Poetry and me
As I entered my teens some 60 years ago, there was a moment when I discovered that I liked poetry. I no longer like poetry, I love poetry. Poetry has been my comfort and my joy for so long.
On solitary walks I will recite poems I have memorised to myself. If I am unlikely to meet people I will recite poetry out loud. If I awake in the night and am unable to get back to sleep, I will test my memory. If I have my back pack with me I will always ensure that I have a Robbie Burns anthology lurking somewhere within. If I am waiting for a train, plane or aeroplane I will reach for my book of poems. Just occasionally when I am in company I will burst into a rendition of a poem that I love. I don’t do that often because people become embarrassed when I do. So I guess we cannot pick our embarrassments. Every man to his own taste as the old wife said as she kissed the cow!
One would think that, with this expressed passion of mine, I would be keen to try my hand at writing poetry. I have tried my hand and am absolutely terrible at it. I guess that at some point in my life I was disappointed that I could not achieve anything of note in this sphere but I can’t remember being overburdened with chagrin. Instead I became more than happy to read and learn the poetry of others. I am overawed by the abilities of a Wordsworth, a Coleridge, a Tennyson to write with such succinct clarity and such rhythmical discipline. It is, perhaps, a sad reflection of my life that I can recite from memory over one thousand lines of Robbie Burns on a good day. Mmmmm, perhaps a bad day if one has to listen to it. So, Dear Reader, as we approach Burns Night on January 25th, I am revisiting my Burns for something appropriate for the night. I am determined not to submit our guests to over 200 lines of ‘Tam O’Shanter’ as once I did. I tried to persuade them that it was not my fault but it was a duty I had to perform. Behind the glazed eyes I could sense that they were unconvinced. They would not be so polite the second time around, Dear Reader. Incidentally there is a valley in Iceland which probably still reverberates from this epic poem as I spouted it with vigour as I walked my lonesome way up it in 2016. I now consider this to have been somewhat foolhardy of me because the whole island is an active volcano and nothing is more likely to stir up the lava juices than an hefty rendition of this Burns epic. Even worse might have been an outburst of ‘To a haggis”! This year guests are going to get a truncated version of “The Twa Dogs” which is a poem I have come to love.
Many years ago, Landseer the painter, painted Burns’ two dogs in magnificent detail. I stumbled on his picture on Amazon and could not resist ordering a print. Hopefully it will arrive before our party.
Burns was at his most effective when he used nature to propound his beliefs on the human condition His “To a Mouse’ is a wee gem of a poem. John Steinbeck quoted from it as the title of probably his most famous novel, “Of Mice and Men”.
“The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”
Is the fuller quotation.
“To a Louse” never fails to produce a smile as Burns sits behind a young woman in church watching as a louse crawls up her bonnet.
“O wad the power the beastie gie us to see oorsels as ithers see us.”
And oh how one fails in that judgement of oneself. Dear Reader, just when I think that I have mastered the tightrope walk between hubris and humility, I am unbalanced and falling headlong into the valley of folly before the wisdom and honesty of Irene. But what happens to us if we have not an Irene to tell us who we really are? Everybody needs a ‘beastie’ and if that happens to be one’s wife then that is why she is the better half.
But back to those two dogs in “The Twa Dogs”, the one is the laird’s dog, Caesar. He is the rich man’s dog, the one with the fancy collar. His friend, Luath, is a plowman’s collie. Wealth meets poverty. After frolicking about, they eventually sit down and discuss each other’s station in life. In doing so they present a wonderful panorama of how society operated in the Scotland of the 18th Century. Over 200 lines of perceptive brilliance, shrewd understanding and masterful rhyme and rhythm, all from the mouths of two dogs who are friends that cross the class divide.
Maybe when I first read this poem, I was tired, Dear Friends. Maybe I had a problem that needed solving. Perhaps there was a burning issue in my life that was causing angst. But there was a moment at the end when I had a lump in my throat, a deep feeling of pathos and sadness almost overwhelmed me. I think it was because in the last eight lines which signalled the end of their discussion, I knew that I was never to meet these characters again and I was saddened by it. That is strange to me, Dear Reader, because generally I am not that emotional about much let alone the written word but here are the last 8 lines of the poem which so demonstrably hit home to me:-
“By this the sun was out o’sight,
An’ darker gloamin brought the night
The bum-clock hummed wi’ lazy drone,
The kye stood rowtan I’ the loan;
When up they gat an’ shook their lugs,
Rejoiced they were na men but dugs;
And each took off his several way,
Resolv’d to meet some ither day.”
Happy New Year to you all.
‘For auld lang syne’, Dear Friends.
