This is not something I’ve ever thought to confess in public before, but I feel happy to share this with you, safe in the knowledge I won’t be derided.
I keep the specs in question in the loo beside a dog-eared copy of Poem for the Day One (Chatto & Windus). The glasses are a good few years old and the lenses are well scuffed. They do the job.
In loo two, I keep Poem for the Day Two. Book Two came first; a birthday gift from best friend, Ruth. I know this because the card she gave me with it is used as a book mark. In it, she has written:
Sorry it’s late but would you expect anything else from me? I have a copy of this too. I keep it in the loo and lock myself in for the odd five minutes of peace to read.
I suspect there are copies of this book in middle-class toilets across the land…
At the top of each dated page, there are related dates; the birth date or death date of some literary figure or another. At the bottom, space allowing, there is an illuminating line or two about the poet featured on the page.
Take today. In Poem for the Day One, it tells me that the Scottish poet William Soutar, died on this day – 15 October 1943. The poor soul suffered from spondylitis and was confined to bed in the home he shared with his parents in Perth from the age of 25 until his death in 1943 at 45. A poignant poetic fact.
Robert Herrick, poet and priest, also died on this day in 1674. He is the featured on this day in Poem for the Day One.
I must have read this poem several times as I’ve been consuming this book for at least seven or eight years on a daily basis. But, as with all the poems, I always take something new from it.
Delight in Disorder
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn* about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.
Robert Herrick
(August 24 1591 – October 15 1674)
*A light scarf
The Herrick intel is as follows:
“Herrick’s verse,” Louis Untermeyer wrote, is “never rowdy, often lascivious, but seldom rudely lecherous”. His life was of a piece with his verse, for as Herrick himself assured the reader:
Wantons we are: and though our words be such,
Our lives do differ from our lines by much.
The beauty of a book like this is at the poems are – out of necessity – fairly short.
There’s always something to take away and chew over.
A reminder of the brevity of the average lifespan.
The fact that someone born 500 years ago had the same hopes and fears as you.
A word or phrase which settles in your frontal cortex and you find yourself chewing over in an idle moment.
Today, it’s Herrick’s wild civility which sets me thinking of textiles in paintings. Take John Singer Sargent’s Gertrude Vernon, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1864-1932).
I’ve known this painting, which the American artist painted in 1892, forever. It now hangs in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. It has stayed in my visual memory bank since I first saw it as a teenager. There is a sweet disorder in Lady Agnew of Lochnaw’s dress. Her ribands do flow confusedly.
When it comes to art, I’ll go for wild civility over precision any day.
Even though I studied English and Scottish literature at university, I’ve discovered and rediscovered many poets – and poems – through these books.
When I was at school, our young hearts were hamstrung by war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
T.S. Eliot and his Modernist precision confounded us. Do I dare to eat a peach? Yes, crack on T.S.
At university, poetry continued to be male-centric. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the romantic Victorians, who all seemed to take take take from the women in their lives. I remember being livid that William Wordsworth had – literally – stolen all his best lines from his sister Dorothy’s journals. The cheek.
Scottish poetry was all about the men too. Ferguson, Dunbar, Burns, Mackay Brown, MacLean… it was years later that Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and Kathleen Jamie came a-calling for me.
Shout out to W.H. Auden though with his fag-wrinkled face and poems full of lyrical longing for the men in his life. Especially in his poem, Lullaby…
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
I hate to admit it but I fell out with poetry for many a long year following my slow handclap evisceration of the muse via what the tutors at uni called constructive criticism. I eventually discovered the likes of Emily Dickinson and Stevie Smith, but it took decades.
I have my Poem of the Day book to thank for this beautiful line which Emily sent to her regular (male) correspondent T. W. Higginson in response to a request for a photograph:
“I . . . am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves”.
As for Stevie Smith, when my kids told me I should listen to Loyle Carner’s album Not Waving, But Drowning in 2019 ‘because it was based on a poem I might know’, my heart beat that little bit faster.
I read about a man getting drowned once
His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea
But really, he was drowning
And then I thought, that in a way
It is true of life too
That a lot of people pretend, out of bravery really
That they are very jolly and ordinary sort of chaps
But really, they do not feel at all at home in the world
Or able to make friends easily
So then they joke a lot and laugh
And people think they're quite alright and jolly nice too
But sometimes that brave pretense breaks down
And then, like the poor man in this poem
They are lostNot waving, but drowning
Carner’s real name is Ben Coyle-Larner. As the mother of a dyslexic daughter, this is music to my ears. I believe we have his mum Jean to thank for instilling a love of her poetry in her son. Thanks pal.
Poetry, we see you. Even if it is through a pair of scuffed old lenses.
I very much enjoyed this. I had readings of Emily D and WH Auden at my wedding. I may hide some books in the bathroom.