Poetry Options

[Simon Kirby]

I don't get most of what passes for poetry. Mostly it just doesn't make sense, and then when sometimes I understand I'm just not interestind in what it has to say. And I have made an effort to read poetry, but I still don't get it. And then I find a poem that speaks to me, and I get the point.

Do you have some favourites? Here's one of mine. I suppose it helps that I like toads, and that I don't like the world of work, it was like Larkin wrote it just for me. And to invent those casual, effortless rhymes so you'd hardly know they were there, that's genius.

Toads by Philip Larkin

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually _starves_.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.

[blackdog]

There is a museum in Ieper (Ypres) called 'In Flanders Fields' - as you might guess it's a WWI museum. In it they have a great installation where the narration is a great poem by Wilfred Owen.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is a line from Horace - roughly translated into English as: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

[Simon Kirby]

I've never been to the towns on the Western Front, but I can imagine the profound effect that poem would have in the museum. I remember how Rudyard Kipling epitomised the spirit of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, until his own son was killed. That image of the men drowing in a green sea of gas is vivid.

This is my choice for a war poem by Edward Thomas who died in 1917 shortly after writing it. The imagery of the fallen elm and the clods that crumble and topple speaks to me of the destruction and vanity of war, but then there's the charlock, which will happily lie dormant for fifty years only to germinate when the field is again turned over, and that's hope.

As the Team's Head- Brass by Edward Thomas

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

[Andy Capp]

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth,
And spotted the perils beneath,
All the toffees I chewed,
And the sweet sticky food,
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.

I wish I'd been that much more willin'
When I had more tooth there than fillin'
To pass up gobstoppers,
From respect to me choppers
And to buy something else with me shillin'.

When I think of the lollies I licked,
And the liquorice allsorts I picked,
Sherbet dabs, big and little,
All that hard peanut brittle,
My conscience gets horribly pricked.

My Mother, she told me no end,
"If you got a tooth, you got a friend"
I was young then, and careless,
My toothbrush was hairless,
I never had much time to spend.

Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right,
I flashed it about late at night,
But up-and-down brushin'
And pokin' and fussin'
Didn't seem worth the time... I could bite!

If I'd known I was paving the way,
To cavities, caps and decay,
The murder of fiIlin's
Injections and drillin's
I'd have thrown all me sherbet away.

So I lay in the old dentist's chair,
And I gaze up his nose in despair,
And his drill it do whine,
In these molars of mine,
"Two amalgum," he'll say, "for in there."

How I laughed at my Mother's false teeth,
As they foamed in the waters beneath,
But now comes the reckonin'
It's me they are beckonin'
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.


I remember this 'live' on TV; it doesn't sound so funny now!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5P5BM23uUU

[blackdog]

This is my choice for a war poem by Edward Thomas who died in 1917 shortly after writing it.

A local link here - Edward Thomas is remembered in a window in Eastbury church.

[Simon Kirby]

A local link here - Edward Thomas is remembered in a window in Eastbury church.

I didn't know that. Did he have a connection with Eastbury?

[blackdog]

I didn't know that. Did he have a connection with Eastbury?

Not really. His widow, Helen, moved to Eastbury in the '50s (he died in 1917) and worshipped at the church. After her death their daughter Myfanwy commissioned the window from Laurence Whistler. Whistler also did the windows to Gerald and Joy Finzi in Ashmansworth church.

[Simon Kirby]

Another favourite, a sort-of poem this time. Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas - can you spot the King Crimson album in there at the start?

[eternalriver]

Another favourite, a sort-of poem this time. Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas - can you spot the King Crimson album in there at the start?

None other than the terrific Starless and Bible Black.

[NWNREADER]

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

[Exhausted]

'There Lie Forgotten Men'

She stands there alone
At the edge of the silent place
And she is shocked
New wars brew and these forgotten men
Will play no part in them
The dead silence warn no ears but hers
In great halls, in moments of great decision
What they fought for is forsaken
And by day's end new gravestones
Appear on the blood red ground
She finds what she seeks
'Sgt John Malley Age 27'
His life brutally ended
And she stands by his grave
But he can give no answers
And she weeps for him
For the empty hole he left behind
And for the new emptiness
Soon to join the black chasm.
And her tears join the flood.

By Rebecca Sullivan