The Jolly Company -- Rupert Brooke

Guest poem submitted by Mike Christie:

(Poem #1857) The Jolly Company The stars, a jolly company, I envied, straying late and lonely; And cried upon their revelry: "O white companionship! You only In love, in faith unbroken dwell, Friends radiant and inseparable!" Light-heart and glad they seemed to me And merry comrades (even so God out of heaven may laugh to see the happy crowds; and never know that in his lone obscure distress each walketh in a wilderness). But I, remembering, pitied well And loved them, who, with lonely light, In empty infinite spaces dwell, Disconsolate. For, all the night, I heard the thin gnat-voices cry, Star to faint star, across the sky. -- Rupert Brooke

I have never been a particular fan of Rupert Brooke, but I think he has the
occasional gift for a perfect turn of phrase.  In this case I knew the
phrase before I knew the poem: the last two and a half lines of this poem,
to be exact.  John Wyndham (the author of "The Day of the Triffids") quotes
them in one of his more obscure books, "The Outward Urge".  I read that book
many years ago and loved the lines, but I only recently found the original
poem.

The poem itself is competent, and I am glad to have found it.  But to me it
turns from silver to gold at the end; those two lines are wonderfully
evocative, and bring the poem's theme out with surgical and emotional
precision.

Mike.

PS. I found this version on the web, so if [any Minstrels reader has] a text
to check that would be good, since I have no faith in the accuracy of web
versions.

The Explosion -- Philip Larkin

Proceeding with the mining disaster theme, here's a guest poem submitted
independently by Mike Christie and
Ameya Nagarajan

(Poem #1387) The Explosion On the day of the explosion Shadows pointed towards the pithead: In the sun the slagheap slept. Down the lane came men in pitboots Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke, Shouldering off the freshened silence. One chased after rabbits; lost them; Came back with a nest of lark's eggs; Showed them; lodged them in the grasses. So they passed in beards and moleskins, Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter, Through the tall gates standing open. At noon, there came a tremor; cows Stopped chewing for a second; sun, Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed. The dead go on before us, they Are sitting in God's house in comfort, We shall see them face to face - Plain as lettering in the chapels It was said, and for a second Wives saw men of the explosion Larger than in life they managed - Gold as on a coin, or walking Somehow from the sun towards them, One showing the eggs unbroken. -- Philip Larkin

Note: the sixth verse ("The dead go on . . . ") should be in italics.

[Mike's commentary]

I've liked the two poems people sent in about mining disasters: I wanted to
add this one to the list.  It's long been one of my favourite Larkin poems.
It manages to be powerfully moving without being sentimental; the last image,
of the men somehow expanding and disappearing away from this mortal world, as
the wives understand they are dead, is one of my favourite images in all of
poetry.

Mike Christie

[Ameya's commentary]

All these mining poems reminded me of larkin, what I like about this poem is
that it focuses on the life of the miners and thus highlights even more the
tragedy of their death.

The saddest image is the one conjured by "Gold as on a coin" because it
implies the miners are worth more to their families after death because of
compensation, an amount of money that their labour could never provide.

Ameya

Money -- Philip Larkin

Guest poem submitted by Mike Christie:

(Poem #1330) Money Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me: 'Why do you let me lie here wastefully? I am all you never had of goods and sex. You could get them still by writing a few cheques.' So I look at others, what they do with theirs: They certainly don't keep it upstairs. By now they've a second house and car and wife: Clearly money has something to do with life - In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire: You can't put off being young until you retire, And however you bank your screw, the money you save Won't in the end buy you more than a shave. I listen to money singing. It's like looking down From long French windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad In the evening sun. It is intensely sad. -- Philip Larkin

A couple of notes: "bank your screw" refers to putting your wages in the
bank; this is British slang and no longer current.  And the "shave"
referred to is the shave you get from the mortician when you are dead,
to make you look good in the coffin.

There have been quite a few Larkin poems on Minstrels, but several of my
favourites are missing, including this one.  I like a lot of things
about Larkin -- technically he is always flawless, and he can make the
most intricate rhyme scheme flow effortlessly.  But most of all I like
his ability to find an image that is unreasonably effective.  In this
poem it's the last verse.  I wish I knew why the town seems such an
apposite image for the disease of money.  And "ornate and mad"; and the
last four words; both give a powerful emotional kick that I don't fully
understand but that have stayed with me since I first read this twenty
years ago.

Mike.

[Minstrels Links]

Philip Larkin:
Poem #178, Water
Poem #73, I Remember, I Remember
Poem #100, Days
Poem #254, The North Ship
Poem #502, MCMXIV
Poem #544, Toads
Poem #756, An Arundel Tomb
Poem #793, No Road
Poem #886, Maiden Name
Poem #1070, Wires

(Of these, 'Toads' has a similarish sort of theme)

On the Grasshopper and the Cricket -- John Keats

Guest poem submitted by Mike Christie:

(Poem #910) On the Grasshopper and the Cricket The poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper's -- he takes the lead In summer luxury -- he has never done With his delights; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills. -- John Keats

It's cricket season here in Texas, and the other day a cricket found its way
into our office and started serenading us from a coworker's desk.  We
eventually tracked him down and released him outside, though the corpses of
dozens of his brethren are littering our parking lot, lobby and staircase.

Anyway, he reminded me of Keats' sonnet above, which I've liked since I read
it decades ago.  As I recall, the sonnet was written relatively early in
Keats' career, and was the result of a competition with a friend to write a
sonnet on a grasshopper.  I've never known who the friend was or how his
sonnet came out, though I rather suspect Keats won the competition.  If
anyone can find out I'd love to know.

Mike Christie.

[Minstrels Links]

Other poems by Keats:
Poem #12, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
Poem #182, La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Poem #316, Ode to a Nightingale
Poem #433, Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell
Poem #575, To Mrs Reynolds' Cat
Poem #696, Last Sonnet
Poem #770, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy for Ever
Poem #910, On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

Poetry competitions seem to have been quite popular with the Romantics; see
Poem #22, Ozymandias  -- Percy Bysshe Shelley
and its companion piece:
Poem #285, On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in
the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below  -- Horace Smith

Sir Beelzebub -- Edith Sitwell

Guest poem submitted by Mike Christie:

(Poem #849) Sir Beelzebub When Sir Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell Where Proserpine first fell, Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea, (Rocking and shocking the barmaid). Nobody comes to give him his rum but the Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum Enhances the chances to bless with a benison Alfred Lord Tennyson crossing the bar laid With cold vegetation from pale deputations Of temperance workers (all signed In Memoriam) Hoping with glory to trip up the Laureate's feet, (Moving in classical metres) ... Like Balaclava, the lava came down from the Roof, and the sea's blue wooden gendarmerie Took them in charge while Beelzebub roared for his rum. ... None of them come! -- Edith Sitwell

Here's a poem I've been thinking about sending in for a while. And I was
shocked -- shocked! -- to discover the word hippopotamus in there. Actually
it would make a good segue away from hippopotami. I first read this in the
Collins Albatross Book of Verse, and loved it at age ten. I still like it
now: I love the metre, and the stuttering way it starts, like a car ignition
coughing and then roaring into life.

Mike.

[thomas adds]

"It seems very pretty", she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather
hard to understand!"
        -- Alice, upon reading "Jabberwocky"

Full Moon and Little Frieda -- Ted Hughes

This week's theme: the Moon. We start with a guest poem submitted by Mike
Christie:

(Poem #723) Full Moon and Little Frieda A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -- And you listening. A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch. A pail lifted, still and brimming -- mirror To tempt a first star to a tremor. Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath -- A dark river of blood, many boulders, Balancing unspilled milk. 'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!' The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work That points at him amazed. -- Ted Hughes

When I was fifteen I liked poetry, but for some reason I was under the
impression that if a poet didn't stick to rhyme and metre they were just
being lazy. I liked Keats, Byron, Rossetti, Housman; romantic verse in
traditional forms. Not too unusual for a fifteen year-old. Then, in English
class, I read an anthology of modern verse that included Andrew Motion,
Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes. None of it stuck at the time except the
Hughes, and I loved 'Pike', 'The Thought Fox', and 'Hawk in the Rain'. Right
at the end of the anthology was 'Full Moon and Little Frieda'.

I was completely taken aback. I can still remember reading it over and over,
trying to figure out why on earth I liked it so much when it didn't do
anything I had thought a poem had to do. It's no longer my favourite Hughes
poem -- that would have to be something in the Crow series; and Larkin has
since overtaken Hughes as my favourite modern poet. But I have a deep
affection for this poem; it taught me in a few seconds more than I knew
there was to learn.

I like the way the first line spreads a canvas: "a cool small evening": and
the rest of the poem shines a light only on selected, disconnected areas of
the canvas.  It's about as far as you can get from a judgmental work; the
poet contributes six or seven almost independent images but lets the reader
assemble them at will.  And the tenses are interesting, too: the poem is an
instantaneous snapshot, lasting only a second or so: all the actions are
either past, or present but captured as a moment.  The only action is the
cry of 'Moon!'.

Mike Christie.

Other Minstrels poems by Ted Hughes:
  Poem #42, "Hawk Roosting"
  Poem #98, "The Thought Fox"
  Poem #417, "Thistles"
  Poem #671, "Lineage"