Has poetry gone off the rails since Auden’s time?
ANEWS item about Royal Mail on Radio 4 the other morning included an extract from the recording of W.H.Auden’s fine poem ‘Night Mail’ (1936) which is a slightly less unsavoury piece of Post Office publicity than we’ve been accustomed to of late.
The poem, narrated by John Grierson, is great stuff – witness the opening lines; ‘This is the Night Mail crossing the border, bringing the cheque and the postal order/Letters for the rich, letters for the poor/The shop at the corner and the girl next door’. Note how the rhythm of these lines matches perfectly the rhythm of the train on the track. Auden isn’t usually linked to rap poetry which was still decades away, but it’s hard to resist the rhythmic comparison.
Other brilliant images and metaphors include ‘Past cotton grass and/moorland boulder/shovelling white steam over her shoulder.’ Unusually, Auden decided the train is female. The rhythmic insistence plus the poem’s descriptive power makes the whole thing irresistible. And try these lines; ‘In the farm she passes, no one wakes/But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.’
Auden read in Newcastle not long before he died and I remember how he shuffled onto the stage in a pair of battered old carpet slippers. His astonishing face echoed perfectly those words from the song MacArthur’s Park about a cake left out in the rain. He read entirely from memory (you’d be be surprised how few modern poets can do that) and when he’d finished he simply shuffled back into the wings.
I interviewed him during his visit here. I never mentioned Night Mail and overall, he showed little interest in my questions about how his poems came into being, or his literary contemporaries and their work, plus several other bookish matters which I thought were important but seemed to leave him in a state of ennui.
It wasn’t till my friend Mary (who’d asked to come along) enquired how his cats were getting on that Auden seemed to perk up. From that moment on the interview went swimmingly, though I wasn’t much involved. It was mainly Mary and Wystan and the felines.
Unlike many modern poems, Night Train does rhyme. When people would ask me (with my literary press editor’s hat on) why so little modern poetry DOES rhyme, I used to reply that the oldest known poem in the English language, which is Beowulf, does not in fact rhyme.
This was some kind of answer, but doesn’t remove the suspicion that most of the public are not switched onto poetry because they don’t much like blank or free verse, and that modernism has helped turn much poetry, like modern jazz, into a mainly irrelevant art form which the general public chooses to ignore.
I blame those two poets (much revered in literary academic circles) T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, both of whom were ultra clever, but both of whom lacked what we’d normally consider a heartbeat. As the late poet Adrian Mitchell succinctly put it, ‘most people avoid poetry, because poetry avoids most people.’
MORTIMER’S three hundredth column looms nearer. Already the Red Arrows are perfecting their aerial display, the army is checking the ammunition for the 21-gun salute, the Grenadier Guards have done a few practice walk- pasts and of course I am preparing for the letter from the palace.
How do these letters begin? ‘Dear Peter?’ ‘Dear Mr. Mortimer?’ ‘Dear Peter John Granville?’ ‘Dear Sir?’ Or do they adopt a modish casualness and simply begin ‘Hi’?
Are they signed by Charlie Boy himself or is it left to one of his functionaries?
Could there be a CBE in it? An OBE? (‘Other Buggers’ Efforts’ as it was once described). How about an Earldom? Would that get me one of those ermine cloaks? And would I have to pay for it?
Did you hear about the Lordship who dreamt he was making a speech in the chamber? And when he woke up, he was.
Onwards!
■ Planet Corona – the First One Hundred Columns, IRON Press, £8.00
■ pmortimer@xlnmail.com