A sharp look at the muddled generalisations that are used to characterise the 'criminal class'

This week's poem, "Positive Identification", is by Ken Smith, and comes from the collection Shed: Poems 1980-2001 published by Bloodaxe Books in 2002. Up until his sadly premature death the following year, Smith was writing as energetically as ever. His poems come out of lived experience: working in Wormwood Scrubs as writer-in-residence, for instance; travelling in eastern Europe and beyond. He was a poet who managed that difficult art of being both politically accountable and true to the demands of poetry in all its shadowy unpredictability.

"Positive Identification" seems, at first, to be written breathlessly from the point of view of someone who has been assaulted and is trying to describe their attackers. Its opening lines mimic the confusion of being surrounded by a swirl of violence, and the difficulty of recalling the faces, the distinguishing marks, and even the weapons.

But it's quickly made plain that "positive identification" is impossible, and the title is meant ironically. As the alternative possibilities build up, we realise that there is no single crime or crime scene in the poem. By listing the variety of identifying marks, forms of attack, weapon, and so on, the poem is pointing out differences that have become similarities and generalisations. It's not about identification but the blurring, and stereotyping, of identity. Even the distinction between perpetrators and victim is blurred.

The syntax is deliberately impressionistic. The lists flow on without separating commas. It's almost like being given a form in which there are boxes to be ticked. The categories may be unclear or pedantic. The poem asks, for example, if the tattooed line of dots, horribly labelled cut here, runs across, through or over the boy's neck. The distinction between "across" and "over" seems meaningless, or meaningless to anyone but a bureaucrat designing a form. The idea that the tattoo runs through the neck, like lettering through peppermint rock, is more chilling. The invitation to cut becomes an invitation to decapitate. Brain and body have already been fatally separated.

The poem deliberately uses stereotypes ("bully", "sissy", "absolute bastard") and at the same time it reveals, perhaps unexpectedly, the strong human emotion expressed by the attackers, their screaming, weeping and laughter. But they also have eyes which are "black nothing" and faces with "the same dead smile." The "same mad anger" is understood by the speaker to have emerged from a sense of betrayal by "someone long ago dead yesterday…" Even the psychological roots of the anti-social behaviour are generalised, and do not restore individuality or induce compassion. There is uncertainty about the very humanity of the criminals. After the clarities of white and black comes an unclassifiable figure who is "some other shade of human". The species of what is being identified seems at one point to be in doubt: "something quick I didn't see".

No injuries are detailed but the word "pain" in line 11 is made to pull its weight, even while subject to a joking tautology (pain hurts). After that climax of his own suffering, the speaker returns to the theme of identification. He falls "for the umpteenth last maybe time" and he is still trying to see his attackers, and see into them. The victim's own identity has become blurred. He too is an amalgamation of case histories.

The people in the poem are not individuals. They are consigned to a few limited categories, and are fundamentally the same. We see them through the eyes of society, and perhaps their own eyes. The speaker meanwhile becomes increasingly angry. His voice rises to a satirical platitude, "this great multi-ethnic society". Such a society ought to have produced something better in terms of human relationships. Instead, violence continues to be delivered, with the usual diversity of means and motivation.

The word "exotics" seems the final satirical flourish. It has been stripped of any glamorous association, and means simply the outsider – who is anyone, of either gender, of "any shade of human". The irony is that the "exotics" the poem has described have been so ordinary, and so drained of human meaning. The poem seems to be indirectly about the creation of "the criminal class" and the facelessness of those so identified. These are people we don't want to see as individuals; people who, we comfortingly pretend, are all alike, and different from ourselves.

Positive Identification

Their eyes they were grey blue they were black nothing.
One had a scar a burn a birthmark one an earring one a tattoo
dotted across through over his neck and the legend cut here.
That makes two were there two was it 3? One with the headbutt
one with the fists and the finger rings one with a fancy blade.
One a white male one a girl one something quick I didn't see.
One a bully one a sissy and one who was an absolute bastard.
One with a knife one a razor one with a baseball bat.
One that wept the other one screaming and screaming
at the same time someone someone else laughing out loud.
I found pain pain however when wherever it comes hurts.
They all yelled the same kind of words you know them
the same mad anger the same eyes the same dead smile
the same fury at someone long ago dead yesterday perhaps.
One was white one black one some other shade of human.
I recall as I fell for the last umpteenth maybe time
my thought here in this great multi-ethnic society
you can be beaten and robbed you can die by all sorts
for all sorts of reasons for none by all sorts of exotics.

A wind-blown lyric exhilarated by the first blasts of wintry weather, which moves beyond the polite conventions of its time

John Clare wrote a number of poems expressing an intense pleasure in windy weather. Perhaps the wind had an animistic quality for him, and turned into some elusive, energetic and unpredictable creature which could excitingly be traced through its effects on other living things – the birds, trees, and mammals which are painstakingly observed in so much of his poetry. I've chosen a seasonal lyric, "Autumn", for this week, a week frequently weather-filled in the UK as it marks the transition from a rich autumnal month to a bleaker more wintry one.

Clare's wind-blown landscape looks, and to some extent is, tidily constructed: it even boasts numbered stanzas. In fact, it combines the two aspects of Clare, the self-aware and well-read literary artist, and the intensely local and watchful nature-poet. The first stanza seem almost Keatsian, apart from what Clare would have called the "grammer" (he had no time for what he perceived as its oppressive pedantry) and odd spelling. These minor matters are nevertheless central to his effects. By rendering "fitful" as "fitfull" he refreshes a literary adjective: the wind is made more alive, somehow, by being fitfull – full of fits and starts. Similarly, as his eye favours the double l, his ear prefers the double s (gusts/shakes) even if it means disagreement between noun and verb. The singular "fitful gust" would not be nearly as effective.

The speaker could be indoors in stanza one, watching from the window. The singular "leaf" here is not standing in poetically for many leaves. It's a particular leaf which he watches, in close-up, as the wind detaches it from the elm-tree. After "twirling by" the window, it's seen in brilliant long-shot, lost among the "thousand others in the lane".

In the second stanza, we're probably outdoors, noticing and hearing the sparrow "on the cottage rig" – presumably the roof, or some other jutting external part of the building. The evocative present participles gather: "twirling", "shaking" (the verb cleverly carried over from casement to twig) and "flirting by", the latter verb picking up the quick trill of "chirp". The personification of spring is saved from mere literary device: she seems more country-girl than goddess. "Flirting" also echoes the "twirling" of the leaf, suggesting a similar playfulness and fitfulness. In Clare's quick-moving imagination, spring swiftly attains the melodious, drowsy fulfilment of the last line, "in summers lap with flowers to lie".

In the next stanza, the smoke that curls upwards through the bare trees suggests that the wind has temporarily paused. Clare has added an extra beat to the usual trimeter of the "b" line, allowing himself a little more space for observation. His tiny bird-portraits are beautifully contrasted. While the pigeons "nestled round the coat" (cote?) might partly symbolise the season's death-threat of sharpening cold, the sparrow, busy as if in spring, and the cock, strutting his stuff as normal on the un-idealised location of a dung-hill, are simply there, simply being themselves. These birds are not wing-clipped to fit the mood or the season.

While the language of this poem does not draw greatly on the rich Northamptonshire dialect we associate with Clare, it still quietly challenges the conventions of the lyric landscape poem. After the defiant image of the cock crowing on the dung-hill, there's a splendid linguistic defiance in " the mill-sails on the heath agoing." That simple, rustic-sounding verb, "agoing" (without a hyphen) is all that's needed to create an impression of rapid and ceaseless movement.

There is a kind of casual framing, in that the falling and fallen leaves of the first stanza are now in the last stanza mirrored by the falling feather and the falling acorns. Once more, Clare gives us the perfect verb-in-apposition: "pattering down," letting us both see and hear the acorns lightly hitting the tree-trunk and each other as they rain onto the dead leaves at the foot.

The humble acorn is often an object of homily. But these acorns are not to grow into "mighty oaks". They are food, and the pigs are suddenly in the picture, cumbersome, noisy and eager, part of the glorious fitfullness of the natural scene.

They complete the landscape and end the poem. Clare has organised his details, so that from stanza to stanza we have moved deeper into the countryside – from a position close to the cottage window, then, via the twirling leaf to the lane. There's a steady backwards look at the cottage, then a longer view of the heath, the mill, the stubble-field. An altered ecology in a landscape now deserted by humans reveals those less domesticated, but, for Clare, not ominous, birds, the raven and the crow. But finally, Clare lets the wild pigs steal the show, reminding us that his poem has been no orderly eighteenth-century pastoral, despite the numbered stanzas, the mostly regular rhyme and metre, and the satisfying grouping of images. The neat frames are filled with movement. And, after the poem has stopped, it's as if it's still going on somewhere, the buffeting wind and flying mill-sails, the birds being bird-like, and the pigs grubbing up the acorns which are still falling, just beyond our view – and beyond Romantic convention. Even without the dialect, Clare ensures his poem is wind-blown, moving, alive.

    Autumn

      1
I love the fitfull gusts that shakes
 The casement all the day
And from the mossy elm tree takes
 The faded leaf away
Twirling it by the window-pane
With thousand others down the lane

      2
I love to see the shaking twig
 Dance till the shut of eve
The sparrow on the cottage rig
 Whose chirp would make believe

That spring was just now flirting by
In summers lap with flowers to lie

      3
I love to see the cottage smoke
 Curl upwards through the naked trees
The pigeons nestled round the coat
 On dull November days like these
The cock upon the dung-hill crowing
The mill sails on the heath agoing

      4
The feather from the ravens breast
 Falls on the stubble lea
The acorns near the old crows nest
 Fall pattering down the tree
The grunting pigs that wait for all
Scramble and hurry where they fall

Nature and mythology combine in this playful account of lugging an oak tree through the London Underground

The author of this week's poem, Katherine Gallagher, was born in 1935 in Maldon, a gold-mining town in central Victoria, Australia, and grew up on a farm in nearby Eastville. She lived in Paris for a number of years before settling in the UK in 1979. The journey in "The Year of the Tree" is, by contrast, a modest one, confined to the London Underground. But it seems to have larger journeys, like tree rings, wrapped and compressed inside it.

The narrative, laid out in spare, short-lined couplets, begins with an arresting hook. As in some of those parables written by eastern European poets in the past century there's a faintly surreal scenario ("I carried a tree/ through the underground") presented in a simple, deadpan style. But while plain, the diction is pointed. "It was hard" immediately describes the effort of carrying the tree, but extends to the tree's texture and rigidity. The picture we first imagine – of a whole tree being carried – is intended: at least, this tree doesn't turn out to be a sapling tucked away in a plastic bag. It's "heavier than a suitcase" and possibly human-size, as seems borne out by the use of the pronoun "we" at the beginning of stanza five.

Typical commuter behaviour is observed as part of the background story. People "scarcely noticed" the unusual duo at first – or perhaps, being seasoned Tube-travellers, they quietly pretended to scarcely notice. Then a few bold spirits venture the reader's own question: "Why a tree?"

The little vision of tree carrying as a daily "rite" may be a tease, but it adds a dimension and further direction to the poem. The answer to "Why a tree?" is deliberately humorous. That prim, Latinate abstract noun "edification" has grabbed a whole line, mocking its own self-importance. Yet the word is far from hollow: it expands on the existing potential of the tree for building, with a notion of self-building. The following stanza is less tongue-in-cheek: "A tree always/ has something to teach." This may nod towards Gallagher's Irish heritage, and the Celtic tradition of the oak as a source of wisdom. Also, despite its un-fussed and coolly playful tone, by evoking the difficulty of "lugging" the tree along, the poem is inevitably a reminder of the Christian significance of tree-carrying.

New sounds occur in the next stanza: the "sharp gusts" which "whirred" (an unusual verb choice) along the Underground's corridors, making the branches rustle. The rustling here is a good detail, and a little ambiguous because, while the tree is destined for replanting (and living foliage, of course, can rustle) the verb is usually associated with autumn and dead, dried-out leaves. The observation that the sweepers are picking up "scraps of paper" – one of the end-products of the timber industry – enhances this idea. The sweepers, nicely in character, are polite but anxious that the tree shouldn't be left behind – the image of the tree as unwanted litter is not far away.

There doesn't seem to have been a Year of the Tree in the UK, though the UN declared 2011 the International Year of Forests. Gallagher's poem was written considerably earlier. However, her title alerts us to the irony in such well-meaning designations. A mere year of tree awareness would hardly save the planet's forests. It's a mark of the poet's tact and gentle humour that an environmental message is present: potent but not preached. Her oak tree retains an older, mythical resonance.

We never see the speaker emerging into daylight so as to fulfil her intention of starting a forest in her garden. We don't even see her boarding a train. At the end of the poem, speaker and tree are still in transit, and the curiosity shown by the other travellers has edged towards paranoia, judging by the comment "Relax…/ it's a tree, not a gun".

The poem's story has characteristics of a quest, as corridors and escalators are endlessly traversed and questions posed and answered. The shadowy setting hints at a deeper underground, perhaps: the underworld.

Descents into the underworld recall the Orpheus myth, among others. Oaks were the trees that tore up their roots so as to follow the singer-poet's music to the seashore, and Euridice herself was an oak-tree nymph. Orpheus's music is a kind of peaceable weapon, calming and taming ("… a tree, not a gun"). Though one of the charms of "The Year of the Tree" is its light touch, its mythical elements form a strong underpinning. The oak tree seems a fitting symbol of both the natural and inner worlds we neglect at our own risk, of the past lives and journeys we carry with us as we travel, and the importance of holding on to these riches, though they may single us out for scrutiny or be otherwise heavy and "difficult to balance".

• "The Year of the Tree" appears in Gallagher's fifth full-length collection Carnival Edge: New and Selected Poems, published by Arc, who will bring out a new volume of her work in 2014.

The Year of the Tree

I carried a tree
through the Underground.

It was hard. At first,
people scarcely noticed me

and the oak I was lugging
along the platforms –

heavier than a suitcase
and difficult to balance.

We threaded through corridors,
changing lines: up and down stairs,

escalators, and for a moment
I imagined everyone on the planet

taking turns
to carry a tree as daily rite.

A few people asked
Why a tree?

I said it was for my own
edification –

a tree always
has something to teach.

•

Sharp gusts
whirred through the corridors

rustling the branches
as I hurried on

past the sweepers
picking up rubbish, scraps of paper.

Be sure to take the tree
with you, they said.

Don't worry, I'm taking it
to my garden,

the start of a forest.
When people stared,

Relax, I said,
it's a tree, not a gun.

A moving, mature sonnet from a young soldier who had studied in the Fatherland but was destined to die by a German bullet

Charles Hamilton Sorley died in 1915 at the age of 20, killed by a sniper in the Battle of Loos. He left a small, uneven but often impressive body of poems, first published as a collection, Marlborough and Other Poems, in 1916. He had been travelling and studying in Germany prior to entering Oxford, when war was declared. This week's poem, a sonnet called To Germany, reflects his feelings for a country which has nurtured him and is now designated the enemy. The breadth of perspective is astonishingly mature.

Sorley consistently opposed conventional war-inspired sentimentality and jingoism, but his poems cannot conveniently be packaged together and labelled anti-war. In Barbury Camp, a monologue written from the point of view of a dead Roman soldier, for example, the speaker exults in the physical challenge of combat: "And here we strove, and here we felt each vein / Ice-bound, each limb fast-frozen, all night long. / And here we held communion with the rain / That lashed us into manhood with its thong, / Cleansing through pain. / And the wind visited us and made us strong." That desire for "cleansing through pain" seems to have been a strong component of Sorley's moral character, instilled by his public-school education, perhaps.

But there are no schoolboy heroics in To Germany. The mood is sombre and analytical, particularly in the octet. "You are blind like us" is a powerful refusal to allocate blame, and in the emotional climate of the time unquestionably demonstrates Sorley's boldness. The young of both countries grope and stumble through "fields of thought" just as they grope and stumble over fields of battle. Sorley contrasts Germany's political ambition ("… your future bigly planned") with the British establishment's narrow self-interest ( "the tapering paths of our own mind") but implies the effects of both are the same: intellectual incapacity. That unusual and rather awkward adverb "bigly" suggests the deliberate avoidance of irony and its easy laugh at imperial ambition. And it denotes straightforwardness. While still a pupil at Marlborough College, Sorley had presented a paper in which he castigated modern literature for refusing "to call a spade a spade". That bracingly prosaic ideal finds the clarity and forcefulness of poetry in the octet's magnificent concluding lines: "And in each other's dearest ways we stand, / And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind."

The sestet begins by envisioning the time "When it is peace". The "truer form" in which the countries and individuals will then see each other "with new-won eyes" has faintly biblical overtones. Such redemption is associated with the afterlife. The adjective "loving-kind" (like "bigly", an unusual grammatical construction) and the imagery of the handshake hint at an evangelical quality in Sorley's imagination.

The modifier "When it is peace" recurs at the end of the second sentence, heightening the sense of longing, with the "if" haunting the "when". Steering away from consolation, and bowing to the inevitability of continuing bloodshed, Sorley concludes with his favourite metaphor of the scourging elements: "… the storm, / The darkness and the thunder and the rain".

To Germany is a tightly constructed sonnet. Sharp, nerve-jangling sounds (blind, designed, pain, rain) contrast with the broader, gentler chords of land, stand, warm, firm, form. If "blind", as both adjective and noun, rules the octet, then "peace", also repeated three times, is the dominant noun of the sestet. Yet the hope Sorley expresses in this repetition remains measured and unassertive. It is subsequent history that ironises the vision – and continues to do so while so little of the world is at peace.

To Germany

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

The delicately-drawn 'memoir' of a marionette carries complex allegorical resonance

This week's poem, "Puppet," is by Gillian Allnutt, winner of the Northern Rock Foundation Writers' award in 2005. It was first published in her 2004 collection, Sojourner, and is re-printed in How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe).

Born in London in 1949, a period when the second world war's shadows still lingered heavily, Allnutt writes from a strongly personal sense of history. Sometimes described as a "spiritual" poet, she belongs to the contemplative tradition, and she is scholarly and deft in handling religious subject-matter. But her poems love the world, too. They have a lapidary quality, and are brightly dotted with the names, places, small scenes and treasured objects of everyday life.

In this week's poem, the Puppet is one of those significant objects. He tells his own story, a little autobiography beginning with an expression of humility and collectivism: "There are many like me." This is perhaps already a cue to imagine vaster populations, displaced by war or political cataclysm. This Puppet is an enigmatic symbol – but his puppet-presence is lightly and beautifully sketched in.

The language is simple and deliberately repetitive, as in a fairytale. The story accumulates from separate statements that reflect the jointed, discrete movements of a marionette. He belongs to another time, "a world of wood and old wives' tales", and to another place, as the reference to the name of his maker, Vaclav, tells us. His memories of Czechoslovakia seem to be pre-war. The voice, with its series of vivid but increasingly uncertain memories, is that of exile.

Traditionally, the Czech marionette was made with one hand closed and one hand open, so it could hold an object such as a flower or a sword. This one evidently held a sword. We're not told what he represented – a pirate or sailor, perhaps, as the sword was lost "at sea". Presumably, this was a theatrical puppet, and the sea an imaginary one. A cheerful, riverside Sunday show came to an end. The narrative grows more elusive, as if the puppet had become foggy about the distinction between reality and fantasy. Perhaps there was a real voyage, in which he travelled into emigration with his owner and his theatrical family?

There's an additional fairytale element when he recalls that Vaclav's "middle daughter made me with her milk and silver needle". This has the flavour of magic. Vaclav's daughter may be an ordinary young woman, dressing the bare wooden puppets to make a living, a baby at her breast. But the puppet clearly feels that something tender and magical, in addition to the "several knives", has gone into his creation.

"I was laid aside, like Czechoslovakia" contains a powerful comparison, all the more chilling for the understatement of "laid aside". No doubt it recalls the Munich betrayal. Perhaps it also hints at the gentler events of the 1990s, when Czechoslovakia was dissolved into two separate states.

The poem is arranged in a characteristic manner, one which Allnutt increasingly adopts in her later work. The unit of the sentence becomes the stanza. This lets the lines breathe, and slows the reader so that sound and nuance are more intensely registered. Delicate alliterative effects and cross-rhymes occur throughout the poem, but the strongest come in the final stanza. Additional internal rhymes (sea/me, rotted/knotted) here suggest the anguished tangle of the strings. They're silk (another fantasy?) but the adjectives – red, raw, rotted – suggest flesh or tendons, exposed and painful. The puppet, made "to hold only the strings that hold me", is immobilised now by the threads that once allowed him to move.

How the Bicycle Shone is a remarkably cohesive volume, showing how faithful Allnutt has remained to her imaginative sources. The poems often interrelate, even across decades, and much of the collection is best read as an extended sequence. "Puppet" stands by itself, but, to fully savour the craft of one of the most trustworthy poets currently writing, you need to read the book.

Puppet

There are many like me.

I was made in a world of wood and old wives' tales.

I was made, with rings in my head and heels, to hold only
the strings that hold me.

Vaclav made me with his several knives.

His middle daughter made me with her milk and silver needle.

I lost my sword at sea when the captain ran off with me
in the play

and Sundays by the Vltava.

I was laid aside, like Czechoslovakia.

My strings were made of raw silk, red, and rotted
at sea and knotted themselves around me.

Written just before its author's execution for treason, the potency of this poem has as much do with its language as its poignant context

This week's poem, popularly known as "Tichborne's Elegy", was written either by a terrorist or a Christian martyr, depending on your point of view. Chidiock Tichborne was born into a devout Catholic family in Southampton, circa 1558. His life became increasingly difficult after Elizabeth I made the practice of Catholicism illegal, and he and his father, who had already spent time in prison, found themselves under constant surveillance.

The younger Tichborne joined the conspiracy known as the Babington Plot, which aimed to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I, and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. The plot was foiled, and Tichborne arrested. Three of his poems survive, of which this week's choice is by far the best, and the best-known. It was enclosed with a letter to his wife Agnes, despatched from the Tower of London on the eve of his execution for treason.

The poem gains a poignant authenticity from the biographical context, and no doubt this helps account for its popularity. It seems to come from the heart, the "I" of the poem at one with that of the condemned man writing it. Yet it would be no less fine a technical achievement if it had been framed as a dramatic monologue. The weaving of antithetical statements into paradox is masterly: the effect is neither playful nor literary but reveals the profound contradictions implicit in the human condition.

Tichborne's metaphorical dexterity is coupled with an ingenious use of tense to suggest the blurring of past and present. The repetition of "now" in the last line of each stanza has the effect of suggesting a passage of time so swift that past and present are telescoped: "And now I live, and now my life is done."

In fact, Tichborne was probably 28 at the time: in terms of Elizabethan life-expectancy he was hardly a green youth. The poem is truthful but it is also a performance, dramatising the actual situation into a dance of life with death. What could be more artificial than an elegy written by a poet for himself? This is not mere autobiography, but autobiography transcended and shaped into art. If he really wrote it the night before his execution, the act of composition must have been deeply absorbing. Let's hope it brought him some temporary serenity and consolation.

The poem was first printed in 1586, in the Royalist compilation, Verses of Prayse and Joye. I thought it would be interesting to include the riposte to the elegy, printed in the same collection, and usually attributed (I hope wrongly) to the pioneering Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Kyd.

The "Decasyllabon" lacks the force and skill of the original. There's no larger perspective, no sense of compassion. Its author lamely tries to appropriate Tichborne's metaphorical grand slam, only to say nothing more interesting than that the young traitor got all he deserved. I'm not sure what conclusion might be drawn from this, beyond the fact that Tichborne had the greater poetic talent. It might be that death makes a better muse than hatred, except that hatred has inspired plenty of fine satirical poems in its time. Perhaps the real trouble is that TK was not writing from any strong personal emotion at all. He was simply voicing the politically correct and safe sentiments of his age, conscious that the Queen's censors were looking over his shoulder.

Tychbornes Elegie, written with his owne hand in the Tower before his execution

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of paine,
My Crop of corne is but a field of tares,
And al my good is but vaine hope of gaine.
The day is past, and yet I saw no sunne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard, and yet it was not told,
My fruite is falne, & yet my leaves are greene:
My youth is spent, and yet I am not old,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seene.
My thred is cut, and yet it is not spunne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death, and found it in my wombe,
I lookt for life, and saw it was a shade:
I trod the earth, and knew it was my Tombe,
And now I die, and now I was but made.
My glasse is full, and now my glasse is runne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

Hendecasyllabon TK in Cygneam Cantionem Chidiochi Tychborne

Thy prime of youth is frozen with thy faults,
Thy feast of joy is finisht with thy fall:
Thy crop of corne is tares availing naughts,
Thy good God knowes, thy hope, thy hap and all.
Short were thy daies, and shadowed was thy sun,
T'obscure thy light unluckelie begun.

Time trieth trueth, & trueth hath treason tript,
Thy faith bare fruit as thou hadst faithless beene:
Thy ill spent youth thine after yeares hath nipt,
And God that saw thee hath preserved our Queen,
Her thred still holds, thine perisht though unspun,
And she shall live when traitors lives are done.

Thou soughtest thy death, and found it in desert,
Thou look'dst for life, yet lewdlie forc'd it fade:
Thou trodst the earth, and now in earth thou art,
As men may wish thou never hadst beene made.
Thy glorie and thy glasse are timeles runne,
And this, O Tychborne, hath thy treason done.

With careful observation animated by bright metaphor, this nature study is quite unafraid of anthropomorphism

This week's poem, "Musk-Ox", is from Jane Yeh's second collection, The Ninjas, recently published by Carcanet Press, and deservedly welcomed in a recent Guardian review by Aingeal Clare. Jane Yeh is an American poet based in London. Her voice, to my ear, has a distinctly English quality. Combining fantasy, melancholy, precision and gently-disturbing wit, it suggests at times how Lewis Carroll could have written, had he been a young 21st-century postmodernist.

While Yeh often enjoys letting the various characters in her poems do the talking, her venture, in "Musk-Ox," into third-person narration allows her a fuller focus on externals. This poem gives us the creature's impressively cumbersome, and very hairy physical presence. At first, it's as if he were being filmed on location. Later, although we never entirely lose the more realist view of him, the poem gradually switches over from wildlife documentary to a beautiful animated cartoon, one which allows the musk-ox to morph into the identity of his dreams – that of a salmon "… In the deep green/Water, flashing his iridescent scales".

The clustering of metaphor ("wall of fur", "dry waterfall", "oversized/Powder puff – ambulatory/ Moustache", "a minibus/ Made of hair…") suggests a technical device associated with the so-called Martian school of poets, who, in their turn, were influenced by the technique of ostranenie ("making strange") favoured by the Russian formalists. Yeh, like Craig Raine in his earlier work, favours sensible-looking quatrains, cracked apart with unpredictable, sometimes jolting, line-breaks. The images are not reinforced by the rhythm but consciously disrupted by it, in a further process of defamiliarisation,

Yeh's tone is generally more overtly affectionate, though, than that of the Martian poets. For them, the love was in the close looking and detailed description. Here, there is an added, quirky characterisation. This is where the Lewis Carroll effect comes in. Yeh's musk-ox increasingly seems to become naturalised to the human world. He longs, like so many of us, for a "svelter/ Silhouette". He absorbs our values, our judgments. The tufts of wool on his back are "jaunty", the pair of horns "gamely frames// His long, sad face". This musk-ox is stoical but not entirely happy in his skin. In real life, he'd belong to a herd: in the poem, he's almost existentially alone. And so he points to a hopelessly paradoxical human desire: to meld into conformity, to shine with special beauty.

One of the pleasures of this poem, and of many other animal poems by Yeh, is the guiltless, almost jubilant acceptance of its own anthropomorphism. That stance is also an honest one. How can any mere human begin to relate to the (more) natural world, let alone write vividly about it, without a degree of self-projection? No achieved poetic creature, from Christopher's Smart's cat Jeoffrey to Elizabeth Bishop's moose, is un-coloured by its human imaginer – and we should be grateful for, rather than scornful of, the fact.

One day, I feel certain, science will confirm that most animals possess enough signifier-processing ability to provide them with a rudimentary ability to think, and that they can feel a rich range of emotions. Until then, we have the poets – and, of course, ordinary pet-owners everywhere – to remind us of our kinship with those to whom we once supposed ourselves to be the divinely-ordained superiors.

Musk-Ox

His impassive side
Is an astounding wall of fur, a kind
Of dry waterfall
Formed of long strands of hair –

The unchecked growth
Of his copious wool hide
Swamps him entirely; somewhere under there
Are four unsightly legs

And hooves, but you wouldn't know it. Oversized
Powder puff – ambulatory
Moustache – through Arctic grassland
He onerously glides, his back

Festooned with jaunty tufts
Of wool. His prehistoric skull barely clears
The dense fur
Around it; a pair of drooping horns

Gamely frames
His long, sad face. If he could speak, he'd ask
For a svelter
Silhouette (or at least more

Lichens to graze on). Happiness comes
From enduring,
It seems. His tiny eyes rove over
The rich summer landscape. He lumbers

Up a crest like a minibus
Made of hair, patiently looking for
The next buffet
Of grasses. If he could choose, he'd

Be reborn
As a salmon – sleek as a torpedo
In the deep green
Water, flashing his iridescent scales.

This ode to the mysterious sea creature is as a much heartfelt homage as it is a grisly lesson in marine biology

It may be the season of advent, but the "star of wonder" described in this week's poem – "Starfish" by John Wedgwood Clarke – is not directly related to the one in the popular Christmas carol. Asteroidea are not stars and not classified as fish, either: marine biologists prefer the term "sea star".

Nonetheless, the creature the poem photographs from such varied angles is truly awe-inspiring, so ingeniously adapted to its environment with its water-powered feet and cardiac stomach that it must count as a miracle (from the Latin, miraculum and mirari = to wonder at). It becomes more, not less, extraordinary, the more closely it's examined and understood. But the poem resists both over-explication and sentimentality. It reveals a starfish of both wonder and terror.

Wedgwood Clarke, whose chapbook, Sea Swim, was published earlier this year, is currently resident at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Science at the Scarborough campus of the University of Hull. "Starfish" is from a collection-in-progress, Aristotle's Lantern, reflecting the poet's fascination with aquatic zoology, and his interest in imaginative connections between the humanities and sciences.

This interest is evident in the combination of images in the poem. Its striking opening line, "Star of wonder, star of teeth", leads into a bizarre and dramatic litany, which will fuse accurate detail with descriptive and associative elements. The effect is a kind of double exposure: the starfish imagined by the untrained eye (which, for instance, sees ossicles as "teeth" and comes up with the metaphor of "zip-fastener undersides") and the starfish anatomised. That untrained eye seems to be connected to childhood, the childhood which has been "drowned in the sea", along with the child's excitement, perhaps, at finding his first starfish.

An important focus in the poem is digestion, metaphorical and literal. The starfish is already a specimen, a meal for the mind – "in a white tray, under the knife", in stanza two. In the next, we're told how the starfish feeds, its stomach emerging from its mouth when there is prey to be engulfed. At this point, if not before, the creature becomes almost horrific: "Star of guts that come out to devour/ Star without centre, brain all over." The plain language is raw and forceful. The Latin word, echinoderm, is avoided but suggested in the following line, and sounds fearsome in itself. This star is a killer: it has to be. With its strangely undifferentiated organs, it seems to threaten the more tidily compartmentalised organisms, such as ourselves.

Digestion is also a metaphor for the way we subject living creatures to processes of verbal classification. Perhaps turning a starfish into a poem is to devour it. For Wedgwood Clarke, the "star of wonder" is reduced by dissection ("star of cuts") and the labels which confirm its lifeless parts. But the poem finally reminds us that the starfish hasn't yielded every secret. The last line may allude to the pedicellariae– structures whose purpose is not fully understood – or it may hint at those proteins that still puzzle geneticists. We're in unclassified territory again, and the modern magi still have a long way to go as they journey towards enlightenment.

Starfish

Star of wonder, star of teeth,
Star of feet that breathe as they're squeezed,
Star with an eye at the end of each ray,
Star of zip-fastener undersides,

Star of childhood drowned in the sea,
Star in a white tray, under the knife,
Star of guts that come out to devour,
Star without centre, brain all over,

Star of Latin and death and spines,
Star of cuts slicing star from fish,
Star of labels digesting these innards
into star of wonder and function unknown.

This intense and erotic lyric by a Victorian Englishman, set in an Arabia of the mind, may not be 'authentic' but its power is stunning

This week's poem is "An Arab Love-Song", by Francis Thompson (1859-1907), author of the great Christian ode, "The Hound of Heaven" and not to be confused with the Scottish poet James Thomson (1834-82), who wrote "The City of Dreadful Night". Both men were utterly original, extremists in their work and in their sometimes wretched lives. But James was the true poète maudit, the "laureate of pessimism", as he was nicknamed, who could raise squalor to the level of the visionary. Francis, despite his own dreadful nights of homelessness and addiction, was blessed by a strong religious faith, and by the friendship and support of the Meynells. Thanks largely to their interventions, he kicked his opium habit for extensive periods, made his mark as an essayist, and published three collections of verse before a final descent into dereliction. This little erotic lyric is an oddity in his work, and yet it seems to possess, in miniature, the rhythmic drive and flexibility which make "The Hound Of Heaven" memorable on its more ambitious scale.

While living rough in London, Thompson found occasional refuge with a kindly woman who worked as a prostitute. But the inspiration of "An Arab Love-Song" is thought to be a later acquaintance, a young short story writer named Katie King. Her mother disapproved of Thompson's courtship, and warned him off in a hurtful letter. "Thy tribe's black tents" is eloquent code for what he felt about the King family.

Borrowing the mask of another culture, perhaps pretending to be a translation, the poem might, with some justification, be labelled pastiche. What Thompson knew first-hand about Arabic poetry is unclear. His English filters are plain to see. There's a Biblical tone, particularly audible in the third stanza. Coleridge's poetry, we know, had touched his imagination, and it seems very likely that he had fallen under the spell of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Of course, it's not impossible that Thompson had heard real Arabic love songs. He roamed the streets of England's capital city for three years, and must have met and talked with many passing strangers at the all-night coffee stalls he haunted – "those little centres of distressed humanity waiting for the dawn".

More likely, though, Thompson's song belongs to an Arabia of his imagination. Its very informality underlines that impression (Arabic poetry was traditionally highly formalised). With its episodic and asymmetrical stanzas, the verses have a strange and no doubt deliberate nomadic quality.

It opens with three sets of irregular couplets. A certain whimsicality is more than offset by that striking image of the clouds as "hunchèd camels". The expected adjective is "humped" but "hunched" both suggests the characteristic shape, and, in a stroke of realism, shows us animals huddled together on the sand, at rest, because it's night. Then, picking up the "moon" rhyme for the first line, and plainly echoing Fitzgerald, Thompson expands into a longer-lined, highly emotive tercet. The declaration of love leads to a thought that, for a Victorian poet, must remain un-sayable (even for a Victorian poet in Orientalist guise) but the erotic intensity is thoroughly insinuated: "And night will catch her breath up, and be dumb."

The voice of the dramatic lyric, as a genre, does not need to be authentic to the poet; though it has to be, or appear, emotionally authentic. Thompson's title demands we conjure up a speaker – or singer – from a different culture. The genuineness or otherwise of the original impulse can be judged only by criteria belonging to the poet's own language – the rhythmic energy, the linguistic inventiveness. Thompson's poem is endowed with both.

The last, seven-line, verse is structurally the boldest, closer to prose than poetry, with rhymes (mother/ brother/brother/mother) that seem casual, almost accidental, subdued to the rhetoric of invocation. Their sound is suitably breathy, almost gasping. The thought is bold, too, when the speaker claims, God-like, to be his beloved's father, brother and mother. Finally, Thompson leaves us with another vivid picture, earthbound this time, as if to balance the earlier imagery of the night sky. The contrast of the "black tents" and the "red pavilion" (recalling the exclamation, "blood of my heart") is almost simplistic, almost crude – yet it's a striking evocation of the polarity of death and life, resistance and invitation.

Thompson's quirky technique never detracts from the fluidity and inevitability of the utterance. Though it might seem one of the by-products of Victorian poetry, this poem actually expresses an essential quality of the age, its power of synthesis. An Arab love song sung by an Englishman, tenuously linked, if at all, to the real grandeur of Arabic literary tradition, the poem is a cunning disguise. It allows Thompson an intensity unlike anything we find in his other secular poems. If the right hand doesn't always know what the left is doing, this is a left-handed poem. I wish he'd written more.

An Arab Love-Song

The hunchèd camels of the night
Trouble the bright
And silver waters of the moon.
The Maiden of the Morn will soon
Through Heaven stray and sing,
Star gathering.

Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,
Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!
And night will catch her breath up, and be dumb.

Leave thy father, leave thy mother
And thy brother;
Leave the black tents of thy tribe apart!
Am I not thy father and thy brother,
And thy mother?
And thou – what needest with thy tribe's black tents
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?

Robert Louis Stevenson telescopes the distance between a cosy Christmas scene and a life-and-death struggle on the high seas

Born in Edinburgh in 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was the son of a light-house engineer. He was a sickly child and a life-long invalid, but an inveterate traveller, living his final years in Samoa, where he was known as "Tusitala" – the Teller of Tales. While Queen Victoria's reign saw the steady rise of steam-powered ships, sailing vessels only slowly became obsolete, and ships often used a combination of steam and sail. Stevenson had very likely experienced first-hand, if only as a passenger, the drama of "Christmas at Sea."

The poem first appeared in the Scots Observer in 1888, several years after the publication of the enormously successful adventure novel Treasure Island. It's a confident performance, vividly depicting, from the point of view of a crew-member, the life-or-death struggle of steering a sailing-ship through winter storms, and contrasting this with a glowingly sentimental, spy-glass view of a Victorian family Christmas. The dash of novelistic irony in the poem is that the parlour scene the sailor witnesses is taking place in his own childhood home.

Immediately, the poem strikes the reader's tactile sense, with sails frozen so hard their edges "cut the naked hand." Then it troubles our sense of balance with those decks "like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand." The 7-beat line is well-chosen. The metre is regular, on the whole, but the relentless rise and fall evokes a pitching movement and simultaneous lack of progress: the frequent slight mid-line caesura adds a momentary hesitation, as if the line had crested a wave and was about to topple. There's a brilliant effect when Stevenson adds an extra syllable in line 21, evoking the tumbled sound of church-bells rung "with a mighty jovial cheer." This, the sixth stanza, is where we learn that it's now Christmas morning.

Stevenson never fails to sustain the reader's interest in the story, or faith in the narrator. He finds an authentic-sounding voice, using judicious touches of dialect spliced with enough sailing jargon to make for a thoroughly convincing mariner's tale – to this landlubber, anyhow. At first, the protagonist speaks as a crew-member, but later shifts from the collective "we" as his experience becomes a personal one and separates him from the others.

Unfolding at a smooth, unhurried pace, the narrative maintains tension, and a happy ending for the ship and her crew seems by no means guaranteed. Stevenson's craft reminds me of something once said by the poet-priest Peter Levi: that a poet must hear every nuance of his poem just as an 18th century sailor would have been aware of every creak and squeak of his ship. Stevenson tacks and hoists the sails of the narrative with a timing that is truly elegant.

The domestic scene the speaker views with such uncanny clarity is clearly not meant to be a fantasy. The house he sees above the coastguard's is where his parents are still living, celebrating Christmas under the shadow of an absent son. He sees the old couple in some detail: they, of course, cannot see him. The ship is eventually manoeuvred into safety and now the speaker most sharply feels his separation from the collective: "And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me…" The danger is past and the vessel is "pointing handsome out to sea" but the speaker is stricken with guilt and a sense of mortality. He left home before, but without thinking about it. The voyage has been one of understanding: he has learnt that time passes, parents age and die. Now he is really leaving home.

Whether you're literally at sea, or only metaphorically "all at sea" this Christmas, here's wishing "Poem of the Week" readers a a cheery and storm-free passage through the festivities … "Fetch aft the rum, me hearties."

Christmas at Sea

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor'wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But 'twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops'l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So's we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every 'long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it's just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard's was the house where I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.

And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.

They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
'All hands to loose top gallant sails,' I heard the captain call.
'By the Lord, she'll never stand it,' our first mate, Jackson, cried.
… 'It's the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,' he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter's day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

This brief, beautiful love poem captures the sense of expectation with which we greet a new year

This week's poem, and one to welcome in the new year, is "Breathless" by the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi. It's translated from the Arabic by Sarah Maguire, a fine poet as well as translator, whose original collections include The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto), shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award. Poems, her translations of Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi's work, made in collaboration with Sabry Hafez, was published by Enitharmon Press in association with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2008.

The Centre, which Maguire founded and directs, is a wonderful resource for the poetry of significant writers from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The poems featured appear in triple text - so you can read Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi's original poem in Arabic, and turn to a literal English translation by Hafiz Kheir. The website features a substantial number of poems by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi.

He was born in 1969 in Omdurman, Khartoum. His poetry achieved popularity and critical acclaim while he was still a teenager, and he had already established an international reputation when he was invited to London to represent Sudan in the 2012 Olympic Games-inspired celebration, Poetry Parnassus. The timing couldn't have been luckier. Although declining the title of political activist when interviewed by the Guardian's Richard Lea in 2006, the poet was considered sufficient political threat to be stripped of the post of cultural editor of the newspaper Al-Sudani, which he'd held for many years, during the anti-government uprising in July 2012. Many arrests occurred during the period, and it's highly likely that he would have faced imprisonment.

"Breathless" is a love-poem – tender, direct and almost shy in tone. Like the short lyrics and fragments by Sappho it gains intensity from brevity. Sappho often pairs frank emotional statement with imagery from the natural world: "Love shook my heart,/ Like the wind on the mountain/ Troubling the oak-trees." (Sappho, tr. A S Kline). "Breathless", too, begins with the human response: "Your heart thumps -". Grammatically, the poem could be addressing someone else, but that insider knowledge about the excitedly thumping heart suggests an interior address, a speaker talking to and about himself.

"Thumps" is a dense, almost physically heavy verb, and it's probably the most strongly accented word in the poem – and certainly in the first six lines. The ensuing rhythms are lighter and airier, with three unstressed line-endings ("already", "expecting her," "window.") There's an interesting grammatical shift, from the past subjunctive mood ("as if she were already/ at your door") to an unexpected indicative when the birds "arrive to clamour at your window." The dramatic descent of "all the birds in the midday sky" is magnified by the shift, and the more significant arrival, hers, foreshadowed. Avoiding the cliche of the fluttering heart, the poem clearly means the birds to symbolise heightened excitement and unanimous purpose. Kheir's more literal (but still poetic) translation describes the birds "gathering/ to line up at your window." The birds seem to be "expecting her" and, in Maguire's version, clamouring rather than lining up, they themselves have turned into expectations.

"An age of patience" suggests its opposite, the impatiently waiting lover, for whom time stretches immeasurably. Stony deferral is contrasted with nervous movement and urgency - "A forest of fluttering". The loved one is already imaginatively present, and yet still awaited. The speaker notes the difficulty of the wait with a touch of gracefully comic exaggeration ("An age…").

"Breathless" is not originally a stanzaic poem, but the use of stanzas, as well as dashes, heightens the sense of what it is to be out of breath and lost for words. In a mystery familiar to love poets, there's always something that tries to escape both honest realism and complex metaphor. It may be expressed in a poem's silences – as here. A row of ellipses separates the last "couplet" from the rest of the poem. The reader is free to fill in the dotted line – or not. It literally makes us wait, and helps visualise for us that "age of patience". It also emphasises the antithetical connection of the last two lines,

Without knowing Arabic, it's impossible to discuss the original poem, or, with any authority, the processes which brought it to its final English version. A translation must convince us fully in the new language. If translation is a journey it's also an art of home-making, of settling rather than trapping a poem in a new linguistic space so that, while it brings with it something new and unfamiliar, there's no sense of dislocation. Here, the image of "all the birds in the midday sky" might evoke an African setting: a bluer, hotter sky than England's, a richer medley of birds. At the same time, there's a faint echo of Edward Thomas's "Adlestrop" and the domesticity of "all the birds/ Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire". This is one of the strange miracles of translation. When a poem journeys into a new language, it's reborn contextually. There are losses and gains, but, in a translation which has become a convincing new poem, as here, any loss remains invisible.

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi's own journey, to date, ends hopefully. He was granted asylum in the UK, and spent a period funded by the Arts Council of England as Writer in Residence at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. The poems he wrote during the residency should be ready for publication in the spring of 2013. You can follow the progress of this new work and its translation by signing up to the PTC's mailing-list.

Meanwhile, join me in wishing Saddiq happiness and fulfilment in his new life in 2013.

Breathless

Your heart thumps -
as if she were already
at your door.

Or - as if expecting her -
all the birds in the midday sky
arrive to clamour at your window.

.........

An age of patience.
A forest of fluttering.

From a writer known for his pious themes, these verses offer an appealingly mundane view of time's passing

The Protestant poet, Francis Quarles, by his own description was an "Essex quill". He was born in Romford in 1592 into a family with a long tradition of royal service. He began as a lawyer, fathered 18 children, became Chronologer to the City of London, and worked as secretary to James Ussher, the religious historian and Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, in addition to varied literary activities. His career had its vicissitudes, despite his much-proclaimed loyalty to King James I, and life-long devotion to the Royalist cause, and he died in poverty in 1644. He wrote pamphlets and one play, but achieved his greatest success as a poet. His second collection Emblems immediately sold out, proving especially popular with the Puritan readership. Impressively illustrated by William Marshall, among others, the collection moved Alexander Pope, in the Dunciad, to comment: "the pictures for the page atone/ And Quarles is saved by beauty not his own."

The title of this week's poem, "The Shortness of Life", reminds us that Quarles was concerned to work themes suitable for religious meditation into his poetry. But it's rather less didactic in tone than usual, and doesn't flag up its underlying Christian moral. There's a kind of bluff realism in the language and attitude, suggesting independence from dogma. The fascination with time's passing perhaps owes something to his experience as a Chronologer. Quarles is a solid craftsman, if not a finely elegant one, and, here as elsewhere, Pope's verdict on his verse seems undeserved.

The informally-phrased question, "And what's a life," is answered by a trope beloved of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, the metaphor of the stage. As if dissatisfied with the conventional answer, Quarles repeats the question, and this time comes up with a different image – the summer-meadow "wearing her green plush". This is predictable too, perhaps, but it's given an original and refreshing "turn", when, as if no longer worth the poet's personification, the meadow subsides into the merely material substance – hay.

In the third stanza, the speaker comes on stage. You can imagine him strolling moodily through the gardens of a great house, searching, like Hamlet in the graveyard, for a memento mori. He finds it in the shape of a dial. The demonstrative, "this dial", might suggest that the poem itself had been destined for inscription on an ornamented sundial. Both the references to "this dial" and "these lilies" bring their objects close to the reader. It's possible there's a sundial somewhere in England bearing a fragment of Quarles's text. On the other hand, the dial could simply be the poet's own time-scarred face. The lilies ("fair copies of my life") are more difficult to interpret.

It seems at first that the speaker is an older man ("my short-lived winter's day") but in stanza five, there's a conflicting chronology in "my nonaged day." Of course, the speaker might be picking different vantage-points from which to view the brevity of a life. Or the winter's day might not only be metaphorical. The hours of daylight, "but from eight to four," are precisely spanned to an English mid-winter.

It's tempting to believe that some direct personal experience is feeding Quarles's imagination. For instance, he travelled abroad with Princess Elizabeth, as an aide on the occasion of her marriage to the Elector Palatine. "How simple is my suit! How small my boon!" might conceivably be inspired by a comparison of ordinary circumstances with the complex "suit" and showy "boon" of royal marriage.

"Slender inch" may refer to the miniature length of winter daylight, to life itself, or even to the style (the device on the sundial which casts the shadow). The spelling of "wile" as a verb meaning "to magic," is surprising and produces a neat, unostentatious pun with the implicit "while." After the poet's brief flirtation with a fantasy of consolation, the last stanza doggedly refuses false hopes. The concluding statement, "here's nothing worth a smile", gains force from the caesura before it, though the tone seems a little sulky. While it signals the importance of other values to the religious believer, looking forward to eternal rewards "over there", it seems more immediately to express an ordinarily glum fit of the "winter blues". For modern readers, averse to preaching, that tone lends an attractive human quality to the poem – and to the poet.

The Shortness of Life

And what's a life? A weary pilgrimage,
Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage
With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.

And what's a life? The flourishing array
Of the proud summer-meadow, which to-day
Wears her green plush, and is to-morrow hay.

Read on this dial, how the shades devour
My short-lived winter's day! hour eats up hour;
Alas! the total's but from eight to four.

Behold these lilies, which Thy hands have made
Fair copies of my life, and open laid
To view, how soon they droop, how soon they fade!

Shade not that dial, night will blind too soon;
My nonaged day already points to noon;
How simple is my suit! how small my boon!

Nor do I beg this slender inch to wile
The time away, or falsely to beguile
My thoughts with joy: here's nothing worth a smile.

Both modern and ancient, this variation on the pastoral is a poignant meditation on the fate of the South Downs

This week's poem, "Shepherds", gives contemporary resonance to the pastoral elegy. It's by Sasha Dugdale and comes from her third collection Red House, published by Carcanet last year under their Oxford Poets imprint. Pastoral poets traditionally transposed their shepherd characters to a distant Golden Age, and gave them infinite leisure for their courtly preoccupations. Dugdale's focus is on the Sussex shepherds of the South Downs, "ghosts" now, but also real working men in a real place. Their decline, hastened by the expansion of arable farming during the second world war, seems to have otherwise been little noticed or lamented. These shepherds and their flocks trudged the old chalk grassland of the South Downs for thousands of years, and, as the poem shows us, helped shape the landscape as it is now. The very turf – short, springy, foot-friendly – is the work of generations of browsing sheep and nibbling rabbits.

The month is June, suggesting midsummer abundance and ceremony, with perhaps a gentle heat haze. The fine summer of 1914 seems also to hover. As if the figures might have reassembled "out of battle", the hook on the end of the shepherd's crook, designed to hold a lantern, carries in line two an ominous "musket barrel."

The internal "crook/hook" rhyme is picked up by "book" at the end of the stanza. That predominantly choppy sound might hint at distant gunfire, though it also echoes the tones of the solider sheep-bells, summoned by WH Hudson in A Shepherd's Life, as "the sonorous clonk-clonk of the big copper bell".

The visually striking compound depiction of the wind-sculpted hawthorn as "mermaid's hair and open book" is followed by an isolated hexameter line, like a down-to-earth corrective: "There are those who died on the hills, and those who died in their beds". Subsequent images suggest accidental conflagration ("the oil lamp tipped") as well as soldiering ("their crook a rifle/ cigarettes for their bible"). The word "rifle", rather than "musket", denotes a more recent war, and produces a startling para-rhyme with "bible".

The landscape seems reflected in the shape of the poem. Ebbing and flowing rhythms gradually unveil new perspectives. Dugdale sometimes avoids punctuation, letting the natural break at the end of the line do the work, or leaving the syntactic units connectively open. An occasional comma or stop at the end of a line seems to forge a link with the next, rather than a separation. The short closing line of each stanza creates a melodic cadence which is often a prelude to the next unit of sound.

"The South is tender and will harbour anyone," Edward Thomas wrote in his essay, "The South Country". This gentleness is registered by Dugdale when she personifies and feminises the land and writes that she (the land) is "never like a moor, never fierce like that". But neither is Nature, as conceived in the Red House poems, soft and sweet. Power as well as kindness is recognised in the way "She'd carry you back to our own gate/ On the palm of her hand … " There's a faintly visionary aspect, too. Although "the hills are not high" they are separate from "our low troubles". The children see them with "a shock of memory" – suggesting that the view, although familiar, is always freshly sensed, and brings, despite its magical proximity to the sky, a feeling of ancestral closeness.

The shepherds are not simply ghostly or mythic in stanza four: their association with the remote "high roads" of "kings and saints" is also a function of their work. The last we see of them is their dogs, also "Creatures apart". The poem is not entirely centred on the shepherds, however, and now it extends its reach in time and space – "Down the scarp, up there … " The beautiful last stanza reworks the trope of land as Bible, prefigured by the hawthorn's "open book". After the "blazing white" of sunlit chalk, suggesting bridal linen as well as clean paper, lovingly picked-out details illuminate this sacred South Downs text, and the sounds are as delicate as the images: "She wrote it in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady's smock/ She wrote it in sweet marjoram and adorned it with bells … "

The poignancy of the past tense and the possessive pronoun ("she wrote it for her shepherds") deepens the linguistic metaphor. What began as an elegy for the shepherds, and then became a eulogy for the Downs, seems finally to elegise language – the collaborative meaning made and shared between the place and its inhabitants, "Who are gone". The unreadable landscape seems, in that bleakly simple ending, to anticipate its own decline, a decline that can be interpreted to include printed "bibles" of all kinds. Pastoral gains a contemporary "edge" in Dugdale's threnody, but the poem's roots surely extend beyond ecological or social critique into the live connection between the close-reading poet (also a professional translator) and her native Sussex countryside.

Shepherds

Late June the ghosts of shepherds meet on the hills
And one has his crook with its musket barrel hook
One carries a Bible, and all wear the smock
And listen out for the little bells and the canister bells
Worn by the sheep and the big cattle, carried by the wind
Which shapes the hawthorn into mermaid's hair and open book.

There are those who died on the hills, and those who died in their beds,

The haloed, who wear a flame above them, were
Asleep in their wagons, the stove door ajar
The oil lamp tipped. And scores stamp
A last ghastly dawn patrol – their crook a rifle
Cigarettes for their bible.

The hills are not high. High enough
To exist outside us, our low troubles
At the school gates the children look up
And see with a shock of memory
That the earth gathers itself
Into another world
One closer to the sky

Once peopled by shepherds,
Who inherited the high roads from kings and saints
As they passed, withy ropes about their shoulders.
Who spoke little, and wore tall hats
Bawled gently at their dogs,
Who were themselves
Creatures apart

Times when the mist comes up
And rolls like weighted grey
Down the scarp, up there
The cars see their lamps reflected back
A metre ahead, and the back of her is silent
But never like a moor, never fierce like that
She'd carry you back to your own gate
On the palm of her hand – not bury you alive.

Her spine is a landshed, and a land of itself
A land of haunches and shoulders, and glistening fields
Impossible that they weren't in love with her
The kindness of her miles, the smalls of her back,
The blazing white of her summers.

The Bible is her book: she wrote it for her shepherds
To train them in oblivion and seasons
And the time she knows, the slowest time on earth.
She wrote it in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady's smock
She wrote it in sweet marjoram and she adorned it with bells
And it has no meaning for anyone, except the shepherds
Who are gone.

To mark the Bard's birthday week, one of his own favourites, describing a celidh to remember

This week, the Scottish Bard's birthday will be celebrated around the world, and what better relish to accompany your dram of usquabae than the mock-heroic, hero-mocking "Tam o'Shanter, a Tale", said to have been Burns's own favourite among his poems. It's a substantial feast of 224 lines, so I've chosen an extract, some verses from the climax of the narrative.

Burns wrote it for his friend Francis Grose, who had asked for a few lines to accompany the illustration of Alloway Kirk intended for volume two of his book The Antiquities of Scotland. Burns remembered the Ayrshire tale from his boyhood. A farmer from Carrick, detained after a long market-day, rides his mare home in the early hours, his course unavoidably passing by the haunted Alloway Kirk. Through the brightly-lit church windows he watches a demonic ceilidh, with Old Nick himself playing the pipes. One young witch, dancing in an under-slip too short for her, so impresses the farmer that he shouts, "Weel luppen, Maggy wei' the short sark!" – with the result that the demonic crew rounds on him and gives furious chase. In the poem, Burns changes the witch's name to Nannie Dee, and gives her an inspired nickname, having the irrepressible Tam call out "Weel done, Cutty-sark" ("Well-done, Mini-skirt!" in rough modern translation). Cutty-sark gave her name and figurehead to the Clyde-built tea-clipper and "tam o'shanter" (the surname probably derived from the Scots noun, mishanter) entered the language to denote a flat-crowned woollen hat with a pom-pom. Poetic immortality can take some strange twists and turns.

A clever exposition sets the scene of booze and bonhomie but works up a few Gothic expectations with warnings about "the mosses, waters, slaps and styles / That lie between us and our hame." After that, it's impossible to resist following the tale to – well, the tail-end – which, for the benefit of new readers, I won't divulge.

Among the sprightly innovations of the narrative, the way it frequently engages directly with Tam is especially piquant. There's no doubt Burns loves the character he has invented. He scolds Tam near the beginning for not heeding his wife's advice and here, in the third segment of our extract, where Tam stares transfixed by the "rigwoodie hags", challenges his taste in women. It's a chance for a sexual boast, too: if the witches had been handsomer, the narrator asserts, he'd have lent them his own once-plush "breeks".

Burns is always conscious of his readers. He draws us into the joke, whatever our gender, because the joke is ultimately on human frailty. His laughter is never cruel, his occasional deliveries of homely wisdom never self-righteous. The poem is not without moments of pathos, and may even have given its first readers a shudder or two in its gleeful summary of the "horrible and awefu',/ Which even to name wad be unlawfu'…" but there's never a doubt that the comic spirit presides. The rhymed tetrameter couplet seems the perfect vehicle for such uniquely rollicking irony. Burns's pace is carefully varied – headlong when it needs to be, sometimes reined-in, but never lacking momentum – and the Scots-English diction is unco' rich, packing the lines with colloquial grittiness and dense harmonies. Enjoy!

From Tam o'Shanter, a Tale

Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
Wi' tippeny, we fear nae evil;
Wi' usquabae, we'll face the devil!—
The swats sae ream'd in Tammie's noddle,
Fair play, he car'd na deils a boddle.
But Maggie stood right sair astonish'd,
Till, by the heel and hand admonish'd,
She ventured forward on the light;
And, vow! Tam saw an unco sight!
Warlocks and witches in a dance;
Nae cotillion brent new frae France,
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels,
Put life and mettle in their heels.
A winnock-bunker in the east,
There sat auld Nick, in shape o' beast;
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,
To gie them music was his charge:
He screw'd the pipes and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a' did dirl.—
Coffins stood round, like open presses,
That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses;
And by some devilish cantraip slight
Each in its cauld hand held a light.—
By which heroic Tam was able
To note upon the haly table,
A murderer's banes in gibbet airns;
Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns;
A thief, new-cutted frae a rape
Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape;
Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted;
Five scymitars, wi' murder crusted;
A garter, which a babe had strangled;
A knife, a father's throat had mangled,
Whom his ain son o' life bereft,
The grey hairs yet stack to the heft;
Wi' mair o' horrible and awefu',
Which even to name wad be unlawfu'.

     As Tammie glow'rd, amaz'd, and curious,
The mirth and fun grew fast and furious:
The piper loud and louder blew;
The dancers quick and quicker flew;
They reel'd, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit,
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
And coost her duddies to the wark,
And linket at it in her sark!

     Now, Tam, O Tam! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strapping in their teens,
Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linnen!
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair,
I wad hae gi'en them off my hurdies,
For ae blink o' the bonie burdies!

     But wither'd beldams, auld and droll,
Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal,
Lowping and flinging on a crummock,
I wonder didna turn thy stomach.

     But Tam kend what was what fu' brawlie,
There was ae winsome wench and wawlie,
That night enlisted in the core,
(Lang after kend on Carrick shore;
For mony a beast to dead she shot,
And perish'd mony a bony boat,
And shook baith meikle corn and bear,
And kept the country-side in fear:)
Her cutty sark, o' Paisley harn,
That while a lassie she had worn,
In longitude tho' sorely scanty,
It was her best, and she was vauntie.—
Ah! little kend thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,
Wi' twa pund Scots, ('twas a' her riches),
Wad ever grac'd a dance of witches!

     But here my Muse her wing maun cour;
Sic flights are far beyond her pow'r;
To sing how Nannie lap and flang,
(A souple jade she was, and strang),
And how Tam stood, like ane bewitch'd,
And thought his very een enrich'd;
Even Satan glowr'd, and fidg'd fu' fain,
And hotch'd an blew wi' might and main:
Till first ae caper, syne anither,
Tam tint his reason a' thegither,
And roars out, 'Weel done, Cutty-sark!'
And in an instant all was dark:
And scarcely had he Maggie rallied.
When out the hellish legion sallied.

Glossary
Tippeny – ale at tuppence a pint
usquabae– whisky
boddle – a worthless coin
brent new– brand new
winnock-bunker– window-seat
towzie tyke– ragged mongrel,
gart them skirl– made them shriek
dirl– shake
cantraip– trick
cleekit – linked arms
carlin – witch
duddies– rags
sark– shift
queans– young girls
creashie flannen– greasy flannel
hurdies– buttocks
rigwoodie– withered
spean– wean
crummock – crook
fu' brawlie– full well
wawlie– good-looking
cutty– short
harn– linen
coft – bought
cour– cower
fidg'd fu' fain – twitched with excitement
hotch'd – fidgeted
tint – lost

The Australian poet's blunt language describes the expectation of abuse and offers a metaphor for the suffering of old age

"Rendition" used to be an innocent sort of word, likely to be found in a kindly local-paper report of the end-of-term junior-school concert: "The Year 3 Recorder Band rounded off the evening with a tuneful rendition of 'Kumbaya'." Now the juridical meaning of the word is the one uppermost in people's minds, the qualifier "extraordinary" hovering with added menace. "Rendition" in this sense means the handing over of a person from one jurisdiction to another: "extraordinary rendition" allows the person to be sent to another country, usually one permitting interrogation under torture.

This week's poem, "Rendition", by the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, is shaped around a litany of pleas, spoken by someone imagining, and expecting, various forms of physical abuse. It's from the "New Poems" section of a career-spanning New and Selected Poems, recently published by Carcanet. Wallace-Crabbe, born in 1934, is a prolific and versatile writer. His technical accomplishment is immense, and the quick-thinking, good-humoured demotic makes it all look easy and easygoing. But his poetry is also concerned with the "blood and tears" that the painter and war-poet Isaac Rosenberg described, in relation to his paintings, as necessities of art. He was uncertain of his abilities as an artist, but when Rosenberg went into the trenches, he wrote poems that were true to the "blood and tears" of a particularly terrible war. "Rendition" has the universality and particularity of a great war-poem – but the frontline from which Wallace-Crabbe reports is not that of the battlefield.

Much of the poem's power, of course, lies in the graphic, if abbreviated, descriptions of the different methods of abuse. There's nothing elaborate in the language: it's blunt and simple, and that sparseness of poetic figure minimises the safe distance we normally keep between ourselves and full-on horror. The images are always memorable, from "the large plain dull old car" to "the bloody gobbet hacked off your left ear –/ which you are then going to be forced to eat." But the poem operates not only through images. As the relentless litany continues, all our senses are attacked in turn ("the cold, the blaring, the slaps", "pints of liquid trickled down your throat", "a bully's foul breath up against your face"). Nerve-endings are involved. We flinch, as the most vulnerable, pleasure-giving body-parts are insulted in a sadistic inversion of sexuality. The pain is accompanied by shame and literal shrinking: "the prodded humiliation of your nudity", "the naked genitals like frightened mice."

The tortures that the speaker's prayers evoke as he begs to be spared are so clearly described each time that it's as if the prayers were being rebuffed by a real interrogator in a real prison cell. In the fifth stanza, the pleading voice seems to rise to a roar of panic: "Fuck, no, not the electrodes." (If you thought that particular Anglo-Saxon-ism had been stripped of its force by casual overuse these days, think again.) But for all the immediacy of the scenes, the speaker is clearly outside the experience. The torture, so vividly imagined, is speculative. It could be taking place in any "Elsewhere," any "regime of colonels or generals of psychopaths".

This is one of many clues that the poem is asking to be read metaphorically. Another is the word "creeping". Torture involves "elaborate pain", but the initial pain is stunning rather than "creeping", or the "slow parody of how lives end". Right from the start, the poem is sending us in another direction. Even the title, "Rendition," has precise metaphorical resonance. Old age, no less than the past, is "another country." Most of us lucky enough to have been healthy in youth and middle-age, will enter the final failing years like strangers.

This is the poem's frontline: the suffering of old age. The extended metaphor forces us to recognise how brutal the condition can be, and also how brutally institutions may handle it. The sharp understatement of the objection to "the treatment of survival as precisely equal to dying" suggests the sophistication and variety of sanctioned suffering. It's not only the neglect, or even the actual violence some patients experience in the geriatric ward, but the invasive treatments that the poem finds shocking. Doctors can behave like policemen. Diagnosis and therapy may simply prolong the process of dying.

The last stanza takes a breather. The tone is matter-of-fact at first, calmly truthful. Deftly, the casual catchphrase "by and large" is turned back on itself, becoming "by and small" to remind us that bodies are not as important as we owners like to think, and not "designed" to last. If we were in any doubt about the poem's real meaning, it is underlined now as the tentative, tactful "You may die" is corrected to "You will suffer and die."

An ambivalent note of consolation ends the poem: "You will survive, language holding some trace of you for years,/ and the mourners, too." This sort of survival is distinctly what writers wish for, and many poems have invoked it, not least Shakespeare's sonnets. But is Wallace-Crabbe also suggesting that every articulate human makes some small mark on the language? Will the mourners survive in their own right, or merely hold the memory of the "you" for a while longer? It would accord with the poet's generous vision that "the mourners" (ie everyman) could live on, too, in the form of some little differences they made, via language, to the sum-total of human memory.

This is not very much to offset the horrors of the frontline report from the country of final rendition. And that's how it should be. Old age is not for wimps (as someone said). We need poets to tell the truth about it. "Rendition" is not a horror-poem but an intense and courageous account of some undeniable facts of the "civilised" life.

Rendition

Not, please, this creeping elaborate pain
and not slow parody of how lives end,
nor policemen in mufti playing a dirty god,
not the stinking underside of Elsewhere,
regimes of colonels or generals or psychopaths,
not fascination with seeing just how far a body can be made to go
nor the treatment of survival as precisely equal to dying.

Please, not a battering on the door at three in the morning;
not, I'm afraid, you're going to have to come with me.
Not the large plain dull old car
waiting outside your door with motor grumbling
for the quick take-off,
nor the bareness of a shabby room with overbright lighting.
Not Them, moving in.

Certainly not having to take off your clothes;
water, the truncheon, the cold, the blaring, the slaps
and long standing still in one damned place,
not the prodded humiliation of your nudity,
clothed ones treating you as a slab of meat,
not the drawn-out thickness of questioning
and not the detumescence of hope.

Not the naked genitals like frightened mice,
not something hard inserted in the vagina,
not pints of liquid trickled down your throat,
not a bully's foul breath up against your face
as concentration goes,
not the pummelled phonebook against your guts
leaving no distinct bruises.

Not the electrodes.
Fuck, no, not the electrodes
and not your buttocks beaten, then beaten again,
not something pushed right up under your fingernails
nor a bloody gobbet hacked off your left ear –
which you are then going to be forced to eat.
Not weeks without food.

Bodies have been designed frail, by and large, by and small,
ready to be tormented and taken apart.
The shit may run down your cold legs.
You may die.
You will suffer and die.
You will survive, language holding some trace of you for years,
And the mourners, too.

A meticulously crafted poem, balancing informality with a tight formal structure, folds a Zen legend into a reflection on the end of an affair

This week's poem, "Love-Letter-Burning", is by the award-winning American poet, Daniel Hall, currently the writer-in-residence at Amherst College. It's from his 1990 debut collection, Hermit with Landscape, chosen by James Merrill the previous year as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. His third and most recent collection, Under Sleep, was published by Chicago University Press in 2007.

In a period when formal poetry sometimes arouses accusations of reactionary politics, and poetry criticism may be equated with blasphemy, it's not necessary, though not a bad idea, to seek cover in the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, or plod backwards with the plodders of New Formalism. There are contemporary poets whose work is of its moment, but still reminds us that the word, poem, comes from the Greek verb, poiein, to make. Of course, lively poems are constructed in the style of shopping lists, prayers, journalistic reports – almost any verbal artefact – and they too can be properly made. But it's good to be reminded how a lyric poem may be uniquely a lyric poem, not masquerading – however thrillingly – as another sort of verbal object, but being its unquestionable self.

"Love-Letter-Burning" draws attention to its care for language from the start, even before the unobtrusively noticeable word, "archivist". Its overall shape is simple and satisfying. It has a framing story-cum-meditation, and a nested, inner story, and is arranged in two inner and two outer quatrains. The rhyme scheme miniaturises this pattern like a fractal: ABBA. The poem's surface is almost suave, the emotion well tamped down, with rueful wit and graceful playfulness preponderant. The fact that grief, heroism, violence etc, may be implied in the destruction of love letters is kept at bay by the very title. "Love-Letter-Burning" sounds like a slightly old-fashioned art or sport, demanding a specific skill and painstaking dedication.

That the emotions are controlled doesn't mean they can't exert tension. This tension registers in Hall's lineation, for instance. The first-line enjambment is neatly plotted so that we feel the shudder of the word "cold" before we realise the sentence is going on, and "cold" will turn out to be an ironically un-exciting, non-shuddering word when properly connected to its hyphen-mate to become "cold-blooded". And then there's a further tease, a near-pun threaded through the further enjambment. In line three the speaker isn't saying "we commit our sins" but "we commit our sins/ to the flames". The lines twist and slough off the expected like a skin, but the skin hangs on suggestively. There's a lingering suspicion, despite the light-hearted hyperbole, that "sins" have been or are being committed. In fact, the letters, as sheets of paper and segments of words, may be sins, or perhaps played a part in a larger sinning.

Heightened emotion remains potent, though coiled into elegant-sounding French and the two caesurae clipping the last line into three segments. Why is it necessary to save yourself if you can? Fear of what "makes us bold"? The letters are somehow dangerous. It's as if evidence of a crime were being destroyed: if it's simply evidence of an unhappy, ill-judged love affair, psychological risk is still implied. The speaker's tone is of course laced with irony, but it's far from wholly ironical.

Picking up "bold" from the last line of the previous stanza in "Tanka was bolder", the poet makes an agile transition from lyric to anecdote. Again, the tone is light but edgy. The weather turns "from fair to frigid" as the story about the Zen master begins. That alliteration ("fair"/ "frigid") adds an extra dash of flamboyance to the artifice. Both epithets are exaggerated, both have sexual undertones (which is surely the point) and "fair" summons echoes of Elizabethan love poetry. The enfolded quatrain-form is itself a reference to the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet's sestet.

Perhaps now to ensure the mannerism is not overdone and the voice remains conversational, the iambic pentameter is pared to 4 stresses: "To build a sacrificial fire." The economy also allows the word "sacrificial" to stand out, connecting to the fire which will consume the letters, and foreshadowing the painfulness of the act.

The parentheses of the third stanza suggest a little jokey aside, something muttered privately by the speaker to his auditors. In the legend, when the chief monk complained about the destruction of the temple Buddha, Tanka claimed he had burned it in order to find its indestructible "Essence." The objection "But if it shows up only in the flesh --?/ … Let's burn the lot!" may be shared by the poem's speaker, at least momentarily. A soft half-rhyme which nevertheless highlights the very different sounds and near-opposite meanings of "ash" and "flesh" hints at the sensuous sweetness of what has gone. A lot of pent-up feeling is released when Tanka grins and says "Let's burn the lot!" Meaning is suddenly stripped from the priceless Buddha – and, perhaps, from the loverless love letters.

The sacrifice becomes, in the last stanza, a "purifying rite" – if only for "believers in the afterlife". It seems both necessary, and an act of superstition. The voice grows curt again: "At last/ a match is struck: it's done". The use of the passive, and the pauses of the caesurae, deflect the emotional crisis. "Love-Letter-Burning" ends with a memorable aphorism, but one divided by enjambment to evade slickness or too-certain closure. It remains memorable and worth remembering, because patently so often true: "The past/ will shed some light but never keep us warm". The fire is nothing much in terms of fire, and the light, too, seems to have cast mostly shadow. But the savour and elegance of the poem linger on. Through symmetry and variety combined, and through polished, faintly teasing but not over-exquisite diction, it has transmitted emotions everyone has felt, and no one easily talks about. This is a well-made poem, but it's also poignantly alive.

Love-Letter-Burning

The archivist in us shudders at such cold-
blooded destruction of the word, but since
we're only human, we commit our sins
to the flames. Sauve qui peut; fear makes us bold.

Tanka was bolder: when the weather turned
from fair to frigid, he saw his way clear
to build a sacrificial fire
in which a priceless temple Buddha burned.

(The pretext? Simple: what he sought
was legendary Essence in the ash.
But if it shows up only in the flesh --?
He grinned and said, Let's burn the lot!)

Believers in the afterlife perform
this purifying rite. At last
a match is struck: it's done. The past
will shed some light, but never keep us warm.

A mysterious set of vanishings are the allusive concerns whispering through this contemporary Occitan verse

This week, we've an unusual treat, a contemporary poem by a writer who works in the language of the Troubadours, Occitan. "Lo temps s'es perdut …"/ "Time has disappeared …" by Aurélia Lassaque, appears in her new collection, Solstice and Other Poems, a bilingual volume with Lassaque's Occitan originals and English translations by James Thomas elegantly set out on facing pages.

Although I'm told its closest relative is Catalan, if you have a smattering of any Romance language, you'll be on the way to understanding Occitan. It's a language many readers will have met before. In The Divine Comedy, Dante gives the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, who appears in the Purgatorio, a speech in Occitan. A bit nearer our own time, there are Occitan passages in Kate Mosse's 2005 novel, Labyrinth. The name comes from "Lenga d'òc" ("the Òc language"), "òc" being the word for "yes." It's spoken in the Southern part of France, in Monaco, and in smaller areas of Spain and Italy – regions sometimes collectively known as Occitania. In France, native Occitan speakers are mostly also native French speakers, and Lassaque composes in both languages.

The "Solstice" collection of poems and poem-sequences is impressionistic and sensuous, glowing like "a beaker full of the warm South". Earth and fire are the dominant elements. The poem I've picked has an airy quality, as well. It captures a moment of feeling and imagining so intense that boundaries between images, like the consciousness of time, have been erased or fractured.

In English, the concept of lost time can suggest both what has passed and what has never been experienced. It could imply missed opportunity, or time wasted. "Time flies," as we say. Here, the main impression is that time has simply ceased to exist.

Some images imply dismemberment. It's only the young girl's face which "takes flight" and this is compared to a "bird without a body" – as if even the face might simply be a voice, disappearing, like time, "into the air-tracks". The poem goes on to suggest that a potent physical experience began the trajectory, even though it was "oblivion" that gave the protagonist "a morsel of moonless night/ Left on her lips". The alliteration in the English translation heightens our sense of the tactile.

Those "air-tracks" could, of course, evoke literal flight: an aircraft's flight-path or the vapour-trails it leaves. Flight, like disappearance, is a significant theme, and the poem is haunted by the myth of Icarus– not by accident one of modern poetry's favourite parables.

The central event in this complicated legend concerns Icarus and his father Daedalus, a brilliant artificer. Both were imprisoned by King Minos, but escaped the tower where they were held captive, using wings devised by Daedalus from birds' feathers and wax. Icarus, thrilled by his ability to fly and forgetting his father's warning, soared towards the sun: the heat melted the wax, the wings disintegrated, and the boy plunged to his death in the sea. Earlier in the story, Daedalus has tried to kill his rival, a gifted young apprentice, by pushing him from the Acropolis. Athena has saved this boy, sometimes named Perdix, by transforming him into a bird.

The allusion to the "Icaria sky" suggests both the myth and its setting. The poem's flight-path, however, is an ascent rather than a fall. I imagine "Icaria sky" as vivid blue, and the "black pearl" of the girl's tear expanding surreally to bring night and perhaps death. Perhaps a female Icarus has also soared too near the sun, but the hubris has condemned her to eternal flight.

The lines beginning "She'll never touch earth …" are incantatory, like a lament. The girl has sacrificed a close, playful relationship with nature ("She'll never tease the stone/ nor the trees…"). Or perhaps she has never belonged to earth at all: "she married an illusion" instead. Was it the illusion of flight or the illusion of love, was it self-deception or the deliberate choice of airy other-worldliness?

The Icarus myth may crudely be interpreted to mean that human skill is fallible and punishable. But that seems too heavily literal for this poem. The dissolution is widespread. It's not only that of time and the girl: the trees, too, seem lost in the wrong element, in "the waters that confound them".

The contrast of weight and weightlessness is nicely conveyed in images that sometimes evoke evanescence ("air-tracks") and sometimes fragile solidity ("black pearl", "morsel"). The English language adds more physical weight and hard sound, with the audibility of the relative pronoun, "that", and the predominance of masculine line-endings contributory factors. The texture of the Occitan poem seems more light and rippling, so that weightlessness is predominant, and the melancholy mood enhanced by the falling cadences.

"Lo temps s'es perdut …" is one of the untitled poems in the book's final section, :"Alba dels Lops: Divèrses Poèmas" ("Dawn of Wolves: Various Poems"). James Thomas's translation is followed, in the closest we can get to facing pages, by the Occitan original in italics.

Aurélia Lassaque has a new collection forthcoming next month in France In the meantime, you can take a look at some other poems from her current collection, and look out for James Thomas's forthcoming anthology of Occitan poetry through the ages, Grains of Gold.

Time has disappeared
Into the air-tracks
Where a young girl's face,
Bird without body,
Takes flight.
From her eyes a black pearl
Escapes to Icaria sky.
She's daughter to oblivion
That bequeathed her
A morsel of moonless night,
Left on her lips.
She'll never touch earth
She'll never tease the stone
Nor the trees
Nor the waters that confound them.
She married an illusion
That vanished in the wind.

Lo temps s'es perdut
Dins los camins de l'èr
Ont, ausèl sens còs,
Una cara de dròlla
Pren sa volada.
Una perla negra dins sos uèlhs
S'escapa cap al cèl d'Icara.
Es filha del neient
Que li daissèt en eritatge
Un tròç de nuèch sens luna
Sus las labras.
Jamai tocarà tèrra
Jamai tutejarà la pèira
Nimai los arbres
E l'aiga que los enjaura.
Qu'a esposada una quimèra
Que se perdèt dins lo vent.

Robinson's sonnet to Britain's early spring sunshine, with kites flying over the river Mersey, is casual, vital and graceful

This week's poem, "Otterspool Prom," is a sonnet by Peter Robinson, from his latest volume, The Returning Sky, published last year by Shearsman Books.

Gathering poems written in England after a period of 18 years working in Japan, the collection focuses a refreshed, penetrating vision on a far from idealised, sometimes un-homely, homeland. But here, late-capitalist corruption is almost on hold as the speaker looks out from the green spaces of Otterspool Promenade across a River Mersey irradiated with mid-February's almost-spring sunshine.

The three-word epigraph, from Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5 ("The time is out of joint: O cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right!") brings a whiff of foreboding, soon swept away in the opening images of brightness. The mood rises in pitch so that the end of the quatrain becomes almost wordless with excitement: "bright as never, never,/ ever before. The reminder of never-never land, imagined by JM Barrie as the country where children never grow up and are able to fly, almost banishes the fainter echo of King Lear's last speech.

"You see" in the next stanza could suggest an addressee other than the reader or the speaker's self. It might have formed an intensifier ("You see!") but grammatically the transitive "see" enacts the process of understanding or simply noticing. The tears are ambiguous: they may imply emotion, because deciduous winter trees are beautiful, but at the same time, eyes may water simply in response to brilliant sunlight. The poem re-balances itself after that momentarily overwhelming excitement earlier. The descriptive pitch is low-key. The "winter boughs" call up no obtrusively eloquent metaphor, no effortful adjectives or verbs: they are simply "spidery" and "twitched in a breeze".

That breeze leads to the kite-flyers, and rhymes building up as the wind strengthens. From now on the "D" rhyme of the second quatrain (trees/breeze) becomes prominent and persists to the end, with the last two tercets rhyming DED EDE.

The "dragon-tailed kite" flies and the sun performs another sort of "release," so that "the frost on the pitch is shrinking" in its warmth. "Shrinking" is a significant choice of verb. So much of the current English experience involves "shrinking". It goes with austerity. But it's also associated with magic: wicked people in fairytales may be shrunk by enchantment. The frost's retreat is a sign of returning life.

And then the speaker remembers the student's dismissive comment, "England's shite!" Milan Kundera once wrote that the opposite of kitsch is shit. Here, perhaps, the opposite of a flying kite is "shite". The very sound takes us back to the epigraph and seems, initially, to explain it. The spite must surely lie in the student's remark?

But the poem, it turns out, doesn't exactly disagree with the judgment. The Hamlet allusion has hinted at something rotten in the state of England. The dismissal is rebuffed ("Please/ yourself") only to be conceded in the qualification, "sunshine born as if to set it right."

The youthful idiom ("her going," instead of "her saying," and "I'm like") reinforces the notion of spring's casual vitality and insouciance. But now the sharp edge of the epigraph becomes fully apparent. The despair of Hamlet, charged to avenge his father's murder, seems humorously, ruefully, translated into the "cursed spite" of the fact that spring-days, for all their luminous power, can't change anything. Perhaps, too, there's an allusion to the cursed difficulty of writing a poem which, without a false note, celebrates the post-industrial English civilities of riverside parkland, sports pitches, strolling couples and kite-flyers. The challenge is met; the poem gracefully and even light-heartedly insists on its epiphany. The student's comment may reverberate, and even rouse a certain assent, but the familiar, sunlit scene of Otterspool Prom remains imprinted on the sonnet's retina. Finally, the date, 17 February 2008, adds its own flicker of optimism, 17 February being the day before the poet's birthday..

Peter Robinson was born in Salford in 1953, and grew up mostly in Liverpool. He has a distinguished career as a poet, critic, teacher, editor and translator. His forthcoming publications this year include Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories (Two Rivers Press) and a chapbook Like the Living End (Worple Press). He'll be appearing on Saturday 8 June in the first Reading poetry festival, at the Museum of English Rural Life in Redlands Road, Reading, Berkshire, and at the highly recommended Bridlington poetry festival on Sunday 16 June at Sewerby Hall and Gardens, Bridlington, Yorkshire.

Otterspool Prom

'O cursed spite'
Hamlet

There's a dazzle of sunlight on the low-tide river
and our far shore
has a silver-grey blur, bright as never, never,
ever before.

You see it's enough to bring tears to the eyes
by silhouetting trees,
winter boughs spidery on mist-like white skies
twitched in a breeze.

But then down the promenade its flyers release
their dragon-tailed kite;
frost on the pitches is shrinking by degrees;

a student's words return, her going 'England's shite!'
and I'm like 'Please
yourself' in sunshine born as if to set it right.

17 February 2008

This loose-limbed lyric on the elemental power of language seems rooted in a distinctly Welsh landscape

Poets choose their words with the utmost care, don't they? "The best words in the best order" and all that? In this week's poem, "Words", Edward Thomas echoes John Keats rather than Coleridge, calling on words to choose him. This is perhaps extreme negative capability.

But, despite Keats, and although Thomas is specifically addressing "English words", it's a poem that seems unusually attuned to the London-born poet's Celtic origins.

Both his parents were, as he said, "mainly Welsh", and he spent numerous holidays in Wales. He formed friendships there, a significant one being with the poet and preacher John Jenkins, known by his bardic name, Gwili. There's an entrancement with language and rhythm, a generally elevated tone, and a concern with national identity in "Words" which carry echoes from Welsh poetry, past and future.

Thomas may have known little of his forebears' language, but he certainly heard Welsh spoken, and, with Gwili's help, he made notes on Welsh verse-forms. Whatever cadences he was imagining as he wrote it, the long sentence comprising the first stanza is curiously un-English. It begins with a subordinate clause. It then brilliantly employs what I'd call a rhetoric of postponement. The adverb "sometimes" makes us wait, and the conceit of the winds whistling of "joy or pain" makes us wait longer. The inversion ("their joy or pain/ to whistle through") further complicates the syntax. These seeming distractions legitimise the repetition of the all-important verb "choose". His question is "Will you choose me, English words?" but he has so played the sentence that, by the time we reach its end, we hear an imperative: "Choose me, English words." The most significant word, "me", is the one that has no rhyme.

Rhymes are thickly strewn, but not enforced by symmetrical pattern. Their chimes are sometimes distant – all/wall, for instance, six lines apart in the first stanza. The non-rhymes are as deliberately plotted as the rhymes themselves really are, but this casual-seeming technique increases the sense that "Words" is more free of fixings than fixed, a kind of meandering stream or dry-stone wall of a poem. And this is surely the intended effect. Words, compared significantly to the wind, are treated as an elemental, and also nearly supernatural, force.

The second stanza is looser than the first, and at times more impressionistic than precise. "Light as dreams" and "tough as oak" make an effective antithesis, as, more subtly, do "poppies" and "corn" but "precious as gold" is less compelling, and the addition of the "old cloak" barely gets away with such obvious rhyme-reaching. The bards seem to hover again, exalted and be-robed. Thomas's adjectives, sweet, strange, dear, etc, and the superlatives, dearest, oldest, are catch-all words – vague but highly emotive. He enjoys playing grammatical variations on them, and the pun-paradox "worn new" confirms the exuberance.

But the poem often out-sings its logic. Why are English words "familiar as lost homes are"? It's a lovely and thought-provoking line but how, for an English poet, can English words suggest lost homes? Could he really thinking at this moment of the Welsh language – which might, in other circumstances, have been his mother tongue?

The comparatives of the second stanza form a landscape – old hills, newly swollen streams – but why are these features specifically English? Isn't it sentimental to suggest they are? They might just as well belong to Wales as to England. And how do English words (or the words of any nation) prove love of earth?

I think at this point Thomas has moved instinctively from language to identity. "Make me content/ With some sweetness/ From Wales" clarifies the shift. He's no longer talking about linguistic influence so much as his own heredity. Perhaps the intended move to America triggers the quest. The poem's uncharacteristic buoyancy may well reflect the optimism Thomas felt in 1915 as he made those never-fulfilled plans of joining Robert Frost in New Hampshire. But, besides the optimism, there's anxiety at the prospect of losing his native landscapes. Words, grounded in locality, may no longer come to him. This fear might explain the earlier preoccupation with familiar strangeness and the old made new.

There's a nice, humorous little tribute to Welsh poets in stanza three: they sing like wingless, ie human, nightingales. (Could he be thinking of Gwili, in particular?) But the "sweetness" he asks to be content with, doesn't end with Wales: the sentence continues with three English counties ("and the villages there"), including Thomas's favourite Wiltshire. Deeply explored in his writing, and part of his identity, none of these beloved English places is, however, specifically connected in the poem to actual words. The reference to "the names, and the things/ No less" is, of course, evocative: we imagine farm implements, wildflowers like the "burnet rose" mentioned earlier, nicknames, the colouring of different dialects. But wouldn't the poem be stronger if Thomas had included more of these names and things, and less of the windy dance and trance of inspiration, less of the "sweetness", whether of Wales or Wilts?

While I love Thomas's poetry, I read "Words" with mixed feelings. I especially wonder why, at the end, this most scrupulous of poets seems to distance himself from his vocation – in the line "As poets do"? It might be a wry little joke, I suppose, meant to raise a smile from an admiring friend, like Gwili or Frost. (Both would certainly have approved of the insight that the poet is both "fixed and free" when he rhymes.) But the last stanza becomes more credible if you imagine that Thomas is continuing to ask the really pressing question: will America cost him his identity, not only his Welshness and Englishness, but his identity as a poet?

"Words" overall is a powerful poem, with an important governing insight. Once more we can hark back to Keats's "negative capability". But, equally, we should remember another of Thomas's Welsh friends, the "tramp-poet" WH Davies, and his emphasis on taking time "to stand and stare". Thomas's poem can be read as an extended metaphor drawn from such ideas of receptivity. If "Words" lacks the pure focus of his greatest poems, the lessons it embodies are no less valuable. The sources of poetry are local to the poet. And it's not bardic mysticism but good psychology for any artist to be free-floating rather than manipulative during the first stages of creation, and only later to apply the fixative.

Words

Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?

I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet,
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.

Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb,
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.

Poetry through cinema is expressed in Forsström's intensely visual work, inspired by film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky

This week's poem, "The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses," is by the Finland-Swedish writer, Tua Forsström, translated from the Swedish by Stina Katchadourian. It's the first poem in her 1998 collection After Spending a Night Among Horses, which is included in the four-part Bloodaxe collection of Forsström's work.

The poems in After Spending a Night Among Horses are inspired by the film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky and are interleaved with quotations from Tarkovsky's film, Stalker, and from his prose-book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Tarkovsky once said, "There is only one way of thinking in cinema: poetically." Forsström expresses the reverse idea, of thinking in poetry cinematically. The collection itself is a montage, and many of the individual poems, like this one, draw on a similar technique, combining different settings, seasons, voices and moods in one imaginative sweep. All have a dream-like and open-ended quality.

In fact, the collection opens with five verses from the film-maker's father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky – some melancholy stanzas, based on Per-Arne Bodin's translation from the Russian, beginning "Now the summer's gone/ as if it never was./ It's still warm in the clearing./ But that's not enough." This is followed by a quotation from the character of the wife, spoken to the camera at the end of Stalker: "Of course it's quite possible that I'm inventing this after the fact. But that time, he just came up to me and said: 'Follow me,' and I did. And I've never regretted that. Never." Both voice themes of compulsion, restlessness and sacrifice.

Forsström's first line "The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses" is like a camera direction. The image is arrestingly visual, with implied contrasts of colour, temperature and movement. While the rose-garden appears literally frozen in time, the scene elsewhere is busy, with the whirling unseasonal snowflakes and the speaker's excited, abbreviated thoughts: "Didn't bring my boots and scarf … don't know what to do with all this light!" She's not simply talking to herself but to the film-maker, testing her poet's material against his cinematic vision: "You wouldn't approve of the colours./ It's too striking, Andrei Arsenyevich, too/ much, too much of everything!"

There's a tension between abundance – too much colour, too much light, too much to remember – and the concentration and "cutting" needed for making art. But, if art is represented by the frost's grip on the iconic rose garden, destruction must be the inevitable result of such preservation. Perhaps the attraction of cinema is that it combines art with apparent fluidity and process. But creative limitations are suggested by the references to the flight and crash of the hot-air balloon at the beginning of another Tarkovsky film, Andrei Rublev. Originally, Tarkovsky had shown a peasant attempting flight with home-made wings, and the poet seems critical of his editorial decision. Depicting the "aerial balloon, a clumsy/ creation cobbled together from rope and rags," the translation catches the contraption's awkwardness in its alliteration: clumsy/ creation/ cobbled/ropes/rags. It's not immediately clear how wings would have been an improvement.

The memory triggers thoughts which seem rather abstract and personal. "Before, I had a lot and didn't remember. Difficult/ to stick to the subject. Difficult to stick to the subject. /Hope to return. Hope to return to the principle/ of wings." These repeated statements are like memos to self. Perhaps they allude to abandoned poems, and plans for future poems. Several themes from "The snow whirls …" will be explored later on.

The memory of the high twittering heard from a Benidorm hotel, for instance, is reprised in a poem where the speaker hears caged willow warblers singing from a barber's shop. Perhaps the birdsong in "The snow whirls …" is associated with hearing the news of Tarkovsky's death. The hare, though it belongs to the "zone" of the frozen rose garden, is also out of place when it almost hops into the "entrance hall here at the Foundation." These poems value the effects of dislocation, but, read sequentially, they strike up echoes with each other. Another poem begins "It doesn't usually snow in Central Sweden in October." This helps explain "the hare's calendar," and its implied disharmony with the seasonal alterations caused by humans.

Before the hare appears, the poet quotes a passage from Sculpting in Time where Tarkovsky apparently comments on Stalker, "The zone is a zone, the zone is life,/ and a person can either be ruined or survive when/ she makes her way through this life. Whether she makes it or/ not depends on her self-esteem." The poem's gently sceptical tone elsewhere destabilises a quotation which could almost be a banal homily out of a self-help manual. "Self-esteem" becomes credible, though, if translated into artistic independence and conviction.

In the end, the poem owns up to a traditional expression of piety, again suggesting Rublev, but with a characteristic twist: "one should/ not constantly give thanks, one should definitely give thanks." Maybe this chimes in with the earlier desire "to return to the principle/ of wings." The strong colours at the end bring us back to the frozen roses. Defiantly contrasting the leaden Swedish lake with the body-and-blood, white and red of the snow and roses, the poem also evokes the shift from black-and-white photography into glowing "sovcolour" near the end of Andrei Rublev.

Forsström has said that she writes every poem 50 or 60 times, and that she often travels with her notebooks to a foreign city in order to complete a poem. "The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses" seems to open a poetry workbook, to show us an intriguing display of raw material. It's a series of comments, notes and sketches for future writing, held together by the casual but constantly-renewed conversation with Tarkovsky. There are moments of lyric concentration and heightened rhythm, but they're held in a framework of increasingly long and enjambed lines which seem to exert an outward pull. While the imagery of snow and roses recalls Louis MacNeice's poem "Snow," Forsström's vision of the world's incorrigible plurality is far more discursive. There's really no zone, it seems to say, and no magical room, even for the poet: there's only the journey.

The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses

The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses.
Didn't bring my boots and scarf, leafing
through books, don't know what to do with all this light!
You wouldn't approve of the colours.
It's too striking, Andrei Arsenyevich, too
much, too much of everything!
You exchanged the wings for an aerial balloon, a clumsy
creation cobbled together from rope and rags, I remember so well.
Before, I had a lot and didn't remember. Difficult
to stick to the subject. Difficult to stick to the subject.
Hope to return. Hope to return to the principle
of wings. The fact remains: the freeze preserved
the rose garden last night. 'The zone is a zone, the zone is life,
and a person can either be ruined or survive when
she makes her way through this life. Whether she makes it or
not depends on her sense of self-esteem-' A hare
almost hopped into the entrance hall here at the Foundation,
mottled against the snow; it's October in the hare's calendar.
You seem to be a moody sort of person
and it's possible that none of this is of interest to you.
On the other hand, you yourself complain fairly often.
I'm writing because you are dead and because I woke up
last spring in my streetside hotel room in Benidorm to that wonderful
high twittering. One shouldn't constantly say one is sorry, one should
not constantly give thanks, one should definitely give thanks. Lake
Mälaren like lead down there. The rest is white and red.