Seamus Heaney: 'Miracle'

I was recently reading the accounts in Luke 5:17-26 and Mark 2:1-12 describing how Jesus healed a paralyzed man after he had been lowered through a gap in the roof of the house. I was reminded of the poem 'Miracle' by Seamus Heaney, inspired by these accounts, which appeared in Human Chain, Heaney's last collection in 2010. Heaney also referenced this event in 'The Skylight', part of his 'Glanmore Revisited' sequence.

'Miracle' was, I think, my favourite poem from Human Chain. It can be read from either a spiritual or a secular perspective, as it describes a miraculous occurrence, but focuses on the friends of the suffering man and all that they do to help him. Their "slight lightheadedness", caused both by their physical exertions and by the wonder of what they've witnessed, is so human. The poem is partly a tribute to Heaney's own friends who helped him after he suffered a stroke in 2006, and it reminded me that in small or large ways, we can play our own part for good and help to make things greater than ourselves come about.


Photo: Ramp up to the Rafters by Paul Sableman. Used under Creative Commons license 

National Poetry Day: Osip Mandelstam's 'The Twilight of Freedom'

Today is National Poetry Day in the UK, and the theme for 2017 is 'Freedom'.

For this year's theme, the poem I have chosen is by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam: 'The Twilight of Freedom' (translated by Clarence Brown and WS Merwin).

This is one of Mandelstam's earlier poems, from his collection Stone (1913). "O sun, judge, people, desolate/are the years into which you are rising!" he writes - presciently, considering that the regime had not yet arrived under which he would eventually die (in 1938, in a transit camp, after years of persecution).

The lines "In the deepening twilight the earth swims into the nets/and the sun can't be seen" made me think of Isaiah 25:7. Mandelstam urges courage, but with a keen, sad understanding of the extent to which the world has drifted from what it should be, in humanity's insatiable quest for power.

Richard Adams and the Rabbit World of Literature

Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down and other novels for children and adults, died on 24 December. He was 96 years old.

In a year where celebrity deaths seemed nonstop, his passing was overshadowed moments after it was announced, by the death of actress Carrie Fisher, who sadly was only 60. But it was particularly hard to hear that Richard Adams was gone, given the importance of Watership Down in my life.

As a child I loved talking-animal books, a genre which seems to have gone thoroughly out of fashion (for anyone older than picture book age, at least). It was inevitable that I would read Watership Down. My first attempt was when I was seven or eight and I didn't get very far. I found the style a bit heavy and the action a little too frightening, and abandoned it. When I picked it up again I think I was ten or eleven, and I was hopelessly lost in the best possible way. I followed Hazel, Fiver and their friends out of the Sandleford warren and never looked back.

Many books have moved me, but I think there are only a few (another important one being The Lord of the Rings) which on repeated readings have proved so emotionally overwhelming that they leave me physically drained. I read and re-read Watership Down with cold shivers, with the complete disappearance of the world around me, in tears. Again and again I seemed to find myself physically in the midst of scenes - 'racing through the ochre light' of a thunderstorm ahead of a murderous gang of thugs, trying to save my friend from the deadly snare, staring awestruck at the enormous, silent movement of clouds over the downs. I have finished it and started it again immediately. I have read it several times in a year, although not for quite a few years, I admit. Despite that, its words and images are always within me. My visualisations of the book play through my head sometimes, or I hear the words, or read them behind my eyes.

Watership Down can be read as a really great adventure story blending the fantasy of anthropomorphic animals and their society with accurate details about the natural life of the rabbits and the English countryside they move through. It also has elements of allegory, particularly about the dangers of totalitarian rule. I have, however, read many beautifully written adventure stories, or allegories about fascism (I was even younger when I read Orwell's Animal Farm). What makes Watership Down unique is the way it subtly draws the reader into a literary world. It contains so many literary references that reading it is a remarkable education.

The book is famous for its epigraphs at the start of each chapter, which range from Xenophon to the Bible to Joseph Campbell to Jane Austen to Dostoevsky to WH Auden - and many others. In subsequent years, every time I have come across one of these quotations within the work of literature it was taken from, I feel a kind of time-shock and I am in Watership Down again. I discovered the World War II poet Sidney Keyes through one of these epigraphs, and he has become one of my favourites. Robinson Jeffers' poem 'Hurt Hawks' also came to me in this way. But the epigraphs are far from being the only references. Within the text itself, Richard Adams compares the adventures of the rabbits to those of Odysseus. The poem recited by Silverweed, the eerie rabbit-poet who appears in one of the book's most sinister passages, contains the phrase 'the heart of light, the silence', which is a quotation from TS Eliot's The Waste Land. (The blunt Bigwig refers to Silverweed as 'that lop-eared nitwit of a poet'.) There are glancing references to Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood, to 'Everyone Sang' by Siegfried Sassoon, to the Psalms, and more.

Watership Down has thus been a kind of slow-release of literature into my bloodstream throughout my life. I have finally realised that this, more than anything else, has made it so important to me. It has created echoes everywhere and has accustomed me to walking through a world where I see and hear literature in everything. It seems that this is how Richard Adams saw the world, or at least how he wanted his readers to see it. I am used to carrying quotations and stories and references and poems with me wherever I go, seeing and hearing them everywhere. And because of this book, I know that it's ok to do so. Some of us see the world in this way, and it enriches us. It makes life a little easier and a little more beautiful. It helps us to understand the interconnectedness of things, to see cause and effect, and to act with compassion and understanding. It shows me that understanding my connections to literature is a way of understanding connections to the world around me.

I don't think Watership Down, which first appeared in 1972, would be published now. If it were, it would be in a massively butchered form. The style would not pass an editorial team today. It would be viewed as too dense and difficult, too prescriptive of the pantheon of literature, too paternalistic. Most books aimed at adults today don't have a tenth of the complexity and beauty of Watership Down. But despite that complexity, it is also far less didactic than many books published now, which tend to hit the reader over the head with a dumbed-down style and a painfully obvious worldview. Richard Adams wrote this book at a time when authors still allowed their convictions and principles to imbue their writing, but not to overwhelm it. This is rare today, but it's good to know that so many people still love his work.

Goodbye and thank you, Richard Adams.

A Vision: Keith Douglas and 'Desert Flowers'

Keith Douglas in North Africa during World War II


DESERT FLOWERS (Keith Douglas)


Living in a wide landscape are the flowers - 
Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying - 
the shell and the hawk every hour
are slaying men and jerboas, slaying

the mind: but the body can fill
the hungry flowers and the dogs who cry words
at nights, the most hostile things of all.
But that is not new. Each time the night discards

draperies on the eyes and leaves the mind awake
I look each side of the door of sleep
for the little coin it will take
to buy the secret I shall not keep.

I see men as trees suffering
or confound the detail and the horizon.
Lay the coin on my tongue and I will sing
of what the others never set eyes on.

                         [? El Ballah, General Hospital, 1943]


I have a habit of relating poems of the past to current events, Sometimes it's the whole poem, sometimes just a phrase. Sometimes I'm sure it's a bit of a leap. But when I do it, it always feels true. And surely the capacity to stand outside time, but within patterns and feelings, is one sign of a great poem.

I started thinking about 'Desert Flowers' again in the wake of the November 13 attacks in Paris. There is so much about this poem that cuts both ways, or all ways...it must be the most delphic of all his poems. Flowers are left to remember the dead, for comfort; but in this poem of the Western Desert Campaign in World War II, they are also "the hungry flowers", devouring the body (perhaps the flowers of artillery fire?).

I wonder very much what Douglas was thinking of when he wrote this poem. It makes me think of concepts such as trauma, the reach and limitations of insight, and what we can learn from the dead. Partly because Douglas was still so young when he died, I tend to feel that he was often writing on a subconscious level that he was consciously not able to fully understand. In other words, he wanted to convey something journalistic and real, and his poems did that, but they were also much deeper than he realised. To a certain extent this happens with all good poetry and poets, but Douglas's poems have always seemed to me to have a real core depth, especially for a young writer.

Throughout the poem Douglas seems to be looking for, or invoking, other voices. In the second line he calls on Isaac Rosenberg, the great World War I poet. If you read Rosenberg's great poems, you will find similarities in their approaches - both poets strove for accuracy and detachment, not romanticism. The parallels between the natural world and the human world are harsh and striking: 'the shell and the hawk every hour/are slaying men and jerboas' - and then Douglas adds 'slaying/the mind'. This is where trauma enters the picture for me. The speaker is a man who cannot fully cope with what he is experiencing; this is one reason for detachment. The pressure on his mind, even the threat of mental death, is too much.

There is a hermetic quality to this poem, and 'the secret I shall not keep' is one of the most mysterious images of all. Is it poetry? Is it the ability to transcend the horrors that humanity witnessed in the World Wars, and that it keeps witnessing? The striving after vision in this poem is intense - incredibly intense, almost desperate. As close as he may get to the truth, Douglas suggests, his vision will be imperfect. Here, with 'I see men as trees suffering', Douglas makes reference to the account of Jesus healing the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-25). When the man's vision was at first partially restored, before a complete restoration, he said 'I see people, but they look like trees walking about' (Mark 8:24, New World Translation; 'I see men as trees, walking', King James Version). 'I see men as trees suffering' is also a blurred vision, but a terrible one, and wholly evocative of the horror and confusion of the battlefield - or even an act of terrorism. It's the moment after the bomb-blast.

The last two lines, as often in Douglas's poetry, seem to look onwards to his own death. The coin, which has already appeared earlier in the poem, here becomes a clear symbol of passage to the land of the dead, when laid on the speaker's tongue: Charon's obol, or the payment for the ferryman who took the dead across the river Styx.

Strangely, though, Douglas also suggests that this coin will open his mouth, or allow him to speak (or sing). How is this possible if he is dead? I see nothing in the poem to suggest that he is writing about ghostly visitations. I think that Douglas may be saying that when he is dead, his words will have a deeper meaning that they couldn't have in his life. They will become a vision that no one else could have had. And in a sense this is true: we perceive his poems differently because he died so young, in a great war, and perhaps those facts have given his poems deeper meaning and significance. This is how the dead can speak to us, in a manner amplified by their deaths.

This is perhaps where and why I thought of the poem in relation to the terrible events of recent weeks. It is a tragic fact that the dead can be transfigured by their deaths. They take on a meaning that they never had in life. Depending on the manner of their death, others (such as politicians) may also try to give them a meaning that those people would not have asked for or desired in life. And the sad thing is that although the dead speak to us in this way, living humans do not learn the lessons.

Guy Goffette's 'Elegy for a Friend': A Long Journey

Nicolas Vigier, Rain in Paris. Public domain


When I first read 'Elegy for a Friend', a sequence of thirteen-line poems by Guy Goffette written for his friend Paul de Roux, I was left overwhelmed and in tears. This reaction came from the pure beautiful power of the poem and its wonderful translation from French by Marilyn Hacker. It probably also had something to do with the fact that elegy has unfortunately been quite relevant in the lives of my family and friends in the past twelve months (not to speak of most of my life, it seems.) But when I started thinking about how I could write about the poem, it took me on a long and revealing journey of its own.

'Elegy for a Friend' has a certain focus on the cumulative effect of words, of events, and of simply living a life, which is perhaps also why it hit me so hard (a couple of years ago, a close friend and I were discussing the fact that 'cumulative' was one of the words of the year, and not in a good way.) Looking back on his relationship with his friend, the poet wishes that certain patterns could have been broken.


          Always, still, tomorrow, these paltry
          words, thrown off in passing, overflow us. 

          [...]

          if we had known
          that, would we have stayed
          sitting so long in our afflicted bedrooms?

          [...]

          It’s the same story always and we blame ourselves
          afterwards for having in the heat of words
          and wine allowed dark clouds to rise
          on the friend’s brow


Beyond this, on further readings I found myself quickly associating this poem with Ecclesiastes and re-reading it through that filter. The final stanza is, to me, overwhelmingly reminiscent of Ecclesiastes 12: "One day we must depart, no longer knowing/anything of what was at the source/of the fire...", alongside the vivid description of the decline of a human being with age: "before the silver cord is removed, and the golden bowl is crushed, and the jar at the spring is broken..." The conclusions are different: Ecclesiastes 12:13 says "Fear the true God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole obligation of man," whereas the poem is secular and contemplates the meaning of life and art ("written, read and reread/by a blind man dancing in the fire"), but it seems to me that both arise from a similar line of questioning.

I first read 'Elegy for a Friend' some months ago and have been thinking about it - and thinking about writing about it - for some time, whether actively or subconsciously. Recently, in relation to the Goffette poem, these lines by another poet came back to me: 


Do you know how it is when one wakes
at night suddenly and asks,
listening to the pounding heart: what more do you want,
insatiable?


I was so convinced that these lines were from Rilke that I leafed through my entire volume of his collected German poems and finally realised they weren't. The lines hadn't come back to me in an exact enough form to Google them accurately, but eventually I remembered enough key words to find them - in this poem by Czeslaw Milosz, 'Farewell' (scroll down to find it).

The connection isn't entirely clear to me: I think there are some stylistic similarities (although the fact that one poem is originally French and the other originally Polish may cloud this somewhat, in translation.) There are echoes of imagery across the poems: the suddenly beating heart, the self-questioning about life, meaning and desire. Milosz also asks: "From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife,/what grain will be saved", which seems to echo the final lines of Goffette's poem. (Very starkly, Milosz concludes: "Nothing remains.") Milosz's poem is, too, a kind of elegy, though it seems to me to mourn the loss of places, groups of people and moments in time, than a single person.

In the past week, when I re-read the first stanza of Goffette's poem, something started nagging at me, and I had a feeling it had to do with TS Eliot. Granted, when things nag at me and they involve poetry, it's not that uncommon for them to have something to do with TS Eliot. (Also, I had just been listening to Viggo Mortensen read The Waste Land at the British Library, and I met him afterwards, and it's safe to say all of that had a lasting effect.) But eventually, after digging around for a while in a) my mind, and b) the Internet, I finally figured it out. It wasn't The Waste Land: it was a poem I have never loved quite as much, 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock'.

'Prufrock' opens with an epigraph from Dante's Inferno, which translates as:


If I but thought that my response were made
to one perhaps returning to the world,
this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.
But since, up from these depths, no one has yet
returned alive, if what I hear is true,
I answer without fear of being shamed.


I suppose I was reminded of this for two reasons, both of which are found in the first poem/stanza of 'Elegy for a Friend'. This section refers to the friends "slipping from the métro to Dante’s/hell without changing faces or/pace", and then moves on to imagery of flame and finally "that shadow/that burns all shadows while it waits for us". I don't know whether or not Goffette intended a direct reference. But I do know that by the time I had tracked down the 'Prufrock' epigraph, I felt as though I had travelled a long journey.

Alun Lewis: 'Indian Day'

Birds over Gateway of India by Swaminathan. Used under Creative Commons license


INDIAN DAY (Alun Lewis)


I

Dawn's cold imperative compels
Bazaars and gutters to disturb
Famine's casual ugly tableaux.
Lazarus is lifted from the kerb.

The supple sweeper girl goes by
Brushing the dung of camels from the street
The daylight's silver bangles
Glitter on her naked feet.

II

Yellow ramtilla stiffens in the noon,
Jackals skulk among the screes,
In skinny fields the oxen shiver,
The gods have prophesied disease.

Hedges of spike and rubber, hedges of cactus,
Lawns of bougainvillea, jasmine, zinnia
Terraces of privilege and loathing,
The masterly shadows of a nightmare

Harden and grow lengthy in the drought.
The moneyed antipathetic faces
Converse in courts of pride and fountains
With ermined sleek injustices.
Gods and dacoits haunt the mountains.

III

The sun the thunder and the hunger grow
Extending stupidly the helds of pain
Ploughing the peasant under with his crop
Denying the great mercy of the rain

Denying what each flowering pear and lime
And every child and each embrace imply - 
The love that is imprisoned in each heart
By the famines and fortunes of the century.

IV

Night bibles India in her wilderness
The Frontier Mail screams blazing with such terror
The russet tribesman lays aside his flute
Rigid with Time's hypnotic surging error.

The kindness of the heart lies mute
Caught in the impotence of dreams
Yet all night long the boulders sing
The timeless songs of mountain streams.


In 2015, it is one hundred years since the birth of Alun Lewis, one of the Big Three of British World War II poetry along with Keith Douglas and Sidney Keyes. Like Keith Douglas, Lewis died in 1944, while Sidney Keyes died in 1943. All were young, but at 28, Lewis lived the longest by a few years. I have written a little more about him here.

Out of the Lewis/Douglas/Keyes trio (none of whom knew each other, although Douglas and Keyes may have crossed paths), Douglas is - to me - by far the most contemporary. He wrote cold, cutting poetry which in most particulars could have been written in recent years. Lewis and Keyes were more in a backwards-looking Romantic tradition, although Keyes was so young when he died that I hesitate to say which direction he would ultimately have taken with his work.

'Indian Day' is taken from Lewis's collection Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, the title of which refers to the description of a war horse in the Biblical book of Job. It was published posthumously in 1945. Lewis was posted to India in 1942 and was deeply moved by the striking sights and violent poverty of the country. This was one of the poems which resulted.

'Indian Day' doesn't exactly escape cliches about the subcontinent, especially those that would have been implicated in the colonial gaze of the time. The view of the "supple sweeper girl" is a bit voyeuristic (without being particularly perceptive) and the conclusion that "love...is imprisoned in each heart" isn't that exciting. But this is still a hugely evocative poem with unforgettable lines - "The sun the thunder and the hunger grow" and "Night bibles India in her wilderness" (the latter made me think of another Welshman, Dylan Thomas, who a few years later wrote the words "starless and bible black" in his play Under Milk Wood. The seriousness of the black-covered Bibles seems to me very evocative of nonconformist Wales.)

Adam Zagajewski's 'Don't Allow the Lucid Moment to Dissolve': Clinging to Lucidity

Soap Bubble by Mike Haller. Used under Creative Commons license


I've been blogging for more than three years now, which may or may not be longer than expected. One thing is certain: very few things get easier with the passage of time, whatever people may tell you - if you're like me and motivation, momentum and good habits aren't your strong points, anyway.

I have recently been wondering what The Stone and the Star is for and whether it needs to change, whether or not I should continue, whether I should dial back on the Facebook and Twitter aspects and just blog, whether I should concentrate on having 800+ Twitter followers and not worry much about the blog...etc. The fact remains that while sometimes blogging feels more like a chore than like a release, it started all this (whatever "all this" is) and in my mind, the blog still seems to be framed as one of the core points of my creative life. The other social media aspects are more peripheral.

I was reaching for a poem which might articulate some of what I've been thinking about and I came to Adam Zagajewski's 'Don't Allow the Lucid Moment to Dissolve'.


DON'T ALLOW THE LUCID MOMENT TO DISSOLVE (Adam Zagajewski, translated by Renata Gorczynski)


In this poem, the "lucid moment" is about reaching our full potential - "the level of ourselves" and "[t]he stature of a man...notched/high up on a white door". When in conclusion Zagajewski says "On a hard dry substance/you have to engrave the truth", it certainly calls poetry and writing to mind; perhaps also the visual arts, carved like Michelangelo's painful and glorious statues; or music, inscribed on the page and written in sound on air.

Beyond these, so much that is important happens because people hold on to and make a record of lucid moments. The Bible writers and prophets, whether you believe their inspiration was divine or otherwise, certainly saw the crucial necessity of recording the lucid moment. Great scientists, explorers, human rights activists and others have glimpsed and reached for them repeatedly. The "lucid moments" become a kind of ladder, or a series of lights on the roadway ('lucid' comes from the Latin for 'light'). And while blogging about poetry isn't a great deal, it can also be a small way to hold onto and to reach forward with lucidity.

Going Into the Room: Turner, Mahon, MacNeice

JMW Turner, The Wreck Buoy, 1807 (reworked 1849)



Last weekend I went to the Turner and the Sea exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I've seen a lot of Turner paintings and quite a few exhibitions, but this was really great, and got better as it went along. There were some of the great paintings which permanently reside in the London galleries, such as The Fighting Temeraire and Snow Storm, but there were also equally amazing oil paintings from galleries elsewhere in the UK and the US; paintings of shipwrecks; delicate watercolours and quick sketches which were exquisite; and a whole range which showcased both Turner's genius in different mediums and styles, and also all the ways in which the sea inspired him.

As I looked at these amazing works by a painter who I love, I felt a very welcome lifting of stress, though it also came with some heightened emotion. It was quite a cleansing feeling. The news has been particularly dark in the past couple of months; constant rolling coverage of the crisis in Ukraine, and the weirdly blank (because they have no news) coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, have all been mentally wearing, as well as the ongoing nightmares of Syria and other places. These events can be distressing even if we are only exposed to them through the media and are not, for now, caught up in the middle of them. The world is a difficult place to live in at this time. I have been reading Mark 13, where Jesus and his apostles discussed "the sign when all these things are to come to a conclusion" (Mark 13:4). "Moreover, when you hear of wars and reports of wars, do not be alarmed; these things must take place, but the end is not yet," said Jesus (Mark 13:7), pointing to conflicts and other "pangs of distress" that would afflict humanity. My strong belief that the increasingly acute world events of the past 100 years are an indication of coming changes, and that things won't always be this way, is incredibly encouraging. But these are still difficult times.

The arts can also have a therapeutic effect in stressful times, and I felt it at the Turner exhibition. I came to a realisation, too. Here it is:

Poetry is like going into a room. When you write it, or when you read it, you go into the room, and you try to work things out. The room could be the size of the whole world, or the size of your heart, or anything in between. You could open the windows and let in floods of light, or it could be completely dark and closed. You could break down the walls, or they could be transparent. There might be one other person there, or crowds, or no one. There could be blank walls, or great artwork, or something utterly unexpected. Perhaps you will feel better, or less confused, or perhaps more confused. But whatever happens, there is always a room, and you go in, and try to work things out.

Along with this, I thought of two poems. One is 'Everything Is Going to Be All Right' by Derek Mahon. Here's a video of him reading it:

The other is 'Order to View' by Louis MacNeice, one of Derek Mahon's greatest influences.

Notes from the Celanworld

Pont Mirabeau, Paris. Photo by Gérard Delafond. Used under Creative Commons license



I haven't been reading Paul Celan quite as much in 2013 as in the previous couple of years. I have already internalised many of his poems, and frankly, sometimes I just do not want to go to that dark place. However, at any given moment I may have read an article about Celan, or work inspired by him, or something - there is always something. And of course, I do intend to keep reading him actively. Here is a little roundup of Celania that I have come across or been thinking about lately.

This video is a lecture and multimedia presentation on Celan by Pierre Joris, from 2012, which I recently watched. Joris is a poet, a translator and a major Celan expert, and his insights into Celan and the role of Celan's poetry in his own life are fascinating.

Courtney Druz, an American-Israeli poet, recently published a book-length poem called The Light and the Light, which I have been reading. Subtitles within the poem refer to poems from Celan's collection Die Niemandsrose (The No-One's Rose). This very interesting work draws upon not only Celan, but also the Biblical book of Ezekiel. The title is taken from Celan's 'Hut Window':


Beth, - this is
the house where the table stands with

the light and the light.


You can purchase The Light and the Light or find more information about Courtney Druz's work at her website: http://www.courtneydruz.com/

This last is not recent, but I wanted to highlight this post on the Arty Semite blog (awesome blog name) which reproduces C K Williams's poem 'Jew on Bridge'. I have read a number of poems which were in some way inspired by Celan, but this is probably the best. Celan committed suicide by jumping off the Pont Mirabeau in Paris, and 'Jew on Bridge' circles around this image, confronting issues of Jewish identity. It's very much worth reading.

Finally, I recently came to the strange realisation that while I don't speak German (beyond a few words), I have reached the point where I can recognise a number of Celan's poems in their German original. While reading the facing translations, and trying to refer to the German, the shape and sound of the originals must have gone into me. I still would like to learn German, in part inspired by Celan and Rilke.

Alun Lewis's 'Raider's Dawn' By Way of Hardy's 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"'

John Constable, A ploughing scene in Suffolk (A summerland), c 1824



When I lived in Canada, I was quite often asked if I was any relation to Dan Aykroyd, the Canadian actor. I am not - he belongs to the other branch of Canadian Aykroyds, who seem unrelated to my family (and furthermore, he pronounces it Ack-royd while we pronounce it Ayk-royd - which has caused no end of confusion over the years.) Living in England, I seldom get asked about Dan Aykroyd but I do get asked occasionally about author Peter Ackroyd (no relation) and very occasionally about artist Carry Akroyd (also no relation.)

A few days ago I went to the London launch for George Szirtes's Bad Machine (which is excellent) and chatted with a gentleman who I had met previously at one or two literary events, and also saw online occasionally on George's Facebook page (which is a bit like an online literary salon.) He asked me about my name and we chatted a bit about the people I wasn't related to. Later that evening, this gentleman messaged me through Facebook to say that at his local train station that evening, where people left books to trade, he had come across a copy of World War II poet Alun Lewis's letters to Freda Aykroyd and had wondered about the surname, given our conversation.

I was quite surprised by this coincidence, because I actually do have a family connection to Freda Aykroyd. She was the wife of my great-uncle W R Aykroyd, who was then the director of the Nutrition Research Laboratories in southern India. Freda Aykroyd and Alun Lewis met in 1943 and fell in love. Lewis's death in 1944 from a self-inflicted gunshot is thought to have been a likely suicide, and it is also thought that the affair had something to do with it. I have not read the letters, which were published as A Cypress Walk, but it seems that both were very aware that they were betraying spouses who they loved, and apparently Lewis's awareness was particularly acute. All the evidence suggests that he was also very much in love with his wife, Gweno.

The coincidence was made a bit stranger by the fact that this copy was signed by Juliet Aykroyd, who is Freda and Wallace's daughter and thus another of my distant-ish cousins, who also helped with the editing of the letters, I think. The people who were directly involved in the drama either died before I was born, or were sufficiently distant relatives that I would never have met them, and thus the story is on mostly an intellectual level for me. It is a strange, sad story to have in the family, though. I am quite unable to find such developments in people's lives romantic; just sad, mainly.

This rather long-winded anecdote did remind me that I have wanted to write about one of Lewis's poems, 'Raider's Dawn', and one of Thomas Hardy's, 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"', for some time. Here, first, is the Hardy poem, written during World War I, in 1916:


IN TIME OF "THE BREAKING OF NATIONS" (Thomas Hardy)


Only a man harrowing clods
  In a slow silent walk,
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
  Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
  From the heaps of couch grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
  Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
  Come whispering by;
War's annals will fade into night
  Ere their story die.


Alun Lewis's World War II poem can be found here:


RAIDER'S DAWN (Alun Lewis)


The title of the Hardy poem makes reference to Jeremiah 51:20 ("Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms.") The counterpoint to Lewis's reference to "Paper on paper,/Peter on Paul" - the falling of fragile pages from a Bible - is very interesting.

Essentially, I haven't come across anything to directly confirm it (if anyone has, please let me know) but I am absolutely convinced that these two poems are related. It seems to me almost impossible that Lewis wouldn't have come across Hardy's poem, and that 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"' wasn't either a conscious or a subconscious inspiration for 'Raider's Dawn'. The poems seem to reflect each other almost like mirror images.

The major difference is, of course, in the conclusions that the poets reach. Hardy saw that the war was changing the world around him, but he chose to focus on the eternal things that would outlive war; love, the basics of human survival, and so on. In Lewis's poem, ominously, the lovers are "Eternity's masters,/Slaves of Time", no longer lost in their own world, but observing the fall of bodies into mass graves. The concluding image of the "blue necklace" on the "charred chair" is especially haunting, and depressing. For me it seems to conjure up thoughts of the deserted house after the pogrom, or the aftermath of the atomic bomb. 'Raider's Dawn' seems to become the dark shadow of 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"', the final loss of innocence in World War II which began with World War I.

The John Constable painting above, incidentally, was chosen simply because Hardy's poem makes me think of Constable's paintings.

"Behold the Man!" - Randall Jarrell's 'Eighth Air Force'

Ecce Homo, Antonio Ciseri, 1871.


This painting by Antonio Ciseri, depicting a crucial moment in the Gospels, is one of the most famous examples of a scene often depicted in art. Its perspective, that of a withdrawn observer, is particularly interesting and powerful.

At this time of year, many people reflect on the figure of Jesus Christ and what his life and death meant. As one of Jehovah's Witnesses, I will be attending the annual Memorial of Jesus's death along with fellow believers and friends around the world. [Updated for 2022: this year, the event takes place on Friday 15 April] (Nisan 14 by the Jewish calendar. You can find some more information about this event on this link: http://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/memorial/.)

This has also led me to think of a poem which I first encountered in university and which makes reference to the events surrounding the death of Jesus. The poem is 'Eighth Air Force' by Randall Jarrell.


EIGHTH AIR FORCE (Randall Jarrell)


As I have studied the Bible for so much of my life, due to its importance in my life as a Christian, I have also often found that being familiar with the Scriptures has had peripheral benefits in helping me to understand many literary references. The Bible is, of course, referenced in a multitude of ways in world literature. In 'Eighth Air Force', Jarrell uses the voices of Pontius Pilate (the governor of Judea) and his wife to reflect on the moral agony and dilemmas of war.

I remember studying this poem in a small seminar class, and writing an essay about it; when the professor handed back our essays, she mentioned that "one of you even looked up the scriptural references." I was just a little surprised that no one else had done so, which hopefully was not a smug reaction.

In any case, I found the way in which Jarrell wove together the voices of Pilate and his wife fascinating. "I have suffered, in a dream, because of him,/Many things" is a reference to the warning sent to Pilate by his wife: "Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I suffered a lot today in a dream because of him" (Matthew 27:19). "What is lying?" is plainly a reference to Pilate's ambiguous philosophical query to Jesus, "What is truth?" (John 18:38). After his famous utterance "Behold the man!" (John 19:5), Pilate said (for about the third time) "I find no fault in this just man," (John 19:6) but caught in what he perceived as a moral dilemma, he still washed his hands symbolically and chose to give Jesus up to those who wanted his death.

Jarrell, in his sad, complex contemplation of men of war - "murderers" - calls up these Biblical references to indicate that he faces a similar moral dilemma. Although he concludes with "I find no fault in this just man" - humanity at war, here evoked by simple homely details - his conclusion is by no means free of ambiguity, and what he really thinks and feels is not at all certain. (Jarrell himself served in the Air Force and is known for other works of war poetry.)

I do know that the impression which this poem made upon me has never left me. I remember the images which appeared in my mind when I read it, and I remember being intrigued by the Biblical references. I even remember the fall of light in the classroom.

It seems to me that certain things - sometimes works of art - are memorable in life because a lot of things flow to and from them. The Scriptural references gave this poem greater significance for me than it would otherwise have had, I think. Many years later, I've developed an increasing interest in war poetry and the sad ambiguities which it encompasses, and this too may have something to do with this poem.

Jo Shapcott's 'Gherkin Music': "Joining the Game of Brilliance"

Gherkin photos © Minouche Wojciechowski



London is a city of contrasts. This is the ultimate cliché; I don't think I've ever come across a city which someone wants to sell to tourists and which isn't called "a city of contrasts" at some point. I have found, though, that London's contrasts can be particularly beautiful or savage.

I was on my way home tonight and had just got on the bus at Sloane Square when a friend texted to ask if I wanted to meet up for dinner. Poised to text back "no, I'm on my way home," I realised that I had nothing much to do at home and didn't particularly want a night in, so instead I hopped off the bus and headed on foot towards Kensington to meet her. I walked up Sloane Street, where the shop windows are like art galleries to me - some of the lovely displays suggested that horses and bags are in this year (I could definitely live with that.) And on through Knightsbridge and up towards the Royal Albert Hall. Near the Victoria and Albert, I ended up buying a hot chocolate for a man who was homeless and ill - he had a cancerous lesion which he'd wrapped plastic bags around. I think part of me closed off in self-defense when I saw that, not really able to confront the fact that I'd just been window shopping in Chelsea amongst people with far more money than they need, and that I was wearing a warm coat and off to have a restaurant dinner before heading home to a flat which is at least tolerably warm - while this man was quite possibly in the process of dying on the street.

This is where London's contrasts are savage, and they are often to do with the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, one of the outstanding failures of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. I will never forget the day when I found myself on a particularly threatening housing estate in Brixton in the afternoon, and then in the evening I went to a millionaire's house in Holborn for an art exhibition. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the exhibition, but the contrast gave me a kind of moral headache. "They will certainly build houses and have occupancy...they will not build and someone else have occupancy; they will not plant and someone else do the eating" (Isaiah 65:21, 22, New World Translation) - this is how the world was actually intended to be.

London's contrasts can also be magnificent and fascinating. I went to St Katharine's Docks one night recently with friends and we were dumbstruck (though conflicted) at the sight of the Tower of London with the Shard rising jagged and space-age behind it. I cannot possibly imagine how the Tudors would have reacted to this. It was one of the most science-fiction things I've ever seen.

I thought of such contrasts when I read one of the new Poems on the Underground - the new set are all London poems, as it is the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. I've loved 'Stations' by Connie Bensley, as well as pieces by Wordsworth and Yeats. This poem, though, really made my day when I saw it on the District line - I imagine I wore a big stupid smile on my face as I read it.


GHERKIN MUSIC (Jo Shapcott)


This poem does a number of things rather wonderfully. The Gherkin is an icon because of its distinctive shape; the first line asks us to "walk the spiral", and then the poem takes a shape and does just that. I'm not a big fan of shape poems, but this one is not obtrusive - it feels very organic and intuitive, a part of the words. The line breaks resemble a staircase (probably a spiral staircase) but they also evoke the shapes of the glass panes which make up the Gherkin, "where flat planes are curves" and "fragments of poems." Although your eye must read down the page to experience the poem, the words and the shape somehow make you feel as though you are ascending - this is wonderfully done and not something I've not often experienced in poetry. The poem itself becomes a "game/of brilliance".

I was also struck by the fusing of the secular and the spiritual in this poem. The building is described in terms which make it into something like a cathedral - "names fall like glory/into the lightwells" - but it is well known that this building is yet another temple to commerce. Shapcott also calls it "St Mary Axe" - the Gherkin's official name is actually 30 St Mary Axe, the name of the street. But again, this term would naturally bring to mind a place of worship. The City of London is, of course, densely populated both with skyscrapers and immensely rich corporations, and with a depth of history which includes many churches and other old buildings. All of this comes together in just a few lines, in a poem which should be providing a moment of transcendence for many Tube travellers this year.

Adam Zagajewski's 'Vita Contemplativa': "In Dark Waters, In Brightness"

Berlin, Museuminsel, 1956. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-41736-0005 / CC-BY-SA


It's perhaps two or three years since I started reading Adam Zagajewski's work. He is originally from Lwów in Poland, which inspired one of his most beautiful poems, 'To Go To Lvov'. From a country and a generation which produced many remarkable poets, he is outstanding.

I am distantly fascinated by Poland. So far I have only visited Krakow for a weekend, but it did not disappoint me. Among its other mysteries, the city carried faint echoes of the weeks I spent every summer in Finland as a child. I suppose this is some Baltic commonality, something in the air. I really love what I have read of Polish literature. The Poles seem to be both philosophical and passionate, which appeals to me a good deal. I remember years ago in Dublin, when I and a friend met some Polish sailors on board their ship in the docklands. I mentioned that I loved Joseph Conrad, although our conversation was mainly about the Bible. When we took our leave, one of the sailors kissed my hand.


VITA CONTEMPLATIVA (Adam Zagajewski)


The narrator of this poem is in Berlin, reflecting on the quiet moment in history where he seems to find himself. I have also been to Berlin; "dark waters" and "black buildings", indeed. I suppose that the references to Greek statuary are from the Pergamon Museum. Zagajewski, or his narrator, says with what seems to me some irony, "So this is the vita contemplativa...So this is it." Like philosophers before him, he contrasts the contemplative life with the active life, and obviously doesn't find peace. The contrast between "tranquility" and "taut attention" suggests that he knows this is just a suspended moment in time. After all, how often and for how long has peace reigned in Europe, or in the world of humans?

I'm haunted by the final line of 'Vita Contemplativa': "We dwell in the abyss. In dark waters. In brightness." There is no one who can fail to find something resonant in those words, in their life.

Thom Gunn's 'In Santa Maria del Popolo' and Caravaggio's Conversion on the Way to Damascus

This painting is Caravaggio's Conversion on the Way to Damascus, painted in 1601. It is in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, in Rome, and I saw it when I visited Rome with a friend three years ago.

By then, the painting had already held a great deal of personal significance for me for close to fifteen years. In my last year of high school, when I was sixteen years old, I took a course called Western Civilization, which (oddly enough) was based on the TV series and book Civilisation by British historian Kenneth Clark. I had never before taken a class which gave me such a good overview of the course of Western history over the last two thousand years, particularly in terms of religion, literature, art, architecture and music, and how they related to the events of history. I discovered Caravaggio and this painting through that class, as well as the paintings of JMW Turner, and Bernini's Apollo and Daphne statue, which we also saw in Rome. It was definitely a pivotal moment for me.

Seeing the painting in real life was a very moving experience. It is an incredibly powerful work, and it depicts an extremely crucial moment in one of my favourite Biblical books, the Acts of the Apostles. I'm always glad to not be disappointed when I see something like a work of art that I have waited to see for many years.

I have been thinking about the intersection between visual art and poetry: the places where they meet, or art inspired by poetry, or poetry inspired by art. I haven't reached many conclusions yet, except that the two mediums do two very different things and so it is hard to do one inspired by the other. Art is more immediate and visceral; poetry is subtle, cumulative and chronological - and even by saying that I am aware that I am simplifying far too much.

I tried to write a poem about this painting years ago, when I was about twenty. I doubt it was more than semi-successful. When I lived in Dublin and was discovering the wonderful art of Jack Yeats, W B Yeat's brother, I wrote a few poems inspired by his paintings, particularly For the Road and The Singing Horseman, both of which are in the National Gallery in Dublin. For the Road came out quite well, The Singing Horseman somewhat less so. I have a poster of his There Is No Night, which I used to go look at in the Hugh Lane Gallery. I love it but it has always bewildered me in some way I can't explain. I tried to write a poem about it - in fact, I tried on and off for at least a few years. I never really succeeded, which is still a source of frustration for me.

This is the poem 'In Santa Maria del Popolo', by Thom Gunn. Again, at this point of intersection between art and poetry, I am left uncertain. It is a rather analytical poem, more about Caravaggio's intentions and the poet's somewhat cynical questions, than about the painting itself, or the scene it depicts.


IN SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO (Thom Gunn)

Wendell Berry's 'The Peace of Wild Things': Leave Your Anxieties and Have a Cup of Tea With the Wolf in the Field of Flowers

Wolf photo by Fremlin. Used under Creative Commons license


Everyone seems to be very stressed out for one reason or another, which I in turn find stressful. Hermitry beckons, or else 'The Peace of Wild Things'. Wolves are one of my favourite wild creatures, if not my favourite, and this fellow looks rather peaceful in a field of flowers.


THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS (Wendell Berry)


The Emergency Poet prescribed this poem to me at Poetry Parnassus, and I was already familiar with it, but I loved it as a choice. I think I had talked about anxiety a fair bit in those few minutes. (I also started thinking about tea therapy tonight; I think we need to get some kind of poetry/tea therapy going.) The wild animals in this poem have the advantage that they "do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief"; a pretty good description of anxiety, I'd say.

The Sermon on the Mount has some of the most practical and comforting words about anxiety ever spoken or written. It comes in different guises, of course, but the illustration of "the lilies of the field" (Matthew 6:25-32) who remain loved and cared for although "they do not toil, nor do they spin" is worth calling to mind in so many situations (particularly as it's possible to feel anxiety and a lack of security both practically and emotionally.) Finally, Jesus said: “Keep on, then, seeking first the kingdom and his [God's] righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you. So, never be anxious about the next day, for the next day will have its own anxieties. Sufficient for each day is its own badness." (Matthew 6:33, 34, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures).

Carolyn Forché, 'Travel Papers' and Poetry of Witness

The child asked if the bones in the wall
Belonged to the lights in the tunnel
Yes, I said, and the stars nailed shut his heaven

-Carolyn Forché, 'Curfew'


I started reading American poet Carolyn Forché's work only a few months ago and already cannot remember how I came across it (not a good indication for my memory). I think it is possible that I was browsing through poems about travel on the Poetry Foundation website and came across 'Travel Papers'. It is also possible that I saw her cited as a poet influenced by Paul Celan; or that I was tracing the term often associated with her work, 'poetry of witness'; or something else.

My discovery of Forché brought a sense of real excitement which comes only occasionally in my artistic experiences. I can describe this only with difficulty, but I suppose it is a combination of wonder and shock. Compassionate, tender, horrific, luminous, bleak; all of these words come to mind. Her most famous poem is 'The Colonel', which is representative of her subject matter if not so much of her style. It is a shocking piece about an encounter which Forché had during her time with Amnesty International in El Salvador, during the civil war. Apparently it is a kind of "found poem"; her publisher came upon it among her notes and thought that it was a completed poem, and they made the decision to publish it as such.

Many of Forché's poems describe atrocities, crimes against humanity, trauma and its aftermath. 'The Garden Shukkei-En' is about Hiroshima; 'Letter to a City Under Siege' is about the siege of Sarajevo; and there are many other examples. She has also edited Against Forgetting, a seminal anthology of poems by and about those who suffered through the terrible events of the twentieth century and survived or died. In an interview with Bloodaxe Books, one of her publishers, she commented on this area of poetics: "I read the poems for the mark of this extremity, for its impress, rather than for positions advocated or subjects addressed. I was interested in the legibility, in the poetry, of this experience, and also in the realm of the social, between the institutions of the state (and politics) and the private life of citizens. This is 'poetry of witness'."

This, to me, is a particularly compassionate, enlightening and useful approach to political poetry. It is not so much politics as testimony, as it encompasses a variety of experiences, even though these may conflict in terms of their political viewpoint. Such poems remind the reader that events which disfigure the world and its people have happened, continue to happen, and continue to affect us after they are apparently over. So far, I have read a fairly small number of Forché's poems, but it is very noticeable that they frequently see through the eyes of women and children, who constituted the majority of the twentieth century's war victims. It is always the innocent who suffer the most. This makes me think of the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes: "And I myself returned that I might see all the acts of oppression that are being done under the sun, and, look! the tears of those being oppressed, but they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, so that they had no comforter." (Ecclesiastes 4:1).


TRAVEL PAPERS (Carolyn Forché)


'Travel Papers', which can be found on the above link, is a more restful poem about travel, memory, and the death of a friend; but it is also haunted by the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. It was published only a year ago and was written for Daniel Simko, a Slovak poet who emigrated with his family to the US after the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He died in 2004 at the age of 45. He wrote in English, as he was relatively young when he left his home country. Simko and Forché had a long friendship involving much travel and collaboration.

'Travel Papers' caught my eye in part because of its opening line: "By boat to Seurasaari...". Seurasaari is an island just outside the Finnish capital of Helsinki, famous as a beautiful park, for its collection of historic buildings, and for its red squirrels. My mother is from Finland and we spent part of every summer there visiting my grandmother in Turku, until she died in 1995. In the subsequent 17 years I've only been back once, a trip which did include a quick visit to Helsinki and Seurasaari.

(Incidentally, the painting which I have included with this entry is by the extraordinary Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela. It depicts Lake Keitele, which is in another part of Finland, but seemed to go nicely with this entry anyway. The painting is now in the National Gallery in London, where it has been hugely popular, and this blog can't convey its uniquely glowing quality. Gallen-Kallela is much less well known than he deserves to be - this painting, as lovely as it is, is far from being one of his greatest. However, this year a number of European galleries including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris will host an unprecedented exhibition of his work, which is a very good sign.)

A few lines in, Forché seems to make reference to the Biblical account of Elijah, who fled from Queen Jezebel and spoke with God on the mountainside: "And after the fire a still small voice." (1 Kings 19:12, KJV). The still small voice - the voice of God - is sometimes used by artists to represent the motivation for their artistic drive.


Still voice. Fire that is no fire.
Ahead years unknown to be lived -


Images flicker past as through the window of a car or train. Snapshots of violent death juxtaposed with the serenity of nature are appropriate for the work and preoccupations of both poets. The birch trees recur again and again, like a repeated theme in a piece of music. The sense of elegy throughout, particularly toward the end, is piercing. I found these lines, about the aftermath of shock on hearing of a loved one's death, to be familiar:


Hours after your death you seemed
everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight.
Now your moments are clouds
in a photograph of swifts.


I can certainly hear echoes of Paul Celan, one of the greatest "poets of witness", in the direct address to the you and the intertwined words. Some lines came back to me through this poem:


I am still writing with your hand,
as you stand in your still-there of lighted words.

(from 'Travel Papers')


I see you, you pick them with
my new, my
everyman's hands, you put them
into the Bright-Once-More which no one
needs to weep or to name.

(Paul Celan, from 'The Bright Stones')


I look forward to reading more of Forché's work and will try to seek out the Against Forgetting anthology, as well. I think that what she is trying to do in the realm of poetics is something essential.

John Milton - 'On His Blindness'

ON HIS BLINDNESS (John Milton)


When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."


John Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, but this poem is also well known and is certainly my favourite of his works - possibly one of my favourite poems by anyone.

Milton, a poet of the 17th century, found himself completely blind by his late forties; and from the evidence of this poem, sadly frustrated, as this impairment left him very limited. He had to dictate his writing to assistants, one of whom was the great metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell.

In this sonnet, Milton refers to Jesus' parable of the talents, found at Matthew 25:14-30. Milton obviously feared that he was becoming like the servant who deliberately hid his talent, rather than using it and making it grow. While the talents in this parable were actually monetary units, and could represent various gifts, opportunities or useful abilities, many artists and interpreters have seen them literally as "talents."

Milton, a devout man, obviously found himself in a difficult position. He didn't want to make excuses for himself, but he also saw that his blindness had left him severely limited. This poem also reminds me of the apostle Paul's comments on his friend Epaphroditus, who was "longing to see all of you and is depressed because you heard he had fallen sick." (Philippians 2:26). Epaphroditus evidently felt that he couldn't do all that he felt he should be doing, and that his weakness had left him somehow exposed.

'On His Blindness' offers the response: "They also serve who only stand and wait." Sometimes there is little else that we can do but hold on. It doesn't mean that we are worth any less, or that we are any less loved.

Vernon Watkins' 'Foal': Nature and Spiritual Beauty in a Welsh Landscape

FOAL (Vernon Watkins)


Darkness is not dark, nor sunlight the light of the sun
But a double journey of insistent silver hooves.
Light wakes in the foal's blind eyes as lightning illuminates corn
With a rustle of fine-eared grass, where a starling shivers.

And whoever watches a foal sees two images,
Delicate, circling, born, the spirit with blind eyes leaping
And the left spirit, vanished, yet here, the vessel of ages
Clay-cold, blue, laid low by her great wide belly the hill.

See him break that circle, stooping to drink, to suck
His mother, vaulted with a beautiful hero's back
Arched under the singing mane,
Shaped to her shining, pricked into awareness
By the swinging dug, amazed by the movement of suns;
His blue fellow has run again down into grass,
And he slips from that mother to the boundless horizons of air,
Looking for that other, the foal no longer there.

But perhaps
In the darkness under the tufted thyme and downtrodden winds,
In the darkness under the violet's roots, in the darkness of the pitcher's music,
In the uttermost darkness of a vase
There is still the print of fingers, the shadow of waters.
And under the dry, curled parchment of the soil there is always a little foal
Asleep.

So the whole morning he runs here, fulfilling the track
Of so many suns; vanishing the mole's way, moving
Into mole's mysteries under the zodiac,
Racing, stopping in the circle. Startled he stands
Dazzled, where darkness is green, where the sunlight is black,
While his mother, grazing, is moving away
From the lagging star of those stars, the unrisen wonder
In the path of the dead, fallen from the sun in her hooves,
And eluding the dead hands, begging him to play.

© The Estate of Vernon Watkins. Used by kind permission of Gwen Watkins.

For this entry I'd like to specially thank Gwen Watkins for giving me permission to reproduce one of her late husband's poems, and also John Rhys Thomas for his assistance. The painting is by Stubbs, another horsey favourite.

I think that I encountered Vernon Watkins' 'Foal' at one of those particularly impressionable moments which came quite often between the ages of 10 and 20 in particular - or perhaps I should say 7 and 24... I think that my artistic interests since then have been mainly an extension of everything that came before. When I was 18 or 19 I was studying modern British poetry in one of my classes at university, and while this was not one of the poems we studied, it was in the Oxford anthology that we were using.

I have loved horses for a very, very long time, particularly since reading Marguerite Henry's King of the Wind when quite young. I was the quintessential horse-obsessed little girl, reading everything I could lay my hands on, writing bad poetry, and riding for several years until my studies and other aspects of life became more demanding. I am pretty sure that this poem came particularly to my notice during my browsing because it was about a foal. Vernon Watkins was a completely unfamiliar name to me. But I loved the poem so much that I ended up reading it to the class during a session where we all chose a poem to share. I've been reading Watkins on and off ever since.

Vernon Watkins is best known today for having been a close friend of Dylan Thomas, not for his own poetry. What is less well known is the fact that Thomas described Watkins as "the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English." Despite their friendship, they seem to have been two utterly different people: Thomas was a pure sensualist in both life and poetry, while Watkins was a deeply religious man with a stable and happy family life, influenced by the Symbolists and his Christian faith. Watkins' poems are pure and almost naive by comparison with those of Dylan Thomas. Notably, Thomas was supposed to be the best man at Watkins' wedding but failed to show up. At the time of Watkins' death, he was a strong candidate for the next British Poet Laureate. Sadly, he was only 61 when he died, and perhaps if he had lived longer and become the Poet Laureate he would be better known to the current generation. However, it is good to know that a New Selected Poems has been published in recent years by Carcanet and is available on this link.

I love Wales, although I have mainly travelled in Snowdonia, and Watkins was from South Wales (the Gower Peninsula). Gwen Watkins said of this poem: "We lived on the Gower cliffs for most of our married life, and at that time the wild ponies ran about the cliffs all the year round, so that in the spring there were many foals. Vernon knew every inch of Gower, and all its flowers, birds and animals." Watkins obviously had a profound love and reverence for the Welsh landscape. There are passages in his poems which crash across the reader's sensibilities like a wave on a headland:


Late I return, O violent, colossal, reverberant, eavesdropping sea.
My country is here. I am foal and violet. Hawthorn breaks from my hands.

(taken from 'Taliesin in Gower')


In other poems, colours and animal images create a powerful tapestry-like impression:


The mound of dust is nearer, white of mute dust that dies
In the soundfall's great light, the music in the eyes,
Transfiguring whiteness into shadows gone,
Utterly secret. I know you, black swan.

(taken from 'Music of Colours: White Blossom')


In his poems the animals and flowers are more than nature; they symbolize spiritual truths. I remember reading about 'Foal' and its companion poem 'The Mare', that Watkins had an interest in Plato's theory of the ideal form, whereby everything in the material world is only an echo or copy of a purer, perfect form on a spiritual plane. This could partly account for the description in 'Foal' of the "left spirit" and the "blue fellow" of the very real little foal who runs through the poem. The whispering image of "the print of fingers, the shadow of waters" also makes me think of Genesis and the early moment of creation, as though God has left his signature: "there was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep" (Genesis 1:2).

Essentially, however, this is a poem that I still find deeply mysterious and beautiful, which I love no less because interpretation somewhat eludes me. In many respects there is no other animal poem which quite compares with it, for me. The movements of the foal - leaping, startling, sleeping - are marvellously observed. Almost fifteen years after first reading the poem, there are still lines in it which haunt me and which remain, enchantingly, just out of reach. Sometimes I think that the shadowy foal refers to a dead twin; sometimes it is the Platonic ideal; sometimes it seems like the beautiful dreams that can wash through both our sleep and our waking hours, and which poetry brings us a little bit closer to touching.