Calling A Halt

I've loved travelling by train since I was a baby, and had family living either side of the River Ribble. Our family - Mum. Dad and me in Layton from 1948. Mum's younger sister, Connie, her husband, Frank, and Nan, my maternal grandmother, near North Station. The other three Panther sisters, Marion, Madge and Phyllis and their families, lived in Southport. So until Dr. Beeching wielded his axe in the early 1960s, there was frequent to-ing and fro-ing, and I learned to love trains.
 

 

Also school soon provided "train poems" for me to enjoy, not least Auden's Night Mail with its wonderful imitation of in metre of the train chugging along the tracks -

"This is the Night Mail

crossing the border,

bringing the letter

and the postal order..." 

That love affair with rail in verse continued through childhood and teens as rail travel and stations began to acquire a romantic significance via films such as Brief Encounter, and the mystery of why some trains were beset by unscheduled halts as in Adlestrop, which seemed nothing much of a poem when I first encountered it at, say, fourteen or fifteen, but has stuck with me for more than fifty years:

 

Adlestrop

by Edward Thomas

 

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas 1878–1917
Source: Poems (1917)

Through researching Thomas and the poem I have come to have a much enhanced understanding of the Victorian and Edwardian eras of my grandparents, and WWI and the 1920s during which my parents were growing to adulthood.

The unscheduled halt has provided poetic inspiration for other poets whose work I admire too such as Dannie Abse:

Not Adlestrop

by Dannie Abse

 

Not Adlestrop, no - besides, the name
hardly matters. Nor did I languish in June heat.
Simply, I stood, too early, on the empty platform,
and the wrong train came in slowly, surprised, stopped.
Directly facing me, from a window,
a very, very pretty girl leaned out.

When I, all instinct,
stared at her, she, all instinct, inclined her head away
as if she'd divined the much married life in me,
or as if she might spot, up platform,
some unlikely familiar.

For my part, under the clock, I continued
my scrutiny with unmitigated pleasure.
And she knew it, she certainly knew it, and would
not glance at me in the silence of not Adlestrop.

Only when the train heaved noisily, only
when it jolted, when it slid away, only then,
daring and secure, she smiled back at my smile,
and I, daring and secure, waved back at her waving.
And so it was, all the way down the hurrying platform
as the train gathered atrocious speed
towards Oxfordshire or Gloucestershire.

Dannie Abse
from Collected Poems, 1948-1976, Hutchinson, London 1977

Even later comes this collection by a current favourite poet, Carole Bromley, a fellow-member with me and over 500 of us on Jo Bell's terrific 2014 Project 52 which recently received a Sabtage Award - the title poem is called Unscheduled Halt and recall vividly a train journey through France which unaccountably stops at Lille.

The chapbook costs very little, perhaps £5.00, from Inpress and is a Smith Doorstep publication which I'd urge you to buy.

But the Calling A Halt which has been most imprtant to my life recently has nothing to do with trains - the HALT was my deciding to quit smoking eight years ago in April 2007.  I have smoked cigarettes from the age of fourteen, and wasted a small fortune on my nicotine addiction, but the Calling A Halt, aided by patches prescribed by one of our GPs until the constant yearning has subsided, is one of the best decisions I have ever taken.  I still quite often dream that I am smoking, but that does my constitution no harm.

Hope you have enjoyed this meander.  It is fun being Guest Blogger from time to time.

 

Christo Heyworth

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What we below could not see

A guest post by David Riley

What’s the best poetry about spring? I’ll tell you, it’s my job to pontificate. It’s when humans are, at most, at the edge of things. Take Seamus Heaney’s Rite of Spring, for example. Spring is there and does better than people can, who can only imitate its liberating effects.

Even more, people can be removed from things, as Ted Hughes does in The River in March. His river is an elemental force, it might even be a deity in itself. In Heaney and Hughes there are things the river and Spring can be and do - they don’t stand for something, they are something.

Wordsworth knew it too - his daffodils are beauty on a hillside, whether there are people there to see it or not.

Jane Hirschfield is excellent at showing how nature is really something other. We may dress it up and give it names, develop amnesia every year when the same seasons come around and trot out our same banalities but it is that something of itself, beyond us, that she shows.

Edward Thomas in his many meditations on nature sometimes links human activity and the seasons. At other times, he urges us to take a step back or rather to another position altogether, where we might see nature as other creatures do. Read his Thaw. See what you think. 

Rooks are back again by Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov

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Lives.

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday. As anyone who has ever worked in a shop will know, it can be awkward. A customer never fails to arrive at the counter bang on 11, every year.

This time, with that in mind, I had gathered a copy of the Sunday Times 'Culture' magazine, bodged up a sign and gone out front with my poppy on 5 minutes early, just so people got the message. Whilst waiting for the radio to switch over to the Cenotaph, I began to read their piece on Edward Thomas, one of the (perhaps) lesser known of the war poets. The article mentioned his developing love of nature and the outdoors, his love of description and his insistence that poetry should be constructed only from words people actually use. These days, many poets will swear by those approaches, the latter two especially.
Printed within the article was a copy of Thomas's poem Adlestrop. You can read it here: Adlestrop: Poetry Foundation website

I digress though. As a football fan, I have been party to a number of 'silences' this weekend and, so as not to waste them, I found myself thinking down various different avenues. It struck home that many of the men I was stood up for were younger than me when they died. It struck me that many of them had families to leave behind, jobs never to go back to and lives never to actually live. What really struck home though was the TV coverage of the faces.

I saw something in the eyes of the veterans, a sort of blooming around them, much like a poppy. This may happen to all old people, I don't know, and please don't take that out of context and consider it a judgement. To look into them suggests many nights of tears shed, many years of tears held in and a grief I would never wish to understand.

After spending all day (as most of us do every year) remembering those lost and the freedoms I have as a result of their sacrifices, I felt I should persist with my ongoing quest to write a decent war poem. I try it every year and haven't quite managed one yet but, with this week's blog theme being 'Ambitions', here is the result.

Cenotaph

The chat chat chattering of tired machine guns,
echoes in the teeth of the silent man beside.
The cold November mornings stop for no one - 
the ticking clock to remember lost lives. 

Amid the bugler's call my focus wandered
past each stoic cheek and tight-buttoned coat,
long swollen eyes of veterans tell of what went on there.
Poppies grown from tears. Lives touched like asymptotes. 

All these years since those Great Wars have ended
Our nation we're told - divided, long undone -
unites, the graves of soldiers freshly tended.
By this prism, we ensure the light lives on. 


Thanks for reading,
S.

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Viking Blood

 by David Riley

Poets all have Viking blood.

They raid the past as if it were a coastline, digging up the skeletons, making them articulate, singing songs like children playing. They do it with great beauty, rarely looking away from what they find in this history; often from the smallest thing great stories flow. You need look little further than the sections encompassing childhood in Neil Astley's Being Human trilogy of poetry anthologies to scratch the surface of what can be done. They remind us of children and childhood from all sorts of perspectives. Look up Adrian Mitchell's Beattie is Three for eye-watering restrained sentiment and his A Puppy Called Puberty for the laugh out loudness of shared (male) memories.

While these books are full of memories (is that what makes us human?) what passes as recollection there isn't child's play. The stuff of memory is worked and reworked to make it seem as if then is now and is eternal and shared by all. Even when such ideas are born of the uncomfortable or the meaning remains elusive it is something poets won't stop pursuing, showing child's play refracted through their words:

I cannot like the scent
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet
With no meaning, than this bitter one

as Edward Thomas mused on a childhood memory and the mysterious image it recalled. This sort of thing was raised again this week for me, obliquely, at some of the great events at Lancaster Litfest, particularly a talk following a reading by poet and short story writer David Constantine and writer Adam Marek. In response to a question about his writing Adam replied that what people saw in his work was the crust on a great amount that they didn't - but without all of it what was seen would not be as good. Implicitly a lot of what is below the surface was produced in a form of play.

Once again, the idea of memory and reworking surfaced for me. We must have that mass behind us to give rise to what is best. It might be produced in many ways (even play) and can be shared with others - but often it must then be put aside and we must carry on trying to quarry from it the best that we can.

Such things may never be finished but they are rarely ever wasted;Paul Valéry said, "poems are never completed, they are only abandoned." It reminds me of a child's toys and games, left haphazardly while they move on to other things but always there, the skeletons of child's play to support all we go on to do.

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On Congruency and Perfect Words

by David Riley

Let’s start with a story. A woman marries a prince who almost immediately begins to behave oddly. The woman also begins to act strangely before she escapes and dies in a suspicious accident. Her funeral is a contested affair between her relatives and the Royal family; the woman’s husband and her brother have a serious fight.

Sound familiar? Several people have noticed one thing – the similarity between the fate of Princess Diana and the plot of Hamlet.

Did that give you a shiver? It did me when I was first brought to see it, not only for the congruency but the fact that a poet several hundred years ago could encapsulate such key aspects of human nature that bind us across time and space.

Lines can make you shiver too. Edward Thomas does it to me; in his prose work, August (among many others) he gives a final twist at the end that makes you go, “Ahhh.” I hope you get chance to look it up. You will shiver in delight.

When he took to writing poetry it just unlocked further that ability to expose the archetypes that are always there, waiting to be seen. Perfect words became strung out diamonds on a line, showing us, in the everyday there is another world. It still happens and poetry still does its job. From Yeats to poems on the underground you just need to raise your gaze to be transported to stand amid somebody’s dreams.

And best of all you can join in. Take that small toolkit of rhyme and metre, rhythm and diction and see where it takes you. Enjoy the sound and the feel of words rubbing up against you and look out for how you can make people shiver.

“A first blow that could make air of a wall.”

Shiver.

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