Like the Touch of Rain 
by Edward Thomas

“Like the touch of rain she was

On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes

When the joy of walking thus

Has taken him by surprise:

With the love of the storm he burns,

He sings, he laughs, well I know how,

But forgets when he returns

As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.

Those two words shut a door

Between me and the blessed rain

That was never shut before

and will not open again.”

This poem imprinted deep into my memory the first time I encountered it, and I often return to re-enter the small, perfect world of joy and loss that it evokes. Edward Thomas is best known for ‘Adlestrop’ and for his war poem ‘Rain’, and I think this one uses similarly crystal-clean imagery – so simple, and so effective.

Edward Thomas died in 1917, in the battle of Arras in northern France, when he was 39. I believe this poem was inspired by his loving friendship with Eleanor Farjeon.

Try as I may – and believe me I have – I cannot get the three separate stanzas to register on screen. You’ll just have to imagine them: three stanzas each of four lines, OK? And if you’d like to look at other Tuesday Poems, you know by now exactly what to do!

Resurrection Song, by Thomas Lovell Beddoes

“Thread the nerves through the right holes;

Get out of my bones, you wormy souls.

Shut up my stomach, the ribs are full;

Muscles be steady and ready to pull.

Heart and artery merrily shake,

And eyelid go up, for we’re going to wake.

His eye must be brighter -one more rub!

And pull up the nostrils! his nose was a snub.”

Thomas Lovell Beddoes was unknown to me as a poet until last week, when I posted Ronald Allison Kells Mason’s lovely poem “Song of Allegiance”. This poem mentions Beddoes in illustrious poetic company, and in the same line as Coleridge and Tennyson, and in a following comment Frances asked what he was doing there. Frankly I had no idea, so I looked him up and discovered this wonderful poem, which I quoted in my reply to Frances’s comment. But I don’t suppose many blog readers scroll through all the comments, and I didn’t want the poem to lurk unseen, so I’m posting it now in its own right and hope lots of people will enjoy it.

One website says that Thomas Lovel Beddoes (1803–1849) is “…mostly remembered now as much for his death obsession and his manic depressive tendencies (probably abetted by frustrated homosexuality and culminating in his suicide by poison) as his literary achievement”, and that his life “was almost as Gothic as his darkest literary creations”. And OK, Resurrection Song is somewhat gruesome, especially to modern sensibilities, but it’s also surprising sweet – the notion of tidying up your body ready to make a good impression at the resurrection is very cleverly sustained. And I think Stanley Spencer would have loved the poem: it perfectly fits his Resurrection in Cookham painting.

If you want to read more of Beddoes’s work the website to go to is http://www.phantomwooer.org/index.html

And if you want to look at other Tuesday Poem blogs, you know what to do!

Song of Allegiance by R.A.K. Mason

Shakespeare Milton Keats are dead

Donne lies in a lowly bed

Shelley at last calm doth lie

knowing ‘whence we are and why’

Byron Wordsworth both are gone

Coleridge Beddoes Tennyson

Houseman neither knows nor cares

how ‘this heavy world’ now fares

Little clinging grains enfold

all the mighty minds of old …

They are gone and I am here

stoutly bringing up the rear

Where they went with limber ease

toil I on with bloody knees

Though my voice is cracked and harsh

stoutly in the rear I march

Though my song have none to hear

boldly bring I up the rear.

I was going to use this poem for the New Zealand Poetry Day, but then I found the Rex Fairburn one and realised I had to use that instead. But this R.A.K. Mason poem is also one I’ve known for years, and I was very pleased to receive permission for its use from the Hocken Librarian at Otago. I love the rhythms of its development, and the contrasts of humour and seriousness. And I suspect Ronald Allison Kells was a poets’ poet. Either way he was also, apparently, a ringer for my Dad.

TO AN EXPATRIATE, by A. R. D. Fairburn

“Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him: but weep sore for him that goeth away: for he shall return no more, nor see his native country.”

Jeremiah XXII:10

Pine for the needles brown and warm,

think of your nameless native hills,

the seagulls landward blown by storm,

the rabbit that the black dog kills.

Swing with the kelp the ocean sucks,

call to the winds and hear them roar,

the westerly that rips the flax,

the madman at the northeast door.

Dream of the mountain creek that spills

among the stones and cools your feet,

the breeze that sags on smoky hills,

the bubble of the noonday heat.

The embers of your old desire

remembered still will glow, and fade,

and glow again and rise in fire

to plague you like a debt unpaid,

to haunt you like a love betrayed.

I have loved this poem since I first encountered it in an English lecture at Auckland Uni, when I’d read very little New Zealand poetry before and had no real idea that I would become an expatriate. The poem took immediate hold of my heart and imagination and it has been part of the soundtrack of my life ever since. At that first encounter I was struck by both the accuracy of the imagery and its deeply romantic appeal, and all I have to do to bring the whole poem to mind is to start that first line off in my head and I’m away – back on Waiheke Island as a child at my grandparents’ house, or sliding on nikau palms down the back hill beside the lines of pine trees, or … or …

I haven’t lived in New Zealand for any length of time since I left (and the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse was one of the five books I took in my suitcase on that first plane journey) but I revisit as often as I can, and stay for as long as possible. And New Zealand poetry in general, as well as this poem in particular, now as then, connects me to that set of almost tribal loyalties and understandings which matter a great deal to me.

So I’m delighted to be able to post this on New Zealand’s Poetry Day – I hope you’ll check out the other poems on the Tuesday Poetry blog.

EVEN SUCH IS TIME, by Sir Walter Raleigh

Even such is time, which takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us naught but age and dust;

Which in the dark and silent grave,

When we have wandered all our ways,

Shuts up the story of our days!

And from which grave, and earth, and dust,

The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

This poem was written the night before his death in 1618, when Raleigh was about 68. Adventurer, explorer, navigator, passionate Protestant, and favourite of Elizabeth I who nevertheless confined him to the Tower of London under threat of death at least twice (although it was Elizabeth’s successor on the throne, James I, who finally executed him). A complicated person for sure and a gloriously successful poet too. This poem seems to hold a perfect tension between an aching and deeply felt sorrow, and a hopeful faith.

Check out the other Tuesday Poems – and there will be an extra helping on the site this coming Friday, for New Zealand’s Poetry Day.

ON THE ROAD FROM OXFORD by Frances Thomas

The colours have gone crazy this year;

All the flowers have broken out.

On the road from Oxford, we gasp

At the blaze and dazzle of them:

At a meadow gilded with buttercups,

Or blue with a sky-haze of flax.

But it’s the poppies that startle.

Imagine, field after field drenched in scarlet!

A bolt of red silk billowed out in an Indian shop,

Or haze of pure pigment showered by a mad artist;

The whole field flushed and glowing,

So hot, demanding our entire attention,

As if to remind us

That beneath the earth, there is fire,

Beneath the skin, there is blood.

The author of this poem – a friend  and fellow writer –  is putting together a poetry journal this year. It’s a diary of reading poetry over the year, and when she first emailed me about it in April, this is what she said:-

“… it’s a sort of poetry diary, which sprang out of a resolve earlier this year to read more poetry. As well as choosing poems myself, I want to sprinkle the mixture with some poems of other people’s choosing, so it’s not too Frances-centric. Do you think you could choose me a favorite poem of yours that I could add to my list? No need for the whole poem, just the title and poet’s name, and I can find it.  At the moment I’m just collecting things in a ring-binder – and enjoying it enormously:  it’s surprising how engrained some poems are in your consciousness, even if you haven’t read them for ages.”

I have now read the first six months of the journal and simply loved it – the kind of thing you wish you’d thought of doing yourself, and that you wish you had the application and stamina to complete. I also discovered that for her entry on 18th June Frances thought only a poem could properly celebrate the experience of driving through dazzling fields of flowers – and so she wrote her own. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

And do look at the other Tuesday poem entries.

GLORY BE TO GOD FOR DAPPLED THINGS by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise Him.

I wanted to post this poem as an extension of last week’s list poem: as Frances pointed out in her comment then, this Hopkins poem is also a great list! Wikipedia say it’s one of only three examples of Hopkins’s invented poetic form, a Curtal sonnet. I know that Wikipedia isn’t an entirely reliable source but if you’re interested to read what they have to say, try this link. Or if you just want to look at a picture of “rose-moles all in stipple” on a trout, here it is.

And do have a look at the other Tuesday poems.

THE GREAT LOVER, by RUPERT BROOKE

These I have loved:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,

Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, færy dust;

Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust

Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,

Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;

Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon

Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss

Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is

Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen

Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;

The benison of hot water; furs to touch;

The good smell of old clothes; and other such — -

The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,

Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers

About dead leaves and last year’s ferns. . . .

It took re-discovering this poem by Rupert Brooke (and I’ve given only an excerpt from the full long poem above) to be reminded  of two things. The first was a sudden and potent memory of sitting in a classroom at Takapuna Grammar listening to my friend Jan Lyon read it aloud. I had one of those sudden memory flashes – with the smell of the classroom, dust and old books and sweaty socks, in a kind of counterpoint to the revelatory pleasure of hearing that poem’s precise and luxurious imagery for the first time. And the second was realising just how much I love lists!

There are quite a few list poems that I love. There’s Wallace Stevens’s 13 Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird - here’s my favourite fifth way to remind you of it:-

V I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

There’s Elspeth Thompson’s Twenty Blessings, of which these are the last three:

May the company be less for your leaving.

May you walk alone beneath the stars.

May your embers still glow in the morning.

And there’s Charles Causley’s Ten Types of Hospital Visitors. The first type “…enters wearing the neon armour/of virtue…”; the second “… a melancholy splurge/ Of theological colours;/ Taps heavily about like a healthy vulture/Distributing deep=frozen hope…”

And the poem ends with: “The tenth visitor/ is not usually named.”

It’s not only poetic lists I love: all lists charm me, including, I have to confess, my own.  Here’s this morning’s fresh Monday morning list, divided as always into two parts (obsessive? moi?).

I love lists like Michael Pollan’s book of Food Rules (Rule Two: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food”). And there are Billy Wilder’s Screen Writing Tips which include gems for any writer to treasure (Rule Five: “The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer”).

I dunno why I love ‘em so much: maybe it’s no more than seeking the illusion of control in some form. Just about any form, to be honest, although I hasten to add that I draw the line way before raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. But lists give me pleasure, and clearly they gave Rupert Brooke pleasure too.  For all I know – and hope – there are other Tuesday Poem bloggers and readers who share this as well.

Today I’m feeling melancholy and wanted to turn that into righteous anger about the oil spill with a poem for the Tuesday Poem blog – but of course couldn’t find a modern angry poem that was both apposite and out of copyright. I can think of several I’d like to use in a future bout of wrath (Adrian Mitchell’s for one) if I can get permission for them.

Meantime, this Charles Causley poem touches the edge of anger and futility – in this case directed at war.

LOSS OF AN OIL TANKER by Charles Causley

Over our heads the missiles ran

Through skies more desolate than the sea.

In jungles, where man hides from man,

Leaves fell, in springtime, from the tree.

A cracked ship on the Seven Stones lies

Dying in resurrection weather.

With squalid hands we hold our prize:

A drowned fish and a sea-bird’s feather.

With thanks, once more, to David Higham Associates for permission to use a poem by Charles Causley.

TO MY FATHER, by Charles Causley

‘It was the First War brought your father down,’

My aunts would say. ‘Nobody in our clan

Fell foul of that t.b. Lungs clear and strong

As Trusham church bell, every single one.’

My soldier-father, Devon hill-village boy,

The Doctor’s sometime gardener and groom

Hunches before me on a kitchen chair,

Possessed by fearful coughing. Beats the floor

With his ash-stick, curses his lack of luck.

At seven, this was the last I saw of him:

A thin and bony man (as I am now),

Long-faced, large-eyed, struggling to speak to me.

I see him on his allotment, leaning on

A spade to catch his breath. He takes me to

The fair, the Plymouth pantomime, the point-

To-point. My mother tells me of how proud

He was when I was five years old and read

The news to him out of the paper. Now,

Seventy years on, he strolls into my dreams:
Immaculate young countryman, his mouth

Twitching with laughter. Always walks ahead

Of me, and I can never catch him up.

I want to take him to the Derby, buy

The wheelbarrow he longed for as a boy.

I want to read out loud to him again.

I speak his name. He never seems to hear.

I know that one day he must stop and turn

His face to me. Wait for me, father. Wait.

(Reproduced by kind permission of the poet’s literary agents, David Higham Associates)

I love this poem of Causley’s and it reminds me of what a great poet he was. It seems he’s never had the recognition he deserved – perhaps because he wrote poetry for children as well as for adults, or perhaps because his work uses such simple forms and words.  Someone said of him that he always stood outside poetic fashion – and maybe that was another reason he’s been neglected. (His work’s still in print with Macmillan, though – both the Collected Poems 1951 – 1997, and his collected children’s poems – so maybe not neglected: just not fully acknowledged.)

This poem expresses such clear eyed memories, such tenderness and longing, and such a visionary ending. I hope it might make those less familiar with his work seek him out.

And do have a look at other Tuesday Poems, when you have a moment.