POEMS AND PROSE

Here is the second Beddoes poem that I have chosen.

When Beddoes died she was only two years old, but I am sure that later in her life she read his work and it may have influenced the writing of her own poem.

E.B.B.

SONG

How many times do I love thee, dear?
Tell me how many thoughts there be
In the atmosphere
Of a new-fall'n year,
Whose white and sable hours appear
The latest flake of Eternity:
So many times do I love thee, dear.

How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravell'd from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star:
So many times do I love again.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Today I am moving on to another male suicidal poet, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849).

His work showed a constant preoccupation with death. He became increasingly disturbed and committed suicide by poison at Basel, in 1849, at the age of 46."

(From Wikipedia)

THOUGHTS

Sweet are the thoughts that haunt the poet’s brain
Like rainbow-fringed clouds, through which some star
Peeps in bright glory on a shepherd swain;
They sweep along and trance him; sweeter far
Than incense trailing up an out-stretched chain
From rocking censer; sweeter too they are
Than the thin mist which rises in the gale
From out the slender cowslip’s bee-scarred breast.
Their delicate pinions buoy up a tale
Like brittle wings, which curtain in the vest
Of cobweb-limbed ephemera, that sail
In gauzy mantle of dun twilight dressed,
Borne on the wind’s soft sighings, when the spring
Listens all evening to its whispering.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Beddoes' choice of poison was curare, which was used by South American indigenous people on arrow tips to paralyse their prey. His body was found in his spectacularly untidy study, together with a suicide note in which he left his wine cellar (and a stomach pump!) to his physician, Dr. Ecklin.

IMPORTANT NOTE: SOME OF THESE DETAILS ARE INCORRECT. PLEASE REFER TO THE COMMENT BY CHRISTINE HANKINSON OF THE THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES SOCIETY.

Randall Jarrell is primarily a war poet, so it comes as a pleasant surprise to read this poem about nature at night.

However, the last four lines bring us back to earth with a reminder that war and death are ever present in our human world.

THE BREATH OF NIGHT

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars.

Randall Jarrell

I have chosen this poem by Randall Jarrell because I do not fully understand it. I think it is about accepting and being happy with the ordinary things of life - but I may have got it completely wrong. Tell me what you think.

WELL WATER

What a girl called "the dailiness of life"
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
"Since you're up . . ." Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

Randall Jarrell

I shall let this Randall Jarrell poem speak for itself.

THE REFUGEES

In the shabby train no seat is vacant.
The child in the ripped mask
Sprawls undisturbed in the waste
Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant?
They had faces and lives like you. What was it they possessed
That they were willing to trade for this?
The dried blood sparkles along the mask
Of the child who yesterday possessed
A country welcomer than this.
Did he? All night into the waste
The train moves silently. The faces are vacant.
Have none of them found the cost extravagant?
How could they? They gave what they possessed.
Here all the purses are vacant.
And what else could satisfy the extravagant
Tears and wish of the child but this?
Impose its canceling terrible mask
On the days and faces and lives they waste?
What else are their lives but a journey to the vacant
Satisfaction of death? And the mask
They wear tonight through their waste
Is death's rehearsal. Is it really extravagant
To read in their faces: What is there we possessed
That we were unwilling to trade for this?

Randall Jarrell

We are now halfway through my presentation of eight suicidal poets and I am moving from the ladies to the men - beginning with Randall Jarrell.

This five-line poem is about a gunner in a Sperry ball turret* on a World War II American bomber aircraft, who was killed and whose remains were unceremoniously hosed out of the turret.

THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell

* Jarrell, who served in the Army Air Force, provided the following explanatory note:

"A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose."

Today I have a challenge for you: Can you tell me what this poem by Anne Sexton is all about?

I confess I am not sure, although I have a few ideas.

It is rather strange and obscure, but perhaps to some of you the meaning is perfectly clear.

Just tell me!

(P.S. Of course she had mental problems all her life and this s reflected in her writing.)

AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN

You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.

I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
sits on my lips and defecates.
It is old. It is also a pauper.
I have tried to keep it on a diet.
I give it no unction.

There is a good look that I wear
like a blood clot. I have
sewn it over my left breast.
I have made a vocation of it.
Lust has taken plant in it
and I have placed you and your
child at its milk tip.

Oh the blackness is murderous
and the milk tip is brimming
and each machine is working
and I will kiss you when
I cut up one dozen new men
and you will die somewhat,
again and again.

Anne Sexton

A CURSE AGAINST ELEGIES

Oh, love, why do we argue like this?
I am tired of all your pious talk.
Also, I am tired of all the dead.
They refuse to listen,
so leave them alone.
Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.

Everyone was always to blame:
the last empty fifth of booze,
the rusty nails and chicken feathers
that stuck in the mud on the back doorstep,
the worms that lived under the cat's ear
and the thin-lipped preacher
who refused to call
except once on a flea-ridden day
when he came scuffing in through the yard
looking for a scapegoat.
I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.

I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you -- you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.

Anne Sexton

(The painting preceding the poem is "Elegy" ("Douleur d'Amour") by the French painter William Bouguereau 1825-1905)

Anne Sexton searches for the comfort of her lost childhood.

45 MERCY STREET

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign --
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was...
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down --
I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

Anne Sexton

Peter Gabriel wrote a tribute song to Anne Sexton. Here he is singing the beautiful, haunting "Mercy Street" at a concert in Milan in 2003.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX7zIypE2FE

I am moving down my list of eight poets who were weighed down by "fardels" and took their own lives - and I have arrived at Anne Sexton.

Here is an excerpt from a biography:

"Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts–October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) was an influential American poet and writer known for her highly personal, confessional poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her long battle with depression. After repeated attempts, she took her own life in 1974."

You can read more about her at:

http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/poetry/as/bio1.html

COURAGE

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Anne Sexton

INSOMNIAC

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

Sylvia Plath

Is this poem by Silvia Plath just what it seems - about mushrooms growing?

There have been many suggestions. Let me know what you think.

MUSHROOMS

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

Sylvia Plath

The mirror is always truthful, but when we look into it we do not always like what we see.

MIRROR

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath

I am moving on - to another lady poet, the American Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963), who I am sure is well-known to many of you.

Sylvia Plath - Self Portrait 1951

MAD GIRL'S LOVE SONG

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Sylvia Plath

This is a sad little poem about unrequited love.

BUT NOT TO ME

The April night is still and sweet
With flowers on every tree;
Peace comes to them on quiet feet,
But not to me.

My peace is hidden in his breast
Where I shall never be,
Love comes to-night to all the rest,
But not to me.

Sara Teasdale

This is the last in my selection of four poems by this writer. If you would like to read more of her work, go to:

where you will find 229 of her poems.

This poem by Sara Teasdale is not about the burial of a person, but a metaphor of the wish to dispose of an emotion, the love for someone once held dear.

BURIED LOVE

I have come to bury Love
Beneath a tree,
In the forest tall and black
Where none can see.

I shall put no flowers at his head,
Nor stone at his feet,
For the mouth I loved so much
Was bittersweet.

I shall go no more to his grave,
For the woods are cold.
I shall gather as much of joy
As my hands can hold.

I shall stay all day in the sun
Where the wide winds blow, --
But oh, I shall cry at night
When none will know.

Sara Teasdale

In this poem Sara Teasdale stresses the value of beauty - in nature and human life.

BARTER

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

Sarah Teasdale

Here is a brief note about the poet:

Her last, and some say her finest, collection of verse, Strange Victory, was published posthumously that same year.

I know I have mentioned here before that Sara Teasdale is one of my favourite lady poets.

This poem is typical - commenting on an expired relationship.

AFTER LOVE

There is no magic any more,
We meet as other people do,
You work no miracle for me
Nor I for you.

You were the wind and I the sea --
There is no splendor any more,
I have grown listless as the pool
Beside the shore.

But though the pool is safe from storm
And from the tide has found surcease,
It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.

Sara Teasdale

I shall tell you more about Sara Teasdale's life (and death) tomorrow.

Charlotte May was a sensitive poet, but unfortunately unable to find someone to share her life.

In this poem she tells of a relationship that ultimately became stagnant - and love died

ROOMS

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart;
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,

The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide -
Rooms where for good or for ill, things died:

But there is the room where we two lie dead
Though every morning we seem to wake, and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall some day in the other dustier quieter bed
Out there - in the sun - in the rain.

Charlotte May

Charlotte Mew was born in Bloomsbury, London on 15th November 1869, the daughter of the architect Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead town hall.

(From Wikipedia and other sources)

Here is another of her poems - a farmer telling us about his young wife, who had an aversion to men - or was it just him?

THE FARMER'S BRIDE

Three summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe-but more's to do
At harvest-time that a bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of winter's day
Her smile went out, and `twadn't a woman-
More like a little frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.

"Out 'mong the sheep, her be," they said,
Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wadn't there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before out lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.

She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to cheat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away
"Not near, not near!" her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The woman say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I've hardly heard her speak at all.
Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me?

The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie's spotted feathers lie
An the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
What's Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!

She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. `Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her-her eyes, her hair, her hair!

Charlotte Mew

Today's post is already quite long, so I shall defer any discussion of the possible reasons for poets to commit suicide until tomorrow.

Sufficient for now to say that it often followed a long history of depression, linked to loneliness and a failure to have lasting, satisfying relationships.

Many of you will have realised that the common link between my eight poets is that they all committed suicide.

That is not necessarily the case - and I shall try to find you something uplifting from each of the poets.

ABSENCE

Sometimes I know the way
You walk, up over the bay;
It is a wind from the far sea
That blows the fragrance of your hair to me.
Or in this garden when the breeze
Touches my trees
To stir their dreaming shadows on the grass
I see you pass.
In shelterd beds, the heart of every rose
Serenely sleeps tonight. As shut as those
Your guarded heart; as safe as they from the beat, beat
Of hooves that tread dropped roses in the street.
Turn never again
On these eyes blind with a wild rain
Your eyes; they were stars to me.
There are things stars may not see.
But call, call, and though Christ stands
Still with scarred hands
Over my mouth, I must answer. So
I will come--He shall let me go!

Charlotte Mew

Another poem by Charlotte Mew tomorrow - and also a brief discussion of why so many poets and writers decide to take their own lives.

Early next year I shall be giving my annual presentation to my local poetry group.

I choose a theme and illustrate it with a selection of poems from various writers. My subject next spring will be "Who would fardels bear?"

You may recognise that as a line from a famous soliloquy in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (see below).

I shall be featuring these eight poets:

Charlotte Mew, Sara Teasdale

Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton

Randall Jarrell, Thomas Beddoes

Thomas Chatterton, Hart Crane

Although they did not all live at the same time, they did have something in common - which some of you may already know, or will have guessed.

The clue is in the title of my talk and the passage of Shakespeare from which it is taken:

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

(Hamlet - Act 3, Scene 1)

I shall explain more tomorrow, when I will begin with a poem by Charlotte Mew.

N.B. A 'fardel' is a burden, or heavy load.

This is the last in my series of poems by Louis MacNeice. I hope you have enjoyed them.

Tomorrow I am moving on to a new topic and, for about three weeks, I shall be presenting the work of eight poets who are connected by something they had in common.

ENTIRELY

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice has wonderful command of words - "Soundlessly collateral and incompatible'", "The drunkenness of things being various" - but is "suddener" a proper word? And what does it mean in this context?

SNOW

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis MacNeice

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070523212022AAF5XwB

There are some marvellous phrases in this description of an early summer's day by Louis MacNeice

"boldly embattled Mays and chestnuts" "beeches verdurous and voluptuous" "lightning's lavish annunciation"

Note how the mood changes with the arrival of the thunderstorm, which leads him to wish he was not alone.

JUNE THUNDER

The Junes were free and full, driving through tiny
Roads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley,
Through fields of mustard and under boldly embattled
Mays and chestnuts

Or between beeches verdurous and voluptuous
Or where broom and gorse beflagged the chalkland--
All the flare and gusto of the unenduring
Joys of a season

Now returned but I note as more appropriate
To the maturer mood impending thunder
With an indigo sky and the garden hushed except for
The treetops moving.

Then the curtains in my room blow suddenly inward,
The shrubbery rustles, birds fly heavily homeward,
The white flowers fade to nothing on the trees and rain comes
Down like a dropscene.

Now there comes catharsis, the cleansing downpour
Breaking the blossoms of our overdated fancies
Our old sentimentality and whimsicality
Loves of the morning.

Blackness at half-past eight, the night's precursor,
Clouds like falling masonry and lightning's lavish
Annunciation, the sword of the mad archangel
Flashed from the scabbard.

If only you would come and dare the crystal
Rampart of the rain and the bottomless moat of thunder,
If only now you would come I should be happy
Now if now only.

Louis Macneice

In this poem Louis tries to recapture something lost, a moment in time, and imagines bringing it close again, like holding a brandy glass.

THE BRANDY GLASS

Only let it form within his hands once more-
The moment cradled like a brandy glass.
Sitting alone in the empty dining hall…
From the chandeliers the snow begins to fall
Piling around carafes and table legs
And chokes the passage of the revolving door.
The last diner, like a ventriloquist’s doll
Left by his master, gazes before him, begs:
“Only let it form within my hands once more.”

Louis Macneice

. . . SUNDAY MORNING

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man's heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

Louis MacNeice

"This touching poem about a colleague who killed himself is a moving record of MacNeice's response to years of office life.

The last two lines might serve as an epitaph on MacNeice himself." *

THE SUICIDE

And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact
Conducting, was his office all those minutes ago,
This man you never heard of. These are the bills
In the intray, the ash in the ashtray, the grey memoranda stacked
Against him, the serried ranks of the box-files, the packed
Jury of his unanswered correspondence
Nodding under the paperweight in the breeze
From the window by which he left; and here is the cracked
Receiver that never got mended and here is the jotter
With his last doodle which might be his own digestive tract
Ulcer and all or might be the flowery maze
Through which he had wandered deliciously till he stumbled
Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked
On a manhole under the hollyhocks. The pencil
Point had obviously broken, yet, when he left this room
By catdrop sleight-of-foot or simple vanishing act,
To those who knew him for all that mess in the street
This man with the shy smile has left behind
Something that was intact.

Louis Macneice

* Comment from 'Smitha' at:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/521.html

In this very descriptive poem, full of vivid images, MacNneice returns to the house of his childhood - and a game of croquet.

SOAP SUDS

This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.

Louis MacNeice

Vestmannaeyjar (English: The Westmen Isles) is a small archipelago off the south coast of Iceland.

The islands are named after the Irish who were captured into slavery by the Norse Gaels. The Old Norse word Vestmenn, literally "Westmen", was applied to the Irish, and retained in Icelandic even though Ireland is more easterly than Iceland.

Louis MacNeice visited them several times and here is his poem about an unfortunate trawlerman.

I am afraid I cannot find a printed version, but sit back and enjoy this reading by Simon Armitage at the 2007 Louis MacNeice Centenary Celebration.

"SONG OF THE WEST MEN"

http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/media/Media,93717,en.mp3

WOLVES

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children’s bedtime, level with the shore.
The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.
Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

Louis Macneice

You may like to listen to this recording of a reading of the poem by Nick Laird at the Louis MacNeice Centenary Celebration and Conference at Queen's University, Belfast in September 2007.

It has a rather hesitant and unassuming introduction.

http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/media/Media,93708,en.mp3

Nick Laird was born in Cookstown, Co. Tyrone in 1975. He currently lives in Rome. His first collection To a Fault (2005) won the Rooney Prize and his first novel Utterly Monkey won the Betty Trask award. His second collection of poems, On Purpose, has just been published by Faber