Poem of the Week 78

After a hiatus, today we are resuming our 'Poem of the Week' scheme, in which poems are posted around the College, and read out and discussed in English class. The idea was originally prompted by 'Poems on the Underground'.

On resumption, our 78th Poem of the Week is Wendy Cope's 'Names', about her grandmother.

'Does it Matter?'

On Sunday we have our annual Remembrance Day ceremony and service, and our 77th Poem of the Week is a reference to this. It was read out in Chapel this morning by Mrs Haslett in her talk to the school about the Poppy Fund and its origins.


'Does it Matter?' by Siefried Sassoon
 
Does it matter?—losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
 
Does it matter?—losing your sight?...
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.

"Hallowe'en 1915"

The 76th Poem of the Week is "Hallowe'en 1915" by Winifred Mary Letts, an Englishwoman with very strong Irish connections, and who is buried in Rathcoole, Co Dublin. Hallowe'en is next week, when we are on half-term holiday. The Poem of the Week will resume after half-term.


Will you come back to us, men of our hearts, to-night
In the misty close of the brief October day?
Will you leave the alien graves where you sleep and steal away
To see the gables and eaves of home grow dark in the evening light?

O men of the manor and moated hall and farm,
Come back to-night, treading softly over the grass;
The dew of the autumn dusk will not betray where you pass;
The watchful dog may stir in his sleep but he'll raise no hoarse alarm.

Then you will stand, not strangers, but wishful to look
At the kindly lamplight shed from the open door,
And the fire-lit casement where one, having wept you sore,
Sits dreaming alone with her sorrow, not heeding her open book.

Forgotten awhile the weary trenches, the dome
Of pitiless Eastern sky, in this quiet hour
When no sound breaks the hush but the chimes from the old church tower,
And the river's song at the weir,—ah! then we will welcome you home.

You will come back to us just as the robin sings
Nunc Dimittis from the larch to a sun late set
In purple woodlands; when caught like silver fish in a net
The stars gleam out through the orchard boughs and the church owl flaps his wings.

We have no fear of you, silent shadows, who tread
The leaf-bestrewn paths, the dew-wet lawns. Draw near
To the glowing fire, the empty chair, — we shall not fear,
Being but ghosts for the lack of you, ghosts of our well-beloved dead.

'Bruises Heal'

This is our annual Bullying Awareness Week, and for our 75th Poem of the Week we've chosen 'Bruises Heal' by Andrew Fusek Peters and Polly Peters.  Polly Peters reads the poem herself on the Poetry Archive website here.

Autumn Haiku

Our 74th Poem of the Week is actually three poems - haiku by the 17th century Japanese master Basho (translated, and thus not with the correct syllabic count):



Blowing from the west,
Fallen leaves gather
In the east.

--

Along this road
Goes no-one,
This autumn eve.

--

The wind has brought
Enough fallen leaves
To make a fire.

l(a

As we move into October, the 74th Poem of the Week is e.e.cummings's l(a.  Nothing else to be said about it: just click on the link to see its effect.

'Porch Swing in September'

Our second Poem of the Week this term, and the 72nd overall, is 'Porch Swing in September', nipping in just before the end of the month. See more on Ted Kooser, former Poet Laureate of the United States, here.

Poem of the Week

Today we resume the Poem of the Week scheme: we post the poem around the College, and read it in English classes. Poem of the Week number 71 is one recited from memory by Mr Swift in his talk this morning in Chapel encouraging pupils to enter the Poetry Aloud 2012 competition. He said he first came across 'Sea of Faith' by John Brehm (above) during his teacher training course.

Mr Swift also recited W.B. Yeats's 'The Fish' and (very briefly of course, to finish off with), Ogden Nash's 'The Fly':-

The Fish

Although you hide in the ebb and flow
Of the pale tide when the moon has set,
The people of coming days will know
About the casting out of my net,
And how you have leaped times out of mind
Over the little silver cords,
And think that you were hard and unkind,
And blame you with many bitter words.

The Fly

God in his wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.

Pupils can get full details of Poetry Aloud from their teacher, or here.

World Poetry Day

Today is World Poetry Day. Some of our poetry resources feature in the latest Times Educational Supplement English resources (including that Shakespeare sonnets Wordle) including the Patterns of Poetry audioboos, so here are the first eight again, embedded below. Our Poem of the Week is one read out recently by Mr McCarthy in a Chapel talk, J.C. Squire's 'Caravels'.
       

   
   
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'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'

It's only appropriate that the latest (69th) Poem of the Week should be Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. Snow still lies deep in the College, though we are promised a thaw soon... Scan the QR code above with a free app like NeoReader and get a nice surprise...

'The Send -Off'

Today is Remembrance Day, and we've just had our annual ceremony on Chapel Square, with the laying of the memorial wreath by the Senior Prefect in memory of Columbans who died in wars.

Here's the first repeated Poem of the Week (previously posted two years) ago, just because it's so appropriate. Wilfred Owen's quiet and devastating 'The Send-Off' can be read in full here, and is spoken by Kenneth Branagh above.

If you're in the College, and you've arrived here via the funny thing in the right-corner by scanning it on your House noticeboard, well done. It's a QR code, and the English Department will be experimenting with these. You just need a 'smartphone' and a QR reader such as NeoReader. For a thorough explanation of QR codes, go to James Michie's excellent article here.

'For a Five-Year-Old'

The 67th Poem of the Week, read in English classes and displayed around the school, is Fleur Adcock's 'For a Five-Year-Old', which you can read here.

National Poetry Day

To mark this day in Ireland and the UK, here is our 66th Poem of the Week. 'Animals' by Miller Williams comes from the excellent American Poetry 180 site (a poem a day for the school year), and might prompt your own thoughts about pets, about loss, about how things change... A good prompt for writing.

'Oranges' by Gary Soto

Our 65th Poem of the Week is Gary Soto's evocative 'Oranges', which Arthur Moffitt read out during Sunday's Voices of Poetry evening. Gary Soto was born in 1952; see his website here.

Poem of the Week 64: 'The Malarkey'

Our 64th Poem of the Week is Helen Dunmore's 'The Malarkey', which recently won the National Poetry Competition. A haunting and mysterious poem, it may prompt more questions than it answers.

From The Guardian:
Picking through the 10,467 anonymous entries for this year's National Poetry Competition, judges and poets Ruth Padel, Daljit Nagra and Neil Rollinson were sure of their winner, "The Malarkey", which Padel described as "completely arresting in its quietness [and] hidden strength". When they discovered it was by Orange prize-winning novelist and poet Helen Dunmore, "we all threw our hats in the air", said Padel.

Listen to an interesting interview with Dunmore by Mark Lawson on 'Front Row' (starts just after 24 minutes), including a reading by the poet. Lawson talks about the 'ambiguous, dark' nature of the poem. Dunmore says the poem is about being 'haunted by loss' and how quickly you can lose something that really matters. 'All children vanish into adulthood', she says, 'and maybe you long to capture that time.'

'78 rpm'

Our 63rd Poem of the Week is '78 rpm' by the Tennessee-born poet Jeff Daniel Marion and can be read here. The poet's touching memories of his parents are prompted by discovering old records 'in the back of the junkhouse.'

'Silver Lining' by Carol Ann Duffy

It seems appropriate that our 62nd Poem of the Week should be 'Silver Lining' by the British poet Carol Ann Duffy, written just a couple of days ago, which starts: 'Five miles up the hush and shush of ash / Yet the sky is as clean as a white slate...' We await the return of many pupils and some staff scattered around the continent...

Read the poem on the Guardian site here.

National Tree Week poem

This is National Tree Week, and Mr Swift's IIIb CSPE set have planted a mountain ash as their Action Project; see a report on the College site here. So it's appropriate to have as our 61st Poem of the Week one of the great poems about trees, Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Binsey Poplars'.

As in his poem 'God's Grandeur' (on the Leaving Cert course), Hopkins was well ahead of his time in his concern for our environment (for him, of course, a manifestation of God's presence). He wrote this poem after seeing that trees near Oxford had disappeared. In the words of the biographer Robert Bernard Martin, 'the destruction seemed an emblem of the loss that man inflicts on the planet.'

Poster (above) by Lily Guinness.


'Binsey Poplars', by Gerard Manley Hopkins
felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

Poem of the Week 60: Valentine

Our 60th Poem of the Week is Naomi Shihab Nye's 'Valentine for Ernest Mann'. You can read more about the poet here, and also listen to her read some poems.

Only three more days until the relevant time...but then we'll all be on half-term.

Remembrance Week 6

Our 59th Poem of the Week (poems which are posted around the school, and read and discussed in English classes) is 'Vergissmeinnicht' by Keith Douglas. Above, an animation by Jim Clark of the poem. This is the last post in our Remembrance series, concluding today after the Act of Remembrance on Chapel Square this morning.

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.