Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (12 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Christopher Hitchens was one of the first to contribute to this anthology, in an e-mail just five days before his death in December 2011.
In the foreword to his 2000 volume of literary criticism,
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
, Hitchens writes: ‘Most of Owen’s
poetry was written or
“finished” in the twelve months before his life was thrown away in a futile action on the Sambre-Meuse canal, and he only published four poems in his lifetime . . . But he has
conclusively outlived all the jingo versifiers, blood-bolted Liberal politicians, garlanded generals and other supposed legislators of the period. He is the most powerful single rebuttal of
Auden’s mild and sane claim that “Poetry makes nothing happen”.’
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But
limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et
decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(1917–1918)
For four decades Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was one of the most prominent and controversial writers and journalists of his time, publishing
twelve books and five collections of essays. British-born but US-resident, with dual nationality, he was a regular columnist for
Vanity Fair
. His 2007
polemic
God Is Not Great
reached
number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list.
EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY
(1892–1950)
PATRICK STEWART
I had never believed the New England fall could possibly be as beautiful as people claimed. And then one morning after breakfast I left my friends’ house in South Salem,
New York State, having arrived in the dark the previous evening. I walked two hundred yards along the lane and broke
down helplessly weeping with the never-before-seen beauty and grandeur of it
all.
God’s World
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black
bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, – Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, – let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
(1917)
Sir Patrick Stewart (b. 1940) has graduated via many Shakespearean and other classical roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company and London’s National Theatre to
international fame as Captain Picard in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
and Professor Xavier in the
X Men
series. Amid more than ninety film and TV credits on both sides of the
Atlantic,
his recent returns to the stage in London’s West End and on Broadway include the title role in
Macbeth
(2007), Claudius in
Hamlet
(2008), Shylock in
The Merchant of
Venice
(RSC, 2011) and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
(2009), revived on Broadway with Harold Pinter’s
No Man’s Land
in 2013.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
(1886–1967)
BARRY HUMPHRIES
This much-anthologised poem remains deeply affecting, evoking as it does a picture of First World War soldiers in a moment of emotional release.
Everyone Sang
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must
find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
(1919)
The Australian actor, writer, artist and comedian Barry Humphries (b. 1934) is best known for his stage and TV alter egos Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. He has also
starred in films from
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
(1972) to
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(2012) and written numerous books on a wide range of subjects.
A. E. HOUSMAN
(1859–1936)
ANDREW MOTION
‘Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’: that’s what Dickens used to say about the structure of his novels. ‘Make them laugh, make them cry,
bring on the dancing girls’: that’s what Philip Larkin said about the ordering of poems in his slim collections. The wish (the impulse, the need,
the requirement) to make an audience
cry is conspicuous in both cases, and it’s always been high on my list of requirements as a reader. As I get older, the requirement is more and more easily met.
Why is this? Because our hearts grow softer as the years click past? Perhaps. But also because we feel the sadness of the creatures (and our fellow human beings) more keenly. And because we can
see the dark at the end of the tunnel more and more clearly. Almost the whole of Shakespeare (comedies and tragedies) makes tears pour down my face. So do large chunks of Wordsworth and Tennyson.
And almost everything by Hardy and Edward Thomas . . . Some days I only have to
think
of particular poems to start going. And every day I only have to think about A. E. Housman’s poem
. . . well,
there are several I could mention. But while I can still see the keyboard let me choose number XL in
Last Poems
: ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying . . .’
RICHARD DAWKINS
This poem is not from
A Shropshire Lad
but it has the same hauntingly wistful air. I knew it by heart as a boy in love – not with any particular girl but with the
idea of being in love, and especially the tragedy
of lost love. Much later, when I organised the funeral of my friend and mentor the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton in New College chapel, his
sister chose the poem for her reading. I was not surprised to learn that it was one of Bill’s favourites, because he had long brought to my mind the melancholy protagonist of
A Shropshire
Lad
. In my book
River Out of Eden
, I had earlier quoted
– actually misquoted from memory – the last verse, when I wanted to convey the indifferent callousness of Darwinian
natural selection, noted by Darwin himself. The politician Douglas Jay, who also loved Housman, pointed out my misquotation to me, and I gratefully corrected it in later printings of the book. Here
is the correct version: