Six Poets (5 page)

I looked up from my writing,

And gave a start to see,

As if rapt in my inditing,

The moon's full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head

Was spectral in its air,

And I involuntarily said,

‘What are you doing there?'

‘Oh, I've been scanning pond and hole

And waterway hereabout

For the body of one with a sunken soul

Who has put his life-light out.

‘Did you hear his frenzied tattle?

It was sorrow for his son

Who is slain in brutish battle,

Though he has injured none.

‘And now I am curious to look

Into the blinkered mind

Of one who wants to write a book

In a world of such a kind.'

Her temper overwrought me,

And I edged to shun her view,

For I felt assured she thought me

One who should drown him too.

Now one of Hardy's greatest poems.

(
Lines on the loss of the
Titanic)

I

In a solitude of the sea

Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres

Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?'

VI

Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate

For her – so gaily great –

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

X

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said ‘Now!' And each one hears,

The consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Hardy died in 1928. His life had spanned a great length of time. One hot, humid day when he was a child, his grandmother had said to him, ‘It was like this in the French Revolution, I remember.' When he was born in 1840, the railway had not reached Dorset; when he died, the news went by telephone to London and was immediately broadcast by the BBC.

Although his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey, his relatives who thought they knew him better, knew he was at heart a peasant like they were, claimed his heart for their own, and that was buried in Dorset. ‘Ache deep,' Hardy had written,

… but make no moans:

Smile not; but stilly suffer:

The paths of love are rougher

    Than thoroughfares of stones.

And when he lay on his deathbed, his sister noted on his face ‘the same triumphant look that all the others bore … but without the smile'.

Two poems to end with. First, a poem of the Boer War:

I

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

Uncoffined – just as found:

His landmark is a kopje-crest

That breaks the veldt around;

And foreign constellations west

Each night above his mound.

II

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –

Fresh from his Wessex home –

The meaning of the broad Karoo,

The Bush, the dusty loam,

And why uprose to nightly view

Strange stars amid the gloam.

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain

Will Hodge for ever be;

His homely Northern breast and brain

Grow to some Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellations reign

His stars eternally.

That poem – the young soldier killed far from home and his grave watched over by alien stars – calls to mind the poet whom I shall be turning to next, A. E. Housman. But I'll end with a little nature poem and one that is, for Hardy, almost cheerful.

The thrushes sing as the sun is going,

And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,

And as it gets dark loud nightingales

In bushes,

Pipe, as they can when April wears,

As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand-new birds of twelve-months' growing,

Which a year ago, or less than twain,

No finches were, nor nightingales,

Nor thrushes,

But only particles of grain,

And earth, and air, and rain.

1859–1936

Alfred Edward Housman, son of a solicitor and eldest of seven siblings, was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, and educated at St John's College, Oxford. Failing his finals, he found work as a clerk in the London Patent Office but continued to study the classics, publishing articles when he could. In 1892, ten years after leaving Oxford, he was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and, in 1911, at Cambridge. His first poetry collection,
A Shropshire Lad
, was published in 1896, followed by
Last Poems
in 1922 and
More Poems
in 1936. His principal scholarly concern was to ensure the authenticity of old texts, and he has been highly praised by classicists for his editions of Roman poets including Juvenal, Lucan and Manilius. After his death and burial in Ludlow, Shropshire, many composers – among them Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, George Butterworth and the American Samuel Barber – set his poems to music.