Haphazard by Starlight - Poems for Advent

The Adoration of the Magi, by Andrea Mantegnadd - celebrate Christmas
 by reading TS Eliot's 'Journey of the

Being a bit of a magpie, I look at what people write about books, then steal authors and titles for my own use. Sometimes I require instant gratification, which is where the Kindle comes into its own. Or, if I’m prepared to wait a short while, I order online, or make a trip to a bookshop (here in Tamworth we only have The Works, which is nice in its way but, sadly, its way is not that of a proper bookshop). Usually, however, details of the desired volume store themselves away in my mind and get forgotten unless, by some strange serendipity, I come across the book whilst mooching around in charity shops and second-hand stores. Then snippets of hidden knowledge surface, and I pounce triumphantly on my literary treasure.

And that’s more or less what happened when I was visiting my mother last week, only I was browsing in a ‘real’ bookshop. Ledbury Books and Maps is one of the town’s two independent bookshops (I hope residents realise how lucky they are), and I’d been in there for ages, and bought ‘Poetry Please’ for Mum (more on this another day), and was on my way out when there, on a stand by the door, was the last copy Haphazard by Starlight, A poem a day from Advent to Epiphany, by Janet Morley. I certainly don’t remember seeing it as I went in, but as I looked at the beautiful cover, something clicked in my brain, because back at the beginning of the month Moira, over at Vulpes Libris, waxed lyrical about this book. It was the title as much as anything which caught my attention, because it’s from ‘BC:AD’ by UA Fanthorpe, and I’m a huge fan of her work – that’s why Moira’s review stayed in my mind. So I bought the book, because I felt I was meant to have it.  

It’s published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which may put some people off, but it’s not preachy, and it really is a wonderful collection of poems, which will take you from December 1 all the way through to January 6, with explanatory notes and comments on each.  

Like all good anthologies, there’s a nice mix of old favourites and unknowns (unknown to me at any rate). I may not agree with all Morley’s choices - personally I think it’s incomplete without John Donne’s ‘Nocturnal Upon St Lucie’s Day’ (but then I think any poetry anthology is incomplete if it doesn’t include Donne). And I would have liked to see something really old, like a medieval carol perhaps, but you can’t have everything, and any anthology is always a very personal choice, and I can see why Morley made the selection she did.

In this book you’ll find Auden, DH Lawrence, Elizabeth Jennings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, Sylvia Plath, and TS Eliot (Journey of the Magi, one of my favourites) to name but a few. There’s also a poem by Rowan Williams (I only know him as an Archbishop, and had no idea he wrote poetry) which I enjoyed very much. There are poems about Christmas and winter, and faith, and light and dark. But many, like Ozymandias or Dover Beach are not overtly religious, or even about Christmas or the winter season. However they do contain truths about mankind and the world in the general, and the author uses them (as she uses all the poems) as a kind of meditation, giving her thoughts on the meaning, ending each piece with a question, to make you think about your own values and beliefs, and the way we live our lives. Her commentaries and questions are reflections on life which are, as Moira says, rather like Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’.  

Hendrick Avercamp's Winter Scene on a Canal may not be quite as bleak
as Christina Rossetti's 'In the Bleak Mid-Winter', but it does conjure up
the chilly feel of ice and snow.

Actually, I wanted my review to be different to Moira’s but, like her, I cannot resist explaining the book’s title with some quotes from U A Fanthorpe’s BC:AD, which is the choice for Christmas Day. Here is the opening: 

This was the moment when Before

Turned into After, and the future’s

Uninvented timekeepers presented arms. 

And here is the end:  

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect 

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Isn’t that wonderful? It always makes me catch my breath and think about ancient kingdoms, and where the Three Wise Men may actually have come from, and how the very beginning of Christianity was about poor people and minorities, rather than wealthy VIPs and rulers. And I love the way Fanthorpe describes the Nativity as ‘the moment when Before turned into After’, and that wonderful phrase about the three members of an obscure Persian sect walking ‘haphazard by starlight’. 

Rosseau's Tiger in a Tropical Storm always reminds me of Blake's Tyger,
which features in 'Haphazard by Starlight'.

Today’s offering is seasonal ghazal by Harry Gilonis, who I’d never heard of before. Nor did I know that a ‘ghazal’ is an ancient form of Arabic verse, dating from the 6th century and widely sung in the Arabic speaking world. According to Morley it typically consists of five or more couplets, which have the same metre, but are not necessarily linked by themes. “It is the poetic expression of the pain of loss and separation, shot through with a sense of beauty, and its normal theme is unattainable love,” She explains. “Frequently the Beloved becomes a metaphor for God, and the themes revolve around metaphysical issues.” 

This poem eschews the normal rules of grammar and punctuation, and abandons any rhyming conventions and is possibly the most ‘difficult’ in this anthology. It’s only short, but is suffused with images of Christmas from carols, songs, poems, books, the Bible, as well as touching on older, pagan traditions, challenging our perception of what a poem should be, as well as our perception of the way we celebrate Christmas. At first glance the poem seems almost like a string of unrelated words, especially the first two lines:  

the silent stars descend to us

come angel seraph sheep pear tree 

But as you read, the allusions and layers of meaning become clearer, and words and thoughts echo each other in quick succession – it’s like a painting, packed with individual symbols, which seem to be unconnected, yet nevertheless all mesh together to form a cohesive whole.  

Having given her interpretation of this poem, Morley poses the question: “What are the connections or tensions for you between Christian beliefs and the traditional pagan practices around Christmas /Yuletide?” But you could equally well consider the connections or tensions between Christian beliefs and modern consumerism. I like her commentaries, but I only read them after I’ve gathered my own thoughts on the poems. Sometimes, to my surprise, we are in accord. Sometimes I look at her views and think ‘oh, that’s what that means’, or ‘how come I didn’t see that’. And occasionally (very occasionally) I wonder if she is right. 

 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by Bruegel, vital to Auden's Musee des
Beaux Arts, which should be read on December 30.

I’m really enjoying reading this book - it's a really nice alternative to a conventional advent calendar, and I think it’s a wonderful idea to celebrate Christmas by forgetting about the glitz and glitter for a few moments each day and reading a poem. And if you’re new to reading poetry, or not very confident about your interpretation, then the notes really do help. 

Edited: I should perhaps, make it clear that there are no illustrations in Haphazard by Moonlight. I chose paintings I like to illustrate the review, because I have this thing about breaking up blocks of print with pictures to make it more user friendly. I think it's the result of working as a local reporter and sub-editor for so many years, and being ingrained with the theory that photos attract people's attention!

Woods, Sea and Stars...

Woods etc. has a rather plain cover, so instead,
here is a picture in Seawood, at Bardsea, Cumbria.

I love Alice Oswald's 'Dart', and 'A Sleepwalk On The Severn', which are both long poems, but hadn't read any of her shorter work, so I was pleased when I spotted her collection Woods etc. in the library, just before we travelled up to the Furness Peninsula in Cumbria for a week's holiday in the campervan. It gave us a chance to enjoy the glorious countryside, and made us feel very close to nature, and Oswald is very much a nature poet. So I read the poems, two or three each day, curled up in bed in the early morning when the rest of the world was still asleep, and they seemed to fit the landscape.

Oswald has been compared to Ted Hughes, and I can see why, because she shows the natural world in its raw state, before it's been pruned and cultivated and tidied up, but there's a humanity there as well, and echoes of old legends and folk tales. The poems in this collection are reflective, about the elements, the moon, the stars, the sea, seabirds, birdsong, a wood, stones and flowers. There's a Lovesong for Three Children (her own, presumably), A Poem for Taking a Baby out of Hospital, and a Psalm to Sing in a Canoe.

When she's on form Oswald uses language in strange and unexpected ways, stringing words together like stray beads on a thread, making patterns and shapes that remain in the mind, even though the beads don't match. The poems in 'Woods etc' didn't grip my imagination in quite the same way as 'Dart' or 'A Sleepwalk On The Severn' which both have a curiously haunting quality, with hypnotic rhythms and evocative images. Possibly her style, with its lists and repetitions, is better suited to longer, more sustained work, But having said that, I enjoyed most of these poems very much indeed.

I particularly liked A Star Here And A Star There, where she writes

the first whisper of stars is a faint thing

a candle sound, too far away to read by

and she goes on to say

someone looks up, he sees his soul growing visible

in various shapes above the house

he sees his soul tilted above the house

all his opponent selves hanging and fluttering

out there in the taken for granted air

in various shapes above the house

star

I love the idea of the first whisper of a star, and the 'opponent selves' seems such a simple way of describing the many different aspects of personality that each of us has, and how beliefs and actions, and other people's view of us (and their expectations), and our own hopes and fears, can all fight against each other, but somehow we have to meld them together into a unified whole.

Seagulls, not flying (my camera is not good enough to snap
them aloft) but perched on a jetty railing.

And I thought Seabird's Blessing was wonderful, especially when read with the gulls wheeling and crying overhead, and I could imagine them calling on 'God the featherer' to lift them if they fall. The first stanza perfectly captures the way they move through the air:

We are crowds of seabirds,

makers of many angles,

workers that unpick a web

of the air's threads and tangles.

Then there's Sea Poem with:

water deep in its own world

steep shafts warm streams

cool salt cod weed

dispersed outflows and flytipping

and the sun and its refelexion

throwing two shadows

what is the beauty of water

sky is its beauty

Clouds reflected in one of the marshy pools at Bardsea, in Cumbria.

Lonely Londoners

On a grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if it is not London at all, but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train.

The fellar is Henry Oliver, nicknamed Sir Galahad, who has no luggage, and is clad only in a light tropical suit – but claims he doesn't feel the cold. He's one of characters who drift through The Lonely Londoners, by Sam Selvon, talking of home while they look for a room to live, a job, food, drink, and women.

I spotted this slender book in the tiny classics section at my local library, picked it up to have a browse (I'd never heard of the author before), and was intrigued. It's difficult to know how to describe it it, because you can't categorise it. The characters are wonderfully drawn, but there's no plot, and it doesn't seem like a novel in the conventional sense. Although various incidents are described, it's not really picaresque, and it's not quite stream of consciousness either. However, one thing is certain, I thought it was one of the most poetic pieces of writing I've come across. It's written in a kind of Creole, or patois, following the rhythms of Caribbean speech, but is easy to follow (unlike the speech patterns of the slaves in Andrea Levy's 'The Long Song', which I found stilted).

This was written in 1956, eight years after the first Jamaican passengers disembarked from the Windrush. The author, who was born in Trinidad, was a journalist, novelist and poet, who became known as the founding father of modern black writing in London. Here he tells the tale of the early immigrants, lured to the Mother Land by the promise of a better life. There's no back story to their lives, and no resolution: they arrive, they dream of home, they stay. Nor does he judge his characters, and neither should we: they simply are, and it is not up to us to think they should be other than they are.

London is an unreal city (shades of TS Eliot here I think) where Moses, a veteran black Londoner, shows newcomers how to survive in this alien environment. He is the central figure, and we see life largely through his eyes.

'The only thing,' Galahad say when they was in the tube going to the Water, 'is that I find when talk smoke coming out of my mouth.'

'Is so, it is in this country,' Moses say. 'Sometimes the words freeze and you have to melt it to hear the talk.'

That last sentence is wonderful, and the men, and their friends, certainly encounter some frozen words in a land where there is no heat from the sun, and where people are suspicious of these newcomers. Racism is already a very real threat, and Galahad makes an impassioned plea for tolerance, that recalls Shylock's speech in 'A Merchant of Venice'.

Lord, what it is we want that the white people and them find it so hard to give? A little work, a little food, a little place to sleep. We not asking for the sun, or the moon. We only want to get by, we don't even want to get on.

Galahad, a sharp dresser, with an eye for a pretty woman, finds that when things are going well, life is good.

This is London, this is the life Oh Lord, to walk like a king with money in your pocket, not a worry in the world.

But life can be hard and cruel. One cold winter's day, when he has no money and no food, he kills a pigeon, and shares a meal with Moses. Eesewhere, one of their friends traps gulls to cook and eat.

At times there's an almost Biblical feel to the language and action, for Moses, Galahad, Cap, Harris, Bart and Tolroy (and his large extended family who join him in England, uninvited) are exiles in a strange land. The men support each other. They chat and spin tales, and quarrel, and fight, and chat some more. The years pass, and though they still talk of returning home they know, and so do we, that even if they could afford it they wouldn't go because, for all its faults, they have fallen in love with London.


What it is that a city have, that any place in the world have, that you get so much to like it you wouldn't leave it for anywhere else? What it is that would keep men although by and large, in truth and in fact, they catching their royal to make a living, staying in a cramp-up room where you have to do everything – sleep, eat, dress, wash, cook, live. Why it is, that although they grumble about it all the time, curse the people, curse the government, say all kind of things about this and that, why it is, that in the end, everybody cagey about saying outright that if the chance come they will go back to them green islands in the sun?

Author Sam Selvon

Happy Birthday To Me - and Browning!

Robert Browning as a young man.

Today is my birthday, an anniversary I share with poet Robert Browning, who is 200 today, but seems to have been forgotten in all the brouhaha surrounding Charles Dickens (by the way, Edward Lear, famed for his limericks and nonsense poems, is also 200 in another few days – on May 12 – and he too has been overlooked).  Now I may not have had a poem read to me, although I live in hopes of this happening, and I didn’t get tea and breakfast in bed, which is my idea of luxury, but The Man of The House, who plays in a local folk band, did serenade me with a tuneful rendition of Happy Birthday, which I think is pretty romantic. And he bought me a fruit cake and a pair of binoculars! Before that Younger Daughter rang and sang, and before that Elder Daughter, en route to a very early shift at the hospital, sent a text message.

Anyway, back to Browning, who seems to have fallen out of fashion, which is a shame. I don’t like everything he wrote, but I am fond of much his poetry, and can never resist the fairy-tale love story of his elopement and with Elizabeth Barrett, whose work is better known. I must admit I know very little about him, apart from the fact that he married her, they lived in Italy, and had a son, so I was surprised to find he was 33 when they met in 1845 – somehow I imagined him much younger than that, and although I knew she was older I didn’t realise she was 39 at the time.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The couple had corresponded for some months before that first meeting - Browning wrote to Elizabeth after reading and admiring her work. They fell in love and defied her father (who didn’t want any of his children to get married) and were wed when they ran away together in 1846, setting up home in Pisa, and then in Florence, at the Casa Guidi, which is now owned by  Eton College and used as a study centre for the boys. But it is open to the public at certain times, and is also leased to the Landmark Trust and rented out as a holiday home for a few weeks each year, which sounds as if it would be absolutely fabulous, but is probably well outside my price range. Just think though, what an enchanting holiday you could have, visiting art galleries thinking about Browning sitting under a hot Florentine sun, yearning for an English spring, with a pale sun and rain-washed skies. I love Home Thoughts From Abroad, with its emphasis on the fact that April is ‘there’ in England, but is not present in Italy: the use of that word ‘there’ rather than ‘here’ conveys so much, so simply.

Casa Giuidi

 Browning, born at Camberwell in 1812, was the son of a Bank of England clerk who was something of a bibliophile, with a collection of more than 6,000 books. His mother was a gifted musician, and he was considered to be something of a child prodigy, writing his first book of poetry (which was never published) before the age of 12.  He admired Shelley and the Romantic poets, and as a young man he travelled to Russia and Italy with a diplomatic mission. However, he decided to dedicate his life to poetry rather than seeking formal work. I gather his parents tried to persuade him to earn a living in a more conventional way, but they must have been happy to support him, because his father sponsored publication of his poems, and he lived at home until his marriage.

Browning when he was older

After some early work sank without trace, his poems were applauded by people like Carlyle and Wordsworth, and his circle of friends included Dickens and actor manager William Charles Macready, but he failed to achieve widespread popularity.  It was only when he returned to England after his wife’s death that he began to win acclaim. During that period he travelled widely, although he never returned to the apartment where he lived with Elizabeth. In April 1889 he was recorded on an Edison cylinder phonograph, reciting part of How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent, and he died in December that year, at his son’s home in Venice. His grave can be seen next to that of Tennyson, in Poets Corner, in Westminster Abbey.

Browning's grave

The style of his poems varies tremendously, from seemingly simple verses with structured rhyme and metre, to complex dramatic monologues where the traditional tools of poetic language are absent or altered, enabling him to focus on story and personality and to reveal a character in a very subtle fashion. In My Last Duchess, for example, the sense and meaning of the poem is carried across the lines so you hardly realise it’s written in rhyming couplets – and you’re a good way through before you understand that this clever, urbane, sophisticated narrator, who loves beauty in all its forms, has actually killed the woman in the painting.

An Arthur Rackham illustration for Browning's
poem showing the Pied Piper leading the
 children of Hamelin away

Then there’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which may be much simpler, but demands to be read aloud, captivating us with is strong rhythms and rhymes in an almost dizzying fashion. This is the bit I like the best:

Rats!
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

But my favourite is Meeting at Night, which I’m sure grew out of the difficult courtship he had with Elizabeth. It makes me imagine two lovers, parted by circumstances, having a secret meeting despite trials and tribulations – but others people may read something  different into it.

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 i' the slushy sand. 

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, through its joys and fears, 

Than the two hearts beating each to each! 

Journey of the Magi

I seem to be all behind hand with the Advent Bookfest. having missed day yesterday, but I have a poem for you today - TS Eliot's Journey of the Magi, and if you go to http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7070 you can hear him reciting it on an old and rather crackly radio recording. I love the way Eliot makes the journey of the Three Kings sound so real, and the way little things foreshadow what is to come, like the men at the inn door 'dicing for pieces of silver', referencing the 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas, and the Roman soldiers who gambled for Jesus' robe. And if that makes it sound grim, it isn't. It's a poem about rebirth and redemption, and an affirmation of Eliot's own growing faith. Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.' And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling And running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

From Collected Poems 1909-1926, TS Eliot, published by Faber and Faber, 1963.