Life must be filled up

Weekends are a TV desert for me. I’m watching Magpie Murders because I’d read the book and wondered how Anthony Horowitz would translate such a complicated plot to the screen. I read it again and now watch it playing ‘spot the differences’. I also like to watch Antiques Roadshow but yesterday it was cancelled at short notice. The only reason I can think of for it is that the BBC really hates older viewers and cares nothing for their disappointment. All was not lost, as I found two absolute gems on BBC 4.

The Queen’s Realm: England is a little film first shown for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. We take a tour of England from the air: the green countryside, the coast, industry, holiday camps, cars on new (then) roads, canals and steam trains. It must have looked nostalgic then; even more so now. There’s music but no commentary, just a lot of poetry, chosen by John Betjeman. This turned into a great quiz for me: spot the poet! I actually started making a list, which I won’t bore you with except to say that it was a masterstroke to have the Flying Scotsman whizzing along to Faster than fairies, faster than witches …. I Think Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses is underrated and all children should read it because they will never forget the poems. RLS, Auden and T S Eliot in the same programme and all perfectly appropriate? Brilliant. Research afterwards failed to find a list of the poems used but I did discover that the film is on YouTube, fast becoming my favourite channel.

Later, I watched an absolute cracker: Norwegian violinist Bjarte Elke and his band Barroksoliniste playing seventeenth century British music in various candlelit venues. Traditional folk songs, drinking songs, sad laments, sea shanties and some lovely Purcell sung by a guest soprano. Brilliant musicians (several nationalities), subtle choreography and a lot of fun, including duelling fiddles. Do you ever wonder how you know The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies-O, Haul Away Joe and Leave Her Johnny, Leave Her?
I think I learned some at junior school, and slightly different versions; only to be expected with songs which have lasted centuries. They ended with Leave Her Johnny, singing it softly as they left the stage then, later, with their instruments all packed up and apparently bidding each other fond farewells, they played it again. This scene was intercut with atmospheric shots of a foggy old Thames, reminding you that it must have looked much the same in the past. I found I went to bed still singing, ‘what care I for a goose-feather bed’ to myself. Highly recommended, especially if you like folk music.

The Waste Land was first published in 1922, so to mark the centenary, there’s a flurry of programmes about Eliot. Last week, BBC 2 showed a programme devoted entirely to The Waste Land. It wasn’t bad. The most surprising thing about it for me was to find how much of the poem I knew, although I haven’t read it that often.

Yesterday evening, on BBC 4, there was a repeat of a programme I’ve seen before: A N Wilson talking about Eliot’s life and work. He was trying to square the great poet (he considers The Waste Land the greatest poem of the twentieth century) with Eliot’s ‘abhorrent’ views. He failed in this attempt and confessed himself ‘baffled’. It’s good. Both these programmes used Eliot’s own recordings of his poems; an eerie voice from the past.

This was followed by possibly the most challenging and exhausting one-hour film I’ve ever seen. Apparently, when lockdown began, Ralph Fiennes set himself the task of learning The Four Quartets. Phew! He turned his recitation into a one-man stage performance and then this film (directed by his sister). To hold an audience with poetry for an hour non-stop and never a dull moment is an amazing achievement. (Weakly, I did get the occasional mental flash of Fiennes with no nose.) It must surely become compulsory viewing for anyone unlucky enough to be studying the poems. I say unlucky not because the poetry is bad (far from it) but because you could spend a lifetime studying the Quartets and still not get to the bottom of them. Luckily for me, I can accept mysteries. I felt tired afterwards so Fiennes must have been prostrated. When does he get a knighthood?

Do you not enjoy summer as much as you feel you ought to? You are not alone. I’ve just finished The Shell Seekers, a lovely fat read. That book is full of glorious summer days but does include these lines from Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice:
September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.

In her latest newsletter Countess Ablaze (knitting and classics!) writes:
‘Sitting outdoors with a glass of your favourite tipple with the birdsong in your ear as the sun blazing down (sic). Maybe that is your ideal summer's day.

Mine is sat on the floor of a cold shower waiting for summer to go away. Bring on autumn so I can wear those knitted socks that I've strategically knocked up ready.’

Summer or autumn for you?

They are all Gone into the World of Light

They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit ling’ring here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest,
After the sun’s remove.

Henry Vaughan

There’s lots more. I’ve always loved the line, ‘Like stars upon some gloomy grove’, which is why I picked this poem (or part of it).

daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;

Shakespeare’s daffodils wouldn’t have been like the ones in our gardens; more like those Wordsworth wrote about, I imagine. The principle remains though: however foul the weather, the daffodils don’t fail us. There are masses of daffodils of the larger type in my garden but they’re not out yet. They were all here when I moved in. The miniature ones I planted myself, in front of the potting shed, where they do very well. I had to cut this little beauty because I wasn’t prepared to lie down on wet grass just to get a photo.

Yesterday was a glorious spring day and I could garden outside feeling the warmth of the sun. Today we’re back to the November-like murk which has plagued us for the past week. But still there are daffodils. By the end of their season, I always feel they have delighted us long enough, but it’s worth waiting for the late flowering of the beautiful Pheasant’s Eye type, as shown in the userpic.

Yesterday evening, feeling flaked out, I thought, ‘Must be something on BBC4’ and was just in time to catch Great Poets in Their Own Words. This was a fascinating compilation of archive TV footage and radio broadcasts, most of it new to me. T S Eliot, for instance, seems such a figure of the first half of the twentieth century that it’s easy to forget that he lived until 1965, in time to appear on television, reading his own work and looking pretty uncomfortable about it. W H Auden was on the Michael Parkinson show! Can you imagine such a great man chatting to Graham Norton? Edith Sitwell was well able to cope with John Freeman’s notoriously tough questions on Face to Face. And what a pleasure to see Stevie Smith reading Not Waving but Drowning. I must have listened to a lot of her readings at one time because I now hear her voice when I read her poems.

Apart from the works of Hugh MacDiarmid and R S Thomas, which mean nothing to me, every line read was familiar and so doubly delightful. The programme made me wonder why I bother reading anything except poetry. After all, I could spend the rest of my life at it and still not read the half of what is worth reading. If the aim of the programme was to send viewers back to the texts, it succeeded admirably. Highly recommended and I’m looking forward to the next episode.



Photo: The Guardian

Hardy wrote this poem at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

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.

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.
Thomas Hardy


Photo BBC

Field of Autumn

Slow moves the acid breath of noon
over the copper-coated hill,
slow from the wild crab’s bearded breast
the palsied apples fall.

Like coloured smoke the day hangs fire,
taking the village without sound;
the vulture-headed sun lies low
chained to the violet ground.

The horse upon the rocky height
rolls all the valley in his eye,
but dares not raise his foot or move
his shoulder from the fly.

The sheep, snail-backed against the wall,
lifts her blind face but does not know
the cry her blackened tongue gives forth
is the first bleat of snow.

Each bird and stone, each roof and well,
feels the gold foot of autumn pass;
each spider binds with glittering snare
the splintered bones of grass.

Slow moves the hour that sucks our life,
slow drops the late wasp from the pear,
the rose tree’s thread of scent draws thin -
and snaps upon the air.

Laurie Lee

This poem was in an anthology I was given as a child, and I was very taken with it.

Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes
So says the great sage Molesworth, who then informs us that the only poem in the English language is The Brook. He does also mention Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Tennyson, 't s eliot christopfer fry auden etc' and that famous poem SIR THE BURIAL SIR OF SIR JOHN MOORE SIR AT CORUNNA SIR, so something is sticking in his brane. Apart from Hilary McKay in her Exiles books, I can’t think of a modern children’s author whose books are full of literary references.* That’s a pity, because it’s a painless introduction. It was reading Arthur Ransome that taught me about the red glare on Skiddaw rousing the burghers of Carlisle, the boy standing on the burning deck and stout Cortes on a peak in Darien.

dovegreyreader’s post about learning poetry by heart inspired these thoughts. Like Lynne, these days I can’t even remember my own mobile number yet my head is stuffed with poetry of various kinds. Is there a difference between words you just remember (nursery rhymes, hymns) and something you learn deliberately? Either can be invaluable for plucking from the mind at a suitable moment. I learnt Henry V’s Agincourt speech when I was young and found it terribly useful at the dentist’s. An elderly woman told me that when she was in hospital and very weak, it was a comfort that she could recall chunks of the Prayer Book without effort.

In The Faber Popular Reciter (1978), Kingsley Amis says, ‘When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War, the majority of poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting.’ He says the book is intended not for reciting in the way that people used to but for reading aloud. The qualities required are ‘absolute clarity, heavy rhythms and noticeable rhymes with some break in the sense preferred at the end of the line.’ This means including a lot of ‘good bad’ poetry and leaving out some of the best, to fit the brief. These are the kinds of poems that Nancy and Peggy Blackett and countless other children were made to learn by heart: Sir Patrick Spens, The Royal George (one of Molesworth’s!), Gray’s ‘Elegy’, Upon Westminster Bridge, The Village Blacksmith, Home Thoughts From Abroad, The Charge of the Light Brigade, O Captain! My Captain! And many, many more.

I can still remember odd things I was made to learn at school, from ‘Overpopulation is too many people living in a country for the resources of that country to support.’ to Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus. One teacher I knew used to make his class learn the American Declaration of Independence (they were very proud of it) while another would dazzle his pupils by reciting the entire Periodic Table, inspiring them to want to do the same. These were not especially bright children but they enjoyed the competitive element. So is it cruel to make children learn poetry, or will they thank you for it later? I’ve just found this. Perhaps fashions are about to change.

*Correction. I remembered later that Jacqueline Wilson is another.

The sky is leaden, the field on the other side of my hedge thick with frost. I've just watched a fox loping across and Keats' poem came into my head:

St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Plenty more verses but this one seems so appropriate.