Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (16 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
SALIL SHETTY
I have known this poem since my earliest childhood. Millions of Indian schoolchildren learn the poem at school. Even if I had not learned it at school, I suspect it would have
come to my notice anyway.
Such prolonged and forced exposure might usually lead to a deep antipathy to any
poem, however great. In this case, however, Tagore’s poem has meant more and more to me as I have read it
and reread it over the years.
To be truthful, I rarely tear up when reading poetry. I admit that I reserve my tears for over-the-top Bollywood spectaculars, where the chances of my leaving the cinema with dry eyes are
embarrassingly low. This poem – translated from Bengali into English
by Tagore himself – is, however, special to me in a different way, a powerful call to action and a declaration of
belief in achievable change.
Its final line is a powerful culmination of the pent-up aspirations of the poem: ‘Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’ The poem was published in 1910, in an
India then still part of the British Raj, but the line seems to
me more universal than that. It could just as well read: ‘Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let the
world awake.’ This poem is about universal aspirations, and I love the pugnacious optimism contained within it.
DAVID PUTTNAM
For some while, I’ve thought we are nearing a tipping point in the fragility of our planet. If we awaken our senses in time to what might be achieved when we
act in the
interests of everyone, and seriously embrace these sentiments, we could dramatically change the balance of our world to a point where we achieve freedom and fairness for all.
Let My Country Awake
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
(1930s)
The Indian-born human rights activist Salil Shetty (b. 1961) is Secretary General of Amnesty International. He has previously served as director of the United Nations Millennium
Campaign and Chief Executive of ActionAid.
David Puttnam (b. 1941) is the producer of such films as
Bugsy Malone
(1976),
The Duellists
(1977),
Midnight Express
(1978),
Chariots of Fire
(1981, winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture),
Local Hero
(1983),
The Killing Fields
(1984) and
The Mission
(1986). He served as chairman of Columbia Pictures
between 1986 and 1988. Since leaving the film industry in 1998, he has concentrated on public work in such fields as education and the environment. He was created a life peer in 1997.
Finnegans Wake
JAMES JOYCE
(1882–1941)
JAMES M
C
MANUS
Finnegans Wake
is at least as much prose poem as novel. The speaker here is the River Liffey, dying this drizzly morning into the cold Irish Sea below Howth while
recirculating as rain on her headwaters. The Liffey represents Joyce’s muse and collaborator – his daughter, Lucia. The seventeen
years he spent writing the book were also spent
watching her swallowed alive down the maw of schizophrenia. Trying every known treatment to save her, he also transmogrified the punny multilingual patois they spoke together into 628 pages of
musical dream-language. When the Nazi occupation of France forced her to be evacuated to asylums out of reach of her family, Joyce lamented, ‘I have
no idea where my daughter is.’ They
never saw each other again.
My son, James, died in a mental-health facility, out of reach of my ability to comfort him. He was a guitarist, a point guard, a funny and affectionate brother till his illness overwhelmed him.
I don’t believe in souls, but there’s an abscess in mine where he lives.
The eternal-return seam in
Finnegans Wake
reminds me
of Joyce’s doomed, saltsick efforts to get on Lucia’s wavelength and my own dreams of hugging my son, moananoaning, so bad
do I still want to save him, carry him along on my shoulders, begin again.
Extract from
Finnegans Wake
. . . and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the
moyles and moyles of it,
moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have
drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy
fair! If I seen
him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where.
First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys
to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
[here the
Wake
ends, only to re-commence on its opening page, where the sentence continues]
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
(1939)
James McManus (b. 1951) has
published two volumes of poetry and four novels, as well as two celebrated books about poker,
Positively Fifth Street
(2003) and
Cowboys
Full: The Story of Poker
(2009). He has written for publications from
The New Yorker
and
Esquire
to the
New York Times
and teaches writing and literature at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago.
W. H. AUDEN
(1907–1973)
SALMAN RUSHDIE
This great poem, written as the shadow of approaching war fell across Europe, magnificently demands that poetry look horror in the eye and still insist on beauty, still
‘persuade us to rejoice’. It’s the last couplet that makes Auden’s highest claim for the power of art, and, especially
when spoken aloud, moves me to tears.
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of
a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William
Yeats is laid to est.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
(1940)