For the last meeting of that wretched year 2020, our theme was appropriately “Endings”.
Although many of the poems were about the end of specific lives, we also had endings of days, years, relationships, empires and the occupation of a house.
The magical realism in Roger Robinson’s ‘The missing’ is seductive, and we’re brought up with a jolt when we realise this is a reflection on the Grenfell Tower disaster.
In ‘Alma Road’ by Lucy Newlyn, normal life soon resumes at the spot where the Yorkshire Ripper encountered his final victim.
In Lorna Goodison’s ‘My mother’s sea shanty’, the sea seems to denote a mythic transition between life and death.
Helen Dunmore deals with her own imminent death in ‘Inside the whale’.
Douglas Dunn’s touching sonnet ‘France’ is from Elegies, poems on his wife’s early death.
W H Auden’s ‘In memory of WB Yeats’ is splendid public poetry while his deservedly well-known ‘Funeral blues’ is painfully intimate. Some poems about death are so moving it is hardly possible to read them aloud without choking with emotion. For that reason I didn’t attempt to read from Simon Armitage’s ‘Black Rose’.
In ‘A dog has died’ Pablo Neruda remembers the joyful life of his companion.
Weston and Lee’s ‘Brahn Boots’ combines broad humour with moving sentiment.
Alun Lewis’s ‘Goodbye’ evokes a 1940s interior where he and his wife are together before he leaves for war – from which the poet in fact did not return.
In Seamus Heaney’s ‘A call’, even after imagining his father’s death, sadly the narrator can’t say ‘I love you’.
Tony Harrison and his father carry on being like a pair of ‘Bookends’ after his mother’s death.
Other poems about the end of lives were ‘Slow bell from the high hill’ by Geoffrey Grigson and ‘The draw’ by George Macbeth.
David Aldred’s ‘The tourist’ deals with the ending of a relationship as does the comedy in Wendy Cope’s pithy ‘Loss’ and Kathy Short’s ‘Saturday’.
In Douglas Dunn’s ‘A Removal from Terry Street’ a family’s tenancy is ending, offering hope for the long-suffering neighbours and for a formerly redundant lawnmower.
‘Station dog rose’ by Ken Gambles mourns the ending not only of a branch railway but also the youthful thrill of spotting trains.
Shelley’s ‘Ozymandius’ exemplifies how empires end.
We didn’t have time to read from them, but examples of poems dealing with the end of journeys and wars respectively are Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and Edmund Blunden’s ‘V Day’. Also left unread was Chris Short’s ‘Anna Karenina – OK?’ – see elsewhere on this site – in which the line endings are acrostic.
At the end of the year, Brian Bilston reflects on the things he failed to do in that and every other year – ‘That was the year’.
The ending of a day, and of our evening of endings, was represented by the opening three verses of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’.
Finally, do have a go at the “Endings” quiz, which you will find elsewhere on this site.