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LITERATURA INGLESA III

ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

SHORT ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH POETRY

2014-2015

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Required reading for UNIT 2. Poetry in the Fifties: Writing against the grain

Philip Larkin

“Aubade”

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

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And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Let’s no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178058

“Church going”

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

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Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come

To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,

A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt

Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspoilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation -- marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these -- for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,

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Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar5.htm

“Sad Steps”

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There's something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow

Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate -

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain

Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178054

“Talking In Bed”

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

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It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

http://giron.itgo.com/Talking.htm

John Betjeman

“A Subaltern's Love Song”

(Please see that the poem in the Addenda is incorrect due to a change in the order of
the stanzas)

Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn,

Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,

How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father's euonymus shines as we walk,

And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,

The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,

And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun,
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall,

The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,

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My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing's the light on your hair.

By roads "not adopted", by woodlanded ways,

She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o'clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,

I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surry twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,

Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1537

“Christmas”

The bells of waiting Advent ring,

The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge

And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
'The church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,

Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze,
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall

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Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'.

And London shops on Christmas Eve

Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,

And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/787

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Stevie Smith

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15801

“Our Bog is Dood”

Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,

They lisped in accents mild,
But when I asked them to explain
They grew a little wild.
How do you know your Bog is dood
My darling little child?
We know because we wish it so
That is enough, they cried,
And straight within each infant eye
Stood up the flame of pride,
And if you do not think it so
You shall be crucified.
Then tell me, darling little ones,
What's dood, suppose Bog is?
Just what we think, the answer came,
Just what we think it is.
They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours
And we are wholly his.
But when they raised them up again
They had forgotten me
Each one upon each other glared
In pride and misery

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For what was dood, and what their Bog
They never could agree.
Oh sweet it was to leave them then,
And sweeter not to see,
And sweetest of all to walk alone
Beside the encroaching sea,
The sea that soon should drown them all,
That never yet drowned me.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/our-bog-is-dood/

“Pretty”

Why is the word pretty so underrated?

In November the leaf is pretty when it falls
The stream grows deep in the woods after rain
And in the pretty pool the pike stalks

He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too,

The prey escapes with an underwater flash
But not for long, the great fish has him now
The pike is a fish who always has his prey

And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty

His paws are not webbed, he cannot shut his nostrils
As the otter can and the beaver, he is torn between
The land and water. Not ‘torn’, he does not mind.

The owl hunts in the evening and it is pretty

The lake water below him rustles with ice
There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist
All this is pretty, it could not be prettier.

Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes

It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough,
Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier
A field in the evening, tilting up.

The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late

The sky is lighter than the hill field
All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary
Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty.

And it is careless, and that is always pretty

This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless,
As Nature is always careless and indifferent

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Who sees, who steps, means nothing, and this is pretty.

So a person can come along like a thief—pretty!—

Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel,
Lick the icicle broken from the bank
And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty.

Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you’ll be able

Very soon not even to cry pretty
And so be delivered entirely from humanity
This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.
Stevie Smith, “Pretty” from New Selected Poems. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176222

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Ted Hughes

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up --
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_74vwf8fcw

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Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect

Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,

Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

Of submarine delicacy and horror.

A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-

Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs

Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,

Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: red fry to them-
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:

The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,

Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them-

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Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished

With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods

Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.

http://literaturenubd.blogspot.com.es/2012/04/pike-by-ted-hughes-from-
first-year.html

You can listen to Ted Hughes reading this poem at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvk-lHIs9GI

Examination at the Womb-Door

Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death

Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death
Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death
Who owns these questionable brains? Death
All this messy blood? Death
These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death
This wicked little tongue? Death
This occasional wakefulness? Death

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?

Held

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death

Who owns all of space? Death

Who is stronger than hope? Death

Who is stronger than the will? Death

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 Stronger than love? Death
Stronger than life? Death

But who is stronger than Death?

Me, evidently
Pass, Crow

http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Ted-hughes-examination-at-the-womb-door-
annotated#note-826740

Daffodils

Remember how we picked the daffodils?

Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you) ,
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
'A custom of the house'.

Besides, we still weren't sure we wanted to own

Anything. Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads-still strangers
To our whole possession. The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we'd live forever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest epherma-
Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall.

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Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else's
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April-your last April.
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks-
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter's bench,

Distributed leaves among the dozens-
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered-
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch-

Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,

With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave's stony cold
As if ice had a breath-

We sold them, to wither.

The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

Every March since they have lifted again

Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.

Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod-an anchor, a cross of rust.

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http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/ted_hughes_2011_6.pdf

Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -

I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md_5IXqXg_E

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Sylvia Plath

Balloons

Since Christmas they have lived with us,

Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,

Giving a shriek and pop
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish---
Such queer moons we live with

Instead of dead furniture!

Straw mats, white walls
And these traveling
Globes of thin air, red, green,
Delighting

The heart like wishes or free

Peacocks blessing
Old ground with a feather
Beaten in starry metals.
Your small

Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,

Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist.

http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/Balloons

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The Beekeeper’s Daughter

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black

The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.

The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings.
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest ---

A fruit that's death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees

Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/The_Beekeepers_Daughter

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

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Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

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And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---

The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.

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They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178960

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.

One year in every ten
I manage it-----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.
Do I terrify?-------

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

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Them unwrap me hand and foot ------
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands

My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.

It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart---
It really goes.

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And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/ll.html

Child

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.

I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate ---

April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

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Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous

Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/Child

26
Geoffrey Hill

In Memory of Jane Fraser

When snow like sheep lay in the fold

And winds went begging at each door,
And the far hills were blue with cold,
And a cold shroud lay on the moor,

She kept the siege. And every day

We watched her brooding over death
Like a strong bird above its prey.
The room filled with the kettle’s breath.

Damp curtains glued against the pane

Sealed time away. Her body froze
As if to freeze us all, and chain
Creation to a stunned repose.

She died before the world could stir.

In March the ice unloosed the brook
And water ruffled the sun’s hair.
Dead cones upon the alder shook.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178121

Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,

Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
27
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178122

September Song

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable

you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,

sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses

flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/september-song/

28
Tony Harrison

Heredity

How you became a poet's a mystery!

Wherever did you get your talent from?

I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry-

one was a stammerer, the other dumb.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/heredity/

National Trust
Bottomless pits. There's on in Castleton,
and stout upholders of our law and order
one day thought its depth worth wagering on
and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder
and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.

Not even a good flogging made him holler!

O gentlemen, a better way to plumb

the depths of Britain's dangling a scholar,
say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath,
now National Trust, a place where they got tin,
those gentlemen who silenced the men's oath
and killed the language that they swore it in.

The dumb go down in history and disappear

and not one gentleman's been brough to book:

Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr

(Cornish-)
'the tongueless man gets his land took.'

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http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/national-trust/

Book Ends

I
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don't try.
You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…
The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.
Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.
At night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we're alike!
You're life's all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between 's
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

II

The stone's too full. The wording must be terse.

There's scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it--
Come on, it's not as if we're wanting verse.
It's not as if we're wanting a whole sonnet!
After tumblers of neat Johnny Walker
(I think that both of us we're on our third)
you said you'd always been a clumsy talker
and couldn't find another, shorter word
for 'beloved' or for 'wife' in the inscription,
but not too clumsy that you can't still cut:
You're supposed to be the bright boy at description

30
and you can't tell them what the fuck to put!
I've got to find the right words on my own.
I've got the envelope that he'd been scrawling,
mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling
but I can't squeeze more love into their stone.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/tony_harrison/poems/12690

Long Distance

I
Your bed's got two wrong sides. You life's all grouse.
I let your phone-call take its dismal course:

Ah can't stand it no more, this empty house!

Carrots choke us wi'out your mam's white sauce!

Them sweets you brought me, you can have 'em back.
Ah'm diabetic now. Got all the facts.
(The diabetes comes hard on the track
of two coronaries and cataracts.)

Ah've allus liked things sweet! But now ah push

food down mi throat! Ah'd sooner do wi'out.
And t'only reason now for beer 's to flush
(so t'dietician said) mi kidneys out.

When I come round, they'll be laid out, the sweets,

Lifesavers, my father's New World treats,
still in the big brown bag, and only bought
rushing through JFK as a last thought.

II
Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed

31
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.

He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief

though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.

You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/long-distance-ii/

Turns

I thought it made me look more 'working class'

(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You're every bit as good as that lot are!)

All the pension queue came out to stare.

Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR) ,
his cap turned inside up beside his head,
smudged H A H in purple Indian ink
and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folks migh think
he wanted charity for dropping dead.

He never begged. For nowt! Death's reticence

crowns his life, and me, I'm opening my trap

32
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/turns/

Marked with D.
When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven
not unlike those he fuelled all his life,
I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven
and radiant with the sight of his dead wife,
light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,
'not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie.'
I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame
but only literally, which makes me sorry,
sorry for his sake there's no Heaven to reach.
I get it all from Earth my daily bread
but he hungered for release from mortal speech
that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead.
The baker’s man that no one will see rise
and England made to feel like some dull oaf
is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes
and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/marked-with-d/

33
Benjamin Zephaniah

Dis-poetry
Watch and listen to Zepahnia performing the poem at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2jSG2dmdfs

Talking Turkeys, at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4AgPSjzXkw

Don`t worry, be happy, at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4AgPSjzXkw

The Death of Joy Gardner

They put a leather belt around her
13 feet of tape and bound her
Handcuffs to secure her
And only God knows what else,
She's illegal, so deport her
Said the Empire that brought her
She died,
Nobody killed her
And she never killed herself.
It is our job to make her
Return to Jamaica
Said the Alien Deporters
Who deports people like me,
It was said she had a warning
That the officers were calling
On that deadly July morning
As her young son watched TV.

An officer unplugged the phone

Mother and child were now alone
When all they wanted was a home
A child watch Mummy die,
34
No matter what the law may say
A mother should not die this way
Let human rights come into play
And to everyone apply.
I know not of a perfect race
I know not of a perfect place
I know this is not a simple case
Of Yardies on the move,
We must talk some Race Relations
With the folks from immigration
About this kind of deportation
If things are to improve.

Let it go down in history

The word is that officially
She died democratically
In 13 feet of tape,
That Christian was over here
Because pirates were over there
The Bible sent us everywhere
To make Great Britain great.
Here lies the extradition squad
And we should all now pray to God
That as they go about their job
They make not one mistake,
For I fear as I walk the streets
That one day I just may meet
Officials who may tie my feet
And how would I escape.

I see my people demonstrating

And educated folks debating
The way they're separating
The elder from the youth,
When all they are demanding
Is a little overstanding
They too have family planning
Now their children want the truth.
As I move around I am eyeing
So many poets crying
And so many poets trying
To articulate the grief,
I cannot help but wonder
How the alien deporters

35
(As they said to press reporters)
Can feel absolute relief.

http://benjaminzephaniah.com/rhymin/the-death-of-joy-gardner/

Bought and Sold

Smart big awards and prize money

Is killing off black poetry
It’s not censors or dictators that are cutting up our art.
The lure of meeting royalty
And touching high society
Is damping creativity and eating at our heart.

The ancestors would turn in graves

Those poor black folk that once were Slaves would wonder
How souls were sold
And check our strategies,
The empire strikes back and waves
Tamed warriors bow on parades
When they have done what they’ve been told
They get their OBE’s
(Order of the British Empire)

Don’t take my word, go check the verse

Cause every laureate gets worse
A family that you cannot fault as muse will mess your mind,
And yeah, you may fatten your purse
And surely they will check you
First when subjects need to be amused
With paid for prose and rhymes.

Take your prize, now write more,

Faster,
Fuck the truth!
Now you’re an actor do not fault your benefactor
Write, publish and review,
You look like a dreadlock Rasta,
You look like a ghetto blaster,
But you can´t diss your paymaster
And bite the hand that feeds you.

36
What happened to the verse of fire
Cursing cool the empire
What happened to the soul rebel that Marley had in mind,
This bloodstained, stolen empire
Rewards you and you conspire,
(Yes Marley said that time will tell)
Now look they’ve gone and joined.

We keep getting this beating

It’s bad history repeating
It reminds me of those capitalists that say
‘Look you have a choice,’
It’s sick and self-defeating if your dispossessed keep weeping
And we give these awards meaning
But we end up with no voice.

37
Grace Nichols

My Gran Visits England

My Gran was a Caribbean lady

As Caribbean as could be
She came across to visit us
In Shoreham by the sea.
She'd hardly put her suitcase down
when she began a digging spree
Out in the back garden
To see what she could see
And she found:
That the ground was as groundy
That the frogs were as froggy
That the earthworms were as worthy
That the weeds were as weedy
That the seeds were as seedy
That the bees were as busy
as those back home
And she paused from her digging
And she wondered
And she looked at her spade
And she pondered
Then she stood by a rose
As a slug passed by her toes
And she called to my Dad
as she struck pose after pose,
'Boy, come and take my photo – the place cold,
But wherever there's God's earth, I'm at home.'
From Under the Moon and Under the Sea

http://www.poetryline.org.uk/poems/my-gran-visits-england-508

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