Our session on the theme ‘Uniforms’ took place during the invasion of Ukraine, giving several of the poems heightened resonance.
Uniforms of the law:
‘A constable calls’ to check on Seamus Heaney’s father’s root vegetables. The tension grips us in this beautifully observed memory. In Luke Wright’s ‘Judge Crush’ the poet is turned on by the elderly judge’s liver spots. Roger McGough’s ‘Newsflash’ is a bit of absurdist fun which almost became reality in the Covid lockdown.
The same poet’s ‘My bus conductor’ is also playful, but with a melancholy side.
Ann Sexton ‘Doctors’ is strikingly spare and wise.
‘Cat Morgan introduces himself’ as a pirate turned commissionaire – one of TS Eliot’s (or Old Possum’s) charming practical cats.
Uniforms of the cloth:
R S Thomas pays tribute to the unrewarded dedication of ‘The country clergy’. An extract from Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The deserted village’ concerned the village preacher, ‘more skilled to raise the wretched than to rise’ – a sincere practitioner of ‘levelling up’. There’s a sense of frustration in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’. Even within the constraints of a sonnet we get the poet’s characteristic dazzling turns of phrase. Paul Durcan pokes a lot of fun at ‘Cardinal Richelieu’ in response to a ‘poncy’ portrait in the National Gallery. This prompted the suggestion of a future challenge of poems inspired by paintings.
Barbara Shmitz’s ‘Uniforms’ is about dressing to identify with your tribe.
David Aldred’s ‘This poem has no form’ had some telling lines among the punning fun.
In ‘Report’, UA Fanthorpe has fun with the conventions and platitudes of school report writing.
Michael Rosen’s ‘I sometimes fear that’ reminds me of Brecht. It points out that the fascists don’t always come in uniform.
Uniformity:
Several poems conformed to the theme by interpreting it as ‘Uniform’. Wallace Stevens in ‘Disillusionment at 10 o’clock’ longs for more exotic evenings. Louis McNeice’s ‘Jigsaw II’ is a splendid polemic against smug suburbia. Its references to ‘boxes’ prompted a spontaneous rendition of Malvina Reynolds’ ‘Little boxes’. An extract from ‘The Ascent of F6’, the verse play by WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood, continued the distaste for social conformity. I was interested to read that the play included Auden’s wonderful ‘Funeral Blues’, in a choral setting by Benjamin Britten.
Uniforms of the miltary:
The blues again, in Auden’s ‘Roman wall blues’, depicting a cold and homesick legionnaire. Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Tommy’ finds that ordinary soldiers are spurned in peacetime, and Wilfred Owen’s ‘The send-off’ suggests that the return of the few survivors will be muted. The formal structure of this poem is interesting. Siegfried Sassoon’s bitter ‘Suicide in the trenches’ also refers to the non-combatant public. Though decidedly more elegaic, Rupert Brooke’s ‘The soldier’ nevertheless seems a sincere expression of love of country, in a well-crafted sonnet. In ‘The man he killed’, Thomas Hardy refects on the irony that likely the two combatants differed only in their uniform. ‘Digging in a footlocker’, Walter McDonald found a collection of war souvenirs and wondered ‘how did uncles learn to kill, what would happen when we grew up’. The boy grew up to serve in Vietnam. Ken Gambles’ sometime pupil Danielle Treanor responded to a classroom exercise with the telling poem ‘The arms of Lithuania’. This now felt very topical.
Turning now to our latest challenge, ‘I’ll put a Wordle round the earth’, Ken Gambles had responded with a powerful and specifically topical poem ‘Collateral damage’, written on the first day that all the twenty required words were known. This set the bar very high for any others who will be addressing the challenge; will our efforts will be uniformly excellent?