“Earth has not anything to show more fair” (mind the stairs, any more fares?) – but several of the poems and poetic prose extracts read at our September session took a more jaundiced view of ‘The City’.
We met in the Mother Shipton for the first time since February, and were delighted to have John with us.
A passage from DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover bemoaned the grim tide of industrial development encroaching on the Chatterleys’ country seat (though enriching them in the process) and the same powerful revulsion informed his poems ‘City Life’ and ‘The North Country’, both presenting the inhabitants as helpless captives of a machine. Phrases in the latter poem had striking resemblances to his poem ‘Piano’.
Dickens expresses similar attitudes to an industrial town in extracts from Hard Times describing Coketown. Science and mechanisation has also corrupted education, as we see Mr M’Choakumchild preparing to fill the empty vessels that are his pupils.
Thomas Hardy’s ‘In a Cathedral City’ turns out to be not a celebration of Gothic splendour and quiet closes, but a bitter address to a lost love.
In Cavafy’s ‘The City’ the poet warns that it (presumably his home city Alexandria) will retain its grip on anyone trying to leave. Chris Short’s translation retains the original’s rhyme scheme – see ‘The City (translation)’.
Eliot’s descriptions of interwar London have a pleasant nostalgia, as in his ‘Preludes’ I and II. But lines 60ff of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ from The Wasteland relate an everyday London scene to Dante’s ‘Inferno’, as Eliot points out in his notes to the poem.
Rimbaud’s ‘City’ from Les Illuminations praises the modern metropolis where ‘all known taste has been evaded’, so surely ironically. As John suggested, Rimbaud is probably best left untranslated.
For properly positive views of cities we had Langston Hughes’ ‘Juke Box Love Song’, celebrating Harlem, and William McGonagall’s ‘Edinburgh’, a hilarious paean to its tourists, moles and lambkins. Also highly positive is Tony Walsh’s impassioned tribute to Manchester ‘This is the Place’.
John also read two of Ken Gambles’ fine poems; the sensual ‘Kalie’, with its reference to the sherbet habit of Eliot’s magi, and ‘The Lodger’, a bleak tale with echoes of Larkin and perhaps Alan Bennett, recently published in Dream Catcher 41.
There must be a lot more scope in the theme of City; we had no topless towers of Ilium nor Troy Town; no rose-red city; no Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Rome, Rio…. So perhaps we’ll return to it. Or you might like to mention suggested poems in a Comment below.
NB poetryatlas.com is an interesting resource for finding poems relating to places worldwide.