Six Poets Read online

  Still, life has a terrible way of imitating art, and during the war, Housman’s college, Trinity, was turned into a hospital, so his daily life came to be peopled by the kind of young men he had written about, but whose endings weren’t so quick or so clean. Other dons made them welcome. Housman just complained of the inconvenience. It was all a bit too close to home. The imagination was better, the landscape of the heart more real and more comfortable than the landscape of the trenches.

  Tell me not here

  (from Last Poems)

  Tell me not here, it needs not saying,

  What tune the enchantress plays

  In aftermaths of soft September

  Or under blanching mays,

  For she and I were long acquainted

  And I knew all her ways.

  On russet floors, by waters idle,

  The pine lets fall its cone;

  The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing

  In leafy dells alone;

  And traveller’s joy beguiles in autumn

  Hearts that have lost their own.

  On acres of the seeded grasses

  The changing burnish heaves;

  Or marshalled under moons of harvest

  Stand still all night the sheaves;

  Or beeches strip in storms for winter

  And stain the wind with leaves.

  Possess, as I possessed a season,

  The countries I resign,

  Where over elmy plains the highway

  Would mount the hills and shine,

  And full of shade the pillared forest

  Would murmur and be mine.

  For nature, heartless, witless nature,

  Will neither care nor know

  What stranger’s feet may find the meadow

  And trespass there and go,

  Nor ask amid the dews of morning

  If they are mine or no.

  Housman’s punctiliousness extended to nature as well as to scholarship, and each spring he would note the date that the cherries blossomed in the Cambridge Backs. Some of the trees that blossom there now are trees that Housman saw planted.

  Loveliest of trees

  (from A Shropshire Lad)

  Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

  Is hung with bloom along the bough,

  And stands about the woodland ride

  Wearing white for Eastertide.

  Now, of my threescore years and ten,

  Twenty will not come again,

  And take from seventy springs a score,

  It only leaves me fifty more.

  And since to look at things in bloom

  Fifty springs are little room,

  About the woodlands I will go

  To see the cherry hung with snow.

  Cambridge’s famous poet could be seen every afternoon taking a walk by one of his regular routes, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and should any acquaintance dare to acknowledge him, they would be steadfastly ignored. At one time, the philosopher Wittgenstein had rooms on the same staircase as Housman lived (as indeed did the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt). Wittgenstein was one day taken short, knocked at Housman’s door and asked to use the lavatory. Housman just looked at him, said, ‘Certainly not,’ and closed the door. It’s almost comic, his determination not to be liked.

  And yet he enjoyed his celebrity, knowing that heads turned as he passed and saying of his fame that it was like a cushion between him and the hard ground. Of course, his admirers were not expected to approach him. Anyone who took the poems to be messages in code or flags of distress and, on the strength of them, plucked up courage to address what they took to be the real man, the author of A Shropshire Lad, found themselves sharply rebuffed. And why not? If he could have revealed the ‘real’ man, he would hardly have written the poems.

  We like to think that artists have a bad time and that this is the price they pay for being able to write their poems and/or their novels. So this seemingly dried-up husk of a man cherishing the memory of a lost love confirms some vague assumptions we have about suffering and art.

  I’m not sure this is true. Housman certainly had a better time than his poems let on. He travelled a good deal, went regularly to France – courageously, for that time, by aeroplane – and was rather vain of this daredevil side to his character. He liked tempting fate, and often ran up the several flights of stairs to his room in the hope that he might have a heart attack when he got to the top. Nor was he the ascetic his appearance suggested. Liking good food, he would go on gastronomic tours of France, nosing out in unsuspected corners the remnants of great cellars. And he may have had the occasional fling there, life not quite the sexual Sahara his poems suggest. One should not be surprised if he didn’t sometimes grow weary of his thralldom to what was now just a memory. The inner life has its routines and they can be every bit as tedious and irksome as those of the outer life. The grave began to seem a release from love as much as from life.

  Crossing alone

  (from More Poems)

  Crossing alone the nighted ferry

  With the one coin for fee,

  Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,

  Count you to find? Not me.

  The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,

  The true, sick-hearted slave,

  Expect him not in the just city

  And free land of the grave.

  The next poem is Housman at his very best: clear-eyed, unsentimental, having no truck with God or conventional morality and, in a poem that is full of echoes of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, having no patience with either.

  Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

  (from Last Poems)

  These, in the day when heaven was falling,

  The hour when earth’s foundations fled,

  Followed their mercenary calling

  And took their wages and are dead.

  Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

  They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;

  What God abandoned, these defended,

  And saved the sum of things for pay.

  There are in all of us the remnants of another morality, a persistent rival to Christian and conventional ethics, in which honour, loyalty and pride outweigh modesty and self-denial. It’s the morality that prevails in gangster movies and in the western, and the point of Housman’s poem is immediately familiar if we set it in the American West and substitute for the mercenaries the reluctant gunslinger and the town lecher. Despised by the respectable (but cowardly) churchgoing homesteaders, these two social outcasts get together with the drunken doctor and shoot it out with the cattle gang who are holding the town to ransom. It is morality far from its official haunts, an ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’ but also Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

  While Housman’s poems are autobiographical, his landscapes are the landscapes of the heart. Although the ‘blue remembered hills’ of the next poem can be identified with the Malverns, they are symbols of a lost time rather than a lost place.

  Into my heart an air that kills

  (from A Shropshire Lad)

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  Once there had been another Housman: good at parody and light verse; even fun, as Lewis Carroll had been fun. Occasionally this surfaces, if rather mordantly, in the poems. In ‘Is my team ploughing’, Housman has a sour joke at the expense of the departed lover.

  Is my team ploughing

  (from A Shropshire Lad)

  ‘Is my team ploughing,

  That I was used to drive

  And hear the harness jingle

  When I was man alive?’

  Ay, the horses trample,
/>   The harness jingles now;

  No change though you lie under

  The land you used to plough.

  ‘Is football playing

  Along the river shore,

  With lads to chase the leather,

  Now I stand up no more?’

  Ay, the ball is flying,

  The lads play heart and soul;

  The goal stands up, the keeper

  Stands up to keep the goal.

  ‘Is my girl happy,

  That I thought hard to leave,

  And has she tired of weeping

  As she lies down at eve?’

  Ay, she lies down lightly,

  She lies not down to weep:

  Your girl is well contented.

  Be still, my lad, and sleep.

  ‘Is my friend hearty,

  Now I am thin and pine,

  And has he found to sleep in

  A better bed than mine?’

  Yes, lad, I lie easy,

  I lie as lads would choose;

  I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,

  Never ask me whose.

  If you don’t conform in one thing, you must conform in all the others – and Housman had conformed. And yet this drab little man – who still affected the Norfolk jacket and elastic-sided boots and little cap he had worn when he was young – was a pervert, an iconoclast and a blasphemer. Ruthless as an editor, he was pitiless as a critic and contemptuous of all honour and praise. He refused the Order of Merit, and of a colleague who said of him that he was the greatest living Latin scholar, Housman said, ‘Well, if I were, he would not know it.’ That was one of his voices. But we end with the other.

  When summer’s end is nighing

  (from Last Poems)

  When summer’s end is nighing

  And skies at evening cloud,

  I muse on change and fortune

  And all the feats I vowed

  When I was young and proud.

  The weathercock at sunset

  Would lose the slanted ray,

  And I would climb the beacon

  That looked to Wales away

  And saw the last of day.

  From hill and cloud and heaven

  The hues of evening died;

  Night welled through lane and hollow

  And hushed the countryside,

  But I had youth and pride.

  And I with earth and nightfall

  In converse high would stand,

  Late, till the west was ashen

  And darkness hard at hand,

  And the eye lost the land.

  The year might age, and cloudy

  The lessening day might close,

  But air of other summers

  Breathed from beyond the snows,

  And I had hope of those.

  They came and were and are not

  And come no more anew;

  And all the years and seasons

  That ever can ensue

  Must now be worse and few.

  So here’s an end of roaming

  On eves when autumn nighs:

  The ear too fondly listens

  For summer’s parting sighs,

  And then the heart replies.

  John Betjeman

  1906–1984

  John Betjeman was born in North London, the only child of affluent parents. He was educated at Marlborough and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his friends included Auden and MacNeice. He left without taking a degree. At twenty-five, he began writing for the Architectural Review and, throughout his life, held passionate views about architecture. Other freelance work included the Shell Guides on Cornwall and Devon and film criticism for the London Evening Standard (he later described himself in Who’s Who as ‘a poet and a hack’). His first collection of verse, Mount Zion, appeared in 1931, followed by collections including New Bats in Old Belfries, A Few Late Chrysanthemums, A Nip in the Air, High and Low and his blank-verse autobiography Summoned by Bells. His Collected Poems were published in 1958, the first edition selling over 100,000 copies. He was knighted in 1969 and appointed Poet Laureate in 1972. He died in Cornwall in 1984.

  Hunter Trials

  It’s awf’lly bad luck on Diana,

  Her ponies have swallowed their bits;

  She fished down their throats with a spanner

  And frightened them all into fits.

  So now she’s attempting to borrow.

  Do lend her some bits, Mummy, do;

  I’ll lend her my own for to-morrow,

  But to-day I’ll be wanting them too.

  Just look at Prunella on Guzzle,

  The wizardest pony on earth;

  Why doesn’t she slacken his muzzle

  And tighten the breech in his girth?

  I say, Mummy, there’s Mrs Geyser

  And doesn’t she look pretty sick?

  I bet it’s because Mona Lisa

  Was hit on the hock with a brick.

  Miss Blewitt says Monica threw it,

  But Monica says it was Joan,

  And Joan’s very thick with Miss Blewitt,

  So Monica’s sulking alone.

  And Margaret failed in her paces,

  Her withers got tied in a noose,

  So her coronets caught in the traces

  And now all her fetlocks are loose.

  Oh, it’s me now. I’m terribly nervous.

  I wonder if Smudges will shy.

  She’s practically certain to swerve as

  Her Pelham is over one eye.

  Oh wasn’t it naughty of Smudges?

  Oh, Mummy, I’m sick with disgust.

  She threw me in front of the Judges,

  And my silly old collarbone’s bust.

  Writers like to elude their public, lead them a bit of a dance. They take them down untrodden paths, land them in unknown country where they have to ask for directions. Most of the poets in the thirties did that, but not Betjeman. He’s always accessible. And, of course, it’s a bit of a shock to find that he is a thirties poet, just a few months older than Auden, who to his credit was always one of Betjeman’s champions. Not that he needed much championing, at any rate in the second part of his life. His verse has an immediate appeal, and as a result he’s probably the best-known and the most successful English poet this last century.

  It could be said that this was because of television, on which Betjeman was a frequent and indeed an eager performer – but not entirely. Larkin had no truck with television, and when he died the regret and affection for him matched that for Betjeman. Both of them were, of course, very English and wrote straightforward poetry that didn’t need much exposition. But it’s also the case that poetry, though we don’t learn it by heart nowadays and though there is no poetic equivalent of the Booker Prize, still has magic, and seems magical. If their verse chimes in with common experience, poets can still capture the nation’s imagination – as, quite apart from his showmanship, Betjeman did.

  Much of his verse is backward-looking. As Auden and his friends turned to the proletariat and the future, Betjeman looked back to Victorian and Edwardian models (as, in a different way, did Evelyn Waugh). But why not? Poets don’t have to be prophets. The following poem is one of Betjeman’s earliest, written in 1930.

  Death in Leamington

  She died in the upstairs bedroom

  By the light of the ev’ning star

  That shone through the plate glass window

  From over Leamington Spa.

  Beside her the lonely crochet

  Lay patiently and unstirred,

  But the fingers that would have work’d it

  Were dead as the spoken word.

  And Nurse came in with the tea-things

  Breast high ’mid stands and chairs –

  But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,

  And the things were alone with theirs.

  She bolted the big round window,

  She let the blinds unroll,

  She set a match to the mant
le,

  She covered the fire with coal.

  And ‘Tea!’ she said in a tiny voice

  ‘Wake up! It’s nearly five.’

  Oh! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,

  Half dead and half alive!

  Do you know that the stucco is peeling?

  Do you know that the heart will stop?

  From those yellow Italianate arches

  Do you hear the plaster drop?

  Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,

  At the grey, decaying face,

  As the calm of the Leamington ev’ning

  Drifted into the place.

  She moved the table of bottles

  Away from the bed to the wall;

  And tiptoeing gently over the stairs

  Turned down the gas in the hall.

  Betjeman was born in London at the foot of one of the hills that leads up to Highgate. The charm of this area (which nowadays can be elusive) stayed with him all his life, and his poetry owes as much to childhood as does Wordsworth’s. London as it was; England as it was. Anyone fond of architecture in this century has had to watch so much of it destroyed that they condemn themselves to a life of distress and regret, and it is this behind most of Betjeman’s poems that gives them a persistent melancholy and sense of loss.

  The following poem is about Lissenden Mansions, a block of Edwardian flats opposite Parliament Hill Mansions where Betjeman was born.