MY TOP TEN FAVOURITE POEMS
After New Year’s Day the Tuesday after carnival is the most
poignant day of the year. Especially this year, falling as it did on Sept 1st.
It's as if summer turns to autumn overnight. Sure enough Tuesday morning saw a sky
turned black and the heavens open on the still grubby and dishevelled streets. Streets
on which I caught first sight of the black dog that will haunt me throughout
the autumn and winter months.
So as I thought about what to write about, in a world
growing ever darker? As toddlers with their parents, desperately trying to escape
war ripped Syria, drown in the Mediterranean. As a Trotskyite friend of
fascistic theocrats and apologist for Putin looks set to become the next leader
of the Labour Party. As the Chinese experiment with Capitalism looks set to
implode. As Putin gears up for another hefty shove at wobbly western resolve? What
to write about?
So to avoid a complete nervous collapse I here produce a
list of my top ten favourite poems.
My
Top Ten Poems.*
10. Ernest Dowson ‘Cynara’
George Orwell once commented, rather
snobbishly, that the poem had the same charm as a pink geranium or soft centred
chocolate. True it strays dangerously close to being mawkish, but does not
cross the line, whilst the ambiguity of ‘in my fashion,’ means that it never
descends into sentimentality.
9. Elizabeth Bishop ‘One Art’
Wonderful reflection on the ‘art’ of
losing http://alextalbot.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/art-of-loosing.html
8. Philip Larkin ‘The Whitsun Weddings’
I studied this poem for A Level and my
affection for it survived. No greater testimony exists. Evocates an England now
vanished. Though the truth of Larkin’s observations in this and other poems
holds just as good for contemporary life as when they were written.
7.
WH Auden ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’
Never a fan of Yeats mysticism Auden
pays tribute to Ireland’s greatest poet. I always felt the poems description of
dying hold a deep truth.
‘But
for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An
afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The
provinces of his body revolted,
The
squares of his mind were empty,
Silence
invaded the suburbs,
The
current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.’
6. Thomas Hardy ‘The Convergence of the
Twain.’
Hardy’s reflections on the sinking of
the Titanic. The sinister stanza:-
And as the smart ship grew
In
stature, grace, and hue,
In
shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.’
Speaks to a wider truth about fate.
5. Louis MacNeice ‘Prayer before Birth’
Further comment feels superfluous. Poem
speaks for itself.
4. John Betjeman ‘Devonshire Street W1’
The saddest and most poignant poem on
the list. People tend to think of Betjeman as a writer of light jolly hockey
sticks verse, but this is a poem that packs a punch, saying much about fate,
intimacy, old age, denial.
3. Louis MacNeice ‘Snow.’
 |
| Louis MacNeice |
MacNeice is the most underrated of the
thirties poets. His Autumn Journal is too long to be placed on this list, but
is one of the truly great poems of that era. Snow manages to say more about the
physicality of human experience than many novels, and in just three short
stanzas.
2. W H Auden ‘1st September
1939.’
Arguably Auden’s greatest poem and,
next to ‘stop all the clocks…i.e. Funeral Blues,’ his best known. Again it is a
poem I know great chunks of by heart. It was much quoted after September 11,
2001, having as much resonance for that period as ‘The low dishonest decade’ of
the 1930’s.
1. T S Eliot ‘The Love Song of J Alfred
Prufrock.
The Waste Land was a more influential
poem, the Four Quartets greater poetry, so I don’t have much of a defence for
placing Prufrock at number one. However it was Prufrock that launched Eliot’s
career and influenced so many of his contemporaries. It was the poem that
introduced me to Eliot and the first poem that shifted the way I saw the world.
It was also one of the first poems I learnt by heart.
* Well at least on 31st August 2015
