by Anthony
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to est.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
(1940)
The Indian-born, US-resident writer Sir Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) is the author of eleven novels, notably the 1981 Booker Prize winner Midnight’s Children, which also won the Best of the Booker in 2008 and was filmed in 2012. His most recent book is a memoir, Joseph Anton.
Lullaby
W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973)
SIMON SCHAMA
Tears come to me reading Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ to a lover already asleep because the poem suspends time and the brutality of the world (‘1937 when fashionable madmen raise/Their pedantic boring cry’) at the moment of unanswerably perfect love. The bed is sheltering redemption and the writer, speaking to the slumbering beloved, registers rapture in the kindness of a loving heart. But this is not the fantastical fancy of poets. The word human occurs at the opening and closing of the work: ‘Human on my faithless arm’ and Nights of insult let you pass/Watched by every human love’ and it is the honesty embedded amidst sheets and on the pillow that makes the eyes prick and the heart knock.
SIMON CALLOW
Auden has always been a poet who spoke to me – for me. His eloquence, his directness, his formal skill, his jokes, his music, appealed to me from my early teens; I felt I knew him. Added to which he was very openly and explicitly gay.
I loved ‘Funeral Blues’ long before it became my personal epitaph in Four Weddings and a Funeral, especially its melodramatic refrain of:
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
But it was ‘Lullaby’ which moved me to instant tears. It described, in unmistakably erotic terms, a particular state of mind and an experience of the heart, a kind of relationship, which I had not yet known for myself, but all of which, with the uncanny emotional prescience of adolescence, I knew would be mine, soon. The sooner the better.
I still find it impossible to utter out loud or even read to myself the opening two lines without breaking down. The poem is essentially a lullaby, and it is partly the caressing, gently rocking rhythm that makes it so affecting: it is instinct with tenderness, care, boundless benevolence.
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
And in the final couplet the benevolence becomes universal. This is my idea of love; if ever I forget it, Auden is there to remind me.
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
(1940)
The historian Simon Schama (b. 1945) has published seventeen books, notably The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987), Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), Landscape and Memory (1995), Rembrandt’s Eyes (1999), a three-volume History of Britain (2000–2) and Rough Crossings (2005), the last two of which are among the ten documentary series he has made for BBC Television, most recently Simon Schama’s Shakespeare (2012) and The Story of the Jews (2013).
Having played Mozart in the original 1979 stage production of Amadeus, Simon Callow (b. 1949) made his film debut in the 1984 screen version
as Emmanuel Schikaneder. Amid numerous TV roles, his forty subsequent screen credits include Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Phantom of the Opera (2004). His many stage appearances include one-man shows as Dickens and Shakespeare as well as Waiting for Godot (2009). Also known as a director of plays, musicals and opera, he has published thirteen books including Being An Actor (1984), My Life in Pieces (2010) and biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Orson Welles.
If I Could Tell You
W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973)
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
‘If I Could Tell You’ is one of W. H. Auden’s most beautiful lyrical poems. Like much of his verse, it may strike the reader as opaque. It is certainly enigmatic, but that is what Auden is talking about here – the difficulty of understanding that which simply is and cannot necessarily be explained. Several of the lines are very haunting – ‘If we should weep when clowns put on their show’ and ‘The winds must come from somewhere when they blow’ are both examples of this. I never tire of reading this poem: it is for me an experience that is very similar to listening to a particularly beautiful passage of Mozart. I am haunted by this poem.
If I Could Tell You
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
(c. 1940)
Born in Zimbabwe in 1948, Alexander McCall Smith was educated there and in Scotland. He enjoyed a distinguished career as a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh. In 2005 he left the university to concentrate on his writing, and is now the author of more than sixty books, including the The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the 44 Scotland Street series, The Sunday Philosophy Club series and his recent book, What W. H. Auden Can Do For You (2013).
Canoe
KEITH DOUGLAS (1920–1944)
CLIVE JAMES
Keith Douglas was born to be a classical poet, so it should not be surprising that his beautifully poised poem ‘Canoe’ was written quite early in his career, before he went off to war and wrote the poems that would make him famous. Yet ‘Canoe’ is still prodigious for the concentrated pathos of its landscape, the Oxford setting so very like Virgil’s lugetes campos, the weeping fields. The moment that melts my eyes is towards the end, when the young woman in the canoe is pictured as making her journey alone in the future, because the narrator will not be with her. At that point, the story is already clinched; he has, we think, foreseen his death, although the poem would have remained powerful even if he had got back, grown old and died in bed.
But in a poem that is all grace, the supremely gracious moment is yet to come. Suddenly he becomes a ghost – for decades in my memory, until I corrected it against the text, it was always his ghost, and not his ‘spirit’ – and he ‘kisses her mouth lightly’. By then I can hardly breathe for grief. The grief is personal, of course. My father went away to the war; he, too, was fated never to return, and my mother continued her voyage alone. This great poem could have been written about them, and therefore about me.
Canoe
Well, I am thinking this may be my last
summer, but cannot lose even a part
of pleasure in the old-fashioned art
of idleness. I cannot stand aghast
at whatever doom hovers in the background;
while grass and buildings and the somnolent river,
who know they are allowed to last for ever,
exchange between them the whole subdued sound
of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate
can deter my shade wandering next year
from a return? Whistle and I will hear
and come again another evening, when this boat
travels with you alone toward Iffley:
as you lie looking up for thunder again,
this cool touch does not betoken rain;
it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.
(1940)
The Australian-born (1939) author, critic and broadcaster Clive James has lived and worked in the UK since the early 1960s. As well as his autobiographical series Always Unreliable, and numerous volumes of criticism, he has published many distinguished volumes of poetry and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (2013).
My Papa’s Waltz
THEODORE ROETHKE (1908–63)
STANLEY TUCCI
This poem speaks to me of the adoration that all children of a certain age have for their fathers. The father’s life outside the home is hinted at brilliantly through the physical aspects (rough hands, the smell of whiskey), but never clearly defined. There is an aura of danger that these elements carry with them.
One imagines that this small child has been cared for lovingly all day by a sweet and doting mother, has been fed and bathed and just before bedtime the father enters unfed, unbathed and slightly drunk, undoing in an instant any sense of calm domestic order that has been put in place during the day. The father may well be loved or despised by the wife/mother due to his state, we don’t know. We just know that the child sees only his happy hero. Innocence is bliss, and something we lose as we age.
My Papa’s Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
(1942)
Stanley Tucci (b. 1960) made his screen debut in the 1980s, has earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance in The Lovely Bones (2009), and won Golden Globes for playing the title role in HBO’s Winchell (1998) and as Adolf Eichmann in Conspiracy (2001). Onstage, he received a Tony nomination as Johnny in the 2002 Broadway revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune. Among his many other film credits are Billy Bathgate (1991), The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and Julie and Julia (2009). He co-wrote, co-directed and starred in Big Night (1996) and has directed three other films. In 2012 he published The Tucci Cookbook.
The Book Burnings
BERTOLT BRECHT (1898–1956)
JACK MAPANJE
This may sound unusual but every time I read this poem, I cry with laughter. Do not ask me why.
The Book Burnings
When the regime ordered that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burnt, and all around
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the pyre, one banished poet
One of the best, discovered, studying the list of the burnt
To his horror, that his books
Had been forgotten. He hurried to his desk
>
On wings of rage and wrote a letter to the powers that be.
Burn me! he wrote, his pen flying, burn me!
Don’t do this to me! Don’t pass me over! Have I not always told
The truth in my books? And now
I am treated by you as a liar!
I order you:
Burn me!
(c. 1941)
TRANSLATION BY TOM KUHN
Born in Malawi, Jack Mapanje (b. 1944) is a poet and writer. Head of English at the University of Malawi before being jailed without charge in 1987 – apparently for his collection Of Chameleons and Gods, which was seen as critical of President Hastings Banda – he was declared a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International. The many international protests against his imprisonment included a reading of his poems outside the Malawian High Commission in London by Harold Pinter. Released in 1991, he emigrated to the UK, where he wrote a memoir of his experience, And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night (2011), which later became a play. He has since taught English at York, Leeds and Newcastle universities, and creative writing in UK prisons.
Liberté
PAUL ÉLUARD (1895–1952)
JOE WRIGHT
I first came across this poem in my late teens and was told by I-can’t-remember-who that during the Second World War the RAF dropped thousands of copies of it over occupied France. This legend illustrates for me the social and spiritual power of poetry. In the face of such terror, the delicacy and beauty of hope makes me cry.
Liberty
On my notebooks from school
On my desk and the trees
On the sand on the snow