And Another Thing

1 March 2008

Ten perfect poems and one little brown man

Another favourite is Francis Thompson, that poor, lost, bewildered man, though I do not like his masterpiece, ‘The Hound of Heaven’. His great short poem on cosmology and spirits, which has various titles but which I call ‘The Many Splendoured Thing’, is a near-perfect short treatment of a gigantic theme. But I prefer his cricket poem, ‘At Lord’s’, because of its pathos and its ingenious triple image. One sees his batsmen, ‘my Hornby and my Barlow long ago’, as he presents them to us, as he saw them once, and as he sees them in his mind now, the ‘run-stealers flickering’ in misty grey, and the ‘noiseless clapping host’ applauding silently. This is the poet as conjuror, pulling amazing rabbits out of insubstantial hats. Another example is Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, a perfect poem in imagery, power to move and bestow comfort, all achieved by mastery of words. Yeats was our greatest 20th-century poet, though his position might have been challenged if Wilfred Owen had survived the first world war. Owen’s sonnet ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, another of my choices, comes as close to perfection as can be, each line, each word-sound, chosen with musical precision, like a Mozart aria but with solemn sadness.

The last of my ten short poems is Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’, perhaps the best thing he ever wrote, though it came very late. I think it was inspired by the Solent crossing. A friend, shown it, said: ‘This crowns your life’s work.’ ‘Yes. It came to me in a moment.’ Tennyson believed strongly in two things: God, and a future life. When he was 40 and living in Twickenham, he said to William Allingham: ‘If I thought there was no life to come I would rush out of the house and throw myself off Richmond Bridge.’ Allingham laughed. ‘Why do you laugh?’ ‘Well, the idea of such an act strikes me as comic.’ ‘I’d rather come to a comical end than a tragic one.’

In fact, Tennyson loved jokes, stored them up, and told them beautifully. Many were rustic items from his Lincolnshire youth. Others were modern. He said: ‘They say I write about fairies as if I knew them, and they ask, “What are fairies really like?”’ He then told the story of the New Forest gnome: Holman Hunt went into the forest to get some studies of foliage on paper. Sitting in a glade he was so absorbed in his work that he did not notice that a little brown man, not three feet high, had crept up behind him. Then he saw a little brown arm stretch out and take his bottle. He looked round, and the little brown man said eagerly: ‘Gin?’ ‘No,’ said Hunt, firmly. ‘Water.’ The little brown man vanished immediately.