Our investigation of the Four Elements started with poetry on Fire and (or) Water.
Christopher Pearse Cranch’s ‘Sonnet 18 – The fireside’ considers the fire as a lively companion, whereas in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Miners’ – all in half rhymes – the fire’s coal brings to mind fallen miners, and soldiers similarly burrowing in their dugouts.
Another poem employing half rhymes, demonstrating magic skill in more than one way, is Seamus Heaney ‘The diviner’.
Evie Johnson’s ‘Fire’ is a concrete poem representing a flame. Stacie Cassarino’s ‘Firework’ contains striking but baffling images.
Clive James ‘Signing ceremony’, evoked by Etna’s fire, is touchingly romantic.
A short extract ‘Listen, oh drop’ (trans. Helminski) was but a drop in the vast ocean of Rumi’s ‘Mathnawi’. Another extract ‘Stay together, friends’ (trans. Barks) relates a circle of friendship to a waterwheel.
In ‘Today’s forecast’, one of Brian Bilston’s many poems on British weather, the rain never lets up – as, though to very different effect, in Alun Lewis’s ‘All day it has rained’. Another poem inspired by war is Alan Ross ‘Survivors’, with terrible recollections of naval warfare. For Edward Thomas, another poet associated with war, ‘Rain’ brings on bleak thoughts about death.
James W. Foley ‘Drop a pebble in the water’ reminds us that unkind – or kind – words also send out wide ripples.
‘The sea’ by James Reeves has a dog as an effective metaphor for the sea at a beach.
In George Mackay Brown’s ‘Beachcomber’, each day the sea throws up something interesting. The same poet’s ‘The Finished House’ is an evocation of Orcadian traditions that starts with fire and ends with water.
TS Eliot, in an extract from Four Quartets ‘Little Gidding’, ‘The dove descending…’ deals with the fires of hell and of purification. Similarly fired up by religious concerns, Robert Southwell in ‘The burning babe’ uses an over-extended metaphor which makes me metaphysically sick.
Dylan Thomas’s ‘A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London’ also employs mystical religious imagery in its fierce declamation of a challenging proposition.
Stevie Smith’s ‘The river god’ is a feast of black humour. The appetite of rivers for drowning also informed a number of short folk verses which include Yorkshire rivers and wells.
Sara Teasdale’s ‘There will come soft rains’ reflects on the indifference of the non-human world to man’s concerns.
‘The tyger’ continues to burn bright in William Blake’s celebrated poem.
That master of bathos, William McGonagall, thrilled us with his account of ‘The Clepington catastrophe’ as the firemen train their hoses on the blaze, neatly combining this month’s themes.
Chris, the miners in WW1 actually dug under German trenches to lay explosives, as did the Germans to the British trenches. What a terrific wide-ranging selection of poems , again expertly commented on. Thanks Chris.