Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (26 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Requiem for the Croppies
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley . . .
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp . . .
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches
with the tramp.
A people hardly marching . . . on the hike . . .
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until . . . on Vinegar Hill . . . the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes
at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August . . . the barley grew up out of our grave.
(1966)
The Belfast-born screenwriter and director Terry George (b. 1952) is the author of various screenplays, notably
In the Name of the Father
(1993). In 1996 George
made his
directorial debut with
Some Mother’s Son
. Since then he has written and directed numerous television shows and feature films including
A Bright Shining Lie
(1998),
The
District
(2000–4),
Hart’s War
(2002) and
Reservation Road
(2007). In 2004 he wrote, directed and produced
Hotel Rwanda,
and his latest feature film is
Whole
Lotta Sole
(2011). In 2012 George and his daughter, Oorlagh,
won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film for their Northern Ireland reconciliation story
The Shore.
CHRISTOPHER LOGUE
(1926–2011)
BRIAN PATTEN
Christopher Logue wrote ‘Gone Ladies’ in 1966 and dedicated it to the artist Pauline Boty, who died that year at the age of twenty-eight. In 1978 her husband, Clive
Goodwin, died of a brain haemorrhage in a Los Angeles lockup where he’d been thrown by the police. They thought he was drunk. Boty
Goodwin, their daughter, as heart-stoppingly beautiful as
her mother, died seventeen years after that, at the age of twenty-nine.
‘Gone Ladies’ is an adaptation of Villon’s ‘
Ballade des dames du temps jadis
’
,
written in the twelfth century. It is an elegy for real and mythical
women, their beauty, and how it vanishes, like – as Dante Gabriel Rossetti says in an earlier translation – ’the
snows of yesteryear’. It also evokes a far broader sadness,
the sadness one feels for all gone friends.
Gone Ladies
Where in the world is Helen gone,
Whose loveliness demolished Troy?
Where is Salome?
Where the wan licentious cream of Avalon?
Who sees my lady Fontenoy
And where is Joan, so soldier tall?
And she who bore
God’s only boy?
Where is the snow we watched last Fall?
Is Thaïs still? Is Nell? And can
Stem Héloïse aurene,
Whose so-by-love-enchanted man
Sooner would risk castration than
Abandon her, be seen?
Who does Scheherazade enthral?
And who, within her arms and small,
Shares Sappho’s evergreen?
Through what eventless territory
Are ladies Day and Joplin swept?
What news of Marilyn who crept
Into an endless reverie?
You saw Lucrece? And Jane? And she,
Salvations’s ancient blame-it-all,
Delicious Eve? Then answer me:
Where is the snow we watched last Fall?
Girl never see to know from me
Who was the fairest of them all.
What wouldst thou say
if I asked thee:
Where is the snow we watched last Fall?
(1966)
Brian Patten (b. 1946) made his name in the 1960s as one of the Liverpool Poets, alongside Adrian Henri and Roger McGough with their
joint anthology,
The Mersey Sound
(1967), which is now a Penguin Modern Classic. He has published more than forty books, including
Collected
Love Poems
and
Selected Poems
(2007). He writes for
both children and adults and his poems are translated into many European languages.
JOHN BERRYMAN
(1914–72)
AL ALVAREZ
John Berryman wrote this poem about his friend Randall Jarrell.
As it happens, Jarrell was not one of the young writers who gathered around Richard Blackmur, though like most of them – Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke –
he died badly and too soon. But,
whenever I read Berryman’s lines about ‘the beloved faces’, I think of Blackmur and Princeton, of being young and ambitious and full of ideas and
of arguing all night with Kenneth Burke. And sometimes the poem makes me wish that I, too, believed in an afterlife – if only because I know that if I ran into Burke up there we’d go on
with the argument, and all would be as before.
Dream Song 90: Op. posth. no. 13
In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces,
of liberations, and beloved faces,
such as now ere dawn he sings.
It would not be easy, accustomed to these things,
to give up the old world, but he could try;
let it all rest, have a good cry.
Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing
cannot restore
one instant’s good to, rest:
he’s left us now.
The panic died and in the panic’s dying
so did my old friend. I am headed west
also, also, somehow.
In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again
I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat
and all will be as before
whenas we sought, among the beloved faces,
eminence and were dissatisfied
with that
and needed more.
(c. 1968)
The poet, critic and novelist Al Alvarez (b. 1929) is the author of two seminal works on twentieth-century poetry, his 1962 anthology
The New Poetry
and his 1971 study of
suicide and literature,
The Savage God
. He has been a champion of Sylvia Plath, Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert, among many
other European and American poets. His choice evokes memories
of his time as a young man at Princeton, as recalled in his 1999 autobiography
Where Did It All Go Right?
HAYDEN CARRUTH
(1921–2008)
JONATHAN FRANZEN
The line that gets me is ‘They are going away’.
Essay
So many poems about the deaths of animals.
Wilbur’s toad, Kinnell’s porcupine, Eberhart’s squirrel,
and that poem by someone – Hecht? Merrill? –
about cremating a woodchuck. But mostly
I remember
the outrageous number of them,
as if
every
poet, I too, had written at least
one animal elegy; with the result that today
when I came to a good enough poem by Edwin Brock
about finding a dead fox at the edge of the sea
I could not respond; as if permanent shock
had deadened me. And then after a moment
I began to give way to sorrow (watching
myself
sorrowlessly the while), not merely because
part of my being had been violated and annulled,
but because all these many poems over the years
have been necessary, – suitable and correct. This
has been the time of the finishing off of the animals.
They are going away – their fur and their wild eyes,
their voices. Deer leap and leap in
front
of the screaming snowmobiles until they leap
out of existence. Hawks circle once or twice
around their shattered nests and then they climb
to the stars. I have lived with them fifty years,
we have lived with them fifty million years,
and now they are going, almost gone. I don’t know
if the animals are capable of reproach.
But
clearly they do not bother to say good-bye.
(1970s)