Our theme was Days – inspired by George Mackay Brown’s ‘The Beachcomber’ at our October meeting. Mackay Brown is often inspired by the weekly round, and we heard his ‘The net’, describing the catch of the day throughout a week.
Another poem – or rather song lyric – which featured all the days of the week was the WW1 recruiting song ‘I’ll make a man of you’ by Arthur Wimperis, included to great ironic effect in Oh! What a Lovely War.
WW1 is also the background to the intensely moving ‘Futility’ by Wilfred Owen, which we heard recited from memory; another day of despair in the battlefield. The poem’s scheme of rhymes and half-rhymes is notable.
Another song lyric featuring all the days of the week was Michael Flanders brilliant ‘The gas-man cometh’.
In John Donne’s ‘The good-morrow’, all the lovers’ yesterdays pale into insignificance as the sun rises on their new infatuation. But in his ‘The sun rising’, the sun is initially chided for invading the lovers’ bedroom.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 likens the succession of time to successive waves on a beach, while Billy Collins ‘Days’ entertains with a splendid image of successive days as a teetering pile of plates.
But for TS Eliot in the first section of ‘Burnt Norton’ from ‘Four Quartets’, time is not a simple succession of moments. And indeed you can relive the past in the present, as William Blake’s ‘The echoing green’ from Songs of Innocence, suggests; the children play all day while the old folk remember doing the same in their day.
The nostalgia in Anne Bronte’s ‘Past Days’, however, is a cruel rather than a mild and pleasant pain.
Where can we live but days? Philip Larkin’s ‘Days’ warns us off asking such a question.
In another ‘Days’, Ray Davies created a song lyric telling of loss and resilience, which has become a much-loved classic as it resonates with so many listeners.
In Emily Dickinson’s ‘A clock stopped’ the clock seems to rejoice in its chronic (ha!) un-mendability. Is the style a very early example of expressionism? The same poet’s ‘These are the days when birds come back’ describes an Indian summer, in a style rather less idiosyncratic than we expect from her.
By contrast there’s a chilly autumn in John Forster’s ‘Poem’, where days have stretched into months. His ‘English lessons’ – apparently a reminiscence of the ‘good old days’, indoor smoking and all – deals with a feisty pupil in a language school.
Also dealing with school days – primary in this case – is the charming ‘Please Mrs Butler’ by Allan Ahlberg.
We had an excerpt from Tony Harrison’s ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, which bursts with invention inspired by the enigmatic fruit, literary history, and Harrison’s life experiences – and days do get a mention.
We had extracts from John Dryden’s ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day’ and W H Auden’s ‘Hymn to St Cecilia’. The former, written when Dryden was Poet Laureate, was originally set to music by Draghi, later by Handel. Stanza 3 was used in Karl Jenkins’ very popular modern choral work The Armed Man. The latter poem was written to be set to music by Benjamin Britten, who was auspiciously born on St Cecilia’s Day.
Poets are inspired by the longest and shortest days; for the former, Derek Walcott’s haiku-like ‘Midsummer Tobago’ and Rose Styron’s ‘Summer solstice’ with its undercurrent of loss. For the latter, Patricia Beer’s sharply observed ‘Frost on the shortest day’.
Three poems arising from our challenge to write about Days were read: David Aldred’s ‘Good Friday’ has fun juggling with the days of the week and associated lovers. Linda Turner’s ‘Lockdown Spring 2020 – every day the same’ vividly captured the experience of the unfamiliar quietness and sense of jeopardy. Also concerned with Covid over the first seven days of isolation was Chris Short’s ‘Eh?’. You can read these three poems elsewhere on this site.
Our attention was also drawn to Edwin Muir’s ‘The Horses’, dealing with the progress and apocalyptic but ultimately optimistic aftermath of a 7-day war.