by Anthony
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
(1911)
TRANSLATION BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD
The films of the Brazilian director Walter Salles (b. 1956) include Terra Estrangeira / Foreign Land (1996), Central do Brasil / Central Station (1998), Abril Despedaçado / Behind the Sun (2001), Diarios de Motocicleta / The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Dark Water (2005), Linha de Passe (2008) and On The Road (2012).
At Castle Boterel
THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928)
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
This is one of several great poems written by Hardy after the death of his first wife, in which he and she reappear as their youthful selves in phantom form, haunting charged places in the Wessex landscape. Since this is also the landscape of most of Hardy’s novels, and he had stopped writing fiction a decade earlier, the poem seems an elegy too for himself and for his own long career.
It’s now forty years since I first read it, and though its rhythms are as familiar to me as those of a favourite piece of music, the idiosyncratic wording and dexterous rhyming keep it as alive as any stubborn ghost, the clinching dimeter of each stanza paying off overwhelmingly in the last line of all.
At Castle Boterel
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet
Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.
What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, –
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.
It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.
Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is – that we two passed.
And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.
(1912)
The novelist and poet Alan Hollinghurst (b. 1954) won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. His other works include The Swimming Pool Library (1988), The Stranger’s Child (2011) and translations of two plays by Racine.
The Voice
THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928)
SEAMUS HEANEY
I can’t honestly say that I break down when I read ‘The Voice’, but when I get to the last four lines the tear ducts do congest a bit. The poem is one of several Thomas Hardy wrote immediately after the death of his first wife in late November 1912, hence the poignancy of his dating it ‘December 1912’. Hardy once described this group of memorial poems as ‘an expiation’, acknowledging his grief and remorse at the way he had neglected and hurt the one ‘who was all to me . . . at first, when our day was fair’. What renders the music of the poem so moving is the drag in the voice, as if there were sinkers on many of the lines. But in the final stanza, in that landscape of falling leaves, wind and thorn, and the woman calling, there is a banshee note that haunts ‘long after it is heard no more’.
The Voice
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Traveling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
(1912)
With twelve volumes of original poems to his name, and several books of critical essays, translations and drama, Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Adlestrop
EDWARD THOMAS (1878–1917)
SIMON WINCHESTER
I suppose I should stop kidding myself and admit that I’ll probably never go back to live in England. I’m an American citizen now. When I reached that famous fork in the woods, I took the road less travelled (Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were friends) and ended up on a weary farm in Massachusetts. That doesn’t stop a certain yearning though: whenever I see The Last of the Summer Wine, or hear the Queen at Christmas-time, I long for England, only to go back and find that what I longed for has all but vanished.
I left home in 1966, by chance the year they closed Adlestrop station, a quiet two-platform halt on the Oxford to Worcester main line. The old railway system then began its own long decline: stations closed, lines torn up, engines sent for scrap. There was something infinitely special and terribly English about a half-deserted country railway station on a blissful summer’s day. I listen to this deceptively slight poem, immediately smell creosote and gillyflowers, can hear the waiting-room clock, the clank of signal wires – but then have to blink my eyes, every time. This is the England that I loved; I weep for its passing.
Adlestrop
Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
(1914)
Once a geologist, Simon Winchester (b. 1944) spent almost thirty years as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian and other newspapers in various countries until the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, when he became a full-time writer. He has written twenty-five nonfiction books, dealing with such topics as the Oxford En
glish Dictionary, the origins of geology, China, the Atlantic Ocean and, most recently, the uniting of the United States.
The Soldier
RUPERT BROOKE (1887–1915)
HUGH BONNEVILLE
Like many schoolchildren, I was introduced to this sonnet when studying the poets of the First World War. The graphic bitterness of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, we were instructed, was to be contrasted with the naïve patriotism of Rupert Brooke.
Brooke’s view of death and his love of country is that of a clear-eyed young man who, like the hundreds of thousands of others who rushed to join up, felt confident of purpose and of victory within months, entirely innocent of what was to come. I won’t judge him for that.
Every time I watch the movie Gladiator this poem comes to mind. Like the recurring motif of Maximus’s hand brushing the wheat of his fields as he heads for his waiting family, ‘The Soldier’, for me, is ultimately about belonging. It’s about coming home.
And it’s not the notion of death with honor or pride in motherland that moves me, it’s the simple phrase ‘laughter, learnt of friends’ that gets me every time. An image of happiness shared, in a land at peace.
With the privilege of hindsight I find it is as pitiful as it is beautiful in its evocation of contentment.
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
(1914)
The actor Hugh Bonneville (b. 1963) is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Lord Grantham in television’s Downton Abbey, and for the Olympics mockumentary series Twenty Twelve. His feature films include Notting Hill (1999), Mansfield Park (1999), Iris (2001) and The Monuments Men (2014).
During Wind and Rain
THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928)
KEN FOLLETT
I read this as a schoolboy, and even then I was overwhelmed by its melancholy. Half a century of rereading has shown me how clever it is. The rhyming scheme – ABCBCDA – and the stanza form are unique, as far as I know. In each verse, the first five lines swing like a pop song, showing us a family engaged in a merry project: singing, gardening, picnicking. Moving house is vividly evoked with the simple image of clocks on the lawn. But every stanza is a sucker punch. In the last two lines of each the rhythm falters, and decay and death are evoked until the end, when we realise that the poet is standing in a rain-wet graveyard, looking at the tombstones, and everyone in that happy family is now dead.
During Wind and Rain
They sing their dearest songs –
He, she, all of them – yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face. . . .
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss –
Elders and juniors – aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all –
Men and maidens – yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them – aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
(1917)
The Welsh-born novelist Ken Follett (b. 1949) has sold more than 130 million books worldwide. His first bestseller was Eye of the Needle (1978), a spy story set during the Second World War. In 1989 The Pillars of the Earth marked a radical change; a novel about building a cathedral in the Middle Ages, it has sold more than nineteen million copies in many languages. His latest project is the Century trilogy, three historical novels telling the story of the twentieth century through the eyes of five families: Fall of Giants (2010), Winter of the World (2012) and Edge of Eternity (2014).
Dulce et Decorum Est
WILFRED OWEN (1893–1918)
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Christopher Hitchens was one of the first to contribute to this anthology, in an e-mail just five days before his death in December 2011.
In the foreword to his 2000 volume of literary criticism, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, Hitchens writes: ‘Most of Owen’s poetry was written or “finished” in the twelve months before his life was thrown away in a futile action on the Sambre-Meuse canal, and he only published four poems in his lifetime . . . But he has conclusively outlived all the jingo versifiers, blood-bolted Liberal politicians, garlanded generals and other supposed legislators of the period. He is the most powerful single rebuttal of Auden’s mild and sane claim that “Poetry makes nothing happen”.’
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(1917–1918)
For four decades Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was one of the most prominent and controversial writers and journalists of his time, publishing twelve books and five collections of essays. British-born but US-resident, with dual nationality, he was a regular columnist for Vanity Fair. His 2007 polemic God Is Not Great reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list.
God’s World
EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950)
PATRICK STEWART
I had
never believed the New England fall could possibly be as beautiful as people claimed. And then one morning after breakfast I left my friends’ house in South Salem, New York State, having arrived in the dark the previous evening. I walked two hundred yards along the lane and broke down helplessly weeping with the never-before-seen beauty and grandeur of it all.
God’s World
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, – Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, – let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
(1917)
Sir Patrick Stewart (b. 1940) has graduated via many Shakespearean and other classical roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company and London’s National Theatre to international fame as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Xavier in the X Men series. Amid more than ninety film and TV credits on both sides of the Atlantic, his recent returns to the stage in London’s West End and on Broadway include the title role in Macbeth (2007), Claudius in Hamlet (2008), Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (RSC, 2011) and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (2009), revived on Broadway with Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land in 2013.