Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Read online

  Put another way: we have ‘a good cry’ and feel better.

  An alternative theory is that crying is an advancement of a mammalian distress signal. After all, tears provide a clear and immediate cry for help that is tricky to fake. And just as it is tough to counterfeit, crying can also be catching, like yawning. One person’s tears often set off another’s.

  In these ways, weeping betrays not only vulnerability but also an openness that is contagious. Yet so often we try to hide our tears when caught out or in public, as if it is embarrassing to be around such raw tenderness. This is perhaps especially true for those of us who are men.

  Despite the male tear duct being larger than the female, studies have consistently shown that from around the age of ten a divergence occurs and thereafter boys cry far less than girls. Whether that is down to cultural or biological reasons (or, as is likely the case, both), the sad truth is that the male of our species has not always been allowed to cry. Tears may have been venerated in European cultures during the nine-teenth century as a sign of high moral character but, these days, they are all too hastily wiped away.

  We want to put paid to that with this anthology. We hope that readers may set each other off as they read these verses aloud to one another. Let’s celebrate high emotion! Together let’s express our shared humanity, whatever your gender, background or circumstances. However grievous at times, let these pages console you, if upset; lift you, if down; I defy you not to be inspired by them.

  To borrow from Samuel Beckett, our contributors’ ‘words are their tears’. Some of their introductions are profoundly moving and many describe devastating ordeals. These woes are framed in personal contexts but will be familiar to many readers. During its compilation, contributor Billy Collins jokingly asked how any of us will make it through the book without succumbing to a complete emotional breakdown. Yet our intent with this collection is to celebrate our shared compassion and common humanity, all in keeping with the creed of our partners at Amnesty International.

  We hope as you read these pages that your own corneas may at times flood. Crying expresses our very inability to articulate emotion, after all, and so what could be more human, honest, or pure than tears?

  Perhaps the only response is that other ‘special expression’ of ours: poetry.

  POEMS

  THAT MAKE

  GROWN MEN

  CRY

  Elegy

  CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE (1563–86)

  DAVID McVICAR

  Tichborne died at around age twenty-three in 1586, a conspirator in the infamous Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth I and rescue Mary Stuart from captivity. The poem was written as part of a letter to his wife, Agnes, days before the hideous sentence for traitors was carried out, and he was executed. It’s a beautifully constructed elegy, as would be expected from an educated gentleman of the period. The use of paradox to describe his mental state reaches out beyond the personal and touches upon the universal human condition.

  These are technical points. It moves and terrifies me so much because the poet is here composing his own elegy. The immediacy of these lines, as their author reflects upon the waste of his brief life and faces a death of indescribable agony, touches me in a way that’s hard to put into words. The certain knowledge of and the struggle to accept death seems to me a primary motor of the artistic impulse; why we create art and why we turn to art and how art helps us to express whatever is valid or has meaning in our short span of existence.

  Elegy

  My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,

  My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,

  My crop of corn is but a field of tares,

  And all my good is but vain hope of gain;

  The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

  And now I live, and now my life is done.

  My tale was heard and yet it was not told,

  My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green,

  My youth is spent and yet I am not old,

  I saw the world and yet I was not seen;

  My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,

  And now I live, and now my life is done.

  I sought my death and found it in my womb,

  I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

  I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,

  And now I die, and now I was but made;

  My glass is full, and now my glass is run,

  And now I live, and now my life is done.

  (1586)

  Productions by the Scottish opera director Sir David McVicar (b. 1966) have been seen at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, Glyndebourne, Chicago Lyric Opera, English National Opera, Scottish Opera, the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, and at many other theatres around the world.

  Sonnet XXX

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)

  MELVYN BRAGG

  I have never been able to read this sonnet to the end without stumbling and then stopping. It is the final couplet that finishes me off and yet it says the opposite of what the poem has made me feel so acutely.

  All great poems are about each one of us. This speaks as directly to me over the centuries as any evening’s call from a close friend. What is described is a condition we all find ourselves in and increasingly so as we age.

  For me it paints a picture of my thoughts and feelings when I think of my first wife, who took her life more than forty years ago. I feel as responsible, as guilty, and as ashamed now as I was then. The first twelve lines bind the past to the present so accurately and poignantly that you see no division between them, and that, for me, is the great power of the piece.

  In the poem Shakespeare moves from considerations of time, to friends, to love, to sights, and the resurrection of ancient ‘woes’. All these magnetised my past and present feelings about Lise. And somehow his optimistic last two lines, which redeem the rest and even rebut it, are those I can never meet without tears. Perhaps because his ‘dear friend’ is living and mine is not.

  Sonnet XXX

  When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

  I summon up remembrance of things past,

  I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

  And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

  Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

  For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,

  And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,

  And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:

  Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

  And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er

  The sad account of fore-bemoanéd moan,

  Which I new pay as if not paid before.

  But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

  All losses are restored and sorrows end.

  (1609)

  The writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg (b. 1939) has published more than twenty novels, most recently Grace and Mary (2013), and fourteen works of nonfiction, including The Adventure of English (2003). He has also written two books for children and four screenplays, including The Music Lovers (1970) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). For several decades he has presented TV’s The South Bank Show and BBC Radio’s In Our Time. He was created a life peer in 1998.

  On My First Son

  BEN JONSON (1572–1637)

  JOHN CAREY

  I have, thank God, never lost a child. But every parent has a lurking dread that it may happen, and an inbuilt sympathy with those to whom it has. Over and above these obvious triggers of grief in Jonson’s poem, though, it is the tone that makes it, for me, impossible – or anyway, unsafe – to try to read aloud.

  I know, from experiment, that I cannot be sure to get any further than the last two words of the second line – ’loved boy’. They sound so natural, so like a loving afterthought, as if he has turned to the child and addressed him in an altered, gentler voice, as you might do after making some more public announcement – ju
st to reassure him, in case he is afraid or bewildered. I think that, once that point is past, I could manage to read the rest. Jonson blaming himself, and consoling himself by thinking of the tribulations his child will not now have to suffer, reaches a kind of precarious equipoise, and by the end he’s looking to the future. It’s that ‘loved boy’ that’s the killer.

  On My First Son

  Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

  My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

  Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

  Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

  O, could I lose all father now! For why

  Will man lament the state he should envy?

  To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,

  And, if no other misery, yet age?

  Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, ‘Here doth lie

  Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’

  For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such

  As what he loves may never like too much.

  (1616)

  John Carey (b. 1934) is emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, twice chairman of the Man Booker Prize judges, and a frequent broadcaster. Among his many published works are studies of Milton, Dickens, Thackeray, Donne, and Golding, a polemic entitled What Good Are the Arts? (2005), and his new memoir, The Unexpected Professor (2014).

  Amor constante más allá de la muerte

  FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO (1580–1645)

  ARIEL DORFMAN

  It is the last line that does it; the tears come from beyond me, and perhaps from beyond death. The eyes that shed those tears will become dust, the eyes that have seen over and over the love of my life, Angélica, the woman who helped me survive exile and tribulations and peopled my world with hope – those eyes will have been closed by the final shadow. And yet the polvo, the dust, is enamorado, is in love.

  Except that there are no words in English that can offer us the equivalent of enamorado or enamoramiento, so much so that I have had a correspondence with my friend, the extraordinary Spanish author Javier Marías, about the right translation into English for his equally extraordinary novel, entitled Los Enamoramientos, and we reached the conclusion that there was no perfect fit for such a word, not in English, not in any language.

  Quevedo knew this many centuries ago and finished his poem with that word, which tells us that we are filled with love, we fall into love as if into an abyss, we ascend to its invitation to enamorar, a verb that enhances what both lovers must do, make someone love me, find myself overflowing with love.

  That last verse never fails to make me cry. The laws of the universe discovered by physics assure humanity that we are composed of atoms and that protons and neutrons and electrons will scatter and rejoin, that everything is connected, that when we drink a glass of water or shed a tear, some slight marrow of Shakespeare or Brecht or Rumi is submerged in the depths of the liquid coupling of hydrogen and oxygen: the cosmos as a giant blender, making our every cell ultimately immortal. I am not religious and do not believe, as Quevedo did, that the soul will subsist, that God will greet us once our body has finished its course of skin and bone and flesh. But this I do believe: my wife and I have sworn to mix our ashes, to be dust together for eternity. Polvo seremos, mas polvo enamorado. Angélica and I will be dust but dust in love. How can I not cry with joy for myself, for her, for all of us on this earth that will itself turn to dust, ashes to ashes, yes, but ashes in love.

  JAVIER MARÍAS

  As we grow older, perhaps what saddens us most about the prospect of death – and, oddly enough, what strikes us as most melancholy and unbearable too – is not that we will cease to live and have no more future, that is, no more knowledge, curiosity, or laughter, but the certainty that all our memories, our past, will disappear along with us, that everything we have experienced, seen, heard, thought, and felt will no longer ‘float’ in the world – to use a deliberately imprecise verb.

  Maybe that is what is so moving about any attempt to rebel against this future disappearance. Not, I repeat, the disappearance of our own selves, but of all that we preserve within us and that depends for its existence entirely upon our consciousness.

  Quevedo’s sonnet is one of the most successful of rebellions. It matters little that, as Borges pointed out, its extraordinary last lines are perhaps ‘a re-creation, or an exaltation’ of a line by Propertius (Elegies, Book I, 19). Quevedo’s last two lines – the lines that bring a lump to the throat – are infinitely superior. As are the first two lines, which throw down the challenge: even though death may close my eyes and sweep me off on the blank white day – ’el blanco día’, that is, ‘el día en blanco’, a marvelous way of describing the day on which nothing will be written and on which nothing will happen – even though my veins and my marrow and my whole body will be turned to ash, it will be ash that is still filled with meaning, and even though they will be dust, even though they will be nothing, they will be a nothing that still loves. Yes, this poem is one of the most sublime rebellions in the history of literature. And we, the living, continue to read it, and that, at least, is something.

  Amor constante más allá de la muerte

  Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera

  Sombra que me llevare el blanco día,

  Y podrá desatar esta alma mía

  Hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;

  Mas no, de esotra parte, en la ribera,

  Dejará la memoria, en donde ardía:

  Nadar sabe mi llama el agua fría,

  Y perder el respeto a ley severa.

  Alma a quien todo un dios prisión ha sido,

  Venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado,

  Médulas que han gloriosamente ardido:

  Su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado;

  Serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido;

  Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.

  (PUBLISHED 1648)

  Love Constant Beyond Death

  Though my eyes be closed by the final

  Shadow that sweeps me off on the blank white day

  And thus my soul be rendered up

  By fawning time to hastening death;

  Yet memory will not abandon love

  On the shore where first it burned:

  My flame can swim through coldest water

  And will not bend to laws severe.

  Soul that was prison to a god,

  Veins that fueled such fire,

  Marrow that gloriously burned –

  The body they will leave, though not its cares;

  Ash they will be, but filled with meaning;

  Dust they will be, but dust in love.

  TRANSLATION BY MARGARET JULL COSTA

  A Chilean-American citizen born in Argentina, the novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942) has written many works in English and Spanish, published in over fifty languages. His plays have been performed in more than one hundred countries, including Death and the Maiden (filmed in 1994 by Roman Polanski), Purgatorio, and Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark. A Distinguished Professor at Duke University, human rights activist, and contributor to major papers and journals across the world, he has received numerous international awards for his poetry, essays, and novels. His latest work is the memoir Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, a sequel to Heading South, Looking North, both of them dedicated to his wife, Angélica.

  The Spanish novelist Javier Marías (b. 1951) has published thirteen novels, three collections of short stories, and several volumes of essays. His novels include Todas las almas / All Souls (1988), Corazón tan blanco / A Heart so White (1992), Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí / Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1994), Negra espalda del tiempo / Dark Back of Time (1998), and Los enamoramientos / The Infatuations (2013). He is also the translator of various English classics into Spanish, notably Tristram Shandy. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States, and Brita
in as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

  Hokku

  FUKUDA CHIYO-NI (1703–75)

  BORIS AKUNIN

  I think that I understood the meaning of poetry for the first time when I read this hokku written by Chiyo, a Japanese poetess of the eighteenth century.

  To understand poetry, to be deeply moved by its beauty and force, one needs a key. I felt immediately that there was a mystery in this formula, which sounds so beautiful in Japanese (‘Tonbo-tsuri kefu wa doko made itta yara?‘), but looks devoid of meaning. A dragonfly catcher? Is it a symbol of some kind clear only to a Japanese?

  The mystery made me dig deeper and I learned that, no, it wasn’t something esoterically Japanese.

  Chiyo wrote that poem when her little son died. On writing the hokku she became a nun.

  In the original there are only seventeen syllables. This masterpiece moves me so much that in homage to it I once wrote a long, long novel. The first volume consists of seventeen chapters and is called Dragonfly Catcher. The second volume, Between the Lines, is four times thicker and explains the meaning of the first. All in all, it is five hundred pages, and it cannot even remotely compare to Chiyo’s miniature. That’s what poetry is about.