So farewell, then,
Sir David Frost.
Now that you have
Died, I thought
I would write
A silly poem about
You.
And, no doubt, soon
There’ll also be
One in the Eye.
Keith’s Mum says
She used to like
Breakfast with Frost.
But I’ve never been
All that keen
On Frosties.
by Peter Coles (aged 50 ¼).
Follow @telescoperI sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying–
He had always taken funerals in his stride–
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble,’
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
by Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)
Follow @telescoperI heard a reading of this poem on BBC Radio 3 last night and couldn’t resist posting it here. It’s by Suffolk poet George Crabbe and it came up in the context of a programme about poetry and the music of Benjamin Britten. That gives me the opportunity to plug an anthology of the poems Britten set to music, which is available from the excellent Carcanet Press. Last time I plugged one of their books on here they sent me a free copy. Fingers crossed.
Crabbe is probably most famous for his lengthy work The Borough, part of which features a character called Peter Grimes. It was that work that inspired Britten to write the opera of that name, a true masterpiece if ever there was one.
I didn’t know until yesterday evening that Britten had written other pieces based on Crabbe’s poetry, so it was a pleasant surprise to hear this one, which became one of the Five Flower Songs (Op. 47). It stands on its own, however, as a wonderfully dry piece of comic verse, the plodding meter perfectly conveying the uninspiring nature of the fenland flora described by the text. It’s also full of clever touches, such as the alliteration in Line 4 “sickly scent is seen”.
Here the strong mallow strikes her slimy root,
Here the dull nightshade hangs her deadly fruit:
On hills of dust the henbane’s faded green,
And pencil’d flower of sickly scent is seen.
Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,
Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume.
At the wall’s base the fiery nettle springs
With fruit globose and fierce with poison’d stings;
In every chink delights the fern to grow,
With glossy leaf and tawny bloom below;
The few dull flowers that o’er the place are spread
Partake the nature of their fenny bed.
These, with our sea-weeds rolling up and down,
Form the contracted Flora of our town.
by George Crabbe (1754-1832).
Follow @telescoperNot many people know that William Shakespeare was an enthusiastic supporter of hydraulic fracturing with scant regard for those who protest against it. His views are most clearly represented in the famous Balcombe speech in Act III, Scene 2 of King Lear:
Go drills and frack for weeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our lentils, drown’d the spliffs!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to tree-hugging dunderheads,
Singe my dread locks! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Frack nature’s moulds, all toxins spill at once
That make ingrateful man!
Years ago, at a private school
Run on traditional lines,
One fellow used to perform
Prodigious feats in the dorm;
His quite undevious designs
Found many a willing tool.
On the rugger field, in the gym,
Buck marked down at his leisure
The likeliest bits of stuff;
The notion, familiar enough,
Of ‘using somebody for pleasure’
Seemed handy and harmless to him.
But another chap was above
The diversions of such a lout;
Seven years in the place
And he never got to first base
With the kid he followed about:
What interested Ralph was love.
He did the whole thing in style –
Letters three times a week,
Sonnet-sequences, Sunday walks;
Then, during one of their talks,
The youngster caressed his cheek,
And that made it all worth while.
These days, for a quid pro quo,
Ralph’s chum does what, and with which;
Buck’s playmates, family men,
Eye a Boy Scout now and then.
Sex is a momentary itch,
Love never lets you go.
by Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)
Follow @telescoperDeath be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure: then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
by John Donne (1572-1631).
Follow @telescoperSince I’m in Germany I thought I’d have a look around for a poem related to the area I’m staying in at the moment. I found this, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have the feeling he didn’t particularly enjoy his visit to the fine city of Cologne…
In Kohln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavements fang’d with murderous stones
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye Nymphs that reign o’er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Follow @telescoperAll the flowers of the spring
Meet to perfume our burying;
These have but their growing prime,
And man does flourish but his time:
Survey our progress from our birth;
We are set, we grow, we turn to earth.
Courts adieu, and all delights,
All bewitching appetites!
Sweetest breath and clearest eye,
Like perfumes, go out and die;
And consequently this is done
As shadows wait upon the sun.
Vain ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
by John Webster (c. 1580- c. 1634)
Follow @telescoperI
I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.
O see the pulse of summer in the ice.
II
But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There, in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
We are the dark deniers let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp
And from the planted womb the man of straw.
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds’ iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies
Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry,
O see the poles of promise in the boys.
III
I see you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man in his maggot’s barren.
And boys are full and foreign to the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Follow @telescoperThink twice
and then don’t
Zero tolerance
that’s me
Step out of line
and I’ll have you
sprawled in the dust
as the warning shot
screams past your ear
into the gloves
A sniper’s brain
a hair-trigger arm
Take me on?
Make my day
by Simon Rae
Follow @telescoper
In the Dark 