February 2024 – Guilty party

Eleven of us – not quite a full jury – deliberated on twenty-eight poems featuring crime and/or punishment.

In Beatrice Garland’s thought-provoking ‘Kamikaze’, the pilot’s punishment for returning home is total ostracism.

Environmental crimes are committed in Spike Milligan’s ‘Tree-kill’ and Verity Bargate’s ‘Wasp poem’; implied by Steve Smith’s earth-shaped ‘If the Earth’; and averted by incompetence in Charles Causley’s ‘ I saw a jolly hunter’.

In Sylvia Plath’s ‘The moon and the yew tree’, the moon’s mysterious crime is to create the tides.

Glyn Maxwell’s ‘Deep sorriness atonement song’ hyperbolises the crime of missing an appointment while Norman Cameron deals out ‘Punishment enough’ to himself for his many faults.

TS Eliot’s ‘Macavity the mystery cat’, “the Napoleon of crime”, avoids any punishment.

Seamus Heaney’s horrific ‘Ugolino’ is based on Dante’s ‘Inferno’. Frozen together in ice, Ugolino forever gnaws the head of the archbishop who left him and his sons to starve to death in a cell. The same poet’s (Heaney that is, not Dante!) ‘Punishment’ connects the fate of a bog-preserved body to the Troubles. ‘The Tollund Man’ relates another bog body – a human sacrifice? – to Heaney’s familiarity with Irish peat bogs.

In Cyrus Cassels’ ‘The postcard of Sophie Scholl’ her crime was defying the Nazis. Another defiant victim of totalitarianism was Ozip Mandelstam from whom ‘You took away all the oceans and all the room’.

Maurice Ogden’s ‘The Hangman’ is a gruesome tale with a strong moral message. Another Gothic horror, Vernon Scannell’s ‘A case of murder’ has been interpreted as an symbol of post-traumatic stress in soldiers. Both brought to mind the tales of Edgar Alan Poe.

In William E Stafford ‘Judgements’ the poet repeatedly echoes Zola’s “I accuse” to call out his former student friends and himself, their crime possibly abandoning youthful idealism?

Dave Ward’s ‘The bottles’ is like a folk tale, in which the crime is one of unfair trading.

In Gwendoline Brooks’ disturbing poem, ‘The mother’ reflects on what might have been had she not had abortions. The crime referred to seems not to be the literal crime that an abortion might be in some places or circumstances.

Traci Brimhall’s baffling ‘Crime and punishment’ is a lurid monologue presumably spoken by the painter Francis Bacon.

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘A dead statesman’ is wondering how he’ll defend his crimes. I see that in 2021 Alan Bennett called it “a poem for Boris”, but would even a dead Boris be that self-aware?

Tom Cunningham is a UK poet who seems to specialise in ballads. In his ‘Walk tall’ an American teenager got into the wrong crowd but came out of prison a changed man.

In Brian Patten’s ‘I saw a thief’ the burgled poet moves into the burglar’s home to continue enjoying his possessions.

Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Matilda, who told lies, and was burned to death’ is the author of her own doom as is the childish Sir Ralph the Rover in Robert Southey’s ‘Inchcape Rock’.

In ‘Learning by rote’ Simon Armitage is reminded how he was made to write his name backwards 10,000 times by a sadistic schoolmaster.

John Betjeman’s famous ‘Slough’ contains some uncomfortable snobbery as well as indignation at exploitative capitalism.

Edwin Morgan’s offensive ‘Rules for dwarf throwing’ is, I hope, a Swiftian satire.

We had unearthed a lot more poems than there was time for (such as the ‘crimes against poetry’ committed by William McGonagall), so probably we’ll soon return to this theme.