Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

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The speaker for Spontaneity begins. Perhaps he’s invoking the famous letter from John Keats to John Taylor (1818) in which the young poet announced his view that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”. Drummond Allison was born in Caterham, Surrey, in 1921. He took a “wartime shortened” history degree at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he formed a close friendship with the poets John Heath-Stubbs and Sidney Keyes. After military training at Sandhurst, he joined the army as an intelligence officer and was killed in action in Italy, at the age of 22. This week’s poem was published in his posthumous collection, The Yellow Night (1944). When the speaker’s gaze takes us, via the balcony, beyond the cosy inner sanctum of “sufficient booze / and shabby furniture” the view is presented objectively. The person who is the place has a long-sighted perspective on their own geography. Bennet’s angle is to blend the aesthetic and informative. Watery inlets are turned from pewter to bronze by the evening sun, “a habitat where rare / plants learn to live with salt, and birds nest on the ground”. A reader might be tempted to identify a seascape of the mind: it’s remote and the wonders are hard-won. Salt-water has forced difficult evolution on the “rare plants”: birds that nest on the ground face particular dangers. Trespass and, more fearfully, “death by erosion” threaten the arcadia, its creative freedom and pleasant sense of decline. In the place’s view, sketching, photography and note-making become environmental threats. Practical concerns may replace the artistic. This week’s poem is from a chapbook of intense yet rangy ecopoems, Watershed by Ruth Padel. Connecting the lively and varied angles of reflection on the subject of water, realism is the primary value, but it’s expressed without being wrung of its own magical dimension. The work has the characteristic balance of literary artistry, casual grace and scientific knowledge that distinguishes Padel’s work. That the term watershed itself denotes a physical phenomenon as well as being a popular colloquialism for a crucial moment is indicative. Although the adjective “lunar” is ambiguous, it’s difficult for the reader not to imagine the presence of either the moon or a moonlit object. If an object, what could it be, since it “has no history / is complete and early”? Some extremely ancient artefact? A stone? A very youthful face? A poem from two decades later, Nocturne 1, is an interesting subject for comparison. This is definitely a poem with a moon in it, and an argument about whether the moon is best seen as “goddess” or “faceless dynamo”. Auden in his maturity seeks balance: he reduces the lyricism, and some of the magic, but powerfully finds a counter-image, with the power to banish “my world, the private motor-car / And all the engines of the state”. The moon in “this lunar beauty”’ – if we insist on one “– is certainly not the woman she is in Nocturne 1. Imagine it embodied, and we might see the unusual figure of a moon-god.

Ultimately, of course, there’s no Krishna to bring light and redemption to this moral anguish. If the writing of a poem might once have had redemptive potency, the poet now disconnects the current by her question “What has a poem got to do with this?” The question seems to anticipate the answer, “nothing: it’s no help to anyone – not even the poet”. The title of this week’s poem anticipates analogy, the construction of the human self in geographical terms. It might suggest a creative-writing or therapeutic exercise prompted by the question “If you were a place, what sort of place would you be?” This would be an amusing and perhaps revealing assignment, but Bennet’s poem does something more strange and complicated with that act of translation: the person is also present, and often construed separately from the self-as-place. Wylie takes a rather different view of ecclesiastical imagery in Sunset on the Spire, an interesting comparison with The Church-Bell. Here, the transcendence is benign: “From the sun’s dome / I am shouted proof / that this is my home, / And that is my roof.” Without the demanding bell, merely a sunlit spire, the speaker is at home on earth. To cut to the chase, who wins the argument? Although Slog has the last word in the form of a punchy aphorism, “Windows don’t happen”, he must know, as a poet, that they sometimes do, or at least appear to. Sunlight, both poets would concede, is the necessity: the dilemma concerns the best way to invite it in. The above poem was the second of fourteen by Tagore in the June 1913 issue of Poetry magazine. Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West".

Of the hospitable poor.
There is no bird half so harmless,
None so sweetly rude as you,
None so common and so charmless,
None of virtues nude as you. Prose poetry is a genre that particularly interests the poet-theologian Hannah Stone. Her passion for the genre is reflected in previous anthology publications, a chapter in the essay collection Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice and three unpublished pamphlets in preparation – among them, the enticingly named Twenty-Nine Volumes. Such ambiguities make it a compelling couplet, in which the silences are themselves mirrored. The underlying thought regarding the mirror is that it can’t tell tales, as it doesn’t keep any impression of what it reflects, in this case the “realities” that “plunge” nearby. The verb “plunge” implies turbulence, probably sexual. Silence in the sense of “not telling” conceals but doesn’t suppress the “realities”. Anne Brontë had only a little longer than a decade left for her writing: she died of her tuberculosis at the age of 29. Her poems are included in the first Brontë book to be published, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Her two works of fiction are Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

I first discovered the poetry of the 14th-century Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym when, planning a poem about my roof-nesting herring-gull family, I cast around the internet for company and ideas. I was thrilled by the radiance of the poem I discovered, Yr Wylan: Gwilym’s seagull soars, alive and shining, even in English translation. The poem was probably written in April 1930. Among the subsequent small changes he records, Mendelson notes that in Auden’s lover Chester Kallman’s copy of Poems (1934), Auden revised the first line to “Your lunar beauty”, but that this change isn’t made in any further printings. The initials JC appear in Kallman’s copy: the identity of JC is unknown. Arthritic and tubercular, Tristan Corbière (1845-75) had a short, often dismal life. His single collection, Les Amours Jaunes, was “published at the author’s expense”. The poète maudit (as Verlaine dubbed him) seems to have discovered a kindred spirit in the toad: at least, he had nailed the dried-out corpse of one above the mantelpiece in the family home. Now other metaphorical shapes appear. The sun is “God’s ball”: it also has a mysterious, special “fringe”. The metaphors are given more space and separation in the original, but there’s something to be said for the clustering in the shortened version. The sun after all is no simple object. No one can hold it steady. It can change shape radically as the eye perceives it at different times of day and through various kinds of weather. The poet’s “sweet impudence” is apparent in the generally colloquial diction, but above all in his choice of double- or triple- word rhymes: “end go”/ “window”, “rude as you”/ “nude as you”. A joyful list of the sparrow’s faults in verse four is purposely unconvincing, especially when he repeats himself in “sweetly rude”.Though Roberts's aim is far from merely descriptive, she succeeds in producing one of the most full and multi-faceted evocations of the second world war to be found in English-language poetry. Among the poems that cite environmental damage, this one is particularly oblique. The severity of the lightning strike might be attributable to the effects of climate change or previous destruction of the tree’s more protective environment. But the poem itself demands no such context: the lightning strike may be what was once called an act of God. And the larger question remains: is this a true story? The reference to the Thomas Hardy worksheets in line two might suggest a literary source besides the sonnet or the lime-tree bower: perhaps chapter 37 of Far from the Madding Crowd? The five-lined stanzas flexibly worked in iambic pentameter, are unrhymed. The choice of blank verse, perhaps another way the poem relates to the Mahabharata, is ideal for conveying the relentless drive of the speaker to “talk on by”. Stone’s prompt, the editorial call-out for poems on “seconds”, coincided with her interest in a concept that apparently preceded the introduction of street lighting. She explains: “I was aware from a poem I wrote about Pepys that in the 18th century it was common for people to conduct all sorts of business, in and out of the bedroom, in the intervals between sleeps. As an accomplished insomniac, I have plenty of experience of night-time lucidity, and I have observed that the majority of my most vivid dreams happen in the pre-dawn slice of somnolence. I wrote this poem in the aftermath of my mother dying, just after Christmas 2021, which coincided with me getting Covid, which is still with me in its postviral state, and produces a lot of very weird mental processes and sleep issues, among other things.” The English translation now cuts to the most significant Morfudd image in the poem. At first, the girl/sun metaphor is reversed and it’s the sun that moves “with the dazzle of a girl”. The image isn’t decorative: “beautifully dressed in the body of the day” suggests daylight is the sun’s very skin, no mere costume. Benign and magnificent, the girl-sun “shepherds the sky from horizon to horizon”. It’s a refreshing change from Phoebus’s chariot, and boldly revises the masculine Christian representation of pastoral tenderness.

To a Sparrow should certainly please an admirer of John Clare. It has both the bright earthiness of observation and the political edge. The latter is immediately apparent in the poet’s announcement of solidarity with the bird: “Because you have no fear to mingle / Wings with those of greater part, / So like me …” The internal half-rhyme (“song”/ “single”) dodges around the obvious verb, “sing” – which would be too fanciful for this poem and for this bird-call. Ledwidge can be fairly accused of poeticism in some of his writing. Here, his diction and images are firmly grounded. Rhyme enhances the rueful comedy of the quatrains. Although “know it/poet” is an old familiar, it’s refreshed by the two ruthless epithets the speaker applies to himself: “baldy, wingless”. Finally, more alone than ever, he shrugs off what might be seen as the ultimate rejection. The crestfallen toad has “buggered off” and now the poet will do likewise, having announced, “Old toady-boyo’s really me”. This sounds like a confession of failure, but the questions at the start of the stanza have sounded their warning: “Well, is it really such an awful croak? / Can’t you see the bright glint in his eye?” Toads, like poets, should not be underestimated. Snow-Flakes appears in Longfellow’s 1863 collection, Birds of Passage, in which the poems are organised in “Flights” (Snow-Flakes is from “Flight the Second”). Although the date of the poem’s actual composition is unknown, the elegiac intensity suggests a response to the death by fire of the poet’s wife, Frances Appleton, in 1861. Crane parades a somewhat Elizabethan romantic-masochistic style when he claims this “cleaving and this burning” will be learned only by one who “spends out himself again”. The aftermath of the “little death” is colourfully and painfully evoked in the paired images at the start of the last stanza, the “smoking souvenir” and the “bleeding eidolon”. The first suggests a used gun, the second, a disconcerting image from a horror movie.Crane’s defiance in the next stanza refuses one kind of sacrifice (“repentance”, “regrets”) only to embrace another. His metaphor isn’t the conventional trope of the moth seduced by the flame: both elements have parity – “For the moth / Bends no more than the still / Imploring flame”. The “white falling flakes” suggest ash, perhaps, but ash as sexual metaphor, implying an incendiary climax. The poem’s short assertion that “kisses are” suggests transcendence by the powerful “realities” of the opening couplet, although the sentence continues after the halt-signs in the punctuation: “Kisses are,— / The only worth all granting.” Here, the statement gains force from its abbreviated syntax. In the last line of the translation, the Old English compound “wordhoard” may suggest that lesser nations, too, will be redeemed, as poems, or perhaps one poem, by the “laureate of heaven”. The tadpoles in Pool are perhaps the punctuation marks vital to opening the verbal treasury.

At first glance, the poem looks formal. It might be a 20th-century Elizabethan song, with verses cut to a regular length. Only they’re not: the first verse has seven lines, the second eight, the third nine – two odd numbers bookending an even one. It’s as if even at the most basic level of form, there’d been a decision both to reflect stasis – the immutable “lunar beauty”– and the movement of time. In the crucial line in verse two, “time is inches”, and one might add that time is also the pulse of the poem, the dimeter rhythm carrying the thought from line to line, the sonic pattern of assertions and echoes. At first God wanted just himself. And this huge output of light whirled in horror Throughout the heavens with nothing very much to do. Knowing evil and good he was bored. Knowing life he was really fed up, So he set up like an artist to fulfil his daily needs, And wandered from the first day and entered the second. Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff in 1913. When he was five, his father, who had served as an officer in the merchant navy, began working for the Irish ferry service and moved the family to Holyhead, described later by Thomas as “a horrible little town with a glorious expanse of cliff and coastal scenery”. Thomas went on to study classics at the University College of North Wales (now Bangor University). Ordained as a minister of the Church of Wales, he subsequently left north for mid-Wales and elsewhere, but still seems to have felt an outsider; his ancestors were mostly English speakers from the south of the country and English was his mother tongue. Although he learned Welsh as a young man, and chose it as the medium for his autobiographical writings, it wasn’t the language of his poetry. On the fourth day the stars appeared in stern formation But were obscured by the sun's warrior rays. The evening of the fourth day found them poxed. They shone with anger rather than with grace And fulfilled no heavenly place. The moon yielded a false light and all things Living swayed with uneasiness and took Note of each other...interchanging and companionable... The secret of life stirred in their blood. And this the serpent termed fear. And he was right, For God disappeared that night into the mist. The Glass Town Federation (the paracosm invented by the four Brontë children), began with a box of toy soldiers given to Branwell in June 1826. The game evolved into a series of written narratives, penned neatly on numerous doll-sized fragments of paper by the elder children, Branwell and Charlotte, with contributions from Emily and Anne. Its role in the literary development of the three sisters must have been considerable.The language of this is dense and, as she herself said, "congested", with "certain hard metallic lines ... introduced with deliberate emphasis to represent a period of muddled and intense thought which arose out of the first years of conflict ... " Roberts recreates in sound and vision both the heavy industrial labour and the violent action of war (a plane comes down in the sea in the last stanza of Part I). In Part IV, a lament entitled Cri Madonna, she adds a surely autobiographical portrait of the gunner-protagonist's wife, who sits "rimmelled, awake before the dressing sun", mourning her miscarried child in an image of "crape-plume/ in a work-basket cast into swaddling clothes." Meanwhile, a protective circle is drawn round the beauty of the lover, sealing it from censure, shame, regret. In the transcendent moment of adoration, Eros may be a transgression, and the last four lines, part incantation, part blessing, command love not to “near / the sweetness here”. As at the beginning of the poem, the “lunar beauty” exemplifies only itself. This week’s poem, recalling the experience of wild camping on Dartmoor, was Sean Borodale’s response on 13 January to a local landowner case against the use of the moorland for this purpose. In a prose-note to the poem, Borodale wrote: “Wild camping is a frail, frayed remnant of deeper engagement, and the writing of this poem is an appeal against the belief that powerful landscapes are only for the wealthy, to be reserved for specific kinds of recreation – hunting, shooting – or as passing photo opportunities.” Gwilym glorifies Morfudd, said to be a rich merchant’s wife from Aberystwyth, as a troubadour might glorify his lady, but from closer quarters. For all her bejewelled brightness, she is no static icon, rather a force of nature. When we first see her, it seems she is naked, “a sheen of snow on a pebbly field”. Then she is transformed into a breaking wave, with its surface foam and unfurling “breast” of colour, its play of sunlight and echo. There’s no need for any superlative claim that Morfudd is more beautiful than these natural phenomena. In Gwilym’s poem, human beauty never eclipses nature, but is equal in the whole sacred constellation.