Our September 2012 meeting: some favourite poems

We got back together in September after a break for school holidays in July and August, and we had an indulgent meeting reading aloud some of our favourite poems.

We started with Sylvia Plath's Mirror, published in 1961, and spent some time discussing the powerful imagery that it evokes with its twin themes of ageing and faithfulness.

The second poem was Fleur Adcock's Weathering from her book Poems 1960-2000, published by Bloodaxe.  This had surprising echoes of the Plath poem with another description of ageing and its consequences, although this time a little more comfortable perhaps.  It also refers to "pre-Raphaelite beauty", which took us back to our meeting in June when we looked at The Lady of Shallot.  It inspired a discussion about accuracy on the internet when researching poems: we discovered that it was often not faithfully reproduced, even when read aloud by other poets.  Fleur Adcock herself can be seen reading the poem at Vimeo.  Born in New Zealand, she spent the war years in England, returning to New Zealand in 1947 before emigrating to Britain in 1963. She received an OBE in 1996 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006.

Fleur Adcock got another look-in when we read her short poem, Things, published in her Selected Poems by Oxford University Press.  Humorous, and so perceptive!

Another thoughtful poem was Wild Geese (1986) by the prolific American author and "indefatigable guide to the natural world", Mary Oliver.  Its powerfully resonating opening lines draw you in: "You do not have to be good.  You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting."  Oliver can be seen reading her poem on You Tube.

We moved away from women writers of the 20th century to go back to the 19th century and read The Roman Centurion's Song (Roman Occupation of  Britain AD 300) by Rudyard Kipling, and to talk about how familiar the classical references would have been to schoolchildren in the past, and how descendants of Claudius' original invasion force eventually became embedded in their new communities over generations.  Kipling's theme of returning "home" - and the consequences for such exiles - was resonant.

Finally, in contrast to the Kipling, we read Roman Wall Blues, by W H Auden (1937).

Our June 2012 meeting: the Lady of Shallot

June seems a distant memory now, but we decided to give ourselves the luxury of concentrating on just one poem for our meeting:  Alfred, Lord Tennyson's gorgeous work, The Lady of Shallot (first published in 1833, we used the 1842 revised text).  As well as reading the poem and talking about its fabulous imagery, we spent some time looking at some of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the time.  References to the poem and the beautiful works of art that we looked at keep cropping up in magazines, in newspapers or on television and so it stays fresh in the memory! 

 

This is one of those wonderful Victorian poems that is so evocative of England's distant pastoral and chivalric age: even if you've never read it you immediately think of all the glorious Pre-Raphaelite paintings that it inspired.  The verses are redolent with jewel-like colours, Arthurian references and a sense of romantic foreboding as the cursed Lady of Shallot sits in her tower, looking into her mirror as she weaves her tapestry, and eventually being so overcome by the sight of Sir Lancelot riding along the river bank (singing 'tirra lirra') that she turns to gaze at him.  In perhaps the most famous lines in the poem, we learn of the consequences:

 

'The mirror crack'd from side to side,

"The curse is come upon me", cried the Lady of Shallot.'

 

We shall be looking forward to a visit to Tate Britain in November, to see the fantastic new exhibition: Pre Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde.

 

 

Our May 2012 meeting

Well, we took the train this week with some interesting fellow passengers: the poets Edward Thomas, John Betjeman and T S Eliot.  We travelled from Adlestrop to Ruislip Gardens in Middlesex, then on to Dilton Marsh Halt in Wiltshire, before finally taking the Night Mail with Skimbleshanks and arriving in Glasgow's Gallowgate station.  We learned a little about each of the poets along the way.  Betjeman was taught briefly by T S Eliot and exchanged many letters with Johnny Morris.  Thomas was one of the Dymock Poets and was involved with Eleanor Farjeon who wrote Morning Has Broken.  Eliot was nicknamed 'Old Possum' by Ezra Pound (hence Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats).  So many connections ...

And here's a challenge: read The Diary of a Nobody (1888-9) by George & Weedon Grossmith before our next meeting to discover why Betjeman referred to Lupin Pooter and Murray Posh in his poem Middlesex.

Lots to think about for our next  meeting ...

On the rails for our next meeting: Wednesday 23 May 2012

We're taking the train for our next poetry group on Wednesday 23 May 2012.  No apologies for a double dose of John Betjeman: he was the master of railway poetry after all ...

• Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas (1917)
• Middlesex, by John Betjeman (1953)
• Dilton Marsh Halt, by John Betjeman (1968) - because it's only just up the road!
• Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat, by T S Eliot (1939) - his parody of Rudyard Kipling's 1892 poem l'Envoi (also known as The Long Trail) from Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses

If we've got time we'll also look at:

• Morning Express, by Siegfried Sassoon (1915)
• The Night Mail, by W H Auden (1936)

Our meeting on 17 April 2012

Another session round the kitchen table today: this time with an eerie, woodland theme.

We started off with The Way through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling (published in 1910), with its spine-chilling sensation of hearing ghostly long skirts swishing in the dew, and that haunting last line: 'But there is no road through the woods'. Kipling, "the poet of the British Empire", was born in India, educated in England and spent his adult years in the USA, South Africa and the UK. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Then we moved on to what is often described as the most famous of all American poems, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost. This was included in Frost's collection New Hampshire (1923) for which he won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. You can see Frost reading the poem at the Poetry Foundation's website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/18. We discussed the scansion, and particularly the repetition of the last line (“And miles to go before I sleep”) which makes the poem so memorable.

It was time for Walter de la Mare's classic poem The Listeners, published in 1912: one of the most frequently taught poems in schools today and often near the top of the list whenever the nation votes for its favourite poem. Another poem giving us so much to talk about: including why it has the title it does, when the focus of the poem is on the Traveller, and the complex scansion. We were amused to see a few appropriate lines from the poem picked out in brick on the side of a hotel on the A3 at Guildford.

Finally - or so we thought - we read Pleasant Sounds by John Clare, and talked about his strange and complex life, which ended sadly in a Northamptonshire asylum in 1864. It would be interesting to find the original manuscript for this poem, to see whether it has been published as written - so many of the words seemed too modern.

But we still couldn't leave without just one last poem, and so we read Alfred Noyes' classic story from 1906: The Highwayman, with its wonderful repetition, the tloc tloc sound of the horse's hooves on the moonlit road, and the image of of Bess the Landlord's Daughter, desperately trying to save her highwayman lover. Described by Peter and Iona Opie as "the best narrative poem in existence for oral delivery", and well-known to all Fleetwood Mac fans, this was certainly an enthralling finish to a really enjoyable hour.

Into the woods for our next meeting: 17 April 2012

I've chosen four beautiful poems with a woodland theme for our next meeting.  They are:

• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost (1922)
• The Listeners by Walter de la Mare (1912)
• The Way through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling (1910)
• Pleasant Sounds by John Clare (written during his many years in Northamptonshire Asylum where he died in 1864) 

Monday 12 March 2012: Our First Meeting - Jewels and Gloves

This morning was our first meeting.  We got together round the kitchen table to read and talk about four short modern poems:

• Warming Her Pearls by Carol Ann Duffy
• Red Gloves by Andrew Motion
• Jane's Pearls by Alicia Stubbersfield
• Amber by Gillian Clarke

We found lots to talk about and to discover: the beautiful language, the crafting of the words, the way the poems made us feel, the memories they evoked and the shape of each of the verses.  We also discussed the masculine and feminine sense of each of the poems and whether we would have been able to identify the gender of each poet correctly if we hadn't known who had written them.  We felt we would!

Our next meeting is on Tuesday 17 April: four new poems to find!  What fun!