Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (19 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
The films directed by Joe
Wright (b. 1972) include
Pride and Prejudice
(2005),
Atonement
(2007),
The Soloist
(2009),
Hanna
(2011), and
Anna
Karenina
(2012)
.
He has also directed the television mini-series
The Last King
(2003) and London theatre productions of
Trelawny of the Wells
and
A Season in the
Congo
(both 2013).
The Pisan Cantos
EZRA POUND
(1885–1972)
CRAIG RAINE
These passages are taken from the beginning and the end of
The Pisan Cantos
, a poem impossible to divorce from the circumstances of its composition. It is a poem written
out of crushing defeat, the defeat of Mussolini, whom Ezra Pound supported.
Like Raleigh in the Tower, Pound wrote
in prison, a US detention centre – actually a cage, open to the elements, just outside Pisa. There he typed this great affirmation to the human
spirit – telling us what we cling to in extremis (‘a lizard upheld me’), lamenting the vanity of human endeavour, affirming the importance of love, seeing noble intention pulsing
still in the ashes of defeat.
From ‘Canto LXXXI’ from
The Pisan Cantos:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls
of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.
‘Master thyself, then others shall thee beare’
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black, half
white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
And I love two lines, rescued from Chaucer,
just before this:
‘Your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly
I may the beauté of hem nat susteyne.’
From
‘
Canto LXXIV’:
. . . and there was a smell of mint under the tent flaps especially after the rain
and a white ox on the road toward Pisa as
if facing the tower,
dark sheep in the drill field and on wet days were clouds
in the mountain as if under the guard roosts.
A lizard upheld me . . .
(1944–1945)
Also a critic, librettist and novelist, the poet Craig Raine (b. 1944) is known for cofounding the ‘Martian School’ of poetry. For many years a Fellow at New
College, Oxford, he founded and edits the literary journal
Areté.
PHILIP LARKIN
(1922–85)
SIMON RUSSELL BEALE
When I first read this poem, the last lines made me gasp with surprise. They also confused me, as I think they are meant to, because the writing suddenly expands and the skies
open, promising something almost too weighty for the poet’s argument to bear.
Larkin is, of
course, the master of charting quotidian disappointments – how small failures can build until they define a life.
All of us, I suspect, have felt what he feels, and some of us have longed for a redemptive, defining experience of the sort that the ‘snow-white unicorn’ represents. It is this
longing that Shakespeare tapped into when he wrote his last plays; and this poem, like those plays,
articulates an uncertainty about the significance of that longing. Is hope for redemption,
forgiveness, or validation a fantasy? Is resignation to something imperfect or essentially meaningless the only rational option when evaluating one’s life? Or is it possible, ‘against
all argument’, as Larkin puts it, that we can believe in the possibility of a fabulous unicorn?
I suppose I hope
the latter option is viable, but I am uncertain. That is why the emotional fragility of this poem ‘dries my throat’.
I see a girl dragged by the wrists
I see a girl dragged by the wrists
Across a dazzling field of snow,
And there is nothing in me that resists.
Once it would not be so;
Once I should choke with powerless jealousies;
But now I seem devoid of subtlety,
As simple as the things I see,
Being no more, no less, than two weak eyes.
There is snow everywhere,
Snow in one blinding light.
Even snow smudged in her hair
As she laughs and struggles, and pretends to fight;
And still I have no regret;
Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she
Rears up in me,
And would not, though I watched an hour yet.
So I walk on. Perhaps what I desired
– That long and sickly hope, someday to be
As she is – gave a flicker and expired;
For the first time I’m content to see
What poor mortar and bricks
I have to build with, knowing that I can
Never in seventy years be more a man
Than now – a sack of meal upon two sticks.
So I walk on. And yet the first brick’s laid.
Else how should two old ragged men
Clearing the drifts with shovels and a spade
Bring up my mind to fever-pitch again?
How should they sweep the girl clean from my heart,
With no more done
Than to stand coughing in the sun,
Then
stoop and shovel snow onto a cart?
The beauty dries my throat.
Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.
Damn all explanatory rhymes!
To be that girl! – but that’s impossible,
For me the task’s to learn the many times
When I must stoop, and throw a shovelful:
I must repeat until I live the fact
That everything’s remade
With shovel and spade;
That each dull day and each despairing act
Builds up the crags from which
the spirit leaps
– The beast most innocent
That is so fabulous it never sleeps;
If I can keep against all argument
Such image of a snow-white unicorn,
Then as I pray it may for sanctuary
Descend at last to me,
And put into my hand its golden horn.
(1944)
As well as playing many of the major
Shakespearean roles, most recently King Lear in Sam Mendes’s production at London’s National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale (b.
1961) has also appeared onstage in roles as varied as Konstantin in Chekhov’s
The Seagull
(1991), King Arthur in
Spamalot
(2005), Stalin in
Collaborators
(2011) and Terri
Dennis in Peter Nichols’s
Privates on Parade
(2013). He has appeared in such films as Kenneth Branagh’s
Hamlet
(1996),
The Deep Blue Sea
(2011) and
My Week with
Marilyn
(2011), played roles from Schubert to John Adams on television, George Smiley in BBC Radio’s adaptation of John le Carré’s Smiley novels (2009–10), and danced
with the Royal Ballet in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(2011).
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
(1917–2000)