Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (17 page)

The Indian-born, US-resident writer Sir Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) is the author of eleven novels, notably the 1981 Booker Prize winner
Midnight’s Children
, which
also won the Best of the Booker in 2008 and was filmed in 2012. His most recent book is a memoir,
Joseph
Anton.

W. H. AUDEN
(1907–1973)

SIMON SCHAMA

Tears come to me reading Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ to a lover already asleep because the poem suspends time and the brutality of the world (‘1937 when
fashionable madmen raise/Their pedantic boring cry’) at the moment of unanswerably perfect love. The bed is sheltering redemption and the writer, speaking to the
slumbering beloved, registers
rapture in the kindness of a loving heart. But this is not the fantastical fancy of poets. The word
human
occurs at the opening and closing of the work: ‘Human on my faithless
arm’ and Nights of insult let you pass/Watched by every human love’ and it is the honesty embedded amidst sheets and on the pillow that makes the eyes prick and the heart knock.

SIMON
CALLOW

Auden has always been a poet who spoke to me – for me. His eloquence, his directness, his formal skill, his jokes, his music, appealed to me from my early teens; I felt I
knew him. Added to which he was very openly and explicitly gay.

I loved ‘Funeral Blues’ long before it became my personal epitaph
in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, especially its melodramatic refrain of:

But it was ‘Lullaby’ which moved me to instant tears. It described, in unmistakably erotic terms, a particular state of mind and an experience of the heart, a kind
of relationship,
which I had not yet known for myself, but all of which, with the uncanny emotional prescience of adolescence, I knew would be mine, soon. The sooner the better.

I still find it impossible to utter out loud or even read to myself the opening two lines without breaking down. The poem is essentially a lullaby, and it is partly the caressing, gently rocking
rhythm that makes it so affecting:
it is instinct with tenderness, care, boundless benevolence.

And in the final couplet the benevolence becomes universal. This is my idea of love; if ever I forget it, Auden is there to remind me.

The historian Simon Schama (b. 1945) has published
seventeen books, notably
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
(1987),
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
(1989),
Landscape and Memory
(1995),
Rembrandt’s Eyes
(1999), a three-volume
History of Britain
(2000–2) and
Rough Crossings
(2005), the last two of which are among the ten documentary series he has made for BBC Television, most recently
Simon Schama’s Shakespeare
(2012) and
The
Story of the Jews
(2013).

Having played Mozart in the original 1979 stage production of
Amadeus
, Simon Callow (b. 1949) made his film debut in the 1984 screen version as Emmanuel Schikaneder.
Amid numerous TV roles, his forty subsequent screen credits include
Four Weddings and a Funeral
(1994),
Shakespeare in Love
(1998) and
Phantom of the Opera
(2004). His many
stage appearances include one-man shows as Dickens and Shakespeare as well as
Waiting for Godot
(2009). Also known as a director of plays, musicals and opera, he has published thirteen books
including
Being An Actor
(1984),
My Life in Pieces
(2010) and biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Orson Welles.

W. H. AUDEN
(1907–1973)

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

‘If I Could Tell You’ is one of W. H. Auden’s most beautiful lyrical poems. Like much of his verse, it may strike the reader as opaque. It is certainly
enigmatic, but that is what Auden is talking about here – the difficulty of understanding that which simply
is
and cannot necessarily
be explained. Several of the lines are very
haunting – ‘If we should weep when clowns put on their show’ and ‘The winds must come from somewhere when they blow’ are both examples of this. I never tire of reading
this poem: it is for me an experience that is very similar to listening to a particularly beautiful passage of Mozart. I am haunted by this poem.

Born in Zimbabwe in 1948, Alexander McCall Smith was educated there and in Scotland. He enjoyed a distinguished career as a professor of
medical law at the University of
Edinburgh. In 2005 he left the university to concentrate on his writing, and is now the author of more than sixty books, including the
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
series, the
44 Scotland Street
series,
The Sunday Philosophy Club
series and his recent book,
What W. H. Auden Can Do For You
(2013).

KEITH DOUGLAS
(1920–1944)

CLIVE JAMES

Keith Douglas was born to be a classical poet, so it should not be surprising that his beautifully poised poem ‘Canoe’ was written quite early in his career, before
he went off to war and wrote the poems that would make him famous. Yet ‘Canoe’ is still prodigious for the concentrated pathos of its landscape,
the Oxford setting so very like
Virgil’s
lugetes campos
, the weeping fields. The moment that melts my eyes is towards the end, when the young woman in the canoe is pictured as making her journey alone in the future,
because the narrator will not be with her. At that point, the story is already clinched; he has, we think, foreseen his death, although the poem would have remained powerful even
if he had got
back, grown old and died in bed.

But in a poem that is all grace, the supremely gracious moment is yet to come. Suddenly he becomes a ghost – for decades in my memory, until I corrected it against the text, it was always
his ghost, and not his ‘spirit’ – and he ‘kisses her mouth lightly’. By then I can hardly breathe for grief. The grief is personal, of course. My father
went away to
the war; he, too, was fated never to return, and my mother continued her voyage alone. This great poem could have been written about them, and therefore about me.