A time of poetry

A chance conversation reminds Alexander McCall Smith of the joy to be found in sharing verse with friends These meetings soon became the highlight of our week

For me, this has been a time of poetry, and it started quite by chance when an old friend, a retired sheriff, told me over the telephone that a legal friend of his had been thinking about W.H. Auden’s poem Whitsunday in Kirchstetten. This poem, like much of Auden’s work, is rich in reference, and can be puzzling when first approached.

Knowing of my interest in Auden, my friend suggested that the three of us have a Zoom call in which we could tease out the meaning of such lines as The Ape of the Living God / knows how to stage a funeral, though / as penitents like it… and From Loipersbach / to the Bering Sea not a living stockbroker, / and church attendance is frowned upon / like visiting brothels (but the chess and physics / are still the same)…

Auden, I added, was often rude about stockbrokers, and is referring here to their absence behind what was then the Iron Curtain, where religion was suppressed even though chess players and physicists were allowed intellectual freedom.

We spent a good hour and a half talking about this poem, which inspired me to set up a virtual meeting with other friends to go over the same ground, with the addition of one or two other poems. I invited another friend who had spent the last forty-plus years as a professor lecturing on poetry to university students in Scotland and France. Added to the mix were several other friends with backgrounds far removed from poetry.

So it was that a former Government vet, a lawyer, and a company secretary met in the ether to tease out the meaning of poems that were either new to us, or had been read a long time ago and forgotten. These meetings took place every Tuesday morning, and quickly became the highlight of our week. Lance Butler, the professor, guided our discussions, suggesting poems that he thought we might benefit from reading and that represented important saliences in particular literary movements.

We did Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and reflected on the loss of certainty that lay behind that: a suitable theme for these difficult times. We did Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, and talked about how important a statement that is of the spiritual value of the natural world. We read Edward Thomas’s Adelstrop, about stopping at a country railway siding, and The Road Not Taken by Thomas’s friend, Robert Frost.

As a contrast to the rural setting of both of these, at another meeting we discussed Edwin Morgan’s King Billy. If you haven’t, you must. It starts with the arresting line Grey over Riddrie the clouds piled up… From there we are taken to the funeral procession of Billy Fullerton, a Glasgow gangster, at whose obsequies a thousand people turned out, and where the flute band (this was a Protestant occasion) gave a rendition of Onward Christian Soldiers, played, the poet observes, from unironic lips. It was not a long step geographically, but a world away, from that to Iain Crichton Smith’s touching You Lived in Glasgow, a gentle poem the poet composed after the death of his mother.

There were disagreements, sometimes about interpretation rather than poetic merit. The majority thought Craig Raine’s

The Onion Memory, which contains the lovely line It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry, was about sex, when it is – in my view – about onions and memory. That led to a heated debate about metaphor, and the sub-categories of metaphor – metonymy and synecdoche. After that, the finer points of prosody, the broad fields of iambic pentameter, trochees, and spondees could hardly be avoided.

Our discussions continue. Our next meeting will involve a foray into Chinese poetry of the Tang Dynasty, a fertile source of pleasure if one is looking for short poetry on the pleasures of wine, or apricot trees, and of friendship. The best translations of these poems were made by the scholar, Arthur Waley, who manages to convey the whimsical world of the imperial civil servants who penned these lovely little poems over a thousand years ago.

The poems we shall look at include one looking forward to visiting a friend whose table offers only meagre fare, but whose wisdom makes up for the thin culinary pickings. Then there is a poem in which the poet recalls the person who gave him a hat. He still has the hat, which is misshapen with use, but the donor has long since left this world and autumn winds blow over his tomb.

Those poems were my choice. I also chose an excerpt from Lin Yutang’s essay on flower arranging. This is not strictly speaking poetry, but its effect is poetic. What, he asks, are the conditions that please flowers and what are the conditions that humiliate them? Flowers, we are told, are pleased by clear windows, clean rooms, and visits from monks who understand tea.

By contrast, flowers are humiliated by owners continually seeing guests, by the consultation of rhyming dictionaries by those who write poems, by common monks talking zen, by false expressions of love, by secret agents, and by traces of slime left by snails.

How that will be received, I am not sure. There is room for disagreement on what flowers like, but the essential idea, that flowers should have views, is one that is so utterly charming that it would be churlish to gainsay.

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