Poems I Journey With 12

The world throws up many wonderful and wondrous souls over and over again, but none so wonderful and wondrous as Isaac Rosenberg (1890 - 1918) who was sadly killed at the age of 27 as he and others were returning to their trenches, having just finished night patrol. Rosenberg was the least privileged of the British poets as he was born into a poor working-class Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia.  His economic circumstances militated against his attending either Cambridge or Oxford. However, he was a talented artist as well as a great poet, whom both Eliot and Pound acknowledged as a good modernist poet - great praise indeed.  Had he lived he would have matched them with work equally as good as theirs.  Alas that was not to be.  Too many young men were killed during the Great War - "half the seed of Europe one by one" as Wilfred Owen, another First World War poet would put it. As a talented artist, the young Rosenberg enrolled in evening classes in the Art School at Birkbeck College, London University. Indeed, he had hoped to make his living as a portrait artist and had moved to South Africa to pursue that career when war broke out. Like most young men of his time he would have felt he was abandoning his native homeland were he not to return to England and enlist. He was no sympathizer with the war at all - he simply felt duty-bound like many a young man of his era.  He was to write in a letter to a friend that "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons.  Nothing can justify war.  I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over."  Commentators are united in their view that the voice of a modernist poet can be heard in his poems.

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is. 

And though we have our lives, we know

What sinister threat lies there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know

This poison-blasted track opens on our camp –

On a little safe sleep. 

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy. 

Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks. 

Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark

As easily as song –

But song only dropped, 

Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand

By dangerous tides, 

Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, 

Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Isaac Rosenberg, selfportrait, 1915

It is somewhat ironic that it was when returning from such a patrol the the young artist and poet, Isaac Rosenberg was killed. "And though we have our lives, we know //What sinister threat lies there" are words sombre indeed as the night. The opening imagery is clear and stark: "dragging anguished limbs," "poison-blasted tracks," and then the wonder of hearing a little joyous song breaks the sombre tone with joyful aural images in the stanza

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy. 

Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks. 

Music showering our upturned list’ning faces,

lines that obviously make more sense when read aloud to get their full aural effect. And then, we are given the wondrous and wonderful final stanza that is loaded with mystery and magic interwoven with fear and dread. It is as if Rosenberg is taking the fear and awfulness created in the first and second stanzas and the joy, beauty and exultation of the third and combining them both into a rather eerily beautiful and shockingly scary mixture in the final stanza. It is indeed eerie and scary that death can drop from the dark sky just as easily as song, but that is the nature of war.  Then those wondrous and magical lines that suggest inevitable lostness (blindman's dreams) on "sands," (not a very stable support) which are right beside "dangerous tides" (being washed away to destruction.)  Then those juxtaposed opposites in "girl's dark hair" (love and beauty) and the "ruin" that may lie there is hauntingly bleak. Finally, then, even her kisses which should be sweet, may hide the serpent lurking deep within.  And so, to end, dear reader, let us reread and ponder the words of the last stanza:

Death could drop from the dark 

As easily as song – 

But song only dropped, 

Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand 

By dangerous tides, 

Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, 

Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Poems I Journey With 11

Clarity versus Unclarity

This contrast is one that has always confounded me. On the one hand each of us desires clarity and yet there is pretty little of it to be found in this world - at least, of the logical variety. At college we had to read Albert Camus' short book The Myth of Sisyphus for our philosophy class. For Camus, the philosopher of the absurd, or the absurd person, demands clarity or certainty above all, but again there is little or none to be found in the world around him. The sense of the absurd, then, results from the the conflict that is created between human reason that demands clarity and the unreasonable universe that is very unclear indeed.  

I remember many years ago when I was a green young teacher walking into a staff room early one winter's morning to find a colleague named Gerard Smith, one very smart young gentleman, asking me the following question, "Well, Tim, what is it all about?"  What a huge question that was, and I was taken aback to be asked it so early in the morning.  I don't remember what I replied, but I certainly would have said little of worth as I was quite a shy young man then with little confidence. A few years later we were all to learn that poor Gerard had died in America, having taken a career break from school. It as only then that we found out that the poor man had a congenital and fatal heart defect from his youth and that there remained little time on earth for him when he asked his question.  In hindsight, I then understood why he had asked that weighty question.  Again, he would have known that I had a background in theology and philosophy, and he perhaps believed that I could furnish him with some sort of answer to his deep question.

Most religious or spiritual gurus and writers acknowledge the unclarity of the world and the sheer lack of any logical answers. They simply have a different take on things, a much different perspective. Often they even seem to delight in the sheer unclarity of things, and speak about mysticism, wonder and mystery, especially that mystery which the divine is, that mystery that simply cannot be caught in a net of words or in dogmatic phrases no matter how intricate or sublime. There are other ways, apparently of encountering the world, outside the logical. Those who have this perspective are often fond of quoting the words of Blaise Pascal: "Le coeur as ses raisons que la raison ne connait point" - "The heart has its reasons which reason itself cannot understand." It is with this background in mind that I now invite the reader to read Louis Macneice's very fine poem called "Entirely:"

Louis Macneice 1907 - 1963

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely 

   It would take too long; 

All we know is the splash of words in passing   

   And falling twigs of song, 

And when we try to eavesdrop on the great   

   Presences it is rarely 

That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate   

   Even a phrase entirely. 

If we could find our happiness entirely 

   In somebody else’s arms 

We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s 

   Yammering fire alarms 

But, as it is, the spears each year go through 

   Our flesh and almost hourly   

Bell or siren banishes the blue   

   Eyes of Love entirely. 

And if the world were black or white entirely 

   And all the charts were plain 

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, 

   A prism of delight and pain, 

We might be surer where we wished to go   

   Or again we might be merely 

Bored but in brute reality there is no 

     Road that is right entirely.

I love this poem because of its complete honesty and total authenticity.  The poet does not trot out old pieties or standard traditional phrases that simplify life. Rather, he honestly presents a perspective on life which is all too common and all too realistic - that is, that life is exceedingly complex and often beyond our understanding of it.  In short, the poet admits to being somewhat stumped about the mystery that life faces us with. The theme is clear, and that theme is that there is no ultimate clarity. Camus drove himself wild looking for such clarity.  

In stanza one the poet recounts how we simply cannot "get the hang of it entirely," and even if we could, we simply would not live long enough to figure it out.  When we listen we often only pick up a fraction of what is said.  Indeed, we readers can add in our minds to this that we often do not see the full picture as we are only granted a certain perspective on events, often from an awkward angle. MacNeice hints at religious and spiritual themes when he says that when sometimes we try to "eavesdrop on the great Presences" we scarcely succeed in that endeavour at all.  

"[S]plash of words" and "falling twigs of song" are two powerful images with the second one blending two totally opposite realities - twigs (physical) and song (immaterial). Love is fleeting, not just the romantic idea of it, but its physical reality, as we are not entirely satisfied in our physical experience of it.  The imagery of "spears" reminds us of Shakespeare's line "to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and the intended meaning of both is the same, namely a battle image to sum up the misfortunes we encounter in our lives. The "yammering fire alarms" are those that are constantly calling out to warm the citizens of London about the fires consequent on enemy attack.  Those bells "banish the Blue Eyes of Love entirely."

The last stanza is as succinct as the other two and points out that it is ludicrous to approach life in a "black and white" manner as there are too many other colours in between the two that manifest themselves through "a prism of delight and pain." Indeed, even the maps we get are not one hundred per cent clear and logical. They are, rather, more than somewhat unclear as they often manifest themselves in actuality as "a mad weir of tigerish waters."  Then there are times that we merely grow bored of trying to find our way through the maze of unclarity that much of life can be. Whatever our reaction to our situation in life is, we can be fully sure that there is "no road that is right entirely."

Finally, the title is a most apt and succinct summary of the poem, that is, that we can never be totally sure entirely. I find this a comforting poem in the down periods of my life as I begin to be less hard on myself as a result of the wisdom garnered here. After all, we will never get everything right entirely. Not even the commentary on this poem.

Poems I Journey With 10

Archibald Macleish

Archibald Macleish (1892-1982) is a major modernist American poet and writer of the twentieth century, and I first discovered him through his critical writings, rather than through his poetry.  I have beside me as I write the first book I bought by him way back in 1978 when I was a mere twenty years of age.  That book is called Poetry and Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961).  I remember being blown away by how easily he communicated to the reader his understanding of what poetry does and is.  In part one of that book, he discusses in a comprehensive way how poems work through sound, sign, image and metaphor.   In the second section of the book, Macleish treats of how what he has discussed in the first section functions in the works of Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud and John Keats.  This book, consequently, would be a wonderful introduction to poetry appreciation for anyone wishing to learn more about how to read and enjoy it.

The Old Men in the Leaf Smoke

The old men rake the yards for winter
burning the autumn-fallen leaves.
They have no lives, the one or the other.
The leaves are dead, the old men live
Only a little, light as a leaf,
Left to themselves of all their loves:
Light in the head most often too.

Raking the leaves, raking the leaves,
Raking life and leaf together,
The old men smell of burning leaves,
But which is which they wonder – whether
Anyone tells the leaves and loves –
Anyone left, that is, who lives.

For me, it is the existential thrust of this poem that engages me as a reader.  I have already alluded to the psychiatrist Dr Irvin Yalom's listing humanity's awareness of its mortality as being one of the four great ultimate concerns in every human being's life.  Raking leaves is a perennial occupation for anyone with trees in their garden.  Growing up, it was one task I loved to do when I visited my country cousins and when I spent some three years as a would-be monk.  This poem uses the leaf as a symbol of the mortality of humanity and for the shortness and beauty of life.  I love the way Macleish speaks of "lives" and "loves" and "leaves" as they are, in effect, slight or partial rhymes as these words share the consonants "l," "v" and "s."  Such felicity of language enchants this reader, simple though this use of words is.

Repetition in the poem gives it a song-like sound.  As a country boy, I can almost smell the burning leaves as I have stood beside many a man burning dead vegetation in my time. Another riveting thing about this poem is its apparent simplicity that somehow draws us into the deeper mystery that life is.  It would seem that life is an amorphous mix of things in unity rather than a collection of random things.  When one rakes a garden one rakes many bits and pieces of vegetation and insect life and mud and clay together in a unity, and that unity in plurality suggests a mysticism at work in Macleish's sensitivity.  And this latter mystical sensibility is all too apparent to the perceptive and open reader.  Let's read the second stanza slowly and meditatively with the thoughts and sensitivities of this paragraph in mind:

Raking the leaves, raking the leaves,

Raking life and leaf together,

The old men smell of burning leaves,

But which is which they wonder – whether

Anyone tells the leaves and loves –

Anyone left, that is, who lives.

Mystically and linguistically leaves and lives and loves are all somehow magically one.  We are one with the poet raking them together as we live. On the one hand, then, this is a sad and depressing poem, and yet, on the other, this is a poem that suggests that we are part of the great cycle of nature, and we are ennobled by being part of it, never lessened, as, after all, we are the ones who do the raking.  We are the ones who do the maintenance on the garden.  We, in our turn, will become old men or old women, as the case may be, and we will surely smell of leaves and loves and lives.  Then, the beauty of the poem is that it does not state too much.  It connotes rather than denotes, and that is a wonderful device at the very heart of poetry.  Mystery, mystique, wonder and magic are always beyond capturing in prose.  They are more readily captured but never subdued or crushed in poetry.  That's why the last stanza defies paraphrase, which is surely anathema to anyone with a poetic sensibility.

Poems I journey With 9

This morning I want to introduce the reader to another favourite poem, this time from the pen of the great twentieth century English poet, W.H. Auden (1907 - 1973) whose work never failed to inspire me and set me thinking.  One of my favourite poems of his is "Musée des Beaux Arts," a short poem that was composed in 1938 and which was published a year later in a newspaper.  The eponymous title of the poem is the museum in question and it is situated in Brussels, Belgium.  The painting is by the Dutch Pieter Brueghel, the Elder (c. 1525 - 1569) and is called "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." (1558)  This is a fairly simple poem and it basically sums up the thoughts and feelings inspired by a viewing of this great painting.  The description is ekphrastic that is it verbally describes all the images that occur in the painting. In short, the poem does "exactly what it says on the tin" or exactly what it says it will do in the title. 

The Painting in question

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I love the opening as it draws the reader in with its inversion of the normal way of saying thimgs as we have to read on to find out who was never wrong about suffering.  Why were they never wrong?  In the second line we know it was the Old Masters, those old painters from the Dutch School.  Those old Masters were never wrong about human suffering.  When one views this painting, according to W.H. Auden, one realises quickly that while someone is suffering (like Icarus hitting the water after flying too close to the sun that caused the wax to melt on his constructed wings) others are blithely going about their daily tasks: like eating, opening a window or "just walking dully along" and so on.  They simply never notice Icarus' suffering and pain. If they never noticed the tragic fall of Icarus to his watery destruction how would they ever notice ours either?  He tells us also that the elderly people amongst us hold out some desperate hope for some miracle to transform their brittle and fragile lives. While these elders amongst us vainly hope, the children play on in their own constructed reality, totally unconcerned and oblivious to all worry and anxiety.  Even a saintly martyr must die on the margins of society. Those who live are too busy going about their daily tasks to note even a martyr's demise: they are just too busy living. 

The young Wystan Hugh Auden

Auden states his conclusion even more clearly as we proceed down through the poem: Brueghel's depiction of poor Icarus' falling from the heights of his hubris to his watery grave shows how uncaringly "everything turns away" from this disaster which is simply sidelined. The ploughman might have heard the splash as Icarus hit the water, but even if he did he chose to ignore it and get on with his work.  The passengers on the nearby ship must surely have noticed this tragic disaster, but again, even if they had, they chose to sail away to wherever they were going.  It would also appear that scenes from other pictures by Brueghel, also hanging in the Musée des Beaux Arts are alluded to in Auden's poem as his lines about people "dully" walking along and the elderly waiting for a miraculous birth and children skating may derive from a painting called "The Numbering of Bethlehem."  Furthermore the following lines:

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

may be inspired by another of Brueghel's paintings, namely, The Massacre of innocents.  In this latter painting, there are indeed dogs and horses.

One of the most pleasing features of this poem is its straight-forward description of life in the various paintings in clear images, that is, what we mean when we use the Greek term "ekphrasis."  Another is its lack of more poetic and formalised language.  However, the most satisfying feature for the present reviewer is Auden's lack of didacticism or direct moralising. The poet is far too authentic an individual to be a self-righteous preacher. Rather, he is making a subtle point as indeed did the Grand Masters who were so right about the human condition.  Humans really don't so much care about the fate of their fellow men and women insofar as they have to get on with their own concerns to eek out a living and survive. In this context, it is interesting to underscore the fact that this poem was written about a year before the outbreak of the Second World War.  One might not be too far from the truth to guess that the poet was picking up the international feeling of this lack of concern for the welfare of others. To my mind, this is a well-structured poem with considerable poise and delicacy shown by its oblique criticism of mid-twentieth century humanity.

Poems I Journey With 8

Back in the good old days we had to learn many poems off by heart as learning by rote was still in the ascendant in the mid-seventies of the last century. Ireland has given birth to legions of poets, and the author I am celebrating here tonight, one Patrick Kavanagh remarked that at any one time our country could boast of a standing army of some 10,000 poets. W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella and Austin Clarke were the four major Irish poets we studied at school. Tonight I want to discuss Patrick Kavanagh's great poem "Stony Grey Soil" which we studied for our Leaving Certificate.

Patrick Kavanagh

Stony Grey Soil

O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.

You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick-tongued mumble.

You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life-conquering plough!
The mandril stained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.

You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of cowards' brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food

You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!

Lost the long hours of pleasure
All the women that love young men.
O can I still stroke the monster's back
Or write with unpoisoned pen

His name in these lonely verses
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant's prayer.

Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco -
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.

Commentary

Rare colour photo of Patrick Kavanagh

We all at one time or another have a love-hate relationship with the city,  town, village, townland or countryside where we were born.  We are never happy with our progress in life and we often blame our native place for the singular lack of opportunity it offered us as young people.  We also, of course, blame our family of origin which is naturally enough specifically rooted in our birthplace.  When I studied the Irish Gaelic language we were told that the great Irish Gaelic poet Seán Ó Ríordáin had a propensity to compose compound words or "chomhfhocail" as we called them in that language.  Kavanagh uses a similar technique in his poems by using his own compound or hyphenated words, viz., "clod-conceived," "thick-tongued" and "green-life-conquering." I especially liked, as a youngster studying this poem, Kavanagh's use of the literary devices of personification (where his Monaghan farm home is addressed directly as a person) and apostrophe (addressing someone or something that is simply not there in front of one). Also "Stony Grey Soil" is written in a form somewhat akin to that of the ballad as the poem contains stanzas of four lines each even though Kavanagh does not stick rigidly to the rhyming schemes of the traditional ballad.

However, for me the strongest feature of this poem, as of virtually all of Kavanagh's poetry, is the strength or force of his simple and direct imagery. Such strong imagery is evidenced practically in very line and indeed in the very title which occurs as a repeated line that has the effect of a chorus of lament.  A list of images is always easy to make in any poem by our author: "stony-grey soil," "gay child of my passion," "clod-conceived," "clogged," "stumble,"  "stride of Apollo," the named parts of the plough, "lea-field" and so on.  I shall not bore the reader with listing them for the whole poem as he or she can easily do that for themselves.

This poem is steeped in regret for his lost opportunities as a poet and as a human being since as a young man he dedicated himself to the land rather than to his métier as a poet or as a lover or suitor for young women.  The poem then becomes a lament for his predicament, that is, having wasted his youth.  That sentiment is stated very strongly and bitterly in the following lines packed with clear imagery:

O stony grey soil of Monaghan

You burgled my bank of youth!

I also particularly love the traditional format and nature of this poem.  It was long a tradition in Irish Gaelic poems to list off the names of townlands and towns as in the tradition of the "dindshenchus" as is exemplified in the final stanza.

Again, there are references to religion, God, but not the Church as in the following five lines:

Or write with unpoisoned pen

His name in these lonely verses

Or mention the dark fields where

The first gay flight of my lyric

Got caught in a peasant's prayer.

It is the "peasant's prayer" or natural or instinctive spirituality that appeals to Kavanagh. That is at once Pagan Celtic as well as Catholic or Christian.  Then there is the paradox that exists at the very heart of life, namely "dark fields" that might suggest something profoundly ungrounding and unnerving like the "dark night of the soul" and yet it is placed side by side with "the gay flight of his lyric" that somehow was caught up in a peasant's prayer rather than a poet's book of promise.

Finally the line "Dead loves that were born for me" is distinctly depressing and profoundly disturbing.  That the ballad format is used for this poem is also good as it is able to carry the lament and regret from his misspent youth and the lost opportunities he might have had, had he been luckier in life. 

Poems I Journey With 7

1. I remember one of my former students once exclaiming "Huh, families!" in quiet desperation. He had simply felt smothered by his.  On another occasion I remember an older colleague remarking about his first marriage that he had married a family not an individual. Freud spoke about the Oedipus Complex, that is, his theory, the validity of which is often hotly debated still, that there is a complex of emotions aroused in a young child, typically around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and a wish to exclude the parent of the same sex. (He had applied the term originally to boys but Jung and others applied the term also to girls and designated it by a new title, namely the Electra Complex.) However, let's not get too bogged down in terminology for its own sake. What I simply wish to point out here is how complex the relationships within any one family are in actuality.  As we grow up we initially model ourselves on our same-sex parents, then we begin to pit one against the other, and as we further age we begin to grow away from them as we enter our adolescent years and finally we then break to a greater or lesser extent those ties that bind us to our family of origin as we form new families of our own.  All of this intense relational interaction causes a complexity of joy and pain, little clarity and much confusion for all concerned.  However, that is the price we must pay for growing up.

   
   

   Having given this brief introduction to the complexity of our inter-relationships within our families of origin, I wish to present the reader with two poems in which the respective authors look back rather critically on how their parents reared them.  As many have often remarked parenthood is often simply thrust upon us by necessity, rather than by foresight or planning and that it is one task for which none of us has really ever been properly prepared in the first place.  I remember when I was in my late teens arguing with my mother and saying to her in a fit of anger that I had never asked to be born. Indeed, it was a dreadful thing to say, and had I even thought about it I would have realised that neither had she either.  Indeed, recently I was sitting with some friends looking at some little birds feeding at a seed feeder in a garden when a magpie came up and chased the little ones away.  My friend Mia remarked that the magpie while a somewhat ugly and repulsive bird was "just another of God's creatures that had never asked to be born." Here I was reminded of Heidegger's phrase that we humans experience a sense of "dasein" or "thrownness" into existence. Indeed, for me this is exactly what my friend Mia was expressing.  The two poems I offer the reader in today's poetic reflection are poems that speak essentially about that existential condition of our thrownness (random as it is) into existence.  No wonder the first action of any child is to cry out in fear at the feeling of new being in an alien world.

   
   

   Our first poem is called "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin (1922-1985), a poem which I have seen used quite profitably in a counselling session and "Sorry" by R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)  They are two poems that are very provocative and necessarily so, as we often need to be confronted by such reality! I believe they have much to teach us insofar as they may help us come to grips with ourselves and our relationships with our mothers and with our fathers. I will offer them below as a diptych without commentary by way of comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable.

   

   Philip Larkin, librarian and poet 

   
   

                                     This Be The Verse

                                         Philip Larkin

   
   

   They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

   They may not mean to, but they do.

   They fill you with the faults they had

   And add some extra, just for you.

   
   

   But they were fucked up in their turn

   By fools in old-style hats and coats,

   Who half the time were soppy-stern

   And half at one another’s throats.

   
   

   Man hands on misery to man.

   It deepens like a coastal shelf.

   Get out as early as you can,

   And don’t have any kids yourself.

   
   

   Sorry

   R.S. Thomas

   
   

   Dear parents,

   I forgive you my life,

   Begotten in a drab town,
   The intention was good;
   Passing the street now,
   I see still the remains of sunlight.
   
   It was not the bone buckled;
   You gave me enough food
   To renew myself.
   It was the mind's weight
   Kept me bent, as I grew tall.
   
   It was not your fault.
   What should have gone on,
   Arrow aimed from a tried bow
   At a tried target, has turned back,
   Wounding itself
   With questions you had not asked.
2. 
   
3. 
   

   

   R.S. Thomas

4. 
   
5. 
   
6. 
   

Poems I Journey With 6

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) from early on became one of my favourite poets.  Firstly, as a young boy and as a teenager I was always fascinated with wars, especially World War 1 and World War II, not from the military point of view solely, but primarily because of the havoc it had wrought on the world through the destruction of human life and property on such a vast scale.  Such wanton destruction on such unprecedented scales amazed and astounded me. That humanity veered so quickly and so spontaneously towards war, rather than engaging in political debate and conflict resolution was also an intriguing feature that seemed to suggest that there was something rather corrupt that stank to high heaven within the human make-up.  Then, I discovered the War Poets from both world wars, and those from the first of these wars were the more moving for me as that war in particular involved  the first widespread use of machine guns, air power, submarine operations, armoured vehicles, bigger and more powerful guns and the use of poison gas and, of course, the mad rush of opposing troops against each other across NO-MAN'S-LAND, all of which led the poets to describe the horrors of war in such graphic detail that I was hooked forever and still moved, often to tears, by their words and images.  To them we owe a great debt of gratitude for highlighting these horrors.  Wilfred Owen was only 25 when he was killed on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal exactly a week before the signing of the Armistice that ended the War.  In a rather ironic twist of fate, his poor mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day just as the bells rang out in jubilation at the cessation of hostilities.  He is buried at Ors Communal Cemetery.

Lieutenant W. Owen

Owen is the foremost poet of the Great War and his poems are much anthologized. Therefore, I will not publish any of his more popular ones hereunder as the reader will be almost too familiar with them.  Instead, I will quote here another powerful, but less well known poem from his pen:

The Parable of The Young Man and The Old

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one. 

Wilfred Owen

There is no need for commentary on this wonderful little poem save to say that it is crafted with care and based on the famous Old Testament story of God's command to Abraham to slay his son Isaac by way of offering to appease Him.  Those of us, au fait with mythology will know that such an image of God as a rather cruel task-master, who seemingly has no concern for morality as He is somehow beyond all such standards of proper behaviour, will realize that this is pure story, a story with a moral or a message - a story composed by priests or scribes simply to teach us lessons.  The lesson here is simply that God often tests our loyalty in strange and even cruel ways.  Whatever about Old Testament times the twentieth century unleashed the wrath of a most bloody God or Gods - Gods of greed and hate and vengeance - that slew "half the seed of Europe, one by one."  As an officer, the young Lieutenant Owen would have witnessed so much bloodshed and so many horrible deaths of his soldier comrades that it must have surely felt that some bloodthirsty gods somewhere were slaying the young men of Europe one by one.  This is not one of his famous poems, but I feel it is beautifully written, and most solemnly so as it practically repeats the beautiful English of the King James Bible and interweaves in the story images from the horrors of the First World War: "fire and iron," "belts and straps" (soldiers would have had many of these about their uniforms) and "parapets and trenches."  However, it is the last two lines that are the most effective for me as they sum up the horrors of the Great War:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.