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.