Our theme in May 2021 was ‘Children’, and we met a lot of them, ranging from carefree tribes to deeply troubled loners, and beyond.
In two sonnets by Hartley Coleridge (eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), ‘Long time a child’ and ‘The flight of youth’, the grey-haired poet seems haunted by growing up – or not growing up.
A third sonnet ‘To a deaf and dumb little girl’ seems to me to probably underestimate the child’s appreciation of ‘the sublime’.
Dylan Thomas’s celebrated ‘Fern Hill’ is an ecstatic recollection of youthful pleasures, bursting with energy.
Ken Gambles’ Primary Colours’ also recollects childhood games. The sight of lupins ‘hurries (him) back’ to those times (recalling a similar phrase in D H Lawrence’s ‘Piano’, which would also have suited our theme).
The Hal Summers poem ‘Out of school’ also celebrates exuberant games, while Thomas More in ‘Childhood’ wishes life could be all games and no study. But Carol Ann Duffy is very happy to be ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s class’, where she hopes to learn useful life lessons. Another rite of passage, as in Paul Henry’s ‘Daylight robbery’, is a boy’s first professional haircut.
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-picking’ evokes the brimming bowls of luscious fruit, and the annual disappointment of finding them covered in mould next morning.
In Charles Causley’s ‘By St Thomas Water’, two children pinching a jam-jar off a grave terrify themselves with thoughts of the dead arising to get them.
A cold windy night gives rise to rueful feelings in Roger McGough’s ‘Cinders’ – the poem most requested at his readings, expressing the anxieties of an ‘older dad’.
‘My Parents’ … kept me from children who were rough, says Stephen Spender, who tries unsuccessfully to bridge the class gap. Causley’s ‘Timothy Winters’ is also a rough child, although in this case he’s the odd one out. D H Lawrence considers ‘Willy Wet-leg’ to be a totally pathetic case. John Betjeman’s ‘Percival Mandeville’ by contrast is a shining example of a young gentleman, putting his school-mate Betjeman to shame.
Philip Larkin, passing through his childhood home town (‘I remember, I remember’), thinks of various romantic things that didn’t happen to him, leading to the gnomic final line. The structure and rhyme scheme are notable.
In ‘Refugee mother and child’, Chinua Achebe captures an exquisitely tender scene, to harrowing effect.
Heaney’s ‘Mid-term break’ also deals with the death of a young child, from the perspective of his older brother. The final lines are hard to read.
Another older sibling enjoys sending her new sister back whence she came, in Fleur Adcock’s ‘The video’. There’s little humour in Louis MacNeice’s disturbing ‘Prayer before birth’ in which an unborn child is pessimistic about his coming life.
To cheer us up, we had two hilarious poems; Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Rebecca, who slammed doors for fun’ and Thomas Hood’s ‘A Parental Ode to my son’; and finally we were challenged to identify the parodied poet and the original nursery rhyme in Wendy Cope’s clever ‘Nursery rhyme’.