetry by reading Yeats carefully. But he’s also an enjoyable poet to read. If you have a copy of his collected that prints the poems in chronological order, you can start at the beginning and read through to the end as though you were reading a novel.

There will be much more of Yeats on future podcasts, the real problem he poses is which poems to read.

If you're interested in Yeats the man, he is the subject of a superb two volume biography by Roy Foster: 'W.B. Yeats a life'. Vol I: The Apprentice Mage, Vol 2 The Archpoet.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'They Flee From Me'

Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503-1542

The First great English poet? The first writer of great English lyric poems?

If you look behind Wyatt, it’s hard to find much that is worth reading between him and Chaucer. Since most modern readers don’t share Chaucer’s assumptions about poetry, Wyatt’s poems do feel like a new start. They are amongst the first English poems that can be read, as poems, by any literate reader for the pleasure they offer.

No matter how conventional or artificial the voice is, reading Wyatt is an encounter with a voice. Reading Wyatt’s collected is a depressing wade through forests of Tudor Pine, but there are gems and this is one of them. The idea that the woman in the second verse is Anne Boleyn is probably a critic’s fantasy.

Recently Wyatt was the subject of two excellent biographies, which complement each other. Nicola Shulman’s ‘Graven with Diamonds’ (2011) is very good on the poems and their place in the Court. Susan Brigden’s ‘Thomas Wyatt, the Heart’s Forest’ (2012) is a fine, detailed scholarly biography.

There will be more Wyatt on The Poetry Voice.

Patrick Kavanagh's 'Kerr's Ass'

As a poet, Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) was like the little boy in the nursery rhyme; ‘When he was good he was very very good, and when he was bad he was horrid’. ‘Kerr’s Ass’ is one of his best.

Louis MacNeice 'Cradle song for Eleanor'

This is one of the first poems I memorised, a very long time ago. Louise MacNeice is often overlooked or undervalued in histories of English poetry where he is overshadowed by his friend W. H. Auden. But he was one of the great lyric poets writing in English in the twentieth century. To mark the centenary of his birth in 2007 Peter McDonald edited a beautiful collected for Faber. McDonald also contributed an excellent discussion of Cradle song to 'Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his legacy' essays edited by Fran Brearton and Edna Longley (Carcanet 2012). (An essay is excellent when it makes you revist a poem you’ve known for forty years and see things you hadn’t previously noticed…)