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The greatest casualty of our education system? Poetry. Either you’re from an older generation and you know a few lines by heart – whether or not you remember what they mean – or you’re younger, and were forced to kill and dissect some verses for your GCSEs. It’s enough to put anyone off.
But I think we still have a strong national curiosity about poetry. If only we could “get” it, we would like it. We all know that poetry’s important – we just don’t know how, or where, to begin.
Enter The Telegraph’s poetry series. Every Monday we publish a new poem, contemporary or old, which you can read in the time it takes to have a cup of tea.
I’ll give you a brief introduction, to explain who the poet is and what they might be doing. But don’t worry, exams are over. As the poet Caroline Bird once said at a reading: “Focus on the feeling first. Let it wash over you.” In other words: enjoy.
Jump to:
- ‘Long Distance II’ by Tony Harrison
- ‘Starlings: 1938’ by Lilian Bowes Lyon
- ‘Astonishment’ by Wisława Szymborska
- ‘Lock’ by Michael Ondaatje
- ‘The Gazelle’ by Rainer Maria Rilke
This week’s poem: ‘Long Distance II’ by Tony Harrison
When Andy Burnham was 17, he had to convince his father, a telephone engineer, that studying English literature at university wasn’t a mad idea. And so he showed the older man V (1985), the great book-length poem by the late Tony Harrison. Its epigraph quotes Arthur Scargill: “My father still reads the dictionary every day. / He says your life depends on your power to master words.”
Almost 40 years later, Britain has a new prime minister who genuinely loves poetry. Philip Larkin and Lemn Sissay are among Burnham’s favourites; but the Harrison connection, I think, is more telling. The poet, born in Leeds, also felt a distance between himself and his baker father – a distance that only widened with “books, books, books.”
Harrison, who died last year, wrote a great many poems about his mother and father. But I find “Long Distance II” the most affecting: a Meredithian sonnet (16 lines, not 14), it describes a spouse’s grief in touching detail, before coming to that final, heartwrenching end.
‘Starlings: 1938’ by Lilian Bowes Lyon
Lilian Bowes Lyon’s poetry is usually overshadowed by one biographical fact: she was the first cousin of the Queen Mother.
And yet this royal connection didn’t see her relaxing in splendour. Born in Ridley Hall in western Northumberland, she worked tirelessly as a nurse in Scotland during the First World War, then moved to London’s East End during the Second, where she became known as a Florence Nightingale figure, assisting the Blitz’s injured and recruiting sponsors for Kindertransport refugees. On one occasion, she summoned Anthony Eden, then the foreign secretary, to see her work – and “to give him a good talking-to”.
Between all this, she wrote. Gerard Manley Hopkins was her lodestar, and I think you see his knotty rhythms in “Starlings: 1938”, which is republished in a new collection of her poetry. It’s a wonderfully rich poem, combining both the scenery of her Northumberland youth with the nervy atmosphere of London as the city slides towards war.
‘Astonishment’ by Wisława Szymborska
“What a catastrophe!” It’s not your typical reaction to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature – but then, Wisława Szymborska was an intensely private person. How, she said to friends in Poland, was she going to survive the international spotlight? And why had the Nobel committee chosen her work, which was about local people, anecdotes, the minute stuff of life?
Her readers knew why. Until her death in 2012, Szymborska wrote hundreds of conversational and often ironic poems, admired by professors and non-poetry readers alike. Though her focus was the “ordinary”, she insisted that label meant little: “In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal.”
The spirit of the extraordinary runs throughout “Astonishment”, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, and featured in a delightful new selection of Szymborska’s work, The Acrobat. The poem asks about those strange, numinous reasons why you are the person you are – what happened in those murky beginnings when your soul was assigned to you.
‘Lock’ by Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje’s latest collection is sexy: he likes ankles, thighs and bedsheets. “If I were a cinnamon peeler,” he writes, “you could never walk through markets / without the profession of my fingers / floating over you.” In another, the speaker imagines different lovers for his wife: “the boy / who was invited to your heartbeat / under a kimono”.
Ondaatje was born in Colombo (now Sri Lanka) in 1943; aged 19, he moved to Canada to attend university. His homesickness was immense – all “order”, he felt, had suddenly dissolved – but like many teenagers, he saved himself by writing reams of “embarrassing poetry”.
Thirty years later, his 1992 novel The English Patient would launch him to literary stardom, winning him the Booker Prize and leaving his poems forgotten. But Ondaatje has continued to publish nostalgic, astute collections between novels, and “Lock” below proves he’s a poet first and foremost.
‘The Gazelle’ by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke offered extraordinarily intense advice. Writing to an aspiring fellow poet, he urged the young man to “admit, in all honesty, whether or not you would die if you weren’t allowed to write”. If the answer was “yes”, Rilke declared, then there was no choice but to “build your life” around poetry.
Rilke practised what he preached. He was a useless father and skipped his only daughter’s wedding to write. He had lovers – he positively bombarded Lou Andreas-Salomé with letters – but he also demanded that they respect his solitude and allow him frequent jaunts around Europe alone. Only like this could he summon the right lyricism; what he called “inward-seeing” – the act of looking into another’s soul.
One hundred years on from this strange and wonderful writer’s death, read “The Gazelle”, deftly translated from German by Geoffrey Lehmann. Rilke wrote it after a period in Paris, where he was working as Auguste Rodin’s secretary, and spending his free time at the city zoo.
