Dancing by the Light of the Moon Read online

  As any bird in flight.

  They do not think of safety,

  Are blind to possible extinction

  And when most vulnerable

  Are most themselves.

  The good are real as the sun,

  Are best perceived through clouds

  Of casual corruption

  That cannot kill the luminous sufficiency

  That shines on city, sea and wilderness,

  Fastidiously revealing

  One man to another,

  Who yet will not accept

  Responsibilities of light.

  The good incline to praise,

  To have the knack of seeing that

  The best is not destroyed

  Although forever threatened.

  The good go naked in all weathers,

  And by their nakedness rebuke

  The small protective sanities

  That hide men from themselves.

  The good are difficult to see

  Though open, rare, destructible.

  Always, they retain a kind of youth,

  The vulnerable grace

  Of any bird in flight,

  Content to be itself,

  Accomplished master and potential victim,

  Accepting what the earth or sky intends.

  I think that I know one or two

  Among my friends.

  Let me Die a Youngman’s Death

  by Roger McGough

  (born 1937)

  Let me die a youngman’s death

  not a clean & inbetween

  the sheets holywater death

  not a famous-last-words

  peaceful out of breath death

  When I’m 73

  & in constant good tumour

  may I be mown down at dawn

  by a bright red sports car

  on my way home

  from an allnight party

  Or when I’m 91

  with silver hair

  & sitting in a barber’s chair

  may rival gangsters

  with hamfisted tommyguns burst in

  & give me a short back & insides

  Or when I’m 104

  & banned from the Cavern

  may my mistress

  catching me in bed with her daughter

  & fearing for her son

  cut me up into little pieces

  & throw away every piece but one

  Let me die a youngman’s death

  not a free from sin tiptoe in

  candle wax & waning death

  not a curtains drawn by angels borne

  ‘what a nice way to go’ death

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A to ZAn alphabet of poets

  From Auden to Zephaniah, from Byron to Yeats, via Eliot and Frost, Kipling and Larkin, these are the ‘classics’, the pick of the pops, the best loved, the most frequently quoted, the most often learnt, the most easily remembered: twenty-six poems to learn by heart from twenty-six poets whose work has stood the test of time and, with good reason, lingers in the memory.

  A

  Night Mail

  by W. H. Auden

  (1907–73)fn1

  I

  This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,

  Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

  Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

  The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

  Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

  The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

  Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder

  Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

  Snorting noisily as she passes

  Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

  Birds turn their heads as she approaches,

  Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

  Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;

  They slumber on with paws across.

  In the farm she passes no one wakes,

  But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

  II

  Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.

  Down towards Glasgow she descends,

  Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes,

  Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

  Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

  All Scotland waits for her:

  In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs,

  Men long for news.

  III

  Letters of thanks, letters from banks,

  Letters of joy from girl and boy,

  Receipted bills and invitations

  To inspect new stock or to visit relations,

  And applications for situations,

  And timid lovers’ declarations,

  And gossip, gossip from all the nations,

  News circumstantial, news financial,

  Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,

  Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,

  Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,

  Letters to Scotland from the South of France,

  Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands,

  Written on paper of every hue,

  The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

  The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,

  The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,

  Clever, stupid, short and long,

  The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

  IV

  Thousands are still asleep,

  Dreaming of terrifying monsters

  Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:

  Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,

  Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

  They continue their dreams,

  But shall wake soon and hope for letters,

  And none will hear the postman’s knock

  Without a quickening of the heart,

  For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

  B

  She Walks in Beauty

  by George Gordon, Lord Byron

  (1788–1824)

  She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

  Thus mellow’d to that tender light

  Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

  One shade the more, one ray the less,

  Had half impair’d the nameless grace

  Which waves in every raven tress,

  Or softly lightens o’er her face;

  Where thoughts serenely sweet express

  How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

  And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

  So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

  The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

  But tell of days in goodness spent,

  A mind at peace with all below,

  A heart whose love is innocent!

  C

  The Rolling English Road

  by G. K. Chesterton

  (1874–1936)fn2

  Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

  The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

  A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,

  And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;

  A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread

  The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

  I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,

  And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;

  But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed

  To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

  Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,

  The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

  H
is sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run

  Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?

  The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,

  But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.

  God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear

  The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

  My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,

  Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,

  But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,

  And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;

  For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,

  Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

  D

  Leisure

  by W. H. Davies

  (1871–1940)fn3

  What is this life if, full of care,

  We have no time to stand and stare.

  No time to stand beneath the boughs

  And stare as long as sheep or cows.

  No time to see, when woods we pass,

  Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

  No time to see, in broad daylight,

  Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

  No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,

  And watch her feet, how they can dance.

  No time to wait till her mouth can

  Enrich that smile her eyes began.

  A poor life this is if, full of care,

  We have no time to stand and stare.

  E

  Journey of the Magi

  by T. S. Eliot

  (1888–1965)

  ‘A cold coming we had of it,

  Just the worst time of the year

  For a journey, and such a long 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 singing 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 might 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.

  F

  The Road Not Taken

  by Robert Frost

  (1874–1963)

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both

  And be one traveler, long I stood

  And looked down one as far as I could

  To where it bent in the undergrowth;

  Then took the other, as just as fair,

  And having perhaps the better claim,

  Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

  Though as for that the passing there

  Had worn them really about the same,

  And both that morning equally lay

  In leaves no step had trodden black.

  Oh, I kept the first for another day!

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  I doubted if I should ever come back.

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  G

  I’d Love to Be a Fairy’s Child

  by Robert Graves

  (1895–1985)

  Children born of fairy stock

  Never need for shirt or frock,

  Never want for food or fire,

  Always get their heart’s desire:

  Jingle pockets full of gold,

  Marry when they’re seven years old.

  Every fairy child may keep

  Two strong ponies and ten sheep;

  All have houses, each his own,

  Built of brick or granite stone;

  They live on cherries, they run wild –

  I’d love to be a fairy’s child.

  H

  Invictus

  by William Ernest Henley

  (1849–1903)fn4

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds and shall find me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  I

  The Camp Fires of the Past

  by Rex Ingamells

  (1913–55)fn5

  A thousand, thousand camp fires every night,

  in ages gone, would twinkle to the dark

  from crest and valley in the rolling bush,

  from mulga scrub and mallee scrub, from dunes

  of Central sand, from gaps in straggling ranges,

  from gibber plains and plains of iron-wood,

  through leaves and in the open, from the mangroves

  by shore of Carpenteria, from rocks

  and beaches of the Bight …. for countless aeons,

  a thousand, thousand camp fires burned each night,

  and, by the fires, the Old Men told their tales

  which held their listeners spellbound … Every night

  among the fires men chanted to the beat

  of stick and boomerangs and clap of hands,

  or drone-and-boom of didgeridoo, the songs

  rising and falling, trailing, quickening,

  while eyes gleamed bright, through smoke drift, bodies shone

  and dusked in fitful glow amid the shadows …..

  J

  Warning

  by Jenny Joseph

  (1932–2018)fn6<
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  When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

  With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,

  And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

  And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.

  I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired

  And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

  And run my stick along the public railings

  And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

  I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

  And pick flowers in other people’s gardens

  And learn to spit.

  You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

  And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

  Or only bread and pickle for a week

  And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

  But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

  And pay our rent and not swear in the street

  And set a good example for the children.

  We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

  But maybe I ought to practise a little now?

  So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

  When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.

  K

  If –

  by Rudyard Kipling

  (1865–1936)fn7

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

  But make allowance for their doubting too;

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

  Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

  If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

  If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim,

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two impostors just the same;

  If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

  Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings