My favourite poems VI: Seamus Heaney

Another poem. I've read many attempts to analyse this, mostly concluding that it's about the need not to be sentimental when living in the country. I think that rather ignores the blindingly obvious hint of the title. You don't purge animals, you purge people. You start with small cruelties and you end up herding children into gas chambers.

The Early Purges 

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

  Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
  Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
  Of the pump and the water pumped in.

'Sure, isn't it better for them now?' Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

  Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
  Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
  Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens' necks.

  Still, living displaces false sentiments
  And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
  I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:

'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Seamus Heaney

My Favourite Poems V: R S Thomas

It's Sunday so why not have a poem by a vicar? This is not the most complimentary poem about the land of my mothers, but it does sum up what I've been intensely aware of, ever since I moved back here in 1983.

Welsh Landscape

To live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went into the making of the wild sky,

Dyeing the immaculate rivers

In all their courses.

It is to be aware,

Above the noisy tractor

And hum of the machine

Of strife in the strung woods,

Vibrant with sped arrows.

You cannot live in the present,

At least not in Wales.

There is the language for instance,

The soft consonants

Strange to the ear.

There are cries in the dark at night

As owls answer the moon,

And thick ambush of shadows,

Hushed at the fields' corners.

There is no present in Wales,

And no future;

There is only the past,

Brittle with relics,

Wind-bitten towers and castles

With sham ghosts;

Mouldering quarries and mines;

And an impotent people,

Sick with inbreeding,

Worrying the carcase of an old song.

R S Thomas

My favourite poems IV: George Herbert

I am not religious. I don't pray. I know a lot of Christians who do and I'm not sure what they get out of it. Sometimes it seems to be a shopping list of requirements, sometimes a request for an answer confirming what they've already decided, sometimes a buttering up of a strangely narcissistic God, sometimes just ritual. George Herbert managed to come up with a definition that makes it far more meaningful. And I love the way the poem is just a string of mystical metaphors.
I'll post this one today, because this, of all days, needs all the prayers going as the doors slam shut.

Prayer 

Prayer the Church’s banquet, angels’ age,
  God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
  The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;
Engine against the Almighty, sinner’s tower,
  Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days-world-transposing in an hour,
  A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
  Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
  The milky way, the bird of paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
  The land of spices; something understood.

George Herbert

My favourite poems III: escape

Another poem, which everyone knows. If, like me, you are sitting for hours on a hard hospital chair, waiting for a bed to become available for your mother, the thought of being anywhere else at all is wonderful.
It also taught me how to use rhythm to paint a picture.
I do wonder, though, how a rowed ship owned by Nineveh (access Persian Gulf) can make it from Ophir (possibly Sri Lanka or Red sea port) to Palestine (Mediterranean) before the building of the Suez canal. This sort of thing worries me.

Cargoes

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

John Masefield

My Favourite Poems II

Here's another poem, which is an entire Dystopian/Utopian novel in miniature, by Edwin Muir. Very green.

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
Edwin Muir

My favourite poems I

I'm going to share my favourite poems, just because I feel like it.

This one, because I spent a particularly beautiful day in Laugharne this year, although I saw no herons or cockle-women. And I am long past being thirty.

POEM IN OCTOBER

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron 

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In a rainy autumn

And walked abroad in shower of all my days

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

Over the border

And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill's shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

To the rain wringing

Wind blow cold

In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel

My birthday

Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

Streamed again a wonder of summer

With apples

Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

Through the parables

Of sunlight

And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

These were the woods the river and the sea

Where a boy

In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery

Sang alive

Still in the water and singing birds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart's truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year's turning.

Dylan Thomas

How to be King of the World

Right, as it’s the eve of Doomsday, I’ll just get this out of my system: my analysis of what has happened in Britain – not just on December 12th, or in 2016, but since 1979. Or even since 1918 when Britain officially became a democracy.

Democracy is usually defined as One Man (person) One Vote, but Abraham Lincoln offered an alternative definition: government of the people, by the people, for the people. Government by the people means the people being involved in government, playing an active part in decisions, confronting problems, dealing with them and seeing through the consequences. That requires a lot more involvement than putting a cross on a piece of paper once every four or five years. If the people start demanding to be involved in government on a day to day basis, what do you do about it if you are someone who thinks they should stay in their place and leave the decisions to properly qualified people like you?

Once upon a time, back at the start of the 19th century, our parliamentary-based government was in the hands of two parties, the Whigs and the Tories. To be grossly simplistic, the Whigs represented the free-thinking, disgracefully dissolute aristocracy and the Tories represented the respectable conservative squirearchy. Either way, they represented the property-owning classes because it was taken for granted that only those with property could have a proper and responsible interest in the government of the Kingdom. The landless labouring classes were regarded as a dangerous mob who would unleash anarchy unless controlled with an iron hand. If they were good and loyal, they would be visited with bowls of gruel when they were old and sick.

Then through the 19th century, things changed. The driving force of the economy moved from land-ownership to industry and trade and the franchise began to expand bit by bit until, in 1918, democracy in the form of One Man (and some women) One Vote was established. The Tories couldn’t really come to terms with this for decades. Not only were the lower orders now excepting to be allowed into polling booths, they were even expecting to be actively involved in government. They had the temerity to form their own political party and to join unions demanding a say in the economy. The country finished up with swathes of rural counties painted pure blue Tory and swathes of industrial areas painted socialist red and just a handful of swing seats in between.

Nothing was going to change until Thatcher came on the scene. She beheld the swathes of red, which were an irritant to her, and set about destroying them.

First step, obliterate the mining, steel, ship-building, motor industries, which had given those red communities their identity, with seemingly secure, highly skilled, comparatively well-paid, highly unionised jobs. Replace with financial services in The City that make vast fortunes for a few yobs in red braces. In the process, unions are demolished, helped along by legislation, so that instead of an organised labour force, ready to fight for its own, people are left on the dole or in a dog-eat-dog fight for low-paid, non-unionised jobs stacking shelves in supermarkets.

To add to the collapse of communal unity, whip up a general contempt for anyone claiming social security, even though 99% have no choice. Label them social scroungers. Broadcast stories of their dissolute laziness. Get neighbours and one-time comrades informing on each other as social security cheats.

Sell the idea that you are the hero of the common man by telling them they can buy their council houses. A property-owning democracy. Even today you can hear Tory politicians regurgitating the eighteenth century idea that property ownership gives people a stake in society. (No, actually we all have a stake in society, even if we don’t even own the cardboard box we shelter in.) The home ceases to be a place of shelter, warmth and security where families can be raised, and becomes a financial asset on a property ladder that must be climbed if anyone is to have any self-respect. Of course everyone wants to buy their own home. Everyone also nurses a hope of making a fortune by a nifty property deal. Help it all along with an end to rent control, allowing private landlords to charge fortunes for ramshackle shoeboxes, and forbid councils to build new social housing. Get everyone scrabbling for property that is skyrocketing in value. Skyrocketing, that is, in prosperous areas where there are jobs, but stuck at rock-bottom in the areas that have been eviscerated by the destruction of industry. There, property doesn’t sell, and even if a buyer is found, the price won't even to cover a deposit in the South East, so how do they move? They don’t. They are abandoned in their hopelessness. Add the final touch by portraying tenants of social housing as the criminal riff-raff at the bottom of the heap. Come up with terms like ‘sink estate.’ Ensure that ‘council house tenant’ can only be pronounced with a sneering curl of the lip.

As you have kept property prices low in those old Red areas, where better to dump desperate immigrants? Push them into areas where everyone else is already unemployed and hopeless. The benefit of this is that the people whose communities you have destroyed will now see the immigrants, fighting for the same jobs, housing and run-down services, as the enemy and the source of all their woes. Encourage mindless racism. Continue to mouth the stock line that Britain is renowned for its tolerance and open-minded generosity, while stoking up the underlying flames of intolerance and xenophobic meanness.

Your banker friends create a world-wide financial crisis. Deal with it by heaping all the pain onto the unemployed, the poor, the disabled – everyone living in the old Red areas. Reduce them to desperation. Don’t forget to say “We’re all in it together” as they go to the food banks and you order a delivery from Waitrose.

Since people are general pissed-off and angry, build on the racist resentment by pointing out that everything that’s gone wrong in their communities has happened since we joined the EEC/EU. Persuade them that it’s not the Tories who have destroyed their world but the wicked faceless bureaucrats of Brussels. And then, ta-ra! Use their anger to persuade them to vote Leave in a referendum that they are sure to see, primarily, as an opportunity to scream their rage.

The nation has spent centuries and countless gallons of blood fighting against despotic tyranny and for the rule of law and Parliamentary sovereignty. Tell the people that leaving the EU will restore powers to our own Parliament and to our courts. Take Back Control!!! (they like nice simple three-word chants). But then convince them that our Parliament and our courts are actually the enemy of the people and should be discarded or at least muzzled, leaving power solely in the hands of the government. Whatever you do, don’t remind them that they don't actually elect their Prime Minister.

Throughout all this, bear in mind that old trade unions used to set great store on education. Working men’s institutes and libraries encouraged questions, thought and discussion, but you will have changed the notion of education from being about expansion of the mind to a course of training designed solely to meet the requirements of employers. Education is not to be about thinking, analysing and understanding but about getting the necessary qualifications that will, just possibly, fend off the chaos and humiliation of Universal Credit.

Now you are in a position to wind the clock right back to the Eighteenth century. Persuade the angry plebs that they can say yes or no in a referendum but they really don’t want to have bother themselves with the consequences or search for genuine solutions. Leave that to the entitled classes, educated at Eton and equipped to understand these matters. If they vote for jolly old Boris, they’ll never have to worry about the fate of the country again. All this talking is just doing their heads in, isn’t it? They don’t want to hear any more discussion about the pros and cons of Brexit. If they simply give up all their last hundred years of struggle and vote Tory, they can get back to watching football and worrying over which Celeb is doing what with whom, or whatever it is that Common People do. They can leave the boring details of our fate to that rather amusing Bullingdon wag, whose only ambition is to be king of the world, and his clever minder, who doesn’t give a damn about anything but who knows how to play politics like a computer game bent on conquering citadels and and killing enemies by fair means or foul.

And there you have it. You have persuaded the people you’ve been kicking in the teeth for the last forty years to put you back where you belong, running the country. In fact, at this rate, you can probably dispense with holding another general election. Like Brenda of Bristol, they don’t really want to be bothered with all that stuff.

Lastly, don’t forget to say that you now intend to unite the country. This will be easy. You will already have established that everything you do is The Will of the People. No need to mention that it’s at best the will of only half the people. You will already have defined the other half as Intellectual Liberal Metropolitan Elitists. Just round up all Remainers in a cultural revolution and ship them off to political re-education camps where they can be quietly disappeared.

Oh, and if you want to boast about having a Tory MP presiding over the next Durham Miners’ Gala, learn how to pronounce Durham Miners’ Gala.