Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (11 page)
With twelve volumes of original poems to his name, and several books of critical essays, translations and drama, Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize
for Literature.
EDWARD THOMAS
(1878–1917)
SIMON WINCHESTER
I suppose I should stop kidding myself and admit that I’ll probably never go back to live in England. I’m an American citizen now. When I reached that famous fork
in the woods, I took the road less travelled (Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were friends) and ended up on a weary farm in Massachusetts.
That doesn’t stop a certain yearning though: whenever
I see
The Last of the Summer Wine
, or hear the Queen at Christmas-time, I long for England, only to go back and find that what I longed for has all but vanished.
I left home in 1966, by chance the year they closed Adlestrop station, a quiet two-platform halt on the Oxford to Worcester main line. The old railway system then began its own
long decline:
stations closed, lines torn up, engines sent for scrap. There was something infinitely special and terribly English about a half-deserted country railway station on a blissful summer’s day. I
listen to this deceptively slight poem, immediately smell creosote and gillyflowers, can hear the waiting-room clock, the clank of signal wires – but then have to blink my eyes, every time.
This is the England that I loved; I weep for its passing.
Adlestrop
Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop
– only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
(1914)
Once a geologist, Simon Winchester (b. 1944) spent almost thirty years as a foreign correspondent for
The Guardian
and other newspapers in various countries until the
handover of Hong Kong in 1997, when he became a full-time writer. He has written twenty-five nonfiction books, dealing with such topics as the Oxford English Dictionary, the origins of geology,
China, the Atlantic Ocean and,
most recently, the uniting of the United States.
RUPERT BROOKE
(1887–1915)
HUGH BONNEVILLE
Like many schoolchildren, I was introduced to this sonnet when studying the poets of the First World War. The graphic bitterness of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, we were
instructed, was to be contrasted with the naïve patriotism of Rupert Brooke.
Brooke’s view of death and his love of
country is that of a clear-eyed young man who, like the hundreds of thousands of others who rushed to join up, felt confident of purpose and of
victory within months, entirely innocent of what was to come. I won’t judge him for that.
Every time I watch the movie
Gladiator
this poem comes to mind. Like the recurring motif of Maximus’s hand brushing the wheat of his fields as he heads for
his waiting family,
‘The Soldier’, for me, is ultimately about belonging. It’s about coming home.
And it’s not the notion of death with honor or pride in motherland that moves me, it’s the simple phrase ‘laughter, learnt of friends’ that gets me every time. An image
of happiness shared, in a land at peace.
With the privilege of hindsight I find it is as pitiful as it is beautiful in
its evocation of contentment.
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of
England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at
peace, under an English heaven.
(1914)
The actor Hugh Bonneville (b. 1963) is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Lord Grantham in television’s
Downton Abbey
, and for the Olympics mockumentary series
Twenty Twelve
. His feature films include
Notting Hill
(1999)
, Mansfield Park
(1999)
, Iris
(2001) and
The Monuments Men
(2014).
THOMAS HARDY
(1840–1928)
KEN FOLLETT
I read this as a schoolboy, and even then I was overwhelmed by its melancholy. Half a century of rereading has shown me how clever it is. The rhyming scheme – ABCBCDA
– and the stanza form are unique, as far as I know. In each verse, the first five lines swing like a pop song, showing us a family
engaged in a merry project: singing, gardening, picnicking.
Moving house is vividly evoked with the simple image of clocks on the lawn. But every stanza is a sucker punch. In the last two lines of each the rhythm falters, and decay and death are evoked
until the end, when we realise that the poet is standing in a rain-wet graveyard, looking at the tombstones, and everyone in that happy family
is now dead.
During Wind and Rain
They sing their dearest songs –
He, she, all of them – yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face. . . .
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss –
Elders and juniors – aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all –
Men and maidens – yea,
Under the summer tree,
With
a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them – aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
(1917)
The Welsh-born novelist Ken Follett (b. 1949) has sold more than 130 million books worldwide. His first bestseller was
Eye of the Needle
(1978), a spy story set during
the Second World War. In 1989
The Pillars of the Earth
marked
a radical change; a novel about building a
cathedral in the Middle Ages, it has sold more than nineteen
million copies in many languages. His latest project is the Century trilogy, three historical novels telling the story of the twentieth century through the eyes of five families:
Fall of
Giants
(2010),
Winter of the World
(2012) and
Edge of Eternity
(2014).
WILFRED OWEN
(1893–1918)