Penguin's Poems for Life

by Laura Barber

  Emily Dickinson: ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes –’

  Thom Gunn: The Reassurance

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘I envy not in any moods’, from In Memoriam A. H. H.: XXVII

  William Johnson Cory: Heraclitus

  Dylan Thomas: And death shall have no dominion

  Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep –’, from Adonais

  Robert Browning: My Last Duchess

  Ezra Pound: Epitaphs

  Wallace Stevens: A Postcard from the Volcano

  Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias

  Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard

  Stephen Spender: ‘I think continually of those who were truly great’

  Thomas Hardy: Transformations

  Walt Whitman: ‘A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands’, from Song of Myself

  Philip Larkin: An Arundel Tomb

  Edwin Morgan: Message Clear

  Acknowledgements

  Index of Poets

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  JAQUES:

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players:

  They have their exits and their entrances;

  And one man in his time plays many parts,

  His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

  Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

  And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

  And shining morning face, creeping like snail

  Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

  Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

  Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

  Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

  Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

  Seeking the bubble reputation

  Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

  In fair round belly with good capon lined,

  With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

  Full of wise saws and modern instances;

  And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

  Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

  With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

  His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

  For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

  Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

  And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

  That ends this strange eventful history,

  Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

  Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

  William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II, vii

  Preface

  ‘I need a poem.’ This may not be a sentence you expect to come across very often in your life, but since beginning to think about this book, it’s one I’ve heard a lot: from friends who are planning their weddings or trying to find the right thing to say at a funeral, and from others who are stuck for words while writing a birthday card or find themselves in need of distraction when they arrive at work on a drizzly Monday morning. The effect of a well-chosen poem can be real and tangible – it can soothe a bruised heart, patch a broken friendship, lull a baby to sleep, seduce the hesitant or console the bereaved. And while most of us probably don’t read poetry every single day, it seems that there are plenty of times in our lives when only a poem will do. This is a book that sets out to meet that need, by offering a selection of poems to accompany you through life, from birth to death, and a little beyond.

  The structure of the book was inspired by a few lines in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, in which one of the characters, Jacques, describes a human life as having seven distinct ages. The images he conjures up for each age are broadly familiar to us today, but these lines also reveal as much about the misanthropic nature of the character who uttered them (the sullen Jacques is known as ‘Monsieur Melancholy’) as about the human life cycle itself. In thinking about how poetry might trace a modern lifeline, I wanted this anthology to be shaped less by how the different phases of life might look from the outside (still less to a cynical outsider) than by how they feel from the inside – whether experienced, remembered or imagined. And if, in the spirit of the contrarian Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who declared herself capable of believing ‘six impossible things before breakfast’, we experience ourselves as having several possible sides to our personalities at any given time (perhaps especially before breakfast), we will also want poems that constantly push beyond this notion of playing a series of discrete roles in life determined by our age, and instead express the complexity and endless variety of what it means to be alive and human.

  We start off then with birth and babies and the mysterious beginnings of existence, before moving into childhood and the tottering first steps towards an awareness of who we are and what else the world contains. The section on growing up brings us an intoxicating taste of independence, and explores the dizzying possibilities on offer – in life and in love. The next stage looks at the practical reality of making our way in adult life – through the dogged persistence of routine at work, and the equally dogged pursuit of relaxation and romance. The chapter on family life covers the whole range of experiences we might find in loving and living with other people, before we turn to the poems about growing older, whether this hurls us towards a flamboyant midlife crisis or we relish the slower pace of life. In the seventh part we are brought face to face with the prospect of death and travel right up to life’s closing moments. At this point the book takes us beyond Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages’, with the addition of an extra section devoted to the experience of living on after the end of someone else’s life, and the strange journey of grief from the initial shock of loss towards a time when the agony of absence might be replaced by the sense of a continued, though different, presence.

  Within these eight sections, the poems are not organized by when or where they were written, but by what they say. As well as speaking to the various themes of each stage of life, this allows the poems to speak to each other too, sometimes as a deliberate response to an earlier work and sometimes in conversations that are unintended and unexpected. Of course, any anthology that departs from the neutrality of chronology, geography or the alphabet as a way of arranging itself necessarily introduces a more singular and subjective order and, like Jacques’s, the lifeline that this book maps out is inevitably a personal one, but not – I hope – prescriptive. If you read continuously, each part tells its own story about a different period of life, but you can also approach a single section like a lucky dip, rummaging about until you find the poem that perfectly matches your mood or picking one out at random and allowing yourself to be transported somewhere unexpected.

  Here you will find some of the best-loved poems from the past, poems whose words resonate as richly today as they did when they were first written, and whose sentiments still seem as true. The well-known lines of these poems seem now to be woven into the very fabric of our culture, the threads running so deep that some of the ways we understand or think about life seem to follow the pattern laid out by an earlier word-perfect expression. There are also contemporary voices in English from around the world, questioning the traditional ways of seeing life, re-imagining the limits to what we can feel or be, and making modern music out of today’s ever-evolving language. Old or new, what these poems share is an ability to rise to the challenge of finding the right words. We may believe with Wordsworth that poets should avoid fancy phrases in favour of ‘language really used by men’, but the reason we sometimes turn to a poem rather than look for our own words is that our ‘real’ use of language can be haphazard and hasty, and a good poem happens when a poet has found a way – and taken the time – to use our language more precisely and carefully than we tend to. A poem may allow us to say what we really mean in another sense too, especially when we are dealing
with occasions or events that don’t occur every day. Poetry does not shy away from significant moments or milestones, and it is not afraid of confronting the raw or awkward facts of life, sex and death. At such times, poetry may be able to say more than we feel able to articulate: it can speak more honestly than a close friend, more passionately than a cautious lover, more bravely than an embarrassed stranger.

  As well as the public occasions like births, marriages or funerals, I also wanted to include some poems for the more private rites of passage or emotional crossroads – when you realize that a sibling has grown up and left you behind or that you need to disentangle yourself from a flailing relationship; when you experience the nervous exhilaration of your first kiss or admit the guilty exhaustion of looking after children; when you are struggling to emerge from the black depths of depression or find yourself reeling from a sudden, fresh stab of loss. And then there are poems that describe the less intense incidents of daily life – the white lie you tell your child, the grey hair you spot in the mirror, the back-to-school feeling that settles in the pit of your stomach on a Sunday evening, the drowsy boredom of a slow afternoon in the office, the bitter marital bickering that poisons a dinner party, or the comfort of entering a house and knowing that you’re home.

  Whatever the occasion, poetry is able to capture the moments and emotions of life – even the mundane or ugly ones – and transform them into something remarkable and beautiful. Coleridge defined this potent magic quite simply as ‘poetry = the best words in the best order’ and a good poem often has the curious effect of describing your state of mind or heart so accurately that it seems instantly recognizable and true, while also startling you with the sensation that you are seeing something familiar as if for the very first time. Such poems enter your imagination, like wine swirling through water, altering the colour and the flavour of your experience.

  When we are young, we are quite used to the startling and stirring effect of poetry. It has a natural and instinctive place in our life: as we learn nursery rhymes and join in with playground chants, our enjoyment of poetry is almost physical – we taste the shape of the words in our mouth, we feel the rhythms, and we hear the rhymes. Discovering the right poem at the right time when you are older can be equally powerful and visceral. As Emily Dickinson said: ‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’ The encounter may not always be comfortable but, like a good friend, a collection of poems should offer shocks and surprises as well as support; it should shake you out of your usual way of thinking, force you to look at the things you would rather not see, and encourage you to broaden your experience of life by sometimes considering it inside out or upside down. Thomas Gray described poetry as ‘thoughts that breathe and words that burn’ and, as well as giving expression to our innermost feelings, poems can occasionally push us up against the flames and change us for ever. Whether breathing, or burning, or taking the top of your head off, these are the words that sing in your heart when you hear them and that dance back into your mind years later; they are the lines that somehow become part of your very being and that carry you through your life.

  A Note on the Poems

  All the poems included here were written in English, but beyond this my aim has been to range as widely as possible – through time and space. The earliest poems in the selection were composed in the fourteenth century and the most recent has only just appeared in print; and the poets themselves come from all parts of the world, including Africa, the Caribbean, India, North and South America, Canada, Europe, the British Isles and the Republic of Ireland.

  For ease of comprehension, older poems have been lightly modernized in punctuation and spelling but in the few instances when modernization or standardization would completely alter the feel of the original or amount to translation (the Medieval English and dialect poems), glosses have been provided instead. Where a definitive text has been established by editors (for example, Emily Dickinson and Wilfred Owen) and for all modern works, the poems are reproduced exactly as published.

  SYLVIA PLATH

  Morning Song

  Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

  The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

  Took its place among the elements.

  Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

  In a drafty museum, your nakedness

  Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

  I’m no more your mother

  Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

  Effacement at the wind’s hand.

  All night your moth-breath

  Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

  A far sea moves in my ear.

  One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

  In my Victorian nightgown.

  Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

  Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

  Your handful of notes;

  The clear vowels rise like balloons.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  Infant Sorrow

  My mother groan’d, my father wept,

  Into the dangerous world I leapt;

  Helpless, naked, piping loud,

  Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

  Struggling in my father’s hands,

  Striving against my swaddling-bands,

  Bound and weary, I thought best

  To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

  WALTER DE LA MARE

  The Birthnight: To F.

  Dearest, it was a night

  That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;

  A sighing wind ran faintly white

  Along the willows, and the cedar boughs

  Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across

  The starry silence of their antique moss:

  No sound save rushing air

  Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,

  And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,

  Thou, lovely thing.

  THOMAS TRAHERNE

  The Salutation

  These little Limbs,

  These Eyes and Hands which here I find.

  These rosy Cheeks wherewith my Life begins,

  Where have ye been? Behind

  What Curtain were ye from me hid so long?

  Where was, in what Abyss, my speaking Tongue?

  When silent I,

  So many thousand, thousand years

  Beneath the Dust did in a Chaos lie,

  How could I Smiles or Tears,

  Or Lips or Hands or Eyes or Ears perceive?

  Welcome ye Treasures which I now receive.

  I that so long

  Was Nothing from Eternity,

  Did little think such Joys as Ear or Tongue

  To celebrate or see:

  Such Sounds to hear, such Hands to feel, such Feet,

  Beneath the Skies, on such a Ground to meet.

  New burnished Joys!

  Which yellow Gold and Pearls excel!

  Such sacred Treasures are the Limbs in Boys,

  In which a Soul doth Dwell;

  Their organized Joints and azure Veins

  More Wealth include than all the World contains.

  From Dust I rise,

  And out of Nothing now awake;

  These brighter Regions which salute mine Eyes,

  A Gift from God I take.

  The Earth, the Seas, the Light, the Day, the Skies,

  The Sun and Stars are mine, if those I prize.

  Long time before

  I in my mother’s Womb was born,

  A God preparing did this Glorious Store,

  The World, for me adorn.

  Into this Eden so divine and fair,

  So wide and bright, I come His Son and Heir.

  A Stranger here

  S
trange Things doth meet, strange Glories see;

  Strange Treasures lodg’d in this fair World appear,

  Strange all, and new to me;

  But that they mine should be, who nothing was,

  That Strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

  ANNE STEVENSON

  The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument

  The spirit is too blunt an instrument

  to have made this baby.

  Nothing so unskilful as human passions

  could have managed the intricate

  exacting particulars: the tiny

  blind bones with their manipulating tendons,

  the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient

  fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae

  in the chain of the difficult spine.

  Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent

  fingernails, the shell-like complexity

  of the ear with its firm involutions

  concentric in miniature to the minute

  ossicles. Imagine the

  infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections

  of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments

  through which the completed body

  already answers to the brain.

  Then name any passion or sentiment

  possessed of the simplest accuracy.

  No. No desire or affection could have done

  with practice what habit

  has done perfectly, indifferently,

  through the body’s ignorant precision.

  It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent

  love and despair and anxiety

  and their pain.

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  Little bosom not yet cold,

  Noble forehead made for thought,