"If you don't have a real tree you don't bring the Christmas life into the house." Josephine Mackinnon, aged 8
Bring in a tree, a young Norwegian spruce, Bring hyacinths that rooted in the cold. Bring winter jasmine as its buds unfold - Bring the Christmas life into this house.
Bring red and green and gold, bring things that shine, Bring candlesticks and music, food and wine. Bring in your memories of Christmas past. Bring in your tears for all that you have lost.
Bring in the shepherd boy, the ox and ass, Bring in the stillness of an icy night, Bring in the birth, of hope and love and light. Bring the Christmas life into this house.
Valerie Eliot died on 9th November. She was T S Eliot's second wife. His first marriage to the unhappy and disturbed Vivienne Haigh-Wood was wretched.
"To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."
"My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. "What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think."
I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones.
"What is that noise?" The wind under the door. "What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?" Nothing again nothing. "Do "You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "Nothing?"
The Wasteland
He married Valerie, his secretary, when he was sixty-eight and she was thirty. He dedicated his only tender love poem to her.
A Dedication to My Wife
To whom I owe the leaping delight That quickens my senses in our wakingtime And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime, The breathing in unison
Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech And babble the same speech without need of meaning.
No peevish winter wind shall chill No sullen tropic sun shall wither The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only
But this dedication is for others to read: These are private words addressed to you in public.
I googled for a copy to paste and found it on a site of readings for weddings. The arcane modernist wrote a poem that anyone who has been in love can understand.
(A piece about the disappearing breed of literary widows here.)
I had almost finished this poem for ANZAC day. I'm now posting it for Remembrance Day. It's based on something my brother-in-law, John Lyall, told me about his family.
Generations
(for my brother-in-law, John Lyall)
From Australia, my mother made a call. "What are you doing? "Nothing much at all."
"I remembered young Dave Lyall today, Your great uncle, killed at Suvla Bay.
At seventeen," And that was young to me,. David Lyall, left in Gallipoli.
And my grandfather, who was crippled from, A bullet in the neck got at the Somme.
We cleared my mother's house and found his pack, The unit number stencilled on the back.
The empires spilled and caused a mighty stain.
This cafe is encased by Auckland's rain.
I think of that old war, and it's so sad, And long ago. I tap my phone. "Hi, Dad!"
"Whatcha doing?" Nothing much. Work and fun" No khakied man taught us to fire a gun.
Carol Ann Duffy does rise to her job as Poet Laureate by turning out occasional poems, though she doesn't always rise to the occasion. In her poem for the Olympics she sank like a Lib Dem poll; like Tony Blair's credibility; like the brotherly love in the Coalition - insert your own political metaphor.
Enough of the soundbite abstract nouns, austerity, policy, legacy, of tightening metaphorical belts; we got on our real bikes, for we are Bradley Wiggins, side-burned, Mod, god; we are Sir Chris Hoy, Laura Trott, Victoria Pendleton, Kenny, Hindes, Clancy, Burke, Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas, Olympian names.
We want more cycle lanes.
Or we saddled our steed, or we paddled our own canoe, or we rowed in an eight or a four or a two; our names, Glover and Stanning; Baillie and Stott; Adlington, Ainslie, Wilson, Murray, Valegro (Dujardin's horse).
(No we aren't and we didn't. Speak for yourself. "We" mostly sat on the sofa.)
She has received a lot of derision for it , and nowhere more than at That Place, where some commenters complained that Betjeman would have done it better, and inquired how would Larkin have done it?
"Lamia" produced this fine pastiche, which caught the Larkin mood (glass three quarters empty and a fly drowning in the remaining liquid).
Prize-giving MMXII
by Philip Larkin
With a stern blazered smile the judge draws near, Headmasterly, to where I loiter, bald Bowing my head, and blinking behind my specs. And then a velvet fumbling, a falling into place As something heavy slithers round my neck To hang in awkward gaudiness. A cheer, And then the National Anthem strikes up gold.
Gold? Or something else? Stepping down slowly From the podium to piss, I wonder What it was all for. ‘Run for Team GB’ They said. But where does one run from here? The crowds will quietly drift away, The stadiums will crumble into pieces. The asphalt lanes will gather weed and leaf. This cycling Kraut, that weightlifting Bolivian, That crew of sailing Japs, each year will sink A little further into blank oblivion.
And poised between my thumb and finger This cold token of autumnal grief. In a bare wintry drawer it will linger, for a while, gathering dust, unsold, Among dead stamps and a leaflet about wine. An old wives' charm to ward away new failure. Something to please the nephews and the nieces. Something to taunt those pricks in Australia.
In the Olympic bar I stand a drink For a Danish woman and some ass from Spain. The hot triumphant evening turns to thunder, And somewhere out beyond the finish line The first small medals of rain. Strange to think We will never be so happy again.
The theme "Lamia" has taken. that no happiness endures, is in the tradition of Pindar, the poet who wrote poems to celebrate the victories of the original Olympic athletes. Here are the last verses of his Ode to Aristomenes of Aegina, the winner of the boys' wrestling contest. He speaks of the humiliation of the losers as well as the joy of the winners:-
Now from on high on four young bodies You hurled your strength with fierce intent. For them No happy homecoming from Pytho was decreed, As that of yours, nor at their mother's side Could pleasant laughter ring a joyful greeting For their return. But shunning hostile eyes, they creep By quiet paths, o'erwhelmed by their ill-fortune,
But he to whom is given new glory In the rich sweetness of his youth, flies up, Aloft, high hope fulfilled on wings of soaring valour, In realms that brook no dullard cares of wealth, But man's delight flowers but for a brief moment, And no less swiftly falls to the ground again, shattered, By destined will that may not be gainsaid.
Creatures of a day! What is man? What is he not? A dream of a shadow Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men A gleam of splendour given of Heaven, Then rests on them a light of glory And blessed are their days.
(Translated by Geoffrey S Conway)
Duffy of course is entitled to write about the Government's economic policy with the fiercest anger - but a poem about the Olympics is not the best place to start, at least not in this tone - Yay Hoy! Boo Cameron! Inserting a local political message jars with the events and sounds ridiculous. "Lamia" as Larkin and Pindar describe an event which becomes haloed with a universal theme.
When Larkin did write an occasional poem it was for the opening of the Humber Bridge, which became part of a broader theme of isolation and joining. If he'd been in Duffy mode he would have added something about more money should be spent on cycle paths, and damned transport policy generally.
The winds play on it like a harp; the song, Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west, Will never to one separate shire belong, But north and south make union manifest.
Lost centuries of local lives that rose And flowered to fall short where they began Seem now to reassemble and unclose, All resurrected in this single span,
Reaching for the world, as our lives do, As all lives do, reaching that we may give The best of what we are and hold as true: Always it is by bridges that we live.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now...
Those of course are the last lines of Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting. The dead soldier tells what his life could have been to the soldier who killed him.
This poem was brought to my mind by an item on the Today programme the other morning.
During the Falklands War an anti-aircraft gunner shot down a fighter jet and thought he had killed the pilot. He then found out that the pilot had survived. The gunner went to meet him, now a retired Commodore and living in a village in Argentina. The Commodore had no hard feelings and said:-"Each one of us had to fulfil our duties".
It's common enough for soldiers to return from wars with admiration for the enemy's fighting prowess and bravery. Soldiers, sailors and airmen who once tried to kill each other can meet, shake hands and say that was what they had to do. However, the torture victim cannot greet his torturer with such easy feelings. He may agree to forgive, after something like a truth and reconciliation process, but this is not the meeting of equals. Nor would the women of Berlin in 1945 be ready to say, it was your duty, to the Soviet soldiers who raped them. The aftermath for them was horror and shame and suicide. You can be shot at by an impersonal force, but not deliberately humiliated, tortured or raped. You are in some kind of relationship between human beings that has gone grossly awry.
If war were not about the total failure of the human spirit, there would be something grotesquely funny about the American reaction to the pissing pictures.
For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses. And even more to the point: YOU MUSTN'T DO IT ON CAMERA! Too late. It comes to this. Armies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things but when we accept all these lies about "bad apples" and the exceptionalism of crime in war – "there may have been some excesses" is the usual dictator-speak – we are accepting war and going along with the dishonesty of it and we are making it more possible and easier and the killings and rapes more excusable and more frequent.
There is a reasonable aspect to this argument. If atrocities are run of the mill, that should be known. The public like to think that there can be such a thing as a clean war, not many hurt, everything sorted out. With any war in the offing they should realise that it's not just the killing and maiming, destruction and mayhem but the chance for humiliation, rape and torture. Also, remember that humiliation, rape and torture are a great pleasure for some men and that the taste for them can spread among a platoon or a regiment. Giving a man a gun is giving him brief and petty power - and some will become Caligulas and Uday Husseins. So if bringing to mind the horrors of war can prevent more wars, all to the good.
However I don't think "war is the total failure of the human spirit "- Auschwitz is, and Hiroshima is, and rape and torture and atrocities are. But war? All wars, for whatever reason?
"For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses."
It's the Marine Corps' job to kill these men. You can call it a terrible job, you can say they're involved in an unjust war, but that is how wars are conducted. You kill or disable the enemy. You don't inflict gratuitous humiliation on him, even after death. Wars happen, and they are horrible. It is better though that there are things like Geneva conventions and political leaders who are embarrassed when they are conducted with unnecessary cruelty (see Normblog on this).
Pacifists say "war is murder". But that is not generally accepted. We don't do the dulce et decorum thing any more - Wilfred Owen was one who taught us not to - but we acknowledge the necessity of war in certain circumstances, carried out for certain ends. Those fighting it will at their best regard those they are fighting against as caught up in something larger - duty perhaps, or professional pride or patriotism. So they can meet afterwards without personal animosity. They can say, I am the enemy you killed, or tried to kill, my friend. (Wilfred Owen was a soldier as well as a poet.)
But you can't say:-
I am the enemy you raped, my friend I am the enemy you tortured, my friend I am the enemy you pissed over, my friend
I've always thought the saying “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” was self-eivdently stupid, both physically and emotionally. I can't imagine a crowd of amputees, paraplegics and others crippled from nearly fatal accidents chanting it in a chorus. As for the realms of feeling, the bad things that batter you can toughen you or weaken you or leave you pretty much as you were. There are no rules there and no consistency. Now Hitchens is finding out the hard way that this maxim come from bravado rather than experience, truthfully reported.
Hitchen is dwindling. The cancer, and its treatment, are assaulting him violently. Swallowing is torture, and he's losing the use of his fingers so he is in fear of being unable to write. However he can still put the words together and bear witness to the state of himself.
I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. . . . . To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it. . . .
I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.
These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise?
He quotes John Betjeman's poem Five O'Clock Shadow, with its vision of the modern unsupernatural hell that most of us will go through one day:-
This is the time of day when we in the Men's ward Think "one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight." When he who struggles for breath can struggle less strongly: This is the time of day which is worse than night.
A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds, A doctors' foursome out of the links is played, Safe in her sitting-room Sister is putting her feet up: This is the time of day when we feel betrayed.
Below the windows, loads of loving relations Rev in the car park, changing gear at the bend, Making for home and a nice big tea and the telly: "Well, we've done what we can. It can't be long till the end."
This is the time of day when the weight of bedclothes Is harder to bear than a sharp incision of steel. The endless anonymous croak of a cheap transistor Intensifies the lonely terror I feel.
The Captain's Bar is putting on another Havers and Blethers show for the Edinburgh festival. That's an hour of spoken word performance from various poets and prose writers.
Venue:- Captain's Bar 4 South College Street Edinburgh EH8 9AA Dates:- 1st August - 20th August Time:- 7:30 - 8:30 pm
I'm performing Friday 5th August and Wednesday 10th August
It's a great little venue, right in the heart of Festival land and also what the fringe Festival is supposed to be like, instead of the huge venues with their 50 different stand up comedians at £15 a show it's become.
Dates:- 1st August - 20th August Time:- 9:30 - 10:30 am
A different author/poet each day will present their work to you in a special one off performance. It's a breakfast show so you get a coffee and a cake thrown in with the ticket price.
