Monday, December 24, 2012

Poetry Monday

I just read Ian McEwan's latest novel, Sweet Tooth, which will certainly be one of my favorite books of the year. It's a twisty take on the spy novel, one that is actually far more about literature and love. There's a fair amount of poetry discussion in the novel, including a reference to one of my favorite Kingsley Amis poems, "A Bookstore Idyll". And there is reference to a poem I had never read by Edward Thomas called "Adlestrop."

Here are both poems, well worth reading.



A Bookshop Idyll


Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY
            Comes the brief POETRY shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
            Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
            I scan the contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
            No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
            Landscape near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
            So does Rilke and Buddha.

“I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read”
            These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
            Poem for J.,

The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter
            For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
            A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
            Or squash it flat?
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;
            Girls aren’t like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
            Can get by without it.
Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;
            They write about it,

And the awful way their poems lay them open
            Just doesn’t strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
            No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
            We sat up half the night
Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
            And couldn’t write.

                                   
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.




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