Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (15 page)
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Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the
sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this
flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense
gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and groom.
(1933)
Simon Armitage (b. 1963) has published nine volumes of poetry, most recently
The Not Dead
(2008) and
Seeing Stars
(2011). His dramatisation of
The Odyssey
was broadcast on BBC Radio, and his translation of the Middle English classic
poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
was published in 2007. He has also written over a
dozen television films and prose work including two novels and the memoir
All Points North
(1998). Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Iowa’s
Writers’ Workshop and Manchester Metropolitan University. He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield.
W. H. AUDEN
(1907–73)
WILLIAM BOYD
First of all, and quite simply, this is a really beautiful poem with W. H. Auden at the height of his amazing powers – master rhymer, master imagist. The picture it
conjures up is so magical and the metaphor of ‘the lion griefs’ – the laying of a muzzle on a thigh, that mute sign of trust and affection
– is so powerful that the poem is
bound to stir emotion.
However, anyone who knows the history of Auden and his poetry will know that this poem refers to an incident that occurred while Auden was a young teacher at a prep school. As someone who went
to a prep school myself, I find this poem, for some reason – perhaps because I remember similar summer nights – effortlessly takes me back
to my early childhood. Death puts down his
book for a second or two and the tear ducts tingle.
A Summer Night
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June,
As congregated leaves complete
Their day’s activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.
Lucky, this point in time
and space
Is chosen as my working-place,
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms
Are good to a newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
With all its gradual dove-like pleading,
Its logic and its powers:
That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.
Now north and south and east and west
Those I love lie down to rest;
The moon looks on them all,
The healers and the brilliant talkers,
The eccentrics and the silent walkers,
The dumpy and the tall.
She climbs the European sky,
Churches and power stations lie
Alike among earth’s fixtures:
Into the galleries she peers
And blankly as a butcher
stares
Upon the marvelous pictures.
To gravity attentive, she
Can notice nothing here, though we
Whom hunger does not move,
From gardens where we feel secure
Look up and with a sigh endure
The tyrannies of love:
And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her eastern bow,
What violence
is done,
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.
Soon, soon, through the dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.
But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears,
When stranded monsters gasping lie,
And sounds of riveting terrify
Their whorled unsubtle ears,
May these delights we dread to lose,
This privacy, need no excuse
But to that strength belong,
As through a child’s rash happy cries
The drowned parental voices rise
In unlamenting song.
After discharges of alarm
All unpredicted let them calm
The pulse of nervous nations,
Forgive the murderer in the glass,
Tough in their patience to surpass
The tigress her swift motions.
(1933)
Born in Ghana (1952), the British writer William Boyd is the author of twelve novels, including the award-winning
A Good Man in Africa
(1981),
An Ice Cream War
(1982),
Any Human Heart
(2002) and
Restless
(2006). His James Bond novel,
Solo
, was published in 2013. Along with several adaptations of his own novels, his screenplays include
Scoop
(1987),
Mister Johnson
(1990) and
The Trench
(1999), which he also directed. His first play,
Longing
, adapted from two Chekhov short stories, opened in London in
2013.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
(1861–1941)
CHRIS COOPER
This poem speaks to all who have suffered every parent’s worst fear: the loss of a child. Even after the first jolting pain becomes the dimmer sorrow you live with every
day, a grieving parent still feels deep love and hopeless yearning for that child, even in the company
of others, even in the joy of the creative process, even when many years have passed.
The line ‘my heart is full with your unspoken words’ resonates in a particular way: my son, Jesse, who died on 3 January 2005, was nonverbal, but always able to speak to my
heart’s core. The poem ends with a line that is grounded in truth; the love of family and friends is a conduit to the boundless love
I knew when my son was alive.
Those Who Are Near Me Do Not Know
Those who are near me do not know that you are nearer to me than they are
Those who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken words
Those who crowd in my path do not know that I am walking alone with you
They who love me do not know that their love brings you to
my heart.
(1930s)
The actor Chris Cooper (b. 1951) has appeared in such films as
American Beauty
(1999),
The Bourne Identity
(2002),
Seabiscuit
(2003),
Syriana
(2005),
Capote
(2005),
The Kingdom
(2007),
Breach
(2007),
The Town
(2010) and
August: Osage County
(2013). He won both the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best
Supporting Actor
for his performance in
Adaptation
(2002).
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
(1861–1941)