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’.

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.

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.

William Wordsworth's 'The world is too much with us'. (Any requests?)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’. Says it all really.

This reading was a request. Which reminds me to point out that if you have a poem you’d like to hear read on the Podcast you can send your request via the contact form on www.liamguilar.com or to my author page on facebook.

Some poems don’t work well read aloud, and some just don’t work when I read them. I can’t promise there will be no parrots, dogs or traffic in the background, but i’ll see what I can do.

On the website you’ll also find an index of all 159 poems that have been read so far.

John Keats' 'When I have fears that I may cease to be'.

John Keats (1795-1821)

Sometimes poetry is the memorable expression of a commonplace thought.

Keats, more than most, was haunted by the threat of an early death.  A dedicated poet, he wanted to be ‘amongst the English poets at my death’.

He died of Tuberculosis, in his mid twenties, a long way from home, coughing his lungs up in a rented room in Italy and he felt he’d failed. The epitaph he choose for himself, ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’, sums up his disappointment.

Amongst the unfinished epics and plays, he’d written a handful of poems that guaranteed his place in any anthology of English poetry. But he didn't know that when he died.

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Alfred De Musset's 'On a Dead Woman' (Sur une Morte)

Alfred De Musset (1810-1857)

Alfred De Musset

The woman in question was not dead. According to the translator, Stanley Appelbaum, ‘The ‘Morte’ of the poem, the Princess Belgiojoso, was not at all dead but coquettishly indifferent to the poet’s advances.’

This is taken from “Introduction to French Poetry’ edited by Stanley Appelbaum, who claims in his introduction that the translations are ‘definitely not intended to be poetic recreations of the original works, but merely aids to the understanding of the content’. In this case the English version seems to stand on its own..

Lewis Carroll's 'The Walrus and the Carpenter'.

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

‘Light verse’ is often a dismissive term. Light verse can be clever, witty, humorous, entertaining, memorable and enjoyable but Real poetry should be serious, profound, ‘deep’, emotional….it’s a silly argument. Some of the best poetry of the 19th century is described as ‘light verse’, and Lewis Carroll wrote some of the best examples.

Almost as silly as the dismissal of light verse is the inevitable attempt to find political, religious or ideological themes that would raise it to the level of ‘serious poetry’.

It is what it is.

John Keats' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'

John Keats (1795-1821)

John Keats

In Tennyson’s Lady of Shalotte, the metaphor is buried by the story. In La Belle Dame sans Merci, the story is the metaphor. The narrative is as straightforward as a fairy tale, though it also reads like a nightmare.

 There are several suggestions as to what the story ‘means’: La Belle Dame is tuberculosis, Infatuation, Fanny Brawne, male fear of the feminine. You can take your pick.

What Keats thought it meant is a different matter.  The poem first appeared in a long letter he wrote to George and Georgina Keats.

At the end of the poem he wrote:

Why four kisses-you will say-why four because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse-she would have fain said ‘score’ without hurting the rhyme-but we must temper the Imagination as the Critics say with Judgement. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes have fair play: and to speak truly I think two a piece quite sufficient-suppose I had said seven: there would have been three and a half a piece-a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side- 

Which doesn’t sound like he was taking it or himself too seriously.

The poem is also a candidate for the prize for worst editing of a poem by the person who wrote it. When Keats published the poem in The Indicator, he changed the first line to: 

Ah what can ail thee wretched wight…

Which is awful.  His defenders claim that by this time his illness was so advanced his judgement was impaired.

The poem, even more than the Lady of Shalotte, appealed to painters in the 19th century.