"Songs And Dreams Are Better Than The Truth"

I am fond of perusing poetry anthologies -- the older the better.  As I have mentioned before, individual poems are more important than individual poets.  Of course, I have my favorite poets.  And, of course, the best-known poets have produced a greater number of good poems than the average obscure poet.

But there is something to be said for the forgotten, struggling poet who produced a good poem that has been lost in the Mists of Time.  These poems are waiting patiently for us in out-of-the-way anthologies.

James Torrington Bell (1898-1970), "Carnoustie House" (1962)

For instance, I recently came across the following poem in Georgian Poetry 1920-1922, the final entry in Edward Marsh's series of anthologies. The usual names are there -- Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden -- but so is William Kerr, who I had not heard of before.

                        The Audit

Mere living wears the most of life away:
Even the lilies take thought for many things,
For frost in April and for drought in May,
And from no careless heart the skylark sings.

Those cheap utilities of rain and sun
Describe the foolish circle of our years,
Until death takes us, doing all undone,
And there's an end at last to hopes and fears.

Though song be hollow and no dreams come true,
Still songs and dreams are better than the truth:
But there's so much to get, so much to do,
Mary must drudge like Martha, dainty Ruth

Forget the morning music in the corn,
And Rachel grudge when Leah's boys are born.

William Kerr, in Edward Marsh (editor), Georgian Poetry 1920-1922 (1922).

As far as I can discover, Kerr published a single volume of verse: The Apple Tree (in 1927).  It turns out that he and Ivor Gurney were friends.  Part of me wishes to hear a Gurney echo in "mere living wears the most of life away."  Or in:  "Though song be hollow and no dreams come true,/Still songs and dreams are better than the truth." But that is pure speculation.

James Torrington Bell, "Landscape"

Here is another poem from the same volume.

On a Friend Who Died Suddenly
            Upon the Seashore

Quiet he lived, and quietly died;
Nor, like the unwilling tide,
Did once complain or strive
To stay one brief hour more alive.
But as a summer wave
Serenely for a while
Will lift a crest to the sun,
Then sink again, so he
Back to the bright heavens gave
An answering smile;
Then quietly, having run
His course, bowed down his head,
And sank unmurmuringly,
Sank back into the sea,
The silent, the unfathomable sea
Of all the happy dead.

J. D. C. Pellow, in Ibid.

Pellow gained some notoriety in his day when his poem "The Temple" was selected as one of the thirteen poems examined by I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929).  In response to Richards's request to use the poem, Pellow good-naturedly responded:  "It is pleasant to know that I am serving the cause of science!"  Ibid, page 367. Pellow no doubt knew what he was in for at the hands of Richards.  But perhaps he got the last laugh:  Pellow's poem received the highest "favourable" ranking from the Cambridge students who read and analyzed the poems selected by Richards, thus triumphing over poems by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence.  Ibid, page 365.

Those of you who hold to strict critical principles may find this sort of poem to be not worthy of close attention.  I concede that J. D. C. Pellow is not Thomas Hardy or W. B. Yeats.  Call me soft-hearted or soft-headed or bereft of critical principles (whatever they are), but I like (unapologetically) this poem.  And I love the last four lines.

James Torrington Bell, "Braes of Downie" (1938)

Mediterranean

My recent meanderings in The Greek Anthology have me daydreaming of golden classical landscapes and seascapes.  Idealized landscapes and seascapes, I readily concede.  Without barathrums, for instance.  Still . . .

Bernard Spencer (who I have previously identified as a "neglected poet") spent a great deal of time in the Mediterranean as an employee of the British Council, and became stranded in Egypt during the Second World War.  His poems about the region -- first Greece, then to Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, and later to Spain -- are lovely and evocative.

Helen Lavinia Cochrane, "Song of Spring" (c. 1939)

            Aegean Islands 1940-41

Where white stares, smokes or breaks,
Thread white, white of plaster and of foam,
Where sea like a wall falls;
Ribbed, lionish coast,
The stony islands which blow into my mind
More often than I imagine my grassy home;

To sun one's bones beside the
Explosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea
(The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam,
Familiar of famous and deserted harbours,
Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars.)

To know the gear and skill of sailing,
The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses,
Stories of Turks and smoky ikons,
Cry of the bagpipe, treading
Of the peasant dancers;

The dark bread
The island wine and the sweet dishes;
All these were elements in a happiness
More distant now than any date like '40,
A. D. or B. C., ever can express.

Bernard Spencer, Aegean Islands and Other Poems (1946).

The "grassy home" (line 6) to which Spencer refers is England.

Helen Lavinia Cochrane, "Almond Blossom, Majorca"

                                   Olive Trees

The dour thing in olive trees
is that their trunks are stooped like never dying crones,
and they camp where roads climb, and drink with dust and stones.

The pleasant thing is how in the heat
their plumage brushes the sight with a bird's-wing feeling:
and perhaps the gold of their oil is mild with dreams of healing.

The cold thing is how they were
there at the start of us; and one grey look surveyed
the builder imagining the city, the historian with his spade.

The warm thing is that they are
first promise of the South to waking travellers:
of the peacock sea, and the islands and their boulder-lumbered spurs.

Bernard Spencer, Ibid.

"The dour thing . . . The pleasant thing . . . The cold thing . . . The warm thing . . ." is a nice back-and-forth progression.  And Spencer captures the telescoping of Time -- with the olive tree as a constant and as a mute witness -- very well:  ". . . and one grey look surveyed/the builder imagining the city, the historian with his spade."

I spent my teenage years in a part of California where wild peacocks roamed the dry hills.  I remember the brilliant, ever-turning blues of their heads and bodies and tails.  (And the sound of their screams!)  Thus, I think Spencer's "the peacock sea" is exactly right.

Helen Lavina Cochrane, "Olive Gatherers" (c. 1939)

Four-Line Poems, Part Two: "So I Trust, Too"

The early life of John Masefield sounds like something out of a novel by Charles Dickens.  He was born in 1878 in Herefordshire, where his father was a successful solicitor.  However, his mother died when he was six, and his father died when he was thirteen.  He was placed in the care of an aunt and uncle, who decided that he should immediately leave school and join the Merchant Navy.

After suffering bouts of seasickness and sunstroke, as well as a nervous breakdown, he deserted his ship in New York in 1895.  In America, he lived as a vagrant for a time, but then found work in a tavern and, later, in a carpet factory.  He returned to England in 1897.

He went to work as a bank clerk, but then decided to become a poet.  His life at sea provided him with the poems that were collected in Salt-Water Ballads (1902), the book that established his reputation.  The rest is, as they say, history:  he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1930, and served in that position until his death in 1967.

His work is now neglected, which is unfortunate.  Yet, a four-line poem by him continues to find its way into anthologies.

Eric Hesketh Hubbard (1892-1957), "The Cuckmere Valley, East Sussex"

                       An Epilogue

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.

John Masefield, Poems (1946).

I suspect that "An Epilogue" is too non-ironic for "modern" sensibilities (such as they are).  No surprise there.  It has its source in deeply-felt, non-ironic experience, which always seems to puzzle and befuddle "moderns." The following poem provides a hint of that experience.

                                          Personal

Tramping at night in the cold and wet, I passed the lighted inn,
And an old tune, a sweet tune, was being played within.
It was full of the laugh of the leaves and the song the wind sings;
It brought the tears and the choked throat, and a catch to the heart-strings.

And it brought a bitter thought of the days that now were dead to me,
The merry days in the old home before I went to sea --
Days that were dead to me indeed.  I bowed my head to the rain,
And I passed by the lighted inn to the lonely roads again.

John Masefield, Salt-Water Ballads (1902).

George Mackley (1900-1983), "Brackie's Burn, Northumberland"

Hospital Poems, Part Five: "And If I Am Lucky, Find Some Link, Some Link"

I have previously suggested that Bernard Spencer (1909-1963) is a "neglected poet."  Thus, I am pleased to report that his poems have recently come back into print (Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose, edited by Peter Robinson, Bloodaxe Books).  As I noted in my earlier post on Spencer, his poetry reminds me of that of Louis MacNeice (they were, in fact, acquaintances; they both died too young in September of 1963). Perhaps the resemblance has something to do with an urbanity of tone, together with a certain irony, with a bit of reserve thrown in.  (I suppose that this description fits a number of English poets of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties.  A. S. J. Tessimond comes to mind, for instance.)

Spencer worked for the British Council in various European (usually Mediterranean) countries.  His poetry vividly reflects all of the locations in which he lived.  At one point, he contracted tuberculosis, and, as a result, spent some time in a hospital in Switzerland in 1948.  The following poem is about that hospital stay.

               William Ratcliffe (1870-1955), "The Conservatory Window"

               In a Foreign Hospital

Valleys away in the August dark the thunder
roots and tramples: lightning sharply prints
for an instant trees, hills, chimneys on the night.
We lie here in our similar rooms with the white
furniture, with our bit of Death inside us
(nearer than that Death our whole life lies under);
the man in the next room with the low voice,
the brown-skinned boy, the child among its toys
and I and others.  Against my bedside light
a small green insect flings itself with a noise
tiny and regular, a 'tink; tink, tink'.

A Nun stands rustling by, saying good night,
hooded and starched and smiling with her kind
lifeless, religious eyes.  'Is there anything
you want?' -- 'Sister, why yes, so many things:'
England is somewhere far away to my right
and all Your letter promised; days behind
my left hand or my head (or a whole age)
are dearer names and easier beds than here.
But since tonight must lack for all of these
I am free to keep my watch with images,
a bare white room, the World, an insect's rage,
and if I am lucky, find some link, some link.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).

The phrase "all Your letter promised" in line 17 may refer to his first wife Nora, who died of tuberculosis-related heart failure in June of 1947.  His lovely poem "At Courmayeur" (which I have previously posted) is based upon their planned holiday in the Alps that was foreclosed by her death.

                      William Ratcliffe, "Regent's Canal at Hammersmith"

"Desire For Something None Can Say"

I once suggested that A. S. J. Tessimond (1902-1962) was a "neglected poet," but was later pleased to learn, through the help of readers, that Bloodaxe Books re-published his Collected Poems last year, and that he was the subject of a feature on BBC Radio 4 in April of that year.  In the following poem Tessimond provides a fine (if melancholy) view of autumn in the city (in this case, London).

                       Autumn

Already men are brushing up
   Brown leaves around the saddened parks.
At Marble Arch the nights draw in
   Upon expounders of Karl Marx.

By the Round Pond the lovers feel
   Heavier dews, and grow uneasy.
Elderly men don overcoats,
   Catch cold -- sniff -- become hoarse and wheezy.

Grey clouds streak across chill white skies.
   Refuse and dirty papers blow
About the gutters.  Shoppers hurry,
   Oppressed by vague autumnal woe.

The cats that pick amongst the empty
   Gold Flake boxes, sniffing orts
From frowsy fish-shops, seem beruffled,
   Limp of tail and out of sorts.

Policemen are pale and fin-de-siecle.
   The navvy's arm wilts and relaxes.
With more than usual bitterness
   Bus-drivers curse impulsive taxis.

A general malaise descends:
   Desire for something none can say.
And autumn brings once more the pangs
   Of this our annual decay!

A. S. J. Tessimond, Morning Meeting (1980).

                         Cyril Edward Deakins, "Suffolk Scarecrow" (1984)

"Perpetual Seed"

The three Victorian grave poems that appeared in my previous post reminded me of the following poem by Joan Barton.  Although Barton is not a Victorian poet, the poem (which is dated "November 1931") has a Victorian mood to it (particularly the closing lines, which sound as though they could have been written by Christina Rossetti).

           Rest Eternal

I shall not forget that place
Where the dead were:
Only the rain, the rain,
No-one astir,
None with me when I found
The church in its fallow ground;

Oh there was nothing there
But nettles and rain and grass,
So tangled you could not tell
Where the churchyard was,
And below in the plain
Grey fields and fields of rain.

Only the ebony rooks
Into the early light
Out of the ebony trees
Silent took flight.
I was afraid to hear
A voice in my ear.

No sound but a rook on the wing,
And of endless summer rain
The vasty whispering,
Yet close to my ear again,
(No stir from the tangled weed),
I heard, "Perpetual seed,"
And still, "Perpetual seed."

Joan Barton, The Mistress and Other Poems (1972).

As I have noted previously, Barton's poetry deserves greater attention.  She wrote few poems (which, in my view, is often a good sign), but those that she wrote are worth seeking out.  Her collection A House Under Old Sarum: New and Selected Poems (1981) includes poems from The Mistress and Other Poems, as well as additional poems written after its publication.

               Edward Bawden, "The Churches of All Saints and St Mary's,
                                       Great Melton, Norfolk" (1966)    

"Reciprocity"

Today was windy, and leaves fell by the thousands.  Rather than pleading "Slow, slow!" (like Robert Frost), I thought:  "Stop, stop!  Not yet!"  To no avail, of course.  Another instance of the World's impassivity, a topic that I visited a few months ago.

A poem by John Drinkwater (1882-1937) seems apt.  Although Drinkwater is now known only for the much-anthologized "Moonlit Apples" ("moonlit apples of dreams . . . moon-washed apples of wonder"), he did write other poems that are worth remembering.

                    Reciprocity

I do not think that skies and meadows are
Moral, or that the fixture of a star
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees
Have wisdom in their windless silences.
Yet these are things invested in my mood
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,
That in my troubled season I can cry
Upon the wide composure of the sky,
And envy fields, and wish that I might be
As little daunted as a star or tree.

John Drinkwater, Tides (1917).

                   Gilbert Adams, "The Cotswolds from Park Leys" (1958)

"Autumn Evening"

Today was one of those "golden clear-blue autumn days" (to quote Steve Forbert's song "Search Your Heart" from Streets of this Town).  But these bright days are becoming ever shorter.

                         Autumn Evening

Autumn is easy, when disappointed leaves make scenes
At parting for ever from perennial boughs,
When naked laburnums in small front gardens pose
Their glistening limbs obliquely in the chilly rain.
Summer, too beautiful to appreciate,
Prints many yellow copies of defeat;
The brown sensations blow about the street
Or, thrown away by the wind, obstruct the grates.
But most in the earlier evenings someone's face
Flares for a moment at a match, or the lamplight
Cleans the darkness from a smudgy bough:
It is myself, and the mind descends like night
With infinite possibilities of truth
Upon the terraces that have taken place.

Stanley Cook, Woods Beyond a Cornfield: Collected Poems (1995).  Stanley Cook (1922-1991) was born in Yorkshire and worked as a teacher there for most of his life.  His poems contain an interesting mixture of both the urban and rural features of the area.  Thus, for example, you find poems by him titled "M1 at Woolley Edge" and "Leaving Huddersfield by the A616." His poetry deserves a wider audience.

I cannot say that I have ever fully puzzled out the last three lines of "Autumn Evening."  The final line -- "upon the terraces that have taken place" -- I find particularly elusive.  What are "the terraces"?  Serried rows of houses in a Yorkshire town?  The empty boughs of trees?  Or something more abstract?  Or none of the above?  But the line is beautiful whether or not I know exactly what it means.  I am content to leave it at that.

                 Algernon Newton, "The Surrey Canal, Camberwell" (1935)

Hospital Poems, Part 4: "And The Saved Man Goes Home"

Here is a hospital poem by James Reeves, one of my neglected poets.  Whether this poem is light or dark or deep or shallow I have never been able to decide.  (Which no doubt means that I am very slow on the uptake.)

                    Discharged From Hospital

He stands upon the steps and fronts the morning.
The porter has called a taxi, and behind him
The infirmary doors have swung and come to rest.
Physician, surgeon, and anaesthetist
Have exercised their skill and he is cured.
The rabelaisian sister with the bedpan,
The vigorous masseuse, the sensual nurse
Who washes him modestly beneath a blanket,
The dawn chorus of cleaners, the almoner,
The visiting clergyman -- all proceed without him.
He is alone beyond all need of them,
And the saved man goes home, to die of health.

James Reeves, The Questioning Tiger (1964).

                 Charles Mahoney (1903-1968), "Still Life With Celery"

Neglected Poets: Joan Barton

I discovered Joan Barton (1908-1986) via Philip Larkin's The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse.  In compiling that much-maligned anthology, Larkin chose poems (shockingly!) that he liked, and gave short shrift (imagine that!) to "modernism."  One of the poems that he chose was Barton's "The Mistress," which is the title poem of Barton's first collection (published when she was 64).  Barton was a bookseller who had a shop in Marlborough for 20 years, and then moved to Salisbury.  The following poem reflects one aspect of her profession:  buying books at an auction or an estate sale.

           Lot 304: Various Books

There are always lives
Left between the leaves
Scattering as I dust
The honeymoon edelweiss
Pressed ferns from prayer-books
Seed lists and hints on puddings
Deprecatory letters from old cousins
Proposing to come for Easter
And always clouded negatives
The ghost dogs in the vanishing gardens:

Fading ephemera of non-events,
Whoever owned it
(Dead or cut adrift or homeless in a home)
Nothing to me, a number, or if a name
Then meaningless,
Yet always as I touch a current flows,
The poles connect, the wards latch into place,
A life extends me --
Love-hate; grief; faith; wonder;
Tenderness.

Joan Barton, The Mistress and Other Poems (1972).  Larkin did not include this poem in his anthology, but one can see from it why he might have liked Barton's poetry.  Consider, in particular, the last five lines:  they have a certain "Larkin" feel about them, I think.     

                                         Norman Clark (1913-1992)
                           "Still Life by a Window with The Listener"

Neglected Poets: Charlotte Mew

The poetry of Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was admired by some of the best poets of her day:  Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, and Siegfried Sassoon (among others) all praised her.  Because of her difficult financial  circumstances, in 1923 Hardy, de la Mare, and John Masefield successfully petitioned for her to receive a Civil List Pension.  Their petition to the Prime Minister read, in part:  "As she is a poet, writing poetry of a rare kind, she may not be widely known for many years.  We feel that it would be a wise and gracious act, worthy of a great people, to give to this rare spirit the means of doing her work until the work can appraise and reward it." 

                                 Rooms

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart;
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide --
   Rooms where for good or for ill, things died:
But there is the room where we two lie dead
Though every morning we seem to wake, and might just as well seem
                to sleep again
   As we shall some day in the other dustier quieter bed
   Out there -- in the sun -- in the rain.

                                                           Paul Nash
                               "Riviera Window, Cros de Cagnes" (1926)

                              Afternoon Tea

Please you, excuse me, good five-o'clock people,
   I've lost my last hatful of words,
And my heart's in the wood up above the church steeple,
   I'd rather have tea with -- the birds.

Gay Kate's stolen kisses, poor Barnaby's scars,
   John's losses and Mary's gains,
Oh! what do they matter, my dears, to the stars
   Or the glow-worms in the lanes!

I'd rather lie under the tall elm-trees,
   With old rooks talking loud overhead,
To watch a red squirrel run over my knees,
   Very still on my brackeny bed.

And wonder what feathers the wrens will be taking
   For lining their nests next Spring;
Or why the tossed shadow of boughs in a great wind shaking
   Is such a lovely thing.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).

                                   Paul Nash, "Mimosa Wood" (1926)

Neglected Poets: James Reeves

James Reeves (1909-1978) devoted his life to poetry -- as a poet, an editor, an anthologist, a teacher, and a critic.  But his devotion was a quiet one.  Hence, his poetry does not receive the attention that it deserves.  I urge you to seek it out, for I believe that you will find it rewarding.  The poems below may all be found in his Collected Poems: 1929-1974 (Heinemann 1974).

                    Things to Come

The shadow of a fat man in the moonlight
   Precedes me on the road down which I go;
And should I turn and run, he would pursue me:
   This is the man whom I must get to know.

                                      Stanley Roy Badmin (1906-1989)

                           "The Abbey Barn, Doulting, Somerset" (1930) 

To put the following poem in context, it may be helpful to know that it was written by Reeves after the death of his wife Mary (1910-1966).  He dedicated his Collected Poems to her.              

                         To Not Love

One looked at life in the prince style, shunning pain.
Now one has seen too much not to fear more.
Apprehensive, it seems, for all one loves,
One asks only to not love, to not love.

                         Stanley Roy Badmin, "Fallen Mill Sails" (1931)

                       Bestiary

Happy the quick-eyed lizard that pursues
   Its creviced zigzag race
Amid the epic ruins of a temple
   Leaving no trace.

Happy the weasel in the moonlit churchyard
   Twisting a vibrant thread
Of narrow life between the mounds that hide
   The important dead.

Close to the complex fabric of their world
   The small beasts live who shun
The spaces where the huge ones bellow, fight,
   And snore in the sun.

How admirable the modest and the frugal,
   The small, the neat, the furtive.
How troublesome the mammoths of the world,
   Gross and assertive.

Happy should we live in the interstices
   Of a declining age,
Even while the impudent masters of decision
   Trample and rage.

                                     Stanley Roy Badmin, "Priory Pond"

                              Precept

Dwell in some decent corner of your being,
Where plates are orderly set and talk is quiet,
Not in its devious crooked corridors
Nor in its halls of riot.         

Neglected Poets: Bernard Spencer

The poetry of Bernard Spencer (1909-1963) reflects the fact that he spent most of his life as an expatriate, working much of the time for the British Council as a teacher, lecturer, and administrator.  His poems -- few and far between -- have as their locales Greece, Egypt, Italy, Spain, and Austria.  During the Second World War, he was stranded in Cairo, where he was one of the poets (including Lawrence Durrell, Keith Douglas, and Terence Tiller) associated with the journal Personal Landscape.  He died in Vienna at the age of 53.

His verse is conversational in tone, but at the same time it is elegant and exact.  It reminds me at times of the later poetry of Louis MacNeice (with whom Spencer was acquainted).  I am not suggesting that Spencer's poetry was directly influenced by that of MacNeice, only that the two of them independently shared a similar style.  (Coincidentally, they both died in September of 1963.)  The following two poems provide only a brief introduction to Spencer's poetry.         

             At Courmayeur

This climbers' valley with its wayside shrines
(the young crowned Mother and her dying flowers)
became our theme for weeks.  Do you remember
the letters that we wrote and how we planned
the journey there and chose our hotel; ours
was to be one 'among the pines'?

Guesses went wide; but zigzag past that ridge
the road climbs from the Roman town; there stand
the glittering peaks, and one, the God, immensely
tossing the clouds around his shoulders; here
are what you asked for, summer pastures and
an air with glaciers in its edge.

Under all sounds is mountain water falling;
at night, the river seems to draw much closer;
darling, how did you think I could forget you,
you who for ever stayed behind?  Your absence
comes back as hard as rocks.  Just now it was
those hangdown flowers that meant recalling.

With Luck Lasting (1963) in Collected Poems, edited by Roger Bowen (Oxford University Press 1981).  Although I am, in general, not a proponent of attempting to link a poet's poems to specific events in the poet's life, I think that one should know that "At Courmayeur" was written after Spencer's first wife died at a young age of tuberculosis. 

               On the Road

Our roof was grapes and the broad hands of the vine
as we two drank in the vine-chinky shade
of harvest France;
and wherever the white road led we could not care,
it had brought us there
to the arbour built on a valley side where time,
if time any more existed, was that river
of so profound a current, it at once
both flowed and stayed.

We two.  And nothing in the whole world was lacking.
It is later one realizes.  I forget
the exact year or what we said.  But the place
for a lifetime glows with noon.  There are the rustic
table and the benches set; beyond the river
forests as soft as fallen clouds, and in
our wine and eyes I remember other noons.
It is a lot to say, nothing was lacking;
river, sun and leaves, and I am making
words to say 'grapes' and 'her skin'.

Ibid.

                  Turner, Mont Blanc from above Courmayeur (1810)

Neglected Poets: C. H. Sisson

Even though he worked in government until the age of 58, C. H. Sisson (1914-2003) wrote a prodigious amount of poetry (both his own and translations) and prose.  He certainly was not unknown or unrecognized during his lifetime, but I believe that his work does not receive the attention it deserves.

          Good-day, Citizen

My life is given over to follies
More than I can exaggerate:
If I told you half you would imagine
That I am a very respectable person.

First, there is the folly of earning money
In order to have what is called independence:
You can admire that quality if you will,
I know what it is and do not admire it.

Secondly, there is the folly of spending it wisely,
So much for insurance, so much for the house,
Suitable provision for the children's education
Which for the most part they would rather not have.

Thirdly there would be, if that were not in fact all,
The supervening graces of domestic virtue
Everything paid up, honest as the day
But I am nearest to my own language in sleep.

A wonderful poem, and perhaps something of a surprise coming from a man who was described in the Daily Telegraph's obituary as "a doughty defender of traditional Anglicanism," whose "unfashionable high Tory views and . . . deeply-felt patriotism meant that he never found favour with the Left-liberal establishment, whose follies were a frequent theme of both his poetry and prose writings."  (A man after my own heart!)  Another fine poem in the same vein is "Money."

However, I do not wish to misrepresent Sisson's breadth and depth by citing these two somewhat acerbic poems (not that Sisson ever failed to call things as he saw them) -- they just happen to be long-time favorites of mine.  I could easily have begun with poems that have as their subjects the natural world, the classical world, theology, philosophy, or history.  (Throughout, he has a wicked sense of humor.)   There are more than 300 poems in his Collected Poems (published by Carcanet in 1998), so where does one begin?

               April

Exactly: where the winter was
The spring has come:  I see her now
In the fields, and as she goes
The flowers spring, nobody knows how.
   
       The Mind of Man

The mind of man is nothing but
A repertoire of what is not,
Never was, and can never be:
So, at least, it is with me.

           The Media

1
The world is fabricated by
A gang of entertainers who
Have replaced God Almighty.

The universe, made in six days,
Is re-made every day by those
Who hear all that the newsman says,
For whom fact is replaced by gloze.

2
The air is full of noise,
The screen of caper:
Reality enjoys
No inch of paper.

The most expensive lies
Flourish in every home:
Great gulps of froth and foam
Win the first prize.

Go to the quiet wood
To hear the beating heart:
Leaf fall and breaking bud
Will play their part.

And so the truth is out
Which only quiet tells,
And as it does, its voice
Sounds like a peal of bells.
 

Neglected Poets: Norman Nicholson

Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) spent nearly his entire life in Millom, Cumbria.  He used these lines from W. H. Auden's Epistle to a Godson as the epigraph to his collection Sea to the West (1981):

     A poet's hope: to be,

     like some valley cheese,

     local, but prized elsewhere.

This is Millom:

            Five Minutes

'I'm having five minutes,' he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape.  His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on.  The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
'Just five minutes,' he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

"Five Minutes" appeared in The Pot Geranium (1954).  His 1972 collection, A Local Habitation, takes its name from these lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream: ". . . and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name."  Here is "Old Man at a Cricket Match":

             'It's mending worse,' he said,
             Bending west his head,
Strands of anxiety ravelled like old rope,
     Skitter of rain on the scorer's shed
                 His only hope.

             Seven down for forty-five,
             Catches like stings from a hive,
And every man on the boundary appealing --
     An evening when it's bad to be alive,
                 And the swifts squealing.

             Yet without boo or curse
             He waits leg-break or hearse,
Obedient in each to law and letter --
     Life and the weather mending worse,
                 Or worsening better.
  

Neglected Poets: Siegfried Sassoon

It may seem odd to identify Siegfried Sassoon as a "neglected poet."  His poems and memoirs of the First World War have certainly not been forgotten (particularly Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and several much-anthologized poems:  "Base Details," "The General," "Attack," "'Blighters'," "The Dug-Out," "To Any Dead Officer," "Suicide in the Trenches").  Further, his personality - the "fox-hunting man" who was known as "Mad Jack" in the trenches for his bravery and recklessness; the war protester who nevertheless wished to return to the front due to his love for the men he led - still holds interest:  three substantial biographies have been written about him within the past 10 years or so.

However, I believe that Sassoon is a "neglected poet" when it comes to the poetry that he wrote after the War.  Bear in mind that he was born in 1886 and died in 1967 - just short of 81.  During most of the 49 years of his life after the War he continued to write poetry, and, although he was certainly a well-known personage, his poetry was generally viewed by critics as out-of-fashion (or, more commonly, was simply ignored).

I readily admit that I, too, viewed him simply as a "War Poet" - until I read Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet's Pilgrimage by D. Felicitas Corrigan (published in 1973).  The book combines extracts of Sassoon's writing (some of it previously unpublished) with a biographical narrative that places the pieces in context.  I discovered that there was a great deal that I had missed in Sassoon.  Here is a small part of what I found.

                   Release

One winter's end I much bemused my head
In tasked attempts to drive it up to date
With what the undelighting moderns said
   Forecasting human fate.

And then, with nothing unforeseen to say
And no belief or unbelief to bring,
Came, in its old unintellectual way,
   The first real day of spring.

Sequences (1956).  This poem was originally published in 1950 in a volume titled Common Chords.

'When I'm alone' -- the words tripped off his tongue
As though to be alone were nothing strange.
'When I was young,' he said; 'when I was young . . .'

I thought of age, and loneliness, and change.
I thought how strange we grow when we're alone,
And how unlike the selves that meet, and talk,
And blow the candles out, and say good-night.
Alone . . . The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown.

Collected Poems (1961).  According to Sassoon, this poem was written in December of 1924.

Neglected Poets: Andrew Young

Many of my favorite poems have been written by poets who I consider to be "neglected."  There are various reasons for this neglect.  Perhaps it has to do with literary "reputations" and (Heaven forbid) literary "criticism."  (I am not an unremitting foe of literary criticism, but its role has been a trifle (!) inflated in recent times.)  Whatever the reason for the neglect, it saddens me that wonderful poets and poems do not receive the attention they deserve.  One of my goals is to share these poets and poems with you.

Andrew Young (1885-1971), who was born in Scotland, was first a Presbyterian minister and, later, an Anglican vicar.  He wrote poetry throughout his long life.

          A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,
That so much lived below the ground,
Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,
For you to raise a mound
Was as for us to make a hole;
What wonder now that being dead
Your body lies here stout and square
Buried within the blue vault of the air?

If you wish to read more of Andrew Young's poetry, try to find a copy of his 1960 Collected Poems: it is illustrated with wood-engravings by Joan Hassall.  The engraving below is by Hassall: