Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Read online

  Last Sonnet

  Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art –

  Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

  And watching, with eternal lids apart,

  Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

  The moving waters at their priestlike task

  Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

  Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

  Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –

  No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

  Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

  To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

  Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

  (1818–1819)

  The playwright, screenwriter, and director Kenneth Lonergan (b. 1962) wrote and directed the films You Can Count On Me (2000) and Margaret (2011). His stage credits include This Is Our Youth (1996), The Waverley Gallery (2000), Lobby Hero (2001), The Starry Messenger (2009), and Medieval Play (2012). Among Lonergan’s other screenplays are Analyse This (1999) and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), which was cowritten with Jay Cocks and Steven Zaillian.

  Extract from The Masque of Anarchy

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792–1822)

  DAVID EDGAR

  News of the Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819 – during which British cavalry killed fifteen and injured up to seven hundred men and women at a Manchester rally for parliamentary reform – reached Shelley in Italy three weeks later. The resultant ninety-one-stanza poem was not to be published for thirteen years.

  The title refers not to the anarchy of protest but to the brutality of the politicians who put it down (‘I met Murder on the way – / He had a mask like Castlereagh’). The parade of Murder and his allies (Anarchy itself mounted ‘like Death in the Apocalypse’) is met by a ‘maniac maid’ whose name is Hope but ‘looked more like Despair.’ The second half of the poem consists of her speech, imagining the gathering of a ‘great assembly’ whose nonviolent resistance to armed tyranny anticipates Thoreau and Gandhi.

  No one who has ever been at, or been inspired by, a great demonstration can fail to be moved by Hope’s final call for the people to rise ‘in unvanquishable number’. The last line is even more devastating. Shelley has established a variation in his four-line stanza pattern, adding an occasional, unexpected, third-rhyming fifth line. Earlier, the device emphasises brutality and starvation. At the end, it celebrates something very different.

  The Masque of Anarchy XC-XCI

  ‘And these words shall then become

  Like Oppression’s thundered doom

  Ringing through each heart and brain,

  Heard again – again – again –

  ‘Rise like Lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number –

  Shake your chains to earth like dew

  Which in sleep had fallen on you –

  Ye are many – they are few.’

  (1819)

  More than sixty plays by David Edgar (b. 1948) have been performed around the world on stage, radio, and TV. They include Destiny (1976), Maydays (1983), The Shape of the Table (1990), Albert Speer (2000), The Continental Divide (2003), Playing with Fire (2005), Written on the Heart (2011), and If Only (2013), as well as an adaptation of Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1980). Formerly Professor of Playwriting at the University of Birmingham, he has also written several books about theatre, including The Second Time as Farce (1988) and How Plays Work (2009).

  I Am

  JOHN CLARE (1793–1864)

  KEN LOACH

  So many poems can touch you. Which one to choose? A war poem? Who could read Wilfred Owen’s words and remain unmoved? In ‘Disabled’, he describes a soldier, both legs gone, waiting in his wheelchair to be put to bed.

  Then there are poems of mourning and loss. Goethe’s ‘The Erl-King’, where a child is taken from the arms of his father as he rides through the night, captures the acute, shocking pain of sudden bereavement. In another vein, there are Christina Rossetti’s poems of lost love: ‘Remember me when I am gone away . . .’

  Shelley is one of the many poets who have written of the struggle of the common people to end oppression. After the Peterloo Massacre, he wrote in ‘Men of England’:

  The seed ye sow, another reaps:

  The wealth ye find, another keeps.

  The sadness comes from hopes betrayed so many times, despite the courage of those who resist. But I have to choose one. John Clare wrote of the countryside with great affection but spent his last years in an asylum. This poem tells of a man reduced to nothingness – bereft, abandoned, beyond tears. The desperation of Clare’s words leaves you weeping for all who share his plight.

  I Am

  I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows,

  My friends forsake me like a memory lost: –

  I am the self-consumer of my woes; –

  They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,

  Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;

  And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, –

  Into the living sea of waking dreams,

  Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,

  But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

  And e’en the dearest – that I loved the best –

  Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

  I long for scenes where man hath never trod;

  A place where woman never smiled or wept;

  There to abide with my Creator, God,

  And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

  Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;

  The grass below – above the vaulted sky.

  (1844–1845)

  After a brief spell in the theatre, Ken Loach (b. 1936) was recruited by the BBC in 1963 as a television director. This launched a long career directing films for television and the cinema, from Cathy Come Home (1966) and Kes (1969) to Land and Freedom (1995), Sweet Sixteen (2002), The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) and The Angels’ Share (2012). His latest films are a documentary called The Spirit of ’45 (2013) and Jimmy’s Hall (2014).

  Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

  WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)

  STEPHEN FRY

  For some reason, the blubbiest poem for me has always been Whitman’s ‘Of The Terrible Doubt of Appearances’. It’s Uncle Walt at his most perfect, I think. The strangely jerky parenthetical hiccups in the middle all build into an ending that never fails to choke me.

  Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

  Of the terrible doubt of appearances,

  Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,

  That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,

  That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,

  May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters,

  The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, Maybe these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known;

  (How often they dart out of themselves, as if to confound me and mock me!

  How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them, )

  May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem) as from my present point of view, And might prove (as of course they would) naught of what they appear, or naught anyhow, from entirely changed points of view;

  To me, these and the like of these are curiously answer’d by my lovers, my dear friends,

  When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me by the hand,

  When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us,

  Then I am charged with untol
d and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I require nothing further,

  I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave,

  But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,

  He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

  (1860)

  The writer, actor, and TV and radio presenter Stephen Fry (b. 1957) has published four novels, several nonfiction works, two volumes of autobiography and a guide to writing poetry, The Ode Less Travelled (2005). He has appeared in some thirty movies, notably Wilde (1997), directed Bright Young Things (2003) and voiced all seven of the Harry Potter audiobooks. His many TV appearances include Black-adder (1986–8), and his most recent stage role was as Malvolio at the Globe Theatre and in London’s West End in 2012, and on Broadway in 2013.

  Remember

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830–1894)

  ROBERT FISK

  As I write these words, I prepare for my next fraught journey back to Baghdad, back to the suicide bombers and the throat-cutters and the fast-firing Americans. And through the veil of Iraqi tears, I will draw more portraits of suffering and pain and greed and occasional courage and I wonder if, when I eventually leave this vast chamber of horrors, I will try to emulate the advice of the only poem that always moves me to tears, Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’:

  Better by far you should forget and smile

  Than that you should remember and be sad.

  JULIAN FELLOWES

  I don’t have a very good ear for poetry or for music either, really. As a general rule, I am more influenced by prose and I must be one of the few who think Dorothy Wordsworth’s description of the daffodils considerably more effective than her brother William’s poem. But I am moved by ‘Remember’, perhaps because I became aware of it when my family was essentially waiting for my mother to die of the cancer that had been shutting her down for two years. I had not seen much of death before that point, other than a pair of legs under a crashed car on the M1, and the enormity of the change, the idea of saying good-bye forever, seemed for a while to engulf me. In the end, my mother’s departure was peaceful and un-horrid, and there was a comfort in that, but I do recall that sense of disloyalty in the early months, when I would find myself laughing at a party and suddenly remember that she was gone and my poor father was alone, and Rossetti’s words did resonate with me, expressing, as they do, a feeling that my late and so-lamented parent would have thoroughly endorsed. As it happens, I don’t know to whom the poem was originally addressed, but I suppose, in the end, great poetry, like great art, is not about anyone in particular because it is about everyone.

  Remember

  Remember me when I am gone away,

  Gone far away into the silent land;

  When you can no more hold me by the hand,

  Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

  Remember me when no more day by day

  You tell me of our future that you plann’d:

  Only remember me; you understand

  It will be late to counsel then or pray.

  Yet if you should forget me for a while

  And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

  For if the darkness and corruption leave

  A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

  Better by far you should forget and smile

  Than that you should remember and be sad.

  (1862)

  These thoughts of the veteran war reporter Robert Fisk (b. 1946), Middle East correspondent for the London Times and Independent for more than thirty years, are the closing words of his book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005).

  The writer, actor and director Julian Fellowes (b. Cairo, 1949) is best known as the creator of the award-winning TV series Downton Abbey and for his Oscar-winning screenplay for Robert Altman’s 2002 film Gosford Park. As well as appearing as an actor on TV and the West End stage, and in films such as Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), he has published several novels and wrote the stage version of Mary Poppins (2004). He was created a life peer in 2011.

  After Great Pain

  EMILY DICKISON (1830–1886)

  DOUGLAS KENNEDY

  In the United States we are in love with one of the more specious words in the modern lexicon: closure. This word is employed whenever the spectre of tragedy has cast its shadow on a life. ‘I need to achieve closure’ is a common lament in the wake of a profound grief. Yet lurking behind this proclamation is the equally spurious belief that the horrors which life can wreak upon us – and which we can also wreak upon ourselves – can be eventually placed in a box, put on a shelf and shut away forever.

  Emily Dickinson’s masterpiece of a poem points up one of the reasons why her work so endures and so resonates with the modern consciousness. It speaks directly to the heart of the matter. It doesn’t flinch in the face of human contradiction and the way we all try to negotiate the worst that life can throw at us. And within its diamondhard craftsmanship – its lyrical economy, its imagistic precision – Dickinson not only speaks volumes about the shadowland of despair that is the price of being given the gift of life, but also reminds us of one of the central truths with which we all grapple: to live is to harbour so many profound losses.

  After Great Pain

  After great pain a formal feeling comes –

  The Nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs;

  The stiff Heart questions – was it He that bore

  And Yesterday – or Centuries before?

  The Feet, mechanical, go round

  A Wooden way

  Of Ground, or Air, or Ought,

  Regardless grown,

  A Quartz contentment, like a stone.

  This is the Hour of Lead

  Remembered if outlived,

  As Freezing persons recollect the Snow –

  First Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go.

  (c. 1864)

  Douglas Kennedy (b. 1955) has published ten novels (translated into twenty-two languages), three of which, The Dead Heart (1994), The Big Picture (1997) and The Woman in the Fifth (2007), have been made into films. He has also written three works of nonfiction, Beyond the Pyramids: Travels in Egypt (1988), In God’s Country: Travels in the Bible Belt (1989) and Chasing Mammon (1992).

  Extract from Peer Gynt

  HENRIK IBSEN (1828–1906)

  KENNETH BRANAGH

  In Christopher Fry’s verse translation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, there is a sermon by a pastor towards the end of the play. Peer listens while the priest tells the story (in verse) of a young man from the mountains who mutilates himself to avoid joining the army and losing his sweet-heart. The sermon is the brief story of the young man’s life, and in this version – a fine poet’s translation of a fine poet – it always makes me cry.

  From Peer Gynt

  And now, when the soul has gone its way to judgment,

  And the flesh reposes here like an empty pod,

  Now, dear friends, we have a word to say

  About this dead man’s journeyings on earth.

  He wasn’t rich, or of great understanding;

  His voice was small, he had no manly bearing;

  He gave his opinions shyly, uncertainly,

  Was scarcely master in his own house.

  In church, he walked like someone who would ask

  Permission to sit there among the others.

  He came from Gudbrands valley, as you know.

  When he settled here he was hardly more than a boy;

  And you all remember how, up to the last,

  He always kept his right hand in his pocket.

  This right hand in the pocket was the thing

  That impressed the man’s image on one’s mind;

  And also the uneasiness, the shy

  Reticence when he walked into the room.

  But though he preferred to go his quiet way,

  And though he seemed a stranger here among us,

  You all know (though he t
ried hard to conceal it)

  There were only four fingers on the hand he hid. –

  I remember, on a morning many years ago,

  A meeting at Lunde to enroll recruits.

  It was war-time. Everybody was discussing

  The country’s ordeal, and what lay ahead.

  I stood watching. Sitting behind the table

  Was the Captain, the parish clerk and some N.C.O.s.

  They took the measure of one boy after another,

  Swore them in and took them for the army.

  The room was full, and outside you could hear

  The crowd of young men laughing in the yard.

  Then a name was shouted. Another lad came forward,

  Looking as pale as the snow on a glacier.

  They called him nearer; he approached the table;

  A piece of rag was tied round his right hand.

  He gasped, swallowed, groped about for words,

  But couldn’t speak, in spite of the Captain’s order.

  However, his cheeks burning, stammering still

  And speaking very quickly, he managed at last

  To mumble something about an accidental

  Slip of a scythe that sheared his finger off.

  Silence fell on the room, as soon as he had said it.

  Men exchanged looks, and their lips tightened.

  They all stoned the boy with silent stares.

  He felt the hailstorm, but he didn’t see it.

  The Captain, an elderly, grey-haired man, stood up,