The snowy peak and riven Alpine landscape turn the Romantic poet to thoughts of meaning, perception and eternity

Shelley was just short of his 25th birthday when he began drafting "Mont Blanc" in July 1816. It was published the following year in the volume he and Mary Shelley jointly compiled, History of a Six Weeks' Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. While sometimes described as an ode, the poem is more intellectually rigorous than the title implies. A superb, sometimes personified portrait of the Alpine landscape, "Mont Blanc" also traces a journey through philosophical and scientific concepts that had yet to find a modern vocabulary. The mountains, falls and glaciers are not only geological entities as an explorer would see them or spiritual embodiments as they might be for Wordsworth: they inspire radical questions about meaning and perception.

"The everlasting universe of things/ Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves/ Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom/ Now lending splendour, where from secret springs/ The source of human thought its tribute brings/ Of waters …" So Shelley begins the short, almost introductory first stanza with a complex metaphor. The mind is carved out by perceptions as the earth is carved by watercourses that begin as "secret springs". Stanza 3, the extract I've chosen for this week's poem, takes the meditation to a deeper level.

The previous stanza has addressed the ravine: "Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down/ From the ice gulfs that gird his secret throne." Like the River Arve, the verse is sinewy and spacious. Thrilling description captures the movement and sounds as well as the shapes of the landscape. But it is the nature of this "power" that troubles Shelley. He has embarked on the poem almost as a test-drive, through dangerously sublime conditions, of his own atheism.

"Mont Blanc" is a direct response to an earlier poem by Coleridge, "Hymn Before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni". This is far more Ode-like in character. The tone is consistently elevated and the poet reiterates his belief that the "signs and wonders" of the natural world "utter forth God". Coleridge had begun the poem after climbing Scafell Pike during a solitary Lake District tour in 1802. He concealed the actual setting because, he said, the poem contained "ideas etc. disproportionate to our humble mountains". Less forgivably, he incorporated the text of a poem by the Swiss writer Frederika Brun, without acknowledgment (Coleridge, Selected Poems, edited by Richard Holmes, p.317). It's little wonder that the pious declarations sound so jarring and uncharacteristic.

While both Coleridge and Wordsworth are critiqued in "Mont Blanc", enquiry is more important than attack. Stanza 3 signals a meditative turn, as Shelley considers the possibility that the unconsciousness of sleep and death is visited by "gleams of a remoter world". Shelley is clearly not concerned with the afterlife in a Christian sense, but with a richer source of mental reality, possibly one that today would be equated with the subconscious mind. His rhetorical questions hang unanswered in the vast landscape, and "… the very spirit fails …" A similar vocabulary occurred in stanza 2, referring to "the strange sleep/ Which when the voices of the desert fail/ Wraps all in its own deep eternity …" The "desert" – not sand, of course, but the rocky Alpine wastes – seems ultimately mysterious because no human has left an imprint there. The hunter responsible for the "bone" carried off by the eagle is not human – it may well be the wolf of the following line. These images of rapacity no less than the shapes of the outcrops themselves seem to give rise to the exclamation: "How hideously …" Again, when Shelley personifies the formation of the mountains, he alludes to destruction rather than creation: "ruin" is all the "Earthquake-daemon" has taught her young. Shelley may not quite have stripped the landscape of deities, but he has stripped it very surely of sentimental charm, with those triple-adjective rockpiles reinforcing the lesson: "rude, bare and high", "ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven".

Nature's lessons depend on the learner. So the "mysterious tongue" of the wilderness can teach either "awful doubt or faith so mild/ So solemn, so serene, that man may be/ But for such faith with nature reconciled". Some critics take "but for such faith" to mean "by virtue of such faith". Bruce Woodcock, editor of the Wordsworth Poetry Library's The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley (2002), takes this view, noting that in the earlier draft Shelley had written "in such a faith". The reading of "but" as "except" in the later version would be possible, but it's more likely that Shelley intended faith to possess a certain healing power at this juncture of his thought.

Towards the end of the stanza, for the first time in the whole poem, Shelley apostrophises Mont Blanc itself. There's a hushed moment of near-religious awe. "Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal/ Large codes of fraud and woe …" But it's the political reformer in Shelley who projects on to the mountain a voice capable of abolishing systemic corruption. He can go no further with this idea of a near-divine voice: after that, it's to an ideal of privileged human understanding that he turns.

The concept of mind as a helpless natural force comparable to glaciers, rivers, winds, etc is a difficult one for an idealistic and reforming imagination such as Shelley's. While travelling, he would sign guesthouse registers as "Shelley – Democrat, Philanthropist and Atheist", and under "destination" write "L'Enfer" (Woodcock, p.viii). At the end of "Mont Blanc", framing that final rhetorical question about meaning, he evokes a chilling kind of hell. God's absence is no problem. But a "vacancy" that denied imaginative resonance to our perceptions would be the ultimate bleakness. It's almost as if the young poet had foreseen the hollow materialism of a secular age not unlike our own: "The secret Strength of things/ Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome/ Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!/ And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,/ If to the human mind's imaginings/ Silence and solitude were vacancy?"

III (from Mont Blanc)

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live. I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears – still, snowy, and serene;
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there – how hideously
Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven. Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
None can reply – all seems eternal now.
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

Using repetition to splice two genres – the oriental ghazal and the blues – this humorous offering demonstrates the poet's joy in language and form

There's always a wealth of interesting new writing in Gene Doty's online quarterly, The Ghazal Page, reflecting the editor's welcoming and creative approach to the classical form (a ghazal is a kind of oriental lyric). This week's poem, Chain Ghazal: Chickens by Esther Greenleaf Mürer, comes from the latest issue and nicely blends innovative and traditional approaches. It's guaranteed to put a spring in your step, even if the March weather doesn't.

Originally, in the Persian ghazal, the couplet, or sher, was a single line divided by a caesura, and each sher formed a small, separate poem. Agha Shahid Ali, the ghazal's first "ambassador" in America, describes the couplet as "a stone from a necklace". A mono-rhyme (the qafia), declared in the first couplet, and picked up by the second line of each succeeding one, brings unity to the diversity of the whole poem. The refrain, or radif, has a similar function, and follows the qafia in the same pattern. The last couplet traditionally includes the poet's name.

Readers in the UK will know Mimi Khalvati's many fine and tender love poems in the form. The challenge for the anglophone poet lies both in rhyming skill and tonal balance. The repetition of qafia and radif suggests polysyllabic rhyme, and the latter, in English, tends towards comic verse. Mürer's poem is open to the comic spirit, but also uses the rhyme scheme's potential for generating serious ideas – and narrative.

The choice of linked quatrains thickens the plot. Mürer triples the mono-rhyme in each stanza, and each first line of a new stanza recovers, with minor variations, the refrain from the last line of the previous one: hence, the "chain" effect. That repetition, although it crosses the stanza break, gives a rather "bluesy" feel to this ghazal. In fact, the fourth stanza talks about the "blues", including the word in its trio of rhymes, and about how walking cures them. It's almost as if the poem spliced two genres: the ghazal and the blues. Even without that direct reference, you'd hear the slightly mournful undertone to the jauntiness.

Another kind of splicing occurs in the first line, which recalls both the proverb, "Never count your chickens before they're hatched," and the children's riddle: "Why did the chicken cross the road?" The combination is a little surreal, although the statement is perfectly logical and sensible. The quatrain goes on to establish its dialectic, a moral/artistic tension between caution and impulsiveness which underlies the whole ghazal: "I always run like the dickens when crossing the road."

The "chickens/ dickens" rhyme is fun, and the line sounds effortless, as a colloquial expression should. "What the dickens" goes back at least to Shakespeare ("I cannot tell what the dickens his name is," The Merry Wives of Windsor," Act 3, Sc 2). The word is a euphemism for "devil" and has no connection with great Victorian novelists.

The last line of the first stanza says "… the plot thickens once I have crossed the road." And it does. In the second stanza, crossing the road leads to "fixing to write an ode", the link between the two cunningly established by the toad, which reminds us not only that toads might get squashed on roads, but that, as Marianne Moore, said, poetry concerns "real toads in imaginary gardens".

There's a deliberate clash of high and low registers in "First I gird up my loins and then put on my shoes." The Biblical phrase refers to the belting of one's tunic in preparation for hard work or travel. The speaker's statement brings the two actions together. Crossing the road and writing an ode can both be journeys, after all, and take a certain amount of courage. As for "Des Moines", I didn't even know how to pronounce it until I met the inspired rhyme in this stanza. Then I caught someone on the radio quoting Bill Bryson: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." Everyone needs a Des Moines of the imagination.

That quatrain is full of humorously practical preparation: the coins, the girded loins, the shoes. And the gusto with which the last stanza turns the idea on its head, and rejects, after all, the precautionary measure of counting chickens, is highly satisfying: "A gallinaceous fixation beclouds the mind." Absolutely. The parable applies to life and art: you certainly won't "sight an auk" if you're obsessed with practical calculations.

For such a short poem, a considerable distance is covered – from a road to an ode, from a walk to an auk. The differently rhymed qafias of each stanza make a trio of genially odd companions. In an interview with the online magazine The Centrifugual Eye, the poet comments that using the absurd and surreal allows her to explore political themes, and "to say multiple things at once, like counterpoint in music". There is certainly an element of the contrapuntal in this ghazal.

In part, it's about getting into the right frame of mind for poetry. You might want to compare it with an actual ars poetica, Arrgh Poetica by the same author. Widely published online, Esther Greenleaf Mürer's poetry demonstrates a joy in language and form which began with her early reading of Lewis Carroll and Dorothy Parker. You can learn more about the poet and discover more of her work on her blog– where you'll also find information about her first print collection, Unglobed Fruit (2011).

Chain Ghazal: Chickens

I never count my chickens when crossing the road.
I always run like the dickens when crossing the road.
When I let go of expectations I'm always amazed
at how the plot thickens once I have crossed the road.

When preparing to cross the road I gird up my loins.
Before I pick up a toad I gird up my loins.
And thus I train myself in poetic practice:
When fixing to write an ode I gird up my loins.

First I gird up my loins and then I put on my shoes.
Fill my pockets with coins before I put on my shoes.
It will never do to arrive back home with bare feet;
can't go to Des Moines until I've put on my shoes.

I put on my shoes and decide it's time for a walk.
Wake up from a snooze and decide it's time for a walk.
The best therapy I know is peripatetic:
When I get the blues I know it's time for a walk.

It's time to go for a walk and stop counting my chickens.
Wanderlust makes me balk at counting my chickens.
A gallinacious fixation beclouds the mind:
I may sight an auk if I just stop counting my chickens.

Whether sacred, profane – or both – the mystery of this poem remains immediately appealing some 700 years on

This week's poem is among the earliest surviving English love lyrics. "Bird on a Briar" or, in Middle English, "Bryd one Brere", is an enchanting little song, anonymous, of course, but with an extra mystery attached to its provenance. It was written on the back of a papal bull, at least a hundred years after the bull had been issued by Pope Innocent III in 1199. The scribe was probably a monk at the Priory of St James, near Exeter. Whether he transcribed a secular poem on a holy and ancient document as an act of mischief, piety or sheer carelessness, we'll probably never know: we don't even know for certain the poem is secular.

As often with texts from this period, the variant spellings raise another question: was the scribe aiming for a particular effect or set of effects? For "bird" we have "bryd", "brid" and "biryd". As the word changes shape, it seems to mirror the quick, flickering movement of the bird. All the bird-words are more onomatopoeic than the modern English "bird", thanks to the audibility of the "r". The two-syllable "biryd" is a bird-call in itself. Even the elision of "on a" to "one" in the first line sharpens our sense of the bird's singularity and special-ness.

The "bird" is usually taken to represent a young woman. Lines two and three reinforce the metaphor: translated, they read "Blissful bird, take pity on me/ Or dig, love, dig thou for me my grave." Again, a spelling-shift enriches the text for the modern reader: "greyth" contains "grey" and therefore hints at the lover's decline into age, while "greith" suggests more the physical grappling of the spade with the earth. If we pick up a hint of "leaf" from "lef" (love) an autumnal tone appears in the initially bright and lively scene.

The mood soon picks up. "Brihit" means "bright" and, again, a double-syllable adds jauntiness, and an echo of the "biryd" itself. There is such delight and anticipation in this stanza. The alliteration of "hic" and "hende" adds to the effect, and joins the speaker and the object of his love in the verbal dance. Now "bryd one brere" is abbreviated to "brid on brere," as if speeding the thought to its conclusion.

That second stanza culminates in a vision: "She is white of limb, lovely, true/ She is fair and flower of all." Secular and sacred poems were frequently cross-bred in the middle ages, and one possible interpretation of the lyric is that it's a prayer to St Bride or Saint Brighid. The poet is asking pity of a saint rather than a bird, feathered or otherwise The saint fits the description "fair, and flower of all", and might account for the choice of a papal bull as note-paper. A straightforward interpretation of the poem as a prayer seems contradicted by the next stanza and its first line, "Mikt ic hire at wille haven" ("Might I have her at my will… "). On the other hand, perhaps the metaphor continues, and it's the spiritual possession of a divine presence that is alluded to. "Haven" might mean "have" but looks very much like "heaven", after all.

The word "hende" is variously translated. The link above gives "handsome one", while Luminarium favours "handmaid". The handmaid might be a servant, unobtrusively attending to her lord or lady in the great hall, flitting about like the bird on the briar. She might conceivably be the Virgin Mary, the briar itself representing the Crown of Thorns.

The second and third stanzas share the little half-line refrain, "loveli, trewe", differently positioned and changing emphasis. The qualities seem physical in the second stanza, and moral in the third: being lovely and true here are connected with being "Stedefast of love". "Trewe", of course, echoes and embodies the "rewe" of the third line.

There's certainly a note of redemption at the end, though at first it's difficult to get a modern tongue around the line, "Jouye and blisse were were me new". The first "were" is the conditional, "would", and the second means, and I think should be pronounced, "wear". The poet is talking about renewal, and not about the past.

Love song, prayer or a cunning weave of both, "Bryd one Brere" still feels freshly minted. There's the irregular, dancing rhythm, the open-heartedness, and the simplicity of imagery. And, of course, there's the spelling. "Bryd one Brere" sings from the page (the papal bull, to be precise). It belongs to a time when poetry was an oral art. Transcription was a new skill: writing was thought untrustworthy, and made a lot of people hot and bothered, as online publishing does today. Reading the poem in the original spelling, we can see English words and grammar in their infancy, still not quite ready to grow up and settle down. They seem like living organisms at this stage, shape-changing, unsettled, and difficult to catch as birds.

Bird on a Briar

Bryd one brere, brid, brid one brere,
Kynd is come of love, love to crave
Blythful biryd, on me thu rewe
Or greyth, lef, greith thu me my grave.

Hic am so blithe, so bryhit, brid on brere,
Quan I se that hende in halle:
Yhe is whit of lime, loveli, trewe
Yhe is fayr and flur of alle.

Mikte ic hire at wille haven,
Stedefast of love, loveli, trewe,
Of mi sorwe yhe may me saven
Ioye and blisse were were me newe.

Translation
Bird on a briar, bird, bird on a briar,
We come from love, and love we crave,
Blissful bird, have pity on me,
Or dig, love, dig for me my grave.

I am so blithe, so bright, bird on briar
When I see that handmaid in the hall:
She is white-limbed, lovely, true,
She is fair, and the flower of all.

Might I have her at my will,
Steadfast of love, lovely, true,
She may save me from my sorrow;
Joy and bliss would wear me new.

For 1 April, a sonorous refrain from one of literature's most plaintive fools, making plain the shadows behind the japes

It's not often that April Fool's Day and "Poem of the week Monday" coincide. So it seems an auspicious time to honour one of Shakespeare's most graceful and complex fools, Feste, from Twelfth Night, or What You Will. His song, "When that I was and a little tiny boy", concludes a play which is itself a celebration of misrule, with a plot driven by disguise, mistaken identity and practical jokes.

The lyrics of this song, like others in Twelfth Night, might not have been written by Shakespeare. Robert Armin, a noted singer and clown, and the first actor to play Feste, is also a contender – as is our old friend, Anon. Whoever he was, the writer seems to have wanted to fill out Feste's character and "back-story" and add a little last-minute tragi-comic, silly-sad commentary on life. It's almost a version of "All the world's a stage". For that reason, my money's on Shakespeare as the song's author.

A recent displacement in the clown's fortunes is hinted at early in the play. Feste – "a fool that the Lady Olivia's father took much delight in" – has outlived his first master, and seems to wander freely between the houses of Olivia and the Duke Orsino. Jester, singer, psychologist, philosopher, informal physician and spoof priest, Feste knows his own superior worth: "Those wits that think they have thee do very oft prove fools."

Twelfth Night is full of music, and explores different attitudes to it. For Orsino, music is "the food of love" and even Sir Toby Belch prefers a love-song to "a song of good life". The forlorn realism and mock-ballad-form of "When that I was…" make it unique among the seven songs in the play.

The double refrains in each verse are relentless, yet their touch is light. "Hey, ho, the wind and the rain" shrugs a wry weariness at life's weather. The play has delivered the requisite happy endings to its nobly-born leads, but Feste and the rain go on telling a different story. Their epilogue points a sly finger at privilege, and, perhaps, at the whole device of happy endings.

The first line offers a charming image, almost a Nativity scene, and an unexpected conjunction: "When that I was and a little tiny boy" (my italics). Why the word "and" rather than the equally metrical "but"? It's oddly effective, fencing off the first part of the sentence to give it existential bite – "When that I was… " It's the kind of enigma Feste loves. However, the answer is probably that three subsequent verses, and the penultimate line, begin with a "But" (almost as in a nonsense poem). Another would be excessive.

"A foolish thing was but a toy" could be a joking reference to masturbation; the actor can make the appropriate gesture and get an easy laugh. The price of the double entendre is the pathos of imagining the clown as an innocent child, not yet officially a clown, not blamed for foolish acts, simply licensed to play. Some commentaries interpret the "foolish thing" as the child himself, in which case he would also be the worthless "toy" or "trifle".

If the child has made a sadly unnoticed start in life, the second verse brings no redemption. Attaining adulthood, he remains an outsider, one of the "knaves and thieves" who will never enter the gates of inheritance and power (a further manifestation of "man's estate").

The life story goes from under-achievement to under-achievement. Each verse, every "but", knocks down another hope. But (alas!) there's no fooling the wife. Does she throw out her swaggering husband between the verses? The strange plural of "beds" lends it a hovering association with the guest-house dormitory – perhaps also with hospitals and Bedlam. The beds could be harlots' beds, or, as the Shakespeare scholar Leslie Hotson says, "the various spots he is likely to fall". By now, the clown is an old man, infirm, perhaps a drunk.

In the third line, the narrator seems to omit a first person pronoun: "With tosspots still" (I) "had drunken heads". He might be alluding to past carouses with Sir Toby and his pals, or merely generalising. The tosspots, whoever they are, will simply go on boozing, whatever happens.

Finally, he seems about to embark on a mock-history of the world. But it's a tease and he shifts quickly to real time and real identities, with a courteous farewell to the relieved audience. "Come back for more" might be the gist of the last line, "We put on a great show every day!" Meanwhile, "that's all one" and the fooling is over. "All's one" is a phrase Feste uses several times during the play, and, again, it reminds us of that little existential shadow the character (or Shakespeare himself?) so often casts.

"When that I was and a little tiny boy…"

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut the gate,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
  And we'll strive to please you every day.

Swept clean of the 'I', this is poetry full of space and light and freewheeling observation

The title of this week's poem, "Autobiography Without Pronouns," from Kink and Particle by Tiffany Atkinson, declares a paradox: personal revelation (autobiography) and impersonality (no identifying pronouns). Poets, of course, sometimes look for a way of encoding private experience, but it would be complacent to assume that's the aim here. The challenge the writer sets herself is primarily a linguistic one, and she accomplishes it with no sacrifice of specific detail or personal voice.

Although relatively short at 20 lines, the poem seems full of space, light and movement. The absence of an "I" and other pronominal clutter certainly liberates the "eye" of writer and reader. Present participles enhance the poem's momentum, the syntax is loosened, and the reader shares the speaker's experience of watching, though car-windows, a flow of moving images.

This cinematic device is underlined by the "Super-8" simile in lines six to eight and later references to slo-mo and panning. The hand-held camera and 8mm film contrast with the advanced technology of the wind farm, but both might evoke parallels with the mind's memory-storing processes. Perhaps, additionally, the film-making is an activity framed in other parts of the poem (the tricycling child, for instance, could be on film). The immediate observation seems to enfold snippets of an older story, and the homecoming implied by "driving back" and "breaking home for twilight" may involve remembering other meanings of "home".

The windmills are clearly moving fast. Both the sweep of their tempo and the environmental friendliness of their technology are evoked by the colours and preposition of "white-through-blue". At the same time, they're linked to traditional agriculture by the notion of "reaping". A more familiar metaphor, the sky as a china bowl, is wittily filtered through the allusions, "priceless", "hairline crack". Another quietly-plotted surprise is the word "hiss" as a description of the noise the sea makes. Are ominous associations conjured by a sound connected with home movies? Despite the "Feathers by/ the roadside" confirming death or injury, the poem maintains its light-hearted, open-road, into-the-west sort of mood.

More omens appear in the encounter with the traveller selling quartz hearts, an incident relayed with a nicely-underlined zeugma when s/he "prophecies a wild affair/ and light rain, though in no particular/ order". We assume the car has stopped and the speaker has alighted, but the event could, of course, belong to more distant memory. It's an easy shift from the landscape's "slipstream" to these closer, more random-seeming character-shots.

The appearance of the small girl on a scarlet tricycle is all magical surprise. "Rounding the corner," she shrinks the linear stretch of landscape to town-sized dimensions. The observation that she "has just created pigeons" is her own excited point-of-view, perhaps. And now the narrative becomes simultaneously explicit and mysterious. "Mother" and "Ricardo", are not visibly connected to the speaker, but intimacy is implied. The shift to the past tense gives their finished lives a reality; in fact, they seem to supply a sombre biographical core to the poem. These lines enhance our sense of watching a film, a foreign film, decades-old, with a terse voiceover, and images – colourless, grainy, haunting – which seem freighted with back-story. The three characters may form a family triad (child, mother, the unfortunate Ricardo) but it's up to the reader. The absence of pronouns has freed the poem for this kind of bold stroke.

The narrative has always been tight and pacy, and now it consciously accelerates with that almost-monosyllabic camera-direction: "pan through/ sky to sea to road to quartz to pigeons." These different objects seem to meld in tones of blue and grey, and degrees of iridescence, relieving the imagined ugliness of Ricardo's death. The hooting train and the "all change" ("all" being a pronoun without an autobiography) underline a denouement harsher than expected, though in accord with the poem's overall sense of openness to what happens. "And love insists, like gravity" seems to confirm that the poem's journey was not to safety, but to a further emotional centre, a home-in-the-making. As movement ceases, the perfectly-judged intransitive use of "insists" somehow knits every earlier experience and future possibility together.

Atkinson has followed up her debut collection, Kink and Particle, with a lively re-working and re-gendering of the Latin poet, Catullus, Catulla et al, published by Bloodaxe last year. A new collection, So Many Moving Parts, is forthcoming.

Autobiography Without Pronouns

Driving back in the slipstream
of the windfarm, each arc of white-
through-blue reaping ohms from clean
air. The sky would be priceless but
for a hairline crack on its far curve:
everything in slow-mo, the sea
for miles on the passenger side
like the hiss of Super-8. Feathers by
the roadside. Breaking home for twilight
where the traveller selling quartz hearts
on the seafront prophesies a wild affair
and light rain, though in no particular
order. The small girl rounding the corner
on a scarlet tricycle has just created
pigeons; an astonishment of beat and wing.
Mother's death was nothing unexpected
but Ricardo's came brutally. Pan through
sky to sea to road to quartz to pigeons
as the last train westward claxons in. All
change. And love insists, like gravity.

An atmospheric winter train ride connects the present to the past, and a father's experience to his son's

The title of this week's poem, Peter McDonald's "The Overcoat" inevitably recalls Gogol's eponymous short story in which a poor, industrious clerk is destroyed by the violence and bureaucracy of 19th-century St Petersburg. There's a tangible chill in the weather and the politics of both poem and story, and both have a ghost, but I'm reminded less of Gogol than of Philip Larkin in "The Whitsun Weddings". McDonald's poem, too, describes, and almost is, a train journey. In unhurried, expansive stanzas, a solitary narrator observes the passengers' comings and goings. This narrative, however, enfolds a further story, told through recollections of a particular individual, whom I take to be the speaker's father.

The poem's slant rhyming emphasises the way the present imperfectly echoes the past, with the four-fold "A" rhyme of each stanza nevertheless insisting on recurrence. Some ghostly atmospherics initiate the convergence of present and previous selves, and of son and father: the shared "early dark", fierce rain, chill air. The men who crowd onto the 21st-century train, after their patient, storm-soaked queuing, are "agents for winter afternoons/ and entrepreneurs of the cold" – a depiction that may suggest a light gibe at market-driven policies, while lending a significant unreality to these figures.

Damp and cold suffuse every stanza. Whatever the strange odour of cold is made of, this poem conveys it. A rarer smell, of cigarette smoke, eases the transition into Belfast, 1972. "Behind me by a couple of hours," the father is returning by bus from the Inglis bakery. The working day for both men concludes with tantalisingly near synchrony.

"Where he hangs up his overcoat" in stanza four indicates the "breezeblock, ground-floor" childhood flat, but the narrative swerves quickly back to the haunted present. The train seems to pass through time, carrying the innumerable shades in whose "infinite/ line of shapes" the singular ghost, the poem's ghost, risks being lost.

Earlier, the men walked "in envelopes of smoke and cold". Similarly, the remembered overcoat envelops little pay-day gifts, "sealed up" in their cardboard boxes. The precision which has noted proper nouns and bus numbers now records the pre-decimal prices of the toys – and, again, numbers share the potency of the poem's quietly-measured diction. Like the other objects evoked, the toys have solidity, but, by emphasising their unhandled coldness, the poet flips them into mystery. Yet nothing gothic or sentimental taints the chilly haunting. Never fully embodied, never warm, the coat is only momentarily sinister, when the child sees its empty shape in stanza four.

The incident that, one night, forced a late homecoming, was foreshadowed by the "hold-ups" on the road at the end of stanza two. It's outlined in general and unemotional terms in the climactic sixth and seventh stanzas, with a faint touch of extra-dry humour in the litotes of "pointed questions", "whoever they had come to see", etc. The chill comes indoors, as it did, benevolently, in stanza five, "with little said". The hostages are lined up; when released, they gather in a similar line, so that we recall the "lines" of the opening stanzas. But now they are reprieved by a perfect line of description, "smoking, and wondering, and free".

In the last stanza, there's "a grey overcoat", the indefinite article detaching the coat from its owner – fellow commuter or lingering ghost. The speaker, about to alight from his train, is "weighed down" with his own "dead papers" and the abundance (and shallow masculinity?) of the remembered gifts: "chilly racing cars/… brittle plastic soldiers." Son blends into father, and, in a forlorn, compelling final plot twist, he, too, is late coming home.

Metrically varied, the lines are mostly octosyllabic, and that count-of-eight seems fundamental, even where the audible syllable count is less, as in stanza three, line eight. It gives rise to some lively, unpredictable effects of substitution, contrasting with the repetition of the words and images that sustain atmosphere and form less escapable patterns.

"The Overcoat" was first included in McDonald's often elegiac, 2007 volume, The House of Clay, and can currently be found in Carcanet's edition of the five-volume Collected Poems, With its wide range of themes, and high proportion of memorable poems and translations, this "collected" is among the very few worth reading from cover to cover.

The Overcoat

We stop, and doors come open then
to let the early dark blow in
from whatever rain-raked platform
is just outside the lighted train,
as men who lined up in a storm
crush in to seats, bringing a chilled
February air along with them,
agents for winter afternoons,
and entrepreneurs of the cold.

On business now, and going home,
I'm no more than a few steps from
Belfast in 1972:
the cigarette smell is the same
in the same draught, that pushes through
with men who walk in envelopes
of smoke and cold from a slow queue
and onto buses with no room
in the stops and starts, the hold-ups.

Behind me by a couple of hours,
in winter downpours, sleet showers,
he comes by bus from Inglis's,
and the breadmen and the bakers,
to town, and waits again, and catches
the number 24 or 32
home, back over his own traces,
to a breezeblock, ground-floor
Braniel flat; to damp and mildew.

Where he hangs up his overcoat
the cold begins to radiate,
shaped out, like the body's ghost,
by the hall door at night;
and now the cold that presses past
me here is maybe a ghost's trail,
the time it fills already lost
and its place lost in an infinite
line of shapes: indistinct, frail.

On Friday nights, the coat sealed up
some toy bought from a closing shop
for a shilling or for one and six,
coming to me still cold, its shape
and size all cold, a cardboard box
with a soldier or a car inside,
and the toy and winter night would mix
together, as outside would slip
inside: with gifts and little said.

He was late one night, and came in
quietly; quietly sat down
and ate his tea, then told us how
at work for half the afternoon
the bakery had hosted two
men with guns, their faces masked,
who lined them all up in one row
on the cold floor, to wait, locked in,
for pointed questions to be asked.

The two men left eventually.
Whoever they had come to see
that day they missed, and would find
easily on some other day;
so, standing where they had been lined
up, as if in some anteroom,
everyone talked as they stayed behind,
smoking, and wondering, and free.
Little to do then but go home.

Beside me, a grey overcoat
in the train here is sending out
a smoky aura of sheer cold
invisibly in the carriage-light;
but when I get up, and take hold
of a case packed with dead papers
and a book or two, I come home late,
weighed down with chilly racing cars
and with brittle plastic soldiers.

Two perspectives on either side of a nocturnal liaison make up a strikingly contrasting diptych

This week's choice is an intriguing diptych by Robert Browning. "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning" were paired on their first publication in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), under the title "Night and Morning; I. Night; II. Morning." The present titles come from the Poems of 1849.

In length, metre and mood, the "twins" are distinctly un-identical. One is a nocturne, the other, a kind of aubade, or alba. They are part of the same narrative, but as different as night and day.

The first poem itself has two stanzas, but, despite their separate numbering, the effect is unitary. It begins in boldly impressionistic, even imagistic, style, as the salient features of the scene are listed in lines of lightly-flowing tetrameter. The syntax is casual, as if lines had been lifted from a notebook. Browning paints in contrasted colours and shapes, and deploys some brilliant chiaroscuro. It's visually stunning, and the auditory effects, the plashing and rippling captured in sound, are no less impressive.

The informal repetition of "and" in lines two and three helps move the syntax along with the rhythm of a traveller impatient to arrive. The boat's swiftness is evoked in the description of the little waves as "startled", and the oarsman's mood, perhaps, in the word "fiery". The pathetic fallacy hardly intrudes, so acute are the observations. Browning has taken some stock Romantic images and thrillingly re-bottled them, not least of his triumphs being that determinedly realistic "slushy sand".

Masculine energy certainly informs the activity of this stanza, but seeing it as erotic metaphor, a view which tempts some commentators, may be a case of premature imaginative ejaculation. The excitement of the sexual encounter subtly implied in the second stanza is spoiled if the first becomes merely a colourful (and noisy) preview.

The second stanza begins on foot, in a scene no less magical. The speaker's way is a long one, across "a mile of sea-scented beach" and the three fields, with the landmark of the farm signalling arrival, or near-arrival, at the lover's house. But there's no sense that the journey is arduous, and the sensuous relish intensifies. The auditory effects have been chosen to tell a highly compressed story. The tap on the glass, the scratch and spurt of the match, the low voice, the heartbeats, are pure radio. The rhyming is denser than before, thanks to the similarity of the "d" and "f" rhymes: beach/ scratch/ match/ each. That reiterated "ch" sound creates a sort of stuttering which heightens the excitement.

The phrase, "the two hearts beating each to each", might seem decorous to a modern reader, but for a Victorian poet it must have nudged the limits of the permissible. Because of the compression of the narrative, we can't be sure if it records the embrace of greeting, or if the lovers have by now bared more than their hearts.

And then there's the morning after. Browning's alba opens with a panoramic view and an optimistic, open-air flourish. The rhythm changes, or seems at first to change: the reader can hardly avoid stressing the opening word, "Round". There are no adoring backward glances, no wishing the sun could be the moon. The "world of men" doesn't threaten the speaker: he has, in fact, a "need" of it. The sun itself is given a masculine pronoun ("him"). That "path of gold", its suddenness and steadiness captured in the single word, "straight", welcomes a traveller now firmly outward-bound.

The dramatic monologue, as every literature student knows, is Browning's particular innovation (though he was not the originator of the term). More than a decade earlier, "Pauline: a Fragment of a Confession" marked his first foray into the genre. So could the "Night and Morning" poems qualify as dramatic monologue? Not if we consider the essence of the genre to be irony – that is, the speaker's unintended self-revelation.

I've sometimes felt that the "Parting" quatrain spoilt a perfect lyric: it's too forthright, after the earlier subtleties, and the implied gender polarisation seems simplistic. And yet, re-reading it, I appreciate how well it fills out the characterisation and develops the story embodied in the first poem. Browning's dramatic genius so often insists that he push the poetic boat out. Composing a two-part love-lyric that exposes contrasted psychological forces is a characteristically bold move, and, if not quite adding up to a dramatic monologue, this odd coupling seems to be a rather wonderful by-product of the genre.

Meeting at Night
I

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed in the slushy sand.

II
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Parting at Morning
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim –
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

Rodker's eclectic denunciation of religion's repressions, written after the first world war, is funny and unexpectedly sympathetic

Don't believe the title of this week's poem. "Hymn of Hymns," by John Rodker, is an anti-hymn, psalm-like in some of its structures, but owing nothing to the pieties of church or synagogue. "God damn" is its motto and mood, yet, for all its angry denunciation, it's a bracing, funny, and unexpectedly sympathetic poem.

Novelist, publisher and conscientious objector, Rodker was one of the "Whitechapel Boys," a casual affiliation of Jewish artists and writers which included Isaac Rosenberg and the artists Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. They formed an important battalion of British Modernism in the early years of the 20th century.

Rodker's Jewish emigrant parents, originally from Poland, moved from Manchester to London in 1900, when he was six. His formal education was limited, but after leaving school at 14 he studied French, German and science at evening classes. The French symbolist poets, particularly Verlaine, influenced his later writing.

Rodker produced a varied but relatively small body of poetry before turning his energies to publishing. Some of his work is online but, for a comprehensive introduction, Andrew Crozier's edition of the poems, dramatic pieces and short fiction put together for Carcanet in 1996, Poems & Adolphe 1920 is indispensable.

"Hymn of Hymns" appeared in a collection called Hymns, published by Rodker's own Ovid Press in 1920. Not all the poems are "Hymns," but the opening sequence of six establishes the collection's key signature. They mount an attack on various shibboleths and the "Hymn of Hymns," a kind of synthesis, concludes the sequence.

In tune with the Poundian enterprise of stripping poetic language of Victorian frills and padding, Rodker sieves through poetry's epiphanic experiences to find their grimy residue. If physical disgust is sometimes part of the procedure, his ultimate target is a moral one: hypocrisy.

The title, "Hymn of Hymns," may allude ironically to the "Song of Songs," but Rodker's anti-psalmist is as unimpressed by the human body as by divinity. The human odour is "like old clothes", the flesh "white mushroomy flaccid". These descriptions of "man" and "woman" might remind us that Rodker's father was a corset-maker by profession. What the poet scents here is unwashed, ill-fed city poverty.

Rodker's style is eclectic. A Joycean spritz enters the diction through neologisms like "Cosmoses"and "prurulent". In "woman's heirs and assigns" the use of "assigns" as a noun summons a variety of enriching echoes: signs, assignations, designs, commands.

"All that galley" is the professional publisher's bright revision of the cliche, "all that jazz." The placing of compound adjectives before the noun, "… smelling of old clothes … Man!", hints at a non-English language structure – Yiddish, perhaps – which energises the line. The syntax sometimes shares a rhetorical tone, though not a philosophy, with DH Lawrence: "Futile cunning man – [By cunning overcoming the life-inertia]."

The parade of cliched "sea" adjectives in the fourth stanza mocks Whitmanesque celebration, emphasising the point with a finely judged pause before naming names. Rodker is on a roll, denouncing both water and its inhabitants, besides the oceanic visions of Walt. From the elemental to the man-made, the anti-psalmist then turns to "the twilight labour of water works". Is this another Victorian shibboleth under attack – the sewage system? Perhaps the reference to the "satyriast's beatitude" indicates a symbolic, and Freudian, treatment of the water works. Masked by the faux pastoral of "geometric ponds/ fringed by willows," they represent the evils of repression.

The speaker seems at one moment to be jokingly exaggerating, and, at another, connecting to the fine, hard grain of realism. The last stanza turns from Whitman and water works to the social context: slums, disease and poverty. The compression and repetition have a flattening effect: it's as if we can feel the tenement walls pressing on the inhabitants of those "streets … / whose mean houses hold mean lives,/ wallpaper, flypaper,/ paperfaced brats."

The final reversal, "God be with you, Reader," is a parodic blessing. The God of the poem is a false God, one of pomposity and cover-ups, a God who has made a damnable creation. Such, no doubt, is the God of the imagined Reader, who prefers polite literary convention to Modernist challenges. Rodker might as well be saying, "Go to hell."

While not dealing directly with the first world war and the poet's pacifism, "Hymn of Hymns" plainly reveals a mind repelled by heroics. In the Hymn's most memorable lines, Rodker's speaker detonates the hubris of "Attacking the stars/ from eyes five feet above ground". At the same time, he's undoubtedly exhilarated by the surge of his iconoclasm. The traditional psalmic devices – strong rhythms, incantatory repetition – underlie the force of this hymn against hymns. Although not apparently designed as such, it would have made a rousing performance poem.

Hymn of Hymns

God damn Cosmoses –
Eternities, infinities
and all that galley.

God damn
white mushroomy flaccid
and smelling of old clothes
Man!
Whether Homeric
or after
Dostoievsky.
Born between excrements
in death returning:
Futile cunning man –
[By cunning overcoming the life-inertia.]
Attacking the stars
from eyes five feet above ground.

God damn
woman
mushroomy flaccid
and smelling of old clothes woman.
Her heirs and assigns
for ever.

God damn
the prurulent pestilent wind,
and the pullulating sea.
The eternal infinite, cosmical, blue,
deep, unfathomed, boundless, free,
racing, wild, mysterious sea –
its argus-eyed, winged and lanthorned dwellers.
And you; Walt.

God damn the swift fiery wind
the close comfortable clouds.

God damn
and eternally destroy
the twilight labour of water works,
where in the pumping room
sure pistons work –
[satyriast's beatitude.]

God damn
the incredible tragedies of their geometric ponds
fringed by poplars.

God damn streets
whose dust sends up syph and flu
diarrhoea and smallpox,
whose mean houses hold mean lives,
wallpaper, flypaper,
paperfaced brats.

God be with you, Reader.

Phillipson's humorous description of an intellectual family making a cake is leavened by her fondness for her subjects

This week's poem, "Relational Epistemology" by Heather Phillipson, is almost as full of philosophical nuggets as the rich cherry Genoa cake it celebrates is full of raisins. The poem appears in the artist-poet's new collection, Instant-Flex 718, the title of which refers to a kind of glue used in bookbinding. Perhaps it's also a metaphor about the fusion of body and mind – a central concern for Phillipson, and for contemporary philosophy.

Modern thinkers in the field of epistemology (the theory of knowledge) often argue, very sensibly, that their discipline should take account of the ways in which forms of knowledge interconnect. The "relational" of the title signals an everyday meaning, too. Like many young writers' poems, but with a finer edge than most, this one is built around family interaction. The household under scrutiny is talkative and articulate, a kind of super-Simpsons whose paterfamilias is every bit a match for his wife and offspring. When he paraphrases Merleau-Ponty, the French philosopher who viewed the body as the centre of perception, he voices lyrically one of the poem's principle conundrums: "the toucher touching touched".

"Phenomenology at the dinner table was not unusual," as the speaker quips, in one of her seemingly throwaway remarks. Rarely were intellectuals so charming, even as mild insults are bandied ("All men are not idiots … but …"). Phillipson's clan members demonstrate a self-mocking sense of humour and a desire to co-operate. Yes, they must be fictional. But I'd still like to have tea with them.

A short anecdote introduces the father. The speaker's My Little Pony toy has been turned into art-work, and, if that wasn't enough, there's Kafka at bedtime. Her tone is deadpan, suggesting that it all seemed perfectly normal. The father's opening words ("It's whatever you want it to be") possibly answer a plaintive "What is it?", posed as the daughter surveys the mutilation/ transformation of her toy – a favourite question of audiences confronted by contemporary art, but a question about the nature of reality, too.

When the mother speaks, her style is bracingly didactic. Her mixture of feminine and feminist realism underpins the speaker's own cool self-confidence. She is presented entirely through what she says, and what she inscribes in the copy of Someday My Prince Won't Come, clearly an essential text passed from mother to daughter. Sceptical about theory, which seems to be equated with male modes of thinking, mother hands on advice which the poem itself variously addresses, an ars poetica in miniature: "Darling, don't be limited/ by propositional modes of representation! xx." Lest we forget the poet's craft in the enjoyment of her ideas, the effectiveness of the line-break here is worth noting.

The father, it seems, would not disagree with the mother's views. The couple is not stereotypical. United by the "methodological" approach, they companionably share the cake-making (at least, he steadies the mixing-bowl while she sifts the sugar). The home-made, many-splendour'd cherry Genoa leads effortlessly to Wittgenstein's raisins, and further conflict-resolution, led by the mother. She is ultimately able to "absolve" Wittgenstein, whose theory, in this case, can be tested on the taste-buds.

That there can be experience unmediated by language seems to be the crucial insight. Of course, the poem works the other way, as it has to. Poetry creates experience for its readers out of language (though the experience depends on our own previous experience, of course). It also registers the sensuous textures, the sounds and colours of words, even if their meaning is unclear or unknown.

Theory, in theory, could be an easy target for a narrative grounded in cheerful domesticity. The poem's solution is to avoid the hefty drench of irony. Terms like "signifiers" and "methodological" and even "so called" are not included for a cheap laugh: the poem acknowledges the value of precisions and abstractions in making their vocabulary part of the lexis of family chat. And that's where the humour of the writing meets its intelligence, aided by the distanced but affectionate tone of the narrator.

Like a good, complicated cake, "Relational Epistemology" harmonises its many flavours. And those philosophical raisins not only stimulate the reader's grey cells, but leave an added lexical fragrance on the palate.

Relational Epistemology

'It's whatever you want it to be,' said my father
after he bisected My Little Pony and used her in a sculpture.
At bedtime he read me Kafka's short fiction.

'All men are not idiots,' my mother advised,
'but beware of Structuralists;
life will never be a matter of signifiers and signs.'

She gave up her copy of Some Day My Prince Won't Come
with a dedication: 'Darling, Don't be limited
by propositional modes of representation! xx'

Preparation of Rich Cherry Genoa was methodological.
My father paraphrased Merleau-Ponty: 'the toucher touching touched.'
His hands around the mixing bowl, she sifted sugar.

It helped them contextualise the relationship between Self
and Other. Phenomenology at the dinner table was not unusual.
My brother queried so-called 'pepper', so-called 'ketchup',

ingested as if objective fact. The colour 'red' is not universal.
Mainly, my sister slept at any hour.
'See!' said my mother,

'The claim that all experience might be mediated by language
is one all women know to be preposterous.
And besides, Wittgenstein is dead.'

Over dessert, however, she absolved him
on account of her cake and his raisins. 'It's like Ludwig said,
raisins may be the best part of a cake

but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake.
My cake isn't, as it were, thinned-out raisins,
as you will know from experience.'

Concise and musical, this is one of the most popular versions of a much-reworked ballad of aching love and loss

This week's poem is among the most beautiful of the "Child" ballads. It's an unusually compact and harmonious narrative, constructed around a conversation between a young man and the ghost of his beloved, and with very little extraneous or expository material. In fact, the focused intensity is almost that of a lyric poem rather than a storytelling ballad.

The Harvard scholar, Francis James Child, collected these ballads mainly from printed sources. The resulting magnum opus, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1892-98), initially ran to 10 volumes, and that was without the commentary, which Child didn't live to complete. His unique contribution to the field of ballad scholarship lies in his meticulous inclusion of different versions of the same text.

Child prints a number of variants for "The Unquiet Grave". This one, the favourite of many folksingers and anthologists, is numbered 78A.

The first two stanzas are spoken by the young man (compare 78F with its female mourner). At first, it seems he directly addresses the dead woman, although it's not impossible that he's talking to a new, living beloved: "The wind doth blow today, my love,/ And a few small drops of rain." The reference to the "small drops of rain" faintly recalls the lovely quatrain from the early 16th century, "Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow/ The small raine down can raine?/ Cryst, if my louve were in my armes/ And I in my bedde again!" The speaker continues in lines three and four either to address his new lover, or to turn to another auditor: if the latter, the effect is of an "aside" spoken on-stage: "I never had but one true-love./ In cold grave she was lain." The device is more than expository: its simple directness confirms the speaker's emotional authority.

At first, the woman's death seems recent. But the pledged period of mourning ("a twelvemonth and a day") passes between stanzas two and three. The belief that graves become "unquiet", and the restless ghosts enact an angry or violent haunting because excessive grief prevents their leaving the earth, is an ancient one, far older than the poem.

This mourner refuses to accept that his time is up, and, as a result, "the dead began to speak". There's something eerie in the fact that the woman, though clearly the one referred to, is not specified: she is simply "the dead". Now the dialogue proper begins: the spectral woman asks whose weeping is disturbing her, and the young man promises he'll leave her in peace in return for one kiss.

The repetitions from verse to verse, a common mnemonic or musical patterning, here have the effect of bringing the lovers touchingly close, as if one echoed the other. "I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips" is reinforced almost tenderly by the response, "You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips", while the clagginess of the alliteration leaves a contrasting impression of un-sentimentalised mortality.

Although it could be the man speaking in stanza six, it seems more likely that the woman's ghost is the speaker throughout five, six and seven. Her description of the dead flower is a parable about loss and its acceptance. The mourner still wants to believe the "finest flower" (their love) can grow again. The woman knows regeneration is impossible: the flower is "withered to a stalk" and this withering happens to lovers' hearts, too: it's an inevitable fact of time. The message is harsh and sad, but the subsequent words are kindly. "So make yourself content, my love,/ Till God calls you away." Permission to forge new connections seems to be offered in that "make yourself content".

Contemporary readers largely share the realistic attitude shown by this thoughtful ghost. We stress the importance of "moving on" as the eventual aim of mourning. But we need to remember that, whenever this ballad originated, it was long before modern psychologising about death. The superstition that kissing a dead person results in one's own death would have had a logical basis at a time when many people died of infectious diseases such as the plague. Read with a historically distanced perspective, the ballad may be a practical warning about how the living should treat the dead (for both their sakes) rather than advice on how best to survive traumatic loss.

It's interesting to compare 78B. There the lovers do kiss, and the poem ends ominously, as the male ghost tells the young woman, "I am afraid, my pretty, pretty maid,/ Your time will not be long."

Whatever the ballad's "message", its harmonies leave us in no doubt of the depth of the lovers' empathy. The images are memorably simple, almost archetypal. Intermittently liquid sounds and the flowing, predominantly iambic rhythm suggest at times a lullaby. The rain-flecked wind, the "earthy strong" breath and the green garden with its one withered flower are details that, although this is a "supernatural" ballad, create the impression of a natural cycle, ever-present and compelling.

Ballads are notoriously difficult to date. Some sources suggest c.1400; others say that there is no evidence that "The Unquiet Grave" existed in written form before 1800. In fact, not many of Child's ballads date from before 1600. In some versions, it's the young man who has died: like a medieval knight, he lies "slain" in the "greenwood". 78D has a literary diction at times, a hint of Scots dialect, and a nautical setting. The quality of 78A could reflect the later crafting and processing of some rougher, older material. But there are many versions in addition to Child's and you may have a favourite of your own.

The Unquiet Grave

"The wind doth blow today, my love,
  And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
  In cold grave she was lain.

"I'll do as much for my true-love
  As any young man may;
I'll sit and mourn all at her grave
  For a twelvemonth and a day."

The twelvemonth and a day being up,
  The dead began to speak:
"Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
  And will not let me sleep?"

"'T is I, my love, sits on your grave,
  And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
  And that is all I seek."

"You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
  But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
  Your time will not be long.

"'T is down in yonder garden green,
  Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that e're was seen
  Is withered to a stalk.

"The stalk is withered dry, my love,
  So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
  Till God calls you away."

A lover's lament to personified 'Absence', the melancholy here is contained by a remarkably elegant rhetorical technique

This week's poem comes from a collection of sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies and epigrams by the newly-rediscovered Elizabethan poet, Robert Sidney. It's untitled, but numbered "Sonnet 30", and begins, aptly for a re-emergent poet, "Absence, I cannot say thou hid'st my light … "

Sidney's poems, handwritten in a notebook, with a leather binding added in the 19th century, came to notice in the 1960s, when the contents of the library of Warwick Castle were dispersed. The collection had been misattributed, but Sidney's spiky italic handwriting was identified by the Cambridge scholar Peter Croft, who went on to become the poet's first editor. Croft's magnificent edition of The Poems of Robert Sidney is essential reading, not only for students of Elizabethan literature but for anyone generally interested in poetry and poetics.

There must have been a certain amount of sibling rivalry in the Sidney establishment. Philip was Robert's elder brother by nine years: there was also the talented younger sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, the dedicatee of Robert's collection. Their achievements might help explain why Robert confined himself to the private circulation of his work. Exhorted constantly by his father to follow Philip's example, he may well have lacked complete confidence in his own writing projects. At court, as well, his career seems to have been overshadowed by the brilliant elder brother.

After Philip was mortally wounded, he was cared for by Robert until his death. Robert succeeded him as Governor of Flushing, a post he seems not to have relished. Melancholy as most of the sonnets are, Robert for many years was happily married to the Welsh heiress, Barbara Gamage. Another distinguished poet was among their children: Mary Wroth.

As Peter Croft's illuminating Introduction makes clear, courtly love was still a potent influence on the Elizabethan poets, and Neoplatonic idealism informs much of Sidney's work. Robert's sonnet-sequence is not the narrative of a love affair, actual or imaginary. The sonnets separately explore different aspects of love and rejection, and the female beauty which is praised may often be more ideal than real.

Sidney's sonnets [PDF] are carefully wrought Petrarchan structures, showing a gift for what I would call "deep embroidery". This is not embroidery in the sense of trivial embellishment, but the delicate stitching of the syntax into various rhetorical patterns. The cross-stitch of chiasmus is particularly favoured in Sonnet 30. These devices, properly used, do so much more than proclaim the author's wit: they sharpen both sense and sentiment.

The thought in the first quatrain is complex. Absence, addressed directly in the opening line, might almost be an allegorical figure rather than an abstract noun. The speaker's claims are deliberately paradoxical. We'd expect a lover's absence from his beloved to hide his light, and prevent his day's dawning. Not so, he says, and yet his sun has set for ever. The fourth line begins to shed a little more illumination on the matter: he is "absent" when present because, although visible, he remains unseen.

"Nothing but I do parallel the night" is an odd construction. Because of the earlier reference to the permanently set sun, I read it as meaning "I resemble nothing other than the night". It's almost as if the tortuous grammar were a mask, keeping self-revelation at bay. The verse continues more artfully, with a play on the meaning of "done" as both "finished" and "accomplished" ("all act of heat and light is done"). "She that did all in me all hath undone" admits, for the first time, the presence of the sadly impossible She. The near-homographic rhyme (done/undone) brings home the entirely negative connotations of "all … undone."

Antithesis reaches its climax in the metaphor of the eighth line: "I was love's cradle once, now love's grave right." Again, the construction is hardly straightforward. It seems possible that "grave" is not simply a noun, the easy antonym of "cradle", but does service as an adjective, whilst "right" becomes a noun: "grave right" or even, to stretch a pun, "grave rite". If "right" is intended simply as an adjective, placed after the noun "grave", perhaps it could be read as a synonym for "rightful".

Polyptoton, the device which repeats the same word in a different grammatical case, continues to enliven the emotional interplay in the sestet. "Absence", once more denoting an addressee, is echoed by "Absent" as an adjective, the subject of which is "I". Similarly, there's the double sense of "care" - a verb with a loving undertone in "all what I care to see" and a plural noun that suggests pain and effort in "my cares avail me not".

This sestet is sharpened by Robert's characteristic division of the six lines into two separate triplets, a structure favoured by Philip Sidney in Astrophil and Stella. Both triplets of Sonnet 30 conclude with a powerful rhyming couplet.

The night remorselessly darkens. Happiness was possible when the end of absence could be anticipated, but now the speaker "cannot say mine" of any "joys". Notice the emotional loss is expressed in a comment about grammatical usage. The annihilation in the last line is total: "Present not hearkened to, absent forgot." The speaker has himself become the absence. Perhaps earlier, when he wasn't seen, he was simply overlooked. Not being heard is surely worse. It implies he has spoken directly to the object of his desire, and has wilfully been ignored. The psychological plight of a younger brother perhaps informs the subconscious feelings here.

As lovers' complaints go, this one is stark but composed: the loss described is so comprehensive it almost negates the loser, but the tone is never exaggerated or self-pitying. There are no showy gestures, simply the quiet, intricate stabbing and looping of that rhetorical needle, and perhaps the glint of a melancholy smile.

Sonnet 30

Absence, I cannot say thou hid'st my light,
Not darkened, but for ay sett is my sun;
No day sees me, not when night's glass is run;
I present, absent am; unseen in sight.

Nothing but I do parallel the night
In whom all act of light and heat is done:
She that did all in me, all hath undone;
I was love's cradle once, now love's grave right.

Absence, I used to make my moan to thee;
When thy clouds stayed, my joys they did not shine;
But now I may say joys, cannot say mine.

Absent, I want all what I care to see,
Present, I see my cares avail me not:
Present not hearkened to, absent forgot.

This shocking portrait of a child locked into a brutal cycle of war restrains its language, but its outrage is palpable

This week's poem "Boy Soldier" is by Fred D'Aguiar and comes from his new collection, The Rose of Toulouse. A prolific, multi-talented writer in genres including drama, prose fiction and the verse-novel, D'Aguiar fulfils both contemporary and traditional expectations of the poet's role. Private memory and public accountability converge and energise each other throughout his work.

A jagged "Song of Experience", "Boy Soldier" has some of the simplicity and directness of Blake, but the moral indignation is implicit rather than explicit. The particular hostilities in which the child is caught are not named or located. The boy portrayed is an individual, but he is also the universal child-soldier.

Instantly visual, the tercet begins with an exclamation, bringing speaker and reader straight into contact with the boy, and asserting the speaker's empathy: "What a smile!" A detached, almost "Martian School" style of observation braces the fatherly tenderness. As with that older generation of poet-reporters, compassion will express itself largely through watchful, ego-free attention to the subject.

Romantic and popular convention associates children (especially smiling ones) with innocence and adult enlightenment. The smile of the boy soldier summons that convention, and immediately complicates it, moving from the "large lamp" of the face to the bony "lanterns" of the skinny, unformed body supporting it, "waiting for muscle." The pathos of that "waiting" will become apparent in the fourth stanza. Meanwhile, after the establishing close-up, a cleverly transitional phrase, "body all angles", evokes not only the physique but the rapidity of movement as the boy goes into action.

The poem's rhythm is angular, too, despite its stanzaic symmetry, with curtly enjambed lines jutting through the flow of the syntax, and occasional abbreviation of the syntax itself. Dramatic, cliff-hanger pauses occur at many of the line-endings ("moving/ thing", "drags/ down", etc) culminating in the cross-stanza breaking of "stops// dead." By separating two elements of an ordinary-enough verbal phrase, the poet slows the action and achieves compression. The boy "stops dead" his unknown victim, and the victim himself stops, and falls dead, in slower motion. But, of course, the sentence, like the boy, carries on. The point is that the child has not thought about his target: he shoots at whatever moves and "fails to weigh whom he stops// dead or maims … " . Several verbs in the poem suggest hunting, and an awkward, painful, inefficient "kill". That the bullets are compared to "jabs thrown … " recalls the more playful sport a normally raised boy might enjoy – boxing, perhaps.

There's a sense that the boy's failure to weigh things up is the result of carrying too much adult weight, metaphorically and literally: "His Kalashnikov fires at each moving/ thing … " The gun seems bigger than him, with a depersonalising will of its own. Recruited by force, half-starved, possibly drugged, the boy is a small, cheap set of instantaneous reflexes, almost a robot. Perhaps he's too young to know what he's doing; more likely, he's been deprived of that intelligence by his operators.

A novelistic device fast-forwards the narrative, revealing what will happen to the boy before it happens. His body itself registers this in the "involuntary shudders/ when someone, somewhere, steps over// his shallow, unmarked, mass grave." The word "shudders" could be a verb, but I think it's a noun, an abbreviation which might be in a reporter's notebook, jotted without syntactic ballast. The superstition is commonplace, but used to striking effect: it's one of the moments when we see clearly the boy's own vulnerability, and the vulnerability of all war-used bodies, shuddering involuntarily as they are brought down.

In stanza four we are witnessing his death, perhaps not realising it at first because "his smile remains undimmed, inviting … " Again, an ordinary colloquialism is made to resonate: this child truly doesn't know what has hit him. The opening "lamp" metaphor is resumed with poignant visual clarity: "not knowing … / what snuffs out the wicks in his eyes."

At this point the boldest of the pauses occurs. A full stop and a stanza break appear to terminate the action at the end of the fourth stanza. But the poem goes on and allows us to identify the new figure. The presence of this assailant gains emphasis by being cordoned off, though the clause qualifies the "not knowing" of the preceding stanza. "Except that he moves" assigns a gender to the unknown mover: he is, of course, another boy-soldier. The first child's death-smile is the final irony. We know there's a larger defeat awaiting him and his fellow-combatants – a mass grave.

Now it's as if the speaker and the boy-soldier unite in their recognition of the second child's identity. He's like the first child's mirror image. And because this tercet is itself a mirror-image, reflecting the opening stanza, we might imagine the poem's beginning again, with this other face, smiling largely, this other skinny, agile little body with its Kalashnikov. The implied circularity takes us towards a general sense of war as a cycle of futility, without blurring the particular portrayal – that of a young boy subjected to a form of enslavement. It's estimated that three-quarters of the world's current conflicts recruit children. The boy-soldier is a child of our time.

Boy Soldier

What a smile! One large lamp for a face,
smaller lanterns where skin stretches over
bones waiting for muscle, body all angles.

His Kalashnikov fires at each moving
thing before he knows what he drags
down. He halts movement of every
kind and fails to weigh whom he stops

dead or maims, his bullets
like jabs thrown before the thought
to throw them, involuntary shudders
when someone, somewhere, steps over

his shallow, unmarked, mass grave.
But his smile remains undimmed,
inviting, not knowing what hit him,
what snuffs out the wicks in his eyes.

Except that he moves and a face just like
his figures like him to stop all action
with a flick of finger on the trigger.

Fred D'Aguiar will be reading from his work on June 22 for the Wordsworth Trust .

The unjustly neglected early modernist developed from haiku her own form, a vessel for pared-down vernacular observation

When a loved daughter was christened in Brooklyn Heights in 1878, the name Adelaide must have seemed to her mother, another Adelaide, and her father, the freethinking Episcopal minister Algernon Crapsey, a fine choice. But a name may date quickly, especially in times of dramatic historical change, and it's just possible that this distinctly unattractive handle contributed, alongside her gender, to the poet's later neglect.

Crapsey's posthumously published collection Verses (1915) was initially a popular success. Critical attention eluded her, however, and she was sidelined by the pace-setting anthologies. Yet she was one of the pioneers of 20th-century modernism. Inspired by a collection of Japanese haiku and tanka published in French translation, she invented the unrhymed, 5-lined, 22-syllable form known subsequently as the American cinquain. If only, like HD, she'd had Ezra Pound as a publicist and an intriguing pseudonym. Poetry editors just might have been more receptive to the work of "AC Cinquainiste".

The cinquains are a good introduction to her work and I've picked two examples for this week, Blue Hyancinths and Youth. They appear separately in her collection, but the pairing usefully illustrates her range, and recalls the haiku influence. Haiku traditionally consist of poems which focus on images from the natural cycle, and a sub-genre, senryu, depicting everyday social life.

Crapsey's stress-pattern is usually iambic. The number of stresses per line is 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, while the syllabic pattern is 2, 4, 6, 8, 2. However, she's not rigidly tied to these rules, as both poems demonstrate, particularly Blue Hyacinths. The beautifully casual first line ("In your") can be stressed in various ways according to pronunciation, or better still not stressed at all. The second line has five syllables, not four, and the fourth has all of nine. This is worth noting, because the irregularity seems to enhance the difference of scale between the flower's individual "curled petals" and the vastness of the "blue headlands and seas" their colour evokes. Fragile brevity takes on an increasing weightiness as the poem opens out into those rich classical associations, culminating in the "perfumed immortal breath sighing / Of Greece". The two-syllable last line of the cinquain can sometimes create the sense of a "dying fall", but here there's a culmination of meaning and sound in the now solidly iambic stress – "Of Greece". The last word consolidates the flower's mythical qualities, but the flower is not romanticised out of existence. This seems akin to the way HD's poems characteristically operate. Crapsey, too, had visited Europe; in fact, she had studied in Rome. A southern sensuousness is evident in many of her nature poems.

Blue Hyacinths, for all its allusion, is a voiced poem, a rhythmical pulse of praise addressed to the hyacinths. A different sort of voice gives utterance in Youth. The poem works like a small dramatic monologue. Although Youth was written before Blue Hyacinths, it's not an early poem. Crapsey wrote her cinquains late in her short life: she was already ill when she began them in 1911, working on them till 1913 and perhaps a little later (she died in 1914). The voice in Youth may or may not be that of the poet's remembered younger self, but it obviously denotes a speaker young and healthy enough to feel immortal. The syntax is cleverly organised to capture the natural emphases of vehement speech, and this time the first line is firmly iambic: "But me / They cannot touch, / Old age and death …"

There's no direct concrete description, but in the lines "the strange / And ignominious end of old / Dead folk" the adjectives are doing something they too rarely do in poems: pulling their weight. They show us how youth separates itself from age by instinctive blind revulsion. The repetition of "old" insists on the speaker's sense of the difference between these "folk" and herself: perhaps it also suggests, by protesting too much, that she fears their fate. An ellipsis after "death" (perhaps counted as a silent syllable) furthers the idea of a threat which defies expression. Unlike the speaker of Blue Hyacinths, this narrator seems raw and exposed, without the comfort of imagining a living, "breathing" past. Youth turns away from the image of the "old / Dead folk", unaided by any intellectual or aesthetic mediation. Three accented syllables ("old / Dead folk") create a shocking climax, an effect broadcasting what the speaker strenuously wishes to avoid.

Crapsey's earlier neglect has been repaired of late, and there are some excellent online sites devoted to her. The cinquain as a form is discussed comprehensively here, with a good accompanying selection of Crapsey's finest. An important champion of her work, Karen Alkalay-Gut has written an illuminating account of her discovery and reappraisal of a poet she initially feared as a boring, stuffy "local poetess" and has assembled a complete online collection here.

In terms of poetic DNA, Adelaide Crapsey can be regarded as HD's elder sister and Emily Dickinson's niece. Her stature may be smaller than theirs, but she's not a negligible figure. Rightly celebrated for her skills in the cinquain, she wrote poems of many shapes and sizes. While admittedly some of them can seem derivatively romantic, it's the keen-edged, pared-down vernacular of the kind found in the cinquains that distinguishes her, both as an heir of Dickinson (check out The Sun-Dial or You Nor I Nor Nobody Knows in the online collection) and as an important transitional poet of early modernism.

Two cinquains by Adelaide Crapsey

Blue Hyacinths

In your
Curled petals what ghosts
Of blue headlands and seas,
What perfumed immortal breath sighing
Of Greece.

Youth

But me
They cannot touch,
Old age and death … the strange
And ignominious end of old
Dead folk!

Mort's mythic poem of the sea is a story of creation overshadowed, a world where language cannot yet be trusted

This week's poem "The Fetching" is by Graham Mort and comes from his 2007 collection, Visibility. His most recent volume, Cusp, was published in 2011, preceded in 2010 by a debut-collection of stories, Touch, which won the Edge Hill prize for short fiction. Mort is also a playwright and lecturer, and works on development projects in Africa as director of the Transcultural Centre for Writing and Research at Lancaster University.

"The Fetching" is the first poem in Visibility, and can therefore be read as a prelude to the whole five-volume span of the collection. Mort is a poet finely attuned to his varied locations, with an eye for the telling detail. "The Fetching" has an unusually mythic quality, and its positioning as an entry-point raises the pitch for both reader and writer. It's like a portal or archway, which we enter not to leave the everyday world behind but to re-learn its intensity.

The poem's eloquent, authoritative voice has a complementary visual presence. On the page it looks sturdy and traditional – and a traditionally rhymed couplet starts it off. Subsequently there's a more complex sound-stitching, with internal rhyme featuring in seven of the nine couplets. Usually, the penultimate word (and final stress) of the first line rhymes with the last word of the second (wind/rind, stars/tears, souls/pools, etc). This first line is often foreshortened to three beats, resisting closure until the second four-beat line. Full rhymes are used sparingly. So the poem moderates its forcefulness: wrapped up in the textured syntax of each unit, the rhymes avoid facile or too-obvious cadence. The larger grammatical patterning also allows variety, alternating the declarative "I was at the fetching …" with a more casual and abbreviated follow-up, "Then the fetching …" The speaker's continual presence is implied without the heavy hand of repeated assertion.

The poem is like a creation-myth, but the "I" seems to be a participant or witness rather than originator. The processes witnessed are elemental. "Fetching," itself, is a powerful word, particular in its faintly archaic form as a gerund – "the fetching". It suggests a ritual of bringing something into the world, and also of controlling what is brought in. The myth begins with "the fetching of the sea" and its dangerously "white waves," and moves on with "the fetching of the wind" which is already the sea's accomplice. Interestingly, one of the dictionary's definitions of the noun "fetch" is "the distance in the direction of the prevailing wind that waves can travel continuously without obstruction before reaching the coast."

In line four, the wind's rind-licking connects it to the "wolf" metaphor of stanza five. The third stanza's linking of stars and tears recalls Blake's "The Tyger". Mort's stars seem to introduce the concept of time into world and so "salt our tears". The "bitter pools" and "beached souls" may foreshadow the catastrophe hinted in a poem further on in the collection, "Morecambe Bay". Despite the imagery of the sea's destruction, there's a biblical resonance to "the fetching of the souls," as if redemption followed disaster. But the important fifth stanza takes "fetching" to a new malignity with the splendidly rhymed "fetching of the Gulf that/ brought the oil that loosed the wolf".

The poem's broken song encapsulates another myth – that of poetic inspiration. It might evoke Caedmon's hymn, revised as a hymn for the present-day, the glory of creation overshadowed. The "Gulf/ wolf" rhyme is a turning point. No souls are redeemed. Through "the fetching of the war" they are permanently destroyed.

End-rhyme returns in stanza seven, marrying plural (times) with singular (lime), and thus still evading full rhyme. The simile comparing the decay of trust to that of "flesh in lime" is shocking and unexpected. Those simple words which are often politicians' cynical playthings – trust, fears, dark – add the contemporary note of flat dissonance to the song. Almost inevitably, in the final couplet, the poem turns on itself. The speaker seems to be reviewing the poet's part in the act of creation. He has fetched the words, and found them wanting. The dramatic assertion of the last stanza's first line ("The fetching of words is worse") is emphasised by the colon's caesura, like an intake of breath, before the conjunction, "since."

Formally, we've heard notes of a difficult celebration, but the message, in contrary motion, advises caution, with a bitter reminder that language is compromised. Is the poem "cursed" because it can't tell the truth any more, or because it isn't trusted by its hearers to do so? I think the latter, and suspect that many poets share something of the feeling. Nevertheless, the Caedmon of modern times hasn't much option but to go on singing of "created things" – even if it's a corrupted creation, with only a corrupted language to keep the hint of truth or vision alive. So we go through this poem's archway and on into the book – the site where, word by word, language and trust in language are carefully being restored.

The Fetching

I was at the fetching of the sea:
it brought white waves to harry me.

Then the fetching of the wind that
brought the sea to lick earth's rind.

I was at the fetching of the stars that
brought the years to salt our tears.

Then the fetching of the souls the sea
had beached in bitter pools.

I was at the fetching of the Gulf that
brought the oil that loosed the wolf.

Then the fetching of the war that
lost those souls for evermore.

I was at the fetching of the times
when trust decayed as flesh in lime.

And so the fetching of the fears that
brought the dark that still is here.

The fetching of words is worse: since
killing tainted them the poem is cursed.

With its melodious free verse, this love poem's imagery extends beyond an individual woman to wider nature

Among the publications marking the centenary of RS Thomas's birth in 1913, especially interesting is an edition by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies of 138 rediscovered poems. Published recently by Bloodaxe, Uncollected Poems represents what the editors consider to be the best of the work that Thomas, by accident or design, omitted from his individual collections. For both general and specialist readers of this popular but confusingly prolific poet, the selection provides a welcome opportunity, to see him emerge in a clearer and slightly less familiar outline.

Previously scattered among little magazines, limited editions, etc, the chronologically ordered poems represent every stage of their author's career (except juvenilia) and sound all his major themes: religion, the land and nationalism, Daniel Corkery's triad of foci for emergent Irish consciousness are no less significant for this Welsh writer in English. So Iago Prytherch, the hill shepherd character partly inspired by Patrick Kavanagh's peasant-protagonist in "The Great Hunger", appears briefly in these pages, "wandering in the dew" and strangely exalted. The less stony aspects of Thomas and Wales manifest themselves elsewhere, for example in additions to the cache of love poems for Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, the English artist to whom Thomas was married for 51 years. "Luminary" is one of these.

Composed around 1980, it appeared in 2002 in a limited edition pamphlet of family poems, Ringless Fingers, published by the poet's son, Gwydion Thomas (Frangipani Press, Bangkapi, Thailand). Uncollected Poems includes two other fine pieces from this pamphlet.

"Luminary" is free verse at its most melodious. It begins with a spondee (two stressed syllables) asserting the ceremonious quality of the address to "My luminary". The tempo's now set for a slow relishing of vowels and consonants. "Luminary" itself is a word of complex sounds and meanings. Though it doesn't recur again, the rays of its four lovely syllables seem to envelop the whole poem. Usually a noun but also an adjective, its primary, metaphorical definition is "someone who enlightens or influences others". It also has a literal meaning, pertaining to light, and both senses are entwined here. Monosyllables contrast with such Latinate resonance: "star", "light", "noon", "sun" and "sky." Small, but spacious, these words extend the field of luminosity, and perhaps recall Wordsworth's Lucy, "Fair as a star when only one/Is shining in the sky." Then, with the sensuous "l" sound in a minor key, the word "lowers" descends like a cloud.

The "noon when there is no sun/and the sky lowers" is as much a state of mind as weather. Afternoon, for the contemplative orders, was traditionally the most difficult time of day, when slothful despondency (acedia) was most tempting. So, at this point in the poem, the illumination is drawn inward. The following apostrophe, to "My balance", is indicative. This luminary restores personal mental balance, inevitably threatened when loss of balance is a historical condition, and the world itself has "gone off/ joy's standard". Those two plain words, "balance" and "standard", with their connotations of exact measurement, give the abstract transcendence of "joy" an anchorage. The polyptoton ("joy", "joys") neatly illustrates the verbal balancing.

Thomas's use of caesura is always agile. "My light", "My balance" and "Yours the face" subvert the dead hand of the end-stop and ensure the flow of rhythmic energy from one short line to the next.

"Yours the face" introduces a stylistic bridge-passage, allowing the poem to modulate from apostrophe to reminiscence, from an abbreviated to a more expansive syntax. Each word of the short declaration is perfectly placed. As for the Elizabethan poets, love originates in the eyes. Recognition is followed by the wonderfully silent and graceful invitation: "Come, my eyes/ said…" The poem becomes an epithalamion, with a pre-lapsarian freshness shining through the little scene. "The morning/of a world" suggests a comparison of the couple to Adam and Eve in an Edenic first morning. Does the proximity of "world" and "dew" recall the "world of dew" trope which signals transience for the haiku poets? Perhaps, but only fleetingly.

The wedding ceremony might be a Druidic one. Foliage ("a green altar"), and birdsong create a sanctuary from the Church. The thrush officiates, as if in a folk poem. Characteristically, Thomas finds his sacred, unfettered space out of doors.

Anticlerical and anti-technological assertions echo one another in lines 18-20. The capitalisation reminds us that the Machine is, for Thomas, a satanic force. (His ideal Wales would be an Amish community, as far as technology is concerned.) "Stale" and "tarnish" may not strike the reader initially as very interesting or precise verbs; vows can be staled, of course, but these are "gossamer vows" – and how can they be tarnished? Perhaps the vows themselves are seen as bright objects in a fragile pastoral. The pre-emptive metaphor is clarified by its development, from gossamer to flint and platinum, the latter a metal particularly resistant to tarnishing by heat or chemicals.

The subject of the final, and longest, sentence is the speaker. The vows are his, mulled over in exalted solitude, found to have achieved triumphant durability over time. But what is finally emphasised is that the vows are still sensed as unoppressive, "lighter than platinum." And now, for the first time, the plural possessive pronoun, "ours", appears, and one and one make two. In another twist, the "ringless fingers" of the couple prove even the platinum rings imaginary. Their bare fingers demonstrate their concord. Marriage, for them, is unconnected to outward show. It's as if paganism and Puritanism themselves made a spiritual pact.

The imagery extends the poem's reach beyond an individual woman to wider nature. Again we might think of Patrick Kavanagh and the "triangular hill" so lovingly feminised in the poem "Innocence". Thomas places the encounter with his real bride-to-be in his own personally cherished rural space, one of those luminous greenwoods no less integral to the Welsh landscape than are its stony hills.

Luminary

My luminary,
my morning and evening
star. My light at noon
when there is no sun
and the sky lowers. My balance
of joy in a world
that has gone off joy's
standard. Yours the face
that young I recognised
as though I had known you
of old. Come, my eyes
said, out into the morning
of a world whose dew
waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar
with the thrush for priest
I took those gossamer
vows that neither the Church
could stale nor the Machine
tarnish, that with the years
have grown hard as flint,
lighter than platinum
on our ringless fingers.

An impressionist's manifesto for more naturalistic, less grandiose painting also makes the case for – and expresses – a more immediate poetry

This week, it's time to relax and enjoy a fruit-laden summer cocktail. Marianne Burton's "Pissarro's Orchards" is a kind of postmodern sonnet, with the names of 13 different examples of fruit woven into its 14 lines. It's from Burton's first collection, She Inserts the Key, which is itself a variegated garden of delights.

Something that always endears me to a new poet is seeing the pleasure she or he takes in language for its own sake. Of course, that capacity need not always be on show: it's fundamental to good writing, after all, and no less to poems that conceal the verbal craft which powers them. And there are plenty of such poems in She Inserts the Key. Burton has a gift for short, lyrically incisive stories. The atmospherics of specific times and places are memorably recorded in an extended sequence, "Meditations on the Hours", which forms the connective tissue of the collection.

Like many young poets, Burton savours the bizarre anecdote (there's the obese woman who, post-mortem, has turned into a large bar of soap, for instance). More unusually, she can write in a fresh way about the natural world – even bird-poems which don't induce immediate symptoms of avian déjà vu. Nonetheless, the poems foregrounding verbal technique – concrete poems, a riff on anagrams, and "Pissarro's Orchard" itself – are more than makeweights. They're fun, and interactive (with no accompanying technology for the reader to swear at). They're a reminder of poetry's unique status as an art whose subject is inevitably, partly, language itself, and an assurance that the poet is confident enough to know when to let the words call the tune.

"Pissarro's Orchards" is a loosely-rhymed dramatic monologue, spoken by Camille Pissarro, one of the first and finest exponents of impressionism. Pissarro took painting out of the studio into daylight and fresh air, to respond to real people in real landscapes. I imagine he is a significant figure for Burton, especially in her "Meditations on the Hours", where the response-to-the-moment has something in common with impressionist technique.

Pissarro painted many orchards, sometimes in radiant spring blossom, and sometimes at harvest-time, with fruit-pickers at work. But it was a rather pleasing still-life, Fruit in a Round Basket which particularly helped me appreciate Burton's poem. While the contents of Pissarro's basket are a lot less varied and exotic, I was struck by the analogy of a round basket with the sonnet-form. The weaving-in of the fruit-names suggests a hands-on local craft, and the tactile pleasure of objects retaining a homely thumb-print or seam. The names are looped over the ends and beginnings of lines, sometimes more-or-less audibly ("ban/anacondas"), sometimes more easily seen than heard ("gang/rapes"), but it's not a device the poet wants to hide, or not for long. As if inviting the reader into the workshop, she provides an explanatory footnote on the same page.

True to Pissarro's revisionism, the first eight lines amount to a manifesto, directed against grandiosity in art. The diction is sometimes slightly mannered, as if the painter were making a formal speech to the academicians of the salon and mocking their language as well as their prescriptions and proscriptions. His description of Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting, Cupid Complaining to Venus is deliciously arch: "No feather-hatted naked madam,/ son complaining as he is stung by nectar/-inebriated bees." Classical myth, religious set-pieces and "calendar art" are equally repudiated: "… no impudent kitten, its paw/pawing its mother". The repeated paw-dabbing it neatly pictured here, whilst the fruit-name is both immediately audible and visible, suggesting the way such art, too, plays to our most obvious sentiments.

After the list of "no-nos" the sonnet's turn introduces the artistically radical subjects Pissarro favoured. Although the word-game goes on, the diction is now precise and simple ("perhaps a woman/gossiping as she strings pea-trellises") and swiftly evokes the artist's characteristic subjects. His farmhands and serving-maids are thoroughly naturalistic as they stoop to their work or pause for a chat, yet there's an implicit social idealism in the paintings which the poem picks up when it talks of the "common plan", "taint, rot and worm avoided" and "one hope,/ardent and plain."

Pissarro applied radical ideas to his politics as well as his art. Much of the fruit in the poem is neither European nor orchard-grown. The orchards of the title are perhaps metaphorical, the fruit a symbol of Pissarro's cornucopia of ideas about painting and social justice, and his seminal influence on younger artists. It's a reminder, too, that he was born in the then-Danish West Indies, to a Sephardic Jewish father and Dominican Spanish mother. He inherits plantains and oranges as well as apples and pears.

Pissarro's Orchards

Fruit trees are beauty in themselves. I shall ban
anacondas seducing Eve, slithering over her lap
pleading for her to take a bite. I shall veto gang
rapes of nymphs by satyrs; will have no gods or
angels. No feather-hatted naked madam,
son complaining as he is stung by nectar-
inebriated bees; no impudent kitten, its paw
pawing its mother; no Susanna ogled by an elder.
Berry, leaf, blossom are enough. Perhaps a woman
gossiping as she strings pea trellises, an old man
daring to stoop and hoe, a haymaking group,
each worker committed to a common plan,
– taint, rot and worm avoided – one hope,
ardent and plain. Harvest is sufficient passion.

Note: This sonnet considers Camille Pissarro's philosophy of fit subjects for art. It includes the names of fruits broken between the beginning and end of lines.

A quiet portrait of isolated life uses coolly observed, ordinary details to build an unexpectedly suspenseful narrative

This week's poem "The Man" is by the Buddhist writer Maitreyabandhu, whose first full-length collection, The Crumb Road, has just been published by Bloodaxe and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Typically, it's a poem which seems to present a reassuringly ordinary and familiar scenario, while slowly making the reader aware that something unusual is going on. The images in a Maitreyabandhu poem may be drawn from life, and not obviously symbolic, but they're so arranged to denote a re-ordered reality, together evoking a sometimes dreamlike, inexplicable significance beyond the reader's initial expectations.

It's tempting to see the isolation of "the man" in the poem as the chosen solitude of a contemplative. But, if so, it's an edgy, distracted solitude. If this were a self-portrait by an artist, the artist in the picture would not be its whole subject, not a sharply-seen face, but a figure sharing the scene with other objects.

At first, we see him framed by the kitchen window. It's not clear at this point whether the view shown to the reader is seen from outside, or from the kitchen, or from inside the man's head. The view is not menacing, but disconcerting. It's as if the man had projected his own distractions onto the birds, with their nervous movements and "gestures of defiance". Somehow, all the birds in the poem, even the ladybirds, are emblematic, more than they seem, though their behaviour is not markedly extraordinary.

The pheasant is subdued, "his copper coat restrained". This may be the man's perception, but it's presented so as to suggest an act of self-control on the bird's part, a determination, paralleled by that of the setting sun, not to be picturesque. It's then we learn what the man is actually looking at: he's watching the ladybirds inside. We get the impression that there are, unusually, a lot of them – almost a swarm.

The man, as I've suggested, it not at the poem's centre. He's presented unnamed, the member of a species co-existing with other species. They all seem somehow to be caught between overlapping but inaccessible worlds: the ladybirds huddling by the lights and, in a startling simile, falling "down on their backs as if they'd taken ether", the nervous birds, the man who sits by the window and almost obsessively watches the ladybirds in a kitchen which, we increasingly sense, is not his own.

The middle stanza begins by drawing back to unfold a larger perspective of place and time. We see there's a field surrounding the house. Outside and indoors, time seems telescoped, one day merging with many. There are "always" the woodpigeons and the robin. The word "squadrons" gives the woodpigeons an uneasy, greyly militaristic presence. And though the robin's song might seem domesticated as it's conjured by the phrase, "as bright as teaspoons", the sweet, metallic sound so perfectly evoked is both joyous and a little menacing. Now time really speeds up. In a pair of beautifully economical lines, the sun rises and sets, as if seen through a time-lapse camera. The man is shown performing two simple activities, making two cups of coffee and taking off his glasses before sleeping. It's implied that these are regular activities. What else does he do? Does he eat? Is he fasting? Perhaps the poet has chosen to focus on those particular rituals because they are central to the man's sense of identity.

"Nothing/happened inside the house." Like a prisoner, the man goes out for exercise. He "walked around/the garden with his scarf around his neck". The repetition of "around" evokes entrapment. The robin and the scarf-wearing suggest the season is winter (perhaps the ladybirds were seeking places to hibernate?) All the details, so sharply observed, heard, tasted and felt, add up to a repetitive cycle which has a faintly desperate quality about it. Philip Larkin's question, "Where can we live but days?" comes to mind.

The human "signs of life" the man wishes for are auditory, and seem very quiet and intimate, particularly "the sound of someone … slipping on a jacket." These wishes might be memories, rather than the imagining of what another's presence might be like. When I first read the poem, I wondered if the man had lost a loved partner or close friend. But this stanza doesn't actually rule out another presence. It may be one which lacks discernible "signs of life". The man may be deluded about what is and isn't alive or present.

The brightness of the sunlit kettle recalls the robin's song earlier. The "patch of sunlight" seems to move fast ("swivelled") while the man ceases to move much at all. He "lay down and wrote inspiring things/on little scraps of card". Perhaps the reader should resist the temptation to mutter, "Aha. He's a poet." There's no certainty that the inspiring things are poems. The man may be writing anything, the judgment purely subjective. "Inspiring" is a word which tends to carry an ironic undertone.

The man no longer looks or goes outside. He imagines the sounds of the creatures beyond the house, but isn't sure if he's really heard them. The last line-and-a-half close the narrative abruptly and dramatically, the point of no return emphasised by the distant "spout/out" rhyme. Suddenly, the man is without the basic means of survival. He may be a practicing ascetic, but he will be forced to confront anew his human vulnerability. The poem simply says what happened: the man is now out of the picture. The reader supplies the gasp of dismay. But what if it's the moment of liberation?

The poem's slow tempo, its relaxed but precise diction, and the detached yet not unsympathetic manner, grounded in the use of the third-person perspective, create a mood of possibility, not necessarily negative. Importantly, the narrative is in the past tense. This helps build suspense, and adds a flavour of parable. It's impossible to read the poem without sharing the solitary man's own heightened perception. Even at the end, I felt obscurely that I wanted to go living in the poem and sharing the experience, however extreme it had become.

Both alert and bored, a creature of habit and of patient vision, "the man" is everyman. His story could be one that takes place in the future, at the moment when human civilisation begins to crumble. He may die or he'll go on, as Auden said, "To further griefs, and greater,/ And the defeat of grief." Beyond his lifespan, there will still be birds and animals, nights and days. Or so the poem encourages us to hope.

The Man

The man was sitting by the kitchen window.
Outside, the trees were full of nervous birds,
nodding their heads or flicking up their tails
in gestures of defiance. A pheasant walked
along a hedge, his copper coat restrained,
even the sun held back behind the trees.
The man was watching ladybirds climb up
the windowpane: so many on the walls,
so many huddled near the lights! They fell
down on their backs as if they'd taken ether.

The house stood in the corner of a field
with woodpigeons, always woodpigeons, in twos
or squadrons in the trees; and a robin singing
from a post, his song as bright as teaspoons.
The sun rose in pale and broken stripes,
then set in a perfect orange ball. Nothing
happened inside the house. The man took off
his glasses when he slept, drank two strong cups
of coffee every day, and walked around
the garden with his scarf around his neck.

He wanted signs of life: the sound of someone
closing a drawer or slipping on a jacket;
but no-one pressed the gravel drive or opened
the kitchen door. A patch of sunlight swivelled
round the room, brightening the kettle's spout.
The man lay down and wrote inspiring things
on little scraps of card. He thought he heard
a hare snuffling in the grass, an owl
hooting in the night. But then the taps
ran dry and the blue pilot light went out.

Whilst counselling restraint, Pope's famously stinging wit is here trained on targets that can still be seen today

This week's choice is an extract from Part Three of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism. The whole poem runs to 744 lines, but that shouldn't put you off! It's as readable as it was 300 years ago, and highly pertinent to many burning literary issues – writers' prizes and who judges them, for instance. Pope wrote it in 1709, the year his first work, four pastorals, appeared in print. He was barely 21. When it was published in 1711 it earned the young poet immediate acclaim.

Typically, Pope undertook the work in a competitive spirit. He was an ambitious, driven writer, largely self- and home-educated because of a painful spinal deformation, and because the repressive legislation against Catholics at the time denied him access to a university.

It was Nicholas Boileau's treatise, L'Art Poétique, which fired Pope to produce his own study of literary-critical principles. Like Boileau, he champions neoclassicism and its governing aesthetic of nature as the proper model for art. His pantheon of classical writers, the "happy few," as he calls them, includes Quintilian, Longinus and, most importantly, Horace.

Pope's ideals may be recycled, but there's no doubting his passionate belief in them. Deployed in his sparkling heroic couplets, the arguments and summaries are alive with wit, verbal agility and good sense. From his neoclassical scaffolding, he looks outwards to the literary marketplace of his own age. It was a noisy time, and sometimes the reader seems to hear the buzz of the coffee house, the banter, gossip and argument of the writers and booksellers, the jangle of carts and carriages.

Pope's wit is famously caustic, so it's surprising how often the essayist advocates charity and humility. In the chosen section, he begins by advising restraint in criticising dull and incompetent poets. His tongue is in his cheek, as it turns out: "For who can rail as long as they can write?" Although he takes the view that bad critics are more culpable than bad poets, Pope enjoys a sustained dig at the poet-bores who go on and on and on. The metaphor of the spinning-top implies that a whipping will simply keep them going. Tops "sleep" when they move so fast their movement is invisible – hence the faded cliché "to sleep like a tops". The metaphor shifts to "jades" – old horses urged to recover after a stumble and run on, as these desperate poets "run on", their sounds and syllables like the jingling reigns, their words "dull droppings".

From the "shameless bards" in their frenzy of forced inspiration, Pope turns his attention to the critics, and, with nice comic effect, tars them with the same brush. "There are as mad, abandoned critics too." The "blockhead" he conjures reads everything and blindly attacks everything, "From Dryden's fables down to Durfey's tales." Durfey is placed pointedly at the bottom of the pile. He was generally considered an inferior poet, although Pope's friend Addison had time for him. Samuel Garth, on the other hand, was well-regarded, by Pope and many others, for a poem, The Dispensary, denouncing apothecaries and their cohort physicians. There was a rumour current that Garth was not its real author.

Sychophancy is one of the Essay's prime targets. Pope's rhetoric rises to a pitch as he castigates the hypocrisy of the "fops" who always praise the latest play, and the loquacious ignorance of the preferment-seeking clergy. St Paul's Churchyard, the corrupt precinct of the booksellers, may be full of bores and fools, but there's no safer sanctuary at the cathedral's altar.

The Essay is rich in epigrams, still widely quoted. "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread" is among the best known and most borrowed (by Frank Sinatra, among others). Briefly allegorising, Pope goes on to contrast cautious "sense" and impetuous "nonsense", again evoking the rowdy traffic of 18th-century London with the onomatopoeic "rattling".

The flow has been angrily headlong: now, the pace becomes slower, the argument more rational. Antithesis implies balance, and the syntax itself enacts the critical virtues. Where, Pope asks, can you find the paradigm of wise judgement? It's not a rhetorical question. The poem goes on to provide the answer, enumerating the classical models, having a little chauvinistic nip at the rule-bound Boileau, and happily discovering two worthy inheritors of the critical Golden Age, Roscommon and Walsh.

Readers and writers today can't, of course, share Pope's certainties of taste. But we can apply some of his principles, the most important of which is, perhaps, that principles are necessary. And we might even take some tips from writers of the past.

From "An Essay on Criticism," Part Three

'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain,
And charitably let the dull be vain:
Your silence there is better than your spite,
For who can rail so long as they can write?
Still humming on, their drowsy course they keep,
And lashed so long, like tops, are lashed asleep.
False steps but help them to renew the race,
As, after stumbling, jades will mend their pace.
What crowds of these, impenitently bold,
In sounds and jingling syllables grown old,
Still run on poets, in a raging vein,
Ev'n to the dregs and squeezings of the brain,
Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense,
And rhyme with all the rage of impotence.

  Such shameless bards we have, and yet 'tis true
There are as mad, abandoned critics too.
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head,
With his own tongue still edifies his ears,
And always listening to himself appears.
All books he reads, and all he reads assails,
From Dryden's fables down to Durfey's tales.
With him, most authors steal their works, or buy;
Garth did not write his own Dispensary.
Name a new play, and he's the poet's friend,
Nay showed his faults – but when would poets mend?
No place so sacred from such fops is barred,
Nor is Paul's church more safe than Paul's church yard:
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks,
It still looks home, and short excursions makes;
But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks.
And never shocked and never turned aside,
Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide.

  But where's the man who counsel can bestow,
Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?
Unbiassed, or by favour, or by spite:
Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right;
Though learned, well-bred; and though well-bred, sincere;
Modestly bold, and humanly severe:
Who to a friend his faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the merit of a foe?
Blessed with a taste exact, yet unconfined;
A knowledge both of books and human kind;
Generous converse; a soul exempt from pride;
And love to praise, with reason on his side?

Candid and unsentimental, the teenage poet's tribute to his departed grandfather is striking in its originality

Sidney Keyes was a few weeks old when his mother died of peritonitis, and his father, Captain Reginald Keyes, returned with the child to his own father's house. SKK, commemorated in this week's poem "Elegy", was the poet's paternal grandfather, also named Sidney. The boy wrote the poem in July, 1938, when he was only 16.

Born in 1922, he was the same age as Philip Larkin, and both were Oxford undergraduates at the same time. Larkin was wary of him, partly because of his own exclusion from the anthology Eight Oxford Poets, which Keyes and Michael Meyer produced in 1941. There were aesthetic differences too, of course. Keyes objected to WH Auden, and said so in his Introduction. For Larkin, Auden led the way. The Yeatsian strain in Keyes was an influence Larkin himself would struggle to resist.

Besides Yeats, Keyes admired the English and German Romantics, especially Rilke. Yet, he once said he wished he had been born in the 19th century, so he could have been "a good pastoral poet, instead of an uncomfortable metaphysical poet without roots". Who knows what kind of poet he might have become, given time. He was sternly self-critical and readily admitted there was "a vaguely bogus atmosphere" in his early poems. Perhaps he would have rejected symbolism in favour of realism, or consolidated them more successfully. But he was killed in Tunisia just before his 21st birthday, in April 1943 – the month in which, the poem claims, his Grandfather Keyes had died. April, 1942, was also the month Sidney joined the army.

Whatever influences the 16-year-old had absorbed, "Elegy" is remarkably free of imitative gestures. In fact, its originality is striking. The repetition, with slight variants, of the opening statement, "It is a year again", in the first line of the ensuing two stanzas, is forceful without being showily rhetorical, its simplicity all of a piece with the plain diction throughout. The rhyme-scheme (a,b,a,c,b,c) makes for a sturdy and cohesive stanza. There are confidently deployed half-rhymes (especially in stanza two) and some surprise pairings, such as "worms/ terms". Metrically, the poem is loose-limbed, resisting a heavy-stressed regularity that might have expressed the grandfather's character rather well, but which would have destroyed the fresh, insouciant tones of the grandson.

Dactylic rhythms in the first line, and picked up elsewhere, beat out a quietly emphatic tattoo. Before any expectations of a pentameter can be realised, the next line's four-beat stride stops sharply. As a metaphorical description of the death, this line is almost brutal. It might imply that walking out and slamming the door were habitual. But the third line, with its caesura before the last foot, complicates the grandfather's absence, extends his influence, and begins to restore his existence.

Keyes' images become increasingly daring: "Your brain/ Lives in the bank-book" … "your eyes look up/ Laughing from the carpet on the floor". Depersonalised intellect is expressed in wealth which outlives its owner; its power over the survivors clinched by laughter. The image of the eyes looking up from the carpet is almost surreal. Compare this line with the opening of a later poem, "The War Poet": "I am the man who looked for peace and found/ My own eyes barbed." These eyes, too, seem "barbed" – and multiple. Perhaps a pattern on an oriental carpet suggested a face and eyes, or perhaps Keyes was led simply by the association of the ground with the dead man's burial. Bizarre, faintly comic, faintly nightmarish, the images brilliantly reflect the grandfather's vivid, challenging presence. He has left the family "tangled" in his utterance, if blessed by his legacy, and he is still watching them. The assertion that "we still drink from your silver cup" returns to a more realistic mode, and hints at the pleasures of the rich inheritance.

The poem might almost be a prototype for Dylan Thomas's several great protest-poems against death and mourning. It's not Keyes' only treatment of the subject, either. One of his most anthologised poems imagines a magnificently resurrected, rocky-faced William Wordsworth. Both poems are defiant anti-elegies.

Here, forceful rhythms and stark imagery persist in stanza two. The grandfather is not merely buried: the ground is poured into his mouth. In hard, vigorous monosyllables the speaker insists the dead man still "drives" the family's thoughts "like the smart cobs of your youth". "Smart cobs" is a wonderful, brisk trot of a phrase. The equestrian simile turns an abstract idea into a strikingly concrete memory.

Entwined in the narrative of stanzas one and two are references to the grandfather's "words". Now the poet, confessing to the "delight" of making the poem, confirms his bigger, bolder ownership of language. Momentarily, a personal note is struck. Then the plural pronoun "we" is resumed for a final trio of impassioned pledges.

That the elegy, overall, is framed as a collective statement is another mark of its originality. The speaker is a proud heir who speaks publicly and authoritatively for the surviving family. There is a final handover of power to the dead man, and still his influence is not felt as oppressive. The young poet is a confident ally in the grandfather's defeat of "the swift departing years". Somehow a very English, as well as a very masculine poem, "Elegy" thrives on its youthful defiance, candour and lack of sentimentality.

Keyes would write more ambitious poems, some of them a little over-worked and florid compared with "Elegy". If he had only had as much time to mature as Larkin, perhaps he would have rediscovered this less literary style, and found nourishment in the plainer "roots" he thought he lacked.

Elegy
(In memoriam SKK)

April again, and it's a year again
Since you walked out and slammed the door
Leaving us tangled in your words. Your brain
Lives in the bank-book and your eyes look up
Laughing from the carpet on the floor:
And we still drink from your silver cup.

It is a year again since they poured
The dumb ground into your mouth:
And yet we know, by some recurring word
Or look caught unawares, that you still drive
Our thoughts like the smart cobs of your youth –
When you and the world were alive.

A year again, and we have fallen on bad times
Since they gave you to the worms.
I am ashamed to take delight in these rhymes
Without grief; but you need no tears.
We shall never forget nor escape you, nor make terms
With your enemies, the swift departing years.

A version of the Greek myth, refocused through the eyes of an ageing 21st-century man, retells the story suggestively slant

From Victorian times at least, women writers have been retelling classical myths and folktales from a woman-centred or feminist perspective. In this week's poem, "Actaeon" by George Szirtes, the myth is experienced intimately from the male perspective. The larger parables that emerge concern bodily limits and mortality. The hounds that run Actaeon into the ground may be those of time as well as desire.

The epigraph draws attention to Donne's enthralled and enthralling "Elegy XX", (sometimes numbered XIX), "To His Mistress Going to Bed". After a slow, perhaps imaginary, feminine disrobing, "O, my America, my Newfoundland", expresses the lover's delight in the vision of his mistress's newly undressed body, and in the forthcoming conquest. Actaeon's untouchable "America" is, of course, Diana, the "chaste and fair" goddess of the hunt and the moon. Any conquest is all hers.

In Ovid's account in Metamorphoses, Book III, Actaeon breaks the taboo unintentionally. He doesn't deliberately set out to spy on Diana, any more than Oedipus set out to kill his father and marry his mother. Actaeon merely wants to find a quiet resting-place after the morning's hunt, when he comes upon the grotto with its secret pool, and the astonishing presence of Diana and her nymphs, bathing. Retribution is almost immediate. The outraged goddess splashes his head with water and curses him, transforming him into the stag who, now without human language, will be chased across the forest and torn apart by his own hounds.

Numerous painters have depicted the crucial scenes. In the poem, that reference to "a washing line/ I shoved aside without thinking" seems to allude to Titian's Diana and Actaeon. Complete with "strange red shirt", Titian's scene is much as the Szirtes narrator describes, and the irreverent approach to a great painting, as with Paul Durcan's "National Gallery of Ireland" poems, spices our appreciation. But the function of that throwaway domestic description, I think, is to deliver Actaeon solidly into the back-garden of the 21st century.

The point of view throughout the poem is Actaeon's. The question "does desire have thoughts or define/ its object, consuming all in a glance?" seems like a disguised plea of Not Guilty. The logical answer is no: desire itself is not violation. The poem's answer, as it evolves, seems to be that Actaeon's metaphysical theft and the literal destruction Diana unleashes are equally necessary "fatal flaws" in the moral scheme.

Actaeon rephrases his question. He seems angry and combative. "You, with your several flesh" evokes a disturbing, almost grotesque image, with the nymphs like lumpy outgrowths of Diana, flesh of her flesh, and multiplying the threat she represents. In a collection which, as the title Bad Machine implies, considers the faults and limits of the body, there are more interpretative possibilities to "several flesh". You might think of bodies gone slack and adipose, or, at worst, developing tumours. The moon-goddess herself, "drinking night water", seems to be slaking some private and unhealthy thirst – perhaps enhancing her powers, perhaps swallowing medication. The speaker sharpens his earlier challenge with the crucial, negative-riddled question, "What can't we let go/without protest?" This implicates Diana and her prized virginity but then turns back on the speaker, Actaeon, now forced to let go of himself.

The "dangerously toothed" nocturnal pursuers of Actaeon seem to assault him from within. "And so the body burns/as if torn by sheer profusion of skin/and cry." Burning and tearing, in everyday speech, often describe physical pain, and, in poetry, they're traditional tropes associated with love. The tormenting packs come together in "Skin/ and cry", a vivid coupling that recalls "hue and cry", giving us the belling of the hounds as they close in, the confusion of so many bodies, and the impossibility of separating the hunted from the hunters. The more skin we have, as lovers, as ageing bodies, the more, perhaps, it will make us cry.

Actaeon's body "grows contrary" and no longer seems a comfortable fit. This adheres to the Ovidian narrative, while evoking a metamorphosis of ageing in terms of increasingly ragged and un-flesh-like flesh, a loss which has psychological ramifications: "So flesh falls away, ever less/human, like desire itself…"

The poem's structure helps reveal the paradoxes. The stanzas, though uniform in length, have an odd number of lines, the five quintets making a pattern which complicates symmetry. Rhythmically, there's often an impatient forwards-rush, while the "sheer profusion" of rhyme checks it and creates a back-and-forth movement, as the rhyme-word of one stanza's third line is picked up in the first and last lines of the next. It's an innovative and intricate form, and one that seems organic to its subject. Between the stases of desire and death, the hunting dogs rush and circle.

In the fifth stanza, Actaeon, it will be revealed, is finally looking straight at himself. The last word of the poem, rhyming pointedly with "dress" and "less", is "nakedness" (his). The "O, my America" quotation, now with a lower-case "o", has become grimly ironical and, more importantly, part of an address not to a lover's body, but to his own. In discovering his own, isolated male nakedness, Actaeon breaks another taboo. He has no alternative, as before, and no further story, except, perhaps, that he will be forced (by loneliness or ill-health) to get to know this nakedness more intimately. His body may be a Newfoundland, but it's one which can be greeted only with irony. He's not even a stag any more.

Actaeon

O, my America, my Newfoundland
John Donne, "Elegy 20"

O, my America, discovered by slim chance,
behind, as it seemed, a washing line
I shoved aside without thinking –
does desire have thoughts or define
its object, consuming all in a glance?

You, with your several flesh sinking
upon itself in attitudes of hurt,
while the dogs at my heels
growl at the strange red shirt
under a horned moon, you, drinking

night water – tell me what the eye steals
or borrows. What can't we let go
without protest? My own body turns
against me as I sense it grow
contrary. Whatever night reveals

is dangerously toothed. And so the body burns
as if torn by sheer profusion of skin
and cry. It wears its ragged dress
like something it once found comfort in,
the kind of comfort even a dog learns

by scent. So flesh falls away, ever less
human, like desire itself, though pain
still registers in the terrible balance
the mind seems so reluctant to retain,
o, my America, my nakedness!