by Anthony
The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray?
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals . . . And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles outleaping –
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! . . .
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope, – cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) – or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power? –
And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure . . .
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip
Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower . . .
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
(1932)
Harold Bloom (b. 1930) is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at the University of Yale. His many publications include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) and The Anatomy of Influence (2011), from which the above introductory words are taken.
Bavarian Gentians
D. H. LAWRENCE (1885–1930)
SIMON ARMITAGE
The poem is very melancholy, gloomy even, a twilight poem both literally and metaphorically. But it’s a late poem in Lawrence’s life, and I think it signals a kind of readiness for whatever might follow, written by someone at ease with his situation and not afraid of that journey into the eternal underworld. The mythology of the poem has also puzzled me – the poet appears ready to witness the violence of Pluto’s advances on Persephone, but of course she’s also a goddess of springtime and rebirth . . . The concluding rhyme strikes me as a reinforcement of the poet’s desire for personal peace and closure. The poem is so graceful, easy, and apparently effortless.
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and groom.
(1933)
Simon Armitage (b. 1963) has published nine volumes of poetry, most recently The Not Dead (2008) and Seeing Stars (2011). His dramatisation of The Odyssey was broadcast on BBC Radio, and his translation of the Middle English classic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published in 2007. He has also written over a dozen television films and prose work including two novels and the memoir All Points North (1998). Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and Manchester Metropolitan University. He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield.
A Summer Night
W. H. AUDEN (1907–73)
WILLIAM BOYD
First of all, and quite simply, this is a really beautiful poem with W. H. Auden at the height of his amazing powers – master rhymer, master imagist. The picture it conjures up is so magical and the metaphor of ‘the lion griefs’ – the laying of a muzzle on a thigh, that mute sign of trust and affection – is so powerful that the poem is bound to stir emotion.
However, anyone who knows the history of Auden and his poetry will know that this poem refers to an incident that occurred while Auden was a young teacher at a prep school. As someone who went to a prep school myself, I find this poem, for some reason – perhaps because I remember similar summer nights – effortlessly takes me back to my early childhood. Death puts down his book for a second or two and the tear ducts tingle.
A Summer Night
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June,
As congregated leaves complete
Their day’s activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.
Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working-place,
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms
Are good to a newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
With all its gradual dove-like pleading,
Its logic and its powers:
That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.
Now north and south and east and west
Those I love lie down to rest;
The moon looks on them all,
The healers and the brilliant talkers,
The eccentrics and the silent walkers,
The dumpy and the tall.
She climbs the European sky,
Churches and power stations lie
Alike among earth’s fixtures:
Into the galleries she peers
And blankly as a butcher stares
Upon the marvelous pictures.
To gravity attentive, she
Can notice nothing here, though we
Whom hunger does not move,
From gardens where we feel secure
Look up and with a sigh endure
The tyrannies of love:
And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her eastern bow,
What violence is done,
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.
Soon, soon, through the dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent
And,
taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.
But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears,
When stranded monsters gasping lie,
And sounds of riveting terrify
Their whorled unsubtle ears,
May these delights we dread to lose,
This privacy, need no excuse
But to that strength belong,
As through a child’s rash happy cries
The drowned parental voices rise
In unlamenting song.
After discharges of alarm
All unpredicted let them calm
The pulse of nervous nations,
Forgive the murderer in the glass,
Tough in their patience to surpass
The tigress her swift motions.
(1933)
Born in Ghana (1952), the British writer William Boyd is the author of twelve novels, including the award-winning A Good Man in Africa (1981), An Ice Cream War (1982), Any Human Heart (2002) and Restless (2006). His James Bond novel, Solo, was published in 2013. Along with several adaptations of his own novels, his screenplays include Scoop (1987), Mister Johnson (1990) and The Trench (1999), which he also directed. His first play, Longing, adapted from two Chekhov short stories, opened in London in 2013.
Those Who Are Near Me Do Not Know
RABINDRANATH TAGORE (1861–1941)
CHRIS COOPER
This poem speaks to all who have suffered every parent’s worst fear: the loss of a child. Even after the first jolting pain becomes the dimmer sorrow you live with every day, a grieving parent still feels deep love and hopeless yearning for that child, even in the company of others, even in the joy of the creative process, even when many years have passed.
The line ‘my heart is full with your unspoken words’ resonates in a particular way: my son, Jesse, who died on 3 January 2005, was nonverbal, but always able to speak to my heart’s core. The poem ends with a line that is grounded in truth; the love of family and friends is a conduit to the boundless love I knew when my son was alive.
Those Who Are Near Me Do Not Know
Those who are near me do not know that you are nearer to me than they are
Those who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken words
Those who crowd in my path do not know that I am walking alone with you
They who love me do not know that their love brings you to my heart.
(1930s)
The actor Chris Cooper (b. 1951) has appeared in such films as American Beauty (1999), The Bourne Identity (2002), Seabiscuit (2003), Syriana (2005), Capote (2005), The Kingdom (2007), Breach (2007), The Town (2010) and August: Osage County (2013). He won both the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Adaptation (2002).
Let My Country Awake
RABINDRANATH TAGORE (1861–1941)
SALIL SHETTY
I have known this poem since my earliest childhood. Millions of Indian schoolchildren learn the poem at school. Even if I had not learned it at school, I suspect it would have come to my notice anyway.
Such prolonged and forced exposure might usually lead to a deep antipathy to any poem, however great. In this case, however, Tagore’s poem has meant more and more to me as I have read it and reread it over the years.
To be truthful, I rarely tear up when reading poetry. I admit that I reserve my tears for over-the-top Bollywood spectaculars, where the chances of my leaving the cinema with dry eyes are embarrassingly low. This poem – translated from Bengali into English by Tagore himself – is, however, special to me in a different way, a powerful call to action and a declaration of belief in achievable change.
Its final line is a powerful culmination of the pent-up aspirations of the poem: ‘Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’ The poem was published in 1910, in an India then still part of the British Raj, but the line seems to me more universal than that. It could just as well read: ‘Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let the world awake.’ This poem is about universal aspirations, and I love the pugnacious optimism contained within it.
DAVID PUTTNAM
For some while, I’ve thought we are nearing a tipping point in the fragility of our planet. If we awaken our senses in time to what might be achieved when we act in the interests of everyone, and seriously embrace these sentiments, we could dramatically change the balance of our world to a point where we achieve freedom and fairness for all.
Let My Country Awake
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
(1930s)
The Indian-born human rights activist Salil Shetty (b. 1961) is Secretary General of Amnesty International. He has previously served as director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign and Chief Executive of ActionAid.
David Puttnam (b. 1941) is the producer of such films as Bugsy Malone (1976), The Duellists (1977), Midnight Express (1978), Chariots of Fire (1981, winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture), Local Hero (1983), The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986). He served as chairman of Columbia Pictures between 1986 and 1988. Since leaving the film industry in 1998, he has concentrated on public work in such fields as education and the environment. He was created a life peer in 1997.
Extract from Finnegans Wake
JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941)
JAMES MCMANUS
Finnegans Wake is at least as much prose poem as novel. The speaker here is the River Liffey, dying this drizzly morning into the cold Irish Sea below Howth while recirculating as rain on her headwaters. The Liffey represents Joyce’s muse and collaborator – his daughter, Lucia. The seventeen years he spent writing the book were also spent watching her swallowed alive down the maw of schizophrenia. Trying every known treatment to save her, he also transmogrified the punny multilingual patois they spoke together into 628 pages of musical dream-language. When the Nazi occupation of France forced her to be evacuated to asylums out of reach of her family, Joyce lamented, ‘I have no idea where my daughter is.’ They never saw each other again.
My son, James, died in a mental-health facility, out of reach of my ability to comfort him. He was a guitarist, a point guard, a funny and affectionate brother till his illness overwhelmed him. I don’t believe in souls, but there’s an abscess in mine where he lives.
The eternal-return seam in Finnegans Wake reminds me of Joyce’s doomed, saltsick efforts to get on Lucia’s wavelength and my own dreams of hugging my son, moananoaning, so bad do I still want to save him, carry him along on my shoulders, begin again.
Extract from Finnegans Wake
. . . and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. The
re’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
[here the Wake ends, only to re-commence on its opening page, where the sentence continues]
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
(1939)
James McManus (b. 1951) has published two volumes of poetry and four novels, as well as two celebrated books about poker, Positively Fifth Street (2003) and Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker (2009). He has written for publications from The New Yorker and Esquire to the New York Times and teaches writing and literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973)
SALMAN RUSHDIE
This great poem, written as the shadow of approaching war fell across Europe, magnificently demands that poetry look horror in the eye and still insist on beauty, still ‘persuade us to rejoice’. It’s the last couplet that makes Auden’s highest claim for the power of art, and, especially when spoken aloud, moves me to tears.
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree