Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Read online

  POEMS

  THAT MAKE

  GROWN MEN

  CRY

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2014 by Anthony Holden and Ben Holden

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Anthony Holden and Ben Holden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47113-489-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-47113-491-3

  The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

  Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Contents

  Preface by Anthony Holden and Ben Holden

  ‘Elegy’ by Chidiock Tichborne

  DAVID MCVICAR

  Sonnet XXX by William Shakespeare

  MELVYN BRAGG

  ‘On My First Son’ by Ben Jonson

  JOHN CAREY

  ‘Amor constante más allá de la muerte’ by Francisco de Quevedo

  ARIEL DORFMAN AND JAVIER MARÍAS

  ‘Hokku’ by Fukuda Chiyo-ni

  BORIS AKUNIN

  ‘Wandrers Nachtlied II’ by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  JOHN LE CARRÉ

  ‘Frost at Midnight’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  SEBASTIAN FAULKS

  ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ by William Wordsworth

  HAROLD EVANS

  ‘Surprised by Joy’ by William Wordsworth

  HOWARD JACOBSON

  ‘Last Sonnet’ by John Keats

  KENNETH LONERGAN

  Extract from The Masque of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  DAVID EDGAR

  ‘I Am’ by John Clare

  KEN LOACH

  ‘Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances’ by Walt Whitman

  STEPHEN FRY

  ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti

  ROBERT FISK AND JULAIN FELLOWERS

  ‘After Great Pain’ by Emily Dickinson

  DOUGLAS KENNEDY

  Extract from Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen

  KENNETH BRANAGH

  ‘Requiem’ by Robert Louis Stevenson

  CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

  ‘The Remorseful Day’ by A. E. Housman

  JOE KLEIN

  ‘The Wind, One Brilliant Day’ by Antonio Machado

  ROBERT BLY

  ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’ by Rainer Maria Rilke

  COLM TÓIBÍN

  ‘Ithaka’ by Constantine P. Cavafy

  WALTER SALLES

  ‘At Castle Boterel’ by Thomas Hardy

  ALAN HOLLINGHURST

  ‘The Voice’ by Thomas Hardy

  SEAMUS HEANY

  ‘Adlestrop’ by Edward Thomas

  SIMON WINCHESTER

  ‘The Soldier’ by Rupert Brooke

  HUGH BONNEVILLE

  ‘During Wind and Rain’ by Thomas Hardy

  KEN FOLLET

  ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen

  CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  ‘God’s World’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay

  PATRICK STEWART

  ‘Everyone Sang’ by Siegfried Sassoon

  BARRY HUMPHRIES

  ‘Last Poems: XL’ by A. E. Housman

  ANDREW MOTION AND RICHARD DAWKINS

  ‘God Wills It’ by Gabriela Mistral

  JEREMY IRONS

  ‘Out of Work’ by Kenneth H. Ashley

  FELIX DENNIS

  ‘All the Pretty Horses’ by Anonymous

  CARL BERNSTEIN

  ‘The Cool Web’ by Robert Graves

  JOHN SUTHERLAND

  ‘The Broken Tower’ by Hart Crane

  HAROLD BLOOM

  ‘Bavarian Gentians’ by D. H. Lawrence

  SIMON ARMITAGE

  ‘A Summer Night’ by W. H. Auden

  WILLIAM BOYD

  ‘Those Who Are Near Me Do Not Know’ by Rabindranath Tagore

  CHRIS COOPER

  ‘Let My Country Awake’ by Rabindranath Tagore

  SALIL SHETTY AND DAVID PUTTNAM

  Extract from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

  JAMES MCMANUS

  ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ by W. H. Auden

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  ‘Lullaby’ by W. H. Auden

  SIMON SCHAMA AND SIMON CALLOW

  ‘If I Could Tell You’ by W. H. Auden

  ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

  ‘Canoe’ by Keith Douglas

  CLIVE JAMES

  ‘My Papa’s Waltz’ by Theodore Roethke

  STANLEY TUCCI

  ‘The Book Burnings’ by Bertolt Brecht

  JACK MAPANJE

  ‘Liberté’ by Paul Éluard

  JOE WRIGHT

  Extract from The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound

  CRAIG RAINE

  ‘I see a girl dragged by the wrists’ by Philip Larkin

  SIMON RUSSELL BEALE

  ‘The Mother’ by Gwendolyn Brooks

  TERRANCE HAYES

  ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ by Randall Jarrell

  PAUL MULDOON

  ‘War Has Been Brought into Disrepute’ by Bertolt Brecht

  DAVID HARE

  ‘Le Message’ by Jacques Prévert

  PETER SÍS

  ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas

  BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH

  ‘Unfinished Poem’ by Philip Larkin

  FRANK KERMODE

  ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ by Elizabeth Bishop

  JOHN ASHBERRY

  ‘End of Summer’ by Stanley Kunitz

  NICHOLSON BAKER

  ‘The Horses’ by Edwin Muir

  ALEXEI SAYLE

  ‘Friday’s Child’ by W. H. Auden

  ROWAN WILLIAMS

  ‘Long Distance I and II’ by Tony Harrison

  DANIEL RADCLIFF

  ‘The Widower in the Country’ by Les Murray

  NICK CAVE

  ‘A Blessing’ by James Arlington Wright

  RICHARD FORD

  ‘Injustice’ by Pablo Neruda

  CARLOS REYES-MANZO

  ‘The Meaning of Africa’ by Abioseh Nicol

  JAMES EARL JONES

  ‘Elegy for Alto’ by Christopher Okigbo

  BEN OKRI

  ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ by Seamus Heaney

  TERRY GEORGE

  ‘Gone Ladies’ by Christopher Logue

  BRIAN PATTEN

  ‘Dream Song 90: Op. posth. no. 13’ by John Berryman

  AL ALVAREZ

  ‘Essay’ by Hayden Carruth

  JONATHAN FRANZEN

  ‘An Exequy’ by Peter Porter

  IAN MCEWAN

  ‘Crusoe in England’ by Elizabeth Bishop

  ANDREW SOLOMON

  ‘For Julia, in the Deep Water’ by John N. Morris

  TOBIAS WOLFF

  ‘Aubade’ by Philip Larkin

  WILL
IAM SIEGHART

  ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ by W. S. Graham

  NICK LAIRD

  ‘A Meeting’ by Wendell Berry

  COLUM MCCANN

  ‘eulogy to a hell of a dame –’ by Charles Bukowski

  MIKE LEIGH

  Midsummer: ‘Sonnet XLIII’ by Derek Walcott

  MARK HADDON

  ‘In Blackwater Woods’ by Mary Oliver

  MARC FORSTER

  ‘Love After Love’ by Derek Walcott

  TOM HIDDLESTON

  Extract from and our faces, my heart, brief as photos by John Berger

  SIMON MCBURNEY

  ‘Sandra’s Mobile’ by Douglas Dunn

  RICHARD EYRE

  ‘Brindis con el Viejo’ by Mauricio Rosencof

  JUAN MÉNDEZ

  ‘An End or a Beginning’ by Bei Dao

  WUER KAIXI

  ‘A Call’ by Seamus Heaney

  RICHARD CURTIS

  Extract from ‘Eastern War Time’ by Adrienne Rich

  ANISH KAPOOR

  ‘It Is Here (for A)’ by Harold Pinter

  NEIL LABUTE

  ‘For Andrew Wood’ by James Fenton

  DAVID REMNICK

  ‘Not Cancelled Yet’ by John Updike

  JOSEPH O’NEILL

  ‘Armada’ by Brian Patten

  PAUL BETTANY

  ‘A Poetry Reading at West Point’ by William Matthews

  TOM MCCARTHY

  ‘Bedecked’ by Victoria Redel

  BILLY COLLINS

  ‘The Lanyard’ by Billy Collins

  J. J. ABRAMS

  ‘Regarding the home of one’s childhood, one could:’ by Emily Zinnemann

  COLIN FIRTH

  ‘For Ruthie Rogers in Venice’ by Craig Raine

  RICHARD ROGERS

  ‘Keys to the Doors’ by Robin Robertson

  MOHSIN HAMID

  Afterword by Nadine Gordimer

  Acknowledgements

  Amnesty International

  Index of Contributors and Poets

  Index of Titles of Poems

  Index of First Lines

  Credits, Copyrights, and Permissions

  Preface

  ANTHONY HOLDEN

  Late one afternoon in the mid-1990s a close friend of long standing called to tell me of a sudden domestic crisis. My wife and I went straight round to join him for the evening, during which he began to quote a Thomas Hardy poem, ‘The Darkling Thrush’. Upon reaching what might be called the punch line – ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware’ – our friend choked up, unable to get the words out. This was understandable: he was still upset by the day’s events. We ourselves were much moved.

  That weekend we happened to be visiting the scholar and critic Frank Kermode. Frank knew the friend involved, and was also touched by his Hardy moment. ‘Is there any poem you can’t recite without choking up?’ I asked him. Never an emotionally demonstrative man, Frank said immediately: ‘Go and get the Larkin.’

  In front of his half-dozen guests he then began to read aloud ‘Unfinished Poem’, about death treading its remorseless way up the stairs, only to turn out to be a pretty young girl with bare feet, moving the stunned narrator to exclaim: ‘What summer have you broken from?’ It was this startling last line that rendered Frank speechless; with a forlorn waft of the hand, he held the book out for someone else to finish the poem.

  Also there that day was another professor of English, Tony Tanner, so it was not surprising that this topic of conversation lasted all afternoon, ranging far and wide, not just over other candidates for this distinct brand of poetic immortality but the power of poetry over prose to move, the difference between true sentiment and mere mawkishness, and, of course, the pros and cons of men weeping, whether in private or in public.

  For the next few weeks I asked every male literary friend I saw to name a poem he couldn’t read or recite without breaking up. It was amazing how many immediately said yes, this one, and embarked on its first few lines. With Frank’s encouragement, I began to contemplate an anthology called Poems that Make Strong Men Cry.

  Then I remembered I had another book to finish, and set the project aside. But it remained a topic of paradoxically happy conversation between Frank and myself until his death in the summer of 2010, at the age of ninety. I duly steeled myself to reading ‘Unfinished Poem’ at his funeral service and managed it – just – without choking up.

  In 2007, reviewing A. E. Housman’s letters for the London Review of Books, Kermode had discussed the controversy caused in Cambridge in 1933 by a Housman lecture entitled ‘On the Name and Nature of Poetry’. After recalling the brouhaha provoked at the time by Housman’s emphasis on the emotional power of poetry, with F. R. Leavis saying it would ‘take years to remedy the damage the lecture must have inflicted on his students’, Frank continued – with, he told me, our recurrently lachrymose conversation very much in mind:

  What everybody remembers best are the passages about the emotional aspects of poetry. Housman included a number of surprisingly personal comments on this topic. Milton’s ‘Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more’, he said, can ‘draw tears . . . to the eyes of more readers than one.’ And tears are only one symptom. A line of poetry can make his beard bristle as he shaves, or cause a shiver down his spine, or ‘a constriction of the throat’ as well as ‘a precipitation of water to the eyes’. For so reticent a man it was a surprising performance. It possibly upset his health, and he came to regard the date of the lecture, May 1933, as an ominous moment in his life.

  Housman and Hardy have emerged as two of the most tear-provoking poets in this collection – to which I was urged to return, in the wake of Frank’s death, by my son Ben (if with a somewhat less macho title). With three entries each, they are equaled by Philip Larkin and bested only by W. H. Auden, with five. So four of us supposedly buttoned-up Brits top the charts of almost one hundred poems from eighteen countries, a dozen of them written by women, chosen by men of more than twenty nationalities ranging in age from early twenties to late eighties. Five pairs of contributors happen to have chosen the same poem, for intriguingly different reasons.

  Larkin himself could have proved a prototype contributor. ‘Wordsworth was nearly the price of me once,’ he told the [London] Observer in 1979. ‘I was driving down the M1 on a Saturday morning: they had this poetry slot on the radio . . . and someone suddenly started reading the Immortality Ode, and I couldn’t see for tears. And when you’re driving down the middle lane at seventy miles an hour . . .’

  Early in our task, we were encouraged by a note from Professor John Carey, with whom I discussed our work-in-progress over a dinner at Merton College, Oxford, where Ben and I both studied English thirty years apart: ‘It will bring some good poems to public notice, and it will stimulate debate about the emotional power of art and how it affects different people.’ Thanks to our partnership with Amnesty International, we can add such cross-border issues as freedom of speech and thought, as in the contribution from one of the leaders of the 1989 human rights protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

  After deciding to arrange the poems in chronological order, we calculated that some 75 per cent of them were written in the twentieth century – inevitable, perhaps, so early in the twenty-first. The most common themes, apart from intimations of mortality, range from pain and loss via social and political ideals to the beauty and variety of Nature – as well as love, in all its many guises. Three of our contributors have suffered the ultimate pain of losing a child; others are moved to tears by the sheer beauty of the way a poet captures, in Alexander Pope’s famous phrase, ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’. The same might be said of our contributors’ candid explanations of their choices, many of which rival the poems themselves in stirring the reader’s emotions.

  Some of those who declined to take part did so for almost poetic reasons. Wrote the pianist Alfred Brendel: ‘I easily shed tears when I listen to music, experien
ce a Shakespeare play, or encounter a great performance. Literature doesn’t have the same effect on me, so it seems. I cannot tell you why, as reading has been an important part of my life.’ Said the actor-magician Ricky Jay: ‘Right now, I find it hard to think of a poem that doesn’t make me cry. I’m the kinda guy that weeps at reruns of Happy Days.’ And the playwright Patrick Marber: ‘You bet I’ve got one, but I’m not going to share it with anyone else!’

  A sudden shock of emotion naturally overcomes different people in different ways. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the proper reader responds to a poem not with his brain or his heart, but with his back, waiting for ‘the telltale tingle between the shoulder-blades’. To our contributors, a moist eye seems the natural if involuntary response to a particular phrase or line, thought or image; the vast majority are public figures not prone to tears, as is supposedly the manly way, but here prepared to admit to caving in when ambushed by great art.

  The youngest of my three sons, now himself a father, Ben, is a grown man to whom tears do not come readily; I myself, as he has enjoyed telling all enquirers, am prone to weep all too easily, at prose as much as poetry, movies as much as music. We’ve had a great deal of fun, and not a few vigorous disagreements, while compiling this anthology together.

  It was only after intense negotiation, for instance, that we agreed to stretch most definitions of poetry by including an extract from a verse play, and another from a ‘prose-poem’ of a novel, then another, while drawing the line at song lyrics – some of which are fine poetry, for sure, but (in my view) indistinguishable in their power to move from the music to which they are set. We agreed to admit one traditional lullaby; but this policy otherwise cost us, alas, a distinguished writer intent on a touching French chanson, and an astronaut who wanted the lyric of a song from a Broadway musical.

  On which note, I am pleased to hand over to Ben for an expert explanation of the physical mechanics of tears, especially male tears, and to distil perfectly on both our behalves the purpose, as we see it, of this book.

  BEN HOLDEN

  Cecil Day-Lewis once said that he did not write poetry to be understood, but to understand. This quest, to understand, takes many routes but is common to us all. Tears also unite us as humans: we are the only species that cries. Charles Darwin himself was at a loss to explain this uniquely human trait, describing it as that ‘special expression of man’s’.

  One scientific explanation is that the act of crying is evolution’s mechanism for draining excess chemicals released into the blood when we experience extreme stress or high emotion: the chin’s mentalis muscle wobbles; a lump rises in our throat, as the autonomic nervous system expands the glottis to aid our oxygen intake; the lachrymal glands flood the fornix conjunctiva of the upper eyelid; and, as teardrops break their ducts and run down our cheeks, our blood is cleansed of the secreted prolactin and adrenocorticotropic hormones.