by Anthony
Everyone Sang
SIEGFRIED SASSOON (1886–1967)
BARRY HUMPHRIES
This much-anthologised poem remains deeply affecting, evoking as it does a picture of First World War soldiers in a moment of emotional release.
Everyone Sang
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
(1919)
The Australian actor, writer, artist and comedian Barry Humphries (b. 1934) is best known for his stage and TV alter egos Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. He has also starred in films from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and written numerous books on a wide range of subjects.
Last Poems: XL
A. E. HOUSMAN (1859–1936)
ANDREW MOTION
‘Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’: that’s what Dickens used to say about the structure of his novels. ‘Make them laugh, make them cry, bring on the dancing girls’: that’s what Philip Larkin said about the ordering of poems in his slim collections. The wish (the impulse, the need, the requirement) to make an audience cry is conspicuous in both cases, and it’s always been high on my list of requirements as a reader. As I get older, the requirement is more and more easily met.
Why is this? Because our hearts grow softer as the years click past? Perhaps. But also because we feel the sadness of the creatures (and our fellow human beings) more keenly. And because we can see the dark at the end of the tunnel more and more clearly. Almost the whole of Shakespeare (comedies and tragedies) makes tears pour down my face. So do large chunks of Wordsworth and Tennyson. And almost everything by Hardy and Edward Thomas . . . Some days I only have to think of particular poems to start going. And every day I only have to think about A. E. Housman’s poem . . . well, there are several I could mention. But while I can still see the keyboard let me choose number XL in Last Poems: ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying . . .’
RICHARD DAWKINS
This poem is not from A Shropshire Lad but it has the same hauntingly wistful air. I knew it by heart as a boy in love – not with any particular girl but with the idea of being in love, and especially the tragedy of lost love. Much later, when I organised the funeral of my friend and mentor the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton in New College chapel, his sister chose the poem for her reading. I was not surprised to learn that it was one of Bill’s favourites, because he had long brought to my mind the melancholy protagonist of A Shropshire Lad. In my book River Out of Eden, I had earlier quoted – actually misquoted from memory – the last verse, when I wanted to convey the indifferent callousness of Darwinian natural selection, noted by Darwin himself. The politician Douglas Jay, who also loved Housman, pointed out my misquotation to me, and I gratefully corrected it in later printings of the book. Here is the correct version:
For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know.
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Last Poems: XL
Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.
On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveller’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.
On acres of the seeded grasses
The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
Stand still all night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
And stain the wind with leaves.
Possess, as I possessed a season,
The countries I resign,
Where over elmy plains the highway
Would mount the hills and shine,
And full of shade the pillared forest
Would murmur and be mine.
For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.
(1922)
The poet, novelist, and biographer Sir Andrew Motion (b. 1952) was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. As well as several volumes of poetry, he has published biographies of John Keats and Philip Larkin. He is also president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
The many publications of the ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) include The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), The God Delusion (2006) and a memoir, An Appetite for Wonder (2013). Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University from 1995 to 2008, he is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. In 2013 he led Prospect magazine’s list of the world’s Top 100 living thinkers.
God Wills It
GABRIELA MISTRAL (1889–1957)
JEREMY IRONS
I first came across this poem thirty years ago in New York, where I included it in a lunchtime reading I did at St Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue. It is, I think, the poem that of all those I read I find the hardest to get through; it stirs very deep emotions within me, not at any particular line, but in the relentless and naked passion that imbues the poem throughout. The love that generates such emotion is unequivocal, takes no prisoners, and is perhaps the love I am, or yearn to be, part of.
God Wills It
I
Earth will turn against you
If your soul betrays my soul.
A shudder of anguish
will run through the waters.
The world has been brighter
since you made me yours,
when we stood silent
by a flowering thorn,
and love’s fragrance
pierced us like the thorn.
But earth will send forth vipers
against you if you betray my soul;
I will break my barren knees
no child sits upon.
Christ will die in my heart,
and the door of my house
will break the beggar’s knocking hand
and turn the suffering woman away.
II
Every kiss your mouth gives
reaches my ears,
for the deep places of the earth
echo me your words.
The dust of the pathways
holds the scent of your footsoles,
and through the mountains
I track you like a deer.
The clouds above my house
show me the woman you love.
Sneak like a thief to kiss her
in the darkness under earth,
but when you tilt her chin up,
you’ll see my tearstained face.
III
God will keep the sun from you
if you don’t walk beside me.
God won’t let you drink
if I don’t tremble on the water.
He won’t let you sleep, except
in the deep nest of my hair.
IV
If you let go from me you crush my soul
even in the moss of the road;
hunger and thirst gnaw at you
on every hill and plain,
and wherever you go, sunset
will bleed my wounds.
And I slip from your tongue
though you call another woman,
and I stick like the taste
of brine in your throat,
and whether you hate or praise or plead,
to me you cry, to me alone.
V
If you go and die far from me,
you’ll hold out your hollowed hand
for ten years underground,
to catch my tears,
feeling the trembling
of the suffering flesh,
until my bones crumble
into dust on your face.
(1922)
TRANSLATION BY URSULA K. LE GUIN
Jeremy Irons (b. 1948) has played many classical and contemporary roles onstage, starred in TV series from Brideshead Revisited (1981) to The Borgias (2011) and films from The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) to Margin Call (2011). He won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune (1990).
Out of Work
KENNETH H. ASHLEY (1887–?)
FELIX DENNIS
Some time ago, I bought part of the library of the late novelist J. B. Priestley. In the pages of one of his books, Up Hill and Down Dale by an obscure poet, Kenneth H. Ashley, published in 1924, I found a slip of paper where Priestley had marked a particular short poem called ‘Out of Work’. As soon as I read it, I was transported back almost fifty years to a dingy bedsit in an obscure street (now demolished) in Harrow on the Hill.
It was from here, after quitting Harrow School of Art, that I tramped the local streets looking for work to keep me in Gitanes cigarettes, potato and leek soup, and alcohol. The R&B band I was playing in had work most weeks, but after the fuel bills for the van and the hire-purchase payments on the gear, there was precious little left over to split among the band members and manager.
I eventually found work mowing verges for the council and digging the odd grave (a more skilled occupation than you might think!), but I have never forgotten those far-off days of poverty and hopelessness. I know exactly what Ashley meant when he ended on that shocking six-word line: ‘And I wished I were dead.’ The only counter to it I can offer those in the same position comes from the pen of a man who never knew want in his life, Winston Churchill: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’
Easy advice to give but hard to swallow.
Out of Work
Alone at the shut of the day was I,
With a star or two in a frost cleared sky,
And the byre smell in the air.
I’d tramped the length and breadth of the fen,
But never a farmer wanted men;
Naught doing anywhere.
A great calm moon rose back of the mill,
And I told myself it was God’s will
Who went hungry and who went fed.
I tried to whistle; I tried to be brave,
But the new ploughed fields smelt dank as the grave;
And I wished I were dead.
(1924)
In 1971, as co-editor of Oz magazine, Felix Dennis (b. 1947) was imprisoned by the British government at the end of the longest conspiracy trial in English history, during which he recorded a single with John Lennon to raise money for a legal defence fund. Following his subsequent acquittal by the High Court of Appeal, Dennis went on in 1973 to found his own magazine-publishing company, which now sees him a multimillionaire publisher and philanthropist. He turned to poetry only in his mid-fifties, but has since become a popular performance poet, with several best-selling volumes to his name.
All the Pretty Horses
ANONYMOUS
CARL BERNSTEIN
I had to really dig deep here – past Shakespeare’s sonnets, Blake, Whitman, Keats . . . the canon. And finally I got down to this lullaby that I sang to my children from their birth.
All the Pretty Horses
Hush-by, Don’t you cry
Go to sleep a little baby
When you wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses
Blacks and bays, dapples and grays
Coach and six a little horses
When you wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses
Hush-by, Don’t you cry
Go to sleep a little baby
When you wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses
(FIRST IN PRINT 1925)
Since his celebrated partnership with Bob Woodward for the Washington Post on the Nixon presidency and the Watergate scandal, which resulted in All The President’s Men (1974) and other books, Carl Bernstein (b. 1944) has written biographies of Pope John Paul II (The Abuse of Power, with Marco Politi, 1996) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (A Woman in Charge, 2007). He has also published a memoir of his parents, Loyalties (1989).
The Cool Web
ROBERT GRAVES (1895–1985)
JOHN SUTHERLAND
I first came across this poem as an undergraduate. The most inefficient, but wonderfully enthusing, university teacher I’ve ever known, G. S. Fraser, was pursuing a long, quixotic campaign to draw notice to Robert Graves as the greatest lyric poet of the century. As cultish attention to The Movement [a group of other 1950s British poets] monopolised attention, his voice was drowned out.
Fraser failed. But he converted me. ‘The Cool Web’ articulates the poignant sense that, whatever one gains intellectually, one loses more. The sentiment is familiar enough from those who know their Wordsworth, and Auden put it into chillier form in ‘Their Lonely Betters’:
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.
It’s cleverer but – in that term of approbation we loved in the 1960s – less ‘felt.’
Graves, it seems to me, touches a deeper chord. There is always, in his mature poetry, the still-throbbing scar tissue of a survivor of the ‘war called great’ (‘the inward scream, the duty to run mad’, as he put it). Poetry, I think, is the only thing that can make linguistics – that driest of sciences – ‘moving’.
I read ‘The Cool Web’ in the ‘madness’ (as Graves prophesied) of late life, with a distant gesture of gratitude to G. S. Fraser and a moistening of the eye.
The Cool Web
Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.
(1940)
John Sutherland (b. 1938) is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College, London. Among his many books are the Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989, rev. 2009), a series of ‘puzzles in classic fiction’ entitled Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (1996), Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? (1997) and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennett? (1999), as well as the authorised life of Stephen Spender (2004), Lives of the Novelists (2011) and two volumes
of autobiography, Last Drink to LA (2001) and The Boy Who Loved Books (2007). His most recent work is Jumbo, an ‘unauthorised’ biography of Jumbo the Elephant (2014).
The Broken Tower
HART CRANE (1899–1932)
HAROLD BLOOM
This poem is Hart Crane’s farewell to the art of poetry, which was his life. I do not know another poem like it, despite its packed allusiveness. There are parallels of equal distinction: Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day’, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller’, Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Whitman’s ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’.
Crane desperately needed reassurance that he was still a poet, but it was not forthcoming. His suicide [at the age of thirty-two] perhaps would have come even if he had been persuaded that his great gifts were intact. He had been doom-eager all his life.
The Broken Tower
The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before