A Riot of Sunlight

 

GWR 6412 heading for Totnes in July sunshine in 2016

The poet Derek Mahon died this week. 

The BBC quotes the BBC's lachrymose-tolerant Fergal Keane as describing his death as a "terrible loss" and calling him "a master whose words reached me at the darkest moments of life".

Well, this is probably the recent poem he's best known for (well, by me anyhow), and I'm finding it rather uplifting at the moment too. So I thought I'd share it with you. 

So batten down the emotional hatches and don your rational Sou'westers, and look out for that sunshine (if you can):

Everything is Going to be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

Prince Charles reading part of 'Tintern Abbey'

For Remembrance Sunday

As the Team's Head Brass

BY EDWARD THOMAS (1878 – 1917)

As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn

The lovers disappeared into the wood.

I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm

That strewed an angle of the fallow, and

Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square

Of charlock. Every time the horses turned

Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned

Upon the handles to say or ask a word,

About the weather, next about the war.

Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,

And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed

Once more.

                       The blizzard felled the elm whose crest

I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,

The ploughman said. “When will they take it away?”

“When the war’s over.” So the talk began—

One minute and an interval of ten,

A minute more and the same interval.

“Have you been out?” “No.” “And don’t want

to, perhaps?”

“If I could only come back again, I should.

I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose

A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,

I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone

From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few.

Only two teams work on the farm this year.

One of my mates is dead. The second day

In France they killed him. It was back in March,

The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if

He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.”

“And I should not have sat here. Everything

Would have been different. For it would have been

Another world.” “Ay, and a better, though

If we could see all all might seem good.” Then

The lovers came out of the wood again:

The horses started and for the last time

I watched the clods crumble and topple over

After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Of Poet Laureates, UK Broadcasters and the BBC's Will Gompertz

Look! It's Will Gompertz! And he's asking an important question, slowly, like an intellectual! Look! Look!

Simon Armitage - a working-class Yorkshireman made-good - is our new Poet Laureate. 

I'm not very familiar with his poetry (though I've liked some of what I've heard) but his books about walking across England and exploring his home patch on the wrong side of the Pennines are beautifully-written and often very funny, and I'm a fan of his on the strength of them.

News of his appointment broke during last night's main 10 o'clock news bulletins, and I caught the BBC one, which struck me as being particularly 'BBC' in its slant:

In the last half hour, it's been announced that Simon Armitage will be the new Poet Laureate. He says he wants to use the role to ensure poetry embraces major global issues, including climate change.

The following report by the BBC's arts editor, the shy-and-retiring Will Gompertz, began with the end of a poem about climate change:

I'd wanted to offer my daughter

a taste of the glacier, a sense of the world

being pinned in place by a diamond-like cold

at each pole. But opening up my hand

there's nothing to pass on, nothing to hold.

(That's the least impressive bit of that poem. I particularly enjoyed:
"Rotten and rusted, a five-bar gate/

lies felled in the mud, letting the fields escape.")

"Like a rock-star", "taking poetry to the people", etc, were some of Will's words. (Very 'Will'!)

And then came the questions...

As so often with the BBC, viewers were being whacked over the head with a wet halibut of an agenda here - or a very heavy bronze cast of a wet halibut of an agenda. 

More about Will later.

Stay with us...

With ITV's News at Ten, the usual 'viewer-friendly' conversational style resulted in this meandering description of the 'breaking news':

Poetry has been part of Britain's national fabric for centuries, and the names of some of our most famous poets still resonate. Think Wordsworth, Tennyson and Betjeman, amongst many others. They were all, as it happens, Poet Laureates, there's a good pub quiz question, and the new incumbent of this prestigious post was announced just a few minutes ago. He is Simon Armitage, West Yorkshire poet, professor and playwright. Although the role may no longer have the influence on British culture it once did, he says there's still a need to capture moments in words that stretch the imagination. 

And we got an equally non-political poem to illustrate SA's art from ITV:

As he steps out at the traffic lights,

Think what he’ll look like in thirty years’ time –

The deflated face and shrunken scalp

Still daubed with the sad tattoos of high punk.

ITV then went on to focus on the relevance of the role of poet laureate, without any of the BBC's politics and focus on climate change activism.

And Sky News broke it like this:

His appointment was approved by the Queen, and for ten years he'll be seen promoting poetry, because Simon Armitage is the new Poet Laureate. He says he wants to harness the tools of the multi-media age. And if the rising popularity of poetry among millennials is anything to go by, he'll have a willing audience. 

And Sky then focused on the resurgence in the popularity of poetry and featured a clip of SA reading from 'Kid' and, again, included none of the BBC's politicking or any of their stuff about climate change.

*******

Now, if you think that proves something about the BBC, well try this...

Going back to the BBC, I've held back so far in mentioning what came next. Will Gompertz went on - after all the climate change stuff - to raise another issue not raised by either ITV or Sky:

Yes, the BBC's identity politics obsession reared its ugly head again with ghastly inevitability.

And here it is. Here's Will's 'hideously white' question to working-class Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage:

Did it cross your mind, even for a moment, when you were offered the post to say, 'you know, actually, I don't think this is right at this stage for a white male. Maybe someone from a different point of view, a different background, would be better for this role at this moment? 

As I said, very 'BBC'.

Yes, I know ITV and Sky can be as bad on some things, but - in so many respects - the BBC is well and truly unique, don't you think?

Poetry please

A rare photo of R.S. (sort of) smiling

Being a blog mainly devoted to questions of BBC bias, but explicitly not only devoted to that, may I recommend to all lovers of poetry hereabouts an unfamiliar poem by my second favourite poet (after George Herbert), R.S. Thomas.

It's religious poetry for Good Friday.

I was brought up traditionally Anglican, with the lightest, least-bothered-about touch on my parents' believing part - though with a christening and nativity plays and all.

And I was then promised for confirmation as an Anglican, partly to get me into a good local Anglican grant-maintained faith school.

And confirmation duly followed my acceptance - followed, in turn, fairly swiftly by our family's finding other things to do of a Sunday morning. 

One year at our Anglican faith school brought disgrace upon us all by scandalously finding 27-3 in favour of Darwin's theory of evolution against Genesis. (I think we were all aged about 12 or 13 at the time). 

So I fell. Further.

But, being somewhat conservative even then, I felt in my early-to-mid teens (in the early-to-mid '80s) that I really ought to properly believe by the year 2000, or else. I might party, Prince-like, in semi-belief till 1999, but I must ready myself for Judgment Day in 2000.

The year 2000. Full belief. Full armour of belief. Happy Redeemer. Result!

It didn't happen. Science, including the spellbinding works of Richard Dawkins, made me briefly into the kind of atheist who would - at the turn of the millennium - happily wrestle a very pleasant door-ringing Jehovah's Witness into half-submission by banging on about inconsistencies in the Bible for nearly two hours.

(True story, though it was a one-off. Wonder what happened to Karl, the Jehovah's Witness? Hope my cheery militancy didn't do any lasting damage). 

That said, thanks to watching the BBC's Horizon, among other things, my pre-2000 rationality dissolved like something that shouldn't be easily dissolved in water and I genuinely feared the falling-apart of the social fabric of Western civilisation - and the lights going out - at the turn of the millennium.

I was half-persuaded by the scientific/BBC consensus over the seriousness of the Millennium bug.

New Years Eve 2000? Riots on the streets of the UK. Planes falling from the skies. Health systems collapsing and patients dying. Food running out.

(Sounds slightly familiar?).

My dread was real. Half-persuasion led to a credulous belief that, thanks to the Millennium bug, the 21st Century might send us back into the Medieval era.

That was the first New Year's Eve I didn't look forward to.

Is the BBC now, via 92-year-old 'national treasure' Sir David Attenborough, pushing the young of today towards feeling even more anxious about 'Apocalypse Soon' than I felt in the late years of my youth? Or is Sir David a true prophet of scientifically-predicted potential apocalypse for human society, if we don't heed his and the BBC's warnings?

I don't know. Really, I don't know.

Such questions bring me though, with no inevitability, back towards my second favourite poet and the fact that I, a non-religious man, love two religious poets as my first (George Herbert) and second (R.S. Thomas) favourite poet...

...a complication made even more complex by the fact that, except for loving the sea, sea-birds and silence, I couldn't disagree more with the latter, R.S. Thomas, about everything.

That very peculiar man - an anti-social Welsh Anglican priest with a genuinely racist loathing for the English and a strong sympathy for Welsh nationalist terrorism, plus a truly bizarre loathing of every trace of modernity, from tractors to (English) tourists, from TVs to blood transfusions and air-conditioners - at least loved the sea and birds.

And, yes, the sea and the birds should be my only connection with ultra-uptight bigot R.S., but I think his poetry beats pretty much everyone else's poetry.

The misanthropic Welsh nationalist clergyman makes the language of his hated English sing with a beauty Plaid's late leader Leanne Wood couldn't even dream of in her worst Welsh nationalist dreams.

Such as this Good Friday rarity from R.S.'s later years:

They set up their decoy
in the Hebrew sunlight. What
for? Did they expect
death to come sooner
to disprove his claim
to be God’s son? Who
can shoot down God?
Darkness arrived at
midday, the shadow
of whose wing? The blood
ticked from the cross, but it was not
their time it kept. It was no
time at all, but the accompaniment
to a face staring,
as over twenty centuries
it has stared, from unfathomable
darkness into unfathomable light.

Oh, I do like that. It's a Good Friday poem that somehow resonates with me despite my disbelief. I like the idea of moving from unfathomable darkness into unfathomable light.