Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (14 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
CARL BERNSTEIN
I had to really dig deep here – past Shakespeare’s sonnets, Blake, Whitman, Keats . . . the canon. And finally I got down to this lullaby that I sang to my children
from their birth.
All the Pretty Horses
Hush-by, Don’t you cry
Go to sleep a little baby
When you
wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses
Blacks and bays, dapples and grays
Coach and six a little horses
When you wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses
Hush-by, Don’t you cry
Go to sleep a little baby
When you wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses
(
FIRST IN PRINT
1925)
Since his celebrated partnership with Bob Woodward for the
Washington Post
on the Nixon presidency and the Watergate scandal, which resulted in
All The
President’s Men
(1974) and other books, Carl Bernstein (b. 1944) has written biographies of Pope John Paul II (
The Abuse of Power
, with Marco Politi, 1996) and Hillary Rodham
Clinton (
A Woman in Charge,
2007). He has also published a memoir of his parents,
Loyalties
(1989).
ROBERT GRAVES
(1895–1985)
JOHN SUTHERLAND
I first came across this poem as an undergraduate. The most inefficient, but wonderfully enthusing, university teacher I’ve ever known, G. S. Fraser, was pursuing a long,
quixotic campaign to draw notice to Robert Graves as the greatest lyric poet of the century. As cultish attention to The Movement
[a group of other 1950s British poets] monopolised attention, his
voice was drowned out.
Fraser failed. But he converted me. ‘The Cool Web’ articulates the poignant sense that, whatever one gains intellectually, one loses more. The sentiment is familiar enough from those
who know their Wordsworth, and Auden put it into chillier form in ‘Their Lonely Betters’:
As I listened from
a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.
It’s cleverer but – in that term of approbation we loved in the 1960s – less ‘felt.’
Graves, it seems to me, touches a deeper chord. There is always,
in his mature poetry, the still-throbbing scar tissue of a survivor
of the ‘war called great’
(‘the inward scream, the duty to run mad’, as he put it). Poetry, I think, is the only thing that can make linguistics – that driest of sciences – ‘moving’.
I read ‘The Cool Web’ in the ‘madness’ (as Graves prophesied) of late life, with a distant gesture of gratitude to G. S. Fraser and a moistening of the eye.
The Cool Web
Children are
dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare
of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.
(1940)
John Sutherland (b. 1938) is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College, London. Among his many books are the Stanford
Companion
to Victorian Fiction
(1989, rev. 2009),
a series of ‘puzzles in classic fiction’ entitled
Is Heathcliff a Murderer?
(1996),
Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?
(1997) and
Who
Betrays Elizabeth Bennett?
(1999), as well as the authorised life of Stephen Spender (2004),
Lives of the Novelists
(2011) and two volumes of autobiography,
Last Drink to LA
(2001) and
The Boy Who Loved Books
(2007). His most recent work is
Jumbo,
an ‘unauthorised’ biography
of Jumbo the Elephant (2014).
HART CRANE
(1899–1932)
HAROLD BLOOM
This poem is Hart Crane’s farewell to the art of poetry, which was his life. I do not know another poem like it, despite its packed allusiveness. There are parallels of
equal distinction: Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day’, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller’, Shelley’s
‘Ode to the West Wind’, Whitman’s ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’.
Crane desperately needed reassurance that he was still a poet, but it was not forthcoming. His suicide [at the age of thirty-two] perhaps would have come even if he had been persuaded that his
great gifts were intact. He had been doom-eager all his life.
The Broken Tower
The bell-rope that gathers
God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the
sun’s ray?
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals . . . And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles
with reveilles outleaping –
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! . . .
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal
monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope, – cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) – or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power? –
And through whose pulse
I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure . . .
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip
Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower . . .
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
(1932)
Harold Bloom (b. 1930) is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at the University of Yale. His many publications include
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
(1998) and
The Anatomy of Influence
(2011), from which the above introductory words are taken.
D. H. LAWRENCE
(1885–1930)
SIMON ARMITAGE
The poem is very melancholy, gloomy even, a twilight poem both literally and metaphorically. But it’s a late poem in Lawrence’s life, and I think it signals a kind
of readiness for whatever might follow, written by someone at ease with his situation and not afraid of that journey into the
eternal underworld. The mythology of the poem has also puzzled me
– the poet appears ready to witness the violence of Pluto’s advances on Persephone, but of course she’s also a goddess of springtime and rebirth . . . The concluding rhyme strikes
me as a reinforcement of the poet’s desire for personal peace and closure. The poem is so graceful, easy, and apparently effortless.