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‘A sad child’ by Margaret Atwood

You’re sad because you’re sad.
It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill,
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
you need to sleep.

Well, all children are sad
but some get over it.
Count your blessings. Better than that,
buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet.
Take up dancing to forget.

Forget what?
Your sadness, your shadow,
whatever it was that was done to you
the day of the lawn party
when you came inside flushed with the sun,
your mouth sulky with sugar,
in your new dress with the ribbon
and the ice-cream smear,
and said to yourself in the bathroom,
I am not the favorite child.

My darling, when it comes
right down to it
and the light fails and the fog rolls in
and you’re trapped in your overturned body
under a blanket or burning car,

and the red flame is seeping out of you
and igniting the tarmac beside your head
or else the floor, or else the pillow,
none of us is;
or else we all are.

I think this is just a great poem. I haven’t read many Margaret Atwood poems, but I read her novel The Handmaid’s Tale and loved that. I find what I have read of her poetry surprising and direct and very evocative. Especially the third stanza in this poem, with that incredible description of the little girl after the lawn party, her mouth “sulky with sugar”, her dress with the “ribbon/ and the ice-cream smear” telling herself in the bathroom that she is “not the favorite child”. It is such a poignant description of the moment in every child’s life when they realize that there is unfairness in the world; that bad things happen to good people. The image of the pretty dress she had put on being smeared with ice-cream powerfully evokes the idea of smashed dreams and perhaps loss of innocence.
The beginning of the poem presents all the things that are often said to children (and adults) when they are sad or depressed. We have all surely said or heard things like “it’s the age” and “it’s chemical”, and, of course, “you need to sleep”, many times. My favourite line in the whole poem is “hug your sadness like an eyeless doll”. It’s spooky and beautiful.

This poem made me think about a question that so many of us ask: if there is a benign, loving God out there, then why do good people suffer? Why am I not “the favorite child”, since I am so good? It is even more legitimate for children to ask this, because they really are innocent. Why do children suffer? Why do they get ill? Why do they die? Why do unspeakably horrible things happen to them? This poem presents everyone as equal, faced with this question. Who is the favourite? The truth is: “none of us is;/ or else we all are”. This is a comforting ending to the poem because it assures you that even when you are unjustly treated, when you are “trapped in your overturned body” and the “red flame is seeping out of you”, you are not alone. We are all equal before death. I love how the speaker addresses the child as “my darling”. She could be speaking to her own daughter, or to her former self as a child.

Reviewed by Emily Ardagh

Emily Bronte

‘No coward soul is mine’ by Emily Bronte

No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality,

With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.

I have to do an Emily Bronte poem, because Wuthering Heights has been an obsession of mine from the time I first read it at the age of 14. Since then I have read the novel at least once every year. I love it. I love Heathcliff and his diabolical nature; I love the fact that he loves Cathy so fiercely that he would inflict misery on anyone who did her harm or tried to take her from him… and their families, even for generations into the future. I am aware that it is kind of twisted and strange. I am, really. I don’t know why I love it, but I do. It is the uncompromising ferocity of Heathcliff’s love. The love between Cathy and Heathcliff in that novel is a simple necessity, a bond between two souls that cannot be broken. Reading Cathy’s words, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff”, well, it gives me goosebumps every time.

So, on with the poem. ‘No coward soul is mine’ is probably my favourite poem by Emily Bronte. I have read most of her other poems because, as a Bronte obsessive, I have a copy of her complete works that I kept by my bed for a few years and during those years I got through most of them. There is certainly something naïve about her poems, but they are also heroic. To me they feel distinctly adolescent, but there are also glimpses of the majestic in them.

I love the authority in Emily Bronte’s tone in this poem. That opening is one that definitely takes hold in your mind — you don’t forget it. I love the phrase, “storm-troubled sphere”. I don’t know if Emily knew that she had tuberculosis when she wrote this poem, but I like to imagine that she wrote this in defiance of the illness that would eventually kill her. It would be typical of her courageous nature. Charlotte Bronte, her sister, described her as “stronger than a man, simpler than a child”. She apparently hated to show weakness – always bore her sufferings alone — and she even refused to see a doctor for her consumption until it was too late. Here, in this poem, you get a sense of her incredible inner strength. She is “armed” with faith, God lives “within [her] breast”; she has “power”. Yes, this is a powerful poem about faith in God, but Emily Bronte has faith in herself, and that is impossible to ignore here. She evokes her certainty of the immortality of her soul. She calls herself “Undying Life”.
There is something in the spirit of this poem that seems akin to that of Wuthering Heights. Perhaps it is the idea of the immortality of a courageous soul. The stanza that goes,

“Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee

reminds me of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. It is the inseparable nature of two spirits — God and man, or of two lovers. It reminds me of Cathy when she says of Heathcliff, “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.” It is the idea that human love can be as immortal as God’s love. I find it incredibly moving and beautiful.

Reviewed by Emily Ardagh

Dylan Thomas

‘In my craft or sullen art’ by Dylan Thomas

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

I thought I would start the blog with this poem because it is a sort of explanation by the poet of why he writes. That seemed like a good enough place to start. It is a question that interests me because I have felt compelled to write poems since I was about 13 years old (I proudly printed, signed and dated my poems since that age) without really understanding (or wondering) why. I think that if you like poetry then it’s interesting to find out a poet’s take on why he writes it.

Apart from that, ‘In my craft or sullen art’ is a beauty and a glory. It is a poem that I have loved for a very long time. For me it possesses a quality that all my favourite poems have: the quality of being so beautiful that, even on a first reading, you feel that you already know its rhythms, its music — that you have heard it before.

So, why does Dylan Thomas write? Well, he tells us all the things for which he does not write: not for ambition, not for money, not to impress other poets or artists in the same game. He does not write for the “towering dead” (all those immortal poets that went before him — poets people write books and theses and make films about — and who can be such a heavy, often paralysing shadow for a poet). Thomas says that instead he writes “for the lovers”, for the “common wages/ Of their most secret heart”. He wants to speak to ordinary people, to every human being who has ever loved. These are the most important experiences, the most important griefs, the most important, age-old ache of humanity. The lovers in this poem are heroic, cradling all the “griefs of the ages” in their arms. Holding each other, holding on to love, even though the person they are holding represents all their griefs, and the griefs of the whole world. And the poet does not need praise or payment from the lovers for whom he writes — they don’t even read his poems. He just wants to speak to those secret hearts that we all have, that want only to communicate with other hearts — to know and be known, to love and be loved — completely. We are all lovers, we all understand the necessity and the agony of loving someone. I like Dylan Thomas’s reason for writing.

Thomas describes poetry as a “craft”, which is not a word that is often used to describe poetry these days, though of course, it is a craft, just as much as pottery or sculpting or music is a craft. Many people think of poetry as a highly emotional art — full of gushing declarations of love or melodramatic, melancholy musings — and I’m as guilty of that as the next aspiring poet. But even the most ‘emotional’ poets, the Romantics, who described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, added that it must “take its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (that’s Wordsworth in The Lyrical Ballads). So, although poetry often deals with the most intense human experiences and emotions, it is also controlled, it is crafted — and Thomas “labour[s]” – to create a form that will express those experiences and emotions. In the same way, a sculptor does not simply hack away angrily at a block of stone, he rather uses the techniques he has learned to create a recognisable form that will communicate his anger (or whatever) to other people.

You can listen to a recording of Dylan Thomas reading this poem on The Poetry Archive (which is a really good website, by the way). It’s a lovely thing to do because listening to his voice, which is grave and slow and magical, speaking the words really dramatises their quiet power, and makes the poem even more entrancing.

Reviewed by Emily Ardagh