By Ian McDonald
Good poems are instantly recognizable. They startle, shock new life into old ideas, impress on the mind patterns of beauty and truth previously unnoticed. Often, as John Keats wrote, they “strike the reader as the wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose piercingly clear collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to re-read, writes that WH Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.” Heaney believes that one function of poetry is to act as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world; he calls this “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” This is what he calls “redress,” whereby “the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions,” offering “a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit… tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium…This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.”
I believe that is finely put. I am convinced about a good poem’s value as “a glimpsed alternative” to so much in the world that is a denial of enlightened humanity. But at the end of the day what I get most out of good poetry is pleasure, pure enjoyment in what Coleridge called “the best words in the best order,” a feeling of intense contentment and lasting satisfaction that I have discovered a perfect expression in words of some fact about the world or feeling or thought which, once I have experienced it, there seems no other way it could have been written or said, an inevitable achievement of the human imagination to be savoured and remembered.
Every year, birthday to birthday, I chose a poem of my year. I have been doing this since my 38th birthday so I now have thirty-seven of them. I was thinking of publishing these in a very small edition for family and friends for my 75th birthday, but that has past and now perhaps I will wait for my 80th. I think they all must be good poems because they have stood the hard test of time and I like none of them less than at the time of choosing and some of them even more. Good poems reveal themselves fully only after many readings.
My latest poem of the year is A Life by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, translated into English by Alissa Valles. I keep such poems in the leaves of my diary and move them on week-by-week so I often read them and always find something new and life revealing.
A Life
I was a quiet boy a little sleepy and –amazingly –
unlike my peers – who were fond of adventures –
I didn’t expect much – didn’t look out the window
At school more diligent than able – docile stable
Then a normal life at the level of a regular clerk
up early street tram office again tram home sleep
I truly don’t know why I’m tired uneasy in torment
perpetually even now – when I have a right to rest
I know I never rose high – I have no achievements
I collected stamps medicinal herbs was O.K. at chess
I went abroad once – on a holiday to the Black Sea
in the photo a straw hat tanned face – almost happy
I read what came to hand: about scientific socialism
about flights into space and machines that can think
and the thing I liked most: books on the life of bees
Like others I wanted to know what I’d be after death
whether I’d get a new apartment if life had meaning
And above all how to tell the good from what’s evil
to know for sure what is white and what’s all black
Someone recommended a classic work – as he said
it changed life and the lives of millions of others
I read it – I didn’t change – and I’m ashamed to admit
for the life of me I don’t remember the classic’s name
Maybe I didn’t live but endured – cast against my will
into something hard to govern and impossible to grasp
a shadow on a wall
so it was not a life
a life up to the hilt.
How could I explain to my wife or to anyone else
that I summoned all my strength
so as not to commit stupidities cede to insinuation
not to fraternize with the strongest
It’s true – I was always pale. Average. At school
in the Army in the office at home and at parties
Now I’m in the hospital dying of old age.
Here is the same uneasiness and torment.
Born a second time perhaps I’d be better.
I wake at night in a sweat. Stare at the ceiling. Silence.
And again – one more time – with a bone-weary arm
I chase off the bad spirits and summon the good ones.
Zbigniew Herbert
As the year passes I select poems that especially strike me, and at the end of the year I have a folder of choices. One small verse by the playful poet Roger McGough caught my attention, probably because I love cricket and suffer from an immense nostalgia for that era of great West Indian victories.
Uncle Pat
Going in to bat
against the Windies
in his first (and final) Test
Uncle Pat
wore vinyl undies
and an armour-plated vest.
But in the panic to get dressed
(wickets falling thick and fast)
left his box off.
Third ball took his rocks off.
Roger McGough
