The boy stood on the burning deck

This poem was  popular with my parents generation - a staple of school anthologies. It was a particular favourite of my mother's.
 
Casabianca 

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though child-like form.

The flames rolled on–he would not go
Without his Father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

He called aloud–'say, Father, say
If yet my task is done?'
He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.

'Speak, father!' once again he cried,
'If I may yet be gone!'
And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames rolled on.

Upon his brow he felt their breath,
And in his waving hair,
And looked from that lone post of death
In still yet brave despair.

And shouted but once more aloud,
'My father! must I stay?'
While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud,
The wreathing fires made way.

They wrapt the ship in splendour wild,
They caught the flag on high,
And streamed above the gallant child,
Like banners in the sky.

There came a burst of thunder sound–
The boy–oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strewed the sea!–

With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,
That well had borne their part–
But the noblest thing which perished there
Was that young faithful heart.

Felicia Hemans (1793 - 1835)

Link
The Biography of Felicia Hemans

Emily Dickinson in pain

PAIN has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Emily Dickinson

Related posts
Measuring happiness & pain
To minimise the pain
On the death of Mr Robert Levet

The American disease

We know that tobacco had its opponents from the day it was first introduced to these shores - not least in King James I, who wrote a diatribe against this 'vile custom'.

This poem presents an entertaining rant from later in the C17th - from the reference to Cromwell  ('the Protector's name') I guess it was written sometime in the in the late 1650s.

It took 300 years, &  proof, as presented by the Royal College of Physicians, of just one specific threat to health from smoking (lung cancer) to finally start to reverse the long love affair with tobacco.

ON TOBACCO.

WHAT horrid sin condemn'd the teeming Earth,
And curst her womb with such a monstrous birth ?
What crime America, that Heav'n would please
To make thee mother of the world's disease ?
In thy fair womb what accidents could breed,
What plague give root to this pernicious weed?
Tobacco ! oh, the very name doth kill,
And has already fox'd my reeling quill :
I now could write libels against the king,
Treason, or blasphemy, or any thing
Gainst piety, and reason; I could frame
A panegyric to the Protector's name :
Such sly infection does the world infuse
Into the soul of ev'ry modest Muse.

What politic Peregrine was't first could boast,
He brought a pest into his native coast?
Th’ abstract of poison in a stinking weed,
The spurious issue, of corrupted seed;
Seed belch'd in earthquakes from the dark abyss,
Whose name a blot in Nature's herbal is.
What drunken fiend taught Englishmen the crime,
Thus to puff out, and spawl away their time ?

Pernicious weed, (should not my Muse offend,
To say Heav'n made aught for a cruel end)
I should proclaim that thou created wert,
To ruin man's high, and immortal part,
The Stygian damp obscures our reason's eye,
Debauches wit, and makes invention dry;
Destroys the memory, confounds our care;
We know not what we do, or what we are:
Renders our faculties and members lame
To ev'ry office of our country's claim.
Our life's a drunken dream devoid of sense,
And the best actions of our time offence.

Our health, diseases, lethargies, and rheum,
Our friendship's fire, and all our vows are fume.
Of late there's no such thing as wit, or sense,
Counsel, instruction, or intelligence:
Discourse that should distinguish man from beast,
Is by the vapour of this weed supprest;
For what we talk is interrupted stuff,
The one half English, and the other puff:
Freedom and truth are things we do not know,
We know not what we say, or what we do:
We want in all the understanding's light,
We talk in clouds, and walk in endless night.

We smoke, as if we meant, conceal'd by spell,
To spy abroad, yet be invisible :
But no discovery shall the statesman boast,
We raise a mist wherein our selves are lost,
A stinking shade, and whilst we pipe it thus,
Each one appears an ignis fatuus.
Courtier and peasant, nay the madam nice
Is likewise fall'n into the common vice :
We all in dusky error groping lie,
Robb'd of our reasons, and the day's bright eye,
Whilst sailors from the main top see our isle
Wrapt up in smoke, like the Aetnean pile.

What nameless ill does its contagion shroud
In the dark mantle of this noisome cloud ?
Sure 'tis the Devil: Oh. I know that's it,
Foh! how the sulphur makes me cough and spit!
Tis he; or else some fav'rite fiend, at least,
In all the mischief of his malice drest,
Each deadly sin that lurks t' intrap the soul;
Does here conceal'd in curling vapours roll:
And for the body such an unknown ill,
As makes physicians' reading, and their skill,
One undistinguish'd pest, made up of all
That men experienc'd do diseases call;
Coughs, asthmas, apoplexies, fevers, rheum,
All that kill dead, or lingeringly consume;
Folly and madness, nay the plague, the pox,
And ev'ry fool wears a Pandora's box.
From that rich mine the stupid sot doth fill,
Smokes up his liver, and his lungs, until
His reeking nostrils monstrously proclaim,
His brains and bowels are consuming flame.
What noble soul would be content to dwell
In, the dark lanthorn of a smoky cell?
To prostitute his body and his mind
To a debauch of such a stinking kind?
To sacrifice to Moloch, and to fry,
In such a base, dirty idolatry;
As if frail life, which of itself 's too short,
Were to be whift away in drunken sport?
Thus, as if weary of our destin'd years,
We burn the thread so to prevent the shears.

What noble end can simple man propose
For a reward to his all-smoking nose ?
His purposes are level I'd sure amiss,
Where neither ornament nor pleasure is.
What can he then design his worthy hire?
Sure 'tis t' inure him for eternal fire:
And thus his aim must admirably thrive,
In hopes of Hell, he damns himself alive.

But my infected Muse begins to choke
In the vile slink of the increasing smoke,
And can no more in equal numbers chime,
Unless to sneeze, and cough, and spit in rhyme.
Half stifled now in this new time's disease,
She must in fumo vanish, and decease.
This is her fault's excuse, and her, pretence,
This satire, perhaps, else had look'd like sense.

Charles Cotton

Links
Charles Cotton
The works of the English poets, from Chaucer to Cowper: including the series edited with prefaces, biographical and critical
James I: Counterblast to tobacco
Related post
A poem about smoking

One day my spring will come

A Backward Spring

The trees are afraid to put forth buds,
And there is timidity in the grass;
The plots lie gray where gouged by spuds,
And whether next week will pass
Free of sly sour winds is the fret of each bush
Of barberry waiting to bloom.

Yet the snowdrop's face betrays no gloom,
And the primrose pants in its heedless push,
Though the myrtle asks if it's worth the fight
This year with frost and rime
To venture one more time
On delicate leaves and buttons of white
From the selfsame bough as at last year's prime,
And never to ruminate on or remember

What happened to it in mid-December.

Thomas Hardy

Whispering to their souls to go

Time for some more Donne.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

John Donne

Man lying on a wall

L.S. Lowry: Man Lying on a Wall: City Art Gallery & Museum, Salford


"Man Lying on a Wall" : Homage to L.S. Lowry

You could draw a straight line from the heels,
Through the calves, buttocks and shoulderblades
To the back of the head: pressure points
That bear the enormous weight of the sky.
Should you take away the supporting structure
The result would be a miracle or
An extremely clever conjuring trick.
As it is, the man lying on the wall
Is wearing the serious expression
Of popes and kings in their final slumber,
His deportment not dissimilar to
Their stiff, reluctant exits from this world
Above the shoulders of the multitude.

It is difficult to judge whether or not
He is sleeping or merely disinclined
To arrive punctually at the office
Or to return home in time for his tea.
He is wearing a pinstripe suit, black shoes
And a bowler hat: on the pavement
Below him, like a relic or something
He is trying to forget, his briefcase
With everybody's initials on it.

Michael Longley

Links
Poetry Archive: Michael Longden
War Poets Association: Michael Longley
Poetry Foundation: Michael Longley

The Lowry
Man lying on a wall
Related post
A poem about money

Ruskin antidote

When I first came across this poem by Elma Mitchell it made me laugh out loud. Such earthiness, busyness, just plain mess, seemed the very antithesis of Ruskin. His vision seemed to be more one of life spent sitting on cushions, sewing a fine seam, rather than work never done.

But not for a working class woman, it seems, for in Fors Clavigera Ruskin wrote:

Then, for my meaning as to women's work, what should I mean, but scrubbing furniture, dusting walls, sweeping floors, making the beds, washing up the crockery, ditto the children, and whipping them when they want it, mending their clothes, cooking their dinners, and when there are cooks more than enough, helping with the farm work, or the garden, or the dairy ? Is that plain speaking enough ?

It is far to easy to mock Ruskin & his sensibilities, especially if you just unthinkingly put on your old feminist hat.

Thoughts After Ruskin
Women reminded him of lilies and roses.
Me they remind rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:

Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,
- All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.
Their distant husbands lean across mahogany
And delicately manipulate the market,
While safe at home, the tender and the gentle
Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,
Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,
Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,
Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,
Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,
Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners
Around the snags of furniture, they straighten
And haul out sheets from under the incontinent
And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,
Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,
Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,
Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,
Contorting wool around their knitting needles,
Creating snug and comfy on their needles.

Their huge hands! their everywhere eyes! their voices
Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,
Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,
Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,
Their wombs that pocket a man upside down!

And when all's over, off with their overalls,
Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,
Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,
And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,
Their essence of lilies and roses.

Elma Mitchell.

Links
Fors clavigera: Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain (Volume 4)
Elma Mitchell: Obituary
Related post
Sesame & Lilies & Proust

Quinquireme of Nineveh

The poetry of John Masefield – who was in the middle of his near forty-year stint as Poet Laureate - was immensely popular when I was a child.

Every schoolchild probably had to learn this one by heart, its language seemingly mystical & incantatory. It came as an immense disappointment to me when teacher explained that quinquereme was merely a kind of ship, not an exotic product of the East.

Small British coasters were still a familiar sight in the 1950s, unloading goods at harbour in small ports such as Tenby, Whitby, Falmouth & Fowey with their cargoes.

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

Link
JohnMasefield

Strain & fear

Thursday's Times carried a column by Matthew Parris under the headline Budget too hopeful. We want despair.

The weather, which has just gone silly now, according to the driver of the bus which took me into town on Friday, seems to match only too well the despondency which has settled over the economy & politics. The worst snow storm of this winter (I know technically it is now Spring, according to both the Met Office’s tidy definition & more ancient tradition) had brought closure of all the high roads & most schools in the county, but travel less than 10 miles north & there had been no snow at all in town

This extract from Tennyson’s In Memoriam seems to fit the mood.

from In Memoriam
Tonight the winds begin to rise
And roar from yonder dropping day:

The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies ;
The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea ;
And wildly dash'd on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world :

And but for fancies, which aver
That all thy motions gently pass
Athwart a plane of molten glass,
I scarce could brook the strain and stir
That makes the barren branches loud
And but for fear it is not so,

The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
That rises upward always higher,
And onward drags a labouring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Falling from grace

A poem for a week that has seen the spectacular fall of a former Cabinet Minister & his ex-wife.


Upon The Sudden Restraint Of The Earl Of Somerset, Then Falling From Favour

Dazzled thus with height of place,
Whilst our Hopes our wits Beguile,
No man marks the narrow space
'Twixt a Prison and a Smile.

Then since Fortune’s favours fade,
You that in her arms do sleep,
Learn to swim and not to wade;
For the Hearts of Kings are deep.

But if Greatness be so blind,
As to trust in Towers of Air,
Let it be with Goodness lined,
That at least the Fall be fair.

Then though darkened you shall say,
When Friends fail and Princes frown,
Virtue is the roughest way,
But proves at night a Bed of Down.

Sir Henry Wotton

Link
Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset
Related post
Royal & political gossip

Freedom & love

Freedom and Love

HOW delicious is the winning
Of a kiss at Love's beginning,
When two mutual hearts are sighing
For the knot there's no untying!

Yet remember, 'midst your wooing,
Love has bliss, but Love has ruing;
Other smiles may make you fickle,
Tears for other charms may trickle.

Love he comes, and Love he tarries,
Just as fate or fancy carries;
Longest stays when sorest chidden,
Laughs and flies when press'd and bidden.

Bind the sea to slumber stilly,
Bind its odour to the lily,
Bind the aspen ne'er to quiver,
Then bind Love to last for ever.

Love's a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel;
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free he soars enraptured.

Can you keep the bee from ranging,
Or the ringdove's neck from changing?
No! nor fetter'd Love from dying
In the knot there's no untying.

Thomas Campbell

Links
The Poems of Thomas Campbell
Thomas Campbell (1777 - 1844)
Related post
On not saying everything

To minimise the pain

One of the best explanations offered for giving us humans the illusion that time speeds up as we get older.

The River of Life

THE more we live, more brief appear
Our life's succeeding stages;
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages.

The gladsome current of our youth,
Ere passion yet disorders,
Steals lingering like a river smooth
Along its grassy borders.

But as the careworn cheek grows wan,
And sorrow's shafts fly thicker,
Ye stars, that measure life to man,
Why seem your courses quicker?

When joys have lost their bloom and breath,
And life itself is vapid,
Why, as we reach the Falls of Death
Feel we its tide more rapid?

It may be strange—yet who would change
Time's course to slower speeding,
When one by one our friends have gone,
And left our bosoms bleeding?

Heaven gives our years of fading strength
Indemnifying fleetness;
And those of youth, a seeming length,
Proportion'd to their sweetness.

Thomas Campbell

Link
Thomas Campbell 1777-1844

Lord Bacon's life choices

As I re-read this poem my attention rather fixed on Lord Bacon's reservations about the bliss of matrimony - Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,/Or pains his head,  & description of a wife as a double strife - my mind more likely to pick up on this because I have just read Margaret Drabble's Seven Sisters, a novel about a middle aged woman's efforts to make a life for herself, newly single, after her unsatisfactory marriage ends in divorce.

All in all, it is such a gloomy poem that one wonders about his ability to take comfort from his science & philosophy: I do hope so.
Life

THE world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span:
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust
But limns on water, or but writes in dust.

Yet whilst with sorrow here we live opprest,
What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools;
The rural parts are turn'd into a den
Of savage men;
And where's a city from foul vice so free,
But may be term'd the worst of all the three?

Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,
Or pains his head;
Those that live single take it for a curse,
Or do things worse;
Some would have children; those that have them moan
Or wish them gone:
What is it, then, to have, or have no wife,
But single thraldom, or a double strife?

Our own affections still at home to please
Is a disease;
To cross the seas to any foreign soil,
Peril and toil;
Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease,
We are worse in peace:
What then remains, but that we still should cry
For being born, or, being born, to die?
Lord Bacon

Links
Francis Bacon
The Baconian System of Philosophy

Wisdom for humans

The Road to Wisdom

The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain
And simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again,
but less
and less
and less.

Piet Hein

And so ad infinitum

Link
Grooks by Piet Hein
Related post
Creativity

Love story

To my Dear and Loving Husband

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay.
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persever
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Anne Bradstreet

Link
Anne Bradstreet
Related post
Writing legacy

From service to service

Joyce Grenfell was a gifted writer & performer of comic monologues; the one about the nursery school teacher coping with the problem of George was especially popular.

Her poems now provide often touching but revealing insights into the social history of the life of the upper middle classes in mid twentieth century Britain & the upheavals of war.

This one reminds me of Winifred Peck’s novel about another woman’s experiences of ‘the servant problem.’

Tribute to a treasure
A young hand-maiden served me once,
She house-kept with a pleasing grace.
Her temperament was calm & light,
Her very presence blessed the place.
She never got a message wrong,
She cooked & cleaned, she sewed & swept;
She washed & ironed, she fed the dog:
She almost never over-slept.
Nor did she self-indulge in moods
To load my heart with weighty fears
By looking martyred, cross or hurt;
Instead she sang along the years.
Five happy years of carefree days!
And now my loved & leaned-on staff
Has, rightly, lain her apron by
To go in service with the WAAF

Joyce Grenfell 1941

Links
Joyce Grenfell: Hats Off
University of Bristol: Joyce Grenfell archive
YouTube: Nursery School
Related posts
House-bound
Meme multiplied
Jobs worth doing

Secret ministry

from Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully ...


Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

LinksNether Stowey
Coleridge Cottage
Related post
Not knowing what I love

Houghmagandie

I once witnessed a group of young(ish), educated, middle class women in the Caribbean of the 1960s (than whom there was no more tightly sheltered & protected group at that time), persuaded to mark the acquisition by one of their number of a new car by dancing round it, libation in hand, singing that old Scottish celebratory incantation, An' hey for houghmagandie

Gie The Lass Her Fairing

O gie the lass her fairing, lad,
O gie the lass her fairin',
An' something else she'll gie to you,
That's waly worth the wearin';
Syne coup her o'er amang the creels,
When ye hae taen your brandy,
The mair she bangs the less she squeels,
An' hey for houghmagandie.

Then gie the lass a fairin' lad,
O gie the lass her fairin',
An' sh'ell gie you a hairy thing,
An' of it be na sparin';
But coup her o'er amang the creels,
An' bar the door wi' baith your heels,
The mair she gets the less she squeels;
An' hey for houghmagandie.

Robert Burns

Links
Barnes & Noble: Houghmagandie
Words, Words, Words: Houghmagandie, Knockers, Trolleys and Others by Diarmaid O'Muirithe

Awful warning

I heard this lovely poem by Australian Doug Macleod on Poetry Please. An awful warning to sit beside those of Hilaire Belloc.

Eighteen months ago the same programme featured Alastair Reid's poem The O-filler.

I wonder if there are enough poems on this subject to make an anthology?

A little b●y called R●bert R●se,
Whenever reading verse ●r pr●se
W●uld ●ften c●l●ur in the O’s.
He used a pencil for the j●b
And made each O an ●di●us bl●b.

Unhappily for R●bert R●se,
He caught a strange disease
Where O’s appeared between his t●es
And then behind his knees.

His elb●w, thr●at & then his n●se
Were sl●wly ●vergr●wn with O’s,
Then suddenly, ●h w●e, alack!
Th●se ●vals went c●mpletely black.

He died ●f c●urse, which ●nly sh●ws
Y●u sh●uldn’t mess ar●und with O’s

D●ug Macle●d

Links
The world of Doug Macleod
Poetry Please
School’s Out John Foster
Related post
The O-filler

January night

January Night
The rain smites more and more,
The east wind snarls and sneezes;
Through the joints of the quivering door
The water wheezes.

The tip of each ivy-shoot
Writhes on its neighbour's face;
There is some hid dread afoot
That we cannot trace.

Is it the spirit astray
Of the man at the house below
Whose coffin they took in to-day?
We do not know.

Thomas Hardy

Links
January Night from ‘Moments of vision’ (1879)
Solar eclipse of January 22, 1879