"To blame the fledgling is unjust./It toilets when and where it must"

At least there's been some relief today. 

After what seems to have been an eternity, Radio 4's 4.30pm Sunday poetry spot has finally paused from being endlessly 'woke' and brought back splendid, short-breathed Roger McGough and Poetry Please. 

Today's guest was poet laureate Simon Armitage, of whom I'm a fan. He chatted to Roger and chose his pick of listeners' choices. 

And they were great picks too, though the programme began with part of a medieval poem translated by Simon himself called The Owl and the Nightingale, "full of medieval toilet humour" according to Roger - as we heard.

Roger was right that it's "lovely stuff". Here's The Owl defending his reputation to an equally argumentative Nightingale:

I undertake essential tasks

Where people live, performing acts

That folk find helpful, doing good

Where humans house their stock of food. 

I prey on vermin, dusk to dawn, 

Both in the church and in the barn. 

It is my pleasure in Christ's house

To hunt down every filthy mouse.

No rodent will live safely there

While I patrol it from the air.

Alternatively, I might choose

Some different dwelling for my roost.

Great trees stand in the wood, and there

The sturdy boughs are never bare,

But overgrown by ivy vines,

Whose leafy tendrils intertwine, 

Whose verdant tones are never lost

Through any winter - snow or frost. 

My stronghold in those trunks and arms,

In summer cool, in winter warm,

Is always green and always bright

When yours has disappeared from sight.

The extract's closing couplet ran as follows: "To blame the fledgling is unjust./It toilets when and where it must" - which is certainly true.

AE Housman, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare and Wilfred Owen followed, along with a trio of modern female poets, Alison Brackenbury, Lorna Goodison and Shivanee Ramlochan.

Poetry Please

I remember reading a James Delingpole piece recently (though I can't find it again now) where he actually, in passing, praised a Radio 4 programme. (Yes, really!) 

That sole, shining star was Poetry Please. 

I also remember James writing a Spectator piece recently on the rewards of trying to learn poetry by heart, so I imagine he'll have liked the latest edition of Poetry Please as it focused on that very subject.

Learning poetry by heart is something I've tried to do too, but I find it hard - except for very short poems. (I still remember that Stevie Smith poem I learned for my O Levels. In its entirety it ran: "Aloft/In the loft/Sits Croft./He is soft".)

But it is obviously possible to manage long poems with a bit of willpower. After all, actors learn large numbers of lines and, as we know from their political pronouncements, many of them aren't exactly the brightest bulbs in the theatre's neon light display.

Now I, for example, made a determined effort to memorise the entirely of T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (always a favourite of mine) and nearly succeeded, after days and days and day of trying. Most of it has now crumbled to ruins in my memory though, yet I still remember enjoying the stimulation of the challenge. 

This is one of the few poems I have managed to learn by heart:

I was struck though by Poetry Please presenter - and poet - Roger McGough's ready admission that he was unable to recite any of his own poems from heart. 

('Roger McGough' is a splendidly poetic name, incidentally, brimming with assonance). 

MISERRIMUS!

Nowadays, whenever I listen to Poetry Please on Radio 4 I can't help thinking of the (recently-much-maligned) comedian Jake Yapp's hilarious Radio Four in Four Minutes. 

Jake impersonated poet-presenter Roger McGough's idiosyncratic delivery in such a funny way that I can't help hearing the real Roger McGough though the gently mocking hall-of-mirrors lens of Jake's parody:  

Roger: Hello. [Pause] Welcome [Pause] to [Pause] Poetry [Pause] Please. [Silence]. One side [Pause] of [Pause] A4 [Long pause] read out [Pause] over half [Pause] an [Pause] hour.

A recent edition marked the 300th anniversary of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

If you don't think you know it, think: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,/The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,/The plowman homeward plods his weary way,/And leaves the world to darkness and to me" and "The paths of glory lead but to the grave" and "Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,/Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood" and "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,/Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;/Along the cool sequester'd vale of life/They kept the noiseless tenor of their way."

It's a very fine poem actually and Mark Meadows read it wonderfully, but what especially grabbed me on this edition of Poetry Please was a totally unfamiliar sonnet by local boy William Wordsworth:

A Gravestone upon the Floor in the Cloisters of Worcester Cathedral

“MISERRIMUS!” and neither name nor date,

Prayer, text, or symbol, graven upon the stone;

Naught but that word assigned to the unknown,

That solitary word,—to separate

From all, and cast a cloud around the fate 

Of him who lies beneath. Most wretched one,

Who chose his epitaph?—Himself alone

Could thus have dared the grave to agitate,

And claim among the dead this awful crown;

Nor doubt that he marked also for his own  

Close to these cloistral steps a burial-place,

That every foot might fall with heavier tread,

Trampling upon his vileness. Stranger, pass

Softly!—To save the contrite, Jesus bled.

Poetry Please identified the man with the 'Most wretched of men' gravestone - one Thomas Morris (1660-1748), a minor canon of Worcester Cathedral who, as Roger McGough put it:

...because he refused to swear allegiance to King William III [Pause], the unlawful heir to the English throne [Pause], was deprived of holy orders [Pause], which were never restored. [Long pause] He died [Pause] a poor [Pause] and unhappy man.

That prompted me to Google around and find out a bit more about the most wretched Canon Morris and led me to a fascinating piece from the Birmingham Post entitled Solving mystery of the epitaph that got Wordsworth musing.

The piece isn't free of basic errors, such as saying (wrongly) that 1683 was the year of the Glorious Revolution, but it outlines how the Romantics (like Wordsworth) poured "their world-weary and melancholic sentiments" onto Canon Morris, often maligning him in the process, and it provokes even more thoughts on the most-wretched man of all: 

So the no longer Rev Thomas Morris found himself out on his ear, a “non-juror” in official parlance, a conscientious objector in more modern terms. He remained in Worcester, though, supported by funds from like-minded Jacobites, and continued to attend services at the cathedral. As to exactly how poor he was, it is not easy to say. Nor is it easy to prove that Morris was “kindly and gentle”, as some later writers claim.

What he undoubtedly was was bitter, and arguably self-pitying too, as the inscription upon his gravestone suggests.

Morris’s miserable existence, if such it was, came to its conclusion in 1748, more than half a century after his ejection from the Established Church. He was carried to his grave in the cloisters by six maidens, clothed in white, and bearing, it is said, a device of Morris’s own construction. My guess is that this would have been some Jacobite symbol, one last calculated snub to England’s constitutional settlement.

I do like a poem that leads you happily astray.