Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Read online

  Spat, pointed a finger and said Get out!

  And the boy went. Everyone drew aside

  So that he had to run the gauntlet between them.

  He got as far as the door, then took to his heels

  Up and off, across the fields and hillside,

  Scrambling on over the shale and rocks,

  To where his home was, high on the mountainside.

  Six months later he came to live down here

  With a mother, a newborn child, and his wife-to-be.

  He leased a plot of ground way up on the hill

  Where the derelict land joins the parish of Lom.

  He married as soon as he could; put up a house;

  Ploughed the stony ground, and made his way,

  As the waving gold of his little fields bore witness.

  At church he kept his right hand in his pocket,

  But back at home no doubt those nine fingers

  Did the work of other people’s ten. –

  One spring a flood carried it all away.

  Only their lives were spared. Everything lost,

  He set to work to make another clearing,

  And by the autumn smoke rose up again

  From a hillside farm, this time better sheltered.

  Sheltered? Yes, from flood; but not from glaciers.

  Two years later it all lay under the snow.

  Yet not even an avalanche could crack his courage.

  He dug, and cleared, and carted away the debris,

  And before the next winter-snows came drifting

  His little house was built for the third time.

  He had three sons, three fine vigorous boys;

  They should go to school, but the school was a long way off.

  They could only reach the end of the valley road

  By going through a narrow, precipitous pass.

  What did he do? The eldest looked after himself

  As best he could, and where the track dropped steeply

  This man roped him round to give him support;

  The others he bore in his arms and on his back.

  He toiled like this, year after year, until

  The sons were men. Time, you would have thought,

  To get some return. Three prosperous gentlemen

  In the New World have managed to forget

  Their Norwegian father and those journeys to school.

  His horizon was narrow. Apart from the few

  Who were nearest to him, nothing else existed.

  The ringing words that rouse other men’s hearts

  Meant nothing to him, more than a tinkle of bells.

  Mankind, the fatherland, the highest ambitions

  Of men, were only misty figures to him.

  But he had humility, humility, this man;

  And after that call-up day he always carried

  The shame of the verdict, as surely as his cheeks

  Carried the burn of shyness, and his four

  Fingers hid in his pocket. – An offender

  Against the laws of the land? Yes, indeed!

  But there’s one thing that shines above the law,

  As truly as the bright tent of Glitretind

  Has even higher peaks of cloud above it.

  He was a poor patriot. To State

  And Church, an unproductive tree. But there

  On the brow of the hill, within the narrow

  Circle of family, where his work was done,

  There he was great, because he was himself.

  He matched up to the living sounds he was born with.

  His life was like a music on muted strings.

  So peace be with you, silent warrior,

  Who strove and fell in the peasant’s little war!

  We won’t try to probe the ways of his heart.

  That’s for his Maker, not for us, to do.

  But I can hold this hope, with little doubt;

  He is not maimed now as he stands before his God.

  (1867)

  TRANSLATION BY CHRISTOPHER FRY

  Sir Kenneth Branagh (b. 1960) is one of Britain’s most successful actors and directors in film, television and theatre. In addition to his acclaimed cinema adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, he has also directed and/or acted in films such as Valkyrie (2008), Thor (2010), My Week with Marilyn (2011) and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014). He has had huge TV success with his BAFTA-winning portrayal of Wallander and has received five Academy Award nominations in five different categories.

  Requiem

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850–94)

  CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

  Probably unnecessary to explain why this poem almost always brings tears to my eyes. It speaks for itself. In April 2008, I recited it from memory at St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, in front of 2,200 people at the memorial mass for the repose of my father’s soul. It was a particular favourite of his, and well describes him. On that occasion I managed not to cry, having rehearsed in private until my ducts had run dry. But I did slightly clutch at the penultimate line.

  Requiem

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie.

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you ’grave for me:

  Here he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  (1880–1884)

  Once a speechwriter to President George H. W. Bush, which resulted in his first comic novel, The White House Mess (1986), Christopher Buckley (b. 1952) has published numerous satirical novels including Thank You for Smoking (1994), which was filmed by Jason Reitman; Little Green Men (1999); No Way to Treat a First Lady (2002); Florence of Arabia (2004); Boomsday (2007); Supreme Courtship (2008); and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? (2012). He is also the author of Losing Mum and Pup (2009), a memoir about his parents, William and Pat Buckley. His next book is But Enough About You, a collection of essays.

  The Remorseful Day

  A. E. HOUSMAN (1859–1936)

  JOE KLEIN

  Both my parents passed away in the winter of 2011–12. They had been together for eighty-six years, since their first day of kindergarten. My father lasted only a few weeks after my mother went; his will to live sapped visibly the moment I told him she was gone. ‘Is it definite?’ he asked.

  At the same time, my wife and I were in the midst of a major television-watching project: all thirty-three episodes of Inspector Morse in chronological order. There are no twelve-step programmes for British-mystery lovers. We’re addicted, and Morse – irascible, imbibing, extravagantly literate and mysteriously first-nameless (it turned out to be ‘Endeavour’) – was a favourite.

  We came to the final episode a week after my father died and I began to blub – decorously, blotting the corner of my eye with an index finger, but in full blub all the same – when Morse, played by the brilliant John Thaw, recited the Housman. It was triply poignant. Morse was dying. Thaw was near death himself. My parents had just passed away. When I later read the poem, I was slightly disappointed. ‘Ensanguining’ the skies seemed a bit much . . . until I read it aloud, and the funereal metre reasserted itself. I miss Morse, Thaw and, of course, my parents. But the poem remains, a reminder of grief so pure that it can also cleanse.

  The Remorseful Day

  Ensanguining the skies

  How heavily it dies

  Into the west away;

  Past touch and sight and sound

  Not further to be found,

  How hopeless under ground

  Falls the remorseful day.

  (c. 1896)

  Originally as Anonymous, Joe Klein (b. 1946) wrote Primary Colors (1996), subsequently filmed by Mike Nichols. A political columnist for Time magazine since 2003, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Guggenheim Fellow.

  The Wind, One Brilliant Day
/>   ANTONIO MACHADO (1875–1939)

  ROBERT BLY

  This is a poem about the many losses that everybody, men and women, go through in life. The older you get, the more gardens you have abandoned. What else is there to do? Now you see how many old friends are gone, and how things didn’t turn out the way you had hoped.

  The Wind, One Brilliant Day

  The wind, one brilliant day, called

  to my soul with an aroma of jasmine.

  ‘In return for the odor of my jasmine,

  I’d like all the odor of your roses.’

  ‘I have no roses; all the flowers

  in my garden are dead.’

  ‘Well then, I’ll take the waters of the fountains,

  and the withered petals and the yellow leaves.’

  The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:

  ‘What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?’

  (c. 1903)

  TRANSLATION BY ROBERT BLY

  The poet, author, and activist Robert Bly (b. 1926) is best known for his 1990 work Iron John: A Book About Men, which spent sixty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. An influential editor of poetry magazines and anthologies, he has also published some twenty volumes of poetry, sixteen volumes of translation and nine works of nonfiction.

  Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes

  RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875–1926)

  COLM TÓIBÍN

  What is strange is how much coiled emotion a single declaratory sentence can have. In this translation, Mitchell trusts the words. They will do the work. ‘Nothing else was red’ stops you, suggests that this is a real landscape, rather than one which is mythological, or that it is oddly and vividly both, and all the more powerful and present for that. Then, the elaborate description of landscape begins again to be followed once more by a single sentence: ‘Down this path they were coming.’ The poem is filled with hardness. Orpheus is ‘mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.’ He is desperate to get her back, it is not just a dream or an ancient myth, it is you now. Death comes here as both unforgiving and relentless, but it is also an active state. ‘She was filled with her own vast death’ has the power to console as much as to suggest completion, finality. She will be too busy, too distracted to notice who is ahead. The man who loved her will be merely ‘someone or other’; he will have been too impatient. The dead will not come back, but the words will, and the words will be filled with sad wisdom as the woman who was so loved will move into eternity, or nothing much, or perhaps nothing at all, in ways that are ‘uncertain, gentle, and without impatience’.

  Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes

  That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.

  Like veins of silver ore, they silently

  moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up

  among the roots, on its way to the world of men,

  and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.

  Nothing else was red.

  There were cliffs there,

  and forests made of mist. There were bridges

  spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake

  which hung above its distant bottom

  like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.

  And through the gentle, unresisting meadows

  one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

  Down this path they were coming.

  In front, the slender man in the blue cloak –

  mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.

  In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk

  devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,

  tight and heavy, out of the falling folds,

  no longer conscious of the delicate lyre

  which had grown into his left arm, like a slip

  of roses grafted onto an olive tree.

  His senses felt as though they were split in two:

  his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,

  stop, come back, then rushing off again

  would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, –

  but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.

  Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached

  back to the footsteps of those other two

  who were to follow him, up the long path home.

  But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,

  or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.

  He said to himself, they had to be behind him;

  said it aloud and heard it fade away.

  They had to be behind him, but their steps

  were ominously soft. If only he could

  turn around, just once (but looking back

  would ruin this entire work, so near

  completion), then he could not fail to see them,

  those other two, who followed him so softly:

  The god of speed and distant messages,

  a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,

  his slender staff held out in front of him,

  and little wings fluttering at his ankles;

  and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.

  A woman so loved that from one lyre there came

  more lament than from all lamenting women;

  that a whole world of lament arose, in which

  all nature reappeared: forest and valley,

  road and village, field and stream and animal;

  and that around this lament-world, even as

  around the other earth, a sun revolved

  and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-

  heaven, with its own, disfigured stars – :

  So greatly was she loved.

  But now she walked beside the graceful god,

  her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,

  uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

  She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy

  with child, and did not see the man in front

  or the path ascending steeply into life.

  Deep within herself. Being dead

  filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit

  suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,

  she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,

  she could not understand that it had happened.

  She had come into a new virginity

  and was untouchable; her sex had closed

  like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands

  had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s

  infinitely gentle touch of guidance

  hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

  She was no longer that woman with blue eyes

  who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,

  no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,

  and that man’s property no longer.

  She was already loosened like long hair,

  poured out like fallen rain,

  shared like a limitless supply.

  She was already root.

  And when, abruptly,

  the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,

  with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around – ,

  she could not understand, and softly answered

  Who?

  Far away,

  dark before the shining exit-gates,

  someone or other stood, whose features were

  unrecognizable. He stood and saw

  how, on the strip of road among the meadows,

  with a mournful look, the god of messages

  silently turned to follow the small figure

  already walking back along the path,

  her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,

  uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

  (1904)

  TRANSLATION BY STEPHEN MITCHELL

  The Irish novelist Colm Tóibín (b. 1955) has also published short stories, plays, journalism and poetry. He is the winner of the 2011 Irish PEN Award
and currently is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His novels include The Blackwater Lightship (1999), Brooklyn (2009) and The Testament of Mary (2012); his most recent work of criticism is New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families (2012).

  Ithaka

  CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY (1863–1933)

  WALTER SALLES

  Someone once told me: ‘Don’t ask the way of those who know it, you might not get lost.’

  Ithaka

  As you set out for Ithaka

  hope the voyage is a long one,

  full of adventure, full of discovery.

  Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

  angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them:

  you’ll never find things like that on your way

  as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

  as long as a rare excitement

  stirs your spirit and your body.

  Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

  wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them

  unless you bring them along inside your soul,

  unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

  Hope the voyage is a long one.

  May there be many a summer morning when,

  with what pleasure, what joy,

  you come into harbors seen for the first time;

  may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

  to buy fine things,

  mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

  sensual perfume of every kind –

  as many sensual perfumes as you can;

  and may you visit many Egyptian cities

  to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

  Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

  Arriving there is what you are destined for.