Dancing by the Light of the Moon Read online

  10 John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the most celebrated art critic of his day, known for his romanticized view of women and for the problems he faced in forming relations with them. Elma Mitchell was a formidable British poet, translator and librarian, whose dazzling way with words makes this a wonderfully powerful poem to perform.

  11 Bukowski was a German-born American poet and novelist – described by Time magazine as the ‘laureate of American lowlife’ – who sometimes ended his own poetry readings with this.

  12 This is America’s great Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, in 1980, running his country’s and the world’s social, economic, political and environmental problems through a metaphorical washing machine. From the loss of jungle habitats in Africa to the use of Agent Orange (a chemical defoliant sprayed by the US military on jungles during the Vietnam War), it’s a virtuoso riff that’s a challenging learn, but a rewarding one. The lesson is that not everything comes clean in the wash. (It was written as a homage to Ginsberg’s fellow poet, Kenneth Koch.)

  13 Maya Angelou was an American poet, singer, civil rights activist and phenomenon, who published seven volumes of memoirs, the first of which, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), brought her international acclaim and fame. Geri Halliwell told me this is the Spice Girls’ favourite poem.

  14 We are reaching the home straight with a verse that benefits greatly from being performed in the manner of the late, great racing commentator, Sir Peter O’Sullevan.

  15 Kate Tempest is a performance poet, playwright and novelist, who won the Ted Hughes Award for Brand New Ancients in 2013, when, in the UK, Simon Cowell and his X Factor series were dominating Saturday night TV. At the time, I made a film for The One Show in which I interviewed primary schoolchildren about their heroes and who they would most like to be. One child chose Winston Churchill; another chose David Beckham; eighteen chose Simon Cowell.

  Chapter Fourteen: Nowt So Queer as Folk

  1 If you know a school or a care home that you think might like to take part, get them to explore the Poetry Together website and find out more: www.poetrytogether.com. It’s open to all. It’s free. It’s fun.

  2 Famously, Coleridge claimed to have composed this poem in 1797, having taken opium after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China, Kubla Khan. Waking from his drug-infused sleep, Coleridge set about writing the lines that came to him from his dream until he was interrupted by ‘a person from Porlock’ – a nearby village. The poem could not be completed according to his original plan because the interruption caused Coleridge to forget the rest of the lines. He kept the ‘fragment’ for private readings until 1816 when, encouraged by Lord Byron, he had it published.

  3 ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ recounts a story about Ibrahim ibn Adham, one of the most prominent of the early Sufi saints, who lived in the eighth century and, according to legend, had been a prince until he renounced his throne in favour of a life of asceticism and devotion to God and his fellow men.

  4 Kipling’s poem, written in 1890, is set in British India and written from the point of view of an English soldier. It tells the story of an Indian water-bearer – a ‘bhisti’ – who, while bullied and badly treated by the British, proves himself a hero when he is shot and killed while saving the soldier’s life. The soldier regrets the abuse dealt to Din and, in a line that has become famous, recognizes that the bhisti is the better man of the two. (‘Din’, incidentally, while often pronounced to rhyme with ‘pin’ should really be pronounced to rhyme with ‘green’.)

  5 This is a powerful poem with a shocking pay-off written by a remarkable American poet, four times nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and best known for short, dramatic poems like this that tell the stories of people from small East Coast towns.

  6 This is perhaps the best-known of the verses made famous by the actor, entertainer and singer, Stanley Holloway (1890–1982), noted at the end of his life for playing Alfred P. Doolittle in the musical My Fair Lady on stage and screen, but celebrated in his heyday for performing versified monologues like this. You can hear how he did it on YouTube, but once you have heard the master, feel free to do it your way.

  7 My friend and neighbour, Miranda Corben, introduced me to this poem. It was written for her by Reginald Arkell, scriptwriter and comic novelist, who was a friend of her maternal grandfather, A. G. Street, farmer, writer and broadcaster. Miranda explains how the poem came to be written: ‘As a little girl I was terrified of earwigs, because my parents had put up a wooden swing for me in the garden, suspended from ropes tied round a large branch on the tree outside our front door. Earwigs loved to nest in between the ropes and the branch, and therefore often fell on my head when I used the swing! One day Reginald Arkell came with my grandfather Street (‘Old Grumpy’ in the poem) to tea with us, and witnessed one of my tantrums …’ Miranda suggests that, in an ideal world, a poem should be specially written for every child to encourage him/her to learn it – and then others – by heart.

  8 This was one of a series of poems by Diana Morgan – Welsh-born, London-based actress, revue writer, film scriptwriter and poet – written about characters she had observed in different pubs in and around London.

  9 Cyril Fletcher was a comedian, pantomime dame and radio and television star, who made his name in the 1930s performing comic and sentimental poems that he called ‘Odd Odes’. He befriended me when I was in my early twenties and made me the youngest speaker on the ‘public speaking circuit’ when he recruited me to his speakers’ agency, Associated Speakers, in 1971. Soon afterwards I created a one-man show for him in which he played Lewis Carroll and recited a number of Carroll’s best-known verses.

  10 Charles Causley was a Cornish writer, poet and schoolmaster. Of Timothy Winters he said: ‘People always ask me whether this was a real boy. My God, he certainly was. Poor old boy. I don’t know where he is now. I was thunderstruck when people thought I had made it up! He was a real bloke. Poor little devil.’

  11 Lana Turner (1921–95) was a hugely famous American beauty and film star. Frank O’Hara was a writer, poet, art critic and curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  12 Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter, remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group the Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound.

  13 Vincent Malloy is the hero of a short animation made by the film director Tim Burton in 1982 and narrated by Burton’s childhood hero, the actor Vincent Price – best remembered by most as the star of assorted horror films, best remembered by me as probably the most charming man I ever met.

  Chapter Fifteen: Funeral Blues

  1 Henry Scott Holland was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University and a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral in London where, in May 1910, shortly after the death of Edward VII, he delivered a sermon known as ‘The King of Terrors’. It was written as prose, but since Holland’s death has come to be presented and read as if it was a piece of poetry.

  2 Oscar Wilde’s younger sister died, not long before her tenth birthday, in 1867. According to her mother, Isola died of ‘a sudden effusion on the brain’. Oscar was twelve at the time and inconsolable. As a child he frequently visited Isola’s grave, and decorated an envelope to preserve a lock of her hair, which he kept all his life. He wrote this poem in her memory in 1881.

  3 This has become one of the most popular poems spoken at funerals since it was featured in the 1994 film, Four Weddings and a Funeral.

  4 Mary Wilson was a fine poet and a lovely lady, whose husband, Harold Wilson (1916–95), was twice British Prime Minister. In his final years he suffered from dementia, and is buried in St Mary’s Old Churchyard in the Scilly Isles where the Wilsons had a much-loved holiday home.

  Chapter Sixteen: A to Z

  1 The poem was written in 1936 as a ‘verse commentary’ to accompany a documentary film produced by the General Post Office Film Unit. Night Mail, with music by Benjamin Britten, celebrated the n
ightly postal train operated by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) from London to Glasgow.

  2 The poem, when it first appeared in 1913, was called ‘A Song of Temperance Reform’ and was written to give voice to Chesterton’s opposition to the growing campaign, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the prohibition of alcohol. Beachy Head is a chalky headland in East Sussex, notorious as a place where people have taken their own lives; Goodwin Sands is a treacherous sandbank at the southern end of the North Sea that has claimed many sailors’ lives; Bannockburn was the site of a famous battle between the Scots and the English in 1314 in which many were slain; Kensal Green is the location of a large London cemetery established in 1832.

  3 William Henry Davies was a Welsh-born poet who spent much of his early life as a tramp, travelling on the open road in both the UK and the USA, observing the passing scene.

  4 As a boy, Henley suffered from tuberculosis. As a consequence, aged sixteen, his left leg was amputated. In his early twenties, he was told that his right leg would need to be amputated, too. In August 1873 he travelled to Edinburgh where the eminent surgeon Joseph Lister treated him, successfully saving his leg. It was during his recovery that Henley began to write the poem that became ‘Invictus’. It first appeared in 1888 without a title and, when reproduced in late-Victorian newspapers and journals, it was called, variously, ‘Myself’, ‘Song of a Strong Soul’, ‘Clear Grit’, ‘Master of His Fate’, ‘Captain of My Soul’, ‘Urbs Fortitudinis’ and ‘De Profundis’. The title ‘Invictus’ – the Latin for ‘Unconquered’ – was given to the poem by Arthur Quiller-Couch when he included it in The Oxford Book of English Verse in 1900. In a speech to the House of Commons in September 1941, Winston Churchill paraphrased the last two lines of the poem, with his rallying cry: ‘We still are master of our fate. We still are captain of our souls.’ Later, while imprisoned on Robben Island in South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who knew the poem by heart, recited it to other prisoners. The Invictus Games, the international Paralympic-style multi-sport event created by Prince Harry, in which wounded and injured armed services personnel compete, is inspired by the poem.

  5 Rex Ingamells was an Australian poet and one of the pioneers of the Jindyworobak Movement which, in the 1930s and 1940s, saw white Australian writers trying to contribute to a uniquely Australian culture by resisting the influx of ‘alien art’ and showing what they hoped was a true ‘understanding of Australia’s history and traditions, primeval, colonial and modern’.

  6 According to more than one poll, ‘Warning’ by Jenny Joseph, first published in 1961, is now, by a margin, Britain’s ‘most popular post-war poem’.

  7 ‘If –’ regularly tops the poll as Britain’s ‘best-loved poem’. First published in 1910, it was written in the 1890s in the form of advice to the poet’s only son, John Kipling, who was born in 1897 and killed in September 1915, at the Battle of Loos during the First World War, just six weeks after his eighteenth birthday.

  8 John Masefield loomed large in my childhood because my father had met him (and Mrs Masefield) in 1930 when the new Poet Laureate came to a student production of Milton’s Samson Agonistes at Exeter College in Oxford. In the play, my father played the part of Manoa, Samson’s father, and would intone great speeches from the play until his dying day. Whenever anything went awry at home, my father would immediately cry:

  Come, come, no time for lamentation now,

  Nor yet much cause …

  My father also introduced me to Masefield’s long poem, ‘Biography’, which ends with four lines that are among my favourites:

  Best trust the happy moments. What they gave

  Makes man less fearful of the certain grave,

  And gives his work compassion and new eyes.

  The days that make us happy make us wise.

  9 Written in 1892, the poem takes its title from a quotation by the Roman poet, Lucretius, which means ‘the torch of life’. It refers to how a schoolboy, a future soldier, learns selfless commitment to duty playing cricket in the Close at Clifton College, the public school to which Newbolt won a scholarship and where he became head boy in 1881. The engagement mentioned in verse two is the Battle of Abu Klea, which took place in the Sudan in January 1885 during the unsuccessful expedition to rescue General Gordon, the British Governor-General. Frederick Burnaby is the colonel referred to in the line ‘The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel’s dead’, although it was a Gardner machine gun, not a Gatling, that jammed, and the square did not break up disastrously as the poem suggests.

  10 Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’ was a hugely popular poem in its day, but resented – and satirized – by some of those who experienced the reality of war on the front lines between 1914 and 1918. Of the First World War poets, Wilfred Owen is reckoned the greatest by many, and ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ his finest achievement. Like Newbolt’s title, Owen’s is taken from a quotation by a Roman poet: the phrase ‘Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori’ means ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’ and comes from Horace. The first draft of the poem was written in October 1917 and addressed to Owen’s mother, with the message: ‘Here is a gas poem done yesterday (which is not private, but not final).’ In November 1918, Owen was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice. Only five of his poems were published during his lifetime. ‘Dulce et decorum est’ first appeared in print in 1920.

  11 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was an English poet and novelist whose work often appeared under the pseudonym ‘Q’ and whose major achievement was editing the first, and hugely popular, Oxford Book of English Verse in 1900. Among his many admirers was the author Kenneth Grahame, who said that the character of ‘Ratty’ in his book, The Wind in the Willows, was based on Quiller-Couch. The ‘Moxon’ mentioned in the poem was Edward Moxon (1801–58), like Quiller-Couch, another ‘minor bard’ best remembered for publishing other poets, such as Shelley and Browning.

  12 The poem recalls an experience that took place a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and was published three weeks after Thomas’s death at the Battle of Arras in 1917.

  13 People think of Updike as a great American novelist: he was also a poet and an advocate of learning poetry by heart. ‘Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better,’ he said. Another of his lines seems to me to be bang on the money when it comes to the value of simply taking time out to learn a poem: ‘What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.’

  14 This is one of the loveliest poems by one of the most prolific poets: Anon. Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) set the poem to music, first published in 1612 in his First Set of Madrigals and Motets in Five Parts. The author of the words remains anonymous.