Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (2 page)

For the next few weeks I asked every male literary friend I saw to name a poem he couldn’t read or recite without breaking up. It was amazing how many immediately said yes, this one, and
embarked on its first few lines. With Frank’s encouragement,
I began to contemplate an anthology called
Poems that Make Strong Men Cry.

Then I remembered I had another book to finish, and set the project aside. But it remained a topic of paradoxically happy conversation between Frank and myself until his death in the summer of
2010, at the age of ninety. I duly steeled myself to reading ‘Unfinished Poem’ at his funeral service and managed it – just
– without choking up.

In 2007, reviewing A. E. Housman’s letters for the
London Review of Books
, Kermode had discussed the controversy caused in Cambridge in 1933 by a Housman lecture entitled ‘On
the Name and Nature of Poetry’. After recalling the brouhaha provoked at the time by Housman’s emphasis on the emotional power of poetry, with F. R. Leavis saying it would ‘take
years to remedy
the damage the lecture must have inflicted on his students’, Frank continued – with, he told me, our recurrently lachrymose conversation very much in mind:

Housman and Hardy have emerged as two of the most tear-provoking poets in this collection – to which I was urged to return, in the wake of Frank’s death, by my son
Ben (if with a somewhat less
macho
title). With three entries each, they are equaled by Philip Larkin and bested only by W. H. Auden, with five. So four of us
supposedly buttoned-up Brits
top the charts of almost one hundred poems from eighteen countries, a dozen of them written by women, chosen by men of more than twenty nationalities ranging in age from early twenties to late
eighties. Five pairs of contributors happen to have chosen the same poem, for intriguingly different reasons.

Larkin himself could have proved a prototype contributor.
‘Wordsworth was nearly the price of me once,’ he told the [London]
Observer
in 1979. ‘I was driving down the M1
on a Saturday morning: they had this poetry slot on the radio . . . and someone suddenly started reading the Immortality Ode, and I couldn’t see for tears. And when you’re driving down
the middle lane at seventy miles an hour . . .’

Early in our task, we were encouraged by a
note from Professor John Carey, with whom I discussed our work-in-progress over a dinner at Merton College, Oxford, where Ben and I both studied
English thirty years apart: ‘It will bring some good poems to public notice, and it will stimulate debate about the emotional power of art and how it affects different people.’ Thanks
to our partnership with Amnesty International, we can add such cross-border
issues as freedom of speech and thought, as in the contribution from one of the leaders of the 1989 human rights protests
in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

After deciding to arrange the poems in chronological order, we calculated that some 75 per cent of them were written in the twentieth century – inevitable, perhaps, so early in the
twenty-first. The most common themes, apart from intimations
of mortality, range from pain and loss via social and political ideals to the beauty and variety of Nature – as well as love, in
all its many guises. Three of our contributors have suffered the ultimate pain of losing a child; others are moved to tears by the sheer beauty of the way a poet captures, in Alexander Pope’s
famous phrase, ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’.
The same might be said of our contributors’ candid explanations of their choices, many of which
rival the poems themselves in stirring the reader’s emotions.

Some of those who declined to take part did so for almost poetic reasons. Wrote the pianist Alfred Brendel: ‘I easily shed tears when I listen to music, experience a Shakespeare play, or
encounter a great performance. Literature doesn’t
have the same effect on me, so it seems. I cannot tell you why, as reading has been an important part of my life.’ Said the
actor-magician Ricky Jay: ‘Right now, I find it hard to think of a poem that
doesn’t
make me cry. I’m the kinda guy that weeps at reruns of
Happy Days
.’ And
the playwright Patrick Marber: ‘You bet I’ve got one, but I’m not going to share it with anyone else!’

A sudden
shock of emotion naturally overcomes different people in different ways. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the proper reader responds to a poem not with his brain or his heart, but with his
back, waiting for ‘the telltale tingle between the shoulder-blades’. To our contributors, a moist eye seems the natural if involuntary response to a particular phrase or line, thought
or image; the vast majority
are public figures not prone to tears, as is supposedly the manly way, but here prepared to admit to caving in when ambushed by great art.

The youngest of my three sons, now himself a father, Ben, is a grown man to whom tears do not come readily; I myself, as he has enjoyed telling all enquirers, am prone to weep
all too easily, at prose as much as poetry, movies
as much as music. We’ve had a great deal of fun, and not a few vigorous disagreements, while compiling this anthology together.

It was only after intense negotiation, for instance, that we agreed to stretch most definitions of poetry by including an extract from a verse play, and another from a ‘prose-poem’
of a novel, then another, while drawing the line at song lyrics – some of which are
fine poetry, for sure, but (in my view) indistinguishable in their power to move from the music to which
they are set. We agreed to admit one traditional lullaby; but this policy otherwise cost us, alas, a distinguished writer intent on a touching French
chanson
, and an astronaut who wanted the
lyric of a song from a Broadway musical.

On which note, I am pleased to hand over to Ben for
an expert explanation of the physical mechanics of tears, especially male tears, and to distil perfectly on both our behalves the purpose, as
we see it, of this book.

BEN HOLDEN

Cecil Day-Lewis once said that he did not write poetry to be understood, but to understand. This quest, to understand, takes many routes but is common to us all. Tears also
unite us as humans: we are the only
species that cries. Charles Darwin himself was at a loss to explain this uniquely human trait, describing it as that ‘special expression of
man’s’.

One scientific explanation is that the act of crying is evolution’s mechanism for draining excess chemicals released into the blood when we experience extreme stress or high emotion: the
chin’s mentalis muscle wobbles; a lump rises in our throat,
as the autonomic nervous system expands the glottis to aid our oxygen intake; the lachrymal glands flood the fornix conjunctiva of
the upper eyelid; and, as teardrops break their ducts and run down our cheeks, our blood is cleansed of the secreted prolactin and adrenocorticotropic hormones.

Put another way: we have ‘a good cry’ and feel better.

An alternative theory is that crying is
an advancement of a mammalian distress signal. After all, tears provide a clear and immediate cry for help that is tricky to fake. And just as it is tough
to counterfeit, crying can also be catching, like yawning. One person’s tears often set off another’s.

In these ways, weeping betrays not only vulnerability but also an openness that is contagious. Yet so often we try to hide our tears
when caught out or in public, as if it is embarrassing to be
around such raw tenderness. This is perhaps especially true for those of us who are men.

Despite the male tear duct being larger than the female, studies have consistently shown that from around the age of ten a divergence occurs and thereafter boys cry far less than girls. Whether
that is down to cultural or biological reasons
(or, as is likely the case, both), the sad truth is that the male of our species has not always been allowed to cry. Tears may have been venerated in
European cultures during the nine-teenth century as a sign of high moral character but, these days, they are all too hastily wiped away.

We want to put paid to that with this anthology. We hope that readers may set each other off as they read
these verses aloud to one another. Let’s celebrate high emotion! Together
let’s express our shared humanity, whatever your gender, background or circumstances. However grievous at times, let these pages console you, if upset; lift you, if down; I defy you not to be
inspired by them.

To borrow from Samuel Beckett, our contributors’ ‘words are their tears’. Some of their introductions are
profoundly moving and many describe devastating ordeals. These woes
are framed in personal contexts but will be familiar to many readers. During its compilation, contributor Billy Collins jokingly asked how any of us will make it through the book without succumbing
to a complete emotional breakdown. Yet our intent with this collection is to celebrate our shared compassion and common humanity,
all in keeping with the creed of our partners at Amnesty
International.

We hope as you read these pages that your own corneas may at times flood. Crying expresses our very inability to articulate emotion, after all, and so what could be more human, honest, or pure
than tears?

Perhaps the only response is that other ‘special expression’ of ours: poetry.

CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE
(1563–86)

DAVID McVICAR

Tichborne died at around age twenty-three in 1586, a conspirator in the infamous Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth I and rescue Mary Stuart from captivity. The poem was
written as part of a letter to his wife, Agnes, days before the hideous sentence for traitors was carried out, and he was executed.
It’s a beautifully constructed elegy, as would be expected
from an educated gentleman of the period. The use of paradox to describe his mental state reaches out beyond the personal and touches upon the universal human condition.

These are technical points. It moves and terrifies me so much because the poet is here composing his own elegy. The immediacy of these lines, as their author reflects
upon the waste of his brief
life and faces a death of indescribable agony, touches me in a way that’s hard to put into words. The certain knowledge of and the struggle to accept death seems to me a primary motor of the
artistic impulse; why we create art and why we turn to art and how art helps us to express whatever is valid or has meaning in our short span of existence.