Men of the Royal Irish Rifles in the opening hours of the battle of the Somme 1916

Wilfrid Owen (1893-1918)

The last of a short run of poems in which poets use familiar names and stories in their poems.

In the Book of Genesis ,Abraham is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride God offers him, and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between Biblical sacrifice and the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men wearing belts and straps. I’ve always felt that he didn’t trust his readers to make that link

At the risk of being heretical, Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the same point more powerfully, and more effectively.

John Dressel (b1934)

I worry about my pronunciation of people’s names, so if I have mispronounced John Dressel’s I apologise. 

Like Hamlet (see previous episode) Goliath has escaped his story.

Recently a news headline read; ‘Firm wins in David and Goliath legal battle’.

The writer of the headline was confident that the reader would know that this meant a battle between a small firm and a much bigger one. The writer was also positioning the reader to see the smaller as heroic and admirable, and the bigger as the bad guy in the case.

The story of David and Goliath has entered into popular discourse, and people who have never read the Bible know enough to make sense of that headline.

But there’s no reason why we should automatically sympathise with David, or with every small entity taking on a larger one. Dressel’s poem makes this point, playfully.

This poem is taken from ‘Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry’ edited by Dannie Abse and printed by Seren/Poetry Wales Press 1997, reprinted 1998.   

Young man with a skull. Painting by Frans Hals.

Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016)

This is the first of a run of poems in which poets use other works of literature or characters from literature to make a point or to consider an idea. Hamlet is one of the most famous characters in the western tradition, so much so that he has escaped his play and lives a life of his own. People who have never seen a version of the play or read it have heard of him. ‘To be or not to be’ entered everyday speech so long ago it may be used without any knowledge of what the rest of the speech contains.

It’s a young man struggling to verbalise a reason for either living or dying.
Anyone can be driven to ask ‘what is the point’ or ‘what is the meaning of life’. You don’t need to be haunted by what may be the revengeful ghost of your father, or suspect your mother of adultery with your regicidal, fratricidal uncle. Once the religious and philosophical answers have been rejected, the purpose of life becomes finding a a purpose that will make life seem desirable. As Thomas says in this poem, it doesn’t have to be a desire to win an olympic medal or climb mount Everest. Growing onions will do it. Only when you have a reason to live, that matters to you, will you fear death, and only having feared death will you have lived.

I found this poem quoted at the end of Tony Conran’s introduction to ‘Welsh Verse; Translations by Tony Conran.’ Poetry Wales Press 1986. I knew of Gwyn Thomas as a translator of The Mabinogion and his reputation as a poet. I know very little about this poem except I assume it’s translated by Tony Conran from Welsh. If anyone knows differently please let me know.

Sunset on a pacific Pacific. Photograph Copyright Liam Guilar.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

I have been rereading Yeats. Something I recommend everyone with an interest in English poetry should do. It’s difficult to think of a collected poems which has so many great poems in it, or where the quality improves chronologically.

This poem sits at the end of his ‘Last Poems’. It’s not a great poem by his standards, but the honesty of it is appealing. Old men are just young men in failing bodies and Yeats was acutely aware of this. The last two lines express an impossible wish but also acknowledge and accept what has passed.
If you wanted to, you could ask yourself which is the more human response: the men obsessed with politics, or the man admiring the girl. You could also ask yourself which one of the two is less likely to start a war.

A Birmingham Screwdriver in action.

Roy Fisher (1930-2017)

Roy Fisher is one of those poets who are highly regarded by critics and readers who know his work, and yet nowhere near as well known as he should be.

This poem is an extract from Talking to Cameras, the first part of the sequence ‘Texts for a Film’. I laughed the first time I read it. As he explains, a Birmingham screwdriver is a hammer, I grew up in Coventry, about 20 miles from Birmingham, and I often heard the phrase. It’s one of those faintly humorous regional insults that abound in the UK, suggesting something about the craftsmanship and craftsmen from Birmingham.
But Fisher takes what is an insult and turns it into a mediation on a way of thinking. It’s the shift, and the humour, that distinguishes this poem.

The poem is taken from ‘The Long and Short of it, poems 1955-2010 (new edition 2012) Bloodaxwe books.

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential.

At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem’s most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he’s old, he will have written him one poem ‘as cold/and passionate as the dawn’.

You can spend some time admiring those two adjectives, and the effect they create.

Hugh Kenner suggested the difference between Yeats and Pound, or Yeats and most poets, was that Pound, once he’d left London, could sit in relative isolation at his typewriter in Rapallo telling himself he was a genius and dismissing any rumours of negative response to his work as the sniping of lesser interigences. Yeats, standing in the wings at the abbey theatre was forced to confront an often baffled, sometimes hostile audience. It might be one of the reasons Yeats’ poems got better as he got older.

Xenophon and the March of the Ten Thousand to the sea.

The second of these two poems was written in direct response to the first.

A.E.Houseman (1859-1936) was one of the leading classical scholars of his day. Today he’s remembered as the author of ‘The Shropshire Lad’, one of the most well known collections of poems from the first quarter of the last century. I suspect his mercenary army owes a lot to Xenophon’s classic account of how ten thousand Greek soldiers marched to the sea after their Persian paymaster was killed in battle.
Hugh MacDairmid (1892-1978), one of the significant Scottish poets of the twentieth century, had a less romantic view of Mercenaries. which i suspect might be shared by those unlucky enough to have encountered them.

Samuel Beckett in a Paris Cafe.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Technically this isn’t a poem, but an extract from Beckett’s novel Watt, where it’s set out as continuous prose. But it’s too much fun to read to leave out on the grounds that it’s not ‘a poem’.

If you want to tie your head in knots you can try to define ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’. Whatever your definition there will always be a liminal case that challenges the definition. Beckett’s prose is also often a lot funnier than the stern photos of Beckett would lead you to expect. So go along for the ride. And enjoy.

Officers and men of the 13th Light Dragoons who survived the Light Brigade’s charge.

Rudyard Kipling: 1865-1936

This isn’t one of Kipling’s best poems. But it reveals a side of him most people ignore. The incident described here is probably apocryphal. The savagery of the last line depends on a play on the meanings of the word charge. It’s too vicious and carries too much contempt to call it a pun.

The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. In what is sometimes remembered as one of history’s great military blunders, or stupidities, approximately 670 British lightly armed cavalry charged straight down a valley at Russian Cannons with Russian batteries firing at them from either side. There is no record of any of the troopers saying, this is a really stupid idea…Surprisingly, there were some survivors. It would probably have been quietly forgotten to every one but military historians of disaster, a classic case of bad communication, if Alfred Lord Tennyson hadn’t written ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ within weeks of the event.
The popularity of the poem, taught in British schools for the best part of a century, can be measured by the way phrases from it entered into popular discourse. ‘Someone had blundered’ ‘there’s not to reason why/there’s but to do and die’ even if the quotations were often incorrect.
As part of the education of British children, the poem with its insistence on the courage, glory and honour of the participants, contributed not just to to the mentality that lead to equally disastrous military stupidities in the First World War, but the the enthusiasm for the military that contributed to so many eagerly signing up for that war.
Kipling’s poem, written almost forty years after Tennyson’s is an indirect critique both of Tennyson’s poem and the British Public’s attitude towards its military, which he criticises in other poems, most simply in ‘Tommy’.

This is taken from A Man of Heart, by Liam Guilar. Published by Shearsman books 2023.

Lullingston Roman Villa remains, Kent, England.

Maxim 1
History is a record of brutality
tempered by outbursts of idealism.

Memory
There was never enough light
Even in summer, shade
and shadows contour brightness.
At night, torches and lamps
shiver the edge of sight.
The candle drew attention to itself
while life continued in the silent,
darker ebb and pool beyond. 

I remember her hand on the pillar,
a shadow on the white stone.
Her eyes bright in a dark face.
She was worried, there were visitors,
men of power and influence,
come to court her daughter.
Not bad for a freed slave
from the lands around Carthage.
I remember her hand on the pillar,
the light shaking over the mosaic floor.
She had plans. We all had plans.