Liam Guilar's 'You never asked me for the Moon'

This is taken from Lady Godiva and Me.

My Leofric is not Tennyson’s. Nor is he, at this point of the sequence, the historical Earl anymore than Lady G is either the Historical Godgifu or the legendary Godiva.

Leofric is the one who stands and waits, hoping his lady will return. Hoping that being devoted in some way cuts him from the crowd, and knowing that it rarely does.

Lady Godiva and Me is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry, from its earliest Roman beginnings to the present day. More information and samples can be found at www.Liamguilar.com.

Sylvia Plath's 'The Applicant'

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

The reception and treatment of Plath’s poetry has been affected by the details of her life to an extent that is unusual.

But if you ignore the gravitational pull of the biography and the polemics, what you’re left with is a superb poet who produced some fine poems. Although he was talking about Robert Graves, Sir Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that great art is produced when trauma and technique are in balance applies to Plath. in some other poems, and in some of her most famous poems, the technique is overwhelmed by the trauma. In others technique wins out and there’s nothing much left. When she got the balance right she produced impressive art.

I don’t know if this is one of her better poems, but it’s one I like for its surreal menace.

Robert Browning 'Porphyria's Lover'

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the last line of this poem? Is the speaker surprised, relieved disappointed? On the page they are all possible. Even the best reader has to choose. And for that reason I have been avoiding this poem for far too long.

Browning was the master of the dramatic monologue. And he perfected what we might loosely call ‘performative dissonance’. What is being said, is qualified or contradicted or undermined by the way it is being said. It’s an endemic characteristic in 19th Century fiction, from Gogol to Poe to Le Fanu to James.

It’s harder to achieve in a single monologue which has to create its own context. The effect is most famously achieved in ‘My Last Duchess’ where the message the speaker thinks he’s sending, and the one we receive, are so very different. He took it as far as it could go in “The Ring and the Book’ where the reader is presented with different versions of the same story.

In this case the effect is created much more simply, because what the speaker does and says are so far out of the normal definitions of sane behaviour. The problem is how to make him sound believable. If you are paying attention to the first half you can be forgiven for thinking you’re in familiar romance story territory. Then comes the swerve.

One of the familiar critical games to play with this poem is to try and gender the speaker from evidence within the poem. If you put aside the assumption the speaker is male, you will find no evidence within the poem to prove this. On the other hand, that’s also true for any number of first person poems. Browning exploits this common feature as part of the overall creepiness of the poem. (Creepiness is a very technical term…)

Liam Guilar's 'More than a broken token song'

I am a life long devotee of the ‘Traditional folk song’. This poem is dedicated, without irony, ‘For the Ballad singers, with gratitude and affection.’

But I don’t like Broken Token Songs, even if some of them have the best tunes.

In this particular sub set of the folk genre, a girl, we shall call her Sweet Dotty, is usually walking in her garden, or down by a river, when a stranger arrives and propositions her. She says she is waiting for Sweet William to return from the wars, or from sea, or wherever he’s been these last seven years, and she will be faithful to his memory. Having told the girl various lies, the stranger then reveals himself as the missing William. They produce their ‘broken tokens’ and live happily ever after.

The back story here is that before Sweet William went off to the war, set sail to make his fortune or was press ganged, he and Dotty broke a token, a ring or a coin, in two and each kept a half, so that when the battered and disfigured male returned he could prove who he was.

What I don’t like about broken token songs is the implication that it’s ok for the guy to have gone off and had all sorts of adventures but the girl must remain chaste and true. I know this goes back to the Odyssey and I know it’s cultural, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. So I wrote my own version.

If you don’t see the man in the door’s stories and language as utterly inappropriate, and see what that suggests about him, then I can’t help you. This poem is published in ‘Rough Spun To Close Weave’ by Ginninderra press. Available from all online sellers, details at www.liamguilar.com