Susannah Fry
Here sleep I,
Susannah Fry,
No one near me,
No one nigh:
Alone, alone
Under my stone,
Dreaming on,
Still dreaming on:
Grass for my valance1
And coverlid,
Dreaming on
As I always did.
‘Weak in the head?’
Maybe. Who knows?
Susannah Fry
Under the rose.
Three sisters
Three sisters rest beneath
This cypress shade,
Sprightly Rebecca, Anne,
And Adelaide.
Gentle their hearts to all
On earth, save Man;
In Him, they said, all Grief,
All Wo began.
Spinsters they lived, and spinsters
Here are laid;
Sprightly Rebecca, Anne,
And Adelaide.
Thomas Logge
Here lies Thomas Logge — a Rascally Dogge;
A poor useless creatur — by choice as by nature;
Who never served God — for kindness or Rod;
Who, for pleasure or penny — never did any
Work in his life — but to marry a Wife,
And live aye in strife:
And all this he says — at the end of his days
Lest some fine canting pen
Should be at him again.
A midget
Just a span and half a span
From head to heel was this little man.
Scarcely a capful of small bones
Raised up erect this Midget once.
Yet not a knuckle was askew;
Inches for feet God made him true;
And something handsome put between
His coal-black hair and beardless chin.
But now, forsooth, with mole and mouse,
He keeps his own small darkened house.
No Voice to scold
No Voice to scold;
No face to frown;
No hand to smite
The helpless down:
Ay, Stranger, here
An Infant lies,
With worms for
Welcome Paradise.
Ann Poverty
Stranger, here lies
Ann Poverty;
Such was her name
And such was she.
May Jesus pity
Poverty.
Be very quiet now
Be very quiet now:
A child’s asleep
In this small cradle,
In this shadow deep!
G(ILBERT) K(EITH) CHESTERTON
(1874–1936)
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and violinist.
G. K. CHESTERTON: quoted in The New York Times, 16 November 1967
He was educated at St Paul’s School and the Slade. His first book was a medley of poetry and sketches, Greybeards at Play – Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen (1990), which was followed in the same year by The Wild Knight and Other Poems, a volume of verse that included ‘The donkey’; Kipling was sent the book by a friend and responded: ‘I agree with you that there is any amount of promise in the work – and I think marriage will teach him a good deal too. It will be curious to see how he’ll develop in a few years.’ He made his reputation as a journalist, published articles in The Bookman and The Illustrated London News and, with Belloc, wrote for The Speaker anti-imperial, pro-Boer pieces on the Boer War. Shortly after his death in 1936, a memorial Requiem Mass was celebrated for him in Westminster Cathedral, attended by over 2,000 people, and a telegram from Pope Pius XI was read out, offering sympathy to the people of England – Chesterton converted to Catholicism in 1922, to the anguish of his wife, Frances, who remained an Anglican. His many publications include The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) and a number of books on celebrated writers: Robert Browning (1903), William Blake (1910) and Chaucer (1932). His star has since waned. Novels such as The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), which romanticizes the notion of ‘Merry England’ and takes a Betjeman-like stance against technological ‘progress’, are now rarely read, and his fame rests on the Father Brown stories, such as The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), which deal with a modest East Anglian Roman Catholic priest adept at solving crime, and poems such as ‘Lepanto’. His witty essays were collected in a number of volumes, including All Things Considered (1908), A Miscellany of Men (1912), The Uses of Diversity (1920) and As I was Saying (1936). Hilaire Belloc wrote a highly amusing poem (‘Lines to a Don’) that defends Chesterton from unwarranted criticism, and begins ‘Remote and ineffectual Don/That dared attack my Chesterton’. W. H. Auden was a great admirer and edited a selection of Chesterton’s non-fiction prose.
REBECCA CLARKE
The donkey (1942)
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
(Boughton, Hageman)
WILFRID WILSON GIBSON
(1878–1962)
Finally, W. W. Gibson, a poet devoted to simple narrative, telling quiet stories without number, always with feeling and reticence, gave his sober naturalism to the publication [Georgian Poetry]. If Abercrombie was stately and measured, Brooke like a jet of flame, and Drinkwater a contented murmur, Gibson had ever the homeliness of peat and heather.
FRANK SWINNERTON: The Georgian Literary Scene 1910–1935 (1935)
Born in Hexham, Northumberland, Gibson moved to London in 1912, where he rented a room above Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. The style of much of his early poetry is Romantic, but by the time he joined Abercrombie in Gloucestershire, he had begun to find his true voice. One of the Dymock poets – who numbered Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, W. H. Davies, Lascelles Abercrombie, Eleanor Farjeon, John Drinkwater and others – he was inspired by the landscape around the small Gloucestershire village of Dymock, and though he lived there in the Old Nail Shop for much of the war, he kept returning in his poetry to the wild Northumbrian landscape he knew so well. Many of his poems deal with poverty and workers such as fishermen and miners, and tap into the rich folk song heritage of the North-East. In London he met both Edward Marsh and Rupert Brooke, with whom he struck up a close friendship. Gibson contributed to Marsh’s Georgian Poetry, and published many volumes of verse and verse drama. His best-known volume is Whin (1918) – the word means gorse, furze – which includes all the poems printed here. Despite several attempts to enlist in the army, he was always turned down because of poor eyesight; he was finally accepted, however, by the Army Service Corps and served for two years, two months of which were spent at the Front. Such war poems as ‘Breakfast’, ‘Mad’, ‘In the ambulance’ and ‘Back’, published in Battle (1916), are as powerful as any by Owen and Sassoon. Gibson was among sixteen Great War poets who were commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner on 11 November 1985. He continued to write after the war, and his Collected Poems were published in 1926. His last book, Within Four Walls, appeared in 1950. Ivor Gurney set nine of his poems: ‘Black Stitchel’, ‘Blaweary’, ‘The crowder’, ‘All night under the moon’, ‘The mugger’s song’, ‘Pedlar Jack’, ‘Pity me’, ‘Roses’ and ‘Sam Spraggon’, most of them still unpublished. Three other prolific composers of Gibson’s poetry were He
rbert Howells, Fritz Hart and John Jeffreys.
JOHN JEFFREYS
Northumberland (1961/1990)
Heatherland and bent-land –1
Black land and white,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land of my delight.
Land of singing waters,
And winds from off the sea,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land where I would be.
Heatherland and bent-land,
And valleys rich with corn,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land where I was born.
Merry Eye (1990)
On the day ere I was born
Underneath the ragged thorn
Three old women hobbled by.
One, she had an empty sack,
One, she had a humpy back,
One, she had a merry eye.
So the day that I was born
Underneath the ragged thorn,
As I lay upon the sack
With my little humpy back,
I was christened Merry Eye.
Black Stitchel1
As I was lying on Black Stitchel
The wind was blowing from the South:
And I was thinking of the laughters
Of my love’s mouth.
As I was lying on Black Stitchel
The wind was blowing from the West:
And I was thinking of the quiet
Of my love’s breast.
As I was lying on Black Stitchel
The wind was blowing from the North:
And I was thinking of the countries
Black with wrath.
As I was lying on Black Stitchel
The wind was blowing from the East:
And I could think no more for pity
Of man and beast.
(Gurney)
Stow-on-the-Wold (1964/1983)
I met an old man at Stow-on-the-Wold,
Who shook and shivered as though with cold.
And he said to me: ‘Six sons I had,
And each was a tall and a lively lad.
‘But all of them went to France with the guns,
They went together, my six tall sons.
‘Six sons I had, six sons I had –
And each was a tall and a lively lad.’
Otterburn1 (1961/1983)
The lad who went to Flanders –
Otterburn, Otterburn –
The lad who went to Flanders,
And never will return –
Though low he lies in Flanders,
Beneath the Flemish mud,
He hears through all his dreaming
The Otterburn in flood.
And though there be in Flanders
No clear and singing streams,
The Otterburn runs singing
Of summer through his dreams.
And when peace comes to Flanders,
Because it comes too late,
He’ll still lie there, and listen
To the Otterburn in spate –
The lad who went to Flanders –
Otterburn, Otterburn –
The lad who went to Flanders,
And never will return.
JOHN MASEFIELD
(1878–1967)
When I saw first this blood and thunder poet, he was not the tweedy, breezy sea-salt I had expected. He was spare, quiet and with luminous blue eyes. He read his poems on a warm summer evening in Faringdon Church in aid of the restoration of that handsome old building and his voice, though weak, high and a bit quavery, filled the whole church and thrilled the audience. He was a practised verse speaker and all his poems were written to be read aloud. He tells us in his autobiography So Long to Learn how much he enjoyed telling stories in verse.
JOHN BETJEMAN: Preface to John Masefield: Selected Poems (1978)
During his happy early childhood at Ledbury in Herefordshire, Masefield learnt poetry by heart before he could read, and in later life cited Tennyson’s ‘The dying swan’ and Hood’s ‘I remember, I remember’ as the first poems that had moved him. The idyllic days did not last; his mother died when he was six, his father suffered a mental breakdown soon after, and he was brought up by an aunt who had no love of literature and frowned on his literary aspirations. He was sent to King’s School, Warwick, and subsequently, aged fourteen, received his naval training on board the HMS Conway. He sailed as an apprentice on a ship bound for Chile via Cape Horn, suffered appalling seasickness, and described the experience in his verse narrative Dauber, the story of an artist who, though mocked by the crew, continued to paint pictures:
Down in his bunk the Dauber lay awake
Thinking of his unfitness for the sea.
Having spent a period recuperating at home, he set sail on his second ship – which he deserted in New York. In America he became a vagrant, worked as a bartender in the Amerian capital, and then spent two years as an employee in a Yonkers carpet factory – a job which gave him ample time to read widely and hone his literary skills. He discovered Chaucer in 1896 and describes his excitement in the Preface to Poems (New York, 1935): ‘I first felt the real delight of poetry in a room in Yonkers, New York. It was there that I decided that I had rather write verse than do anything else in the world.’ He left America in 1897, and docked in Liverpool with six pounds and a revolver. Having approached Yeats for advice, he regularly attended the Irish poet’s Monday evening gatherings, where he met a number of luminaries who helped him in his career. Between 1902 and 1911 he published no fewer than eighteen books (novels, plays and poems), including Nan (1908), which Yeats called ‘a wonderful play – the best English play since the Elizabethans’ (recorded by Synge in a letter to Molly Allgood, dated 11 January 1908). During the First World War he served with the Red Cross in France, and also aboard a hospital ship in the Gallipoli campaign of 1916. Though Masefield’s career as a sailor was short and unsatisfactory, he remains England’s most celebrated writer of the sea.
Masefield was appointed Poet Laureate in 1930, despite competition from Housman, Kipling, Yeats and de la Mare. He received the support of The Times, who were delighted that the post had been awarded to a poet who had not gone to university and who could ‘touch to beauty the plain speech of everyday life’. In 1933, he created the Royal Medal for Poetry over which he presided – recipients of the award included Auden, Betjeman and Sassoon. He made a speciality of the realistic long narrative. Dauber (1913) is a remarkable depiction of life at sea and the plight of the frustrated artist; The Everlasting Mercy (1911) was particularly well received for the frankness of its language and the way in which it depicted the life of the country labourer without sentimentality or glamour; and Reynard the Fox (1919) was a successful attempt at reviving the character portrait familiar to us from the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Despite the success of these volumes, it is a few of Masefield’s shorter poems that have lasted best. He produced volumes of lyric poetry at regular intervals throughout his career: Salt-Water Ballads (1902), The Daffodil Fields (1913), Good Friday and Other Poems (1916), Lollingdon Downs and Other Poems (1917), King Cole and Other Poems (1923), A Letter from Pontus and Other Verse (1936) and In Glad Thanksgiving (1967). Of all these, it is Salt-Water Ballads that has remained his most popular collection. The title was suggested by Masefield’s publisher, Grant Richards, and Masefield came to dislike it, as it implied a parallel with Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. Both poets, it’s true, make liberal use of the vernacular, but Masefield, in his opening poem, ‘A consecration’, proclaims that he is concerned with pariahs, the despised and despairing, not heroes or imperialists. (‘Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth […]/Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!’) To his sister, Norah, he wrote: ‘I have never been influenced in any way by Rudyard Kipling’s verse (which I hate, and which I haven’t read for three or four years). Our methods are quite distinct, and one might just as well say that Kipling got his manner fr
om Burns as that I got mine from Kipling.’ He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1935.
JOHN IRELAND
Sea-fever (1913/1915)1
I must go down2 to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
St Mary’s bells
[The bells of San Marie] (1918/1919)
It’s pleasant in Holy Mary
By San Marie lagoon1,
The bells they chime and jingle
From dawn to afternoon.
They rhyme and chime and mingle,
They pulse and boom and beat,
And the laughing bells are gentle
And the mournful bells are sweet.
Oh, who are the men that ring them,
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 63