Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (10 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
The Irish novelist
Colm Tóibín (b. 1955) has also published short stories, plays, journalism and poetry. He is the winner of the 2011 Irish PEN Award and currently
is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His novels include
The Blackwater Lightship
(1999),
Brooklyn
(2009) and
The Testament of
Mary
(2012); his most recent work of criticism is
New Ways to Kill Your
Mother: Writers and their Families
(2012).
CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY
(1863–1933)
WALTER SALLES
Someone once told me: ‘Don’t ask the way of those who know it, you might not get lost.’
Ithaka
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – don’t
be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of
you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind –
as many sensual perfumes
as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have
gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what
these Ithakas mean.
(1911)
TRANSLATION BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD
The films of the Brazilian director Walter Salles (b. 1956) include
Terra Estrangeira
/
Foreign Land
(1996
), Central do Brasil / Central Station
(1998),
Abril Despedaçado / Behind the Sun
(2001),
Diarios de Motocicleta / The Motorcycle Diaries
(2004),
Dark Water
(2005),
Linha de Passe
(2008) and
On The Road
(2012).
THOMAS HARDY
(1840–1928)
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
This is one of several great poems written by Hardy after the death of his first wife, in which he and she reappear as their youthful selves in phantom form, haunting charged
places in the Wessex landscape. Since this is also the landscape of most of Hardy’s novels, and he had stopped writing
fiction a decade earlier, the poem seems an elegy too for himself and
for his own long career.
It’s now forty years since I first read it, and though its rhythms are as familiar to me as those of a favourite piece of music, the idiosyncratic wording and dexterous rhyming keep it as
alive as any stubborn ghost, the clinching dimeter of each stanza paying off overwhelmingly in the last line
of all.
At Castle Boterel
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet
Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.
What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, –
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.
It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.
Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory
in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is – that we two passed.
And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.
I look
and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.
(1912)
The novelist and poet Alan Hollinghurst (b. 1954) won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for his novel
The Line of Beauty
. His other works include
The Swimming Pool Library
(1988),
The Stranger’s Child
(2011) and translations of two plays by Racine.
THOMAS HARDY
(1840–1928)
SEAMUS HEANEY
I can’t honestly say that I break down when I read ‘The Voice’, but when I get to the last four lines the tear ducts do congest a bit. The poem is one of
several Thomas Hardy wrote immediately after the death of his first wife in late November 1912, hence the poignancy of his dating it ‘December 1912’.
Hardy once described this group of
memorial poems as ‘an expiation’, acknowledging his grief and remorse at the way he had neglected and hurt the one ‘who was all to me . . . at first, when our day was fair’.
What renders the music of the poem so moving is the drag in the voice, as if there were sinkers on many of the lines. But in the final stanza, in that landscape of falling leaves, wind
and thorn,
and the woman calling, there is a banshee note that haunts ‘long after it is heard no more’.
The Voice
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let
me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Traveling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
(1912)