by Anthony
War Has Been Brought into Disrepute
BERTOLT BRECHT (1898–1956)
DAVID HARE
Reading this poem is like standing at the Cenotaph in London and hearing the first bars of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ Variation: it has the same extraordinary visceral power that comes from something complete being said.
I very much admire a saying of Len Deighton’s which has the same effect: ‘When old men decide to barter young men for pride and profit, the transaction is called war.’ All of us who have lived through the last ten years know the relevance of both Brecht’s poem and Deighton’s observation.
War Has Been Brought into Disrepute
I hear it is being said in respectable circles
That from the moral point of view the Second World War
Did not come up to the First. The Wehrmacht
Is said to deplore the means by which the SS
Effected the extermination of certain peoples. In the Ruhr
It seems, the Captains of Industry regret the bloody razzias
That filled their mines and factories with slaves. The intelligentsia
So I hear, condemn the industrialists’ demand for such slave workers
And their shabby treatment. Even the Bishops
Are distancing themselves from this way of waging war. In short
On all sides there is a feeling that unfortunately
The Nazis have done us a disservice and that war
Of itself a natural and necessary thing, by being conducted
On this occasion in so heedless and indeed inhuman a fashion
Has been, and will be for quite some time
Discredited.
(c. 1945)
TRANSLATION BY DAVID CONSTANTINE
The British playwright and director Sir David Hare (b. 1947) has written some forty plays and TV scripts, among them Plenty (1978), Licking Hitler (1978), Pravda (1985, with Howard Brenton), Strapless (1989), The Absence of War (1993), The Blue Room (1998) and Stuff Happens (2004). He has also written screenplays for such films as The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008).
Le Message
JACQUES PRÉVERT (1900–77)
PETER SÍS
I was born in Czechoslovakia, a country where the door was always closed. You could not go outside, you could just dream about it. Then someone opened the door just a little bit and we could see the ocean and the rainbows. But then the door closed again.
So I was sad, trying to remember what it was that I had seen. I might have even cried. And that was just when I discovered Jacques Prévert’s ‘Le Message’.
For me it was about the freedom of walking through the door. It was the 1970s and a young man in my country burned himself to death because he believed it.
The Message
The door that someone opened
The door that someone closed
The chair on which someone sat
The cat that someone petted
The fruit that someone bit into
The letter that someone read
The chair that someone tipped over
The door that someone opened
The road that someone ran down
The woods that someone crossed
The river in which someone jumped
The hospital where someone died.
(c. 1950)
TRANSLATION BY TERRY LAJTHA
Born in Brno, Moravia, in 1949, Peter Sís today lives and works in New York as an artist, author and filmmaker. A 2003 MacArthur Fellow, he has created award-winning animated shorts and films, tapestries, stage designs and murals. He has written and illustrated numerous books for adults and children, including Komodo! (1993), Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei (1996), Tibet Through the Red Box (1998), The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin (2003) and The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (2007). He received the Hans Christian Andersen Award for his body of work in 2012.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
DYLAN THOMAS (1914–53)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
I don’t really have a connection to this poem. Thomas wrote it while his father was dying, but I didn’t know my father was dying while it was happening, and when I heard that he had died my reaction was minimal. I was actually in my thirties when I discovered this poem, and it touched me on two levels. First, it is a brilliant example of a villanelle, a very difficult poetic form. Dylan Thomas packs so much emotion into it, and not a word is wasted.
But it is not the form that moves me to tears: it’s the love I can feel that he has for his father, the desperation in his ‘voice’ as he is willing his father to live. He is grabbing his father with his words and shaking him, pleading with him not to fade, but to rage. I haven’t talked to a therapist about this, but there might also be something here about his having the kind of love for his father that I never had for mine.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(1951)
The writer, dub poet and musician Benjamin Zephaniah (b. 1958) has published four novels, five children’s books and seven plays, as well as fourteen volumes of verse, notably The Dread Affair: Collected Poems (1985), Rasta Time in Palestine (1990) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001). His discography includes four singles and six albums, including the first recording made by the Wailers following the death of Bob Marley.
Unfinished Poem
PHILIP LARKIN (1922–85)
FRANK KERMODE
Frank Kermode’s role in the genesis of this book is detailed in its preface. Although himself the victim of a backhanded public compliment from Larkin –
If I could talk, I’d be a worthless prof,
Every other year off,
Just a jetset egghead, TLS toff,
Not old toad: Frank Kermode.
– he remained an ardent admirer, describing Larkin in An Appetite for Poetry (1989) as ‘a poet of extraordinary powers’, lamenting that Larkin was ‘so echt English that Americans tend to find him dull and insular’. Kermode asked for this poem to be read at his funeral.
Unfinished Poem
I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.
That was a way to live – newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!
For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thoughts was my whole care,
Yet down among sunlit courts, yes, he was there,
Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of hi
s book,
And the creep of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.
So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind
With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black – so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he’d keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;
And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways and bells. But one night I heard the feet.
Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor
Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted and wrung, dripped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold
Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?
(1951)
Sir Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was regarded as the foremost literary critic of his generation, the author of such books as Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of an Ending (1967) and Shakespeare’s Language (2000). He was Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London, and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. He also inspired the founding of the London Review of Books in 1979.
Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance
ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–79)
JOHN ASHBERY
This poem has always struck me as a wonder. I read it first when I was twenty, in Partisan Review, and was moved to write Elizabeth Bishop a fan letter – the only time I’ve ever done so. I was thrilled to get a postcard from her in return, a view of the Maine coast I think, where she might have been staying that summer. Even though I was barely an adult, the poem seemed to sum up life ahead in its first line ‘Thus should have been our travels’, and life as viewed in retrospect in the last line, ‘and looked and looked our infant sight away’, a line which still elicits a vagrant tear after all these years.
Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance
Thus should have been our travels:
serious, engravable.
The Seven Wonders of the World are tired
and a touch familiar, but the other scenes,
innumerable, though equally sad and still,
are foreign. Often the squatting Arab,
or group of Arabs, plotting, probably,
against our Christian Empire,
while one apart, with outstretched arm and hand
points to the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher.
The branches of the date-palms look like files.
The cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry,
is like a diagram, the brickwork conduits
are vast and obvious, the human figure
far gone in history or theology,
gone with its camel or its faithful horse.
Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds
suspended on invisible threads above the Site,
or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads.
Granted a page alone or a page made up
of several scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles
or circles set on stippled gray,
granted a grim lunette,
caught in the toils of an initial letter,
when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves.
The eye drops, weighted, through the lines
the burin made, the lines that move apart
like ripples above sand,
dispersing storms, God’s spreading fingerprint,
and painfully, finally, that ignite
in watery prismatic white-and-blue.
Entering the Narrows at St. Johns
the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship.
We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs
among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs.
And at St. Peter’s the wind blew and the sun shone madly.
Rapidly, purposefully, the Collegians marched in lines,
crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants.
In Mexico the dead man lay
in a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes
glistened like Easter lilies.
The jukebox went on playing ‘Ay, Jalisco!’
And at Volubilis there were beautiful poppies
splitting the mosaics; the fat old guide made eyes.
In Dingle harbor a golden length of evening
the rotting hulks held up their dripping plush.
The Englishwoman poured tea, informing us
that the Duchess was going to have a baby.
And in the brothels of Marrakesh
the little pockmarked prostitutes
balanced their tea-trays on their heads
and did their belly-dances; flung themselves
naked and giggling against our knees,
asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there
I saw what frightened me most of all:
A holy grave, not looking particularly holy,
one of a group under a keyhole-arched stone baldaquin
open to every wind from the pink desert.
An open, gritty, marble trough, carved solid
with exhortation, yellowed
as scattered cattle-teeth;
half-filled with dust, not even the dust
of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there.
In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused.
Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen
this old Nativity while we were at it?
– the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family of pets,
– and looked and looked our infant sight away.
(1955)
John Ashbery (b. 1927) is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, most recently Quick Question (2012). Other collections include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which won the three major American prizes – the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008, and in 2012 President Obama presented him with a National Humanities Medal.
End of Summer
STANLEY KUNITZ (1905–2006)
NICHOLSON BAKER
Stanley Kunitz was a lonely, kind man, a conscientious objector during World War II who wrote a famous line: ‘The night nailed like an orange to my brow’. It’s from a poem about his father, who killed himself by drinking poison shortly before Kunitz was born. Long ago I bought a collection of Kunitz’s poems and read it on lunch hours, and that’s how I discovered a short lyric called ‘End of Summer’. I’ve been muttering it to myself ever since.
When we sa
y that a poem makes us cry, what do we really mean? Sometimes we mean that it makes us cry out inwardly in shocked agreement. That’s what happened to me when I read Kunitz saying, as he stood in a field of stubble – he owned a farm in Connecticut – that the year was going to ‘turn on its hinge’, like a framed poster in a swivelling poster display. And then it happened again when, in the third stanza, looking up, he says that blue ‘poured into summer blue’. Who knew that an empty afternoon sky could be so full, so generous, so pourably fluid? But it is. And a hawk is up there, having ridden a spiralling thermal up to the top of an invisible aerial tower.
But now, look – the hawk is breaking away. There’s a sudden flash of reflected light from the silo’s metal roof, and our poet, rhyming the line with ‘tower’, realises what’s happening to him: ‘Part of my life was over.’
That’s it. You see? There’s this one last moment, the superb moment of sunlit stasis. Everything is in balance, and pure, and almost happy – a moment of en-passant perfection. But it’s also the end, because ‘already’ the iron door of the north is opening. The change isn’t imminent, it’s already in progress – there’s nothing we can do. And finally we come to the last three slow, fatal, resigned syllables: a ‘cruel wind blows’.
This poem itself is an orange. Nail it to your brow.
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,