Another most enjoyable session, with a wide variety of poems and our best attendance yet at a Zoom meeting.
Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The World’s Wife’ collection featured large in our evening on myths and legends, giving voice to the wives of mythical characters; Eurydice, Circe, Mrs Sisyphus and Medusa.
The Northern Irish poet Michael Longley’s ‘Ceasefire’, ostensibly about the end of the Trojan Wars, suggested that reconciliation in the bitterest modern conflicts was possible.
David Aldred’s ‘Legends’, written in self-imposed exile in Madeira, refused to take the topic seriously; likewithe hith ‘Thuthan, I myth you‘.
Ken Gambles’ ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ is a splendid tribute to a teacher of literature and mythic voyages of literary discovery.
‘The Kraken’ by Tennyson evokes the gruesome sea monster of Norwegian myth.
In ‘Where are you now, Batman?’, Brian Patten recalls the Saturday morning cinema superheroes of his youth.
Yeats’ sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’ is a disturbing treatment of a disturbing subject and, as John explained, it employs Yeats’ concept of the gyre as a turning point in history. I note that it also contains a reference to ‘the dark web(s)’ – way ahead of his time, was Yeats. The same poet’s ‘The White Birds’, a love poem to Maud Gonne, alludes to Irish mythology.
In ‘Merlin’ by Edwin Muir, the poet issues some enchanting but difficult challenges to the legendary wizard.
Two extracts were read from Seamus Heaney’s translation of ‘Beowulf’; in the first, the monster Grendel is unaware that he’s about to meet his end at the hand of the hero, and in the second, Beowulf talks us through his fight like any victorious sports-person interviewed after the match.
‘I’m not saying anything against Alexander’, says Brecht, though of course he is; why can’t legendary heroes like him and Tamerlane relax at home instead of going out conquering?
Two poems on Breugel’s ‘Landscape with the fall of Icarus’; the eponymous William Carlos Williams poem, a rather literal description, and Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which broadens the idea of the indifference of the quotidian to the momentous. ‘Orpheus with his lute’ is a song from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.
Ken Gambles read his own ‘Plato at Fysche Field’, in which he enjoyed a visit to Plato’s allegorical cave. It cleverly uses a scheme of near rhymes.
Finally, a thoroughly demotic Apollo lamented the theft of his herd of cattle in an extract from Tony Harrison’s ‘The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus’.
Brilliant summing up Chris! As usual.
I continue to be impressed at how you so effortlessly ( it seems ) recount the variety of poems read. I was taken by the Duffy poems, who it must be said I have under-estimated. Thanks Chris.
Thanks! Certainly not effortlessly, but re-reading the poems, the better to characterise them, is a pleasurable and instructive effort. Have I just used a fronted adverbial, by the way? Discuss.