CHRISTMAS

I had almost forgotten the singing in the streets,
Snow piled up by the houses, drifting
Underneath the door into the warm room,
Firelight, lamplight, the little lame cat
Dreaming in soft sleep on the hearth, mother dozing.
Waiting for Christmas to come, the boys and me
Trudging over blanket fields waving lanterns to the sky.
I had almost forgotten the smell, the feel of it all,
The coming back home, with girls laughing like stars,
Their cheeks holly berries, me kissing one,
Silent-tongued, soberly, byt he long church wall;
Then back to the kitchen table, supper on the white cloth,
Cheese, bread, the home-made wine;
Symbols of the night's joy, a holy feast.
And I wonder now, years gone, mother gone,
The boys and girls scattered, drifted away with the snowflakes,
Lamplight done, firelight over,
If the sounds of our singing in the streets are still there,
Those old tunes, still praising;
And now, a life-time of Decembers away from it all,
A branch of remembering holly spears my cheeks,
And I think it may be so;
Yes, I believe it may be so.


Leonard Clark
1905-1981

WHEN YOU'VE GOT

When you’ve got the plan of your life
matched to the time it will take
but you just want to press SHIFT / BREAK
and print over and over
this is not what I was after
this is not what I was after.

When you’ve finally stripped out the house
with its iron-cold fireplace,
its mouldings, its mortgage,
its single-skin walls
but you want to write in the plaster
“This is not what I was after.”

When you’ve got the rainbow-clad baby
in his state-of-the-art pushchair
but he arches his back at you
and pulps his Activity Centre
and you just want to whisper
“This is not what I was after.”

When the vacuum seethes and whines in the lounge
and the waste-disposal unit blows,
when tenners settle in your account
like snow hitting a stove,
when you get a chat from your spouse
about marriage and personal growth,

when a wino comes to sleep in your porch
on your Citizen’s Charter
and you know a hostel’s opening soon
but your headache’s closer
and you really just want to torch
the bundle of rags and newspaper

and you’ll say to the newspaper
“This is not what we were after,
this is not what we were after.

Helen Dunmore

1952-

THEMES FOR WOMEN

Käthe Kollwitz

Self Portrait

There is love to begin with, early love,
painful and unskilled, late love for matrons
who eye the beautiful buttocks and thick hair
of young men who do not even notice them.


Parturition, it figures, comes after, cataclysmic
at first, then dissolving into endless care
and rules and baths and orthodontic treatment,
Speech days, Open days, shut days, exams.


There are landscapes and inscapes too, sometimes tracts
of unknown counties, most often the one great hill
in low cloud, the waterfall, the empty sands, the few
snowdrops at the back door, the small birds flying.


Politics crop up at election time and ecology
any old time, no ocelot coats, no South African
oranges, a knowledge of the Serengeti
greater than the positioning of rubbish dumps
here in this off-shore island in hard times.


Seasons never go out of fashion, never will,
the coming of Spring, the dying fall
of Autumn into Winter, fine brash summers,
the red sun going down like a beach ball
into the sea. These do not escape the eyes
of women whose bodies obey the tides
and the cheese-paring sterile moon.


As you might expect, death hangs around a lot.
First ageing mothers, senile fathers, providing
the ham and sherry when the show is over,
examining stretched breasts to catch the process
of decay in time. In farmhouse kitchens they make
pigeon pies, weeping unexpectedly over
curved breasts, among the floating feathers.
The men tread mud in after docking lamb's tails,
and smell of blood.

Elizabeth Bartlett

1924-2008

AN ARUNDEL TOMB

Side by side, their faces blurred, 

The earl and countess lie in stone, 

Their proper habits vaguely shown 

As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, 

And that faint hint of the absurd - 

The little dogs under their feet. 

Such plainness of the pre-baroque 

Hardly involves the eye, until 

It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still 

Clasped empty in the other; and 

One sees, with a sharp tender shock, 

His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. 

They would not think to lie so long. 

Such faithfulness in effigy 

Was just a detail friends would see: 

A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace 

Thrown off in helping to prolong 

The Latin names around the base. 

They would not guess how early in 

Their supine stationary voyage 

The air would change to soundless damage, 

Turn the old tenantry away; 

How soon succeeding eyes begin 

To look, not read. Rigidly they 

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths 

Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light 

Each summer thronged the grass. A bright 

Litter of birdcalls strewed the same 

Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths 

The endless altered people came, 

Washing at their identity. 

Now, helpless in the hollow of 

An unarmorial age, a trough 

Of smoke in slow suspended skeins 

Above their scrap of history, 

Only an attitude remains: 

Time has transfigured them into 

Untruth. The stone fidelity 

They hardly meant has come to be 

Their final blazon, and to prove 

Our almost-instinct almost true: 

What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin

1922-1985

ATLAS

Hesiod - The Theogony - Atlas 

There is a kind of love called maintenance,

Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn't forget

The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way

The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,

And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently ricketty elaborate

Structures of living; which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,

Which knows what time and weather are doing

To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;

Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers

My need for gloss and sprouting; which keeps

My suspect edifice upright in air,

As Atlas did the sky.

U.A. Fanthorpe

1929-2009

AUBADE

 Philip Larkin statue, Hull, England.

The statue, by sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled on the Hull Paragon Station concourse

on 2 December 2010, 25 years to the day after the poet Philip Larkin died.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.


Philip Larkin
1922-1985

ELEGY FOR HIMSELF

Tower of London - Traitor's Gate

(Wikipedia)

Written in the Tower of London Before his Execution

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,

My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,

My crop of corn is but a field of tares,

And all my good is but vain hope of gain;

The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,

My fruit is fallen and yet my leaves are green,

My youth is spent and yet I am not old,

I saw the world and yet I was not seen;

My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,

And now I die, and now I was but made:

My glass is full, and now my glass is run,

And now I live, and now my life is done. 

Chidiock Tichborne

1558 - 1586

In spite of this very moving elegy, Tichborne was not primarily a poet.

He was a conspirator in the Babington Plot, six men who were pledged to kill Queen Elizabeth

and restore the Kingdom to the Church of Rome.

OFFICE FRIENDSHIPS

The Heartless Girl Loses Her Job - Postcard - 1909 

Eve is madly in love with Hugh

And Hugh is keen on Jim.

Charles is in love with very few

And few are in love with him.

Myra sits typing notes of love

With romantic pianist's fingers,

Dick turns his eyes to the heavens above

Where Fran's divine perfume lingers.

Nicky is rolling eyes and tits

And flaunting her wiggly walk.

Everybody is thrilled to bits

by Clive's suggestive talk.

Sex suppressed will go berserk,

But it keeps us all alive.

It's a wonderful change from wives and work,

And it ends at half past five.

Gavin Ewart

1916-1995

Unless the mood takes me, or I receive requests to the contrary, enough now of levity, back to the serious matter of poetry in September. 

ON THE RHINE

Paddle Steamer 'Rheinland', passing the Loreley Rock.

On, on the vessel steals;

Round go the paddle-wheels,

And now the tourist feels

As he should;

For king-like rolls the Rhine, 

And the scenery's divine,

And the victuals and the wine

Rather good.

From every crag we pass'll

Rise up some hoar old castle;

The hanging fir-groves tassel

Every slope:

And the vine her lithe arm stretches

Over peasants singing catches -

And you'll make no end of sketches,

I should hope.

We've a nun here (called Thérèse),

Two couriers out of place,

One Yankee with a face

Like a ferret's;

And three youths in scarlet caps

Drinking chocolate and schnapps -

A diet which perhaps

Has its merits.

And day again declines;

In shadow sleep the vines,

And the last ray through the pines

Feebly glows,

Then sinks behind yon ridge;

And the usual evening midge

Is settling on the bridge

Of my nose.

And keen's the air and cold,

And the sheep are in the fold,

And Night walks sable-stoled

Through the trees;

And on the silent river

The floating starbeams quiver; -

And now the saints deliver

Us from fleas.

C.S. Calverley

1831-1884

Poet and Wit

C.S. Calverley was the literary father of what has been called the "university school of humour".

KID

Batman, big shot, when you gave the order 

to grow up, then let me loose to wander

leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder

as you liked to say, or ditched me, rather,

in the gutter . . . . well, I turned the corner.

Now I've scotched that 'he was like a father

to me' rumour, sacked it, blown the cover

on that 'he was like an elder brother' 

story, let the cat out on that caper

with the married woman, how you took her 

downtown on expenses in the motor.

Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker!

Holy roll-me-over-in-the-clover,

I'm not playing ball-boy any longer

Batman, now I've doffed that off-the-shoulder

Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number

for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper;

now I'm taller, harder, stronger, older,

Batman, it makes a marvellous picture:

you without a shadow, stewing over

chicken giblets in the pressure cooker,

next to nothing in the walk-in larder,

Punching the palm of your hand all winter,

you baby, now I'm the real boy wonder.

Simon Armitage

1963

Simon Armitage comments:

"It gave me great pleasure taking a big, swanky character like Batman and placing him in a little terraced house in West Yorkshire. See how he liked it. I suppose the poem is about power dynamics: father/son, employer/employee, funny guy/straight man, etc. Bravado fuelled by bitterness is the tone of voice I was hoping to catch."

THE LADY AT THE WELL-SPRING

Auguste Renoir - La Source

He is quite captive to the Lady of the Well-Spring,

Who will rescue him?

Into the French drawing-room the afternoon sun shone

And as the French ladies laughed their white faces

Barred by the balcony shadows seemed to make grimaces.

In a far corner of the room

Sat the English child Joan

As far away as she could get but without exasperation

Only to be freed from the difficulty of conversation.

'Quite captive to the lady of the Well-Spring

Who will rescue him?'

Now I have an excuse to go

Said Joan, and walked out of the window

Down the iron staircase and along the path

And then she began to run through the tall wet grass.

Overhead the hot sun slanting

Fell on Joan as she ran through the field panting,

Faster faster uphill she goes hoping

That as the ground goes steeply sloping

She will find the well-spring. Into a little wood

She runs, the branches catching at her feet draw blood

And there is a sound of piping screaming croaking clacking

As the birds of the wood rise chattering.

And now as she runs is the bicker

Of a stream growing narrower in a trickle

And a splash and a flinging, it is water springing.

Now with her feet in deep moss Joan stands looking

Where on a bank a great white lady is lying

A fair smooth lady whose stomach swelling

Full breasts fine waist and long legs tapering

Are shadowed with grass-green streaks. The lady smiles

Lying naked. The sun stealing

Through the branches, her canopies, glorifies

The beautiful rich fat lady where she lies.

Never before in history

In a place so green and watery

Has lady's flesh and so divine a lady's as this is

With just such an admiring look as Joan's met with.

'Quite captive to the Lady of the Well-Spring?'

What nonsense, it is a thing

French ladies would say

In sophisticated conversation on a warm day.

I do not wish to rescue him, blurts Joan,

The Lady lolls, do you wish to go home?

No, says Joan, I should like to live

Here. Right, says the lady, you are my captive.

The child Joan fully sees the beauty her eye embraces.

Do not think of her as one who loses.

Stevie Smith

1902-71

Poet and Novelist

THE ALL PURPOSE COUNTRY AND WESTERN SELF PITY SONG

Image via shutterstock

He jumped off the box-car

In Eastbourne, the beast born

In him was too hungry to hide;

His neck in grief's grommet,

He groaned through his vomit

At the churn

And the yearn

At the turn of the tide.

He headed him soon

For a sad-lit saloon

In back of the edge of the strand,

Where a man almost ended

Sat down and extended

His speckled,

Blue-knuckled

And cuckolded

Hand.

Cried, The wind broke my marriage in two.

Clean through the bones of it,

Christ how it blew!

I got no tomorrow

And sorrow

Is tough to rescind;

So, forgive me if I should break wind, son,

Forgive me

If I should break wind.

At this the bartender

Addressed the agenda,

A dish-cloth kept dabbing his eye,

Said, Pardon intrusion

Upon your effusion

Of loss but none wooed it

Or rued it

As I.

For after the eve of Yvonne,

My God, how it hurts now the woman has gone!

Heart-sick as a dog,

I roll on like a log

Down the roaring black river

Where once sailed

A swan.

Then the dog on the floor,

Who'd not spoken before,

Growled, Ain't it the truth you guys said?

I may be a son-

Of-a-bitch but that bitch

Was my Sun

And she dumped me,

The bitch did,

For dead.

So three lonely guys in the night and a hound

Drank up, and they headed them out to the Sound,

Threw up, then they threw themselves

In and they

Drowned.

O dee-o-dayee

Odee-o-dayee

Woe-woe-dalaye

Kit Wright

b. 1944

SUN AND FUN

The Hangover

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1861-1904

French Painter, Printer, Draughtsman and Illustrator

Song Of A Night-Club Proprietress

I walked into the night-club in the morning;

There was kummel on the handle of the door.

The ashtrays were unemptied,

The cleaning unattempted,

And a squashed tomato sandwich on the floor.

I pulled aside the thick magenta curtains

- Regency, so Regency, my dear -

And a host of little spiders

Ran a race across the ciders

To a box of baby 'pollies by the beer.

Oh sun upon the summer-going by-pass

Where everything is speeding to the sea,

And wonder beyond wonder

That here where lorries thunder

The sun should ever percolate to me.

When Boris used to call in his Sedanca,

When Teddy took me down to his estate

When my nose excited passion,

When my clothes were in the fashion,

When my beaux were never cross if I was late,

There was sun enough for lazing upon beaches,

There was fun enough for far into the night,

But I'm dying now and done for,

What on earth was all the fun for?

For I'm old and ill and terrified and tight.

John Betjeman

1906-1984

"Poet and Hack"

I have decided to lighten the tone of my August Selection.

There will be more Light Verse during the Holiday Month.

ANCIENT HISTORY

Albrecht Durer

The Horsemen Of The Apocalypse

The year began with baleful auguries;

comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires,

the waves lethargic under a coat of pitch,

the length of the coastline. And a cow spoke,

which happened last year too, although last year

no one believed cows spoke. Worse was to come.

There was a bloody rain of lumps of meat

which flocks of gulls snatched in mid-air

while what they missed fell to the ground

where it lay for days without festering.

Then a wind tore up a forest of holm-oaks

and jackdaws pecked the eyes from sheep.

Officials construing the Sybilline books

told of helmeted aliens occupying

the crossroads, and high places of the city.

Blood might be shed. Avoid, they warned,

factions and in-fights. The tribunes claimed

this was the usual con-trick

trumped up to stonewall the new law

about to be passed. Violence was only curbed

by belief in a rumour that the tribes

to the east had joined forces and forged

weapons deadlier than the world has seen

and that even then the hooves of their scouts

had been heard in the southern hills.

The year ended fraught with the fear of war.

Next year began with baleful auguries.

Jamie McKendrick

1955

REMBRANDT'S LATE SELF-PORTRAITS

Rembrandt

Dutch Painter

1606-1669

You are confronted with yourself. Each year

The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.

You give it all unflinchingly. You stare

Into yourself, beyond. Your brush's care

Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.

There is no arrogance. Pride is apart

From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift

The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt

But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last

Experiment went on. You stared beyond 

your age, the times. You also plucked the past

And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,

And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.

Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,

The sadness and the joy. To paint's to breathe,

And all the darknesses are dared. You chose

What each must reckon with.

Elizabeth Jennings

1926-2001

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The Winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. - Great God I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

1770-1850

APRIL RISE

If ever I saw blessing in the air

I see it now in this still early day

Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips

Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.

Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round

Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod

Splutters with soapy-green and all the world

Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud.

If ever I heard blessing it is there

Where birds in trees that shoals and shadows are

Splash with their hidden wings and drops of sound

Break on my ears their crests of throbbing air.

Pure in the haze the emerald sun dilates, 

The lips of sparrows milk the mossy stones,

While white as water by the lake a girl

Swims her green band among the gathered swans.

Now, as the almond burns its smoking wick,

Dropping small flames to light the candled grass;

Now, as my low blood scales its second chance,

If ever world were blessed, now it is.

Laurie Lee

1914-1997

ALL THAT'S PAST

Very old are the woods;

And the buds that break

Out of the briar's bough,

When March winds wake,

So old with their beauty are -

Oh, no man knows

Through what wild centuries

Roves back the rose.

Very old are the brooks;

And the rills that rise

Where snow sleeps cold beneath

The azure skies

Sing such a history

Of come and gone,

Their every drop is as wise

As Solomon.

Very old are we men;

Our dreams are tales

Told in dim Eden

By Eve's nightingales;

We wake and whisper awhile,

But, the day gone by,

Silence and sleep like fields

Of amaranth lie.

Walter de la Mare

1873-1956

6 A.M. THOUGHTS

Karl Spitzweg
The Nightwatchman fallen asleep

As soon as you wake they come blundering in

Like puppies or importunate children;

What was landscape emerging from mist

Becomes at once a disordered garden.

And the mess they trail with them! Embarrassments,

Anger, lust, fear - in fact the whole pig-pen;

And who'll clean it up? No hope for sleep now -

Just heave yourself out, make the tea and give in.

Dick Davis

1945

DRINK TO ME ONLY

Drink to me only with thine eyes,

     And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss within the cup

     And I'll not ask for wine.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise

     Doth ask a drink divine;

But might I of Jove's nectar sup,

     I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

     Not so much honouring thee

As giving it a hope that there

     It could not withered be;

But thou thereon didst only breathe,

     And sent'st it back to me;

Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

     Not of itself but thee!

Song   To Celia

Ben Jonson

1572-1637