Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (7 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Shelley is one of the many poets who have written of the struggle of the common people to end oppression. After the Peterloo Massacre, he wrote in ‘Men of England’:
The seed ye sow, another reaps:
The wealth ye find, another keeps.
The sadness comes from hopes betrayed so many times, despite the courage of those who resist. But I have to choose one. John Clare wrote of the countryside with great affection but spent his
last years in
an asylum. This poem tells of a man reduced to nothingness – bereft, abandoned, beyond tears. The desperation
of Clare’s words leaves you weeping for
all who share his plight.
I Am
I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost: –
I am the self-consumer of my woes; –
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, –
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest – that I loved the best –
Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod;
A place where woman
never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below – above the vaulted sky.
(1844–1845)
After a brief spell in the theatre, Ken Loach (b. 1936) was recruited by the BBC in 1963 as a television director. This
launched a long career
directing
films for television and the cinema, from
Cathy Come Home
(1966) and
Kes
(1969) to
Land and Freedom
(1995)
, Sweet Sixteen
(2002)
, The Wind That Shakes The Barley
(2006) and
The Angels’ Share
(2012). His latest films are a documentary called
The Spirit of ’45
(2013) and
Jimmy’s Hall
(2014)
.
WALT WHITMAN
(1819–1892)
STEPHEN FRY
For some reason, the blubbiest poem for me has always been Whitman’s ‘Of The Terrible Doubt of Appearances’. It’s Uncle Walt at his most perfect, I
think. The strangely jerky parenthetical hiccups in the middle all build into an ending that never fails to choke me.
Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances
Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, Maybe these are (as doubtless they are) only
apparitions, and the real something has yet to be
known;
(How often they dart out of themselves, as if to confound me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them, )
May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed
but seem) as from my present point of view, And might prove (as of course they would) naught of what they appear,
or naught anyhow, from entirely changed points of view;
To me, these and the like of these are curiously answer’d by my lovers, my dear friends,
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable,
the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.
(1860)
The writer, actor, and TV and radio presenter Stephen Fry (b. 1957) has published four novels, several nonfiction works, two volumes of autobiography and a guide to writing
poetry,
The Ode Less Travelled
(2005). He has appeared in some thirty movies, notably
Wilde
(1997), directed
Bright Young Things
(2003) and voiced all
seven of the
Harry Potter
audiobooks.
His many TV appearances include
Black-adder
(1986–8), and his most recent stage role was as Malvolio at the Globe Theatre and in
London’s West End in 2012, and on Broadway in 2013.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
(1830–1894)
ROBERT FISK
As I write these words, I prepare for my next fraught journey back to Baghdad, back to the suicide bombers and the throat-cutters and the fast-firing Americans. And through the
veil of Iraqi tears, I will draw more portraits of suffering and pain and greed and occasional courage and I wonder if, when
I eventually leave this vast chamber of horrors, I will try to emulate
the advice of the only poem that always moves me to tears, Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’:
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
JULIAN FELLOWES
I don’t have a very good ear for poetry or for music either, really. As a general rule, I
am more influenced by prose and I must be one of the few who think Dorothy
Wordsworth’s description of the daffodils considerably more effective than her brother William’s poem. But I am moved by ‘Remember’, perhaps because I became aware of it
when my family was essentially waiting for my mother to die of the cancer that had been
shutting her down for two years. I had not seen much of death
before that point, other
than a pair of legs under a crashed car on the M1, and the enormity of the change, the idea of saying good-bye forever, seemed for a while to engulf me. In the end, my mother’s departure was
peaceful and un-horrid, and there was a comfort in that, but I do recall that sense of disloyalty in the early months, when I would find myself laughing at a party and suddenly
remember that she
was gone and my poor father was alone, and Rossetti’s words did resonate with me, expressing, as they do, a feeling that my late and so-lamented parent would have thoroughly endorsed. As it
happens, I don’t know to whom the poem was originally addressed, but I suppose, in the end, great poetry, like great art, is not about anyone in particular because it is about everyone.
Remember
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
(1862)
These thoughts of the veteran war reporter Robert
Fisk (b. 1946), Middle East correspondent for the London
Times
and
Independent
for more than
thirty years, are the closing words of his book
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
(2005).
The writer, actor and director Julian Fellowes (b. Cairo, 1949) is best known as the creator of the award-winning TV series
Downton Abbey
and for his Oscar-winning
screenplay
for Robert Altman’s 2002 film
Gosford Park
. As well as appearing as an actor on TV and the West End stage, and in films such as
Tomorrow Never Dies
(1997), he has
published several novels and wrote the stage version of
Mary Poppins
(2004). He was created a life peer in 2011.
EMILY DICKISON
(1830–1886)