The Way Throught the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

I adore this poem by Rudyard Kipling. When Kipling wrote it he wouldn't have guessed the awful change in our natural environment. It's ironic that his complaint about the road disappearing has now turned itself around. Now we complain because the roads are key, and the precious countryside is disappearing.

And wildlife is diminishing so much. When I was a kid sparrows were the most common town birds.

Their "dawn chorus" woke me each morning. There were so many little birds, so many different breeds. You needed a bird book to identify them all. Like The Observer's Book of British Birds, a little pocket-sized book that went in your anorak (when it wasn't creepy to own an anorak) to be got out the instant you spotted a bird you'd never seen before.

When I was a kid I knew the names of birds and trees and flowers. I'm so glad I had that, so glad the world was as it was for me.  So much has changed, some of it for the better, but a lot for the worst.

Copyright Janet Cameron

The Way Through the Woods, by Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods...
But there is no road through the woods.

What I Like and Dislike About Poetry and Poets and Other People

I like:

Poets who invent new, exciting words, just so long as I have some idea of what is meant through the context in which they are used.

I dislike:

Pernickety people who say, "There's no such word!"

I like:

People who admit they don't know much about poetry, but they have an open mind, and are willing to see if they can get something from it.

I dislike:

People who just declare they don't like poetry, even though they've never bothered to try it.

I can live with:

People who are indifferent but who don't make judgements are okay. That's their choice and they have every right to make that choice. It's just the noisy detractors I cannot stand.

I like:

People who are open to trying different forms, and don't make certain kinds of poetry "wrong". 

I dislike:

People who insist they hate rhyming poetry or contemporary blank verse, or prose poetry, or humorous verse. There's room for everything, and one kind of voice doesn't prevail over all others.

I like:

Poets who are original and who write from their own experience.

I dislike:

Pretend-poets who steal other people's ideas, change a few words around, (just enough to avoid a charge of plagiarism) and present it as their own. 

I especially dislike:

Two poets who have played that trick on me!

A Poem Lovely as a Tree

Sheffield Park,Photo: Janet Cameron

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

By Joyce Kilmer
    

I Meant to Do My Work Today by Richard LeGallienne

Richard LeGallienne was a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and this simple but truly enchanting poem is one of my favourites. In a few sentences LeGallienne justifies his own longing to escape - a longing he indulges with utter and complete joy.  I have been, so many times, inside that experience, but usually I repress my longing to go and dance among the buttercups, and, instead, I press on with my work. I won't ever do that again.

Copyright: Janet Cameron

I meant to do my work today -
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree
And a butterfly flitted across the field
And all the leaves were calling me.

And the wind went singing over the land
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand -
So what could I do but laugh and go?

Keats' To Autumn

I am going to learn this poem. I think it's great to learn a poem. You can say it to yourself as a sort of beautiful meditation.  To Autumn contains the most sublime sentence structure - a twisty string of delicious words that seem to want to hang around inside your eardrum like an echo.  Soothing to the spirit and keeps the brain synapses sparking.

Every few days I will learn a few more lines until I can recite the entire poem.

Sometimes it's good to do something just for the hell of it.

To Autumn by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.


Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? 
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Adlestrop

I just love this Edward Thomas poem. I think of it as a "minimalist" poem, because it's  short and simple, but it's so evocative in its very simplicity.

Adlestrop

Yes, I remember Adlestrop -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat, the express train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was 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

My copy of the poem has no full stop at the end, and I'm not sure if that's a printing error, or whether it was meant to be "left in the air." I'm guessing the latter. It's as though there ought to be more to come later. Or maybe the poet is indicating that would like to go on but somehow, everything tailed off in the mist as the train drew out of the station.

But maybe that's me just being fanciful.

Louis MacNiece "Snow"

Louis MacNiece's philosophical short poem, "Snow," is a celebration of the energy and plurality of the world of nature.

Louis MacNiece (1907-1953) was an Irish poet, born in Belfast, writing at the time of the thirties' poets, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis.

The contrast in the poem, Snow is between with wild, cold, uncontrolled natural world outside and the warm, safe flowery interior. Each of these worlds contains huge complexity.

This deeply philosophical poem questions the nature of reality, suggesting that nothing is as it appears; that everything is more than it appears.

“World is suddener” in the last line of the first stanza shows us that the world is not a pre-determined, inanimate object, but a living organism with its own will to exist and to effect change in an inspiring way. The energy that is in all living things cannot be suppressed; it erupts and increases and does it own thing because it is a part of nature. Things are manifestations of spirit and the energy that arises from them is invincible and ongoing, for example: “Incorrigibly plural” and “I peel and portion a tangerine and spit the pips.”

The poet reveals a sense of wonder in the comparisons between things, for example the juxtaposition between the snow and pink roses.

The Nature of Things in Themselves

The last line of the second verse: “…the drunkenness of things being various,” makes us question exactly what makes things specifically themselves, while the third line of the last stanza observes: “On the tongue, on the ears, the eyes, in the palms of one’s hands.” This suggests we should not rely only upon the most obvious means of responding to sensations, but that we should become more aware, and accept that, as explained in the last line of the poem: “There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.“

The poem is written without rhyme, except in lines 10 and 12. The use of free verse allows MacNiece a rich vocabulary, unrestricted by rules. Alliteration occurs in “spawning snow” and “fire flames,” and again in “peel and portion” as well as assonance: “spit the pips.”

In the last verse there is also a subjective element in the manner in which MacNiece describes the world as “more spiteful and gay than one supposes,” and here, he is surely thinking about the whole world of nature. Emotions, spitefulness, gaiety, are as much of our world as any other part of it.

In his Autumn Journal, published in 1939, he says: “Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else. I refuse to be “objective” or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.”

Source:

• MacNiece, Louis, The Collected Poems of Louis MacNiece, Faber & Faber, 1966

Originally published by Suite.101 on December 19, 2010.