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Basil Bunting (1900-1985)
This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting was) and he may be talking to his boat, but there’s a sense of defeat here lacking in MacNeice’s poem.
The epigraph to this poem is ‘Perche no Spero’, because there is no hope, which I left out of the reading for no other reason than I forgot to read it.
John Agard (1949-)
My first encounter with John Agard’s poetry was his collection ‘Love Lines for a Goat-Born Lady’.
I don’t know if I’d read Grace Nichols first and then read John Agard because they were married or if it were the other way round and it really didn’t matter. They were both eye opening.
When 'Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur recently went mega on the best seller lists, journalists tied themselves in knots trying to explain the book’s baffling popularity. It was direct. it was immediate, It was not ‘dusty’.
Made me wonder where the journalists had been for the past fifty years or so. Or what kind of poetry they were reading. They had certainly not been reading John Agard, or Grace Nichols, or a list that's too long to fill out.
You can be direct and immediate and intelligent. You can also be witty and make a political point without resorting to political slogans while you’re doing it. If you don’t believe me go read John Agard or Grace Nichols. My only regret here is that John Arlott is not reading this poem.
John Clare (1793-1864)
Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poetry was based on detailed observation of the world around him, he was mostly self educated and he ended his life in what was then called a lunatic asylum.
But his poetry sits awkwardly against his more well known and better connected peers. His ‘nature poetry’ reads like the product of man who had lived and worked in the landscapes he described. Attempts to claim he is central to the period sound like special pleading.
His biography is worth reading for an insight into the reality of poetry in the Romantic period.
W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)
I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise.
Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from the poem alone. It’s this delicate mix of the general and specific, combined with Yeats’ superb phrase making, that makes the poem so effective.
If you’re interested in technique you should compare this poem with its companion piece, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ written for the same Irish Airman.