Stepfather

I cannot pick him out the air,
he is not there,

nor out the soil,
the worm was not his style.

I cannot pick him out the fire,
there’s not a cinder’s worth left.

So why do I still feel bereft
when no love was lost?

Perhaps for what might have been
had he not been.

In the coffin he seems a replica,
a terrible dummy,

still wreaking havoc,
still beating up the living.

Brian Patten

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Stepfather features in Issue 46 of The Reader Magazine and is republished here with the kind permission of the author.

If you want to read the whole story behind the poem, then make sure you subscribe to The Reader Magazine to receive the latest issue, as well as 3 others over the course of a year for a great price of £24 – 15% off the cover price.

Stay tuned to the TRO blog today for a full-taste of what’s inside the latest edition of The Reader…

Last week I read Thomas Hardy’s Her Dilemma with one of my community groups in Birkenhead. The poem had been picked by one of our newly trained reading assistants, who explained her choice by saying, ‘It’s funny, just when I was scanning this, before I even read it properly, something just grabbed me’.

The rest of the group clearly shared her initial arrest, as we all sat in stunned silence after reading it for the first time. When we began to pick it apart, the poem typically threw up more questions than answers. We were unable to work out exactly what the lie was, with everyone keen for a definite answer to the question, ‘did she say yes or not?!’

There was a general consensus that the poem is desperately sad, with each new reading bringing forth different ideas of what might be going on. Someone wryly observed, ‘it’s a bit more than a white lie really, isn’t it?’ another interjecting with, ‘yeah, it’s not like ‘d’you like my new coat, it’s ‘do you love me?’ One member was quite struck by the idea that this man may have returned from war, weakened by his experiences and nearing death. The women, he said, may be unable to turn down someone who has already suffered so much: ‘I mean, he’s ‘holding hard her hand’ – he’s really gripping it’. Another theory was that she doesn’t say yes, though she does love him, there being something – a partner perhaps – rendering it impossible for her to say how she really feels. Several group members were sure she said yes ‘to be a moment kind’ but didn’t mean it, which led to why this ‘mocked humanity’. One man quickly said, ‘Because life sets up these conundrums – that’s what life is, a series of dilemmas.’

The descriptions caused a lot of mulling over, with the group curious as to why so much space was taken up with allusions to age and waste: ‘is it like a wasted life – him being so young?’ Another member immediately came back with ‘oh, I thought he was old!’ at which point both laughed, saying, ‘isn’t that funny – we’ve both seen it so different!’ We talked about the possible significance of certain details, including the ‘wormy poppy-head’. One usually quiet man asserted, ‘they’re the first thing to grow after something’s been destroyed – like Flanders after the war; it was awash with them.’ Another member then mused ‘like a symbol of strength, maybe?’ Our youngest member was quite taken with the fact the two are in a church and kept coming back to it: ‘it’s a mess – it sounds purely manky… is it worse for her because she’s stood in church, like it’s a sin or something?’

Right at the end, one woman bent over the poem very closely and said, ‘It’s easy to think it’s a couple, but it could be a father and daughter, couldn’t it?’

Her Dilemma

The two were silent in a sunless church,
Whose mildewed walls, uneven paving-stones,
And wasted carvings passed antique research;
And nothing broke the clock’s dull monotones.

Leaning against a wormy poppy-head,
So wan and worn that he could scarcely stand,
–For he was soon to die,– he softly said,
“Tell me you love me!”–holding hard her hand.

She would have given a world to breathe “yes” truly,
So much his life seemed hanging on her mind,
And hence she lied, her heart persuaded throughly,
‘Twas worth her soul to be a moment kind.

But the sad need thereof, his nearing death,
So mocked humanity that she shamed to prize
A world conditioned thus, or care for breath
Where Nature such dilemmas could devise.

I first encountered Stephen Crane during my first year of university. There was a text on my reading list: The Red Badge of Courage. The problem was my tutor had listed it in inverted commas, implying it was a poem or short story I could quickly read the night before my seminar. Imagine my annoyance when I realized it was a full-blown novel. I loaned it from the library and being a conscientious 18 year old I read it cover to cover in one night, made possible because it was an excellent book. I have not encountered a more deliciously poetic term than ‘The red badge of courage’ meaning a war wound the protagonist strives for as a soldier in the American Civil War, so I decided to move beyond Crane’s prose and into poetry.

A seemingly strange desire is the obvious theme of I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon, a simple, short and disjointed poem by Crane. The poem packs a rapid punch that as a reader you can relate to and understand. At some stage in life we have all wanted something more, chased a dream, and hopefully we all still do.

The real challenge of this poem is that ‘a man’ is not pursuing a highly unlikely goal, he is pursuing the horizon, something that is constant and cannot be reached. The man is chasing an impossible dream.

If you were to withdraw from the poem and were told of an individual going after something that is actually impossible (e.g. if I was trying to fly around the solar system by flapping my arms), then you would understandably think this ludicrous. However, when I read this poem I support the man pursuing the horizon, and implore him to carry on regardless.

I have used this poem in Get Into Reading at Liverpool Hope University and there has been a variety of responses. Many students, but not all, are wholeheartedly behind the man. One student said that you cannot be told you are unable to do something, it makes you more determined and the man is on a journey with value in itself, much like life. Some have related it to deluded TV talent show contestants who simply refuse to accept they cannot sing.

Another observed that the poem is told from the perspective of a naysayer, and said we do not know what this person does themselves. It just seems like they sit there, not pursuing their own dreams and pouring scorn on others, the man’s pursuit may be fruitless, but at least he’s chasing something.

Plato and Aristotle argued we should strive towards a telos, or end purpose, and this has informed a lot of study on morality and ethics. However, Einstein defined insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ Let’s get them in a Get Into Reading group together and watch them fight it out.

I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”

“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.

Meeting at Night

I

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed in the slushy sand.

II

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Parting at Morning

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim -
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world for me.

Robert Browning

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These poems can be found – along with many, many more – in The Reader Organisation’s poetry anthology Poems To Take Home; full of favourite poems chosen especially by Get Into Reading group members, volunteers and staff. You can buy a copy from our website now or at any time; all proceeds go to supporting our outreach work across the UK.

This enigmatic poem, so markedly observational in tone, feels so intimate, I feel I am almost trespassing in reading it. I imagine I am sat just a short distance away from the poet, who is thinking these thoughts aloud and staring wanly into the space of sky before her.

I like the phrase ‘There’s a certain slant of light,’. These words define this quality of light as different, separate from other types of light. There is something about its quality that captures the speaker and fixes them in the moment. ‘Slant’ makes me think about seeing something from a particular angle: does it allude to perspective?

The first time I read the poem I recall experiencing a lighting up effect. I felt I recognised the experience being described and felt how this kind of light -

‘oppresses, like the heft
Of cathedral tunes.’

My experience of this kind of event is that witnessing a certain slant of light (indeed, experiencing the onset of despair) could be described as if the light suddenly appears to be trying to tell me something of great import, something I’m supposed to understand about the greater scheme of things. It has a timelessness to it that seems outside of the everyday and it compels me, if only for a moment, to step outside of ordinariness and acknowledge some wider truth. But grasping what that wider truth is or what it corresponds to is another matter.

I am also aware there is an undercurrent of egotism at work in this thought. But egotism goes with the territory. I am reminded here of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem, No Worst, There Is None:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who never hung there.

If you’ve not experienced this feeling, those that have may hold you cheap. The egotism – if it can even be called that; solipsism may be closer to the truth – in this is the sense of being part of an exclusive club. It is unavoidable: for some to have any experience that can be defined as special, relies on others not to have done so.

For a poem that deals in despair, Dickinson’s poem doesn’t deal with it in a straightforward way. I’m interested in her use of the word ‘heft’ which means a weight but also implies a physical size. Used in connection with ‘cathedral tunes’, it brings to mind the image of thunderous organs whose immense pipes run up the walls of cathedrals, towards Heaven, and fill the place with music that indeed is designed as an elevating experience for the listener with eyes turned upward. But this idea is complicated by the word ‘oppresses.’ It is a complex juxtaposition. The music is as big as the cathedral, and as heavy too. To have that bearing down on you – it feels like the speaker is overwhelmed.

In the next stanza, we are given a sense of exquisite agony in the first line:

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are

Heavenly hurt? ‘Oppresses, like the heft/Of cathedral tunes’ and, in stanza three, ‘imperial affliction’? There is something neither wholly negative nor wholly positive happening here, isn’t there? And those lines –

We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are

The idea is that this change, which is perhaps spiritual in nature, is on the inside and that this is where the ‘meanings’ are. Within us? Yet the speaker is looking out at a certain slant of light in the sky. Outwards; inwards. We are at the border between day and night, light and dark, ecstasy and despair, life and death. There are tantalising, contradictory forces at work in this poem.

There’s A Certain Slant Of Light 

There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ’t is like the distance
On the look of death.

It seems, on a superficial reading, that this is such a simple poem but, like much of the Wordsworth I have read, it touches on big themes which prompt a strong reaction from the reader. The matter-of-fact way in which the little girl at the centre of the poem talks about her dead siblings has a poignancy which strikes at the heart of modern views of death and grief.

I used it recently in a group . “My little brother died at the age of 4 back in the ’30s and I never got the chance to grieve for him – now I will.” said a member. He went on to explain how his mother had explained the death with platitudes like ” It was for the best,” even though the child had died of an illness which might now be cured with antibiotics. It was never much discussed in the family after that. As a consequence, my group member felt he had never had the chance to properly come to terms with the death . He said he might even attempt to write a poem about the lost brother, and this prompted a discussion about how well we deal with loss now compared with Wordsworth’s era.

As I say – big stuff from such a simple yet lovely poem.

We Are Seven

A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.

‘Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?’
‘How many? Seven in all,’ she said,
And wondering looked at me.

‘And where are they? I pray you tell.’
She answered, ‘Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.

‘Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.’

‘You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven!—I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be.’

Then did the little Maid reply,
‘Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.’

‘You run above, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.’

‘Their graves are green, they may be seen,’
The little Maid replied,
‘Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.

‘My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.

‘And often after sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.

‘The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.

‘So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I

‘And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.’

‘How many are you, then,’ said I,
‘If they two are in heaven?’
Quick was the little Maid’s reply,
‘O Master! we are seven.’

‘But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!’
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’

William Wordsworth

In 2006, when I first encountered Brian Turner’s poetry, media coverage of the Iraq War was at once sensationalist and jaded – Stalin’s reputed remark that “one dead person is a tragedy; one million dead is a statistic” seemed to hold true. The “Conflict in Iraq” was a toxic mess, unimaginable in its human cost. Then Here, Bullet struck me: Brian Turner’s first collection of poems about his experiences in Iraq as an infantry soldier in the US army.

The poems in Here, Bullet are both visceral and elegiac. The epic past and landscape of Babylon/Iraq is conflated with the terror and pain of young, frightened soldiers, stalked by intense boredom and an amorphous enemy that not only appears in human form, but in the terrain and unbearable heat of their treacherous surroundings. Turner’s muscular, beautiful writing gives voice to the “grunts” alongside whom he fought: the title of one of the most powerful films about the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker, was taken from his poem of the same name.

But while Turner’s poems are explicitly focused on his experiences and those of his fellow US soldiers, the true power of his work lies in his ability to intimate the suffering of those they are blindly fighting against: the “insurgent”, the civilian, their own souls. In his second collection, there are poems about violent, frightening encounters but more are about the echo of these experiences: the spacing of the titular poem and the final italics in Phantom Noise gives the poem a pleading tone, an urgent need to express “the rifled symphonic” to the reader, to bring relief from “this ringing hum”.

Phantom Noise

There is this ringing hum   this

bullet-borne language   ringing

shell-fall and static   this late-night

ringing of threadwork and carpet    ringing

hiss and steam    this wing-beat

of rotors and tanks    broken

bodies ringing in steel    humming these

voices of dust    these years ringing

rifles in Babylon    rifles in Sumer

ringing these children their gravestones

and candy    their limbs gone missing    their

static-borne television    their ringing

this eardrum    this rifled symphonic    this

ringing of midnight in gunpowder and oil    this

brake pad gone useless this muzzle-flash singing    this

threading of bullets in muscle and bone    this ringing

hum    this ringing hum    this

ringing

Brian Turner

‘Phantom Noise’ is taken from Phantom Noise (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) and reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and Bloodaxe Books.

Brian Turner will be visiting Liverpool in May as a guest of The Reader Organisation and the Writing on the Wall Festival. He will be giving four readings in Mersey Care NHS Trust and HMP Liverpool, where TRO run weekly Get into Reading groups, and a public reading in the Casa, Hope St, Liverpool L1 9BQ at 7.30pm Wednesday 2 May. For further information and booking, please see the Writing On The Wall website.

I recently bought myself a collection of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry. Having promised my partner that I will stop buying books until we’ve moved house in the summer (it’ll be our fifth move, and he’s not a fan of the endless boxes of books that have to come with us), I planned to have a quick look through before sneaking it on to the bookcase, where it could hide until after the move. However, this poem caught my eye and I am finding that I keep wanting to go back to it. I’m not entirely sure why. It is both uncomfortable and reassuring – the ‘single dream’ that has the potency to ‘poison sleep’, like the ‘wandering thought that pollutes the day’ too easily soil experience, yet the mutability of the poem’s feeling emphasises that these unsettling moods quickly pass. I like the music of the poem, the ‘dissonant blast’ punching through the second stanza jarring against the quiet stillness of the first and I’m interested in the way that the strings have to ‘respond’ to the blast rather than the blast being a product of the strings movement.

Each time I read the poem, something different catches my attention or its meaning slightly changes; ‘Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow’ at first sounds rather reassuring – that lingering unease that accompanies a worrying thought or a bad dream will pass – we only have to ‘endure’ negative experiences for a finite amount of time. However, on second reading, I find myself more aware of the transience of my own thoughts and feelings, with the certainty of Shelley’s final line ‘Nought may endure but Mutability’ striking a much lonelier chord. It is a fascinating poem that I shall continue to return to.

Mutability

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!–yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever;

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. — A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. — One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!–For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

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As an additional Easter bank-holiday treat, why not dip into our collection of Easter themed poems from The Reader Online archive: the perfect accompaniment to any eggs or other goodies you have left-over…

This selection, from Ella Wheeler Wilcox, is particularly significant: if not brimming with optimism at least identifiable – who hasn’t thought at some stage ‘My purpose is not what it ought to be’? – and in that sense, somewhat strangely reassuring. Whether at any point we are closer or further away from our ‘higher selves’, it’s important to recognise that the road isn’t always easy, and so we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves in facing our daily strife.

Fleeing Away

My thoughts soar not as they ought to soar,
Higher and higher on soul-lent wings;
But ever and often, and more and more
They are dragged down earthward by little things,
By little troubles and little needs,
As a lark might be tangled among the weeds.

My purpose is not what it ought to be,
Steady and fixed, like a star on high,
But more like a fisherman’s light at sea;
Hither and thither it seems to fly -
Sometimes feeble, and sometimes bright,
Then suddenly lost in the gloom of night.

My life is far from my dream of life -
Calmly contented, serenely glad;
But, vexed and worried by daily strife,
It is always troubled and ofttimes sad -
And the heights I had thought I should reach one day
Grow dimmer and dimmer, and farther away.

My heart never finds the longed-for rest;
Its worldly striving, its greed for gold,
Chilled and frightened the calm-eyed guest,
Who sometimes sought me in days of old;
And ever fleeing away from me
Is the higher self that I long to be.

Poems To Take Home is available to buy from The Reader Organisation, with all proceeds going towards supporting out outreach work. Please visit our website to find out how to get your copy. 

I heard on the radio the other day that as the revolution continues in Egypt – though it will not now be televised – the activists, mostly young idealists, have adopted a new slogan which translates as ‘if you will not allow us to dream, we will not allow you to sleep’. I was inspired by this language, the simple eloquence with recourse to menace, the voice of a people who, indeed, while hoping, are prepared to die fighting for what they believe is their right. Coupled with recent events across the region, and particularly in Syria, these words made me reflect again upon the paucity of beauty in our own political discourse generally, and particularly in the uprisings that spread from London last summer. Where was the slogan to encapsulate all that anger? Issues of media representation aside, our ‘riots’ were predominantly – literally – a ‘free-for-all’, and of course if language comes out of feeling it was a lack of sentience worth elaborating that led to the storming of the FootLocker. With all their legitimate reasons for anger and action, our youth’s clarion call was, it seems, ‘i will av dem Nikes!’

If our riots lacked culture, they certainly reflected it, and we are all implicated. It may be trite to say, but music video, celebrity ‘culture’, the glut of property and food programming, the marketing of self via social networking media – when everything is about consumption and the material, the soul is left poorer. Bling bling, we’re dead.

These reflections – and this lengthy preamble – lead me to the lines below. When I first read them, I was unaware that they are excerpted from The Mask of Anarchy. I had only the dimmest awareness of the poet. I was 13 and devoured them along with the other sleeve and liner notes on The Jam’s ‘Sound Affects’ album. I remember looking at this toff name, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, and wondering at the connection with Paul Weller, my working class hero from Woking. Weller had a suspicion if not antagonism toward intelligentsia – even students – based on the assumption that education was a privilege of the rich. Yet here were Shelley’s words. There’s a converse awkwardness inherent in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy; here’s a floppy-haired well-to-do lamenting the plight of England’s working class from his bed in Italy. What united Weller and Shelley in the early 1980s was the impulse to ‘declare with measured words’ their indignation with political circumstances – and a concern for the collective over the individual. There’s a shared sensibility, too, though Weller’s romantic discontent manifests most forcefully in lyrics where gritty concrete vignettes of suburbia subvert more romantic/nostalgic imagery, as in That’s Entertainment’s ‘a hot summer’s day and sticky black tarmac / Feeding ducks in the park and wishing you were far away’. Situation and mood suggest personal/political malaise in the later A Town Called Malice, too; ‘Rows and rows of disused milk floats stand dying in the dairy yard / And a hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts’. These words, and others from bands such as The Specials, were my initiation into the relationship between politics and language. They are part of me. I remember and cherish them. The association with Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy lasted, too, reminding me that there was some relevance in my studying for a Renaissance and Romantic Literature MA while seething at the Iraq war.

It’s perhaps not Shelley’s finest poem, written as a piece of rhetoric to galvanise, but it’s heartfelt and stirring. Sad that part of the legacy of the ‘Men of England’ tone has been to be appropriated by television advertising in the marketing of beers and Sky Sports coverage. The Jam and The Specials – the people I looked up to and who were saying something that I valued – were available in the mainstream, Number 1 acts, when that meant something. I wonder what there is in our current popular culture to compare, to inspire more than ‘aspiration’ in its now often impoverished usage, a hankering for trainers, gadgets and the middle-class. What are the recent lyrics that have inspired you?

Below is far from the whole of The Mask of Anarchy. It’s the bit reproduced on the back of Sound Affects. Weller, like a good GIR member, has settled upon and reprinted the bits that most meant something to him.

from The Mask of Anarchy

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.

“Let a vast assembly be,
and with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God made ye, free –

“The old laws of England – they
Whose reverend heads with age are grey,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo – Liberty!

Percy Bysshe Shelley