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Sir Walter Raleigh (1552/54-1618)
The hyphenated man. During his life he played so many roles, that at the end he was able to look back and see it as a series of performances. It’s perhaps ironic that while his date of birth may be disputed, the place time and manner of his dying could probably be noted exactly.
Even his execution had elements of performance.
Robert Graves (1895-1985)
There’s almost a sub genre of poems in English about Ulysses. They would make a fascinating anthology. and I’m steadily adding them to The Poetry Voice index. But in these poems Ulysses is usually heroic or admirable. Most often he’s someone to sympathise with. This poem is unsual in the way it treats its hero.
Graves fancied himself as a classicist. He also had an independent and often idiosyncratic view of the world.
W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)
A private joke made public? A painful truth? A cruel observation. A neat poem. One of the Intriguing aspects of Yeats’ output is that alongside the esoteric complications and the political and public poems, he could write, and publish something like this.
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 (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.
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
RTE produced a box set of cds of Heaney reading his collected poems. And once you’ve heard him read them, they never sound right in any other voice.
I’m no longer sure if it’s the poem or my memory of his performance which I admire.
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…)
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
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.
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
Peter McDonald printed this as as the last poem in his edition of MacNeice’s ‘Collected poems’. It has an attractive combination of elegy, defeat and determination.
Thalassa is the Greek word for the sea. For a classicist like MacNeice, it’s overloaded with connotations. From Xenaphon and his ragged army, desperately trying to get home, to the image of ageing Ulysses, pushing out on one more journey.
This is taken from McDonald’s beautiful ‘Collected poems’ Faber and Faber, 2007
Fairytale sand sculpture, Surfer’s Paradise Australia, 2020
Rumplestiltskin.
This is my favourite story told by the Grimm brothers. Their version is a masterpiece of narrative economy. If you’ve read the earlier French version you can only admire how much has been stripped out by the time they got to it.
Like most folk stories it won’t survive logical scrutiny, but it moves so swiftly you don’t have time to stop and consider how strange it is, or how inconsistent when you’re going along with the story.
So here is the Ugly Little Man, Rumplestiltskin himself, the only one who doesn’t change in a story about transformations, a three time failure in a story of threes, perhaps feeling a little sorry for himself, or just rightfully indignant. As he says: ‘I saved her life three times/she never once asked me my name’.
Percy Shelley (1792-1822)
Change the date, or change country and date. Some things don’t change that much.
It was Shelley who claimed that Poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. If he really believed such mellifluous waffle he was delusional. He may have been outraged by the Peterloo Massacre, but sitting in his garden in Italy, writing this sonnet which wasn’t published til 1839 didn’t help the families of the poor or make any kind of change to Government policy.
Robert Burns (1759-1796)
One of the glories of English poetry, or poetry in English, is the short lyric. There are thousands of them, and some of them, like this one, are excellent. A memorable statement of a commonplace idea which is not undermined by the knowledge that the poet probably got bored of the original addressee and tried the poem out on someone else.
When Richard Tottel printed the first anthology of poetry in English, in 1557, he was almost apologetic about publishing short poems. When poetry was conscripted into the university at the beginning of the twentieth century, the professional critic needed something to write about, and it is far easier to write 40.000 words on the implication of water imagery in the waste land than it is to say anything clever about ‘A red red Rose’. So the short lyric tends to be absent in the classroom.
But its strength lies in its ability to state the well-known and familiar in strikingly memorable ways. When done well it is the most immediately pleasurable of poems. The excellent ones sing themselves.
Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984)
One of the most popular English language poets of the twentieth century. His collected poems sold over two million copies.
One of the nastier assumptions about modern poetry is that it’s not possible to be popular and good. Great poets have five readers and an academic following. Popular poets have either no talent or have prostituted themselves to find an audience. As an assumption it’s both nasty and dangerous.
Betjeman was popular and good. Some of his poems, like this one, seemed to be set in a world that wasn’t on the same planet as mine. His excellence is technical. No modernist pyrotechnics, just a deft handling of the formal aspects of rhyming verse.
His autobiography, ‘Summoned by Bells’ written in blank verse, is one of the better long poems of the century.
The first line of this poem has been been stuck in my head since I first read it decades ago.
George Gascoigne (1535-1578)
I know very little about George Gascoigne, and looking him up on line hasn’t added much to that. But I do like this poem for its combination of weary resignation and sly humour.
And poems like this are the reason why good anthologies are so valuable. I found this one in Seven Centuries of Poetry in English, edited by John Leonard. A lot can be said against anthologies, but a good one, like Seven Centuries, is a great place to start if you’re curious about poetry written in other times or want to read something by famous poet x without wading through x’s complete poems. And in a good anthology, nestled beside famous poet x’s well known poem, will be a poem by someone you’ve never heard of, which you wouldn’t have otherwise found.
Robert Graves (1895-1985)
The ‘Greek Version’, which is the ‘historical version’ is that in 490 BCE, the citizens of Athens and some allies defeated a numerically superior Persian army at Marathon. In doing so they stopped the first Persian attempt to conquer Greece. Marathon became a symbol of small nations fighting for freedom against overwhelming odds.
Graves was having fun imagining the Persian Version of events.
It may not be funny in a world where armies can advance towards the rear, where an American president can talk about ‘a down draw’ in Iraq, or where our political leaders think their version or events is superior to any other, regardless of any inconvenient facts that might prove they are wrong.
Liam Guilar
The most frightening stories I’ve ever heard were told around the table by my English Grandmother and my Irish Father. There was no attempt to ‘be frightening. They both believed in the truth of the stories they were telling.
This one scared me most because it didn’t finish. It seemed to be all detail and no story. Years later, when I remembered to ask her what was under the floorboards, the answer was long and involved and didn’t seem to belong to this story.
The poem is taken from ‘Rough Spun to Close Weave’ (Ginninderra press 2012). You can find other samples from the book at www.liamguilar.com.