Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (3 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Productions by the Scottish opera director Sir David McVicar (b. 1966) have been seen at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, Glyndebourne, Chicago
Lyric Opera, English National Opera, Scottish
Opera, the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, and at many other theatres around the world.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(1564–1616)
MELVYN BRAGG
I have never been able to read this sonnet to the end without stumbling and then stopping. It is the final couplet that finishes me off and yet it says the opposite of what the
poem has made me feel so acutely.
All great poems are about each one of us. This speaks as directly to me over the
centuries as any evening’s call from a close friend. What is described is a condition we all find ourselves
in and increasingly so as we age.
For me it paints a picture of my thoughts and feelings when I think of my first wife, who took her life more than forty years ago. I feel as responsible, as guilty, and as ashamed now as I was
then. The first twelve lines bind the past to the present
so accurately and poignantly that you see no division between them, and that, for me, is the great power of the piece.
In the poem Shakespeare moves from considerations of time, to friends, to love, to sights, and the resurrection of ancient ‘woes’. All these magnetised my past and present feelings
about Lise. And somehow his optimistic last two lines, which redeem the rest and even rebut
it, are those I can never meet without tears. Perhaps because his ‘dear friend’ is living and
mine is not.
Sonnet XXX
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanéd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee,
dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
(1609)
The writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg (b. 1939) has published more than twenty novels, most recently
Grace and Mary
(2013), and fourteen works of nonfiction, including
The Adventure of English
(2003). He has also written two books for children and four screenplays, including
The Music Lovers
(1970) and
Jesus Christ Superstar
(1973). For
several decades he has presented TV’s
The South Bank Show
and BBC Radio’s
In Our Time
. He was created a life peer in 1998.
BEN JONSON
(1572–1637)
JOHN CAREY
I have, thank God, never lost a child. But every parent has a lurking dread that it may happen, and an inbuilt sympathy with those to whom it has. Over and above these obvious
triggers of grief in Jonson’s poem, though, it is the tone that makes it, for me, impossible – or anyway, unsafe – to try to
read aloud.
I know, from experiment, that I cannot be sure to get any further than the last two words of the second line – ’loved boy’. They sound so natural, so like a loving
afterthought, as if he has turned to the child and addressed him in an altered, gentler voice, as you might do after making some more public announcement – just to reassure him, in case he is
afraid or bewildered.
I think that, once that point is past, I could manage to read the rest. Jonson blaming himself, and consoling himself by thinking of the tribulations his child will not now
have to suffer, reaches a kind of precarious equipoise, and by the end he’s looking to the future. It’s that ‘loved boy’ that’s the killer.
On My First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and
joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, asked,
say, ‘Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
(1616)
John Carey (b. 1934) is emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, twice chairman of the Man Booker Prize judges, and a frequent broadcaster.
Among his many published works are studies of Milton, Dickens, Thackeray, Donne, and Golding, a polemic entitled
What Good Are the Arts?
(2005), and his new memoir,
The Unexpected
Professor
(2014).
FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO
(1580–1645)
ARIEL DORFMAN
It is the last line that does it; the tears come from beyond me, and perhaps from beyond death. The eyes that shed those tears will become dust, the eyes that have seen over
and over the love of my life, Angélica, the woman who helped me survive exile and tribulations
and peopled my world with hope – those eyes will have been closed by the final shadow.
And yet the
polvo
, the dust, is
enamorado
, is in love.
Except that there are no words in English that can offer us the equivalent of
enamorado
or
enamoramiento
, so much so that I have had a correspondence with my friend, the
extraordinary Spanish author Javier Marías, about the right translation into
English for his equally extraordinary novel, entitled
Los Enamoramientos
, and we reached the conclusion
that there was no perfect fit for such a word, not in English, not in any language.
Quevedo knew this many centuries ago and finished his poem with that word, which tells us that we are filled with love, we fall into love as if into an abyss, we ascend to its invitation to
enamorar
,
a verb that enhances what both lovers must do, make someone love me, find myself overflowing with love.
That last verse never fails to make me cry. The laws of the universe discovered by physics assure humanity that we are composed of atoms and that protons and neutrons and
electrons will scatter and rejoin, that everything is connected, that when we drink a glass of water or shed a tear,
some slight marrow of Shakespeare or Brecht or Rumi is submerged in the depths
of the liquid coupling of hydrogen and oxygen: the cosmos as a giant blender, making our every cell ultimately immortal. I am not religious and do not believe, as Quevedo did, that the soul will
subsist, that God will greet us once our body has finished its course of skin and bone and flesh. But this I do believe:
my wife and I have sworn to mix our ashes, to be dust together for eternity.
Polvo seremos, mas polvo enamorado
. Angélica and I will be dust but dust in love. How can I not cry with joy for myself, for her, for all of us on this earth that will itself turn to
dust, ashes to ashes, yes, but ashes in love.
JAVIER MARÍAS
As we grow older, perhaps what saddens us most about the prospect
of death – and, oddly enough, what strikes us as most melancholy and unbearable too – is not that we will cease to
live and have no more future, that is, no more knowledge, curiosity, or laughter, but the certainty that all our memories, our past, will disappear along with us, that everything we have
experienced, seen, heard, thought, and felt will no longer ‘float’ in the world – to use a deliberately
imprecise verb.
Maybe that is what is so moving about any attempt to rebel against this future disappearance. Not, I repeat, the disappearance of our own selves, but of all that we preserve within us and that
depends for its existence entirely upon our consciousness.
Quevedo’s sonnet is one of the most successful of rebellions. It matters little that, as Borges pointed out, its extraordinary
last lines are perhaps ‘a re-creation, or an
exaltation’ of a line by Propertius (
Elegies
, Book I, 19). Quevedo’s last two lines – the lines that bring a lump
to the throat – are infinitely
superior. As are the first two lines, which throw down the challenge: even though death may close my eyes and sweep me off on the blank white day – ’
el blanco día
’,
that is, ‘
el día en blanco
’, a marvelous
way of describing the day on which nothing will be written and on which nothing will happen – even though my veins and my
marrow and my whole body will be turned to ash, it will be ash that is still filled with meaning, and even though they will be dust, even though they will be nothing, they will be a nothing that
still loves. Yes, this poem is one of the most sublime rebellions in the
history of literature. And we, the living, continue to read it, and that, at least, is something.