Poems That Make Grown Men Cry
Page 10
I write your name
On every page read
On all the white sheets
Stone blood paper or ash
I write your name
On the golden images
On the soldier’s weapons
On the crowns of kings
I write your name
On the jungle the desert
The nests and the bushes
On the echo of childhood
I write your name
On the wonder of nights
On the white bread of days
On the seasons engaged
I write your name
On all my blue rags
On the pond mildewed sun
On the lake living moon
I write your name
On the fields the horizon
The wings of the birds
On the windmill of shadows
I write your name
On the foam of the clouds
On the sweat of the storm
On dark insipid rain
I write your name
On the glittering forms
On the bells of colour
On physical truth
I write your name
On the wakened paths
On the opened ways
On the scattered places
I write your name
On the lamp that gives light
On the lamp that is drowned
On my house reunited
I write your name
On the bisected fruit
Of my mirror and room
On my bed’s empty shell
I write your name
On my dog greedy tender
On his listening ears
On his awkward paws
I write your name
On the sill of my door
On familiar things
On the fire’s sacred stream
I write your name
On all flesh that’s in tune
On the brows of my friends
On each hand that extends
I write your name
On the glass of surprises
On lips that attend
High over the silence
I write your name
On my ravaged refuges
On my fallen lighthouses
On the walls of my boredom
I write your name
On passionless absence
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name
On health that’s regained
On danger that’s past
On hope without memories
I write your name
By the power of the word
I regain my life
I was born to know you
And to name you
LIBERTY
(1942)
TRANSLATION BY A. S. KLINE
The films directed by Joe Wright (b. 1972) include Pride and Prejudice (2005), Atonement (2007), The Soloist (2009), Hanna (2011), and Anna Karenina (2012). He has also directed the television mini-series The Last King (2003) and London theatre productions of Trelawny of the Wells and A Season in the Congo (both 2013).
Extract from The Pisan Cantos
EZRA POUND (1885–1972)
CRAIG RAINE
These passages are taken from the beginning and the end of The Pisan Cantos, a poem impossible to divorce from the circumstances of its composition. It is a poem written out of crushing defeat, the defeat of Mussolini, whom Ezra Pound supported.
Like Raleigh in the Tower, Pound wrote in prison, a US detention centre – actually a cage, open to the elements, just outside Pisa. There he typed this great affirmation to the human spirit – telling us what we cling to in extremis (‘a lizard upheld me’), lamenting the vanity of human endeavour, affirming the importance of love, seeing noble intention pulsing still in the ashes of defeat.
From ‘Canto LXXXI’ from The Pisan Cantos:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.
‘Master thyself, then others shall thee beare’
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black, half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
And I love two lines, rescued from Chaucer, just before this:
‘Your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly
I may the beauté of hem nat susteyne.’
From ‘Canto LXXIV’:
. . . and there was a smell of mint under the tent flaps especially after the rain
and a white ox on the road toward Pisa as
if facing the tower,
dark sheep in the drill field and on wet days were clouds in the mountain as if under the guard roosts.
A lizard upheld me . . .
(1944–1945)
Also a critic, librettist and novelist, the poet Craig Raine (b. 1944) is known for cofounding the ‘Martian School’ of poetry. For many years a Fellow at New College, Oxford, he founded and edits the literary journal Areté.
I see a girl dragged by the wrists
PHILIP LARKIN (1922–85)
SIMON RUSSELL BEALE
When I first read this poem, the last lines made me gasp with surprise. They also confused me, as I think they are meant to, because the writing suddenly expands and the skies open, promising something almost too weighty for the poet’s argument to bear.
Larkin is, of course, the master of charting quotidian disappointments – how small failures can build until they define a life.
All of us, I suspect, have felt what he feels, and some of us have longed for a redemptive, defining experience of the sort that the ‘snow-white unicorn’ represents. It is this longing that Shakespeare tapped into when he wrote his last plays; and this poem, like those plays, articulates an uncertainty about the significance of that longing. Is hope for redemption, forgiveness, or validation a fantasy? Is resignation to something imperfect or essentially meaningless the only rational option when evaluating one’s life? Or is it possible, ‘against all argument’, as Larkin puts it, that we can believe in the possibility of a fabulous unicorn?
I suppose I hope the latter option is viable, but I am uncertain. That is why the emotional fragility of this poem ‘dries my throat’.
I see a girl dragged by the wrists
I see a girl dragged by the wrists
Across a dazzling field of snow,
And there is nothing in me that resists.
Once it would not be so;
Once I should choke with powerless jealousies;
But now I seem devoid of subtlety,
As simple as the things I see,
Being no more, no less, than two weak eyes.
There is snow everywhere,
Snow in one blinding light.
Even snow smudged in her hair
As she laughs and struggles, and pretends to fight;
And still I have no regret;
Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she
Rears up in me,
And would not, though I watched an hour yet.
So I walk on. Perhaps what I desired
– That long and sickly hope, someday to be
As she is – gave a flicker and expired;
For the first time I’m content to see
What poor mortar and bricks
I have to build with, knowing that I can
Never in seventy years be more a man
Than now – a sack of meal upon two sticks.
So I walk on. And yet the first brick’s laid.
Else how should two old ragged men
Clearing the drifts with shovels and a spade
Bring up my mind to fever-pitch again?
How should they sweep the girl clean from my heart,
With no more done
Than to stand coughing in the sun,
Then stoop and shovel snow onto a cart?
The beauty dries my throat.
Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.
Damn all explanatory rhymes!
To be that girl! – but that’s impossible,
For me the task’s to learn the many times
When I must stoop, and throw a shovelful:
I must repeat until I live the fact
That everything’s remade
With shovel and spade;
That each dull day and each despairing act
Builds up the crags from which the spirit leaps
– The beast most innocent
That is so fabulous it never sleeps;
If I can keep against all argument
Such image of a snow-white unicorn,
Then as I pray it may for sanctuary
Descend at last to me,
And put into my hand its golden horn.
(1944)
As well as playing many of the major Shakespearean roles, most recently King Lear in Sam Mendes’s production at London’s National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale (b. 1961) has also appeared onstage in roles as varied as Konstantin in Chekhov’s The Seagull (1991), King Arthur in Spamalot (2005), Stalin in Collaborators (2011) and Terri Dennis in Peter Nichols’s Privates on Parade (2013). He has appeared in such films as Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and My Week with Marilyn (2011), played roles from Schubert to John Adams on television, George Smiley in BBC Radio’s adaptation of John le Carré’s Smiley novels (2009–10), and danced with the Royal Ballet in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2011).
The Mother
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917–2000)
TERRANCE HAYES
The kinds of poems that make a grown man cry are not necessarily the same poems that make a young man cry. Encountering Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1945 poem ‘The Mother’ one lonely afternoon as a college painting major and basketball jock brought abundant tears. It is, in fact, the poem that made me choose the path of a poet rather than that of a painter. (No painting had ever made me cry.) The first word of ‘The Mother’ tells you some of what a young man could have experienced to be so moved by such a poem. That it continues to move me as an adult is a testament to its craftsmanship. It is the only poem I know, for example, that shifts seamlessly from second-person address in the first stanza to persona poem in the second stanza. The poem begins speaking intimately to a mother and ends speaking as a mother. I’ve never tired of ‘The Mother’. Maybe the question is: can a poem make a man cry more than once? One always hopes the poem that prompts tears can withstand the sobering, scrutinising gaze of time.
The Mother
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine? –
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
(1945)
Terrance Hayes (b. 1971) won the National Book Award for Poetry with his 2010 collection Lighthead. His previous collections are Muscular Music (1999), Hip Logic (2002) and Wind in a Box (2006). His work has appeared in journals from the Kenyon Review to the New Yorker. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
RANDALL JARRELL (1914–65)
PAUL MULDOON
I stopped watching television news reporting in 1991, at precisely the moment we were first shown images purporting to represent ‘precision’ or ‘smart’ bombs falling on Iraq, including heavily populated cities such as Baghdad.
My main reason for giving up television news reporting was that the element of reporting was now clearly absent and has remained absent pretty much ever since. More immediately, though, as someone who had lived in Belfast between 1969 and 1986, I had a sense that bombs are neither precise nor smart.
What Randall Jarrell’s amazing five-line poem achieves for me is no less than bringing to the front of the mind the horror of modern warfare. Written in 1945, it is a poem in dialogue with Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, both collected in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). The ‘ball turret’ in the title of Jarrell’s poem is a de-romanticised version of Yeats’s signature ‘tower set on the stream’s edge’. Another poem to which Jarrell alludes is Richard Eberhart’s ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’, also first published in 1945, with its frank final stanza:
Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,
Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But
they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.
The ‘belt feed lever’ and the ‘belt holding pawl’, technical terms which might easily have strayed from Henry Reed’s great nuts-and-bolts poem ‘Naming of Parts’, first published in 1942, are significant components of the machine guns lodged in the Plexiglas dome of the ball turret.
Though I think of this poem often, the thought of the unceremonious hosing from the turret of what’s left of the gunner never diminishes in power and never fails to make me weep.
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.
A ball turret was a Plexiglas 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 foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.
– Jarrell’s note.
(1945)
The Irish poet Paul Muldoon (b. 1951) has published more than thirty collections, most recently The Word on the Street (2013). A Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot Prize winner, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. At Princeton University, he is the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities and was founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He is also Poetry Editor of The New Yorker.