Profit and Loss begins with a series of poems about housing and transience. Like Mr Bleaney’s room, the rooms are haunted by their previous tennants, but also their current ones (several start with the refrain ‘I once lived’). ‘The Flats’ is a clever re-working of MacNeice’s The Taxis in which the speaker tours a series of neglected lets, each one creepier than the next: ‘In the third flat, something had gone obscenely wrong.’ In ‘The Notorious Case of Robert the Painter’ (‘I once lived in the house of an infamous death’) the haunting promised in the title fails only to be replaced by a haunting of another kind:

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At night in the ashes of my own affairs
I dowsed each room for signs of macabre frisson
but the past remained dust. It would not stir at the thought
of her votive lamps, of the floor where her dentures fell,
or her roses in the garden, blooming yearly

I particularly like Flynn’s poems of abandoned objects: the Peace Lily passed from friend to friend, the boxes of junk itemised in the long poem ‘Letter to Friends’ (‘preserved, this stuff, as in a drift / of snow’). That poem, which plays deceptively lightly on Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Bryon’, is itself a kind of personal and political totting up written in the wake of the financial crash:

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There's an old address book listing rented dives:
the place before the place a-place-ago
of some old friends, and weird, diminutive 
phone numbers which seem missing a first 'O'
which prompts a mental trawl back through the ones 
we had as kids, before successive codes
lengthened their - what? - five digits, maybe less?
And then it dawns: there are no mobile phones
just ancient landlines pegged along the roads,
and not a solitary email address.

The poetry of ordinary dislocation is also a poetry of stuff, because when people are on the move ordinary posessions have to carry (but can’t quite carry) the kind of significance once reserved for people, places and keepsakes. Flynn’s objects have been abandoned by the pace of change too:

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Like the shouts and groans that issue from the mine
after the prop has snapped, the floppy disk
is the love-note still sealed in its envelope.
It's the marker - blank - above its own strange grave.

I can’t think of any other poet who has managed to capture the ‘oh-so-recent, stunningly useless past’ so well, without collapsing into sentimentality. Flynn’s Selected Poems is out with at the end of April; presumably the previous owner of my book was just making space for it.

Once upon a time, around the time I first moved to London, I wrote nothing but sonnets for a year. They weren’t strictly sonnets, because they mostly didn’t rhyme and when they did rhyme they didn’t follow the right patterns; the metre, to the extent there was one, was rough and ready even by my standards. Never mind. I’d been reading a lot of Robert Lowell (possibly too much). The not-quite-sonnet tradition goes further back still.

More interesting, looking back, was how addicted to the form I was. I couldn’t stop writing and whatever I wrote came out in fourteen lines. Here is Ken Gordon, writing about his own sonnetification in Sonnet by Other Means: “It was like a fever. I began writing sonnets continuously. Daily. Sometimes two or three (or even four) in a day. I was like a chain-smoker: One sonnet lit another.” I don’t think I ever wrote four in a day, but yes—it was like that.

Are people drawn to certain forms? It’s a good question. I am still a sonnet reader, but I haven’t started a new one in years. Maybe it is also a question of timing: to everything its season and perhaps particularly to sonnets, that form which is so contained, so combustible, and apparently inexhaustible.

You can read one of those London sonnets in the . I am grateful to Ken not only for taking it, but for providing the title—the only title possible, but I didn’t know that. The poem riffs on Jackson Browne’s song of the same name (written when he was a teenager, made famous by Nico). These Days, I later learnt, is also the title of Flynn’s first collection.

The Sonneteer

These Days

For five full days in March every flower in London blossomed at once. Even the dusk turned purple. Even now, it’s only April. These days, we play safe, make memories from recent things and stash them away in airtight bottles. These days I seem to think a lot…

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12 days ago · 30 likes · 2 comments · The Sonneteer

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Like to the falling of a star,
Or as the flights of eagles are,
Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue,
Or silver drops of morning dew,
Or like a wind that chafes the flood,
Or bubbles which on water stood:
Even such is man, whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn lies;
The dew dries up, the star is shot;
The flight is past, and man forgot. 

I can see sent me the first selection for what would end up becoming the first edition, Poems Beautiful and Useful—which includes Vaughan’s (beautiful and useful) poem—before the summer. Suddenly, it’s here. If you haven’t got one already, you can buy a copy, or subscribe for a year’s worth of (five) pamphlets, here: https://www.headlesspoet.com/shop

Publishing by subscription has a long history, of which the platform that hosts this newsletter is only the most recent example. Once upon a time, publishers would send letters out drumming up interest in a title before committing to print. This continued (and evidently continues) right into the era of commercial publishing, especially for niche or expensive works; Edward Lear was always buttonholing wealthy friends and patrons to support his books of illustrations. There is nothing new under the sun, as the teacher said.

I’m working in a tradition, then. I had more recent inspirations, too. Several small publishers I really admire, like Galley Beggar and Peirene Press, both of which mainly deal in fiction, offer annual subscriptions to supporters as complement to a traditional distribution method, though complement isn’t quite the right word given the scale of the challenge facing independent publishers these days. The subscription seems well suited to poetry: poetry publishing is scrappy, and slow, and it relies on individual risk-taking to make things happen.1

The model also suited me because I am doing this, for the most part, in that fabled thing called “spare time”, so wanted to publish in a way which at least felt sustainable, while also allowing me as much time and momentum as possible to find a readership for each pamphlet—or at least, to give each one its moment in the sun. That moment is something that, from my own observations, poetry presses often struggle to create. The model also imposes a limit and a rhythm, both of which seem well suited to poetry. Well, we shall find out.

There is, of course, a less rational reason for doing things this way. Sending books by post appealed because I am both sentimental about, and seriously enamoured with, post itself. Sentimental, because post is a business, and a dying one at that: the reality is rising costs, low-paid work, petrol, Brexit, and the destruction of Royal Mail and the Post Office (the story of which is a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong in the UK over the last few decades). Seriously enamoured with, because it is both a pleasure and a privilege to send a letter to friends and strangers, and perhaps especially to places you've never been. Every street name, every town, state and village, each one conjuring an image that reality need never disturb. In the case of the US, your flat numbers make the roads seem very long. I picture those roads disappearing off into a beautiful sunset.

It takes time, though. If I owe you a copy of Poems Beautiful & Useful, it will be on its way soon if it is not on its way already.

PS. You can read a preview from using the link below. And there is some exciting news towards the end of his newsletter.

Some Flowers Soon

Yours Truly Flopping onto Your Doormat

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2 months ago · 39 likes · 2 comments · Jeremy Noel-Tod

Endings are hard in all walks of life; they pose their own special problems in poetry. If you read enough contemporary verse (and if you write any of your own) you will probably be familiar with the rhyming couplets which seem to come from nowhere, or the terribly symbolic image introduced without any of the necessary preparation through sound or sense which throws the whole thing off-kilter, or those dramatic, unearned platitudes which fall desperately, unseriously flat.

Like all endings, endings in poetry are often caught between two extremes. It is tempting to slam the door too hard, or to slink out so quietly nobody notices you’ve gone. They are all the more difficult, I think, when a poet is writing in so-called free verse, though ending a (so-called) formal poem isn’t exactly easy either.

Perhaps, like all the best endings, the best endings in poetry aren’t endings at all. Looking back at the poems I wrote about on this blog last year, one thing I notice is the way in which they each close with musical and metrical effects which ring out after the poem is over: Thomas’s misty counties, Brooks’s twinklings and twinges, Masefield’s long trick, even Larkin’s whispering trees. Here is the final stanza of ‘Why Brownlee Left’ by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, its abandoned horses staring out beyond the last line:

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By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.

The horses can’t quite move forward into the future they’re gazing at, but they keep moving all the same. They seem to be caught there forever, shifting their weight from foot to foot. And one way in which Muldoon achieves this effect is by setting that ambiguous image, the not-quite-ending, off against the ‘closing’ rhyme which, again, is only half a closure (foot to / future). A half-rhyme is all it takes to set the thing ringing. Muldoon makes it look easy. It isn’t.

Gillian Allnutt is another poet who makes brilliant use of rhyme and half-rhyme in her endings, often to very different effects. Many of her poems close with a kind of stillness, settling on a natural and/or domestic image: bread, stars, bones, ‘wings in the cupboard’. But this stillness is itself a result of movement, as Allnutt’s lines work through a series of half-rhymes, playing the sound through until its complete. You can hear this, I think, in the last lines of ‘Agape’, from Wolf Light (‘they’, here, are the ‘gaps’ in our thoughts):

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They are the inhabitants of a large asylum.
They live in their field of dream.
A fair feeld ful of folk.
They gallop, gallop and gawp.
At the end of their tether they stop
Like a municipal cup. 

Perhaps inevitably (though, strangely, I’ve not given much thought to it until now) the best lyric poems often end in images of movement, with endings or beginnings, with openings out and winding downs. You can do it relatively quietly, like Muldoon and Allnutt do, in their different ways, or you can make a point. Sylvia Plath, I think, was the master of the striking closing image which is also an opening: the ‘red-eye of the morning’, vowels rising like balloons.

Other poets seem to resist the end entirely. Zaffar Kunial's England's Green is one of my favourite collections of recent years. Returning to it recently I was struck again by something I'd half-noticed on first reading: the extraordinary consistency of its final lines. Time and time again, the poems close with lines built from internal repetition (several are echoes of the first):

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No, I would think. No. 

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They’re there. They’re there. 

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are you watching closely
are you watching closely

It is hard to ignore the ‘trick’ once you’ve noticed it and sometimes this is a little distracting: almost a quarter of the poems in the book end this way. But stripping the words out like this doesn’t do the individual poems justice, since the lines before create new contexts for each new ricochets. Clearly, this isn’t a trick but something fundamental to the thoughts the poems make. ‘Hawthorn’ is particularly beautiful: Kunial gives us ‘the name’ of the familiar tree in the title and then returns it to us fresh by the end, by way of a single, twisting sentence, a memory moving from breeze to birdsong to ‘a scent’:

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that belongs at the slow start
of another summer, alive
and pungent, and unattached
then to the off-white flowers
a little distance off from this bench
and the name, the name.

To be a poet these days often seems to mean being in the business of giving advice to other poets, presumably because it’s difficult to imagine your audience consisting of anyone other than your peers. As I reach the end here I can feel the pressure building (but from where?) to say something useful and final (if I had more commercial sense, you would be reading a blog called End Your Poems Like a Pro: Ten Secrets All Poets Need to Know). But I’ve never been very good at endings, or advice, and thankfully I don’t think that’s what most of you are here for.

Still, here is some advice, or rather a proposition. Endings are always worth paying attention to. Yet all the worst endings (like the kinds I began with) come when a writer is overly self-conscious: when they realise they have reached the end and don't know what to do about it, but feel they have to do something. You cannot retrofit an ending onto a poem which wasn't ready to leave. There is a difference between paying attention to an ending and a poem which is genuinely attentive to its own end—which has been, from the first line, a thing in time, moving through it. A poem like that doesn't need to manufacture a conclusion. Its ending has been there all along, brought closer by every passing line.

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Headless Poet is a new small press and poetry subscription service specialising in the art of the introduction. Our first pamphlet, POEMS BEAUTIFUL & USEFUL, selected by , is available to pre-order here.

You can subscribe to their newsletter, which includes gems like CG’s piece on Sylvia Plath’s prose, here on Substack.2

They throw good parties, too. The review below, of Matthew Buckley Smith’s second collection, Midlife, was first published in Issue 2 last November. One cold, rainy Saturday, I went along to read at the launch party on a cosy old boat in Canary Wharf (a distinctly un-cosy area: the contrast was surreal).

How do you perform a review? We agreed I’d simply read something from the book, without any discussion, so I read ‘Object Permenance’, of which more below. I am glad to say several people came up to me afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed it and asking to see a copy of the book itself (which was quite possibly the only copy in the UK at that point), promising to get hold of one.

It was a strange, and strangely gratifying, experience. Though it has its pleasures, at the end of the day reviewing is always a strange and solitary task. I often find myself mentally distancing myself from a book, and the review itself, once I’m done. Suddenly, I was the book’s ambassador, enthusiastic about the poems all over again and basking in their borrowed glory. Perhaps all critics should be given the opportunity to impersonate their victims.3

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[REVIEW] Midlife by Matthew Buckley Smith (Measure, 2024; $25)

First published in The Little Magazine

When it’s not being shared on the internet, most poetry moves across borders slowly and at great expense. The process by which some American poets and not others are received in the UK, for instance, is opaque and unpredictable. The trade in the opposite direction, meanwhile, doesn’t bear speaking of, which is to say it doesn’t exist.

I first came across Matthew Buckley Smith’s poems on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Smith is an American poet, living in North Carolina. You won’t find his second collection, Midlife, on bookshelves in England. It might take some time to get to you in the post. I am grateful to the publishers for sending me a copy for review.

The poem I came across online was ‘Poem Without Metaphors’. It does what it says on the tin: it is a list of things which are exactly as they are, without metaphors. I thought it was one of the best poems I had read in a long time, because it had the guts to rhyme, and to stick to its conceit (‘The rain against the glass is only rain, / Your heart is just a muscle in your chest’), and because the end was both devastating and ambiguous.

Somewhere a car is racing through the night
No faster than a swiftly moving car,

A brace of deer glance up at something bright –
Gone still, exactly like the deer they are.

And as for you, you could be anyone
Who’s done, who’s said, the things you’ve said and done.

I don’t quite know what this means, but I know that I am implicated.

America is the land of extremes and this is true for its poetry as much as anything. Its ‘formal’ poets are more self-consciously formal than ours are; its ‘free verse’ poets avoid metre like the plague. From a distance, it looks like there are two traditions reacting against each other. Increasingly, the divide seems to be experienced and/or perceived as ideological, to everyone’s detriment; conservatives write in metre, liberals write loosely (this is a general observation: I don’t know anything about Smith’s politics and wouldn’t guess from his poems).

This is a bad and boring situation. Sometimes I think we are heading in a similar direction on this side of the Atlantic. This would be a very bad and very boring thing for British poetry. You can’t write an honest poem while looking over your shoulder. You can’t write well while leaving half the tools in the box.

One of the reasons ‘Poem Without Metaphors’ is so successful is that the final line slows the whole thing down. It reads as though it has more stresses than it should. Often the poems in Midlife are a little neater in their rhythms. Often they are a little too neat. The same holds true for the rhymes. There can be the sense, which I often get from American formalist poetry, of something snapping into place:

When we hear the news your neighbour shot herself,
I’m slow to link her name to the smiling face
We see every Christmas at your parents’ place
And each morning on our fridge, dressed as an elf.

At best, the strict form is in productive, unsettling tension with the subject matter. At worst, it is funnier than it means to be.

The poems in Midlife range from shorter lyrics, often rhyming A/B/A/B, to dramatic monologues – yet the ones I liked the most create their own forms. Subject-wise, as the book’s title suggests, Smith is very good, cold and clear on parenting, love, and regret. ‘Object Permanence’ masterfully inhabits the perspective of a baby being put to bed (I don’t recommend it for new parents), unable to understand that the night isn’t a kind of non-existence, and dragged

Upstairs into the reeling hall that slides
With horrifying slowness to that room
Peopled with deaf-mute mammals on all sides,
Dim as the womb…

Form works with meaning, pushing us into ‘the dark, which, closing with a latch, / Becomes complete’. The final stanza is hard to parse at first – Smith effectively sacrifices the penultimate line to the final one, but I think it’s worth it. In four syllables, the whole ordeal is repeated, yet also redeemed:

No one can hear, but you cry anyway
For more time in the world you hardly knew,
Here in the body one momentous day
We loved as you.

JBW

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Tis the season and I have had Christina Rossetti in my head. Not the whole carol, just the first verse. Not even the true first verse, it turns out, because the version in my head has picked up an extra ‘snow’, so it now goes (or went) like this: Snow had fallen, snow on snow, / Snow on snow on snow. How does she fit so much snow in the line, I kept wondering to myself. It’s astonishing.

But, of course, the original lines are astonishing in their own right and far better. The sheer quantity of snow, five times in two short lines, does what it says, suggests more and yet more. More than that: it’s snow on snow, snow on snow. ‘On’ calls back to ‘no’. And then there’s ‘iron’ an ‘stone’ a few words earlier. Those two letters have completely blanketed the verse.

Three more poems featuring snow which must be in conversation with each other and perhaps with Rossetti too: Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ and Philip Larkin’s ‘The Winter Palace’. Three wintry poems by three wintry poets. Three poems in which the mind is like winter, because winter is nothingness, and so is the mind. Three poems in which each poem feels a little differently about the mind being a kind of nothingness.1

Three poems, too, in which the word ‘snow’ matters, though Frost is the one who makes it work the hardest:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

Fast, snow, fast. It doesn’t snow much here in London, and when it does snow the snow rarely settles. It doesn’t snow anywhere in England as much as it once did, which is one of those facts which, when I remember it, gives me the chills.

I call this newsletter A Poetry Notebook, but don’t use it like a notebook. I write little blog-essays about poems. But there is a lot going on, and it is the end of the year, so this blog really is a series of notes. If you are a new subscriber, hello and thank you. It isn’t usually like this.

I have a poem, ‘In Italy’, in the new issue of The London Magazine. I really admire what the magazine is doing at the moment and it was nice to be across the page from my friend . I’m very pleased. The poem itself is at the end of this email. You can get a copy here.

Further highlights for me so far include: a gentle, moving and cleverly paced short story by Jonathan Edwards (fathers, sons, prostate cancer, road diversions in rural Wales), two poems by Rachel Curzon and ‘41 Numbered Paragraphs About Dementia and Fiction’ (“An individual and a society cannot keep up with one another.”). I enjoyed Jack Barron’s doubts about Famous Seamus, though they should be read alongside ’s warm and wise appreciation.

Winter in poetry so often gets expressed through snow. The one stands for the other. For obvious reasons. There’s nothing like it. Imagine seeing snow for the first time! One of my earliest memories is sledding down a snowy bank outside our house in Birmingham. I would've been two and a half.

Snow stands for winter in a deeper sense, too. The world covered by snow is a new world. Winter, more than any other season, is another world. Its own kingdom. We are ‘inside’ winter in a way we're never inside any other season.2 Summer arrives with one eye on its own departure, spring and autumn are always coming and going but winter has an icy swagger of its own: it believes it’s here to stay. Or at least, we do. This is, as points out here, because winter really was a matter of life and death, once upon a time (and presumably still is for anyone without shelter). It’s also something to do with the lack of light.

Another poem about snow, winter and the mind as winter. The first line of ‘At Lullington Church/To My Daughter’ by Toby Martinez de las Rivas, from his collection Black Sun (Faber, 2018), has also been in my head for days:

In my kingdom it is winter forever.
The snow falls & there is no time nor day —
no distinction between things, no compare,
no flaw to taint our rudimentary clay.

In my kingdom. . . whose kingdom? Winter is its own kingdom. Here, it belongs to the speaker. This is immediately memorable and wonderfully grand. The poem’s title means, I think, that we’re being encouraged to assume this is the poet speaking. It’s an unsettling connection. The speaker is comparing themselves to Hades or the White Witch. (It is difficult not to think about Narnia.)

Martinez de las Rivas isn’t an easy poet and this isn’t an easy poem.3 But it is probably the most accessible poem in Black Sun, which is perhaps why the Forward Prize chose it for their website. It is, I think, about separation. Taken as a whole, I find it terrifying, especially the final lines, the child waking alone. It is beautiful too, especially ‘the bullfinch sheafed’, sword-like, ‘in ice & snow’.

The version shared on the website I linked to above is misleading: on the page, the poem is presented as a 14 line sonnet, with a further line (Lully, Lulley, Lully, Lulley) in a much smaller script below; all the poems in Black Sun are similarly annotated.4 That last line is a reference, apparently, to the Corpus Christi Carol, which is also where the falcon earlier in the poem comes from, though it also calls back to the name of the church and lullabies in general. On the website, it’s in the same format, which diminishes the force of the couplet.

Until she wakes and finds herself alone,
you are her rock, Lord. Lord, you are stone.

When I first started trying to publish my own poetry, I would send work off to poetry prizes and even won one. I had a curious email from the organisers of the competition explaining that they were suggesting a couple of changes to the punctuation in the ‘winning’ poem (a prize-winning poem is a bit like a prize-winning horse: unnatural). These edits weren’t optional. If I quibbled, the prize would be withdrawn. I didn’t quibble. I’ve always liked being edited, within reason and I like to think I’m not precious. The changes, which probably did improve the poem, did not seem particularly important at the time. The prize money did.

But there was another stipulation in the email. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone that this had happened. It was against the competition’s rules to alter poems after they had been submitted, even if the organisers had asked you to do it! They were, I guess, worried that the other entrants would be a bit peeved. If the poem needed editing, how could it be the ‘best’? It was, in retrospect, all rather silly. But it is also just one example of the strange ways in which poetry competitions distort the ways in which poetry is written and received in the twenty-first century.

The poem below wouldn’t read the way it does without suggestions from friends. I didn’t take all their advice, so they aren’t responsible for the end result, but it is a much better poem for them. I hope that doesn’t ruin the mystery.

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“It’s both funny and serious. The speaker’s a shit. That’s always serious.”

- Philip Larkin, 1981

Philip Larkin lived and wrote through the Second World War, but though the conflict is central to both his novels it only plays a shadowy role in his published poetry. He was far happier writing about the first, most famously in ‘MCMXIV’, that dreamy, single-sentence that somehow both transcends and perfects the nostaglia it wallows in, right down to the numerals etched into its title.

Oddly, ‘MCMXIV’ isn’t the only, or even the first, poem in The Whitsun Weddings about the Cenotaph. That honour goes to ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses’. When it was first published in 1961, Larkin complained that he had “never written a poem that has been less understood.” He didn’t make it particularly easy. The poem is a dramatic monologue by a jet-setting academic:

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Hurrying to catch my Comet
One dark November day,
Which soon would snatch me from it
To the sunshine of Bombay,
I pondered pages Berkeley
Not three weeks since had heard,
Perceiving Chatto darkly
Through the mirror of the Third.

In their hurry to get away, the speaker forgets that it is Remembrance Sunday; only the ‘colourless and careworn’ crowds around their taxi remind them of:

That day when Queen and Minister
And Band of Guards and all
Still act their solemn-sinister
Wreath-rubbish in Whitehall.

Larkin’s impersonation was clearly too good; one editor refused the poem on the grounds that it was “rather hard on the Queen”. Elsewhere, he recounts being asked how his trip to India went. “There is nothing like writing poems for realizing how low the level of critical understanding is.”1

Well, quite. But for anyone reading Larkin now there is no missing the irony. The speaker is obviously not him. We know the usual ‘Larkin’ would sneer at people talking so breezily about ‘Berkeley’ (pronounced here to rhyme with ‘darkly’? my American friends can correct me), ‘Chatto’, a publisher, and ‘the Third’, which is apparently a reference to BBC Radio 3.

I found the poem off-putting when I first read it simply because I didn’t get any of the references. But I could tell the speaker was a recognisable type—smugly cosmpopolitan, name-dropping, disdainful of ‘England’, pomp and ceremony:

It used to make me throw up,
These mawkish nursery games:
O when will England grow up?
But I outsoar the Thames…

The clincher is the play on words in the title: the ‘foundation’ bearing our expenses isn’t whatever cultural institution has paid for the speaker’s flight, but the country itself—the young men whose sacrifice they fail to respect. Larkin is asking us, or rather, telling us (there is only one answer) who the child here really is. The poem, in turn, only wants two reactions: either we’re meant to share in Larkin’s disgust, or to be brought up short by the insult as we recognise a version of ourselves in the mirror. In an essay for the Poetry Review, Lara Pawson notes that “it appears to deride someone a bit like me”.

That speaker is, crucially, the product of Larkin’s imagination. As he wrote at the time: “it came from having been to London and having heard that A had gone to India and that B had just got back from India; then when I got back home, happening unexpectedly across the memorial service at the Cenotaph on the wireless… and the two things seemed to get mixed up together.”

The way those two things got ‘mixed up’ is more instructive still. Larkin wrote to Monica Jones how the poem came about “when washing up after listening to the Cenotaph service… & thinking how much sooner I’d rather be there than going to India - in fact the two situations presented themselves so strongly in opposition that I was greatly stricken, and dyd Seek to Compose vpon Itt.”

The self-mockery is typical and endearing, but also contains a curious disclosure: it’s as if Larkin can only access his own patriotism—his own pride, perhaps, at a life of unglamorous public service in Hull—by lashing out at an imagined double. Perhaps more to the point, the only person who is caught unaware by the day is Larkin himself, who comes across the service on the radio ‘unexpectedly’.

Larkin’s comments make it clear that he knew all this (he was his own best analyst). The poem is, in this sense, perfectly, and cynically, reactionary: it only exists because Larkin needs an external outlet for his own mixed feelings; he published it anyway.2 This kind of process—psychologists would call it projection—is, of course, extremely contemporary. Remembrance Sunday (this Sunday, for those who need a reminder) and Remembrance Day have been part of the ‘culture wars’ in the UK since before the phrase caught on, stoked endlessly and cynically by the right-wing media. Anyone not wearing a poppy is disrepcting the dead; anyone wearing one is a stooge for the military-industrial complex, or loves war. Woe betide any left wing politician who puts a foot wrong.

Like many people, I usually wear a poppy. Like David Lammy, I often forget, and that’s fine too. He was probably busy. I also think the way in which the symbol is splashed everywhere these days (including the strange plastic blazons tied to the lamposts down our high-street) is itself disrespectful. Solemn-sinister in fact. In any case, you can respect the dead while being sceptical of the stories a country tells about its past; you can also value tradition and ritual while keeping your own conscience. No country is neatly divided between the dutiful and the ungrateful.

Here, however, Larkin forces the reader to take a side, needling away at our doubts and prejudices. It’s bad poem, I think, and bad politics. But it is also that rare thing: a genuinely effective political poem.3

Thank you for reading A Poetry Notebook! I write about poetry (no surprises there), books more generally, and sometimes share my own stories. Comments and suggestions are always very welcome—and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more of.

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This week, I thought I would share my review of Sam Leith’s ‘history of childhood reading’, which was first published on Engelsberg Ideas around this time last year (The Haunted Wood is now out in paperback).1 You can read the full article below. It is always disorientating to read something like this back later, and all the more so this time. At the time of writing, our son was seven or eight-months-old. In a few months, he will be two. This, of course, is how life works. It doesn’t make the process any less strange.

Books help. The central theme of The Haunted Wood is the intensity of children’s literature’s relationship with time: every book for children is written by an adult, someone both excluded from and only just beginning to understand the experience they’re writing about. When I wrote the review I had no idea about the endless tiny griefs (and the joys) that come with watching someone growing up. I am only beginning to grasp it. Parenting, it turns out, is a process of discovering just how much you don’t know.

When I first read The Haunted Wood, I came away with a strong feeling that children’s literature needs defending as an art in its own right—even, sometimes, from children’s authors themselves. In penance for recycling, and because some time has passed, I also want to throw in a few further bones of contention.

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The best children’s books are written with a real child in mind

So many children’s books published today are bad and cynical. The exact ways in which they are bad and cynical depend on the age range they’re aimed at. Often, they’re hopelessly moralising in very twenty-first century ways: there is one particular picture-book series, deathly dull and utterly surreal, that attempts to draw inspirational self-help lessons from the lives of famous figures like… Anne Frank. We are as moralising as the Victorians, only the morals have changed.2

Still, this stuff sells: the main reason so many children’s books are bad and cynical, preachy or otherwise, is that the genre is seen as one of the last lucrative markets in publishing. And one of the lessons I drew from The Haunted Wood is that children’s books are precisely the kind of books which shouldn’t be written with the market in mind, at least not if they are going to be any good. Think of a classic story and the chances are it was written for a particular child:

So many of these stories begin in private, for particular children: Alice Liddell of the Alice stories, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘best beloved’ Effie, George and Jack Llewyn Davies, who first heard Peter Pan from J. M. Barrie, Richard Adams’s daughters. We only have The Wind in the Willows because Kenneth Grahame’s editor overheard him putting his son to bed. Treasure Island crossed generations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd, and Stevenson’s father: ‘I had counted on one by: I found I had two… My father caught fire at once.’

As that list suggests, the storyteller really doesn’t need to be a parent. But they will be writing for someone. Every child, and every childhood, is unique and it’s only through a real childhood that we glimpse the true strangeness of growing up. More to the point, the stories have to be written with love. We often complain, rightly, about cynical celebrities writing books for children, and cynical publishers pushing them. But the cynicism runs deeper than that. It isn’t, in the end, about who writes. The point is that you can’t simply sit down and say, “I’m going to write a book for children.” You have to want to write one for someone who happens to be a child. Perhaps that’s idealistic, but I think you can tell.

Picture books are the most complex kind of books

In our house, books mean picture books. Toddlers are an illustrator’s best friend, and the best illustrators hide little secrets just for them: ours will often be following a subplot in the images we aren’t paying attention to (like the mice in Mr Magnolia). The last half-century was a golden age for British picture books, helped along by cheaper off-shore production. But their rise has also encouraged the idea that children’s books are the perfect vehicle for first-time authors. Can’t you just write some words and have someone else do the illustrations?

Well, no. Picture books are works of art. In the best, the images and text are in constant dialogue: stories and jokes will begin in words and end in pictures, and vice versa. The illustrations inspire, expand on, and sometimes subtly question the text: the child looking at The Tiger Who Came to Tea sees a very different tiger to the one the adult reads. Picture books are designed, not merely drawn or written. Their creators orchestrate our movement through them.

Too many of the books in our local library are just words plonked beside pictures; even, I’m sorry to say, a few Julia Donaldson titles (The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom are brilliant precisely because words and pictures work together). A great picture book needs either a master illustrator, someone like Quentin Blake or Judith Kerr or Eric Carle, or an extraordinarily close collaboration, like Janet and Allan Ahlbergs’. That arguably makes them the rarest kind of book.

Childhood reading is the most important kind of reading

One final thought (this introduction is now as long as the review). The proportion of people who report reading for pleasure in the UK and US has been falling for years. Sometimes, I pretend the situation isn’t so bad. It is easier than ever—thanks to technology, ironically—to find other people who read widely. I’m often surrounded by people reading on the Tube, because London is the kind of city which attracts the kind of people who might read on the Tube.

But the statistics don’t lie. The cause is more controversial. I think all screens have something to do with it. Smartphones are probably responsible for the most recent declines, but the rot set in earlier. (There were no smartphones when I was a kid, but there were PCs, TVs, and PlayStations.) Those are the pull factors, if you like. But the decline of cultures which nudged people towards reading matters too: religion, the middle class, the trade union movement. Once nudged, people found their own reasons, but surely the nudges helped.3

Then again, as notes in relation to the male reading ‘crisis’, arguing about causes often becomes a way of apportioning blame. Better, perhaps, to talk about solutions. The solution there, he says, is “boring”:

To get more men to read, we need more men reading.

Men will read, Henderson argues, when they see other men reading. It sounds a little too simple, but I think it’s true (and it appeals to my inner William James). The main barrier to men reading isn’t modern publishing, or the books themselves, or men’s interests—after all, they used to read—but the absence of visible readers. What’s true for men is true for people in general.

Ideally, those visible readers will be around at an early age. For understandable reasons, most of the articles and think-pieces I read sounding the alarm around reading rates are written by people working in universities, concerned about how many of their students seem unfamiliar with or seriously estranged from books. Often, the conversation then turns to the way in which schools might be failing students. But school is too late (in the UK, schools are now expected to solve almost every social problem going). Reading, as a habit, sets in early.

That is why the statistics around childhood reading are so depressing: they suggest that more decline is already baked in. Children who don’t enjoy reading probably aren’t going to become adults who enjoy reading to their children. But, if we care about reversing that trend, that’s exactly what needs to happen. Reading will have to be something that children and adults rediscover together. The good news is that the best children’s books are made for exactly that purpose.

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The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, Sam Leith

Children eat books up. Often, when they are small, they literally eat them. One of the many delicious asides in The Haunted Wood, Sam Leith’s new ‘history of childhood reading’, tells the story of a child who wrote to Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, and received a drawing of a ‘Wild Thing’ in return. The boy’s mother wrote back: “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.”

Sendak took it as a compliment. As Leith notes, the boy was a first-rate critic: Where the Wild Things Are wraps eating, love and consumption together in ‘excellently Freudian fashion’. When Max makes to leave, the Wild Things threaten to eat him themselves:

‘Oh please don’t go – We’ll eat you up – we love you so!’

As a child, I always read that line as a kind of invitation. It’s scary, too, as invitations often are. The best children’s authors know how to capture those mixed feelings and Leith is a brilliantly acute guide to the pleasures, fears and heartbreaks involved, as well as the skill which it takes to pull off lines like this. Never stuffy, he takes the texts and images seriously, which is no more than the best children’s books deserve. Time and time again, Leith gets them just right: Julia Donaldson has “one of the best ears for prosody since… Auden”; the key line in Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea is the moment—almost sublime for the child reading—that the tiger drinks “all the water in the tap”.

Leith sets out to do more than just revisit the classics. “I wanted, in the role of literary historian, to see how these books have shaped each other; in the role of literary critic to ask whether they’re any good, and why; and in the role of social historian to understand how these books are involved with the story of childhood in Britain.” The three modes are connected: one of his themes is the way in which children shaped the genre through their own tastes and preferences. Naughtiness gets the upper hand, with a little help from Just William.

At times, The Haunted Wood also reads like a collective biography. Leith is bashful about this, though needlessly so. Children’s books are personal. “Often”, he writes, the authors “are writing from a wound – whether a wound sustained in childhood, or the wound of having had to leave it behind in the first place.” They are psychologically complex, too, “a document not of how children are, but how adults imagine children to be, or how they imagine they want them to be”.

The selection is personal as well. Once the origin stories are out the way, Leith largely focuses on British literature, which, he argues, is one of the country’s great exports. Children’s writing, he suggests, has a “baked in nostalgia” (perhaps that is one reason why the English are so good at it) and perhaps inevitably I came away from The Haunted Wood with a nostalgia for the genre’s high watermark, that long hot summer before the First World War. Leith delivers superlative readings of the Alice books, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, the world of Beatrix Potter and the life and work of E. Nesbit.

Another key theme for Leith is the way in which children’s books draw on the energy of the oldest kind of narratives, of myths and fairytales. This primal, storytelling energy, he argues, means they are always spilling out of books into playground games, retellings and other genres, television, film and even video games. I wondered if some of this energy wasn’t encoded in the act of storytelling itself. Adults rarely tell or perform stories to each other in person anymore—there’s TV for that—but we’ll still sit down with a child.

So many of these stories begin in private, for particular children: Alice Liddell of the Alice stories, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘best beloved’ Effie, George and Jack Llewyn Davies, who first heard Peter Pan from J. M. Barrie, Richard Adams’s daughters. We only have The Wind in the Willows because Kenneth Grahame’s editor overheard him putting his son to bed. Treasure Island crossed generations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd, and Stevenson’s father: “I had counted on one by: I found I had two… My father caught fire at once.”

It didn’t take long for people to notice there might be money to be made here. One early entrepreneur was Enid Blyton, who “was banging out several dozen books a year” by the 1950s (“You don’t so much analyse Enid Blyton’s work as weigh it.”). Blyton cultivated her readership, publishing her own magazine, assiduously answering letters from her admirers and encouraging them to meet each other. The Famous Five Club “had 30,000 members within a year of its inception.” Here, if you like, is the start of fandom.4

Leith also highlights the ‘intertextuality’ of children’s literature. Like the myths and fairytales they draw on, these books borrow from one other and that is part of their appeal. He even defends J.K. Rowling from charges of derivativeness: Rowling is simply the magpie who managed to bring all the shiny pieces together. The genre is “an inexhaustible resource of… characters and situations: orphaned protagonists with portentous desires, portals to other worlds, exotic monsters and talking animals, midnight feasts… perilous journeys, enchanted objects, dark forests, thuggish bullies and evil wizards”. He is surely right about Rowling, though I wish Diane Wynne Jones got more credit and had the same readership. Two of my friends shared a copy of Harry Potter—literally reading the same book at the same time, with the faster reader always one page ahead. You can’t explain that kind of enthusiasm away as a marketing trick.

Equally, all this ‘intertextuality’ is awfully convenient for publishers and their authors. Children, as Leith notes, are conservative. Like Bilbo Baggins, they want their adventure and they want to come home for tea. They also want to come home to the same stories, again and again. Books turn into franchises, franchises never end. Perhaps we should be a little more cynical on their behalf: some of the best children’s stories of the last 50 years have been one-off performances, quietly stunning in their brevity, but Leith understandably doesn’t have room for many. I would put in a word in for Clive King’s Stig of the Dump.

Towards the end of Leith’s tale, children’s authors start making a particular, peculiar claim: that they are not children’s authors at all. The great Alan Garner is “writing for anybody who cares to read, after I have written for myself”. Philip Pullman resists the title. Leith suggests that there’s an air of things coming full circle here: children’s books were the medium which fantasy, fairy tale and adventure—originally for everyone, later sequestered in children’s fiction—were smuggled through to the present, while the novel was busy making itself ‘respectable’. On this reading, the rise of the ‘young adult’ genre (which Leith wisely puts beyond his remit) is just a righting of the scales in favour of the fantastical. Ursula Le Guin makes the claim explicit: her work, she writes, draws on “the tradition of fantastic tales and hero stories, which comes down to us like a great river from sources high in the mountains of myth”, but “modernist literary ideology shunted it all off to children”.

Le Guin’s story about ‘modernist ideology’ is faintly conspiratorial. There is no sense here that adult readers make choices, too: that there might be something about Middlemarch that wouldn’t work in a book about dragons (now that’s an idea), or that writers might have good reasons for looking askance at the ‘high mountains of myth’. After all, there are plenty of modern adventures for ‘adults’— Conrad, Melville, Du Maurier, McCarthy—they just tend to forgo the heroes and the villains. The endless battle between ‘YA’ and ‘literary fiction’ is an argument between two pretty healthy monopolies who both want more of the cake.

Children, however, don’t want adventure for the sake of adventure. They also have what Katherine Rundell calls a “thirst for justice”. The only genuinely amoral children’s book I can think of is Treasure Island. Not only does Silver get away with murder, but as Leith points out, there aren’t really any noble motives in Stevenson’s story. Everyone’s goal is the same: treasure. Stevenson pulls it all off with a wink, but few writers have dared follow him. Leith wonders whether the rift between J.K. Rowling and a section of her fanbase is yet more proof of her success: readers took Harry Potter to heart. Then again, surely in writing about a cataclysmic battle between pure good and pure evil Rowling was only accentuating a dynamic central to the genre. No one identifies as Voldemort.

Still, as Rundell has argued elsewhere, we go back to children’s books because they remind us that ‘hope counts for something’. The problem with doing away with the distinctions between books for adults and books for children is that we end up losing sight of perhaps the most important quality of both adventures and childhood: if we are lucky, they come to an end.

The best children’s books know this, which is why they are so sad. Enjoyable as The Haunted Wood is—and I want to stress that it is great fun—Leith’s wood is still haunted. “To be a child is to know that you have to grow up,” he writes. “To be an adult is to know that you have to die. And to be a parent is to be in a permanent state of mourning.” Ultimately, what defines childhood reading is the intensity of its relationship with time itself.

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Last week’s post on the so-called ‘middle-distance poem’ has had one of its desired effects: people have been sending me poems. Do take a look in the comments for the full discussion. I’m especially grateful to Moul, whose newsletter this week picks up one of the questions my ‘elegy’ threw out, and to William Poulos for pointing me to Peter Porter’s An Exequy.

Victoria also discusses Tony Harrison’s brilliant long poem, A Kumquat for John Keats. The news about Harrison’s death came a few days later. There will be better tributes to Harrison than I can deliver, though it’s hard to shake the feeling he never got the respect he deserved.1 He was also a brilliant reader of his own poems; you can find some on the Poetry Archive.

Speaking of Keats, another important genealogy identified in the responses last week was the Romantic poets, which is a theme I want to come back to: Wordsworth and Co. are almost Freudianly absent in the original essay. This week, however, I’ve been thinking about Keats in particular. Keats is one of those poets who utterly consumed me when I first started reading poetry. I have an old paperback copy of the Complete Poems which has been with me at least a decade, probably picked up at a second-hand book stall in Cambridge.2 On the title page, in green biro, I’ve scrawled the date, the address I was living at, and underneath, in capitals: TO WHAT GREEN ALTAR???

It’s a good question. But the poem on my mind is, of course, To Autumn. This is one of those poems probably best met with the stillness reading it out loud produces. You can read it here (read it out loud). But here are three thoughts.

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I.

The poem is a rush of images. It is, in fact, a list—or rather, three lists. Each verse is a self-contained moment moving through the season, rather like a triptych: all that ripeness; then the lazy, lazy harvest; then the coming cold.

Keats wrote To Autumn while he was staying in Winchester, England’s old capital, in what was then a very rural but fast-changing Hampshire. While there, he wrote a letter to a friend describing his surprise at a stubble-field that looked warm, just like a painting of a stubble-field. Some critics see the poem as a response to the growing tradition of English landscape painting. The images are left as images, with little exclamation or explanation.

It is, in that sense, an unusually modern poem: the poet draws back from the scene. The Romantic poets are often caricatured as being all about the ‘inner light’, the celebration of the self. That autumn, Keats was looking.

II.

What was Keats looking at? In their article Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester Richard Turley, Jayne Archer and Howard Thomas point out that most recent readings of the poem abstract it from its particular place:

As diverse as they may seem, the most resonant recent readings of ‘To Autumn’ share a feature in common: all, in various ways, abstract the ode from its specific Winchester setting… Helen Vendler’s formalist critique recognizes the poem’s ‘remarkably meticulous topography’, but, finally refers the land’s (and the poem’s) meaning back to literary precursors and classical myth. Nicholas Roe’s… takes its brio from the relocation of the dissenting energies of Keats’s ode some 200 miles north to [Peterloo]. Jonathan Bate, in his provocative analysis of the ode as ‘ecosystem’… [contends] that the poem is a ‘meditation on how human culture can only function through links and reciprocal relations with nature’.3

When Winchester is mentioned, To Autumn is usually associated with the water meadows south of the city (you can take a guided walk in that direction). The great relevation in the article is that the place which matters most is, in fact, another loation Keats visited: St Giles’s Hill, on the east side of the city. The slopes are now occupied by a multi-story car park, while the South Downs beyond have been cut through by a motorway—a huge chalk scar I’ve driven through hundreds of times.4

The article goes on to argue for the importance of the poem’s engagement with the local agricultural economy and the shifting social make-up of the town. I did not find this discussion entirely convincing, interesting as agricultural history always is. But the topography matters. From St Giles’s:

the walker faces due west, and in the late-afternoon may observe the ‘maturing sun’ together with the tincturing changes it brings to the landscape (the ‘rosy hue’ of the ‘stubble-plains’), as well as indigenous wildlife such as low-flying swallows gathering insects over the Itchen’s reed beds before nightfall. From its brow, the sights and sounds remembered in Keats’s poem—from the ‘half-reaped furrow’ on which the reaper sleeps, to the bleats of ‘full-grown lambs’ on ‘hilly bourn’—could be observed in one glorious sweep.

No hill, no poem. I can believe it.

III.

At some point in the last century, critics began to worry that To Autumn was unrealistically idyllic. How could Keats write such pastoral scenes when 18 people had just been killed at Peterloo (any many more wounded) the Napoleonic wars had wrecked the economy, and bread prices were soaring? Was the ‘season of mists’ an ideological smoke-screen?

In response, the authors of the New Men of Winchester suggest we can read To Autumn as being ‘as much of a rebuke’ to the ‘speculating and deadening forces of the age’ as the pamphlets and essays Keats’s friends and associates were writing against Lord Liverpool’s government and the price of grain. The poem does this, we’re told, not by idealising rural life but by carefully exposing the tensions of Winchester’s local economy.

So, in the second stanza, we can read ‘store’ in the (ironic) light of local bankers hoarding grain for speculation, while the ‘careless’ labourers below suggest both fears of exploitative landlords and the real problem of declining yields and a dearth of skilled labour. Rural work was poorly paid, and better opportunities were opening up elsewhere. The ‘fumed poppies’ and ‘twined flowers’ sound nice, but left unchecked they will eventually end in scarcity.

Even if we entertain these readings—I remain pretty sceptical—there’s an important distinction the authors never make: were these associations deliberate, or something we only appreciate in retrospect (and with their assistance)? The implication is that it doesn’t matter: unwittingly or not, the really important issues have made their way into the poem, which in turn gives us the green light to admire it with our social conscience clear. But this still begs the question: what if we’d never considered reading the poem this way and liked it all the same? What would Keats’s friends have thought?

Better, surely, to resist the terms of the debate. As a depiction of Winchester’s economy, To Autumn is a classically inspired fantasy. If it were the only document surviving from 1819, that might be cause for concern. But it isn’t—and, of course, it is more than just a fantasy. It is an ode to the season by a young man called John Keats, a man who was racking up debts to support his family and friends while attempting to pursue a life in poetry that could slip away at any moment; a man whose critics dismissed him as a vulgar upstart and told him he would be better off as a poor surgeon than a poor poet.

To understand why this matters we have to go back to the second verse:

 Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor...

Perhaps this has been said before—someone would know, I don’t—but I always hear and feel those lines as an invitation, a levelling gesture: Keats claiming the season—and its poetry—for himself and everyone. The pronouns matter. Who hath not? Everyone has. Whoever seeks abroad. Anyone might. And then we’re off into the landscape, seeking and finding. Keats’s walk up St. Giles’s Hill is as present in those first two lines it is in the sights and sounds that follow, and the poetry is in the act of walking as much as it is in any one particular view. We are always on the move. The poem is asking: who do experiences like this belong to? Who has a right to them? Who gets to decide what’s beautiful?

You can hear Keats’s answer in his diction, and in his attention to the everyday: in the specificity of moss’d cottage-trees, stubble-plains, the garden-croft; the unfussiness of bleat and twitter. That robin might be one of the first fully recognisable birds in English poetry—and it’s just an ordinary bird in an ordinary person’s garden. To Autumn doesn’t need to justify itself politically: the poem is its own rebuke.

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When I think about what I am doing here (in this newsletter, that is, I do my best not to think about the other question) I realise that one of my biggest and fondest inspirations is Carol Rumens’s Poem of the Week column. Rumens has been writing the column for almost two decades. Each week, she shares a poem, sometimes an old poem, sometimes a new one, then takes us through it, closely and clearly. Anyone will get something out of the discussion, whatever their relationship to poetry, because (because not despite) she always starts with what makes a poem a poem: its sound and its shape.

Poem of the Week has introduced me to a lot of poems and poets I might never have encountered elsewhere. But Rumens will also change how you think about poems you thought you knew. Put a good poem in front of a good reader and they will always find something surprising, because poetry is the gift that keeps on giving (in this sense, it is very good for the environment).1 This week’s poem was ‘Sea-Fever’. You can read it here but let’s have it again. There may or may not be a missing word: more on that later.

I must down to the seas 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 seagulls crying.

I must 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.

Like Rumens says, I don’t think you can have this one too many times. I know this because I’ve been reciting it to our son in his cot most evenings for the past month. This is partly because I simply don’t know many poems by heart, partly because once you start doing one thing with a toddler they tend to want you to do it again (he doesn’t have many words, but he will ask for the “poom”) and partly because it is such a joy to say out loud.

‘Sea-Fever’ was first published in 1902 in John Masefield’s first book of poems, Salt-Water Ballads. The reference to ballads is for effect (authenticity was just coming into fashion again in 1900). It is also true. ‘Sea-Fever’ has the quality of a song for voices: if you say it enough times, it creates its own music. The poem has been set to music several times, but I don’t think this quite works and that is not quite what I mean. I don’t just mean that it sounds good, either. Rather, the words have such a strong tug that they literally create their own melody.

Like a real ballad, the tune can vary. I do it a little differently each time. I won’t subject you to my efforts, but you can hear something like a tune emerging in Masefield’s own reading of another poem here. Or you can hear how it works in a real ballad by listening to someone like Joseph Taylor (the British Library recordings have gone awol but there are some on YouTube).2

But ‘Sea-Fever’ isn’t actually a ballad, because it lives on the page too. You can enjoy it without singing it (though, like I say, as soon as you speak it, there is a tug…). There’s a fascinating discussion in Rumens’s piece about the first line: “I must down to the sea again”. In its original form, the poem didn’t include the ‘go’ that most of us would expect (you might, like me, not even notice that it was missing) and which sometimes returns in later editions.

Rumens’s own explanation for what is going on, and for preferring the first version, is wonderful and gets us right to the heart of the poem. In Masefield’s manuscripts, the first line didn’t even include the sea (Masefield writes “I must go down to the roads again” or “I must out on the roads again”). The loss of the roads and the loss of the verb, Rumens suggests, both express the ‘hallucinatory quality’ of Masefield longing for the sailor’s life in landlocked Wolverhampton:

His first impulse, to avoid the pedestrian “go down”, is the right one. He is murmuring to himself as if in a fever-dream: “I must down to the seas again…”

And yet… when Masefield recites the poem, he includes ‘go’. And Masefield is right too. As he puts it:

…in the early edition, 1902, I print the line “I must down”. That was as I wrote the line in the first instance … When I am reciting the poem I usually insert the word “go”. When the poem is spoken I feel the need of the word but in print “go” is unnecessary and looks ill.

What we are encountering here is the very real difference between reading in our heads and reading aloud. The eye, and the inner ear, enjoys a little ambiguity: we can see “must down” and ‘hear’ both the simple, strong rhythm (“I must go down to the sea again”) and the more subtle one which allows for Rumens’s feverish murmer.3 But when you speak the poem, you have to choose and Masefield usually chooses the version which sets the rhythm up clearly from the start. As, I suspect, do most of the poem’s readers and rememberers. Without ‘go’ the poem wouldn’t be as popular as it is.

I will wrap this up now (do read Rumens’s piece). One more thought before I do. The other reason why ‘Sea-Fever’ is so well-loved is the ending: people often request for it to be read at their funerals, because of the sailing or seaside connection, but also, surely, because of the promise offered in that final line: a “quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over”.

As Rumens points out, the line hinges on that penultimate word, the short vowel in ‘trick’, thrown up after so many longer ones. It is a surprise, too, perhaps even a welcome one, to think of life as a ‘trick’, though there is also a wonderful, soothing sense of inevitability to it all: ‘over’ is exactly where it needs to be, the so-called ‘feminine’ ryhme softening the fall.4

But the poem is softer still. The ‘trick’ would have been less of a surprise to Masefield, or to anyone who had served on tall ships like him. A ‘trick’ is another name for a sailor’s watch. It is not that death isn’t present somewhere (it clearly is), but Masefield blurs it in with all our other sleeps. Sleep being something we would all want after a long day at sea.

Then again, one of the things I love about ‘The Bean Eaters’ is that it needs so little introduction. It is a loving, knowing portrait of a couple who don’t have much. The title reminds me of Van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’. Here they are:

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. 
Dinner is a casual affair. 
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, 
Tin flatware.  

Everything is reused, both words and their component parts: ‘plain’ is there twice in that third line, ‘chipware’ calls back to ‘flatware’. The original rhyme is everywhere, so much so that it becomes invisible. The poem is literally economical. It makes do. ‘Mostly’ returns again in the second stanza, where ‘putting’ is put to work twice and bodies become cupboards:

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes   
And putting things away.

Already, I feel like there isn’t much else to say. Which is, like I say, no bad thing. Some poems speak for themselves. This is one of them. The last stanza speaks for itself, too, but writing about it made me like it even more.

And remembering ... 
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, 
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and                                                                                                                                  receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.   

I love this. I love it because ‘twinklings and twinges’ seem so transparently engineered for the rhyme, for the links back to ‘remembering’ and forward to ‘fringes’ and furthermore because this doesn’t matter: once in place, the words support each other. This is what remembering is. There is a quiet happiness in ‘twinklings’. There is something painful in ‘twinge’, but it’s a familiar pang. Some of their memories might be painful. Perhaps it is painful simply to remember.

I love this, too, because the form suddenly gives way to prose: the final two lines become pure list, as if all the objects in the room have forced themselves into the poem. The sudden rush is bitter-sweet. The poem knows that clutter is the opposite of plenty. Yet, that clutter is also a sign of their shared life, which is a different kind of wealth. Piles of memories, piles of stuff.

The list that arrives midway through Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ launches us off into a waking dream. In ‘The Bean Eaters’ we’re left suspended on that last word, ‘fringes’. Suspended by the awkward, unresolved rhythm; suspended by the image of old threads repeating endlessly; and suspended by that rhyme which sends us right back to their memories, rattling between twinklings and twinges, memories repeating like fringes…

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A note on list poems

Like all the best lists, any list of ‘list poems’ is potentially endless. Here are a few I like: Christopher Smart’s My cat, Jeoffry, John Clare’s Emmonsail’s Heath in Winter, William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. Auden’s Spain, which he later disowned, but which is in many ways the quintessential Auden poem, for better and for worse (I can imagine hating it). Auden is a list-maker.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
         Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

A reader of this newsletter remembers their professor once saying that ‘all great poems are really lists’. Which, as said reader said, isn’t strictly true, but is deeply suggestive.2 It takes me back to Auden, who used to argue that all poetry was a form of praise, and back to Edward Thomas, who made endless lists of proper names in his prose before he ever wrote a poem—not just flowers but the names of pubs and villages, houses and gravestones. Back to John Clare, too, whose poems often start with some variation on the line ‘I love to see’. Then, in the poem, he tells you what he loves to see. It makes me think of our toddler, whose favourite word at the moment is ‘more’.

All of which said, there is a recent vogue for poems which are purely, and only, lists which I am wary of and would like to take a moment here to gently warn against.3 It goes back to that question of what a poem ‘really’ is. This question tends to tie everyone up in knots, but I trust the simple answer: the fundamental unit in a poem is the line. The way these lines move together down the page, or (since not every poem is on the page) move through time, is the poem. This is true whether or not you are writing in metre. This is form. And form wrests the poem away from the poet and opens up the possibility of surprise.4

This sounds a little like a list, doesn’t it. Superficially, it is. But a list is not a poem. A list is made up of things, not lines. It is a bag into which you can drop any number of images and ideas in any combination, anytime you like, means the list-maker is always in control. We already know how the list will move down the page. It is a long way from Robert Frost’s ice-cube on the hot stove, riding ‘on its own melting’. Perhaps every good poem starts as a list. But at some point, the poet has to let the poem take over. Which means letting go.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

Some years ago I was in the gents of a fancy restaurant in the West End (this isn’t the story it sounds like), a self-enclosed world of white porcelain, gold taps, chessboard floors and acres and acres of space. That sense of being somewhere else - a stage, perhaps - was only reinforced by the voice coming over a speaker system. A man’s voice, slow and low. It took a few seconds before I realised that they were reciting poetry, a few more before I recognised the poem.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop.

As a metaphor, this is a little too on-the-nose: ‘Adlestrop’ has become so familiar that it’s been turned into lift music. What was particularly strange was that outside there was a thin layer of snow over Trafalgar Square and more snow falling through the December night. ‘Adlestrop’ is a summer poem. It was late June. Late June in England, the summer solstice, is deeper into summer than August is. Right now, it is very hot.

‘Adlestrop’ is a poem about memory and place, but it is also a poem made from names.1 Yes. I remember Adlestrop— / The name. Right from the start, the issue is blurred: is Thomas remembering the station, or the word? The opening stanzas work to make both the train and station disappear—the train becomes the hiss of its steam, the platform is empty, the cough unattributed:

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

Only the name. Even the ‘I’ has been dismantled: we don’t see Thomas himself again for the rest of the poem. It’s only once the name (in the form of a station sign) has been isolated that the true vision begins:

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

This is what Thomas sees from the carriage, though we quickly move beyond sight into that luscious dream of an engine at rest which grows like a strange flowering plant from the still centre. But it’s also a list of names, one which begins with Adlestrop (which, read one way, could be one of the plants in the line below) and ends in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

W. H. Auden said that “proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.”2 Names are the closest thing we have to magic: naming is an act of creation as much as an act of description. Names are also a kind of knowledge. When knowledge dwindles, or is transposed, it becomes obscure. I love ‘Adlestrop’, but the names have always been a problem. I can’t see the flowers. Willows, yes. Grass, yes. But what’s a willow-herb? Meadowsweet? A haycock is a small pile of hay drying in a field. When I first read the poem I thought it was another plant, maybe an early-flowering one that had already dried out. I still read it that way.

I suspect I am not the only one who can’t see what Thomas sees. Does this matter? Yes and no. The poet Dannie Abse, who was born in Cardiff and later lived in London, wrote two poems in reply to Adlestrop, which must have represented a version of poetry he felt alienated by. One of these, ‘Not Adlestrop’, was pretty awful: man stares at ‘very, very pretty girl’ in a train window.3 The other, ‘As I Was Saying’, is much better, much funnier, a defence of the residents of the ‘ignorant suburb’ against a culture which still expects poets to be in communion with nature. In reply to an imagined critic, Abse reels off a long list of names from a ‘W. H. Smith book’, mocking Thomas’s botanical precision: ‘Butterbur, Ling, and Lady’s Smock, Jack-by-the-Hedge, Cuckoo-Pint, and Feverfew, even the stinking Hellebore…’

Still, Abse is being too defensive. When Thomas launches into his list, he is launching into the names for their own sake. We don’t need to know what they are, because the words are poetry. It is easy to forget, too, that Edward Thomas was born in Balham, in the suburbs (which is near me in south London), and there would have been a time when he didn’t know the names either. Thomas’s names are a kind of invitation, one that feels all the more important now, when both the knowledge and the flowers are fading. Just hearing the word ‘willow-herb’ or ‘stitchwort’ can make you want to find out what it is, and knowing something’s name is the first step towards loving it.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Larkin’s trees always arrive in my head this time of year, when London is lit up with gaudy chestnut candles. Partly, it’s that delayed rhyme, which isn’t as simple as it looks: it’s the same scheme as Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Tennyson haunts the whole poem. He’s there in the word “grief”, in the “greeness”, in those long, melancholy vowels.2

But it’s the image that’s unforgettable. Like something almost being said is a line which feels like it was always out there, waiting to be found. That’s what buds are like. It is also something only Philip Larkin could’ve written. There is something unnatural about it. Buds bloom. Surely, something will be said eventually?

Archie Burnett’s edition of the Complete Poems includes a line from a letter Larkin wrote to Monica Jones while he was struggling to finish the poem:

“I seem to have spent a rather fruitless week, spending the evenings sleeping or starting at an incomplete & v. modest poem […] The poem is four lines wch I thought all right, then four more lines wch are less good; now I really want four more about as good as the combine best of Wordsworth & Omar Khayyam to sort of lift the thing up to a finish.”3

Larkin was unsure about the poem, then, as he was about everything. Elsewhere, he describes it as a “sixteen-year old’s poem about spring” and wonders whether it was possible to “write this sort of poem today?” Elsewhere again he says the first verse is “all right, the rest crap, especially the last line”.

Larkin is clearly being too self-deprecating. The letters to Jones are a way of geeing himself up. It must have been exhausting for both of them. But it is true that the rest of ‘The Trees’ doesn’t trip off the tongue as easily as the first verse/stanza. There is a kind of rupture, which is deeper than just a break between verses. The statement is called into question as soon as its made. Why is their greenness a kind of grief? Larkin raises the possibility that “we” might be jealous of the trees’ powers of renewal, only to discount the idea immediately:

Is that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Interestingly, Larkin’s earlier draft gave the opposite answer. This version, also given in Burnett’s notes, ends with a vision of the trees’ world as one in which:

A summer is a separate thing
That makes no reference to the past,
And may not ever be the last,
And mocks our lack of blossoming.

But no, in the end the trees “die too”. In a sense, the final poem is a reply to the first version. This is Larkin thinking while writing, slowly and painfully. Rather than envy the trees’ (unreal) youthfulness, we should copy their lust for life:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
The year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

There is something obviously, wonderfully daring about that last line. Either it works, or it’s one of the sickliest things ever put on paper. Most readers seem to think it works. Despite Larkin’s self-doubt, it is more evidence of his ability to know exactly what a particular poem needed. Here, leaves threshing in the wind.

So far, so familiar. We tend to take ‘The Trees’ as Larkin at his most cautiously optimistic. It is a poem in praise of spring. But this won’t do. There remains something sinister in Larkin’s foliage. That “trick” in the second stanza is one clue. The final stanza is Larkin at his most ‘Cavalier’ (Seamus Heaney’s word), but there is also a kind of disgust or even horror here, both at the trees’ energy and their extravagance: “unresting” is uncanny.

The ambivalence goes deeper still. The first stanza won’t be so easily forgotten. Like something almost being said is too strong, too leading an image. Even if we forget that early draft, the comparison which the poem originally sets up isn’t between arboreal and human lifespans, but between silence and speech. I can never read the rest of the poem without wondering what that something is. Why is greenness a kind of grief? Whose grief? We’re never told. We can guess.

Looked at this way, everything that follows the first stanza a kind of distraction, a breaking off, almost an irrelevancy. The poem can’t answer the question, because the answer is already right there at the beginning: this is a poem about regret. Regret for words unspoken, a life unlived. What the whispering trees in the final line “seem” to offer isn’t so much hope, but another form of avoidance, a way to never really begin or blossom: move on, start over, give up.

It’s a whisper of temptation which the poem itself doesn’t entirely trust, even quietly undermines. Like Tennyson, Larkin is half in love with his own melancholy. He is also warning us against it.

Having not written much about poetry for a while, I haven’t been writing/publishing about much else recently. So it goes. I have a piece in Engelsberg Ideas about the poets of the Second World War (every bit as important as the poets of the trenches) and I’m also in the new Poetry Birmingham, writing in praise of a new(ish) collection by Rory Waterman.

Speaking of trees, I also have a new short story, “Kent’s Oak”, out with Fictionable. The story’s for subscribers only, but you can hear me talk about it (and trees) here.

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Bright pink smear of sky over an ice cold London, one face of the Shard shining blue like a strip of satin. I don’t like the Shard. It looms over the suburbs below the river, poking its point out from behind every terrace. I don’t like how it dominates the skyline either. But in certain lights, I’ll take it.

"Good morning, beautiful."

I turn around.

"Not you, the fox. Stay there, beautiful, I'll get you some food."

The fox is waiting in front of the lacklusture laurel bush behind the basketball court. The dog and I see this fox most mornings. There was a time when the dog would have chased it, but these days he doesn’t bother. And the fox is beautiful, though I’d never stopped to think about it in those terms, a very healthy looking fox, with a shock of chesnut fur, thick as a ruff or whatever it is draped over Mark Rylance’s shoulders in the new series of “Wolf Hall”.

There are quite a few well-fed foxes round here. Last winter, when I was still getting the train into work, I would see one waiting beneath the same ground-floor window every evening. The light was on and you could hear people talking and cooking inside, the scrape of pans. The fox would sit very patiently on a patch of grass, paws folded over one another like a dog by a fire. The grass itself seemed to take on the outline of a room. We think of domestication as a movement inwards - the animal steps through the door - but I’m not sure it’s like that, at least not in a city. A city is a house already.

In street below our street there’s a unit making anti-corrosion paint. The steel drums are out in the elements, walkways in the air, buckets at their base with signs like “waste oil”. The other morning, I saw a fox weaving between the drums. This one didn’t look so healthy. Its coat was rusting, almost grey. No one feeds this fox, though it must live within metres of “beautiful”.

One of the earliest mentions of foxes in poetry must be in The Song of Songs, a genuinely erotic poem which somehow sneaked its way into the Tanakh and subsequently the Bible. One lover is speaking to another:

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”

This is the King James version; take means catch. The foxes need catching because they’re going to eat the grapes, which besides being, as Miles Burrows puts it, good advice for "market gardeners” is simply an admittedly extreme extension of the poem’s central conceit: spring is here and so we better be about our business. But take is so much better than catch. The poem is all about pleasure, abudance, desire: take almost reads as though the foxes are being scooped up along with the grapes and the figs. They are, after all, only little.

We were sleeping on rugs a little way from the jeep, in a makeshift square bordered by bags. The fire had gone out, but there was no need of any shelter, except perhaps from the stars themselves, which were terrifyingly near. It was March 2011 and I was travelling with friends. We had meant to go through Syria, but when the time came Egypt seemed like the safer option.

We were in the White Desert, a surreal expanse of dunes and mushroom-like rocks near the border with Libya. Our driver had warned us about the foxes, but it still wasn’t pleasant to hear them shuffling and sniffing around in the dark. Every time I rolled over, I saw something small duck behind the wheels of the car. With your eyes closed, they seemed nearer. Soon, as the others fell asleep, they really were: weaving between the bags, brushing against toes. Somehow, heroically, I slept. When I woke, the desert was green and so was the sky. The moon was full and the stars were gone. The foxes were there, too, a little way off, with green eyes.

They were back in the morning, playing further off. In the sunlight they were adorable. I think they were Fennecs, the smallest species of fox, but they might have been Rüppell's, which are more closely related to our Red Fox. Presumably the little foxes in The Song of Songs are one or the other, too.

Before leaving, we followed the foxes to their den behind a small dune, which can’t have been more than a few metres from our camp. There was a single sock on the sand below the entrance (later we discovered that many more were missing). At the time, I imagined it was all coincidence: we were hours from anywhere and happened to park next to them. Presumably, though, the driver parked there every other night and that’s why the den was there.

Contemporary poetry is full of foxes and this must be because contemporary poets see them all the time. They are the closest that many of us come to meeting a wild animal. Often, the foxes in these poems are endowed with a kind of mystical quality. Through the encounter, the poet accesses a wilder part of themselves which had been lying dormant. That wildness sits a little uneasily with the fox’s sheer ubiquity. It’s our wildness, not theirs.

The most famous example I can think of, Ted Hughes’s “Thought Fox”, is a very deliberate piece of self-mythologising, though Hughes’s fox lives in the forest (he was remembering Yorkshire). The story you hear at Pembroke, Hughes’s old Cambridge college, is that he wrote it while sitting up one night looking over the old court, bored stiff of essay writing. One version of this myth says that there was a real fox crossing the court. The myth also claims to know which ‘starless’ window he wrote it by. I don’t like “The Thought Fox”, but then I don’t really like any of Hughes’s animal poems. It’s his wildness, not theirs.

One Sunday in the pub the dog was bothering a couple eating their lunch more than he usually bothers people eating. It turned out they had a whole steak under a napkin. Understandably, the dog thought it was going to waste.

“Oh, it’s not for you dear, we’re saving it for the foxes.”

Google, apparently, is broken, but old habits die hard. If you search something along the lines of “poems about foxes” one of the first sites you find is this one: “Famous Poems Celebrating the Enigmatic Fox”. The fact the page has its own contents section should set alarm bells ringing, as should the absence of any poems about hunting. There follows a series of poems by famous poets, none of which I recognise besides Hughes’s Thought-Fox.

The first is attributed, rather insultingly, to R. L. Stevenson, but anyone who has ever asked ChatGPT to write poetry will recognise the style:

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His eyes, like amber, gleam and shine,
As he weaves through the undergrowth's entwine,
A vision of nature's art.

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With every step, he marks his trail,
Leaving behind a secret, untold tale,
Of his wild and cunning heart.

Next, we have a poem by “D. H. Lawrence”, which begins:

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The red fox crosses the ice
intent on none of my business.
It's winter and slim pickings.
I stand in the bushy cemetery,
pretending to watch birds,
but really watching the fox

who could care less.
She paused on the sheer glare 
of the pond. She knows I'm here,
sniffs me in the wind...

This is slightly more convincing, but the vocabularly is odd (“slim pickings” feels unlikely) and the reference to the Thought-Fox in the second line (“coming about its own business”) is impossible. It turns out this is the beginning of a real poem, “Red Fox”, by Margaret Atwood.

Where the rest of the “Lawrence” poem comes from, though, is a mystery:

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and suddenly goes slanting east.

That's that. Alone again,
whatever that may mean.
My word! It's a cold morning
in drafts of frigid wind
but the sun is high, the sky is blue,
the sparrows are building their nests,
and the fox goes bounding along.

Google didn’t know either, though it kept directing me to Wordsworth. I think, heretically, I marginally prefer the fake poem to Atwood’s (though it’s slim pickings). “That’s that” builds on the briskness of the first few lines, where the original rambles on to no great end. But obviously that doesn’t excuse the theft.

It’s all very strange. Cunning, even. There are poems by “Mary Oliver”, by “e e cummings” and by “Ogden Nash”. Did someone ask the AI for those poets in particular? Or did the machine choose them? It would be funny if it wasn’t so bleak: I’ve since seen someone share the “Stevenson” poem on their own blog. If we had any sense we would burn the internet down and start again.

It is hard to think of a less contemporary poet than Walter de la Mare, which I don’t mean as a criticsm. This is ‘Alone’, a title he used more than once:

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The abode of the nightingale is bare,
Flowered frost congeals in the gelid air,
The fox howls from his frozen lair:
      Alas, my loved one is gone,
      I am alone:
      It is winter.

Once the pink cast a winy smell,
The wild bee hung in the hyacinth bell,
Light in effulgence of beauty fell:
      Alas, my loved one is gone,
      I am alone:
      It is winter.

My candle a silent fire doth shed,
Starry Orion hunts o'erhead;
Come moth, come shadow, the world is dead:
      Alas, my loved one is gone,
      I am alone:
      It is winter.

The first two lines are wonderfully chilly (you don’t hear gelid very often), but it’s only when the fox howls that you really feel the cold. I didn’t realise this at first, but the fox is more than an image: the refrain could be a response to the scene, but it might also be the fox’s cry returning. I think we can read it both ways. Unlike Hughes’s Thought Fox, who is thought first, de la Mare uses the fox to his own ends, while also leaving him out in the cold. Not wild. Just fox.

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In February 2022, my girlfriend and I quit our jobs and went travelling through Italy, Greece and the Western Balkans. Times were still a little strange (they still are). Europe was coming out of the pandemic. Those years all roll into one in my memory and I still have to double check the dates when I think back, which is presumably some kind of trauma response. I do remember a lot of uncertainty about crossing borders. The places where we were ultimately heading didn’t ask for much by way of proof of health and vaccination, but to get into Europe to begin with you needed a very recent negative test, so we schlepped over to a pop-up “clinic” in the most miserable part of Southampton to stand in a dense queue and pay a silly amount of money to let a couple of what-looked-like teenagers swab our noses. When we arrived at the airport in Rome the next evening, no one asked to see any tests or vaccination cards. There was barely anyone there at all.

I love Rome. I love almost every Italian city I’ve been to but I love Rome especially. Somewhere so old and so serious and so national has no right to be so easy to love (I love London too, but it isn’t easy to love). Perhaps this is something to do with Italy’s history: for a long time after the Romans, Rome wasn’t the political capital of anywhere at all. Mostly, though, I think I love those red rooves resting between the hills, like potpourri in a wide, shallow bowl. Every view gives a sense of plenty, but a plenty that’s close at hand. The rooves might go on for ever, but they are also contained, limited, maneagable. Walking around at street level is the same. There is always something to see, but unlike Venice or Florence I never feel like I have to see everything. It’s rich and deep without being overwhelming. Which, incidentally, is also true of the best Italian food.

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One of my highlights from this last trip was a place I hadn’t bothered with the first time, a strange, squat, rotunda on the river up by the Vatican called the Castel Sant’Angelo.1 The Castel is many things. It looks like a rather uninspiring, fortified cake. It is now a museum. It is described on all the maps as just that, the Castel Sant’Angelo. But it is none of those things, underneath. Underneath, it is the Mausoleum of the Roman Emperor Hardian.

Maybe I love Rome because I love layers. All that history on top of itself. To a certain kind of sensibility, the only thing better than a ruin is a ruin leaning against an older ruin. After the fall of the Roman Empire, generations of popes fortified the Masoleum out of all recognition. At the top, there are elegant little private apartments with shamelessly pagan decorations. But to get up there, you have to climb up through the tomb itself.

I found this quite overwhelming. The original decorations - the marble walls, the bronze and stone statues - are all long gone, so what’s left is a large, bare brick cylinder (you can see the sides, beneath the crenallations, from the river). In order to use the building for military purposes, the popes constructed a huge stone ramp right through the centre of the cylinder. As you climb this ramp, you are climbing through the space above the Treasury Room, deep in the heart of the building. This is where Hadrian’s urn was originally placed and where the urns of many subsequent emperors joined him. There are funeral niches for relatives in the walls, all empty now too. Like the decorations, Hadrian and the emperors are no longer there. The Visigoths probably scattered their ashes in 410, when Alaric sacked the city.

Instead, almost exactly halfway up the ramp (if I remember right) there is an information board, which includes a copy of a famous poem attributed to Hadrian, written as he was dying of a long and unpleasant illness. We know the poem because it was quoted in the Historia Augusta. Hadrian was particularly interested in the arts (the Historia says he used to pursue arguments with “philosophers and professors” through poetry) and I can’t see any reason not to think it was his. The original Latin goes like this:

Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos.

I don’t read Latin. I took it for a few years at school and then dropped it because I wanted to carry on with both Ancient Greek, which I now can’t read, either, and Drama and I wasn’t prepared to do an extra subject.2 But I can hear it, more or less, and I can hear that lovely, tripping rhythm, which is clearest in the first and fourth lines but present throughout, and which is one reason why the poem has been so popular among translators. W. S. Merwin called it ‘flawless and haunting’.

For a poem so perfect, there is little consensus about how to translate it, so much so that I can’t offer a standard version. Below is a version of the poem I published last week, in the latest issue of The AI Literary Review. I made it when I got back from the trip, by putting each line, one at a time, through Google Translate.

Sweet soul travelling
Host and companion of the body
You'll end up in that place
Pale, still and naked
Not laughing as you usually do

There are some pretty serious issues with this “translation”, which we’ll get on to in a moment, but I like it.3 The idea behind taking each line individually was to sidestep the main problem translators face: how to ascribe the adjectives in the fourth line? Pallidula, rigidia, nudula. For some translators, these three words refer to Hadrian’s soul, for others, they belong to the place where the soul might end up and for others still they should be distributed between the two.

The other main problem translators have to tackle is how to punctuate the third line, which (the first serious issue with my “translation”) should really be a question: not you’ll end up in that place but where will you go, now, little soul? That question must in turn be why so many have assumed that the adjectives belong to the place. What kind of place does a soul end up in after death, if you are a Roman? A pale, quiet and cloudly place. (The other serious issue with my translation is that nudula does not mean “naked”).

I find the other approach, the one which ascribes the adjectives to the soul, more convincing and also more attractive. So much of the appeal of the poem is in the pity Hadrian displays for his soul after death, right from that first line (animula is anima, soul or life force, in the diminuitive). W. S. Merwin’s translation, which is my favourite, makes a great deal of the pity. Merwin also plays with the lines:

Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things

Merwin calls this translation ‘as literal as it could possibly be’, which strictly isn’t true - the second line of the original has gone missing! - but I think it captures the spirit of the original better than anything else I’ve read. It’s spare and austere, gentle and sad. Merwin also avoids the question mark.

Still, I also didn’t want to discard the possiblity that Hardian is describing something else. The poem lives in that ambiguity. The effect of that fourth line, detached as the words are from either the soul or the spirit world, is conjour up a ghostly image of something else again. Namely, the body.

Hadrian’s soul, after all, can’t be entirely rigidia if it is also on the move and why would it be pallidula if it no longer has a body? At the same time, it makes perfect sense to think of a soul as being somehow stuck without the body which gives it motion. Though we’re accustomed to think of souls as a kind of animating life force, we also think of them of shades: pale and bloodless shadows. What’s left after reading this line is neither the soul, nor the underworld, but what both those places are missing. The image of the little, wandering soul is pitiful because it is an image of a poor, wandering person, dead or alive.

This also gives a new answer to Hadrian’s question. The place where the soul ends up is the place where the body ends up, because soul and the body are one: not the underworld but the tomb. An urn, perhaps a mausoleum.

This in turn helps to answer the question that has been bugging me about my ‘AI’ translation. When I put pallidula rigida nubila through Google now, it gives me “pale, stiff clouds”. Nubila might mean cloudy weather, it might mean a cloudy, melancholy mood. What it doesn’t mean is naked. Did I write it wrong in the first place? Did I think “nude” when I read “nubila”? Did some kind of ghost get into the machine? Someone was thinking about bodies.

The other license my own translation takes is that it doesn’t simply remove the question mark, like Merwin’s, but gets rid of the entire question. As with “naked”, I don’t remember doing this deliberately. I’m sure Google did it, though again, as with “naked” it doesn’t do it any longer. Again, I quite like whatever’s happened here, though I think if I “wrote” the poem again I would do it differently. We know, by now, where Hadrian’s soul ended up: its tomb stripped bare, hidden in plain sight and trampled by tourists, some of whom go on to put his words through faceless algorthims. But we don’t know where his ashes are.

It’s tempting to approach ‘Ozymandias’ as a kind of relic, like those two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert, a monumental poem we might poke around out of a sense of duty but which doesn’t really speak to us. Critics, like tourists, have a habit of visiting things because they are there.

But the poem does, literally, speak. Reading it again the other day the first thing that struck me was the number of different voices involved. The poem is a kind of Russian doll, reported speech enclosed within reported speech:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . .

The ‘I’ who opens the poem is dispensible: they get ten words. Two words into the second line, someone new is already talking. But no sooner has this traveller mentioned Ozymandias’ legs than he’s talking about the statue’s ‘wrinkled lip’ and ‘sneer of cold command’. We can already see this ‘shattered visage’ moving its mouth, alone there in the sand, like something out of a cartoon. And this is all before we get to the famous words engraved on the pedestal.

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

The poem’s closing lines are, in theory, given to the traveller, but the lines on the pedestal serve to cut them off from the rest of the text. So, it’s easy to imagine the conclusion as yet another voice, or, perhaps, as no voice at all.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

All these different voices jostling for space make ‘Ozymandias’ surprisingly difficult to read out loud for a poem which is often taught and celebrated for its simplicity. True, the language is more natural than you often get with Shelley (Shelley is either as crisp as an apple or completely unreadable). You can’t recite it ponderously like some readers imagine old poems demand you do, because the register is always changing. The variety of surfaces crushed into the square block of a sonnet give the poem a kind of glassy quality. Like a hunk of granite.

‘Ozymandias’ is often discussed as a comment on Victorian hubris. It was written as part of a friendly competition with another poet, Horace Smith, whose own quite bad version goes on to describe a hunter making their way through the ruins of a future London, a dreamscape which was probably as familiar to Victorians as post-apocalyptic New York is for movie-goers in the States. Shelley was also inspired by reading about the ‘Younger Memnon’, a collosal head which originally formed part of a temple complex in Luxor. The British Consul in Cairo was shipping this head back to the British Museum at the time. There is no evidence Shelley had actually seen it.

When the Victorians imagined the remnants of the ancient world, they saw a warning for their own future: the poem, on this reading, mocks Ozymandias’ pretensions and by implication our own.1 Ozymandias’ ambitions are compared unfavourably with the sculptor’s: unlike the rest of his mighty works, the King of King’s shattered visage is only ‘half sunk’ and yet, through the sculptor's skill in manipulating 'lifeless things', curiously and terrifyingly alive. Art (and by extension, poetry) wins out over tyranny.2 ‘Despair’ is ironic.

Yet Ozymandias’ works do survive. Here we are talking about them. That’s the thing about words etched in stone. It is why ruins have such a hold on the imagination in the first place. They persist. Ruins speak and go on speaking, from the writing on huge public monuments in Rome to private gravestones or roadside waymarkers. More words are written today than ever, but it’s still possible the future will remember our ancestors better than they remember us.

What survives in ‘Ozymandias’ isn’t art in its own right or art alone, but public art, monumental art, art which has found a powerful patron willing to give it a plinth, and cough up the cash for the hard materials. Good stone is, after all, pretty expensive. So is lugging it about. In the end, Ozymandias and the sculptor need each other. There’s an awkward lesson here somewhere, if we want it.

The task of describing something elegantly in verse is a difficult one, and success in it should be honoured. The poet’s main job, though, is to write about something.

George MacBeth

Poets like writing about certain animals more than others. Sometimes it feels like a question of proximity. Modern poetry (at least in the UK) is full of the pitter patter of tiny fox feet, presumably at least in part because of how often you encounter them in streets and gardens. There’s an irony in this. Foxes in poems usually represent the wilder side of nature. They are messengers from another world.1 I know one fox which spends half the summer sitting below the kitchen window of the same ground-floor flat on the way to the train station.

Children and babies like certain animals too (or at least we encourage them to), though they rarely encounter their favourites in person. For a child, the point of an animal is its distinctiveness. A fox might be a dog or a cat, but it is hard to mistake a koala for a giraffe. Animals are a kind of introduction to the world, in both senses of the word. They form a welcome party, snouts poking around the side of the crib: on clothes, in books, as toys, as hoods to their towels. But they are also a kind of way in to learning about… anything.

In the introduction to his Penguin Book of Animal Verse (1965), George MacBeth argued that the animal kingdom was the archetype of all subject matter. For MacBeth, this went beyond childhood: categorising animals was also the root of modern science, a cipher for the natural world. Animals are good for learning with because they are so ‘unlike each other’: real and unique in a way which is actually quite upsetting or overwhelming to think about for too long.

It is not by accident that children are taught the alphabet by means of associating animals with letters. Animals are instantly recognizable and never forgotten. Large numbers of them are quite unlike each other.

If poetry is a good introduction to animals, animals are a good introduction to poetry. The connection between animals and poetry in particular goes a long way back. Here is Paul Muldoon introducing the Faber Book of Beasts:

The very first animal poems (among the first poems of any kind) in most cultures must have been… hunting charms or spells, and something of their magical quality carries over into the earliest descriptions of animals in poetry in English…

Muldoon’s book would be a good place for anyone who wanted to read more poetry to start: animals allow for such a range of tones and approaches (funny, sad, grand, reflective). An anthology like this is also a good corrective to the widely-held and admittedly well-evidenced idea that poetry is navel-gazing.

MacBeth’s is the better anthology about animals. Muldoon’s choices often simply mention animals, rather than addressing them in any detail. It’s a good introduction to modern poetry because Muldoon stretches the theme to the limit in order to get the best poems in: Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ isn’t really about skunks. And there are less surprises than in MacBeth’s book, because Muldoon hasn’t done much thinking about the subject. He takes it for granted that animal poems are interesting because of what they tell us about ourselves.

By contrast, MacBeth argues that a good animal poem should be both about us and about the animal, which means the writer needs to know something about the beast they’re talking about. It’s a model anthology, in that the editor knows a lot about one subject and is passing it on.

All good poems about animals are about something else as well. It may be divine providence or it may be human iniquity. The important point is that these qualities should be seen through the nature of animals.

MacBeth is also a brilliant animal poet in his own right. His ‘Owl’ is a better Ted Hughes poem than any poem Ted Hughes ever wrote himself. The range of MacBeth’s references mean you get quite a lot of not-always-immediately-rewarding eighteenth-century verse, but he also includes some wonderful, sad and funny examples from his contemporaries, including Alan Ross on the koala (‘eternal / image of the cuddly bear’) and D. J. Enright on the last quagga:

By mid-century there were two quaggas left,
And one of the two was male.
The cares of office weighed heavily on him.
When you are the only male of a species,
It is not easy to lead a normal sort of life.

MacBeth helpfully distinguishes between three ‘ways in which poets have considered animals’, each of which he identifies with a broad historical moment. First, medieval poems, where animals are a source of information about God’s creation. These are morally and emotionally ‘neutral’: ‘it is the facts about the animal that matter’. Then, around the time of the Renaissance, ‘a more humanistic interest’ begins to appear. The poems are increasingly ‘normative’. The way animals behave, or the way in which we treat them, is a way of thinking about how we treat or should treat each other.

The modern animal poem, in MacBeth’s timeline, emerges in the ninteenth-century and finds its fruition in poets like D. H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes. Its defining feature is the use of individual and, increasingly, extreme emotion, ‘fear or rage for one’s own plight, compassion or hatred for the human condition’.2 For Lawrence, animals ‘buttress a whole theory of sexual energy’ while for Hughes the hawk in ‘Hawk Roosting’ is a portrait of ‘the psychology of extremism’.

When MacBeth writing, with the ruins of the Second World War still smoking, rage and hatred were more current than fear and compassion. These days the most common emotion Anglophone poets project onto animals is probably pity. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as any surprise; it’s hard to write about animals now without feeling sorry for them, which often means feeling sorry for ourselves even where our own actions have caused their problems in the first place. Sadly, pity doesn’t always make for very good poems. Larkin’s mole is a good example of the risks: his brutal internal editor melted in the face of the small and the furry.

At first, Sylvia Plath’s ‘Blue Moles’ seems like it might be in the same vein as Larkins. Plath finds two of them, dead:

They’re out of the dark’s ragbag, these two
Moles dead in the pebbled rut,
Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart —
Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed.
One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough,
Little victim unearthed by some large creature
From his orbit under the elm root.

The confusion of scale in the mole ‘orbiting’ the elm is brilliant; tiny for us, its whole galaxy. But though the moles are pitiful, 'shapeless as flung gloves’, Plath neutralises the feeling by naming it. The first mole is ‘pitiable enough’ - a ‘little victim’. The ‘gloves’ and the ‘blue suede’ also help to prevent things from getting too maudlin. Violence is something that happens. Humans do it too, for example by making gloves (and notebooks) out of moles’ skins.

‘Blue Moles’ is in two, numbered sections. As the second begins, a transformation takes place and we seem to be about to take a very different turn:

Nightly the battle—snouts start up
In the ear of the veteran, and again
I enter the soft pelt of the mole.

Yet, almost as soon as she becomes the mole, Plath re-establishes the difference between them: they are moving through their ‘mute rooms’ (hard not to hear ‘mushrooms’ here) while she is sleeping. There is something psychoanalytical going on. The moles are war veterans with shellshock and Plath’s journey into the ‘soft pelt of the mole’ is a journey under the surface.

Light’s death to them: they shrivel in it.
They move through their mute rooms while I sleep
Palming the earth aside, grubbers
After the fat children of root and rock.
By day, only the topsoil heaves.
Down there one is alone.

In maintaining that difference, Plath makes both accounts more vivid and, in a strange way, only strengthens the connection between them. In MacBeth’s words, we see ourselves through the animal, but we also see the poem writing itself. By the time we reach the end, and the ‘moles’ have become insatiable (and arguably sexual) we are somehow reading two poems at once: that final, authorative, disconcerting, statement has nothing to do with moles, yet feels irresistable.

Outsize hands prepare a path,
They go before: opening the veins,
Delving for the appendages
Of beetles, sweetbeads, shards —to be eaten
Over and over. And still the heaven
Of final surfeit is just as far
From the door as ever. What happens between us
Happens in darkness, vanishes
As easy and often as each breath. 

‘Blue Moles’ doesn’t fit neatly into any one of MacBeth’s categories: it moves between them, then moves beyond them.

MacBeth’s introduction partly serves as a defence of subject matter in poetry in general – ‘the twigs that make the fire blaze’.3 Perhaps it still needs defending. I’ve become pretty jaded. When I read that a new poetry collection is going to ‘explore’ this or that subject, I switch off. It’s easy to leap from there to the ‘art for art’s sake’ position, which treats the whole idea of subject matter as suspicious, somehow unserious. As if art were the only serious thing in life.

The problem with ‘subject matter’ in so much contemporary poetry isn’t the intention but the delivery. We spend too much time talking up poetry’s unique ‘way of knowing’ and not enough time facing up to how difficult it is to know anything in the first place, which would also involve respecting other ways of knowing, like history or science. Being interested in - or better yet, moved by - what a poet is interested in or moved by has always been as important to me as how they write. There is no reason why a poem about an animal, or family, or politics, or identity, or the person writing the poem - or about any of the subjects that critics sometimes complain that we hear too much about these days - won’t be a good or serious poem besides the fact that all of these things are hard to know. We are more in the dark than we like to think.

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

When I was first reading Larkin, ‘Days’ was one of the poems I kept coming back to. I don’t think it’s particularly typical, though it’s surprising how many Larkin poems you can say that about. There’s a curious (but also typical) combination of chattiness and an almost European existential doubt in those short, aphoristic lines. Days are where we live, but also a kind of object. It’s as if the speaker is alone in a bare, sunlit room with one of them, turning it over with a pencil.

There is something a bit instapoet to all this. Is it profound, or are the lines just short? It’s almost the kind of thing a moody teenager might stick on their wall or post on their Instagram feed. You only ask what days are for if you have a lot of time to kill. But then, I think it helps to understand and appreciate Larkin if we recognise that many of his best poems are just that: young person’s poems. I don’t mean this as a criticism, but it also doesn’t excactly fit his reputation. Much of Larkin’s poetry imagines an argument between freedom (for Larkin, often the same thing as selfishness) and something which we may as well call responsibility, or simply other people. The other people rarely win out.1

I love ‘Days’. That first stanza has such charisma. ‘They come, they wake us / time and time over’ is beautiful, the second line echoing without repeating the rhythm of the first. But it’s the second stanza which always stuck with me.

Ah, solving that question
brings the doctor and priest
in their long coats
running over the fields.

It is a wonderfully creepy image, exact and strange. I see the doctor and the priest racing like fathers at a school sports day, though they might equally be running over different fields towards the same location.

What are days for? Well, this is Philip Larkin: days are for dying. Hence doctors, hence priests. Strangely, almost unbelievably, I didn’t see death in the poem until a few weeks ago. When I first read it — as a moody teenager — I thought ‘Days’ was about freedom. The first verse, as I read it, was a lesson about living in the moment, like an artist or a poet (or a teenager. The doctors and priests were authority figures, foolishly trying to questions that shouldn’t or couldn’t be answered, to worry us into living somewhere other than days. It was the artist (i.e. the teenager) against society. Death must’ve been in the background, but he wasn’t the heart of the poem. I was focused on the runners — those interfering adults — not what they were running towards.

Of course, both readings can be true. And there is, of course, another event which brings in the doctor and the priest and which solves the question of what to do with days, which is conspicious by its absence in the poem’s world. Larkin never had children. Some of his most well-known poems are about not wanting to, though behind the bluff there is also injury and self-doubt (‘where do these innate assumptions come from? Not from what / We think truest, or want most to do’). It’s curious how many critics have taken the bluff at face value.2

The Darkling Thrush is one of the most anthologised poems in the English language and for good reason. Though it was written for the end of a century, the weary but undimmed hope held by Hardy’s thrush still seems to capture something fundamental about how we feel about the turning of the year.

Just how hopeful is Hardy’s thrush? This is a poem in which the landscape is compared to a sepulchre. It is the deadest part of winter. Even the ‘aged’ thrush is ‘frail, gaunt, and small’. Still, he sings, flinging his ‘soul / against the growing gloom’ and in that act of defiance Hardy wonders whether there isn’t a sign of something better to come:

 So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

Carol Rumens suggests that this is Hardy, the famous pessimist and author of some of the most depressing novels ever written (this is not a criticism), at his most optimistic. For John Berryman, those final lines should be read ironically: the ‘blessed Hope’ is a fiction.

The English poet-critic Donald Davie, meanwhile, argued that ‘The Darkling Thrush’ wasn’t only ironic, but downright cynical. Knowing that ‘up-beat, unexceptionable’ poems were the ones most likely to be celebrated and anthologised (they are also the ones which go viral on social media), Hardy went out of his way to write one himself. By 1900, Hardy was a literary celebrity, and the final stanza is, for Davie, a self-deprecating reference to his own reputation: he is ‘unaware’ of the hope to come, because he is such a notorious grump, but the bird knows better. Spring, obviously, is on the way.

Who, after all, is the darkling thrush? Davie doesn’t go so far, but Hardy’s description of the bird is remarkably, suspiciously, precise:

 At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom

Hardy was sixty in 1900. We don’t tend to think of birds as ‘gaunt’, but humans often get that way. In fact, we’ve no reason to think the poet has even seen this bird; the voice simply rises among the twigs. If he had seen it, how would he have known it wasn’t just ill? Hardy was a small man who took care over his appearance. ‘Blast-beruffled plume’ sounds about right.

But Davie was being a bit too clever himself. Winter always ends (in the future it may never get started, but that’s another question), but it doesn’t always feel that way. Despite the bleak winter fields, despite his own bleak self, Hardy finds himself composing a poem, flinging his soul upon the growing gloom. The last stanza might be ironic, but it's true (irony is part of the world). Hardy doesn’t know why he’s singing. He can see no justification for it. He does it all the same.1

In what I can only assume was the doing of a Christmas poltergeist, Substack recently ‘featured’ this newsletter, which has resulted in a lot of new subscriptions. I’m not just being English and self-effacing when I say that this must have been a mistake. I don’t post often and have never had more than a handful of readers (most of whom are friends and family). It’s a personal blog with a niche remit: I mostly write about poetry, and most of the poetry I write about is English and/or British poetry from the 20th century. In short, you’re very welcome, but it’s strange to think you might be there - strange in the way that all writing online is uncanny. You sit in your chilly little flat in south London, write a blog, and anyone, anywhere, can read it.

I’ve been thinking about ghosts a lot recently, especially ghosts as a way of thinking about writing. Back in the tail end of 2023, I wrote something for The London Magazine about the ways in which poets haunt second-hand bookshops. I also wrote something for Engelsberg Ideas about Charles Dickens and the ghosts haunting his story ‘The Signal-Man’. If you’re new here, this piece and those links are a good indication of the kind of thing you’ll find. If you still want to stick around, please do. If you’ve had your fill - Happy New Year, and catch you later. Wherever you are.

Often the poems we think we know the best are also the strangest. In ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, for instance, W. H. Auden uses the paintings by the Dutch masters to think about suffering’s ‘human position’, the way in which terrible things take place while the rest of the world gets on with life. It is one of my favourite poems. I have read it countless times. And I never really thought about it as a poem about art, and looking at art, until I saw the paintings in person.

Perhaps this is as it should be. If poetry about art (ekphrastic poetry) is going to work, it needs to work without you having the painting in front of you, or even having seen it. We can’t read and look at the same time. In this case, the poem’s combination of an off-hand tone and tightly-wound syntax conjures up both the human messiness of paintings like Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus and the moral Auden draws from them. The picture is in the words.

Then again, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ this isn’t so much a poem about paintings as a poem about being in a gallery. Specifically, being in the Musée Royaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels. We are dropped into Auden’s thoughts as he ambles around the collection. It is like listening into a particularly eloquent/verbose tour guide:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position...

Before visiting Brussels, the painting I most associated with Auden’s poem was Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus: that boy falling out of the sky in the final lines. Seeing that painting in person, I thought, would almost be like encountering the poem in person. I would be standing in Auden’s shoes. I began to get quite excited about this (not exactly Stendhal syndrome, but anyone who has been excited by old things will know the feeling). So, when I finally came around one corner in the gallery and caught a glimpse of Icarus, I decided I would start at the other end of the room and save that moment for the end.

Then, as I turned to the wall in front of me, I was confronted with the two other paintings in the poem. Auden doesn’t name them, but they provide the material for the first stanza; paintings I’d barely given a second thought to.

Here, suddenly, was the poem, standing in front of me. There were the ‘children skating’: the wonderful, silly squat little figures mucking around on the ice in The Numbering at Bethlehem. There, in The Massacre of the Innocents, was the ‘dreadful martyrdom’: soldiers butchering babies with pikes, while more go door to door and a small body lies in the snow.

In The Massacre, which the Brueghels made several versions of, an event from the New Testament is transposed into a 16th century Flemish village. Herod has ordered that all the children under the age of two in Bethlehem should be killed. The soldiers are Spanish troops and German mercenaries. It is bitterly cold and the roofs are iced like Christmas cakes. The Dutch will soon rebel against the Hapsburgs. We know that this is the spark for Auden’s comment about ‘suffering’ because of the pair of dogs just to the right of the violence taking place in the centre. They are so close to the action. They are playfighting. They are, in Auden’s words, getting on with their ‘doggy life’. The poem doesn’t mention these details (and there are other dogs). But, once you see them, they feel inevitable.

Elsewhere, Auden seems to use his imagination: none of the paintings provide an exact model for the ‘torturer’s horse’. In in a 1963 essay, one Arthur Kinney suggests that the most likely candidate was a horse towards the front of the painting, since it is the only one both with a rider and near a tree. I wonder if Auden wasn’t also thinking of the horses at the back of the scene, behind the playing dogs (below). They stand with their heads to the trees they’re tied to, as if they can’t bear to look at what is happening behind them.

The Massacre is just one painting. Reading Auden’s poem again, it’s surprisingly difficult to marry what the poem announces it is about (that is, suffering) and what is happening in the other pictures. The skating children are missing something important (the registration of the baby Jesus) but The Numbering at Bethlehem is only about suffering in the sense that any depiction of Jesus would, for medieval viewers, bring to mind the Crucifixion. In fact I think it is a stretch to describe The Fall of Icarus as about suffering, either. Icarus drops out of the sky, but he isn’t suffering long. Whenever I read that story I always think the sufferer is Icarus’s father.

In short, if ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is about any one painting, it isn’t The Fall of Icarus, but The Massacre of the Innocents. Everything Auden thinks and feels, including his response to Icarus (which, admittedly, takes over at the end) is coloured by that one painting. But Auden isn’t only responding to a painting. This is December 1938. He has seen the civil war in Spain and just returned to Europe from reporting on the war in China. He knows what is happening in Germany. So, there is another message, which only becomes clear when you take a step back: suffering is also something that takes place while other people are moseying around art galleries, looking at paintings.

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I read, or heard, recently, I can’t remember where, that in John Donne’s day (1571 to 1632) readers would often make edits to friends’ poems in the process of copying them out into their own private anthologies. The whole idea of changing someone else’s poem without them knowing about it would bring some poets out in hives. It doesn’t seem so strange to me, at least not in those circumstances. One of the myths about poetry is that every word matters. Which they do. But that doesn’t mean they’re written in stone.

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In theory, anyway. With a lot of modern poems this kind of collaboration would be difficult, because modern poems are so self-consciously individual. Sometimes it feels like poets are involved in an unspoken competition to write in the most individual, idiosyncratic, and therefore un-editable, voice imaginable. If you factor in the personal content of a lot of contemporary poetry (personal as in particular rather than emotional - we all have emotions), you can see why the idea of altering a word would feel invasive - like meddling with someone’s soul.1

The poem you can meddle with, meanwhile, will likely be written in a way that someone else might have said it better or at least just as well. They could be different. I don’t mean to say that these poems are more worthwhile than the others. I like a lot of idiosyncratic poets, though sometimes a strong voice is like a spell: it wears off. Arguably, the best poets tread a line between their own voice and the shared language. But I do think that there is a lot of pressure out there to sound, as blurbs and reviews so often put it, unique, and that this pressure is almost always unhelpful - and that poets are much better at complaining about market forces than they are at recognising them in the wild.

Moving on. Sort of. I’ve recently been reading Jonathan Davidson’s very good book On Poetry which among other things is very, very good (insert more verys here) on the importance of making space for poetry to be heard - whether it’s Ted Hughes on vinyl, nursery rhymes in the kitchen or on stage. I’ve also been listening to Alice Oswald’s brilliant (as in, literally sparkling) Oxford Poetry Lectures, which focus on poetry as a spoken art and the power of simile and metaphor - especially in Homer. Oswald is an astonishing performer – I have never heard her in person but the lectures are akin to extended readings. I don’t mean performing as in acting – you can’t act a poem, though people try.

Oswald is not a performance poet, either. Rather, as Davidson puts it, she releases the poems: “The poets I like, really like rather than just admire, do this, they release their poems. They do not present themselves or their histories or their joys and disciplines, they do not set out their stall or display their garish feathers. They simply place the sounds into the silence.” Davidson is not talking about Oswald, only poets in general (and Ted Hughes). But Oswald is a releaser.

In her first lecture, Oswald makes a point of not showing the audience the texts she is quoting from. Instead, she speaks each passage twice - releases the words into the room. These passages are often from Homer – Oswald is always thinking about Homer and the wandering bards who performed (or, perhaps, released) his poems. And one of the most striking things about her poetry is the way, over the years, she has combined this immersion in a poet as impersonal as Homer with her own very distinct - idiosyncratic, even - phrasing and vocabulary.

In Memorial, for instance, her stripped down version of the Iliad, she isolates Homer’s similies from the narrative, and then transforms them into austere - yet clearly Oswaldian - phrases, each repeated the same way as in the lecture:

Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won't let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip

Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won't let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip

The effect of the repetition is like making an impression in a wall before bringing in the drill, or (because Oswald’s image-world is a blue, watery world) the first rush of water which carves the way for a stream. The first reading makes space in the world for the second – for the poetry – to flow through.